Help me build my PC 2017 Catch All

I remember in the distant past using a color strip that stuck to the screen (I think it was vinyl?) and a program that would display the same colors right next to it on the monitor. That allowed both color matching by eye, and correction to local lighting conditions. I wonder if those still exist. That was with a CRT.

Thanks for explaining the ICC itself, though, that's helpful.

Double post. Weird.

LouZiffer wrote:
Malor wrote:
LouZiffer wrote:

This video is dedicated to Malor.

(redacted)

Yepyep. Air is just as good (if you buy a good one), and more reliable. It's more of a pain to install, but on an Intel chip, you normally only have to do that once. If I put an Intel chip on a board, it will never move again. (barring motherboard failure, anyway.) And the big annoying cooler isn't really in the way after it's installed, since any work I'll do on the computer is centered on the PCI slots and SATA cabling.

On an AMD chip, the relative ease of working around a watercooler might matter a little more, because you can theoretically upgrade those. But you'll probably only do that once at most, so two ttotal installs per motherboard lifetime. Probably.

Reliability, on the other hand, pays off every single day.

Thing is, I also agree that Linus' team's testing methods are hilariously clownshoe ludicrous. (GIANT BEAN BAGS?) However, just like their hilariously complicated water cooled rigs they're presented honestly and for entertainment - and they don't invalidate the point.

"Cool factor" and "I like to tinker" are genuine values for many people. Practicality isn't exactly on the same side of the scale as a gaming rig. So, in the end, the more varied the points of view are out there, the easier everyone will find solutions which will match up with their own tastes.

To sum it up: Liked the video and your POV enough to post it Malor. Keep on keepin' on.

I don't fault you for posting it (though I wish you hadn't). The thing is we've all sorta given up on this line of discussion. What happens is that Malor will post at first a somewhat reasonable response essentially repeating what he has posted a million times over. If we do engage (and occasionally I will in a moment of weakness) he will get less reasonable and more condescending.. if you engage further he might even infer that you are an idiot (or to be fair I might infer he (and others) is (are) an idiot(s)) and eventually Certis might come along and slap people around.

There are many reasonable parallels to other products or concepts outside of just AIO vs Air that show that two very different products that essentially do the same thing can co-exist in harmony.. there are also many things that can be shown that say hey XYZ seems pretty popular.. people keep buying them.. and people keep making them so they must be doing something right.

BUT its really really really really really, not worth the time and effort.

edit.

I lie.. I'm usually not savvy enough to nuance an infer of idiocy.

Guru lost men in the Cooler Wars. Good men.

Malor wrote:

The proper way to do it is with a meter. If you're using a published ICC, then it's not tuned for your specific display, just your model. This is usually a fair bit better than nothing, but won't typically look as good as a proper calibration of your actual screen.

Yes, this goes without saying, but as you go on to state, 99.9% of the population is not going to spend $1,000 calibrating their personal use displays.

I used the 2417 DG icc profile as a starting spot and tweaked from there. I have 2 of those displays running the same icc profile, and its clear the downloaded profile is not one-size-fits-all. On one monitor I barely did any adjusting, on the other I adjusted the monitor values just a touch. Either way for my eyes and general room lighting , I found it to be a significant improvement over what I had been running for the last 18 months.

TheGameguru wrote:

I don't fault you for posting it (though I wish you hadn't). The thing is we've all sorta given up on this line of discussion. What happens is that Malor will post at first a somewhat reasonable response essentially repeating what he has posted a million times over. If we do engage (and occasionally I will in a moment of weakness) he will get less reasonable and more condescending.. if you engage further he might even infer that you are an idiot (or to be fair I might infer he (and others) is (are) an idiot(s)) and eventually Certis might come along and slap people around.

There are many reasonable parallels to other products or concepts outside of just AIO vs Air that show that two very different products that essentially do the same thing can co-exist in harmony.. there are also many things that can be shown that say hey XYZ seems pretty popular.. people keep buying them.. and people keep making them so they must be doing something right.

BUT its really really really really really, not worth the time and effort.

edit.

I lie.. I'm usually not savvy enough to nuance an infer of idiocy.

Yeah. There is no one right answer when it comes to our silly overpowered entertainment devices, and how we play dress-up with them like they're extremely complicated dollies. Even the most practical approaches should be accompanied by a knowing smirk. I suppose that potential bridge of understanding isn't one everybody is going to cross, but I like its presence just in case!

Guru lost men in the Cooler Wars. Good men.

On both sides...

I ended up simply replacing my generic pnp monitor driver with the manufacturer's one. We'll see how it goes. I doubt I actually need ICC or even sRGB/scRGB in my world.

Thanks everyone!

*Legion* wrote:

Guru lost men in the Cooler Wars. Good men.

Lol... you made me spit out my soda.

So I just picked up a Logitech G Pro Wireless mouse, as a replacement for my out-of-warranty G900 which has had some double-clicking issues with the right mouse button (although blasting the crap out of the mouse switches with contact cleaner seems to have solved that issue, at least for the time being)

I'm a little torn on the G Pro, as I have large hands and it feels like it was made for babies (the G900 wasn't giant either, but provided much more of a hump for a palm rest, the G Pro is surprisingly flat).

On the other hand, actually playing with it for a 3 1/2 hour Siege session felt extremely good. The light weight makes it glide so well. The tracking is impeccable, not that the G900 had any problems there.

I don't love losing the mouse wheel left-right tilt buttons though.

I'm a little out of practice, it seems. When building a new PC, what's the right way to get a valid Windows 10 license? Does Microsoft sell them directly? It looks like there are product keys you can buy from Newegg, so I assume in that case you'd download Windows onto a USB installation drive then use the product key you receive from Newegg?

beanman101283 wrote:

I'm a little out of practice, it seems. When building a new PC, what's the right way to get a valid Windows 10 license? Does Microsoft sell them directly? It looks like there are product keys you can buy from Newegg, so I assume in that case you'd download Windows onto a USB installation drive then use the product key you receive from Newegg?

I just bought mine directly from MS as a download. I started looking at Amazon and others and saw more and more versions and finally gave up bargain shopping.

beanman101283 wrote:

I'm a little out of practice, it seems. When building a new PC, what's the right way to get a valid Windows 10 license? Does Microsoft sell them directly? It looks like there are product keys you can buy from Newegg, so I assume in that case you'd download Windows onto a USB installation drive then use the product key you receive from Newegg?

I got mine as a USB stick direct from Microsoft. Worked great.

Great, thanks everyone.

Aaaand Older but fairly recent Intel stuff gets hit with yet another major security flaw.

I think I'm dumping my Skylake system for a Ryzen 3000 based setup in the summer.

Couldn't be happier with my Ryzen.

Veloxi wrote:

Couldn't be happier with my Ryzen.

How about your Ryzen AND an ice cream cone? Wouldn't you be happier with that?

-BEP

bepnewt wrote:
Veloxi wrote:

Couldn't be happier with my Ryzen.

How about your Ryzen AND an ice cream cone? Wouldn't you be happier with that?

Only if the ice cream cone is water cooled.

bepnewt wrote:

How about your Ryzen AND an ice cream cone? Wouldn't you be happier with that?

-BEP

Oh yes, please. Vanilla, thank you very much. My needs are simple...

Veloxi wrote:

Couldn't be happier with my Ryzen.

I already have an 1800X system, but for gaming it doesn't really keep up with the 1080Ti. I end up CPU limited on occasion. So I still do my gaming on my 6700k system that does keep up with it.

The 2700X is already roughly a sort of sidegrade from the 6700k, so the supposedly even more IPC efficient and also higher clocked 3000 series should be a decent little upgrade while allowing me to ditch Intel in yet another system.

Disabling hyperthreading may be one of the ways to mitigate it on vulnerable Intel CPUs. Oh yay.

Picked up this monitor from Costco when it went on sale for 1/2 price last week. Even though I don't have a Freesync compatible card, the 144hz is pretty surreal, in a good way.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Picked up this monitor from Costco when it went on sale for 1/2 price last week. Even though I don't have a Freesync compatible card, the 144hz is pretty surreal, in a good way.

You can use Freesync on NVIDIA cards now, in many cases.

*Legion* wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

Picked up this monitor from Costco when it went on sale for 1/2 price last week. Even though I don't have a Freesync compatible card, the 144hz is pretty surreal, in a good way.

You can use Freesync on NVIDIA cards now, in many cases.

I believe not with the 900 series cards, however.

Chairman_Mao wrote:
*Legion* wrote:
Chairman_Mao wrote:

Picked up this monitor from Costco when it went on sale for 1/2 price last week. Even though I don't have a Freesync compatible card, the 144hz is pretty surreal, in a good way.

You can use Freesync on NVIDIA cards now, in many cases.

I believe not with the 900 series cards, however.

Ah, you're right. Only Pascal and newer.

It is still NVIDIA after all, shoulda realized.

I recently made a similar change, Chairman, and yeah, the 144Hz does make a noticeable difference from 60Hz. I'm enjoying it.

Robear wrote:

I recently made a similar change, Chairman, and yeah, the 144Hz does make a noticeable difference from 60Hz. I'm enjoying it.

it's like whatever the temporal equivalent of attaining 20/20 vision is. Very similar to the first time I put glasses on. 60hz just looks choppy now

I finally replaced my ten year old DS system for a Maingear F131.

I envy you the faster monitors - still using my old one, an Ultrawide LG @ 60 hz.
Going to be quite some time before I replace it, but meh, I still get 3440x1440 on it.

Mr Garrison wrote:

There are no stupid questions, only stupid people

OK, with that out of the way, here goes...

I recently picked up a Dell Optiplex 990 i7 2600 3.4Ghz QC 8GB Ram 500GB HDD Win 10 Computer, with a view to drop a well matched graphics card, add a bit more RAM if necessary, and get stuck into my 2012/2014 Steam backlog, and dable in some Dolphin emulation...

Heck, I may even load up my old copy of Game Creator, or try and finally crack Blender.

Basically, I'm not looking for bleeding edge, I'm happy with capable, at 1080p. It's not the SFF chassis, it's the mid tower model so there's a good amount of room inside. I'm even toying with the idea of finally blowing the dust off my Steam Link, and trying that out, via Ethernet.

So, TLDR, looking to breathe life into a second gen i7 setup with an older graphics card, but completely befuddled by that side of the market, as I've been a Macman my entire life.

Considering the following list of cards, made by watching too many ETA Prime YouTube videos, and trying to find "easy" pickups, outside of the US market, down here in Australia for similar projects he's built.

$75 MSI GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Twin Frozr Gaming OC (used but boxed)
$125 MSI Afterburner Geforce GTX 1050ti 4GB (used but boxed)

$50 MSI Radeon R7 240 2GB (used)
$70 Gigabyte Windforce AMD Radeon R9 270X OC 2GB (used but boxed)
$80 MSI R7 370 4GB GDDR5 (used)
$90 ASUS R9 270x 4GB GDDR5 (used)

By comparison, new prices for these two cards.
$119 GALAX GeForce GTX 1030 2GB SDDR4 Graphics Card (GTX1030-2GB)
$217 Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1050 Ti G1 Gaming 4G - OC Edition - graphics card - GF GTX 1050 Ti - 4 GB

Is it worth sticking a new card in an old rig?
Is the AU market overpriced for 2nd hand cards?
I just don't know, looking for some guidance...