Stephen Groom Music Producer? Poker Pro? Sports Bettor? Tune in next post to find out

GTA IV – Finally!!

So it finally happened.. Today I finally got to play a proper session on GTA 4 after buying it on the... 10th of this month.

As-per the post below I went out and bought myself an ATI Radeon 4670. It arrived a few days later and I missed the parcel. Luckily, CityLink delivered it to a house a few doors down so I have to thank them for that.. :thumbs: I get home and go straight to the door to get my parcel. The old lady is out somewhere so I wait watching eagerly until I see her husbands return. Finally!! The 4670 is in my hands and I can now play GTA!!!

I get into the house, take my PC apart a little and install the new graphics card. This takes about 10 minutes and the drivers were installed and working in even less time than that. Now, SURELY I can play GTA so I load up the game. It launches atleast this time but I am greeted with low framerates (1-10 fps at best) and lots of out-of-memory crashes. I am devistated and concede that I won't be playing GTA till I buy myself a new PC.

I had priced up a Core 2 Quad (which I still intend to buy) with about 4gig ram + a sexy new case for around £450. This is too much of a hit to the pocket until next year so I begin to overclock. I had managed to get the game to launch and run but it was still only working for about 2 minutes before it crashed

Today though, my friend Ben gave me some advice that has allowed me to play GTA :D:D. I asked him what a safe voltage was to run on my CPU (AMD Athlon 64 3800+ X2) and he told me 1.6v!!! I had been overclocking mine at 1.4v and had only managed 2400MHz which wasn't doing much for GTA as that was still only the minimum system requirement.

With his advice though, I have now got my PC overclocked to the following specs and it plays GTA 4 with no troubles

[code]AMD Athlon 64 3800+ X2
Voltage: 1.5
FSB: 255
Multiplier: x10
Core Speed: 2550 MHz

RAM: 2 x 512 Corsair Value Select DDR400 + 2x Kingston Value DDR 333
Ratio (RAM/FSB): 1.5:1
Frequency: 170MHz
Timings: 2.5 3 3 7 10 2T 16
Volts: 1.7[/code]

Pretty long blog there but it all leads to this statement:

When buying a game. ALWAYS be sure that you meet minimum system requirements!

Cheers
Overclocker Groom :wave:

Gta IV – The story so far

As I mentioned in my last post, GTA 4 is out for PC and I decided that I should probably buy it for myself if the price is right.

Yesterday I did just that and got home at about 9pm happier than I've been alone in ages and started to install. I figured from the off that it was going to take some time so I kept installing.. and installing.. and installing.. and installing.. and after 45 or so minutes had registered to the two websites the installer asked for, installed the game, verified the key, and verified that it was past the release date.. Phew..

So, I fires up the game on my not-below average machine (Amd Athlon X2 3800+ 64, 2gig DDR400, HIS ATI x800GTO) and gets a "Fatal Error: DD3D50"

After some research, I find out that this is a "DirectX 9 required error" which I thought was a little odd considering AFAIK the x800 is a DX9 card.

So, to cur a long story short, aside from costing me £27.99 for the game, I have also ended up yesterday night buying a new graphics card in an effort to bring my PC up to some sort of modern standard which now has the following vitals:

Socket 949 AMD Athlon X2 3800+ 64bit
2GB ddr400 RAM
500+ GB hdd space (I forget exactly how much)
[url=http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Graphics+Cards/PCI-E/ATI+Radeon+4000+Series/ATI+Radeon+HD4670+1GB+DDR3+PCI-E+?productId=34137]ATI Radeon HD 4670 1GB[/url]

So now the most valuable and modern part of the PC is probably the gfx card, sad really.. I will probably be getting a Core2 or Core quad in the new year though so it's ok for now

Regards
A Groomi who's itching to play his new game which has so far cost him £110

ps. Anyone want to buy a radeon x800?

GTA IV for PC :)

Apparently I have been living under a rock and managed to miss the release of GTA IV on PC on the third of this month!

I have been jealous of all of my friend's with their next-gen consoles who have been able to play this game and I nearly bought a PS3 myself just so I could play it. I have learned in the past though that this is a bad idea, and having recently sold my £3-400 worth of Xbox + games for £20 on ebay, manged to talk myself out of buying a PS3.

I have then, been waiting patiently for GTA IV to come out on PC, even though Rockstar promised that it would be a console release only, and have found myself going shopping, but with no money to buy it

I suppose reasonably, if it is less than £30 in shops today, I will buy it as a Christmas gift to myself If it isn't though, I will hold out until January and buy it online probably for around £20.

Sorry for the out-of-the blue post by the way, I just posted this here so that you guys knew that I wasn't dead or something.

Cheers
Stephen