Be Excellent To Each Other

Budget?

Ah don't worry, this is a question I've raised here before, and now I'm procrastinating. Was hoping to do a grand all-in for PC and screen(s). Not after mega performance, just something that can cope with virtualization and running a few other apps at the same time.

Have previously been directed to ChillBlast before, but I think Sat's model has been replaced by the new Intel processors so isn't available.

And I think your goodself directed me to CCLonline.

Ah OK yes I remember now

The only concern will be the GPU and what ports it has. So yeah, before you order anything let's check how many monitors/which ports it has. You should be fine though because most GPUs nowadays support Nvidia Surround or AMD Eyefinity

thank you very much sir, very kind of you.

FWIW, I use 3 20 inch Apple Cinema Displays (A1081) at work.

competitively priced!

Well, they were free for me

I like multiple monitors, if you have a lot of windows open it can be useful 'snapping' them to the edge of your various displays (and easy too).

Some monitors can rotate into portrait orientation, which I hear is nice for writing and playing vertical scrolling shmups. My monitor can do this, but I've never really bothered - you might like it though...



I've got one of those too, it was retired from work. I'm going to sell it. The screen has a really nasty purple tint all over it that I couldn't get rid of through calibration so maybe the backlights have gone a bit funny.

You're right about changing the orientation. It's very useful and fun... This is my old TV. The pound coin is for scale.

TheVision, that's ludicrous.

Anyone have an opinion on either of these? Seem similarly priced. Would prob look to stick a 2TB SSHD hybrid in them.

FOR ASGARD!

100 shots of Stella

May as well go Skylake...

Depends what the pricing is I suppose. If Skylake systems are the same price then yes of course go for them, but they're only about a 10% boost over Devil's Canyon performance wise so not worth paying any great premium for.

Certainly I'd be quite happy with a Devil's Canyon system if the pricing was keen.

EDIT - D'oh those two systems are Devil's Canyon and Skylake. The Skylake one is £25 more but gets a 128GB SSD as well as the hard drive, plus you're getting the extra performance and DDR4. No competition then, get the 100 Stellas.

Stellar, I'll go and get lairy. Cheers folks.

Long post and I warn you you will probably find it boring, TL;DR.

When I bought the new Alienware it came standard with a 850w Silver PSU, as in Silver 80+. I was going to leave it be but 1. It looks like arse, as do the cables and 2. It whines under load. It was so bad before when I had the two Titan Blacks that I could feel the desk vibrating as it buzzed away. All not good.

However Tom Logan @ OC3D had a give away a week or so back and he is sending me this.



With these.







I have done some trace work on the inside and it seems the only things that will need looking at are that the board has a 8 pin EPS connector at the bottom (which powers the PCIE lanes on the board) and a nice simple molex plug to power the IO board that controls all of the lighting ETC.

I have also promised myself that when I'm in there changing out the PSU I will do something about the cooling. Dell don't seem to understand that desktops do not need Delta/Nidec savage fans that make a ton of noise, so I found these.





So I have ordered five of those. They will replace all of the stock cooling. I used one here in Mrs JC's rig to draw air in for the fets and rads.



Note though I removed the gasket and used it elsewhere.. They are very quiet indeed, so should bring down the horrible whirring sound I get now. I will be using these too.



To save my knuckles.

The mental PC we were using as a test GPU farm is now no longer needed and kicking around the store

Its got 16 physical CPU's, 64GB of Ram and 4X GTX Titans in it

Was thinking of using it home until there is a work use for it (which is doubtful) then I just thought about the cost of running the bloody thing and how little use I would get out of 4 cards

Using it for folding at the moment.

Take it home and take three cards out (and send one to me)?

Do some Bitcoin mining?

I would be concerned about how long the cards would last now, they were hammered 24\7 for 9 months which is not really what they are designed to do. The cards we got with the "enterprise" solution were 5K each as they are built to do this

Dedicated folding or mining rigs run the cards hot constantly, so they shouldn't break.

What were you using the rig for in the first place?

Oil mining.

Windows 10 does not support my radeon HD 48XX, what is a good, cheap replacement?

Ubuntu?

There are older Win10 compatible older drivers here if that's any use:

http://www.driverscape.com/download/ati-radeon-hd-4850

Kov the GTX 950 launches soon. That or a 750ti will do you right fella.

We have a Research CADD group who use CPU and GPU farms for folding type problems. They wanted a GPU solution and head office where dragging their heels, so we built this from scratch so they could test on it and build a case for a larger one

So they used it an proved its worth and got 300K for an HP solution that has 48 Tesla cards in it.

For the card not the the OS...

Apparently GPU mining is making a comeback. Should be good news for AMD as last time their cards were superior.

I had SLI Titan Black and they were OK for 4k. I did buy three, then realised I would be a complete knobber to bother with three way SLI. I've sold two now to fund my Fury X but Mrs JC still has the third one (an MSI with plenty of warranty). I just slapped an AIO cooler on it and for 1080p it's the business. I would say SLI would be good for 1440p but rather hit and miss at 4k and of course, SLI would be fun for 1080p as it's overkill.

But yeah Mrs JC absolutely loves hers

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprod ... ubcat=1985

Is a "Just so the PC is usable" card.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprod ... ubcat=1854

Is the "I want to do mild gaming" card.

I had to turn off the 3D on the new Tomb Raider game because my old PC just couldn't hack it which is, stupidly, making me consider a full upgrade again. I'll probably try and hold out until bonus time though which makes it January.

I, sadly, stopped using 3D. When I bought my "I will never do this again it's a huge waste of three and a half grand" rig I bought two Titan Blacks and a AOC 3D monitor. No modern-ish games worked with it.

Seems like it's a bit of a dead duck now. Shame, I used to really enjoy L4D and L4D2 in 3D. Nothing quite stands up to throwing a pipe bomb and then standing as close as you dare and watching the arms and legs and giblets come flying at you.

What price do you think these will be?

The newest Tomb Raider game has 3D support built in and, frankly, it looks fucking amazing but it's just too demanding to be properly playable on my old machine. There's also an app that adds 3D to non-3D games and it did pretty well with the stuff I tried it on but, again, you need to go back pretty far to find anything my PC could render well enough to be properly playable.

Around the £100 or so mark. That's if you want to game on it (and if you do?) if not go with that £45 Radeon that will get you up and running in Win 10



I might have to dust off my glasses and give that a try, then.

Minecraft does anaglyph 3D. I use it when I'm building tall things. It sometimes makes my tummy funny.

Limbo does that too.

Limbo makes my tummy funny?

Yeah it's kinda like the brown note...

Since noone asked, here's my work desk.

Needs more keyboards.

I wish I had three monitors, or at least two widescreens.

Four monitors are where it's at. Tried five, that was too many.

The pc can do 4,but the desk can't

Up man, up! Look at all your vertical space!

GTX950 has now been released but prices start at a somewhat disappointing £129, which seems expensive considering the rather more capable GTX960 starts at £147.

You can sort make a case for the 950 in that it's a capable 1080p card, and the 960 is also a capable 1080p card - and neither is able to power games at 2560x1440 which is the next step up resolution wise, so save a few pounds and go for the 950.

Leaves a gap at the 'here's a decent graphics card for £100' spot though.

Got my power supply and new fans fitted.



No coil whine, hurrah !

Now that Dying Light has been fixed on AMD I am going to play through it again in co op with a fellow forumite, so that should be fun.

GTX950 review now up at Eurogamer, in all fairness it's a pretty good card in a lot of ways, very solid for 1080p, runs quiet, doesn't generate much heat, doesn't need much power, looks like cards will have a decent overclock out of the box with plenty of headroom to take them close to 960 performance levels for less cash. (You could make the argument that the 960 is a bit of overkill for 1080p whilst falling short at 1440p, so the 950 is a more sensible option for 1080p.)

It's a lot of graphics card for £130, although I think for less than £20 more the 960 still makes more sense, unless you really don't want to spend the small amount of extra cash.

Down at maybe £110 it'd be a lot more compelling IMO.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... 950-review

Same as usual, nothing terribly exciting.

Mind you, the boring products will inevitably end up as their bread and butter cards.

I'm loving my rig now. No more whine when I game. Fans are slightly louder but there is more of them and they are all running at 12v so that's understandable. I may get some resistors for them, if they can keep my clocks where they are (I've settled for a 24/7 4.4ghz on the 5820k which I was never expecting but it seriously kicks ass at those clocks).

Hoping this Fury Nano thing can become my Crossfire card. I don't really need it as I have everything running nicely at 4k but the extra oomph would mean higher detail in games that support it (OK, so I confess I would pay another £400 to enable Hairworks and go ultra)..

I have the same set up! Its a PC with a Matrox card and 3X24 inch screens.

Would never go back, had to do budgets this week, on top of the endless sheets from finance, I have to work with endless dept ones as well, so 3 screens are invaluable for the final entry and copying data from sheet to sheet.

I updated my PC with old test GPU machine that was cluttering up the workshop at work, I'd always been focused on the fact it had 4 Titans in it but the rest of the spec is mental as well. It has 2X 8 Core Xeons and 64 GB of Ram. I went with the one Titan as I don't really need any more graphics and also bought a 960GB SSD.

Will miss the Alienware which is stored away in case the work one ever needs to go back.