I love stusser

There are flat out amazing dell deals two to three times a year (this wasn’t one) and great deals every 4-8 weeks (like this one). Just watch slickdeals and fatwallet daily.

1280x1024, the rez of my LCD.

That’s a pretty high resolution, especially for Crysis. How does it run when you bump the rez down? You tried that?

No it isn’t. I get perfectly acceptable frame rates at that resolution with the config file I posted. Just make sure AA is off (the config does Edge AA, which smooths the edge of objects but takes way less performance).

Dude, I’m running crysis at that resolution, with everything but AA maxed. Are you saying you can’t? The only difference between our systems should be the CPU…

Ok, I’ll reinstall the Crysis demo and give the config file a shot. How do I run a timetest?

I’ll also install 3Dmark and test that.

I ran the demo at 1280x960 with everything on high and AA. It ran fine. It ran even better disabling AA and throwing some things on very high.

Ok, I was wrong.

I originally played Crysis right after I got my new rig (3.0Ghz c2d, 8800GT, 4GB ram), back in early December and it ran poor on high and acceptable on medium.

Now, two months and numerous driver updates later, it runs fine on high. This is at 1280x1024. I also tried the config file that daedalus3 posted. It was a bit slow until I disabled AA, then it was fine. I couldn’t tell if it looked better than “High”, though.

How do I run a timetest in Crysis? Or even display my FPS? I’m still downloading 3Dmark.

Thanks.

Don’t forget to patch Crysis itself. :)

Well, to each their own. I have a WS monitor, and run at 1440x900, no AA, everything on High but Shadows on Medium. My non-combat framerates are in the high 40s and combat rarely dips below 30. The game plays beautifully.

I’m honestly confused that the config file you recommend is getting such good results for you. Do you have any fps figures, or do you care? It’s obviously working well for you, but my performance was worse with it on, so I’m confused as to what it’s doing for you that it won’t do for me.

I just have the demo. Is there a patch for that?

By the way, how does the config file interact with the manual settings? Does it override them?

The latest version of the full game is 1.1. I doubt the demo has been updated too, but they may do it b/c there’s some performance optimizations in it.

Yeah, it does. It will keep everything else the way you set it, but implement the specific settings in the file. There’s an intense, complicated breakdown of how it works here at Tweakguides.com.

Quick question for you XPS 420 owners… any of you have problems setting up dual monitors? Did you have to do anything unusual to get it to work?

Haven’t tried it, but there are two DVI ports so I can’t imagine it would be difficult.

So this is annoying. I reformatted and reinstalled Vista as soon as I got this Bad Ass Rig (BAR?), and everything works except my microphone support. I’ve reinstalled the sound driver and no dice. I’m online with Dell right now trying to figure it out. I thought I’d post to share with my fellow BAR owners.

Actually, my mic port (on the front) does work, but the quality is shitty. I’m not sure what’s going on there, but I’m thinking it may be a hardware issue.

Mine seems to work just fine, btw, although I needed to boost it a bit.

Well, it got fixed. LONG process with several reboots and a cust. rep taking over my computer for a while on remote desktop to troubleshoot it.

Turns out you may have to have the modem drivers installed (which I hadn’t bothered with, for obvious reasons), and the basic Vista “High Definition Sound Device” driver appears to have everything covered, but if you “Update Driver” over that, and choose the driver from the Dell site, it’ll install the right driver and everything will be fine.

Of course you have to try to install shit for an hour before that, so you have unpacked driver files sitting on your hard drive to choose from when Updating the driver, but whatever.

Stupid Vista…

Speaking of sound issues with this machine - there is no way to hear what’s coming in on the line-in input unless you are actually recording audio. After scouring the internet and Dell forums, I found a registry hack that enabled a checkbox in the audio settings that would lead you to believe it would turn on monitoring - it doesn’t. On my old machine, I used the line-in for Xbox 360 audio. Kind of annoying that there’s no solution to this yet. Appears to be an issue with the Sigmatel drivers.