Be Excellent To Each Other

New laptop time for Hearthly Jnr, she's currently playing WoW on Mrs Hearthly's old Sony Vaio which was purchased in August 2009, so it's really not done bad at all.

It still works fine but it struggles dreadfully with WoW (which has a fairly advanced graphics engine these days), even with all the settings dialled down quite considerably - plus the fans make a proper racket when it's running the game. Also, because it's only got 4GB of RAM it's constantly thrashing the SSD for paging, so that's clearly going to die at some point.

I swapped out the original 500GB hard drive some time ago for a second-hand 128GB SSD, which is now approaching capacity, not least thanks to the 57,000 screenshots of the game that Hearthly Jnr has taken. (Seriously, 57,000 screenshots, and counting, and she wants to keep them all. I already back them up to two separate locations as the loss of them is inconceivable. The entire life of her Gnome Warrior 'Randish' is charted in exquisite detail.)

(It was a very high spec laptop back in the day, costing north of £1100 IIRC, with a proper discrete GPU along with a 1080p screen, Core 2 Duo, 4GB RAM etc. The GPU is a Radeon Mobility 4650 with 512MB of its own RAM, and I doff my cap at it for being able to chuck WoW around at 1920x1080 and generally maintain north of 30PFS, albeit at very curtailed graphics settings.)

I'm pretty much decided on this custom spec from PC Specialist, including delivery it comes in at £888 which is very keenly priced, having had a shop around at other haunts I can't see it being possible to match this spec for the same price, and 'gaming laptops' tend to waste resources on RGB keyboards and LEDs all over the place, whereas this comes in quite an austere enclosure.

It's not insanely specced but it should last a decent amount of time, and the GTX965M is a very capable mobile GPU part. I did consider getting her a normal PC but you're looking at around £650 for the base unit, and then extra for a monitor on top of that, so the cost difference isn't that great, and then you've got all the extra wires and stuff that come with a normal PC, whereas the laptop is very neatly self-contained on her table.

Order will most likely be placed before the end of the evening.

WINDOWS 10 IN YOUR HOUSE! DOOOOOOOMMMM!

You might want to get the one on the left a better chair while you're at it.

Not even I am stubborn enough to try and source a new laptop with Windows 7 on it, which I'm sure would be entirely possible, but entering the realms of the foolish I think.

Also as a new build, rather than an upgrade, I'm hoping it'll be free of many of the gremlins that have been encountered elsewhere.



Me and Mrs Hearthly both have exactly the same basic wooden chairs with a cushion on them, we've had them forever and don't feel any great motivation to replace them

I picked up an Asus GL552JX (I think it's that) last month for much less than that, and it's got a GeForce 950M and an i7 in it. Would heartily recommend.

That seems to be around the £850-£950 mark from what I can see?

Apologies in advance for this tedious list of my grievances with the Asus compared to my PC Specialist spec but it's my solemn duty to be a nit-picking arsehole in such matters

The 950M is a reasonable mobile GPU but not great, and having had a Google the GL552JX uses the DDR3 variant rather than the faster GDDR5 version. The 965M is a substantially more powerful part in both scenarios but especially so compared to the DDR3 version of the 950M.

The i7 CPU is considerably more expensive than the equivalent i5, but doesn't offer any bonuses beyond hyper-threading which makes little difference to games.

The screen size is slightly smaller than that on the Vaio, so a slight step backward in that regard. (15.6 versus 16.3, whereas the PC Specialist is an upgrade to 17.3)

Whilst it does have an SSD, it's half the capacity of my PC Specialist spec.

Overall I'm not convinced by the ASUS, unless you got it for something in the region of £700 or so?

I was given a nice laptop recently. Core I7 (sandy) with a desktop GTX 460 in it. It's massive (nearly 18") and it's an Asus ROG so it has overclocking, backlit kb and so on. I had a 64gb SSD lying around so I chucked that in alongside the 750gb it had.

Very nice laptop for free

I did indeed get it for £699, although I see Amazon have now bumped that up by £100.

Fair enough, for £700 it makes sense, pretty much a £200 discount from my spec, and the 950M is still a fairly respectable GPU.

Is that the image that gave you the sweatshop idea?

Ha! No. I got the idea from Reddit.

I was just coming here to give your source as well.

http://imgur.com/a/l5ppq
http://imgur.com/a/CkWVA

Having played a chunk of XCOM with the Steam Controller, this afternoon I've tried some of Shadowrun: Dragonfall. I really like this thing.

Millions of YouTubers can't be wrong, dude.

Fantastic article on Eurogamer.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... e-i5-2500k

Good part of course is that people are moving from 8gb to 16gb any way, so adding the extra ram speed in doesn't even affect the price much.

One of my biggest computing regrets was getting a crap locked I5, not the 2500k. Even more stupidly there was only about £30 difference.

Wanted to mention the keyboard I got last week.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01A ... ge_o02_s00

If you're looking into mechs and fancy giving one a whirl I highly recommend it. Do note though, it's tiny. However, since getting it I have realised just how little I use a keyboard beyond the basic functions, so to that ends it's fantastic. I personally prefer blues myself (preferring the click to the clack of other keys).

I also got one of these for it.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00F ... ge_o02_s00

And again it's very good

I've done gone and pre-ordered a Rift, on the basis that it won't be charged or shipped until July which gives me time to get things like wedding payments out of the way

I'm going to need to upgrade my PC. Current spec:

Core i5-4570 @ 3.2GHz (not overclocked)
16GB RAM
Radeon 7970
SSD

Is it basically just the graphics card I'm going to want to replace here, or is the i5 a bit long in the tooth now too?

I don't think you can overclock that CPU. ARC says it turbos to 3.6ghz

http://ark.intel.com/products/75043/Int ... o-3_60-GHz

But that may be on one core only. It's a tough call Gaz tbh. With Haswell CPUs you really need to be at 4ghz for them to shine. Mind you, given you are going to be using a single GPU (I assume?) then it should be fine. You could track down a 4690k but without knowing what motherboard you have (and thus the phases it has) it's hard to tell if you could overclock that.

I'm also assuming your PSU is up to the job (because the 7970 is quite greedy). I dunno. "Suck em and see" really.

Just downloaded and ran Steam's VR test.



Looks like Portal? Portal 2? (not sure I have never played either) and results were pretty good.

I was running the 5820k at basic speed which I think is around 3.6ghz?

I have spent longer tweaking my Steam Controller for XCOM 2 than I have playing XCOM 2. On the other hand, I think I'm gradually arriving at some bindings that make sense to me. The configurability of this thing is a beast, and you have to spend quite a while clicking around in Steam before you become aware of how powerful it is. But I really like it.

4 months in:

The wireless drops intermittently and then won't find any networks. Apparwnyly this happens a lot. The touch pad has an annoying 'zoom' feature. All in all, 2/10 because a laptop without wireless is a bit shit. It'll probably go back but MrsA will speak to HP later today to see if that helps.

The zoom function can probably be turned off. Every laptop I've had used the synaptics stuff which can be configured that way.

Yeah all that shit gets turned off on PC laptops for me, as the implementation is usually totally awful.

It's taken me a number of hours of tweaking but I am slowly converging on a set of Steam Controller bindings I'm happy with for XCOM. You need to dig pretty deep into the slightly impenetrable menus to get a sense of what this complex beast can do.

Here's how I have it mapped:

* Tactical camera on left pad, tactical cursor on right, triggers for mouse buttons
* ABXY for confirm/cancel/overwatch/reload
* right grip to open the shot menu
* bumpers for cycle targets / units
* joystick for cursor up/down a level

Then I use the left grip as a shift key, which changes the other controls:

* joystick for rotate map / zoom camera in/out
* right pad for a popup menu of 1-9 buttons for selecting abilities (this uses 1:1 mapping which confused me at first)
* left trigger quick load, right trigger quick save (both on hard pulls)

Oh, and then in the game menus, I added some small tweaks like using the left pad as a circular scroll wheel. Only obvious thing I'm still missing is waypoint mode, I think. If anyone wants a copy I can publish them to Steam.

This has been my testbed for the Steam Controller and I really think it's excellent for mouse-based games. I'm still all fingers and thumbs in FPSs -- I tried to play Deus Ex: HR Department and I was dreadful. However I wonder if I would adjust with practice. In any event, there's nothing stopping me getting an XBone pad for those.

To my mind the Steam controller isn't meant to be solving that problem because FPS games tend already to be optimised for normal analogue controllers. You could invest time learning to play them using the Steam controller but, frankly, why bother? You'd just be creating a problem that doesn't exist so you could try and solve it.

In some ways the right pad is better for FPS games as there is so much more fidelity. But it requires unlearning all muscle memory used for the last 15 years. Plus if you switch between PC and PS4 you'll start getting confused.

So yeah, it's probably not worth it.

I'm amenable to this line of thinking.

Of course, FPS games used to be optimised for mice, and occasionally still are on PC. There's apparently some impressive Counterstrike players using the Steam Controller, with the pad for twitch aiming and using the controller's gyro controller for fine aiming of headshots. Allegedly they can compete with mouse&keyboard players, which isn't true of the joypad users. But that's a level of practice I don't think I'm willing to put into it and the shooters I play, even when I'm on PC, were typically aimed at consoles and have joypad-style balancing.

Yeah, I think we're in agreement here.

And for the avoidance of doubt, I still think the Steam Controller is a lovely thing.

"Jensen, this is your final warning."

"I didn't ask for this."

Me too!

Another day another narrative horror game set in an asylum but this one sounds interesting with it's apparent lack of reliance on jump scares and the usual nonsense:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016- ... ght-review

Despite having just finished a horror game I'm tempted to pick this up given it's short (~three hour) run time.

Ta.

Do want

Wrong thread. Tch.

Yeah, I noticed that when I came back to remind myself of it's name so I could buy it. D'oh.

Fuck you 4k and the horse you rode in on.





Well that's it. No more 4k and no more Gsync when I really need Freesync. This one is 1440p, one Radeon can run anything standing on its head at that res so I no longer need to rely on Crossfire and it's 32" too, huge.

I'm going to box up the 4k monitor (still got the box on top of my wardrobe) and put it away. There's pretty much no doubt that next gen I will most likely go back to Nvidia so once there is the technology in place to run it properly I will no doubt use it again.

Doers anyone want to give me a decent gaming PC?

If you don't ask...

Someone school me up here.

Oculus Rift recommended specs state either a GTX 970 or an R9 290. That would suggest that the two cards are broadly similar.

Presumably, then, it follows that the R9 390 is broadly similar to the GTX 980?

If so, why is the 980 almost double the price of the 390?

The R9 290 and the R9 390 are basically the same thing, in lieu of being able to fabricate any sort of actual new architecture AMD are just rebranding the same old tech time and time again. (They stuck an extra 4GB of (largely pointless) VRAM on the 390 and bumped the clock speeds a little bit, but other than that it's a 290.)

The GTX970 and GTX980 are actually pretty close as well (the 980 generally comes in about 15-20% faster than a 970), but the 980 commands a price far beyond the extra performance it delivers. (Both cards however use Nvidia's latest Maxwell architecture.)

The current sweet spot for mid-high end graphics cards is the GTX970, the 980 isn't worth the extra cash, and you need to jump to the 980Ti to see a substantial boost in performance from the R290/R390/GTX970/GTX980.

Well, I'm thinking for VR here where the more bang the better.

What's the difference between a 390 and a 390X? Anything?

The 390X has more bang than the 390 but it's marginal and not worth the extra cash, unless you really need that extra grunt to make VR viable.

(The price premiums for the 390 to the 390X and the 970 to the 980 aren't justified by the extra performance.)

I'd spend £360 on a GTX980 rather than a 390X, the 980 is the faster card, it'll run cooler and use less juice, and Nvidia's drivers are better too.

(If you're looking to spend around £250, then I'd choose the GTX970.)

The 390 is a better card than the 970.

So I got my new monitor recently. Nothing much has changed really. I did have a terrible problem about a week ago with Alienware's PCIE locking system (it can fail and I did not have any screws in the GPUs and one moved and shorted out the £500 PCIE SSD I have !) but I managed to pretty much fix all of that.

However, since getting my new monitor the clever little person that resides in the back of my brain somewhere has realised that I now have 3 inputs. Up until I bought my 4k monitor I also had a rather mean Hackintosh which is what I spent most of my day using. It was running Yosemite which I must say I didn't like as much as Mavericks but ho hum. Any way, that Hackintosh was broken down and sold for parts with others being used to build Mrs JC's MK2 Area 51 but as I posted about a couple of months back I got back my old silver tram Alienware. Only downside? it's AMD That would never work with El Capitan surely? well actually it does. And rather well too, apparently. Some clever so and so has written a complete core kext for the Phenom 2 range (doesn't work so well on FX sadly).

So over the next couple of weeks I am going to be reinstating the Hackintosh as my main daily grind PC. It'll be relatively game capable too (I mostly only play L4D these days) so a single GTX 760 (because SLI does nothing in OSX) will be more than enough for that

Anyone have good headphones reccommendations? The plastic on my PX5's has snapped and the left thing is a tiny bit of thin plastic (and some sellotape) away from falling off...

Headphones or headset?

Ah, headset is the correct term i think? It needs a microphone

Best for sound/price is the Kingston HyperX Cloud 2. The one based on the Qpad.

Sound sound sound !

Obviously since dropping my monitor resolution to 1440p I've been graced with the luxury of being able to disable Crossfire and just gaming on one card. Bliss ! So I decided to change out my headphone amp (I bought the one I am using now for a cheaper pair of headphones, not the Grado RS2E I now have). After doing a lot of reading I decided on this.



And this to go with it.



SB Titanium HD. I don't like the sound of the speakers in the monitor at all, but because it's so big I can't use speakers on the desk. So, I bought one of these for £65 on Ebay (pristine, this isn't mine here)



And then as a hobby type thing I took it apart and binned the old Bose amp (the bit on the back) and replaced it with my own amp and refitted the cover (the bit on the back). It adds a lovely slab of bass to the sound