Jack Carr

Is it me or is this thing nigh undefeatable. Put one of these babies on a hill with some open terrain in front of it and watch the black smoking hulks appear. Unless it gets hit by a 122, frontally its hard to beat. Your only hope as a Russian player is to damage the gun or immobilize it. If CM is accurate in its portrayal of this vehicle why didn't the Germans produce these things like crazy?

I personally hope that it will remain WWII. I would like to know what kind of horsepower its going to require to run it. Time will tell.

Cool!

I got cooked as well playing this scenario as the Germans. After reading Joachim's response to your post, his observations and advice sound very logical.

Here is a link that someone was kind enough to give to me when I had a question pertaining to video cards. It should give you a good idea of how the cards compare to each other. I believe that the list goes up to the GeForce 5950 series cards. Good Luck! Tom's Hardware Guide

Remember the old Soviet addage, "Quantity has a quality all its own." Or something like that. I like to play the Germans and almost always play mid to late war scenarios giving the Russian player +50% or better. My two uber-panzers are always up against 15-20 Russian tanks, most of which are T-34/85's. Regardless of whether I am fielding Tigers or Panthers, It's a hard battle with many nail-biting moments. The Russian 85mm can quickly score a kill if I use my armor foolishly. I think if you play this way, you will see very quickly why the German uber-tanks were not so uber after all. If you put things in a historical perspective in late war scenarios, the lost Tiger was replaced by a grenadier with a panzerfaust while the loss of a T-34 was replaced with two or three more of the same.

At this point, following the thread through, you are looking at upgrading almost every component. You might as well check the power supply while you are at it. Got money? Good luck.

My video card is pretty strong. Chaintech GeForce Ti4600 128MB. I'm hoping that this last upgrade will hold me for several years but CMX2 will more than likely be the driver behind where my rig will go from here.

I didn't use any benchmark software so it may have gotten better but I'm certainly not seeing a big difference when playing CM. I upgraded my motherboard from an ASUS A7V8X to a Chaintech Apogee board with the Nforce2 chipset. The board has a 333mhz FSB which matched the PC2700 RAM I have. I also upgraded my CPU to an AMD Athlon XP2800+ Thoroughbred 2.25ghz. Slight increase in horsepower from the 2700+ I had. Don't get me wrong, I'm extremely happy with my rig but NForce2 didn't do much from what I could see. I picked up approximately 10 seconds on my boot-up from the other motherboard but beyond that, I wonder if it was worth it. To their credit, several folks on the forum advised me not to waste my time and money on it but I had to find out for myself. The new Chaintech board's FSB was quicker than the ASUS boards, 333 vs 266. One thing I will say is that the ASUS motherboard's stability seems better. I have no problems with crashing but if I change a few settings in the BIOS with this Chaintech board the results are unpredictable. I also had a heck of a time getting the machine to boot once I had it all put back together. I think this is more of a Chaintech issue than an NForce2 one.

Is it DDR PC2100 or older than that? If you get a newer motherboard you may have to scrap the older RAM. Just something to keep in mind.

I recently upgraded my motherboard to an nforce board as well. I did this because of an article I read that basically said Nforce was a fast chipset. I wasn't impressed with the results. I to went from an ASUS A7V8X (KT400 chipset). I think you will have better results than I did because of the sheer horsepower in CPU that you are looking at. 900mhz to 1.8-2.0ghz is a big jump. You may have to get more RAM. In fact, depending on the motherboard you get, you may have to scrap the RAM you have now because it won't fit in the new board. What kind of RAM do you have now?

Six hour games? You may have to add some type of resupply element if the engine were changed to handle that length. Most infantry units engaged for any extended period run low on ammo pretty quick. Not sure where this comes into the discussion but if you have a few squads that get caught up in a firefight for 5+ turns, which is not uncommon, they're out of ammo in no time at all. In a game that lasts so long what would these squads do for the remainder of the scenario? They would have to tactically withdraw, taking the inevitable casualties associated with such a maneuver and find a safe spot on the map to wait it out. Resupply would be handy. I think this gets a little out of the scope of the current CM engine. As some have already posted perhaps Battlefront is already taking this into account for CMX2.

How many slots does this card take up? I'm assuming its an AGP slot card but does it invade the IDE slots below it? Good to hear that it doesn't have any issues with any of the settings. Thanks and good luck with your new super-fast video card.

It's good alright! I go into software shops now and just pick up boxes and laugh. I don't think there is anything out there that comes close at this point. I have been playing ever since CMBO and I still play both CMBB and CMAK several times a week. Now that's a testament to how good this CM thing is! Every other piece of software that I bought that long ago, except maybe Microsoft Word, just doesn't get used anymore.

I have a card in my case that fits into an IDE slot. The card has two fans in it. Perhaps you could get this card and insert it in the the IDE slot that is next to your video card. This way the video card gets direct air flow. Is your video card AGP? When I bought the card for my box to increase air flow it was relatively inexpensive, maybe $20.00 or so.

Thanks for these. They look great!

The temperatures that you have listed above are really not that bad. As far as the video card being hot to the touch, I'm not certain if that is a problem or not as I have never touched my video card during operation. There are aftermarket coolers/fans for video cards and as someone has already suggested, you could purchase additional exhaust and cooling hardware for the box.

First, what are the specs of the machine? Is the CPU fan working? The case gets physically hot to the touch? Is it overclocked? Need more specific information.

CMBB has "Quick Battle" as a scenario selection.

Looks great!

I think its going to be more along the lines of "Redneck Rampage". Hillbilly feud type stuff.

It's a deep well these PC's. I don't think that it would hurt to upgrade to a later video driver and turn on anti-aliasing. Shouldn't cause a problem if done correctly with a proven/stable driver. Glad to hear that the machine is running better. Good luck.

You can clear the log and restart the machine. All of the events should be time and date stamped. After clearing the log, the next time you experience the problem, go look into the log for the time and date that it occurred to pinpoint exactly which error corresponds with the problem and then take it from there.

Do you have Windows 98, XP Pro or XP Home, 2000? In XP Pro, go to control panel and then toAdministrative Services and you will see something called Event Viewer. Click on that and one one of te things listed will be System.

Check in the Administrative Services and look at the event viewer. Look at the system events that have been logged to see if there are any errors. I have fixed many a problem by looking here. It's certainly worth a try. Good luck!