Help Me Build My PC Catch-All

tuffalobuffalo wrote:
Schmutzli wrote:

ssd

Nope. :)

Great! Thanks.

Battlefield 4 went from 2 minute load times to 20 seconds, so I guess that bears out.

Schmutzli wrote:
tuffalobuffalo wrote:
Schmutzli wrote:

ssd

Nope. :)

Great! Thanks.

Battlefield 4 went from 2 minute load times to 20 seconds, so I guess that bears out.

That's the way to always get your vehicle of choice at the beginning of the round

Quick Windows 8.1 question: Did they improve the multi monitor support from the release candidate versions? I have 3 monitors on my desk. There is one 2560x1440 monitor in the middle with 2 1920x1080 monitors on either side. Is it possible to boot such that the metro screen with tiles displays on a side monitor, the regular old desktop with start button displays on the middle monitor, and the third monitor just displays extra desktop space?

My question is, will there be a speed hit using symbolic links vs installing the game to the drive? That is, does it have to access the HDD before each read, reducing the speed of the ssd?

Well, it would, but Windows does a good job of caching drive data in memory, so while it takes a teeny extra fraction of a second to parse its way through the memory structures related to the shortcut, it's not going to be constrained by the physical speed of the drive.

There is, in other words, a little extra overhead, but it's so tiny that it would probably be impossible to measure.

Just saw there is a fluid bearing Zalman HSF for $10 AR @ Newegg that seems to review pretty well. It's a degree or two off the 212 EVO, but at $10, that's still a pretty good deal.

Can't wait for my new parts to get here. AMD, I will miss you and your decent chips at good prices but C'MON! You got nathin' I want right now. I'll come back and check in on you, AMD, when my Intel CPU gives up its ghost. (hopefully not soon).

BTW do Intel CPU i5s come with CPU paste or a strip? Or do I have to buy Arctic Silver separate or something.

BTW do Intel CPU i5s come with CPU paste or a strip?

The stock cooler will come with some thermal stuff pre-applied. You just basically stick the four posts through the holes in the motherboard, and it'll goop the processor up properly. Aftermarket coolers will come with a small tube of something: if you want something better, Arctic Silver is really excellent, and not terribly expensive. It's not the absolute best goop on the market in terms of thermal transfer, but it's not too far off, and it never dries out, so it's good for the life of the chip.

But if you're using the stock cooler, don't bother, the TIM on it is fine.

AMD, I will miss you and your decent chips at good prices

I miss them too, and I so very strongly hope they get back in the game. I'm happy to see that they're doing well on the video card side, lately.

MannishBoy wrote:

Just saw there is a fluid bearing Zalman HSF for $10 AR @ Newegg that seems to review pretty well. It's a degree or two off the 212 EVO, but at $10, that's still a pretty good deal.

For ten dollars, that's a huge chunk of metal. With heatpipes, even. Shame it's via a rebate, though, I hate those.

Malor wrote:
BTW do Intel CPU i5s come with CPU paste or a strip?

The stock cooler will come with some thermal stuff pre-applied. You just basically stick the four posts through the holes in the motherboard, and it'll goop the processor up properly. Aftermarket coolers will come with a small tube of something: if you want something better, Arctic Silver is really excellent, and not terribly expensive. It's not the absolute best goop on the market in terms of thermal transfer, but it's not too far off, and it never dries out, so it's good for the life of the chip.

But if you're using the stock cooler, don't bother, the TIM on it is fine.

AMD, I will miss you and your decent chips at good prices

I miss them too, and I so very strongly hope they get back in the game. I'm happy to see that they're doing well on the video card side, lately.

Yup. I'm still rocking my XFX Radeon 6870 vidja kard. I really hope they come back with a great alt to Intel's expensive and powerful chips.

EDIT: Hmm, I've read on teh best tech blog in the world (this thread! kudos!) AMD is building stuff for consoles?

Malor wrote:

Shame it's via a rebate, though, I hate those.

Haha. I hate them too. I almost refuse to acknowledge them in protest, but in the end, if I happen to buy something with a rebate, I'll send the damn thing in.

Might be some trouble with those new ATI cards:

There is a downside to this performance, however: noise. AMD originally planned for the 290 to go up against Nvidia's $399 GTX 770. The 290 handily beats the 770—but thanks to Nvidia's price cuts, the 770 is no longer a $399 card. To keep the 290's performance looking good, AMD has had to make its fans spin faster, giving it more thermal headroom and allowing its GPU to run faster.

This allows the 290 to more or less match the $499 GTX 780's performance (while still being $100 cheaper), but it also means that it's a noisy beast. Both 290 and 290X suck down a lot of power, too.

Worse still, Tom's Hardware is reporting that retail cards are struggling to run as fast as they should. 290X cards are meant to run the GPU at 1GHz and the fan at no more than 40 percent while keeping below a temperature of 94°C. The site tested retail cards that are dropping to just 727MHz. These cards are also seeing their fans run at more than 40 percent as they struggle to stay below their thermal limit.

This means that in practice, the R9 290 review units are running faster than at least some R9 290X retail units.

AMD has told Tom's Hardware that there's something wrong with the retail cards, but at the moment there's some uncertainty over just how well they perform.

EDIT: Hmm, I've read on teh best tech blog in the world (this thread! kudos!) AMD is building stuff for consoles?

Um, not directly, they licensed chip designs to both Microsoft and Sony. AMD CPU/GPU combos are powering both the XBox One and the PS4. But the companies bought the rights to the design, so AMD doesn't actually make the chips.

Malor wrote:
EDIT: Hmm, I've read on teh best tech blog in the world (this thread! kudos!) AMD is building stuff for consoles?

Um, not directly, they licensed chip designs to both Microsoft and Sony. AMD CPU/GPU combos are powering both the XBox One and the PS4. But the companies bought the rights to the design, so AMD doesn't actually make the chips.

But they are producing chips inside their consoles based on AMD's designs?

But they are producing chips inside their consoles based on AMD's designs?

Yes, absolutely. They're using relatively slow CPU cores, but a lot of them, and then each has a different variant of AMD's onboard video.

All XBox and PS4 gaming in the next generation will be running on AMD CPUs and AMD graphics.

Both the 290 and the 290x need better cooling.. there is nothing wrong with physically with the card. You can achieve the rated and above rated performance running at Ultra (which [H] has done for all their reviews) but note that naturally this means the card will heat up and consume more power.

I suspect we will see aftermarket cooling show up ASAP as the various OEM's move to fill this void. Some people have watercooled their 290x's and the headroom on the card is amazing... and the temps stay very reasonable for the performance. So right now the reference cooling is actually holding BACK the card from its true potential simply because of the heat... even at Ultra BIOS levels.

And its not the GPU or the Memory that is the issue with heat.. its the VRM's

It's been a long time, but I seem to remember ATI X900 and X1900 cards running at over 100deg according to PC Gamer.

Quick question for a friend. Will a GTX 760 work in a PCI E 2.1 slot? I know the 760 is 3.0 so I'm working if it will bottleneck with 2.1 or not work at all.

TempestBlayze wrote:

Quick question for a friend. Will a GTX 760 work in a PCI E 2.1 slot? I know the 760 is 3.0 so I'm working if it will bottleneck with 2.1 or not work at all.

It will work fine. Tests done on the different PCIe versions have always shown performance differences so minimal they're not even worth considering.

Thin_J wrote:
TempestBlayze wrote:

Quick question for a friend. Will a GTX 760 work in a PCI E 2.1 slot? I know the 760 is 3.0 so I'm working if it will bottleneck with 2.1 or not work at all.

It will work fine. Tests done on the different PCIe versions have always shown performance differences so minimal they're not even worth considering.

Good to know thanks. Never had to think about that one before. He is trying to put a new video card and PSU in an older machine.

Do we have any sense of when the new Geforce 800 series cards will start coming out? I am wondering whether or not I should hold out for those before I drop a bunch of cash on a card. It isn't like my 570 is on its last legs or anything.

EriktheRed wrote:

Do we have any sense of when the new Geforce 800 series cards will start coming out? I am wondering whether or not I should hold out for those before I drop a bunch of cash on a card. It isn't like my 570 is on its last legs or anything.

Those will probably be on a 20nm which means no time soon... my guess is mid 2014.

TempestBlayze wrote:

Quick question for a friend. Will a GTX 760 work in a PCI E 2.1 slot? I know the 760 is 3.0 so I'm working if it will bottleneck with 2.1 or not work at all.

3D uses surprisingly little bandwidth. It's always been sold as a graphic thing, but it's never been that important in the 3D era. Where it's really needed is when pushing out 2D frames at high speed, like with games, and even that was pretty decisively handled by PCIe 1.0. (A 2560x1600 screen, updating every pixel, every frame, would need about 737 megabytes/second to run at 60fps. That would (just barely) fit in x3 bandwidth; x4 would give you about 20% slop.

They've gradually expanded the bandwidth use, because they had it.... live streaming textures and the like require PCIe-class bandwidth. But, as far as I know, a PCIe x4 slot, version 1.0, is still perfectly adequate to drive nearly any game.

I'll be scanning Newegg of course. I've already started. But if I'm looking for some quiet case fans and a quiet CPU (LGA-775) fans, what are the rules of thumb and are there brands to focus on/be wary of? I would like to make my desktop machine an always-on machine to simplify logistics, both in terms of number of computers sitting around, and to situate the networking stuff. The Verizon/Novatel MiFi supports Ethernet-over-USB, and since my desktop has no wifi, this is what I'll be doing. However, if the desktop's off the MiFi has only ~8 hours battery life, so we'd plug it back into its wall wart.

muraii wrote:

I'll be scanning Newegg of course. I've already started. But if I'm looking for some quiet case fans and a quiet CPU (LGA-775) fans, what are the rules of thumb and are there brands to focus on/be wary of?

The larger the fan, the slower it has to spin to move the same amount of air, and so the quieter it can be while delivering the same cooling performance. For brands and such, I'd google CPU cooler reviews. The better reviews will include noise benchmarks. NewEgg seems to list noise ratings as well for many coolers (presumably the ones where the manufacturer says how loud they are).

Back when I built my system a year ago, I got the Arctic i30 because it was the quietest one I could find that still had good cooling performance. You also want to consider the noise generated by your graphics card cooler and other fans in your case, as at some point, getting an even quieter CPU cooler won't even matter relative to the other stuff in your case.

Finally, the case you get matters (assuming you aren't repurposing an old one). The more holes in the case, the more noise will leak out. Noise dampening often seems to be at odds with good cooling, so there are bound to be some compromises. I spent up and got a Silverstone Fortress FT02 for a number of reasons, but noise was a significant factor. Even with the 3 large case fans, the computer is pretty close to silent. I couldn't be happier.

complexmath wrote:
muraii wrote:

I'll be scanning Newegg of course. I've already started. But if I'm looking for some quiet case fans and a quiet CPU (LGA-775) fans, what are the rules of thumb and are there brands to focus on/be wary of?

The larger the fan, the slower it has to spin to move the same amount of air, and so the quieter it can be while delivering the same cooling performance. For brands and such, I'd google CPU cooler reviews. The better reviews will include noise benchmarks. NewEgg seems to list noise ratings as well for many coolers (presumably the ones where the manufacturer says how loud they are).

Back when I built my system a year ago, I got the ARCTIC i30 because it was the quietest one I could find that still had good cooling performance. You also want to consider the noise generated by your graphics card cooler and other fans in your case, as at some point, getting an even quieter CPU cooler won't even matter relative to the other stuff in your case.

Finally, the case you get matters (assuming you aren't repurposing an old one). The more holes in the case, the more noise will leak out. Noise dampening often seems to be at odds with good cooling, so there are bound to be some compromises. I spent up and got a Silverstone Fortress FT02 for a number of reasons, but noise was a significant factor. Even with the 3 large case fans, the computer is pretty close to silent. I couldn't be happier.

I have an existing system with the E6850 and a GTX 460. If acpi is reading accurately, it's 19C at idle, which is to say, it's not accurate. I mean, yeah, it's chilly in this country house but....

I'll definitely keep looking on Newegg. I'm hoping I can make the thing noticeably quieter--it's certainly not a jet engine, but noticeable--for on the order of $50-70.

In that case, you might want to look into swapping in some really quiet case fans as well, assuming the ones currently in your case aren't.

Yeah, that's the idea. A quick search reveals, for instance, some Enermax fans in the 5-10 dBA range. They're variable but hover in the 30-55 CFM range, and I'm not sure if that's enough airflow. Maybe with four or five of 'em (I have the slots) would suffice.

muraii wrote:

I'll be scanning Newegg of course. I've already started. But if I'm looking for some quiet case fans and a quiet CPU (LGA-775) fans, what are the rules of thumb and are there brands to focus on/be wary of? I would like to make my desktop machine an always-on machine to simplify logistics, both in terms of number of computers sitting around, and to situate the networking stuff. The Verizon/Novatel MiFi supports Ethernet-over-USB, and since my desktop has no wifi, this is what I'll be doing. However, if the desktop's off the MiFi has only ~8 hours battery life, so we'd plug it back into its wall wart.

You could also consider fan speed controllers. Some motherboards allow for control of fans direct through the headers as well.

http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/...

Looks like the 780Ti is a winner.. better thermals and acoustics than the 290x with similar performance but at a $150 premium. Hopefully this pushes the 780's down to 290 pricing.. then we have some competition again.

Malor wrote:

So, I got around to buying my first MicroSD card today.

I can't believe these damn things. It's 32 gigabytes, class 10. It cost me 24 entire dollars. And it's smaller than my thumbnail.

I tell ya, when the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, I realized that I was living in a science fiction novel. Being able to store something around 60,000 books in a device the size of my thumbnail is not dissuading me from that idea.

And that was the cheap one, I could have gotten a 64-gigger for $50.

They're to the point where it's so small it's almost too easy to lose. They should make them in day glow colors.

So, I got around to buying my first MicroSD card today.

I can't believe these damn things. It's 32 gigabytes, class 10. It cost me 24 entire dollars. And it's smaller than my thumbnail.

I tell ya, when the Curiosity rover landed on Mars, I realized that I was living in a science fiction novel. Being able to store something around 60,000 books in a device the size of my thumbnail is not dissuading me from that idea.

And that was the cheap one, I could have gotten a 64-gigger for $50.

edit: not so many years ago, I was mightily pleased with a 256-meg SD card. Two hundred floppies in a an oversize postage stamp! Near as I can figure, I'm up to 23,000 on a card so small you could easily lose it in a shag rug, and it cost less than $25.