Stephen Groom Taking a shot at becoming a Poker Pro

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: