New GFX card so I can play Dirt Rally??

[MartyG]

I bought one of these: http://uk.msi.com/product/vga/GTX-96...-specification
.

Good choice - did you get it up and running okay?

[charlesr]

Power cable should be arriving today

[charlesr]

I had to rearrange the inside of the case a bit. Moved the HDDs down, so that it fits. It's enormous compared to the old one

[charlesr]

Why do they make the fans point down? Is it to keep the heat from the cpu away from the gpu?

[Brad]

Which fans?

[charlesr]

The fans on the gfx card. They are underneath it when mounted in the case

[Brad]

Oh, yeah mine are too. Probably for the reason you stated! I drew a diagram to design the air flow in mine /nerd.

[VR46]

Yes I now have two fans right at the bottom of my case to take hot air out the front and back of the case since upgrading a while back

[charlesr]

I have a silent noctura fan taking in air at the front and one pushing out air at the back, both at the bottom.

Got it up and running, FPS in Terratech went from 18fps at 720x565 on simple mode to 685fps
Seems locked to 60fps on 1080p

Some of the cabling in between one of the GFX card fans and the GFX card heat sink wasn't put together properly. Once the fans fired up, I heard the noise of the fan hitting something. Had a poke around and prodded the cables back a bit and it stopped fouling. Pretty shoddy though - a few more minutes and it would have sliced through the cables.... Just spinning the blades by hand would have spotted it. Guess there is no human QA on these things....

Anyway, all sorted. Thanks everyone for the advice!!! Now to go and buy Dirt Rally. See you all next year.

[VR46]

All bought in and installed now Charles? Let me know your Steam name and of course fire any Dirt Rally questions over.

[charlesr]

Yep. Very happy. Totally silent when not playing games. Winner.

[VR46]

An how is the game running? have you run the built in benchmark at high and ultra? Interested to see what average FPS you get.

Dirt Rally is like a lot of racing games, you start off in the worst cars unfortunately, but doesn't take long to get something much better.

[charlesr]

Still downloading. Will check those!

[charlesr]

Blinking bleeps.... 11GB download. 9GB done already. I paused the download and rebooted the machine. It has started downloading it again from Zero.... Is this normal for the Steam client? If so, what a load of crud.... PC Gaming is such grief.

edit: and I thought perhaps it's just the remaining bits starting from zero, but it now says 1GB/11GB downloaded.

edit2: I tried shutting down Steam and restarting it and it started again from where I was at 1.5GB (as you would expect) - maybe it was the reboot that caused the problem.... Stupid. Quite annoyed. I know I'm uncapped, but 2 hours wasted download is 2 hours...

[charlesr]

Beginning to wonder if this is all a huge mistake.

Dirt Rally finally installed.

First thing says "no save data found - you need to set up a new profile - do you want to set one up now?"
I click yes
Then "autosave warning - game saves automatically. autosave will be disabled if there are any inconsistencies in game content and save data.
I press ok
Then "are you sure? if you continue, autosave will be disabled and no profile will be saved. Continue anyway?"
Options are yes or no. I click No.
Brings me back to the same question.... I click No.
Same question.....
I click Yes.
Then "racenet not available connection failed please try later"
I press ok

It then asks me to create a profile.
So I do.
I then find the option to manually save the profile and press it. However at this point I'm suspicious and try exiting the game and turning it on again. It repeats from the start of this post. There is no sign of the profile I saved manually. Basically there is no way to save my progress.

Any suggestions? ?200 to play one game and it's not working lol....