I spent Friday evening/night and a majority of Sunday hooking up my new Pioneer VSX-820-k receiver, rewiring A/V cabling, rewiring computer cabling and troubleshooting issues with all the above.
After all of that, I’m still not done yet.
It turns out my initial vision with HDMI cabling wasn’t going to work:
Computer (via 5770′s HDMI out) –> Pioneer A/V Receiver –> Sony HDTV
It doesn’t work because the screen would flicker non-stop. I thought this 2D clock fix would remedy the problem, but no dice. I then tried connecting straight into the HDTV like this:
Computer (via 5770′s HDMI out) –> Sony HDTV (via digital optical output) –> Pioneer A/V Receiver
That worked. I used HDMI cable to send both audio and video signals to the display and the HDTV’s digital optical output to pass the audio signal to the receiver. Unfortunately, I am not able to figure out how to get a 5.1 audio signal through to receiver; all I get is a stereo signal.
What’s Next?
I’d like to know why my initial vision didn’t pan out. It seems to be an ATI/AMD video card or video driver problem. If there’s no way to get the video card and the receiver to play nice, I would love to get 5.1 audio signal through.
Where to find the answers though? I guess I will start with the AMD/ATI forums and then probably some of the other tech sites out there. Hell, I’ll probably try NeoGAF as well.
Still Lots to Do
Even though everything is hooked up, I’m still not settled with it. There’s still lots of tweaking to be done. Am I going to play Borderlands at 1080p60 while sacrificing dynamic shadows or should I try 720p60 with everything enabled. That latter will remind me of the Xbox 360 the most.
And then there’s the receiver itself. With the new automatic configuration of MCACC, things sound different. We’re not sure if it’s right or not, so that’s something we need to experience and test.
Oh, boy. The slippery slope of getting back into PC hardware has resulted in more PC related posts.
Today’s interesting tidbit comes in the form of a Radeon HD 6000 launch rumor. According to an HIS senior marketing manager, we should expect the next video card series from AMD/ATI to be anounced around the fourth quarter of this year. Excited? Well, not really.
We can expect bumps in performance, but forget about landscape altering new technologies. This is more about getting more performance while lowering power consumption — “efficiency” is the word I’m looking for. I’m all for more performance at a lower power (and hopefully monetary) costs, but I doubt I’ll be upgrading any time soon.
Update: Settled on 950 MHz for the GPU core and 1300 MHz for the memory. Let’s see how well it reacts in a game.
It hasn’t even been a week yet, but I’ve already decided to overclock my Radeon HD 5770 video card. Things have changed a bit since I last overclocked anything.
In my 2006 PC, I overclocked my Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 2.13 GHz to a nice 3.2 GHz. That thing is still rocking at that speed thanks to rigorous Prime95 testing.
In 2010, however, I will not be overclocking my CPU. It already has a bit overclocking thanks to Intel’s Turbo Boost. But even though Turbo Boost isn’t as effective as good old fashion overclocking: what is the point when it comes to gaming? Most modern games are not at the mercy of the processor: it’s the video card which makes the tangible difference at regular gaming settings.
(more…)
Having purchased Torchlight and looking ahead towards Mass Effect 2, I began contemplating building my PC once again.
The last time I thought this over, I was looking for a Micro ATX PC for the sake of downsizing, but now I want this PC to be small enough for the home theater set up. I want to turn this PC into a console if it needs to be; playing PC games with the Xbox 360 controller if I can. The Antec Mini P180 can still achieve this sitting beside the HDTV; that’s not a problem. The problem, as always, is the amount I wish to spend on a video card.
- Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P55M-UD2 (~$114)
- Processor: Intel Core i5 750 2.66 GHz (~$220)
- Video Card: AMD/ATI Radeon HD 5850 (~$320)
- Case: Antec Mini P180 in White (~$90)
- PSU: Antec EarthWatts 650W (~$90)
- Memory: 2 x 2GB DDR3 1600 (~$100)
- Hard Drive: 500GB – 1TB SATA HDD (~$60 – $100)
- Optical Drive: Most likely none
The Radeon HD 5850 costs approximately $320. That’s more than a console and while the video card can mop the floor with this generation’s console, from a purely entertainment standpoint, I cannot justify that price. I do have a solution to this problem though. I either wait for price drops or I settle for a AMD/ATI Radeon HD 5770 which I can get for about $175.
Decisions. Decisions.
What is it that I wish to play though? Mass Effect 2? It’s coming to the Xbox 360 as well and by the time I’m finished with that there’s a whole lot of other games coming out to consoles. Was this all for nothing then? Nah. If I keep going through this exercise enough times, I’ll eventually find enough reasons to pull the trigger. But for now, I will go play Torchlight. If only more games ran on older hardware like this game.
With the release of the Intel Core i5 & i7 (Lynnfields) and AMD/ATI’s Radeon HD 5870 video cards, it’s now time to plan my next rig. Not all the pieces are in place though. I’m still waiting on how well the Radeon HD 5850 performs along with its Canadian price tag. Nevertheless, I do have an idea of what I want my next rig will be.
It will be smaller, quieter and faster.
(more…)
AMD/ATI’s Radeon HD 4850 and 4870 are the video cards to pick up if you’re looking to build a new gaming rig. An excellent balance of price and performance really shook up the video card landscape and it was no accident. This was a planned attack which began in 2005.
AnandTech has the back story which involved gutsy moves, new ways of thinking and patience. I was surprised to find out that AMD/ATI decided to not only use both a new manufacturing process and a new architecture which focused on price/performance, but they also decided to use GDDR5 memory when it wasn’t even properly speced yet.
When the options were either make the chip too big or make the performance too low, ATI looked elsewhere: let’s use a new memory technology. Again, put yourself in ATI’s shoes, the time was 2005 and ATI had just decided to completely throw away the past few years of how-to-win-the-GPU-race and on top of that, even if the strategy were to succeed it would depend on a memory technology that hadn’t even been prototyped yet.
The spec wasn’t finalized for GDDR5 at the time, there were no test devices, no interface design, nothing. Just an idea that at some point, there would be memory that could offer twice the bandwidth per pin of GDDR3, which would give ATI the bandwidth of a 512-bit bus, but with a physical 256-bit bus. It’s exactly what ATI needed, so it’s exactly what ATI decided to go with.
What a gamble.
This piece of news is pretty big. If you purchase an Intel X58 based motherboard for your Intel Core i7 you will be able to use both AMD/ATI’s Crossfire and Nvidia’s SLI capabilities with the appropriate video cards. Intel chipsets tend to be the best of the bunch and with this solution, you aren’t forced to make that decision of red team or green team; now you can choose the blue team and get both!
There are many hoops for motherboard manufacturers to jump through and since they are part of the Intel “X” chipsets, they will be expensive motherboards, but this is the step in the right direction.
I wonder how long it will be until we see this capability trickle down to the more mainstream chipset offerings.
