What'd you buy yourself today?

Just got my Catleap in today as I was headed out to work. Will post some unboxing and impressions about it soon!

Okay - here goes the unboxing - haven't had time to play with overclocking it just yet but I'll get to that, I promise.

It's worth mentioning that I have 0 dead or stuck pixels. It's an almost creepy kind of clearness on the screen - just wait till I get this thing over 100Hz.

Yes - but unfortunately it's much more involved a task than just saying "120Hz refresh please." The board on this particular monitor (Catleap 2B Extreme Overclock Edition) has been clocked as high as 144Hz by some of the members of 120Hz.net (which is who I bought the monitor through) and almost all are hitting at least 100Hz. I'm only targeting 120 but based on the resolution I'm thinking I may need more GPU power to get decent gaming performance at that setting.

I've tried 80Hz now which works well for most games (except the ones that explicitly try to vsync to 60 instead of vsync'ing to the monitors current refresh. I've disabled vsync on those apps and used the nVidia control panel to sync those apps instead. I haven't had enough time to really get going with my OC but even at 80 things look weird smooth. I'll have to take time to play with the monitor timings soon. BTW, since I put this monitor on my machine my Borderlands 2 has been unable to launch. I even tried having Steam verify all the files and deleting the Borderlands 2 folder from Documents\My Games to reset all the settings, but even then I can't get the splash screen to adjust settings without a crash.

Job bought this for me yesterday

I really like glossy screens so I'm not having any issues at all with it. I have blinds on my window that I keep closed 95% of the time. I'm thinking it's a non-issue for me, but it really depends on how your room is set up.

Got the Catleap up to 100Hz stable using the provided DVI cable. Tried 120 and got the artifacting mentioned by some until they replaced it with a 24 AWG DVI cable. I'll be ordering one of those tonight.


Games seem to work fine and after today's patch to Borderlands 2 it works as well at 100Hz. I see occassional dips in performance from 100 (into the 80's and 90's) so I see now that I will probably need at least a third card to hold 120 once I get that all worked out.

I have noticed one problem that I was not expecting. With my previous monitor I always ran vsync 1920x1080 @ 60 so my GPUs never really worked too hard and I guess in effect neither did the rest of my system. Now that my games are shooting for much higher fidelity several parts of my rig are working a lot harder... CPU temps while gaming can hit 75-78C now when before I was peaking around 60ish. Also, I don't have enough GPU capability to hold even 100fps steady in all my games. Definitely going to need an upgrade in GPU and cooling - especially if my new DVI cable I ordered fixes my 120Hz issues.

Thanks to fimbles I now have one of these

So I got this monster of a cable in yesterday...



and tried running 120hz on the Catleap. It's all good at the desktop for a while but once things get warmed up or I start playing a game for any period of time I start getting the horizontal lines. I don't think it's the cable that is keeping me from hitting 120hz stable. I'm not even going to bother trying any frequencies in between since 100 is a nice round number and 120 is the next one that really makes sense IMO. I've heard that some of the guys have gotten better results by simply changing DVI ports on their cards, but I think I'm just going to sit at 100hz and be happy. I could do some tweaking but things already look so good I can't imagine why I'd want to change anything. I didn't even bother running my color calibration hardware/software on it since it already looks so perfect - if I do that now then I won't be able to stop seeing problems once they're pointed out. So... until I get a new mobo + another 680 I'll leave this whole thing alone and be happy running perfectly at 2560x1440@100hz.

BTW, a guy named ToastyX released a patch to remove this SLI clock limit. Made it freely available on 120hz.net as well and it seems to work with any driver 304.xx or newer.