Be Excellent To Each Other

We have a new champion.

Ooo this one is more interesting. 2080Ti performance with RT on hovers between 30-60FPS at 1080p.

http://www.pcgameshardware.de/Grafikkar ... r-1263244/

Stealthier than a stealth bomber isn't really setting the bar that high.

It had me at intimidating.

Good debunking of Nvidia's performance claims for the 20xx series.

Yes the 2080 is '2x 1080 performance' if you specifically pick the combination of things that the 1080 is very bad at doing.

Thanks for the TL:DR

I need to get Mrs Hearthly's new PC specced up and ordered in the next couple of weeks. I'm glad I waited to see how the 20xx specs and pricing panned out.

She will be getting a 10xx card in her PC along with a Ryzen 2700X.

I'm still undecided between the 1070, 1070Ti and 1080. She basically only plays WoW and Minecraft which her current GTX960 handles fine at 1440p (albeit with some nips and tucks to settings).

TBH the 6GB 1060 would be fine, we shall see.

I also note that 1070/1070Ti/1080 prices have started to creep back up again which is probably because the 20xx cards are coming in at such ridiculous fucking prices, so a £500 1080 somehow manages to look 'reasonably priced'. I wish AMD were competitive in the GPU space, Intel have had to get their house in order since Ryzen launched, we need the same shake-up in the graphics market.

My PC appears to be starting to crumble under the strain of the stuff I'm asking it to do. Need an upgrade, I think.

Current spec:

Core i5 4570 @ 3.2GHz (although amusingly, my PC reports it as an i7-4770K because I used Oculus Tray Tool to forge it (and thus remove the "low CPU spec" warning)
16GB RAM
MSI GeForce GTX 980
SSDs up the wazoo
Corsair 750W PSU

The weak link seems to be the CPU, it's really struggling to do VR stuff, especially while someone's watching a movie off the Plex server and it's having to transcode.

What's the best CPU I can upgrade that will still work with the motherboard (which is a Gigabyte Socket 1150 jobber) - or alternatively, is there a motherboard I'm better off switching to that will allow more flexibility?

I would've thought that attempting to transcode video while also playing VR games is a bad idea regardless of the spec? It sounds more like you just need a separate video serving machine.

I think you cap out at an i7-4790K on that board, so you're still stuck at quad core but you'll get higher clock speeds and hyper-threading.

It's got a base clock speed of 4Ghz (turbos to 4.4) but could be overclocked higher with decent cooling, but it's still Haswell so you won't get any architectural benefits.

I suspect you probably need MOAR CORES - which AFAIK you can't do on that board.

Chuck enough cores and threads at it and it should be OK, I'm consistently impressed at what I can throw at my 8C/16T Ryzen and it just keeps on trucking.

My crumbly old i7 did eight parallel transcodes when Game of Thrones was out last year.

It got a bit crappy as seven and eight were added, but that was more to do with bandwidth (as it was fine for me).

4790k is about as far as you can go. You may find a Xeon to fit but it would be the same c/t any way. Problem is it's DDR3 and nothing modern still uses it. You can get cheap 8/10 core Xeons that will work with DDR3 but sadly the world knows about it so a 2011 X79 board will cost you a king's ransom.

I'd go Ryzen.

Gngh, this is £600 on Amazon and it ticks almost every box I have for a monitor and all my current monitors are at least ten years so I’m well overdue an upgrade.

https://displaysolutions.samsung.com/bu ... 287/C43J89

Giphy hates me

Curved monitors. I just can't get on with them at all.

I love those wide monitors but sadly when I was shopping for one Fallout 4 didn't like them. I so miss playing Dirt 3 over super wide though it was exceptional.

I mean... It's quite the gif.

Across 43”, I want some curvature. My work setup is 2x 27”s (fairly similar overall dimensions) and I have them tilted a bit to bring the far left and right edges closer to me. I didn’t like them when they were straight on.

Is it a sit up close thing or does it work sitting further out?

So identical PCs just switching out the motherboard and CPU comes to the following. (Both builds use motherboards costing the same.)

Intel 8700K build - £2153

Ryzen 2700X build - £2039

So with Ryzen I get two more cores and four more threads, with Intel I get slightly higher clocks and slightly better IPC.

Also because Intel are cunts you have to add in a decent aftermarket cooler because the stock Intel HSF is completely inadequate for the task and the chip throttles itself to fuck all the time, and that's before you even try to overclock it. (AMD supply a high quality cooler in the box, and the CPU costs less too.)

Additionally, overclocking isn't even an option with second gen Ryzen in the Scan configurator because the auto-boost now makes it completely redundant. (You still need to slap a chunky cooler on an Intel chip and overclock it manually to get the most out of it.)

Seems like a pretty simple choice, really.

I saw some prices for the 9000 series the other day and if they're true,ouch. Very expensive, AMD shouldn't have to budge on pricing.

1200 vertical pixels is whack though.

I could live with 1200. 1080 is whack.

1440 is nice, but I find 4k a bit much. Then again Windows scales pretty well in 10.

It’s not ideal but I think it’s a compromise I can live with. I think all the models with 1440 and a better-than-60-Hz screen are north of a grand though, which is a bit rich for my blood.

https://store.hp.com/UKStore/Merch/Prod ... itle_r0004

Is about the best for the money.

Nice screen, we have few at work by HP (not as big as yours), never bothered though as I have 3 24 inch screens on a special stand I bought and its enough for me.

Be interested to hear how you get on with games on it, as always room for an update at home!

I’d rather have the Samsung’s built-in KVM and picture-by-picture two-device support than that screen’s extra vertical pixels and G-sync.

When I picked mine I wasn't so fussed about hz etc. When you are throwing around that many pixels,even on a 1080ti 144 or 160 FPS is a pipe dream any way.

I'm glad tbh. My 4k Gsync gaming monitor absolutely sucked for anything but gaming. The BLB was the worst I've ever seen.

I saw one of these widescreen curved gaming telly things the other day. It was mind glowingly beautiful. I’d get one but PC gaming is shit.

Very simple choice! Don't blow £2k on a pc...

PCs can do more than gaming. 120 Hz is pleasant for workstation use.

Edit — even for gaming, many games are going to end up letterboxed to 1920x1200 or so anyway, or even 1920x1080. My 970 will manage 120 Hz on some games at that resolution.

Well it's a 20th wedding anniversary present and Mrs Hearthly is on her PC all the time, and she's grown out of her current one, so it's a nice present and it'll be a decent upgrade on what she's got now.

Quite right. You spend your money on whatever you want. Certainly not income tax.

The deed is done, that's a fucking nicer PC than mine. Grrrrr. (Although it has a lot less going on in the way of RGB loveliness.)

How many LEDs does it have?

Just what's on the motherboard and the cooler by default.

Is it water cooled and have those neon glowing pipes?

Noice.

I decided to strip my 08 ALX down last night for a full gut and mod. I want two rads, one for the GPU one for the CPU and more water cooling. Ordered some bits yesterday to add to what I have now (the triad case is just too small to host another rad or proper water cooling for the CPU).

8 hours it took me. Just to get down to the carcass. 8 hours. It has an ungodly amount of wiring in it, as well as its own computer just to control the case.

This could take many weeks. Sadly with things becoming more threaded over the past few months I have began to notice that a 120 single thick AIO is nowhere near enough to cool a 14 core beast. And sod's law that means a "new" case. One that can take moar water kewling.

Had a meeting today where I was requested to provide a server costing £130,000.

The main cost was 8 TESLA Volta V100 cards, they were after cards with 32GB on each, these appear to be pre-order. The 16GB versions cost £10,000 each

I'm making them prove the concept on Azure first as I don't want to get stuck with a turkey costing that much if it doesn't live up to the hype.

That's pretty crazy. I bet it will need some pretty serious cooling, too.

Not really gaming hardware, but I will do some gaming on it, so here's an update anyway: this happened yesterday.

Nice. Did you get that monitor too?

Not yet. If that happens it won't be for a while after the move. And it's far from certain yet.

You are the only doc whose handwriting I can actually read

"Are we having fun yet?"



No, no not really. 8 hours to strip the thing down. Then about three more making it look like this.



But the main structural work is gone and man, a lot of metal has also gone. Got some pretty nice water cooling arranged for this one, and ordered all of the fans etc. Now I just need lots of black paint and lots of acrylic sheets.