The Graduates

As I may have mentioned, I'm running Eve on Ubuntu, since I managed to nuke my Windows partition. That happened partly because my PC crashed all of a sudden (probably when writing to the disk) and the system partition just died. I figured I'll see how long I can live without Windows before reinstalling it, and learn something new on the way, so I set up this Linux thing.

Well, that happened to me again, and this time it's my Linux home partition that fell victim to the crash. I'm sitting here now waiting for fsck to finish screwing up all my data so I can go on and poke my eyeballs out. I suspect my motherboard has reached the end of its useful life, or my CPU is about to croak, cause in the last couple of days I've crashed about a dozen times already. It's probably the heat - my CPU temperature is at around 64-65 degrees C. It probably dies right when it reaches 65, although I have disabled temperature shutdown in the BIOS.

The CPU is not overclocked (not anymore), the power supply and the CPU fan are both very loud, and I'm on the verge of tossing everything overboard.

Had I anticipated all this, I wouldn't have bought a new AGP video card for my motherboard a couple of weeks ago, but now I'm stuck with it and I don't want to have to buy a PCI-e card.

Sooo, to cut a long story short (I got plenty of time here), I've been looking for a mobo that can handle both AGP and PCI-e, and can fit a Core 2 Duo CPU.

I'm planning to rush out first thing tomorrow and buy an Asrock 4Core Dual VSTA LGA775 motherboard and an E6420 CPU. As that CPU is socket 775, I assume it will fit fine and that's all I have to worry about.

Now, questions:

1. The shop website says the CPU is a boxed version - does that mean a cooling fan is included?

2. My current ram is a DDR 400MHz piece. Am I correct in assuming that these would work with the new mobo/CPU, but my performance would be somewhat gimped, compared to using the faster DDR2 667 MHz memories? I don't want to spend extra on memory right now, this is an emergency purchase.

3. I'm not sure if my power supply will hack it. Currently I have an Abit NF7-S running an AMD XP 2600+ and a Geforce 7600GT, with two SATA hard disks. I have no idea how one figures out whether a PSU is too small - would the system just not boot at all, would it freeze randomly at high CPU/GPU loads, what? Again, I'd rather not spend if I don't have to.


I'm at the end of my tether. Finally, I'm back in Eve after months and months, and now my hardware is giving me the runaround. *grumble*

The only thing I can speak to is the power situation.

Computer power supplies have built-in circuit that if they can't supply enough voltage they won't come "on" in that they won't supply any voltage.

Now this behavior introduces some interesting problems in that as the PS heats up it becomes less efficient, which means that if it's borderline when it starts up it's going to drop below "good enough" at operating temperature, and it's going to shut off. Once it cools a few degrees it will start right back up like nothing happened.

BTW, I commend you for running on Linux. It's nice to not be the only TGRAD running it for gaming.

BTW, Ventrilo support on Linux blows, even under Wine/Cedega. I'm looking into running a virtual machine for it, but I'm not convinced that will work either. Teamspeak on the other hand has a Linux client and while it can be a little tempermental, it does work.

Gwarnina wrote:As I may have mentioned, I'm running Eve on Ubuntu, since I managed to nuke my Windows partition. That happened partly because my PC crashed all of a sudden (probably when writing to the disk) and the system partition just died. I figured I'll see how long I can live without Windows before reinstalling it, and learn something new on the way, so I set up this Linux thing.

Well, that happened to me again, and this time it's my Linux home partition that fell victim to the crash. I'm sitting here now waiting for fsck to finish screwing up all my data so I can go on and poke my eyeballs out. I suspect my motherboard has reached the end of its useful life, or my CPU is about to croak, cause in the last couple of days I've crashed about a dozen times already. It's probably the heat - my CPU temperature is at around 64-65 degrees C. It probably dies right when it reaches 65, although I have disabled temperature shutdown in the BIOS.

The CPU is not overclocked (not anymore), the power supply and the CPU fan are both very loud, and I'm on the verge of tossing everything overboard.

Had I anticipated all this, I wouldn't have bought a new AGP video card for my motherboard a couple of weeks ago, but now I'm stuck with it and I don't want to have to buy a PCI-e card.

Sooo, to cut a long story short (I got plenty of time here), I've been looking for a mobo that can handle both AGP and PCI-e, and can fit a Core 2 Duo CPU.

I'm planning to rush out first thing tomorrow and buy an Asrock 4Core Dual VSTA LGA775 motherboard and an E6420 CPU. As that CPU is socket 775, I assume it will fit fine and that's all I have to worry about.

Now, questions:

1. The shop website says the CPU is a boxed version - does that mean a cooling fan is included?

2. My current ram is a DDR 400MHz piece. Am I correct in assuming that these would work with the new mobo/CPU, but my performance would be somewhat gimped, compared to using the faster DDR2 667 MHz memories? I don't want to spend extra on memory right now, this is an emergency purchase.

3. I'm not sure if my power supply will hack it. Currently I have an Abit NF7-S running an AMD XP 2600+ and a Geforce 7600GT, with two SATA hard disks. I have no idea how one figures out whether a PSU is too small - would the system just not boot at all, would it freeze randomly at high CPU/GPU loads, what? Again, I'd rather not spend if I don't have to.


I'm at the end of my tether. Finally, I'm back in Eve after months and months, and now my hardware is giving me the runaround. *grumble*

1) Boxed usually means retail as opposed to OEM. Both come with the stock intel cooler. The retail comes with extra instructions and a heftier price tag.

2) Verify your motherboard runs DDR. DDR2 800 is the standard for most new boards now. DDR has a different number of pins than DDR2 so they don't fit in the same slots. Your mobo will have to have a combo memory controller and you lose half of your slots.

Dont forget, DDR3 is going to be released within the next 3 months so you will be behind a bunch.

If you are running Vista, I'd recommend 2GB of 667 Mhz memory at a minimum.

3) Technically, Intel says it can all run nicely at 400W. I'm not sure I buy that... I'd go 500W as a minimum - especially with a nice video card. If you run SLI make sure you are at 650W. Google a powersupply calc if you want to verify my numbers.

In any and all cases of you building a computer, make sure to do your research. I'd recommend www.TomsHardware.com or www.anandtech.com. Both do great reviews of products.

BTW, I just bought a system about 2 months ago:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600
EVGA Nvidia 680i Motherboard
2GB DDR2 Corsair 800Mhz
EVGA Nvidia Geforce 8800GTS
Thermaltake 700W PSU
Windows Vista

So if you have any specific questions, I've done a ton of research.

Gut Punch wrote:So if you have any specific questions, I've done a ton of research.

Yeah, can I have your stuff That 8800 is a sweet piece of kit, I had me eye on it for a long time but then decided I wasn't ready to toss my hardware out, as with my current setup my CPU just wouldn't have been able to make the most of it. Guess I should have listened to my instincts, cause I'm gonna end up pretty much buying a new machine anyway...

In the meanwhile I located the ASRock webpage, and it says the BIOS supports DDR400, so I assume the memory slots will do as well. I'll upgrade to faster memory later, when I can afford to splash out, right now I just need a rig that works.

Thanks for the tip on powersupply calculators, this one seems to have done the trick. My current setup gave me about 300 watts, new setup is 320 watts. I think my PSU is 350 watts, and I included a 30% capacitor aging factor as a safety margin. This one put my mind to rest, thank you!

Thanks for the tip about cooling as well - I'll see if I can get an OEM box and buy a larger and quieter fan for it.

William McCracken wrote:BTW, Ventrilo support on Linux blows, even under Wine/Cedega. I'm looking into running a virtual machine for it, but I'm not convinced that will work either. Teamspeak on the other hand has a Linux client and while it can be a little tempermental, it does work.

That's good to know, cause I installed the native TS client and connected the TGRADS server just fine. I'm still waiting for my BRUCE Vent account to get activated, so I can't try that yet, but I did get the impression that it's gonna be A) a CPU hog and B) a major pain in the ass.

William McCracken wrote:BTW, I commend you for running on Linux. It's nice to not be the only TGRAD running it for gaming.

Thanks, I'm gonna try and stick with Ubuntu. I managed to install an older version of Photoshop and some other Win32 apps into wine, so even my must-have apps work now (well, did work until I fscked around on a mounted drive... seems that's a big no-no in the Linux world... live and learn... When the message says "serious data corruption", they don't kid around).

My current machine gets about 5-10 fps in space, 1-2 fps outside Jita 4-4 and about 20 fps in station. I gather EVE is very CPU intensive, especially under wine instead of win32, so I hope the new setup will push my FPS back into the PVP-enabled range. I don't mind trading and building stuff, but that's not really what I came back for.

Thanks for your help guys, I'm gonna check back tomorrow morning before I head out to the shop to see if others have good ideas that haven't been mentioned so far.

For those interested in my ongoing saga...

I finally got my hardware up and running - currently installing the OS, I'm writing this on my lappy. I ended up buying an E6420 and the motherboard I mentioned above. I'm curious about the quad core performance - I think my old Athlon XP 2600+ runs at the same CPU frequency but is about three and a half years old by now and generations behind the current technology.

I only screwed up connecting the floppy cable, but I can't be arsed to change that. I just want to get into Eve to see the FPS (and hope it's high enough for shooty shooty, cause I really don't want to go back to XP).

Thanks for the help guys, hope to see you all soon in PC9

Out of curiosity, how did you find the performance of Eve under Ubuntu in relation to the demands placed on the hardware, and which instructions did you follow to get it sorted?

The reason I ask is that I am in the process of removing myself from my Mac as a laptop for something a little more 'Eve Friendly' to have with me when I'm away at work. But seeing as I never use Windows for anything other than Eve on my desktop machine at home, I was wondering if I could get away with just running Ubuntu (or any other *nix) on the laptop but still be able to do everything I need to do.

Given the amount of time / network connection issues I get online when at work, I only really need to be able to log in to do minor bits and pieces (trading, chatting, maybe the occasional mission) and was wondering how people have found it.
If performance / hardware drain is similar, how about running two or more clients simultaneously? Is it workable?

Sorry if this is a slight derail, hope the recovery was speedy!

Hi Dave,

Don't worry about derailing the topic, given how many topics I've derailed in my forum whoring career.

Eve seems to be very CPU dependent - much more so than on the video card. Upgrading from an Athlon XP 2600+ to the E6420, and keeping the same video card, pushed my FPS in Ubuntu from 5 to 50... Quite incredible, too.

I was curious about how well Ubuntu performance compared to XP, so I installed XP on a small partition to test. FPS in space under XP was 85-90, compared to 45-50 with Ubuntu, in the exact same spot.

So you do get a performance hit, but that is good enough if you don't want to PVP. In fact, my only problem right now is Ventrilo not working with wine, as even 45 fps is pretty nice for PVP.

I would assume that two clients would work just as well - I'll test that with EVE and a SiSi client later and let you know.

I went from 15fps on an P4 3.0ghz, 1GB memory, GeForce 6600GT and Windows XP to 300fps dual boxed on a Core 2 Duo E6600, 2Gb memory, GeForce 8800GTS, and Vista.

Its all about the CPU until that new graphics engine.

Gwarnina / Gut Punch

Thanks for the feedback, certainly sounds encouraging enough to make it worth giving a try.

Either way I do it the laptop will unlikely handle PvP with any comfortable level of usability anyway, so as long as I can crank enough performance out of it to safely monitor things / keep in touch / and maybe make a few extra ISKies on the side whilst I'm at work it should be good.

Any specific set of instructions you guys followed, or do I just need to brush up on my Linux skills and stop asking n00b questions...
The reason I ask is that I seem to remember finding a couple of slightly different ways of making it work a while ago, both of which were slightly dated.

Dave,

I followed the instructions on page 35 of the Eve-O forums thread on running under wine: http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard ... 57&page=35

Newer versions of wine apparently break Eve. I've ran 0.9.33 and 0.9.36 successfully. Here are the commands to get the proper version under Ubuntu:

The first line removes the old version of wine, so it is not necessary for a new install.

Once you've installed wine, run winecfg to have it create .wine and all the other relevant directories. But it's all explained on the page 35 instructions.

One machine I play on is old-ish. Outside of Jita 4-4 I get between total lag and 8fps. Inside the station I get 30fps.
If you're trading inside a station and not undocking you can do a lot on older or slower hardware, as long as you don't mind waiting 20 min to log in that is.