The Tower of Power

Lovely mod man

"but why does it always work when a video game is on?"

When you are playing a game, chances are good its a Directx game and thus when running fullscreen there is absolutely no drawing of opengl subsystem like windows desktop.

This is why you notice massive frame rate drops when running window mode games. it is drawing both Dx and opengl. The projector isnt doing anything wrong, its the same as a monitor, it can only display what it's given. it cannot simply create graphical glitches like u describe. My thoughts would be the upgrade all drivers, and possibly look for hardware errors under device manager.

The most important thing to remember here is that with most standard CRT monitor there are two "profiles" stored. One for opengl and one for directx, and you will see which one you are in if you open your monitor menu while in a game, etc it should say Directx preferences, etc. This doesn't change the output obviously but if your monitor is incapable of showing a certain res it will automatically stretch it out or something. If your projector is the same way, then its likely you just need to manually tweak screensize, and depth manually via the projector's settings so both modes match. this will minimize the "video mode switch" issues i think. One other thing is if your opengl mode is not set the same as your dx mode the video card will still try to stretch, expand, squeeze and basically do everything it can to force the mode to work on the output device. this is generally the worst cause for errors because at this point its not your hardware simply sending data, its software telling it to tweak it first. you can probably imagine problems would arise from this. My best input here would be to tell you to also hook up a monitor to see what that displays.

My idea: its your video card not built well for switching video outputs. My ATI Radeon All in wonder 9800 pro was the same way. it would just not work sometimes for no reason and other times i ended up with a blank monitor and TV screen, forcing a hard reboot because i couldnt see anything. There are tons of other ways to get video signals out of computers though so i wouldnt worry about it. try everything u can then look for an alternate card or option.

hope i helped a tad.

EDIT: also just a side note.. im running an ATI FireGL V7100 which is powering my Apple 30" Cinema HD monitor @2560 x 1600 and i can tell you that if i try to run a window mode game on this monitor at this desktop res the frame buffer is somewhere around 200 megs for a single frame. its drawing both systems on all of these pixels. so its using just about all of my onboard ram. If i take a screenshot of CounterStrike: Source running it at 2560 x 1500 it crashes me to desktop everytime. i simply run out of vram. if you run a HD projector it may just be running into graphical errors because of this buffer. i used to have a simple frame buffer calculator on the web somewhere.. if you are running 1920x1080 (1080i) res with antialiasing on 2x on both opengl and a DX game windowed its like 180-200 megs or something. Just thought perhaps this might help. the processor of the GPU isnt always the most important thing to remember. its onboard ram does have limitations. if your output res is lower than this it sounds driver level to me.
 
But if I hook up a regular monitor (15" not 6x9) to the tower, it works fine as well.

Also, does anybody know of a PCI extension and what the cable distance restrictions might be? Here's a link to one that I found, but it only has less than a 4" cable. I need about 8" to add in a firewire card (my new mobo doesn't have one if you can believe that). The PCI slot for it is blocked by my GPU's water cooling block. Can I just by the above item and replace it's cables?
 
michaelgildersleeve said:
But if I hook up a regular monitor (15" not 6x9) to the tower, it works fine as well.

*snip*
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have you tryed the right drivers for that projector? you know..like the way moniters have drivers even thought they just kinda work, the right driver might fix it

what happen when you power cycle the projector when the glitch is happening?

and you lost me on the question about the pci adapter, what are you wanting to do again?

thore
 
Have you tried messing with the refresh rate? Try RefreshLock or similar from Guru3d and setting it to the lowest 60. Test then raise it within the projectors limits.
 
while its giveing you the error turn it off then on again, (or even unplug it for a few seconeds) it shouldnt make any difference at all, but if it dose then it may be something wrong in the projector its self, what, im not shure, but it was one of the few things i could think of off the top of my head

anoughter thought, have you tryed it with out all of the extention cables, you said that the laptop dosent have any trouble with 2 cables, perhaps that third cable is defective some how perhaps label the cables and swap there order see if that narrows it down

thore
 
Harddrives.jpg


Here's the "my computer" screen. It comes out to just under 2.7 TBs. I am going to buy a 8x SATA controller so I can add the last 2 stack of 4 hard drives. I imagine that the last 8 will average out to be about 500GBs each as I buy them over the next 3-5 years. Has anybody read anything about projections of hard drive capacity over the next 5 years? Anyway, it will be a rediculous amount of space.
 
michaelgildersleeve said:
Harddrives.jpg


Here's the "my computer" screen. It comes out to just under 2.7 TBs. I am going to buy a 8x SATA controller so I can add the last 2 stack of 4 hard drives. I imagine that the last 8 will average out to be about 500GBs each as I buy them over the next 3-5 years. Has anybody read anything about projections of hard drive capacity over the next 5 years? Anyway, it will be a rediculous amount of space.
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Did you try and download the internet one day, jeez.
 
That is some excellent woodworking, Can't wait to see if you get that controller card worked out.
 
I'm trying to clean up all the cabling now. It's the least fun part of the project. I want to do another project badly, but I don't have the money to fork out for the possibility of selling right now. I decided to make the next project a 3 part modular system - one part for the amp and cable boxes, one part for computer, one part for the hard drives. The reason for this is so a person can buy the modules as needed. I have a lot of ideas for the next one. I'm sure this goes for everybody, but it this project now seems like a something to use to make the next one better.

Maybe I'll just make the furniture part for the next one and fill in the hard ware if some one buys it. I still need to post the video of this thing with the stained glass and the lights responding to the music. I'll try to get to that this weeked.
 
CleanedupFlashBig.jpg
CleanedupDarkBig.jpg

Here's the computer with the cables mostly cleaned up. I have to get a longer IDE cable and move two more cables around the back, but it's time to go to sleep for now.
 
So I started this project to give me some excercise to allow my arm to recouparate after surgery after I broke it on vacation. Now it's finished (Jason just replaced the last cable) and I'm recouporating from surgery from breaking my leg in three places in a bike accident last weeked. I've never broken a bone or had surgury before my arm, now there's two incidents in less than six months. The computer went from being something to do with one injury to having something to do with another.



I wanted to put up pictures to show off the finished cabling, but there's not enough light. It will have to wait, but it's not much different from the last pictures. Just tidying up. Now it's time to enjoy the system. Anyway, thanks for all the compliments and I hope to have another project up here as soon as I can find a buyer for a new project. The next one won't be nearly as tall, about four feet. The leg's going to take a few months to heal, though, so I guess I'll be taking it easy for a while.


Good luck with all of your projects.
 
michaelgildersleeve said:
Here's the "my computer" screen. It comes out to just under 2.7 TBs. I am going to buy a 8x SATA controller so I can add the last 2 stack of 4 hard drives. I imagine that the last 8 will average out to be about 500GBs each as I buy them over the next 3-5 years. Has anybody read anything about projections of hard drive capacity over the next 5 years? Anyway, it will be a rediculous amount of space.[/QUOTE]


Is there a good reason why you aren't using a real hardware raid card, like a 3ware? Even if your CPU can do it, software raid has some serious disadvatages (stability, reliability) compared to a hardware raid card. You're already spending a good chunk of change.

I have a 9500s-12 ([url]http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata9000.asp[/url]) 12 SATA ports, single card, works in PCI/PCI-X slots, very fast, very stable, best way to have an array that big, imho. You can get them for $400-ish on ebay, or $700 new.
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I wish I would have known about that. The reason I didn't have a raid is because I was planning on getting (4) 4 port cards (only because I didn't look on ebay, just newegg) and that would have wasted a lot of space having 4 RAIDS. I would have much rather have gotten what you got. Although I am planning on buying larger and larger hard drives and I hear that causes problems. I just got into making computers with this project and admittedly made a lot of purchasing mistakes along the way. I told a guy who knows a lot about computers one day that I wanted an electronic componant system that basically did what this does (except a DVD carousel unstead of the HD stacks) and he said I should get an HTPC system. I said "what's that?" and here I am now. I feel like I learned a lot along the way, but yes there are several things I would have changed, specifically the 12 port card instead of 4 port cards. I just want to take a break for now, but can you tell me who you got yours from, just in case I want to do the RAID at some point? Thanks.
 
Not a problem bud, we learn along the way.


First, here's a great primer on Redundant Array of Individual Disks http://www.finitesystems.com/PRODUCT/raid/raidlevel.htm.

I given the type of data, and amount of disks you're using, I'd recommend you get a raid card for the following reasons:

1. Ease of Management - RAID can turn your multiple disks into one (or more) big disks. You don't have to worry about filling up an individual drive; you'll have your aggregated space to play with.

2. Redundancy - depending on the RAID level, the card will spread parity information around the disks, enabling the card to rebuild the data from a failed drive, should (and they will) one fail, without you losing any data. With (8) disks, I'd recommend either Raid5, Raid6, or Raid 10/50. The last thing you want to do after archiving 2TB of data is to do it... again..

3. Speed - another advantage of RAID is striping data across disks. This means that your data can come off much faster than a single disk on reads. Writes will be faster, in most cases, than a single disk, but there's a triple-disk-access penalty (read, write, verify) that keeps writes from being as fast as reads on a RAID array.


There are several good companies that make hardware RAID cards (3ware, LSI, Areca), my personal preference is 3ware for maturity of product, drivers, etc.

Here's an Ebay Search for the card I got: http://search.ebay.com/search/searc...ws/&fkr=1&from=R8&satitle=9500s-12&category0=

Here's a pricewatch Search for the card I got: http://castle.pricewatch.com/s/sear...=Controller+Cards&Page=1&srt=t&view=&paging=1

I wouldn't pay more than $400 for the card used, or $750 new.

Good luck with your project bud.. it's a blast.


oh, one last thing, think about an IR (I like Streamzap) or RF remote (ATI All-in-Wonder)....
 
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