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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 18:42 

Joined: 23rd Sep, 2010
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Hearthly wrote:
(For me the 360 pad is as good as a controller has ever got.)

I love the Xbox One controller.

It'll be interesting to see what happens. I've read in a few places that one of the main points of SteamOS is to try reduce the overhead of the OS - which is exactly the same as Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 10 and DirectX12.

SteamOS is also missing a massive thing coming to Windows - the cross platform multiplayer between the Xbox and the PC. If all developers get on board with that, you've instantly got 5-6x the potential players in any game - which would be great for games as they become older, as you'll probably still be able to find plenty of people playing them.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 18:44 
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Cookie197 wrote:
It'll be interesting to see what happens. I've read in a few places that one of the main points of SteamOS is to try reduce the overhead of the OS - which is exactly the same as Microsoft is trying to do with Windows 10 and DirectX12.


But that's just a total non-issue on modern PC hardware, it's a problem that doesn't exist and/or need fixing.

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SteamOS is also missing a massive thing coming to Windows - the cross platform multiplayer between the Xbox and the PC. If all developers get on board with that, you've instantly got 5-6x the potential players in any game - which would be great for games as they become older, as you'll probably still be able to find plenty of people playing them.


Well yes, if MS bind Windows 10 and XBox Live together, they're really onto something there.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 18:47 
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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 19:30 
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How do you market something that's blatantly just an overpriced PC running a stupid non-standard OS?

'Buy this! It costs more than what you've already got, it runs less stuff, and it's got a faffy controller!'

Compare and contrast.....

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 19:38 
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£762 inc VAT is £635 ex VAT is $967. So it's about the same spec and about the same price.

Edit -- this Steam Machine seems very close in spec and price.

Edit edit -- and it runs infinitely more stuff than the no-OS PC you are comparing it to.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 19:54 
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Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Edit edit -- and it runs infinitely more stuff than the no-OS PC you are comparing it to.

:DD

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 19:57 
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Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
£762 inc VAT is £635 ex VAT is $967. So it's about the same spec and about the same price.

Edit -- this Steam Machine seems very close in spec and price.


But the minimum specs on that Steam Box are an i3 with a 120GB SSD and a 750Ti for the graphics, a substantially cheaper offering than the PC which comes with a full-fat i5, an SSD of twice the capacity, and a massively better graphics card.

Here's a PC with pretty much identical specs to that Steam Box in its bare config.

(Admittedly your Scan link is similar on price, but they're still skimping on the SSD and to my mind these Steam Boxes need to be quite a bit cheaper than a Windows PC to be an attractive proposition, not sort of 'closeish'.)

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 20:04 
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Hearthly wrote:
to my mind these Steam Boxes need to be quite a bit cheaper than a Windows PC to be an attractive proposition, not sort of 'closeish'.)

They are literally the same machines running a different OS. PC hardware resellers have famously tiny margins. How would they be any cheaper? Would Scan be selling them at a loss?

Edit -- your "similar PC" has one again overlooked the ~£80 for a copy of Windows.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Thu Mar 05, 2015 20:12 
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Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
They are literally the same machines running a different OS. PC hardware resellers have famously tiny margins. How would they be any cheaper? Would Scan be selling them at a loss?


Well yes I know that, and this is why I think they will fail.

I kind of had an idea that Steam would get fundamentally involved at a hardware level, either supply their own boxes, or subsidising the builders (such as Scan), or something - anything to get the boxes out there, basically. (After all, they can make oodles of cash from Steam itself once they've got the box into people's houses.)

Sort of like Sony did with the PS3, whereby they took a hit on the hardware to get market penetration, establish Blu-Ray, and sell software + services.

At the very least I thought there would actually be a 'Steam Box', some sort of bespoke case and/or hardware, whereas instead we literally do have identical kit in established PC form factors running Steam OS, for about the same price as a Windows PC - and that goes back to my original point, who the hell will want one?

I don't understand who the Steam Box will appeal to, and what its selling point is.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 14:39 
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12GB single GPU graphics card anyone?

The GTX Titan X, effectively a GTX980 and a GTX960 on a single die, delivers equivalent performance to SLI-ed 980s. Remarkably low power draw too.

Manages 4K gaming even in insane titles like Crysis 3.

Just expect it to cost the best part of a grand.....

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... n-x-review

Whilst this is clearly pie in the sky for most folks, it paves the way for a future graphics card based on the same GPU costing a lot less (maybe £400 or so), and makes 4K gaming an achievable goal on a reasonable budget.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 14:46 
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Is it wrong that I'm considering buying a gaming laptop to replace my existing laptop, which is only a couple of months old, mind - purely so I can play Elite on the move?


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 14:53 
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Yes.

Can you not stream it via steam, or nvidia or something?


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 14:57 
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GazChap wrote:
Is it wrong that I'm considering buying a gaming laptop to replace my existing laptop, which is only a couple of months old, mind - purely so I can play Elite on the move?

Yes, you idiot.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 18:50 
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Just turned up on pre-order at Overclockers. Definitely not one for my shopping list but the inevitable mainstream(ish) version of the card should be interesting....

(This the cheapest one, the more exotic variants are up at a grand.)

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 21:54 
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SLI ready :D


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed Mar 18, 2015 22:03 
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Well yes because obviously there's no point in just having one of them.... :)

And the thing is, some people will actually SLI the bloody things. I guess on premium products like this, Nvidia really don't need to sell that many of them to make it worth their while, and then the tech trickles down to more 'normal cards' and the rest of us can be happy!


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 01, 2015 22:36 
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La Bamba

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OK so I'm still well into my computers. I don't think it'll ever end, bit of an Aspie obsession. I now have four rigs. Hilariously I do use all of them..

So here's my main rig. It consists of a 3970x hex core overclocked to 4.7ghz and has two Titan Blacks in SLI. This is my 4k rig I use on my Acer 4k2k G-sync monitor.

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OK so that's basically my main rig. Then I have my Hackintosh which I use for anything arty or design. I have a plotter (I cut all my own graphics) and I use the Mac for that too.

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Both the 8 core 16 thread Ivy CPU and the GTX 480 Lightning are cooled with Corsair H55s. I use Noiseblocker bionic fans that run at 700RPM. Trust me when I say, this rig is utterly silent.

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And with the window on.

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Then there's my all AMD rig running the 8 core 8320 and a Radeon 7990. This rig is used by my wife, we play Borderlands 2 and the Pre Sequel (even though it's a bit shit) and lots of L4D2.

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And now for my latest creation. Recently my lady and I bought a 65" TV. It's 4k but I won't bother with it as it's only 30hz. Any way, I've seen people building these tiny little ITX rigs and fancied a go, so I picked up a GTX Titan Black and went to work. I've cut in a custom fan guard made by Mayhems, and had the PSU fully braided. It's absolutely tiny.

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The CPU is one of those Pentium Anniversary things and a Gigabyte ITX board I had lying around. I'm going to use it on the TV running 1080p.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 9:54 
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That's a fair few grands' worth of kit there, not to mention the 65 inch telly :o

And here's me umming and aaahing about dropping £250 on a new graphics card :D

As for the mini-ITX PCs, they really are quite something, absolutely no compromise on performance but in a tiny form factor with practically zero noise. Mrs Hearthly's kicks ass.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 13:06 
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La Bamba

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Best card ATM is the 290x Matrix Platinum on OCUK for £249

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprod ... =GX-363-AS

Up to and including 1440p are easily covered. The GTX 970 starts to creak a little at 1440p thanks to the lame memory bus and derped memory layout (3.5+0.5gb)

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Sat May 02, 2015 14:07 
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AMD just don't rock my world anymore at all, plus none of the 290/290x cards will fit in my case anyway.

It was actually this dinky little 970 that I was eyeing up, full 970 performance (slightly overclocked from stock in fact), in a mini-ITX form factor.

https://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprod ... ubcat=1010


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Sun May 03, 2015 21:58 
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La Bamba

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Yeah those are OK if you can get your head around the VRAM layout. Expensive though.

I wish I could say AMD will be releasing cards like that but the stock cooler for the new 390x has hose holes so it's looking like another hot potato :(

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 11:39 
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On paper the VRAM fuckery with the 970 could hurt it, and I know in synthetic tests it's been demonstrated to do so.

However, out in the real world, thusfar at least, no one's been able to come up with any examples of the 3.5+0.5 VRAM architecture actually impacting performance. Eurogamer specifically referenced this in the GTAV article as that's the sort of condition (massive VRAM usage) where you might expect the 970 to hurt, but there was no evidence of this being the case. (They also found the same results with other games when they first looked into it.)

(Not that I'm letting Nvidia off the hook for the way they marketed the card which was certainly a bit shady.)

I wish AMD would get their act together in terms of both CPUs and GPUs, because as it stands at the moment Intel and Nvidia respectively can largely charge what they want for fairly uninspiring products, safe in the knowledge that all AMD can do is cut the prices of their existing lines because they've got nothing to counter with. Intel's CPUs in particular have been dreadfully incremental for ages now. (Which is why my ancient (albeit overclocked) i7-920 can still trade blows with their latest CPUs, as fundamentally Intel's current architecture is very similar to the first i7s which were released in 2008.)

But yes, for me, if I do get a new graphics card it'll be a 970, and probably one of those mini-ITX variants. Having kicked GTAV around a fair bit now and tweaking it up, it's definitely my GPU that's maxed out as opposed to the CPU, so a new graphics card should give me a decent boost. (The GPU sits at a near-constant 100% utilisation whilst in game, whereas my four CPU cores are generally at 70-80%, hyper-threading is turned off because it does nothing for games and indeed generally hurts performance a little bit.)


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 13:54 
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La Bamba

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Well you're actually in luck dude. Depending on your motherboard you can now pick up a hex cored Xeon X5650 or better from Ebay for around £50-£70. Overclocked to 4ghz they put out around the same numbers as a 4790k. It's basically a 980x.

Many on OCUK have been fitting them and have found that they're seriously quick. Definitely a worthwhile upgrade and no reason to buy anything newer.

AMD have Zen coming next year and they brought back the guy who designed the original FX CPU you had. They're going to be 4-16 core and will sport some sort of threading too.

Have a look at the Zotac 970 dude it's pretty small also. However if I were you I'd go 290x and replace your case, you'd be surprised what can be had for £50 these days. Not sure you still sub to Custom PC but they did a group test recently and the 290x was quicker at 1440p and 4k thanks to its far wider memory bus.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 14:21 
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La Bamba

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This is the same size as your 670.

http://www.ebuyer.com/666813-palit-gtx- ... 14g2-2041f

This is also nice and diddy.

http://www.ebuyer.com/663452-zotac-gtx- ... -90101-10p

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 14:30 
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The problem I have with the Zotac is it both draws its air in and dumps it back out inside the case, and it's already a bit cramped in mine :) (I have been looking at 970s over the last few months and that's one I've been eyeing up.)

Ideally I'd go for a card with a radial fan that draws air in at the back of the card (which is fed with fresh air by the 120mm fan at the front of my case), and then dumps its hot air out of the back of the case. (Which is what my reference 670 does, in fact, that Palit 970 looks like it uses exactly the same cooler as a reference 670!)

The ASUS mini-ITX 970 does technically dump a chunk of air back into the case but apparently it's got some clever mini vapour chamber trickery going on and runs very cool overall without moving a lot of air around.

I really don't want a 290x TBH, I fell out with AMD a few years ago and the experiences of my mates who've dabbled with their cards since then hasn't impressed me much. (The 290X a friend bought, easily hitting its thermal limits and throttling with the stock cooler whilst sounding like a leaf-blower wasn't exactly a great inspirer of confidence....)


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Mon May 04, 2015 14:39 
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La Bamba

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I initially bought a R9 290 stock for £135 about six months ago for my Hackintosh. Before I put it in there I tried it in Windows 8 and tbh dude I must say I was blown away. It was almost as fast as one of my Titans and they were £699 each. It was hot and loud though but then the stock cooler is awful. However, I ain't gonna knock ya for not wanting to dance with their drivers. They are utterly shit tbh and why I hold firm on buying Nvidias. Just recently they haven't been updating and their crew have been basically saying "We'll release it when it's ready !" which isn't really good enough IMO.

The Palit card is the same as what you have now yes. Small PCB with a plastic extension on the back. Honestly going into miser mode I would say that throwing in a hex cored Xeon and a 970 will cover you for a couple of years at least. You're spot on about Intel. Their gains recently have been complete crap and I've seen some slides on Skylake and it's about 5% faster than Devil's Canyon.

When I bought my 3970x (which I got on Ebay for £340) the 5820k was about to launch. All told with the Dominator Platinum (which is horrifically expensive) I spent about the same as a 5820k set up with crap DDR4 with no heat spreaders. However, my worries were ill founded it seems because I can get 4.9ghz out of it and the 5820k only clocks to around 4.2 which means I can easily beat it in any benchmark or game. That's the issue with these new Intels, whilst the die shrink brings a small bump in performance it also means that the core itself gets incredibly hot as soon as you start to crank on it which means earlier gen CPUs can easily make up for the bump with much higher clocks and lower temps.

It's going to take a bit of a miracle with AMD and this Zen, but hey, this is the chap who brought us the original FX series and they were absolutely incredible. So I do hold at least a glimmer of hope.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2015 1:55 
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I may not personally like some of the style choices, but I do think they are executed well and look to be well assembled.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2015 15:34 
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La Bamba

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Yeah it's a bit loud. The tiny rig is quite refined once the side panel goes back on :)

It's mainly just to make it easier to clean. All I have to do is get out a paint brush and clean out the fans, then once all the dust is out use a damp cloth (very lightly damp I add) and just wipe all the panels down. The big black and orange rig is a real nightmare to keep clean. It's just a dust magnet :(

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Tue May 05, 2015 17:56 
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La Bamba

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Yay, so I'm breaking my duck for this year and this is the first review (with data) that I've done in an absolute age.

Today's review concentrates on the Intel Pentium G3258, also known as the 20th Anniversary CPU. I have built a completely mismatched PC using parts I had lying around for months. The spec of the test system are as follows (the parts that matter).

Intel Pentium G3258 overclocked to 4.2ghz turbo @ 1.197v (max the board allows)
4gb Geil Extreme ram running @ 1333mhz
Gigabyte B85N "Phoenix" ITX motherboard (max 1.2v)
MSI Nvidia GTX Titan Black stock clocks

So what is the aim of this review?

Well, I will be honest I love testing things. Reviews of the Pentium were pretty plentiful at launch but sadly it was benched and tested as a entry level CPU and thus was not tested with high end graphical hardware. This is a shame, because there may be a point where the CPU can be bottlenecked by the graphics hardware. For example, running something like a Radeon 270 with this CPU could cause a situation where you are GPU limited and thus the CPU is made to look bad.

So the aim here was to eliminate any graphical bottle necking at 1080p resolution and find out exactly what the processor itself is capable of.

The CPU

Intel decided a while back to finally release a budget CPU that could be overclocked. They did this to coincide with the 20th anniversary of their first Pentium CPU. Here it is here, retail package.

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And Intel's data sheet.

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This CPU can easily be overclocked. What makes this CPU an even more tempting proposition is that certain board partners have released cheap low end motherboards with the overclocking options left active. This means it's not very difficult to grab a board that will overclock and the CPU for a very low price.

The games and testing methodology

Please note I have chosen games from multiple genres in order to help those out who may be considering buying one of these CPUs. As thus I have chosen a certain type of game and consider those the bigger, leading type of their class (so for example racing games, first person shooters and so on).

Each game has been set to run at the absolute maximum settings the games will allow. I decided to use 2XMSAA when possible due to the amount of system ram, as upping the MSAA can cause the GPU to lean on the system memory.

The benchmarks

OK let's get to the good part.

First up Dirt 3 - Note - Max FPS is not recorded.

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At first I had to rub my eyes and look again. Got to admit, was very shocked by the result. Obviously Dirt 3 is not CPU bound and doesn't really care how many cores you have. Moving on..

Grid 2

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And again I was pretty surprised at how well the Pentium performed. Time for some first person fun.

Sleeping Dogs.

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Not my sort of game and to be honest I only played it for about an hour before I stopped playing. But again we see that the Pentium is not really stopping the system from achieving perfectly playable FPS.

Hitman Absolution

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Again not one of my favourite games but it is quite hard to get running at maximum settings but once again was absolutely no problem at all for the Pentium.

Metro 2033

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Note - this benchmark will always come back with a very low FPS score no matter how good your rig is. What's important here is the average FPS and 64 is again more than playable. In fact it's actually better than just more than playable it's quite amazing. It may be an older title but that doesn't matter, it's still a pig to run.

Crysis 3

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And I will admit the first jaw dropping moment of the day. I just couldn't believe that the Pentium was able to keep the minimum FPS playable. This is a test that I tried, and failed, using both an I5 2400 at stock speed and a AMD FX 8320 at stock speed. The AMD needed serious overclocking to get into the 40s. However once again the average FPS is truly remarkable and again, more than playable. Stunning !

GTAV

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Please note ! I had to enable VSYNC because the game was stuttering quite badly with it disabled. One would think that with it enabled a average FPS count would be hard to maintain, but once again the Pentium truly left me flabbergasted. I really could not believe how well the game ran on such an entry level CPU.

Conclusion

A couple, nay, few years ago I decided to have some fun with a Celeron G530 and a GTX 480. At that time the GTX 480 was still a high end card and I wanted to see what it could do with the cheapest processor available from Intel. Those results left me quite shocked, with the rig only really failing in Mafia 2 which seems to be heavily CPU bound.

I repeated that test this time around and to be honest the game was pretty much unplayable with the Pentium, even with it overclocked. I would imagine it had something to do with Physx which I did set to maximum. However, every other result from the Pentium has absolutely amazed me.

I did read in reviews that in certain games the Pentium could be an issue. However, using many of the latest games I saw no issues at all. It wouldn't surprise me if the minimum FPS counts could actually be improved by running 8gb of ram, but I really wanted to keep the rest of the rig as cheap and low rent as possible.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed May 13, 2015 21:05 
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GTX970 arrived today so first thing I did when I got home was whack it in my PC.

PCs being what they are today I didn't even bother to turn my PC on to uninstall the 670 through Device Manager or anything like that, just took the 670 out, put the 970 in, turned the PC on, it asked for a reboot after the first load into Windows, and thereafter, job done, 970 is good and ready to go.

The only thing I'm really interested in (and indeed the only thing that'll push it) is GTAV, and the main news is that it will indeed shunt it around at 2560x1440@60FPS, with slightly better detail settings than the 670 could manage at 1920x1080, and that was with a more variable framerate (the 670 managed 40-60FPS).

So it's VERY HIGH across the board, although I'm still steering clear of ULTRA and the Advanced Settings.

Took a car out North where all the heavy grass effects kick in and saw a low of 50FPS, so a definite improvement there.

CPU load has remained steady, I was slightly worried I'd hit some sort of horrible CPU bottleneck if I removed a constrained graphics card from the equation, but each of the CPU's four cores are still topping out at around 85% utilisation and it's staying well within its thermal limits.

GPU wise the default fan profile massively prefers to throttle the GPU rather than ramp up the fan, to the extent that the fan tops out at around 45-50% with the GPU under 100% load, with the GPU temperature bobbing around 80C which is the point it throttles at - as such the card was dropping down to 1140MHz to maintain 80C.

With a manual fan profile it boosted a lot more aggressively, settling down to a steady 1240MHz under the same solid 100% load conditions, albeit with the fan at a far noisier 80% speed, but that's no biggy as I tend to play GTAV with some decent volume anyway.

VRAM usage has been between 2.5GB and 3.2GB, which shows how limiting the 2GB was on the GTX670. The 970 has completely eliminated the occasional 'lurch' that I got on the 670, which I can only assume was the result of the game desperately shuffling data in from the slower system RAM into the far faster VRAM where it's required.

The cooler on this card is definitely down at the cheaper end of the market (I think it's exactly the same as the 670 reference cooler), so I'm not going to start buggering about with any overclocking shenanigans. Then again, it's a full-fat GTX970 GPU for £240, so an exotic cooler would be a bit much to ask at that price point.

Outside of GTAV and using the default fan profile, it's very civilised and quiet, not much to be heard over the case fans at their lowest speeds. (I ran a couple of instances in WoW with Hearthly Jnr on that profile, and the PC remained very quiet.)

Overall I'm very happy with the upgrade, it's done exactly what I wanted it to (GTAV at 2560x1440@VERYHIGH@60FPS), I've already got a buyer at work for the 670 for £60, so I've effectively upgraded for £180, to a GPU that is just one notch short of the current king of the GPU castle, the GTX980.

And my really rather elderly i7-920 CPU + mobo and RAM (which I bought second hand on the cheap!) continue to amaze, being as they are now fully six and a half years old and will be celebrating their seventh birthday in November!


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed May 13, 2015 21:36 
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Esoteric

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Intel made a mistake with the I7 920 by thinking that the Phenom 2 would be far better than it was. They made that same mistake with Sandybridge too, again giving AMD a little too much respect, and thinking Bulldozer would be better than it was.

Since then they've realised the error of their ways. An I5 now costs over £200.

The motherboard in my monster rig has decided to die and so I need to gut my Hackintosh whilst I RMA the screwed board.

Bit of a bummer but I've not used the mac in over two months.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Wed May 27, 2015 12:30 
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Esoteric

Joined: 12th Dec, 2008
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Yay so I've repaired my main PC. Got a Rampage IV Extreme for £120. Fitted it and performed what has to be the easiest overclock ever, straight in at 4.7ghz.

Very happy. Just got to RMA the MSI board now but will be selling the replacement as I've vowed never to stray from Asus again.

I should have bought the Rampage at the start.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 14:33 
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Prince of Fops

Joined: 14th May, 2009
Posts: 4296
Not a gaming PC question. However, I am after PC wisdom.

I'm potentially going to be moving out of London and therefore looking to work from home a few days a week. My current Macbook Pro is creaking and aged, which makes working over the VPN slow and frustrating.

So I want a desktop PC that's got enough "grunt" (whatever that is) to make work as zippy as possible, and two monitors so I can ping between screens like I do at work. I don't code or design, I write.

So, in the words of Destiny's Child, question(s)!

1) Are brands like HP, Lenovo and Acer fine?
2) Is PC World to be avoided at all costs? Anywhere better? John Lewis?
3) I'm willing to throw up to £1000 at this to cover the machine and two screens. I'm not bothered about gaming on it but will no doubt use it for the indies and and strategy games I can't get on PS4. Any great deals out there for that sort of cash?
4) Given I'm not especially bothered about gaming on it, is it worth getting an SSD?

Finally, I don't want to build a PC. I'm shit at fingers.

Any thoughts welcomed and gratefully received.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 14:44 
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Esoteric

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I would avoid all of said brands tbh. They're always under powered and in some cases can use non standard parts.

It all really depends on your budget, but, for example have a look at this.

http://www.cclonline.com/product/142043 ... L-EL-NGT2/

A solid, standard PC for not much money. Easily upgraded too, if that tickles your fancy :)

Scan also do a decent range of cheaper computers.. It would help if you knew what sort of spec you wanted (IE gaming, office only, etc) and then I can find you a few to choose from.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 15:10 
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Prince of Fops

Joined: 14th May, 2009
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Awesome, thank you JC. To be honest the spec is primarily office, but being able to play the odd indie or strategy game would be nice. I'll leave my real gaming to the PS4.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 15:13 
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Bad Girl

Joined: 20th Apr, 2008
Posts: 14353
Dear PC gamers.

I played ARMA III and my PC defaulted to Very High settings.

Is that cool or what? Can I play, I dunno, GTAV with better than PS4 graphics or what bearing that mind?

Yours faithfully

Ian


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 15:40 
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Esoteric

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Saturnalian wrote:
Dear PC gamers.

I played ARMA III and my PC defaulted to Very High settings.

Is that cool or what? Can I play, I dunno, GTAV with better than PS4 graphics or what bearing that mind?

Yours faithfully

Ian


It takes some serious muscles to throw around ARMA III on those settings. What is the spec of your machine?

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 15:42 
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Excellent Member

Joined: 25th Jul, 2010
Posts: 11128
Saturnalian wrote:
Dear PC gamers.

I played ARMA III and my PC defaulted to Very High settings.

Is that cool or what? Can I play, I dunno, GTAV with better than PS4 graphics or what bearing that mind?

Yours faithfully

Ian


"Bearing in mind my PC can run a two year old game at an arbitrary level, will it run a brand new game at a level higher than a completely different hardware set?"

8)


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 15:53 
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Bad Girl

Joined: 20th Apr, 2008
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Bamba wrote:
"Bearing in mind my PC can run a two year old game at an arbitrary level, will it run a brand new game at a level higher than a completely different hardware set?"


Pfffffttt. JC gets it and he's a PC obsessive.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 15:53 
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Bad Girl

Joined: 20th Apr, 2008
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JohnCoffey wrote:
It takes some serious muscles to throw around ARMA III on those settings. What is the spec of your machine?


No idea. I should find out...back in a sec.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 15:57 
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Bad Girl

Joined: 20th Apr, 2008
Posts: 14353
Hearthly wrote:
Back to the £500 PC conundrum.....

I realise Saturn that it's very annoying when you state what you want and how much you've got to spend only for someone like me to say 'Ahhh yes but if you just spent a bit more....' - but that's exactly what I'm going to do however I do think it's worth noting, because if you can stretch to £600 then the performance jump from the £500 offerings really is stunning.

In short you're getting an overlocked quad-core i5 processor (considerably more powerful than anything seen in any of the builds suggested thusfar), 8GB of RAM, a 2GB Radeon 260X (which is reckoned to kick about as hard as the PS4's GPU) that will see you right for high quality 1080@60 gaming, a 1TB hybrid drive (1TB of traditional hard drive storage married to 8GB of super-fast SSD cache) and Windows 8.1. (It's got your HDMI as well.)

Apparently it runs nice and cool and quiet as well.

For £600 this is a seriously impressive PC, although you will need to add a keyboard and mouse which will take you past £600 (albeit not by much), but this is genuinely a PC that will last you for years.

Attachment:
600pc.JPG


BOOM! It was this one.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 16:03 
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Esoteric

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It's hard to say really. I would stick to the PS4 if it were me though. It's 7 DVDs to install and takes around four hours so a piss load of hassle.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 16:07 
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Bad Girl

Joined: 20th Apr, 2008
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Dear JC,

Is my PC better than yours and are you well jel?

Thanks

Ian


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 16:08 
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Excellent Member

Joined: 25th Jul, 2010
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Saturnalian wrote:
Pfffffttt. JC gets it and he's a PC obsessive.


JohnCoffey wrote:
It's hard to say really.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 16:38 
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Bad Girl

Joined: 20th Apr, 2008
Posts: 14353
Yeah, he really let me down there...


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Fri May 29, 2015 16:53 
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Esoteric

Joined: 12th Dec, 2008
Posts: 11767
Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
My short answer works out about the same as the long one, which is basically at 1080p the 260x you have is about the same as the GPU in the PS4 and then of course comes the PC premium, so overall it would look about the same but possibly not run as well due to the PC overheads.

I haven't looked at benchmarks or performance on GPUs like yours but I would say the above is about right. I don't run 1080p any more I have a 4k screen and thus only really bother with 4k benchmarks.

If I'm being completely honest if I were running 1080p now days I would buy a PS4.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2015 11:54 
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Still have my Alienware with I7 2600K and 16GB of Ram with a GTX Titan

Been a good PC for the last 3 years, only issue I have is once in a blue moon the BIOS gets upset on reboot and the disk boot order is all messed up.

Can't see me changing it for a while and when I do not sure what I'll get

Don't suppose you build PC's for a price Mr Coffey? :)

Even though I work in IT I hate building my own systems and gave it up.


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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2015 12:38 
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Esoteric

Joined: 12th Dec, 2008
Posts: 11767
Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
I could do yeah. TBH though if I were buying a new PC now I'd actually plump for the new Area 51 I think it's stunning.

Thing is for gaming at least there's absolutely no point in upgrading because you still have a very quick CPU. I would upgrade your Titan to the imminent 980ti as it's a slightly cut back Titan X and fit a PCIE SSD for booting from.

Odd that you mention Alienware. On Thursday I had to swap out my Area 51 with my step son because the PSU has died.

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Sun May 31, 2015 13:33 
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Esoteric

Joined: 12th Dec, 2008
Posts: 11767
Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
So Thursday just gone I went over to see my step daughter and her fiancée. Wonderful people. My step son to be is a lovely kid so for his 21st birthday about ten months back I gave him my Alienware Area 51 ALX. Sadly it started developing issues and eventually the PSU died. This is the model here.

Image

So I gave him my Dark Carnival rig (the red and black one) sans any hard drives or GPUs (the Alienware was running 670 SLI so I just moved those over to the new one) and brought it home. It's in a bit of a sorry state because I had to cut the left side panel and fit some grills due to the 670s overheating. Not only that but the PSU is proprietary and the rig won't function properly without it due to the complex IO the machine needs (motorised vents, front panel, a plethora of LEDs and so on). I almost took it to the dump up the road, then I thought I would at least investigate before calling it a day because it's a lovely unit and the RRP was £2600 and up for this model (it's the ALX).

This is the IO board here.

Image

Note it has a 10 pin proprietary connector for the power? this was the issue. A regular PSU does not come with that connector so I was thinking it really was game over. Then I found these online.

Image

Image

Both match, aside from the one guy not realising one of the 5v is +5vSB but I know exactly what that is as it's the only pink wire in the 24 pin. So what I'm going to do is order a 24 pin ATX extension (done, at a whopping cost of £3) and basically bridge the 10 needed power wires from that. That should allow full function of the IO board which means the case will be back to its original state. The only thing remaining was the left side panel which I cut (and looks pretty nasty) but I managed to find one in the USA for $26 inc so £20. I would imagine it will cost me around £100 to have shipped over but I feel it's worth it. The rest of the case is pristine I mean, not even one mark and pristine examples of this chassis are very rare due to how heavy it is and how hard it is to move. We're talking around 30 kilos empy...

Luckily I have some seriously lovely parts kicking around. An 8 core Ivybridge Xeon complete with motherboard and a choice of either a Radeon 7990 or Titan Black. It's going to be really nice when all restored :)

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 Post subject: Re: PC gaming hardware thread.
PostPosted: Sat Jun 06, 2015 14:21 
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Esoteric

Joined: 12th Dec, 2008
Posts: 11767
Location: On Mars as an anthropologist...
So I cut the proprietary connector from the Alienware loom.

Image

I then soldered it into a 24 pin extension.

Image

And connected up a Corsair RM 750.

Image

Annndd..

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tv3qMT0S69I

Bit squeaky but then it's been sat for nearly a year.

I've ordered a new side panel from the USA as I cut into the original and don't like it. Now all I have to do is fit all of the drooly hardware (8 core Xeon, Titan Black etc)

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