The PC Snobbery Thread

[UnbiddenKarma]

Its not the best overclocker because of so many transistors on such a small die (22nm). Everything is concentrated, so it doesn't take higher voltage too well. Having said that, for gaming, going above 4.5Ghz is silly. We're aren't even close to maxing out our SB CPU's at 4.5Ghz. And the Ivy Bridge CPU's do 4.5Ghz with ease, and with LESS power. 77W vs 95W. For the normal person and even the extreme gamer, I still recommend an Ivy over a Sandy. For the e-peen, extreme over clocker, or OCD numbers people, a Sandy Bridge might be a better bet, provided the chip is binned well...but that is also a crap shoot. Not all Sandy`s do past 4.5Ghz.

Even at 4.5 GHz the Ivy's going to be running just under 10 degree's hotter.... I get where you are coming from, I'm just not personally sure I'd want to run a processor like that.

[Blinx123]

That's awesome, I can upgrade to 32gb tomorrow if I felt like it

I can't, unfortunately.
Sucks that 8GB Dimms weren't that common when I bought my parts back in September 2011.

but please whatever you do, get a new monitor before anything else! It's like a crime pairing a gtx 680 with an old low-res monitor.

Pairing my rig with my TV before Friday, I swear.
Not being able to listen to my TV (you heard that right. I'm using my big ass 47" TV as some sort of radio while gaming on a 19" CRT) while gaming will hurt a bit but oh well.

[Tnecniv]

Well, hope the pairing goes well and have fun playing your games on the HDTV.

Back to Tera for a second, am interested in trying the game but don't have much time for more than one mmo. Am looking to go back to SWTOR sometime this summer (and even then am not sure). Then might give Tera a spin afterwards. What's the PVE for Tera like, is it solo-able? Comparable to SWTOR?

[Blinx123]

Well, hope the pairing goes well and have fun playing your games on the HDTV.

Back to Tera for a second, am interested in trying the game but don't have much time for more than one mmo. Am looking to go back to SWTOR sometime this summer (and even then am not sure). Then might give Tera a spin afterwards. What's the PVE for Tera like, is it solo-able? Comparable to SWTOR?

PvE is fun and challenging, though most of the early quests seem a bit uninspired.

Most of TERA's quests are solo-able. You can pretty much solo anything but the BAMs (Big Ass Monsters). I tried to solo one once but failed miserably.

Most of the fun comes from the PvP though. The game got all sorts of PvP. Arena PvP, Guild VS Guild, duels and Outlaw PvP.

Combat itself happens in real time, so it requires quite some skill.

Too bad you missed the Open Beta. Could've played for free for the whole weekend.

[Blinx123]

Good news everyone!



My boss might take those four 4GB Dimms off me. He bought a broken, AMD 8120 powered Acer desktop PC and decided that it needed a new mainboard and more RAM.

I didn't exactly remember how much i paid for my RAM, so I told him he could have them for 80 euros.

If the deal goes through, I'll replace them with two 8GB Dimms and put in another 16GB in a few months.

Hopefully, RAM isn't going to become expensive again.

As for his new mainboard, that's the one I recommended to him.

http://www.asrock.com/mb/overview.asp?Model=880GMH/U3S3

He's more of an ASUS guy (especially after hearing about the horrors of my ASROCK Z68 Extreme7) but is really tempted by the price (30 euros less than an ASUS board with similar specs but a much worse board design*



*Just to clear things up. I'm not talking about looks but the placement of certain components, such as SATA ports and the northbridge cooler.

[Badger3920]

Pairing my rig with my TV before Friday, I swear.
Not being able to listen to my TV (you heard that right. I'm using my big ass 47" TV as some sort of radio while gaming on a 19" CRT) while gaming will hurt a bit but oh well.

I'm excited. You are finally about to come, albeit kicking and screaming, into gaming in the 21st century.

If the deal goes through, I'll replace them with two 8GB Dimms and put in another 16GB in a few months.

Sure, but dont do that before you get a new monitor. 8GB of RAM is great for most gaming applications etc, and you wouldn't really need 16gb just yet unless you're being weird and.... trying to run games off of RAM

Priorities. Get a nice, big, LED monitor for yourself - it's a visual treat. You're missing out on half the experience. Once you do that, you can sell your current monitor to someone looking for a paperweight for like 20 euros, and put that toward more RAM if you feel like spec-whoring up your rig =)

He's more of an ASUS guy (especially after hearing about the horrors of my ASROCK Z68 Extreme7)

Rofl who isn't? I will personally never buy an Asrock aftere watching the Blinx escapades in this forum. I'm a guy that, when I encounter issues (like something in my PC not working) I have to resolve them immediately - next day if possible. Having some month long debacle would be completely unacceptable.

Glad you're stable now though.

[CorruptedDragon]

Rofl who isn't? I will personally never buy an Asrock aftere watching the Blinx escapades in this forum. I'm a guy that, when I encounter issues (like something in my PC not working) I have to resolve them immediately - next day if possible. Having some month long debacle would be completely unacceptable.

Glad you're stable now though.

Well, I don't think anyone would want to game on their PC anymore after watching the Blinx escapades. He probably has turned more people into console gamers than anything else in history

[Favelle]

Rofl who isn't? I will personally never buy an Asrock aftere watching the Blinx escapades in this forum. I'm a guy that, when I encounter issues (like something in my PC not working) I have to resolve them immediately - next day if possible. Having some month long debacle would be completely unacceptable.

Glad you're stable now though.

You guys do know who owned Asrock for like ever..right? 3rd largest MB manufacturer in da world.

[Badger3920]

You guys do know who owned Asrock for like ever..right? 3rd largest MB manufacturer in da world.

Yep !

[Blinx123]

I'm excited. You are finally about to come, albeit kicking and screaming, into gaming in the 21st century.

Hehe.
And here I thought 768p was already as good as the 21st century goes.
I remember playing games in 800x600 back in 2004.

Sure, but dont do that before you get a new monitor. 8GB of RAM is great for most gaming applications etc, and you wouldn't really need 16gb just yet unless you're being weird and.... trying to run games off of RAM

But I am a weirdo who tries to run everything off RAM.
Unfortunately, time pretty much works against me.
Perhaps I really should overthink my strategy, as there are already games much bigger than 24GB.

I could probably get away only loading the most used files into RAM. For games like SWTOR, LOTRO or Skyrim (the last I could simply load into RAM in it's entirety, if it wasn't for those pesky mods), that's rather easy to achieve but I don't know much about TERA/DC Universe Online and it's underlying Unreal 3 Engine.

Priorities. Get a nice, big, LED monitor for yourself - it's a visual treat. You're missing out on half the experience. Once you do that, you can sell your current monitor to someone looking for a paperweight for like 20 euros, and put that toward more RAM if you feel like spec-whoring up your rig =)

Lol. It's not even worth 20 euros anymore, I think. People in my area are the cheapest in the world. Only a week ago a guy stepped into the store and offered to pay 20 euros for a 21" ASUS LED display.

Rofl who isn't? I will personally never buy an Asrock aftere watching the Blinx escapades in this forum. I'm a guy that, when I encounter issues (like something in my PC not working) I have to resolve them immediately - next day if possible. Having some month long debacle would be completely unacceptable.

Glad you're stable now though.

Well. Their mainboards used to be quite stable and feature packed.
Unfortunately, I've got to admit that some of the new features are unstable and lackluster.

I just tried XFast RAM and while the standard option (create empty RAMDisk) might work great, the rest of the app is useless. For a second, I feared for the life of my precious HDD, for it sounded like this darn thing would access my HDD more often than Windows itself. It also reserved 3.99GB for the Firefox Cache and the system's temp files as well as the pagefile. If I had set it up myself, I would have made sure to limit the pagefile and disable caching.

I might re-install XFast RAM eventually, but I won't touch any of those "advanced" options ever again. The tool works great for creating a NTFS formatted, empty RAMDisk and backing up the files a user manually adds to it, but that's pretty much all it's good at.


@Favelle

They were owned by ASUS/ASUS' parent company (which also has stackes in at least two other well known mainboard manufacturers). Founded in 2002, they were supposed to develop low-budget boards and prototype hardware not worthy of the the name ASUS.

@CD

Yea ... Well ... As for that ...
I almost turned myself into a console gamer.

[Blinx123]

Ok.

Time to assemble a new list of required hardware/software.

Hardware:

A large, flat piece of wood to level my keyboard/mouse.
Another 5 pillows in my back and a stack of pillows to sit on.

Software:

Graphical mods. Lots of graphical mods. Skyrim looks so bad on my big screen, I need at least one 4k landscape patch and one texture patch for more detailed Kajiit fur.

Seeing Skyrim on an ultra sharp big screen almost made me go back to the blissfully ignorant world of sub-HD resolutions on old CRT monitors.




EDIT: There's one particular piece of software (ironically, it's title has "Madness" in it) that just cries out for a RAMDisk.

Stupid bitch streams new data every few minutes (completely busting my framerate for up to 2 seconds). Time to move the whole freaking thing to an 8GB Ramdisk.

[MA16v3]

Okay, job is more or less confirmed. Time to go to war with Favelle.

[MA16v3]

When are the Ivy Bridge CPUs going up on Newegg? I'm trying to figure out what all my upgrades are going to cost so I can budget and have all this done by June.

[Tnecniv]

Testing, testing, 1 2 3.

Edit: Ah, tried posting a reply for Blinx containing a bunch of links for Skyrim mods and tweaks. Kept getting the 'mod must approve' error message thingy. Will just try again later.

[twonunpackmule]

The forums are funky today. Try again.