Be Excellent To Each Other

To be fair, I can relate to not wanting to lower the settings and knowing that I am missing out somehow, but fortunately I am perfectly happy with 1080p, and if the frame rate should drop below 60 fps I can also easily live without anti aliasing, in fact I often prefer it that way.

If I could afford to upgrade, I definitely would, but I currently game on one of these (ahem) borrowed from work, upgraded to 8GB, 128 SSD and with a GeForce GTX 650 1GB stuffed in.

I can run everything that I've tried so far.

Actually, I haven't put GTA5 on that yet. Maybe tonight.

I didn't really mean for this to be a personal attack, but it somehow ended up like it anyway. My apologies.

What would i need to buy?

It's OK I didn't see it as attack. It's a factual statement, I do play all games with a graphics overlay showing at least FPS. DOOM's built-in 'nightmare' onscreen stats are truly wondrous though and something I think all games developers should aspire to.

Something like this. Basically any 2.5" HDD will do:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00MPWYLHO/ ... 608&sr=8-4

Someone will have a horror story for every make available, so I'd just go for the second cheapest you can find.

Blimey. That's twice as much as I thought it'd be. Thank you, though

You could go for a 1TB instead. That's what I did and I haven't filled it yet.

TBH I don't think the Titan XP (Pascal) is terribly expensive for what it is. I know that sounds fucking bonkers but let me explain..

It's 37% faster in DX12 than the 1080 stock for stock, right. Yes you can overclock the 1080 to within about 15% performance very easily. However, The Titan XP needs water and let's face it whoever is spending £1100 on a GPU will more than likely water cool the fucker any way. Once you do that you gain back your 22% and it again becomes 37% faster in DX12 (and 34% in DX11 in case you were wondering).

OK so it's an insane amount of money but it's the ONLY single handed GPU on the market today that can run 4k with acceptable frame rates (not less than 35 and 60 on sync) without having to rely on anything but a half decent driver (which Nvidia usually present any way). So therefore it's the only single GPU 4k card in the world. SLi and Crossfire have been utterly fucked by these new APIs and are yet to be fixed so to me any way (if you were running a 4k screen) it's actually not that bad. I paid £1400 for my attempt to run 4k (two Titan Blacks) and I failed, because SLi would constantly let me down (Wolfenstein and so on simply didn't support it and one GPU fell apart).

So yeah, daft price but actually quite sensible if you are seriously looking to game at 4k..

As for new rigs vs yours Hearth? they will demolish it mate. There's around 40% IPC between your I7 and Skylake and they run at around 1ghz faster in the least. So yeah, they'd simply smack your bitch up.

Stop being a tight wad and get your hand in your pocket

Oh yeah talking of PCs. I've been working my guts out modding mine recently and making custom parts for it. They're all made, shaped and sanded I just need to paint them. Problem is I live in a flat with no garden. So I made a paint booth lmao.

I saw this on Ebay for £60.




Then went off to the website that manufacture it. I saw pics of it in pieces then decided I pretty much had everything I needed to make one for almost nothing. Two plastic storage containers, three Delta high SP fans (two 120 and one 92mm) and then I just needed to order the primary filter mesh from Ebay and cut open an old pillow.



Back fan test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwHxchFPv1Q

And what it sounds like in action with all of the fans and lights going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4aDZ2BJ2MA

Oh yeah and of course I bought this for £2



I also got a crappy respirator for a fiver. It doesn't need to do anything serious as the extractor will get rid of the paint and fumes. I just hope the guy downstairs likes the smell of paint.

Going by the photos alone, it looks like you're building some kind of guinea pig adventure playground.

That's the thing though JC, Intel are still using an iteration of the architecture my i7 uses, a CPU which will be EIGHT YEARS OLD in November.

So yes the latest Skylakes will do about 40% more work per clock cycle, and they'll run (with overclocking) at maybe 4.5GHz instead of 3.4GHz, so there'll definitely be an uplifit, but it's not exactly seismic.

Pascal is a die-shrink and clock bump of Maxwell, and my current graphics card is already Maxwell.

Similarly I have 620GB of SSD storage in my current PC, albeit constrained by the SATA2 bus, but when DOOM is loading checkpoints in 7-8 seconds it's clearly no slouch, how much faster are things going to be with an M2 SSD?

It's against this backdrop that I'm thinking, 'Do I really want to chuck over two grand at a new PC?', with the post-BREXIT price rises added into the mix the answer is increasingly 'no'. That's money I could waste on cars instead, or maybe a drugs habit.

Two grands worth of LSD would definitely blow your mind way more than any new computer and virtual reality hat.

Though the first photo suggests it's an adventure playground run by Richard Gere.

That's fairly nonsensical. There's a million miles between the designs of Skylake and Sandy Bridge, and the fact they all end up sold under the "i3/5/7" branding is just that -- branding.

I mean, you could say that Intel are using an iteration of the architecture of my 8086, a CPU that I owned in 1989.

I have my PC on long term loan.

We built it to do proof of concept on GPU processing for a group at work, at its peak it had 4 titans in it!

The concept went forward and we spent £500,000 on HP blades with high end cards in

After that we had no use for it, so I took it home after it sat in our store for 3 months.

I have one titan in it now as didn't see any use for another 3 aside from giving me a bigger electric bill.

It has 2 8 Core Xeons in it and 64GB of Ram, case is huge and could take 10 drives

Wouldn't buy anything with a spec like this but for a free loan as long as I work where I do its more than enough power.

These are ok for USB 3 storage

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Sharkoon-Stati ... s=sharkoon

I found that many emulators have issues running from a NAS so bought one

At the same time we chucked out some storage shelf's full of 2TB SATA drives so I grabbed 5 and set the box up in RAID 5

Only issue with these are that they have built in power saving so you have to go back to the drive in explorer and click on the folders to wake it up. There is no way to turn this off and it can be pain the arse if you have an emulator open then go away from your PC for 15 minutes. I find the wake up crashes most of them.

Was about the only decent thing I could find for local storage though.

Your workplace sounds like it wastes a lot of money.

Fundamentally they're a very similar architecture though, (I'm not even remotely referring to the branding), it's not like the change from the old P4 Netburst architecture to the newer Core Duo architecture which completely changed the pipeline model and pretty much made Intel the gaming CPU of choice overnight, from being stamped on for years by AMD with their superb Athlon XP architecture. (We do remember Intel's ridiculously expensive and surprisingly awful dual-core Pentium 4s? The ones that ran hotter than the sun and were awful for games due to their ridiculously long pipelines.)

The performance improvements since Sandy Bridge have been very much incremental, with more of a focus on power efficiency, reducing heat output, and so on. (Each major 'tock' iteration has yielded less than 10% of a performance boost over its predecessor.)

Custom PC have been consistently unimpressed with Intel's CPUs over the last few years, every refresh it's been the same basic message, 'Yeah it's a bit better than the old one, but nothing worth the upgrade costs if you've got the previous generation, or even the generation before that.'

We're now at a point where the gap between Sandy Bridge and Skylake is substantial, but still not exactly amazing, and given that Sandy Bridge will be eight years old this year and four major iterations off the pace, that's quite disappointing IMO.

(And let's not forget that the fastest mainstream Skylake i7 actually has a lower clock speed than the fastest mainstream Haswell i7 (4GHz versus 4.4GHz) - to give the newer chip an overall performance uplift of around 8% over its predecessor, which was about the same increase seen from Ivy Bridge to Haswell.)

Did you read that article on Sandybridge running with 2333mhz DDR3 over 1600 DDR3? it made a seismic difference. Up to 30% in some games. It was on Digital Foundry.

If you were running Sandybridge I could see your point but you're not dude. You're running Nehalem which is eight years old and you're probably running spazzy speed DDR3 to boot. Skylake's one major improvement was that it uses DDR4. This is why it can sometimes be so much faster than Sandybridge, and not just the 5-8% per generation.

It's almost like you're attached to that manky old PC and are hoarding it somehow. I wouldn't even mind if you were like many of the people I know who hardly ever gamed. If you just bought things to show off with but man, you spent more hours in Doom than I spent in Fallout 4 FFS and I completed it and all of the DLC to date !

The jump from what you are on now to Skylake and a 980ti/1070 is epic. You're talking double the performance on both CPU and GPU.

As for storage? yeah I do notice a difference. Well, between a £40 Sandisk and my PCIE RAIDR that does 1tb RW. With the PCIE SSD Windows is ready as soon as it's loaded. I can type into Cortana immediately. I can also launch apps like Photoshop instantly. With the Sandisk I have to wait for about twenty seconds before any text appears in Cortana. After about a minute or so post boot the differences are smaller but Photoshop does not load instantly off of the Sandisk not even then.

It was the fastest DDR3 available at the time (remember I bought the mobo+CPU+RAM second hand from a chap who always buys the best), DDR3-1600 I believe (Geil, IIRC), on a high-end Asus motherboard, P6T-Deluxe.

I'm not saying a new PC won't be faster, or even a lot faster, but over two grands' worth of faster? I appreciate that's entirely subjective, but to my mind it keeps falling into the 'not going to do it' category. Fuck knows how many times I've specced up the entire system recently, but it's never got as far as the checkout.

Not really that PC cost around £6,000 to build, compare that with an HP workstation that would cost £8,000 or more and its not bad.

Also we needed to prove that the various Grid apps could and would address GPU before committing to £500,00 worth of further investment.

Now the same guys are going back to the proof of concept and are asking for £300,000 worth of PC's with 4X titans or similar in them in 2017.

I'm having to move my entire server room out to a local data centre as I'm out of space.

Yet you'll happily spend £10k on a car that you will have for a year or two? and you'd happily use a crap PC for years on end?

You confuse me you really do. You probably spend more time on your PC than you do in the car, too.

When I go on my PC I like to have all of the latest mod cons. Nearly all of them make it easier, better, faster and run games better than older rigs. Two grand is a lot of money yes, but when you think about the raw amount of time you will spend on it and how long it will last (possibly longer than your existing rig because Intel are nearing the end IPC wise and are beginning to see Moore's law).

I read an article in Custom PC once. Up until that stage I had always bought cheap monitors and stupid over powered graphics cards to connect them to. Then one day some guy does an article about how important a monitor is as it's basically what you sit and look at ALL DAY and what your PC shows itself to you on. How it's the thing that connects you to your world. I'd never seen the point in expensive monitors until then and then I had an epiphany and haven't looked back. It's right too, I spend all of my time interacting with this screen first before anything else.

£500 seemed ludicrous but man, I'm glad I made the investment.

It is hardly a crap PC!

This is "interesting"

I'd like to see it on a Gsync panel.

Brilliant.

I don't think that would work the way you'd think it would. I think it would still jerk.

Even at 144Hz?

Gsync let's the monitor sync to the GPU output rate, without hacks like vsync or tearing. But (a) that doesn't magically make 15 Hz smooth and (b) that video is presumably recorded at 120 Hz, which the screen would gsync to.

I appreciate it looks like the world's scruffiest piece of crap, but it is a load of laregish modern components stuffed into an eleven year old case. Particularly the graphics card, beefy non-modular power supply which has a million wires coming out of it, large CPU cooler, four drives (two HDD two SSD), and suchlike.

In terms of performance though, it's really not bad at all, hence a replacement that'll be a significant upgrade coming in at £2K or more.

I don't care a crap for what it looks like, I see a PC as a purely functional object. Unlike a car, which I spend daft amounts of cash on because I like them to be interesting and to look nice, and to have very specific things like USB connectivity which is why I spent £500 getting the Dension fitted to the Merc, and whatnot.

You definitely don't like functioning cars, I'll give you that.

But how many LEDs, man? The world needs to know.

It did have quite a few to start with, in the case door, behind the fan controller, and in one of the 120mm fans. (None of which I specified at the original build time back in 2005, Vadim (now long defunct) just put them in. Maybe they went bust because they kept putting loads of free LEDs into everything.)

The case door LEDs all failed within about 18 months IIRC, but the fan controller and fan LEDs still work. (Not that you can see the fan controller LEDs, because they're behind the door.)

In fact that's another reason the inside of the PC is such a mess, the fan controller has four channels and was originally wired up to individually control the CPU fan, both case fans, and the GPU fan (that's a lot of wires).

As I've upgraded the components inside I seriously couldn't be arsed plumbing everything back into the controller, and you wouldn't bother anyway these days as everything is PWM controlled, so it just controls the case fans now, but the spaghetti of wires is still inside the case, and now all over the place unlike when it was originally built when it was all nice and neat.

It's a proper ugly motherfucker of a PC, but that's part of its charm for me now.

Where are you getting your prices dude? I just went over to Dell and onto the Alienware site. I chose an Aurora (their new one) with a I7 6700 (high boost clocks so no point in K really) with a 1080 and 8gb ram (cheap to upgrade, Crucial will do the second 8gb to match) and it comes in at £1460. Surely you have an SSD/other hard drives to add? (it comes with a 1tb drive). I would say by the time you added a decent 240gb SSD and the ram you would be looking at £1600.

I'm doing the whole thing from scratch with no salvage from my current PC, as I want it to remain as a fully operational unit in its existing configuration.

As such the required specs are as per my previous post (quoted below). Storage alone is a killer, the 512GB M2SSDs are very expensive, then I need another decent 1TB SSD on top of that, the 3TB HDD will most likely be a WD Black - those alone are a significant wedge of cash.

I'm also getting the entire thing pre-built, so I won't be adding in any RAM afterwards myself and suchlike, it gets delivered to me in its final configuration.

Seriously, it doesn't come in at less than £2K if my other requirements are met such as a high-end motherboard (Asus Maximus Hero or suchlike), high quality modular power supply and a quality case.

I've been told that apparently Youtube has a limit of 60 FPS.

http://www.testufo.com/#test=framerates ... ne&pps=480

Is better

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-inch-S ... ds=1tb+ssd

Is £244 then this.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Desktop-Hard-D ... hard+drive

Makes it around £350. The ram will cost you no more than £30 and with a 256gb SSD you're looking at around £2050 and that's an Alienware.

It takes around ten seconds to plug in two memory modules and fit three drives dude. It's all tool less on the AW any way.

So that's still over two grand then, and also fails to tick the 'I don't want to fanny about with it at all after delivery' box.

I'm not overly enthused about Alienware either, with their random motherboards and power supplies and strange BIOSes. (Maybe that's changed now, I don't know.)

Mind you, the more I think about this the more I'm starting to wonder if what I really want is a G-Sync monitor. All I'm really after addressing here are the fringe cases where my PC can't maintain a solid 60FPS at 2560x1440, which leads to tearing with v-sync off, and stuttering/juddering with it on.

So instead of lobbing £2K+ at a new PC when my current PC is good enough nearly all of the time, maybe I'll just spend £500-£600 on a nice 2560x1440 G-Sync monitor, then Mrs Hearthly can have my current Dell which will be a nice upgrade for her.

Something like this should do the job - https://www.overclockers.co.uk/acer-pre ... 77-ac.html

I had the 4k version of that and I can tell you it's wank. The piano finish looked cheap and the BLB was among the worst I had ever seen. Acer haven't changed much. I heard horror stories about their 34" monitor that costs over a grand also.

G-Sync is OK but you will still notice frame dips. It does get rid of some of the micro stutter too but it would be better to use Adaptive sync with a much more powerful card IMO. I tried Freesync and it only operates between 45 and 60 FPS IIRC. Which is stupid, because my monitor is 70hz so was out of range most of the time. Obviously I'm back on Nvidia now, but adaptive Vsync seems to do the job OK.

As for Alienware? the only reason I bought my Area 51 as a whole build was because nothing in it is even made by Alienware.



MSI. As for overclocking? check this out.



All you do is punch in a number, add some volts and check all of the cores. Then hit apply.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvjuXgwmg9w

And if you needed all of the really complex stuff...





I've had word from Alienware that the new Aurora is much of the same. I guess it was easier getting MSI to make the whole thing

Yes having done a bit of reading up that Acer isn't possibly the best choice going.

Stepping up a bit price-wise but this looks like it might be just the ticket - http://www.ebuyer.com/726019-asus-pg279 ... tor-pg279q

Overclockers are out of stock at £799.99 but Ebuyer have them in at £659.99, apparently reduced from £699.99.

Seems to be a very well reviewed screen.

A good monitor will last for years, so even if my current PC does explode or totally run out of puff in the next year or two, that monitor will still be great for the new PC. (I've had my current Dell for four years and it's still working perfectly, so would be a nice straight upgrade for Mrs H from her current 24 inch 1920x1080 screen.)

As I understand it G-Sync never 'loses' sync like Freesync does, but once you dip below 40FPS or so, the lower frame rate does make itself quite apparent to the eye, but that'd be a pretty bad drop for me so wouldn't be coming up often.

Apparently you disable v-sync in the game (and in the Nvidia control panel), and enable G-Sync in the Nvidia control panel, and it just takes over from there, pumping out as many frames as it can, perfectly synced to the refresh rate of the screen.

Hmmmm, I'm finding this a much easier sell than getting a whole new PC.

EDIT - Also, LOL at the free DOOM game

Yeah that's exactly what you do I liked G-sync especially because I was running 4k at the time so low FPS was common.

The Swift is about as good as it gets however just know that you may go through a couple trying to get a perfect one.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/27-asus ... 10001-disp

Is more than good enough.

That's a TN panel though, the one I linked to is IPS.

I've been on IPS for years now and don't care for TN panels, I know modern TN panels are a lot better than they used to be but IPS is still where it's at for image quality IMO.

EDIT - I know your linky is £130 cheaper but when you're lashing out £500+ on a monitor to start with it seems worth it to go the extra mile for a good IPS panel.

Oh I see I wondered what the difference was

Handily there's a video comparing these exact two models

In all fairness the TN panel comes out of it pretty well, but I'd still pay the extra for IPS.

Ebuyer are very cheap on this, even Amazon is £691 compared to Ebuyer's £660.

My monitor (HP Envy 32) is IPS and I can see the difference. I dread to think what a 32" TN panel would look like as IIRC the Acer was TN and it was pants. It had a lovely gaming screen quality though I will say that but for everything else it was bad. The BLB looked like fucking spotlights when the screen was black !

I bought one of these and took the drive out. Although it was £5 cheaper when I bought it.

Hmmm turns out that setting adaptive v-sync on a per-game basis as required through the Nvidia control panel might be good enough.

It worked wonderfully in DOOM but that was actually an in-game option and I bemoaned the fact it seemed to be unusual/unique. (For some reason I had no idea it was also an option in the Nvidia control panel and can be set to override game settings on a per-game/application basis.)

More testing is required but if a simple setting will largely negate the requirement to spend £660 on a monitor, that would make very good sense. It certainly works really well in GTAV online, which seems to suffer from more performance issues than the single player game, for some reason. If it needs to tear it's generally when something hectic is going on so I don't really notice, and then the image is solid and synced when cruising around or racing or flying or whatever.

I'm getting drearily sensible in my old age (well, big daft Mercedes aside, I suppose), ordinarily I'd be like 'YAY A VAGUE EXCUSE TO BUY NEW TOYS' whereas now I'm like, 'I could put that towards an overpayment on the mortgage this month.....'

I did tell you that earlier dude !

It's very good and the more muscular the GPU the better the result

Sorry JC I did read that post but I didn't click that you were suggesting adaptive sync as a potential answer to my current situation, I thought you were making a broader point about it with high-end GPUs.

I did a bit more mucking about with it last night, it seems to work really well, so for the time being at least, I'll put the new monitor purchase on hold. (And it's gone back up to £700 at Ebuyer!)

The real test will be when we do another heist in GTAV, as I've had some pretty dramatic framerate drops in that when shit has properly been kicking off, and v-sync stops being fit for purpose in that scenario. (I could just drop down to 1080p from 1440p, but I bought the GTX970 specifically to run GTAV at 1440p )

I don't know anything about expensive PCs or expensive cars, but from a layman's point of view is say that though both a PC and a car might crash, PCs rarely cause a risk to life when they do so.