yeah I found it only worked with SB live 24bit under win 2k and only the drivers that came on the CD, did not work with any of the public driver releases on the net.  That was the only and last time I had EAX working until about a month afo when I got my first Xonar card.

Worked well for all games except one where it was over exaggerated and the sound stops after 5 min. I have no idea why only that game does it, but it is the only one that uses the windows included direct sound dll's via the registry values rather than the game's own dll's.  So basically it's using the windows included EAX libraries not it's own which all my other games do.  

I wish I knew enough how to mod the registry to tell it to look in it's own directory which would allow me to experiment with alternative dll's to try fix it. 

I am going to try the same game on my daily PC with win 7 and this Phoebus card and see if it works. My retro PC is using win server 2003 x64 as normal XP lacks functionality and support for the hardware I am using.

But I can say ut2004 sounds amazing with EAX working once again which I haven't heard since the game was brand new.


I heard some people use a bit of paid software from creative called Alchemy MB or something like that which emulates EAX on any card on new OSs to restore function to games.  Because it's creative and it's a paid software I would not risk my money given 90% of their products I have had were not fit for their purpose.

dudes, which it works better with SE? AMD or nvidia (1060 6gb vs rx 580 8gb)?

RX 580. It's on average faster, fair bit cheaper and has 2 extra GB which will matter in SE if you play with high settings which it can.  It also pulls even further ahead in modern titles with good DX12 and vulkan implementations.   In SE I don't know for sure but it should be slightly faster than the 1060 even with openGL that SE uses.

At the moment the 580 has some really good deals and can be had for 200 USD and I think they come with 3 free games too.

I would have gotten the RX 580 unfortunately I needed DVI ports and luckily found the Gigabyte Windforce 1060 6 GB which has two of them.  It seems to work fine at high settings but of course I have 1080P and 1280x1024 monitors so my resolution isn't very high.

vlad01 wrote:

RX 580. It's on average faster, fair bit cheaper and has 2 extra GB which will matter in SE if you play with high settings which it can.  It also pulls even further ahead in modern titles with good DX12 and vulkan implementations.   In SE I don't know for sure but it should be slightly faster than the 1060 even with openGL that SE uses.

At the moment the 580 has some really good deals and can be had for 200 USD and I think they come with 3 free games too.

If you've been using nothing but nVIDIA cards since 2003, then why do you recommend AMD cards?

Because the RX 580 compared to the 1060 is objectively better and cheaper. A no brainer.

Why does it matter what I have used in the past? I have had one or 2 Radeon cards before then in the early 00s.  I don't like to play favorites and got what ever was suited for my needs vs price at the time.  The times ATi (now AMD) had better cards were during times I was not in the position to upgrade.   Last time I bought new was before the famous HD series even came out so I just missed out on a better deal by about 6 months, in hind sight I should of waited and got a HD Radeon as they were much better and cheaper and didn't use as much power, also didn't suffer bump gate (i got burnt by that).

I havn't bought a new card since 2007 or 08 and my current card was offered to me by my friend for a price too good to pass up, but I have to say my 980 although a good upgrade over what I had is pretty disappointing mainly because the anemic vram capacity and poor overclocking ability. 

Don't know what my next card will be, but it won't be either Pascal or Turing as they both offer very poor value at the top end.

Just going to wait a year and see what comes out and if I get desperate a vega 64 will be my stop gap as the value for them at least in Aus is way better than any nvidia offerings at the moment, and I mean a lot better value, 0-10% faster than 1080 for 25% less money.  I am even eyeing off vega FE as I can get them $100 more than a 64 with 16GB of vram and slightly higher clocks. Still a good $150 cheaper than a basic 1080.   It's one of those things that a year ago people would never have guessed the prices would change that much to swing the brand values the opposite way.

I have used both interchangeably in the past and have equal numbers of both cards populating my closets lol.

Question how much RAM and VRAM do you think will be ideal going forward for the next 10 years or so if the highest resolution one uses is 1080P and dual display monitors?

Right now it's 16 GB RAM and 6 GB VRAM.  I haven't seen any reviews that find any improvements with more than those values.

16GB of ram should be enough for a while, for 10 years if you really plan to keep it that long, 32GB as a min. 

Vram, I would like to say 16GB lol but it seems vram capacity has really lagged in progress. So I personally wouldn't go less than 8GB but more if you can afford it.

In every gaming instance I see vram usage is way above normal ram usage. So I personally think vram is more important than ram in gaming. In fact less ram for gaming and general performance is usually better in a indirect way. It comes down to single rank modules vs dual rank. Single allows faster speeds and tighter timing which improves performance, especially in Ryzen based systems.  So in that case 16GB is the limit at the moment for single rank if you are trying to get the best performance.

There is still some gains with intel systems, but small enough that going dual rank and higher capacity really is not going hurt it. A few % at most. On Ryzen ram speeds has effects of around 10% or more in some cases to the overall performance so in that case it does matter a lot what ram you run.

Yes!  Thats exactly why I chose 16 GB RAM for now, because 2x8GB modules are faster and more stable.  I see Samsung is introducing new memory which will allow up to 32 GB per bank (so 128 GB total if using all 4 slots.)

I think when 4K displays become more commonplace you'll see a big jump in VRAM in video cards.

Yeah I heard about that too. 

I think vram scales more with game engines use of textures and meshes rather than res.  On my PC I have ran out of 4GB and my max res is 900p which is really low.  My monitor is just a spare 20" as my good gaming monitor died few years ago.

vlad01 wrote:

Yeah I heard about that too. 

I think vram scales more with game engines use of textures and meshes rather than res.  On my PC I have ran out of 4GB and my max res is 900p which is really low.  My monitor is just a spare 20" as my good gaming monitor died few years ago.

Ugh what caused your monitor to die? I still have old monitors from 2005 that work.  Right now I have one from 2005, one from 2013 and one new one I haven't hooked up yet.

First the CCFL inverter died and I replaced that with a generic one and then several weeks later the main PSU died and I fixed that. Then something on the main board died which I could not work out nor get spare parts as the parts were no longer produced.   This all started 2 weeks after the 2 year warranty ran out.  The fact they didn't even have spares while the product was still being sold new told me they built it to be thrown out with no intentions of support.   They also did not want to help despite being so close to warranty.

Google search showed heaps of customers complaining with the same issue, days to weeks outside of warranty failures with knocked back claims etc.

It was a 28" 1080p 2ms viewsonic gaming monitor from when most monitors were still only 19-20".   It cost me over $1000 and lasted 2 years and 2 weeks.  First time and last time I ever look at viewsonic stuff.  Pure garbage support and unreliable products.

The monitor I have now I got around the same time in 2008 for another pc, a cheap $170 at the time AOC monitor.  Still going.  I also had a 20" Samsung monitor I got the same year. That died this year from LCD cancer.

I have another 19" 4:3 dell LCD from 2001 that still works great lol.  Dell monitors are rock solid makes. Makes sense as they are mostly business class products.


I want to get a Pixio 32" 1440p monitor next year at some point. I mentioned and linked that a few pages back.

guys I am sorry I know there has to be a way to post in the proper thread, so feel free to guid me there.  I have a big issue, my docking abilities stopped for all of my instalations. I have atleast four separate installations and the green lines will no longer appear for me no matter what I do. I noticed when I was trying to dock with the space station. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

vlad01 wrote:

First the CCFL inverter died and I replaced that with a generic one and then several weeks later the main PSU died and I fixed that. Then something on the main board died which I could not work out nor get spare parts as the parts were no longer produced.   This all started 2 weeks after the 2 year warranty ran out.  The fact they didn't even have spares while the product was still being sold new told me they built it to be thrown out with no intentions of support.   They also did not want to help despite being so close to warranty.

Google search showed heaps of customers complaining with the same issue, days to weeks outside of warranty failures with knocked back claims etc.

It was a 28" 1080p 2ms viewsonic gaming monitor from when most monitors were still only 19-20".   It cost me over $1000 and lasted 2 years and 2 weeks.  First time and last time I ever look at viewsonic stuff.  Pure garbage support and unreliable products.

The monitor I have now I got around the same time in 2008 for another pc, a cheap $170 at the time AOC monitor.  Still going.  I also had a 20" Samsung monitor I got the same year. That died this year from LCD cancer.

I have another 19" 4:3 dell LCD from 2001 that still works great lol.  Dell monitors are rock solid makes. Makes sense as they are mostly business class products.


I want to get a Pixio 32" 1440p monitor next year at some point. I mentioned and linked that a few pages back.

Wow I have been hit and miss with Viewsonic stuff too.  I bought a $1700 20 inch 1600x1200 Viewsonic back in 2002 that lasted for about 10 years.  One of my two displays currently is a 19 inch Viewsonic 1280x1024 which I got in the same year, but it came without a stand and they were going to charge me another $80 to give me a stand, so I decided to make my own lol.  The one from 2005 is a 19" 1280x1024 Sony and the new one is a 1080P 22" BenQ.  That last one is an LED.
Whats LCD cancer? Do LCD die out quicker than LED do or just get dimmer with time?

Who was your motherboard manufacturer?  My old AsRock lasted for 11 years and is actually still working despite being a budget board, it's just that the hard drive died so I decided to upgrade everything.  The only part that stopped working on it was the ethernet so I just got a Netgear gigabit PCI ethernet card when that happened.  Their customer support and BIOS updates to support new graphics cards were awesome years after the warranty expired.  I hope ASUS is the same.

I have used mainly Asus boards and a few MSI ones. Had 2 gigabyte ones before but both died, one catastrophically, a mosfet exploded sending bits of it all over the room.

I also have one Tyan/Fujitsu-Siemens board. It's excellent!

none of my LCDs use LEDs, all are CCFL back lit.  They predate blue and white LEDs even being commercially available in everyday uses. RGB wasn't even a thing either really, it fact I built a project for my diploma on driving a single RGB LED as they only came out the same year I got these monitors, a price of about $10+ each and they were huge as any first of a kind tech.  LED LCDs did not come out until about 5 years later I recall, at least not commonly.


LCD cancer. I have seen other monitors do it before.  It happens over a few hours to days.  It's some chemical degradation of the liquid crystals that spreads once it starts.