My new gaming rig arrived

[ICantSpellDawg]

Well, in fairness, I would not order anything with watercooling from an el cheapo site. I'm scared of having liquid inside my boxen as it is.

Why not ship it back to them, TuffStuff? Surely they have some sort of provision for that, and I know you kept the box ....

I don't want to. I keep the things that I buy - i just put 2 cheap fans in the box. That and it plays music, surfs the web, plays movies and prints paper.

It is a pain and total loss to send things back. It will cost me 50 or more just to ship it, it will take a long time to get an RMA, take time to package, wasted my time using it etc. I'd rather just harass them about it.

Plus, I'm not sure that the card is the problem. I've scanned the pc with everything I could think of - it seems to be an empire/new nvidia problem.

I've gone all over the web, people are describing the exact same problem with the gts 250 and above. Whatever. This is why pc gaming is dying out - you can get a better, more reliable experience for less with an xbox or ps3.

Modding is the one reason to have a pc for gaming, otherwise I would just use a laptop and buy an xbox. I probably should have done that. TW obviously doesn't care much about the quality of their games anymore, so neither should I.

Bleh. It does look good while it is't failing and turing into an erratic rainbow.

[Lemur]

I was thinking of something more along the lines of telling them what ain't right and shipping it back to have it fixed. (What possessed you to order watercooling, anyway?)

[ICantSpellDawg]

I was thinking of something more along the lines of telling them what ain't right and shipping it back to have it fixed. (What possessed you to order watercooling, anyway?)

I missed the part about the case having water cooling. Eh, screw it. The case is awesome. The concept is great. I don't know anyone with a case that was meant to be water cooled.

I don't think my graphics card can play this game full blast. I've set it on high and now it doesn't crash.

[Husar]

Didn't you say that there is no decent cooler on your graphicscard?
Maybe it was overheating?

If the card can't handle the game, I'd expect it to stutter from the first second, not to start after ten minutes.

[ICantSpellDawg]

Didn't you say that there is no decent cooler on your graphicscard?
Maybe it was overheating?

If the card can't handle the game, I'd expect it to stutter from the first second, not to start after ten minutes.

THe card is an EVGA gts 250

I just don't know enough about computers to configure it. Maybe I have my sights too high - I've been tryign to play it pretty much maxed out. I put almost everything to ultra and use 2x anistropic filtering. I leave some shadowing lower. I didn't think it was too much to ask, but what do I know.

[Husar]

Long story short, Empire crashes or the graphics sputter like mad every 30 mins. Vista works pretty crappy with the games that I used to love playing (Battlefield 2) and the Audio input jacks are faulty on my case. They sent no instructions on anything, sent a cheap brick stereo.

The PC is good for surfing the web, playing music and vieiwng Empire for 20 mins at a time before failure.

That is what I am referring to, does it stutter as soon as you enter a battle and just run fine on the campaign map or does the same "scene" start to stutter after a while of fluent gameplay?
Because if it's the latter then it should not be a problem of the card being unable to handle things but rather some tevhnical problem like overheating or something similar, maybe a software problem, driver bug or game bug.
If the card can't handle the battlefield graphics, then it should stutter on the battlefield everytime you see all of your men, look at huge reflections in a town or whatever, but if the stuttering is completely random or in certain intervals, then I'd look for another problem.