Be Excellent To Each Other

A major constraint is that ZFS has no ability for online drive expansion, and wiping arrays storing 5+ TB of data to resize them is (obviously) a pain in the arse. So I'm speccing somewhat generously on storage.

I'll be running this in the ZFS version of RAID-6 -- two parity disks.

That's a lot of porn but, it's got to go somewhere! Good work.

Yeah... what do you need all that storage for?

You know what that build needs? More hard disks!

Nerding

Don't you mean Redknapp?

Yes, I know that was Nurding

Didn't they get divorced?

Now you've stopped using toy OSs at home you could switch to NTFS and have stuff that works

Factorio

Don't know whether it should be in this thread but I don't see how it matters... Anyway, my steam controller came today.

I'm just about to plug it in but so far I'm thinking that it's a weird little thing. It's probably because I'm not used to it but it doesn't quite fit in my hands properly.

Got my steam link today. That's a lot of hardware for £2. Worth it for the lovely flat ethernet cable alone

I set mine up today and what do you know? It works exactly as it should! Amazing. I like it.

The SSD that I "borrowed" from work to run my games machine has died. Now I have to use a mechanical disk like a fucking peasant.

On the upside, I also "borrowed" the mechanical disk

SSDs are crazy cheap now, there's really no excuse not to have one as the primary OS/apps/game drive in any PC or laptop. (Or even a main 'games drive', really.)

Of course there's an excuse. I'm very, very tight.

Title

Oh yeah.

Not bought sod all for my PC now in a year. Literally a whole year, without buying anything PC related.

The whole mining debacle was bad enough, but the contempt shown to gamers was just incredible. Then of course RAM prices have been off the scale, and SSD prices have been stupid too. I can't count how many times I thought "ooo, let me add something to my PC !" and then thought "haha, no chance am I paying that".

So it has remained exactly as it was, and since playing 4k on my 1X I doubt I will do anything to it any time soon. Bikes are cheaper, much more fun (and substantially more for your money) and have the added bonus of making you fit. Win.

Never thought I'd see John Coffey go full console, but here we are!

Culmination of things. I always knew this stuff was stupid prices but I always managed to find an excuse. I got my last GPU just in time (before the rush, I could have doubled up tbh) and then had lots of pleasure playing games driven to 4k with max detail. Then you get used to it and go looking for the latest game tech to make your card struggle.. Nothing. Which I guess takes a lot of the fun out of it. Then AMD & Nvidia saying "We love PC gamers really mmmm yummy money up yours PC gamers !" as well as all of the other things (memory price fixing and all of that crap). Yeah, totally felt like an abused step kid. Then you load up a game on a console and run it at 4k and from 20ft away there is no major difference. Shit, I even stop from time to time when playing Quantum Break to admire how beautiful it is. I hadn't done that in a long time.

I could probably load it up on my PC, stare at it really hard and spot some detail differences but I just can't be arsed any more. As long as it looks good, doesn't give me a headache and doesn't crawl to a stop then it's perfectly fine.

Quantum Break is such an odd game to wax lyrical about how pretty it is. Look how great these shipping containers are! Look at these offices! And these shipping containers. And this office corridor. Shipping container. Another office. Office.

I’d suggest Gears 4 for 4K goodness but that’s equally boring to play through.

I really wanted to like Quantum Break but it just didn't click with me. I enjoyed the live action stuff but that's not the point of playing a game is it?

Yeah man got Gears too it's great in co op.

What I meant with QB is like, very high res textures. Like the floor for example. You can stand there and it looks perfect. No AA needed (not sure if it AAs somehow?) but yeah just how sharp it is with no fuzzy edges.

I guess the game could be boring, but I am so monged out on tablets ATM that I am enjoying the slow pace. The action scenes are fun, I like the puzzles too It kinda reminds me of Max Payne a bit.

Can't you just "ask" work to get another one for you to "borrow"?

£58 for a 250GB SSD.

No excuse!

So it's less than zero then? Pass.

More than zero.

Much worse.

OK then, £25.

Yup I noticed prices had tanked. Might be something to do with what's going down in China.

25 is closer to zero, I'll give you that.

Thats not bad.

I will say when I switched on my PC for the first time with an SSD it was mind boggling how fast it was.

Next stop PCIe SSDs

You can bring a lot of kit 'back to life' as it were with a cheapy SSD. We've got an old laptop that the hard drive died in (a 2009 vintage Sony Vaio), I replaced it with a second hand 120GB SSD (an oldish SSD that wasn't top of the line even when it was new) and rebuilt Windows 7 onto it.

It's like using a brand new top of the line laptop, it absolutely flies, despite just having a Core Duo and 4GB RAM.

The hard drive is almost always the weakest link in a PC/laptop, especially laptops with their shit 5400rpm drives.

Barely makes any discernible difference, IMO. I got a stupid fast one and even a heatsink for it and it "felt" no different to the one it replaced. It's definitely not got that "Dial up to broadband" feel about it that going from a rust spinner to an SSD does.

So I didn't bother getting any more. If I wanted to rely on the NAS completely I could remove the spinners from my PC now. But I haven't, simply because I cba

Looks like the great graphics card price crash has started in earnest, which is excellent news as I'll be buying a whole new PC for Mrs Hearthly in the next 4-6 weeks for her wedding anniversary present (20 years!).

Word is that there are millions of unsold Nvidia GPUs out there in inventory, the crypto boom is all but over, and Nvidia are dragging their heels on the launch of their next line of GPUs as there is already so much stock out there, which retailers are having trouble shifting because a lot of folks are waiting for that next line of GPUs.

As such 1080s are back down to about £450+, and the 6GB 1060 can be had for under £250, which is excellent news.

She's going to have a better PC than me, grrrrr.

I don't find it very exciting when GPUs cost the same they cost at launch two years? ago. It's hardly something to celebrate really.

What is sorely missing from gaming now are huge graphical advances like we have seen in the past. It's kinda levelled off and gone "meh". I mean sure, there's all of this promise and talk about Ray Tracing, and Metro Exodus is going to have "some" but I would guess it will be quite severely limited by the fact that it needs to run on the consoles first. So whatever is added in that the consoles can't do needs to be added in at time/money. Plus unless you bought a Titan V you will be paying out for another GPU, given Pascal is useless. I dunno man, it doesn't get me reaching for my wallet to spend out another £700+ on a GPU.

That's the problem really, consoles. Same as it always was. They will and will continue to hold back PC gaming. I think there will reach a point of equilibrium once the consoles catch up, but that is a HUGE question... Will they? ever? because if they do the GPU could go the way of the dinosaurs. I seldom play many games now, but I am still playing FO4. And it is every bit as enjoyable at 4k on my Xbox. Any extra detail would simply be too far away for me to see it on the TV any way. Nvidia keep on dropping hints about their next gen (Volta, Ampere etc etc) but they are forgetting there is fuck all really worth having about it. I mean yeah, minor RT (because we are years away from fully RT games) but other than that? lol, I can get a nice framerate already with my XP in any game running at 4k. That is what Nvidia have forgotten. They have now caught up, and you only need a 1080Ti for 4k max with decent frame rates. What's the fuckin point in Volta? more FPS? haha, all three of the games I play are locked at 60, can be pushed to 70 but any more and they simply break and you can't play them any more.

I think it all depends on if VR takes off or not. Serious GPU grunt is needed right now at the low resolutions they run at, once they start pushing the resolution envelope in the displays and still need to hit 90fps twice over (for each eye), then GPU needs will rise significantly.

Is VR going to take off though? I'm not so sure, it has more penetration than at any point in the past, but it still feels like a bit of a fad to me.

Doc made an excellent point the other day which is that game development, for AAAs at least, is on a 2-3 year cycle. So we've probably not even seen a full cycle since VR has existed.

Good point, well presented.

edit: it'll be a relatively brave dev house who started a AAA VR project a couple of years ago though, so it's a bit of a chicken and egg situation...

Yes but it's nice when you have to buy a new PC and cards are at least back down to 'sort of reasonable' price levels as opposed to 'fucking extortionate'.

It's a fad. I bought a DK2 for about £100 ages ago and played with it for about a week. It was supposed to be the lead up to me buying a full blown headset but it was just as I suspected.. Basically 3Dvision on your head. I "ooed and ahhed" a few times, then put it out to pasture (it's literally sitting in a heap in the corner of my living room).

AMD made a point about VR ages ago.. Something along the lines of "VR will be realistic when we hit 5k. Per eye". I must say I agree with them. And knowing just how long it took Nvidia to throw around 4k? yeah, I kinda lost hope at that point. I was going to buy a full blown VR headset, then found out that to play Fallout 4 I must mess around for hours setting up sensors and etc, all to have to stand up waving my arms around like a belm. Which kinda ruins the experience of long play, given I would be knackered within 30 mins. I waited for sit down support to come. And waited. And waited. And waited some more, then gave up on that too.

That last sentence kinda sums up VR for me.



I hate to sound like the total opposite of my old self, but, you don't have to buy it you know.

I thought VR was a fad until I played SUPERHOT. It’ll take a couple of generations to become better and more affordable but I hope to god it’s not going away because when it’s good it’s mindblowing.

Well it's not for me, it's for Mrs Hearthly, it's a present, and she's totally maxed out on her current PC.

When I specced it up and bought it for her it was basically just intended to be a sleek games machine, mini-ITX board in a small case, minimal storage (256GB SSD), quad core Intel CPU (whatever the i5 was of the time, 4690 I think?), and geared to playing WoW at 1080p with the potential for other games if required. (2GB GTX960.)

However, in the three or four years she's had it things have changed, she's got into games DVR, editing together and rendering videos, she runs a Minecraft server, plays other games and so on. (So she'll be running the Minecraft server which Jnr will be connected to, whilst she plays WoW, and has Chrome open with a million tabs whilst she's got a big project open in Movie Studio.)

I've seen the thing totally maxed out on CPU, out of RAM and paging like fuck, with her game jittering as she's trying to play it. She's constantly low on space on her SSD, and we've had to offload a lot of stuff to an external 1TB USB3 drive.

She's grown out of it, basically, and there's really very little room for upgrades or expansion in her current case.

So her next PC will be a full fat 'proper' PC, similar to mine basically, but using second gen Ryzen instead of first. Still not decided on graphics card, but there's not much in it between 1070 and 1080 price wise, so might just go 1080 although that would be overkill. (The other option would be a 6GB 1060.)

They've been coming in at about two grand on the configurators (a bit more with the 1080, more like £1800 with the 1060), but I'm prepared to wait a few weeks to see if RAM drops a bit, and I think GPUs have still got a way to go down in price. The anniversary isn't until September so there's no mega-rush.

Yeah I think a RAM price drop of some sort is inevitable. SSDs have taken a huge price cut recently.

What GPU did you get? a 1070? why not give that a clean and give her that and get yourself a 1080? at least then nothing will be going to waste under achieving its potential and you get an upgrade out of it.

There hasn't really been much said about "Ampere" or whatever the fuck Nvidia are calling it this week. There was a "leak"* back at the beginning of the year but I think Nvidia were all set to release it, then changed their mind and by all accounts made a whole jeffload of Pascal cards instead. I used to read everything Richard Swinburne had to say over at the Bit-tech forum and he had spoken to Asus who were worried they may get caught holding the baby so refused to mass produce Pascal cards. Seems their suspicions to be careful were correct, and now there are a whole load of 10 series cards that are going to be very hard to sell. Especially as Nvidia let the cat out of the bag back at the beginning of the year, then pissed in the hype train's steam engine putting it out. Of course OCUK and pals are doing us all a favour selling 10 series cards at retail prices again, but I think there are more price cuts to come. They have to clear the way for Ampere, and most who wanted one already owned one before mining went mental.

*everything these days is leaked. Or accidentally dropped because some one at Intel or Nvidia made a mistake and just so happened to release all of these slides. Yeah yeah, bullshit. They've obviously cottoned on to the fact that most people only want what they can't have so have learned to market to them. It's the same reason that for 5 miles or so people walk in the CYCLE PATH (clearly labelled as such and with a dividing line down it) rather than the PATH right next to it. In fact, I usually end up riding in the PATH because there's nae coont in it.



Depends on the game. If it's an EA game then yeah 2-3 years is about the norm. Something like a Skyrim or Fallout? five and up. The problem I have had with VR (and not taking the second, far more expensive step) is that all I am hearing seems to be people turning their backs on it, rather than stuff coming out for it. Like, all I seem to see in the news is things evaporating rather than what I can have should I decide to drop my wedge on an expensive unit.

And I still don't think it is good enough graphically yet to be real reality. Sure, stuff like Superhot and other techy sorta demos with N64 style graphics work very well, but they are quite a ways from reality. That means upping the resolution ante quite severely, which exposes GPUs and their lack of power to be up to it.

I hope that VR doesn't totally die out before we reach that stage (because we can, given that 4k gaming is well achievable if we have the graphical grunt) but arms length is good for me until that happens.

VR may only be 'realistic' when we hit really high resolutions, but luckily that doesn't matter worth a fuck given that we're talking about playing computer games here; which currently don't look all that realistic in the vast, vast majority of cases and that isn't a barrier to enjoyment. Also, Fallout 4 is a pointless test case because it's an existing game ported badly to VR rather than something designed for the platform.

I mean I'm not saying it won't die a death, but your reasons for why it's a fad are basically nonsense.

VR isn't going to die a death.

How so?. If I think about myself and my personal gaming preferences FO4 VR would be the game I want to play. It's all but the only game I play. VR works in a similar fashion to 3DVision, meaning it was always going to port well. Both Fallout 3 and FONV were quite superb in 3Dvision, all barring the crosshair which you could fix yourself.

Given the incredibly low amount of games on VR one title can make it or break it. Plus it has to have appeal to every one, not just those who happen to like a particular game on it. Like me, yeah, I am not a fan of ED at all. Yet all you hear is people raving on about how brilliant it is and how wonderful it is in VR. Sure, if that is what floats your boat then fair play but I would rather play FO4.

OK look, let me put it this way. I have not bought a Vive or Oculus CV because the only game I have seen that I would want to play is Fallout 4 VR. But as you say, they have managed it badly and controller support never came (even though they promised it in January) and thus I have not bought one. I just can't see me pulling a 13 hour session stood up waving my arms around. Other than that? there really isn't anything else on VR I must have. And that is a problem. And usually when that is a problem the item in question is a fad.

We'll see I guess.

VR adaptations of existing games exist, but they're an afterthought and VR doesn't work well in that context. Games specifically designed for VR like Superhot and Star Trek are breathtaking

Also everything on PSVR works pretty much perfectly sat down.