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Erkki

Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

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I'm also building a new computer. Last time I did this was 4 years ago and I remember we had a special thread about building computers here, but I can't find it now. It had links to some awesome table with recommendations, I wonder if there's anything similar now? Although I might just try upgrading as little as possible (I need a new motherboard at least, and a new graphics card).

 

I'm still a believer in TechReport's tiered build list with tested alternatives, even if the rest of the site has mostly gone to pot.

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I am fixing my cousins friends laptop as a favor and man, I am never, ever doing this again. Normally I have no problem doing this for people, but this guy has ruined it for all non-family members. So salty right now.

 

He tells me "I don't know it won't turn on":

1. It smells like dog piss

2. The hard drive is dead (this was accompanied a crying phone calls asking me to "find his files".

3. Ordering the hard drive with my own money, until I see him next so he can pay me back

4. His laptop's fans are fucked making this whining shitty noise, annoying me and scaring my dog

5. I can't find his specific stupid wifi adapter, so I have to hunt around until I find the proper one (since of course he doesn't have the driver cd)

 

This is the second time in a year I've fixed this specific machine for barely a thank you, I am super over it.

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and I need to replace the motherboard because of issues, but there seems to be only one available that fits my system and demands: Gigabyte Z77X-UD4H (I have 2nd gen Core i7 processor). Only one seller here still lists it and it's out of stock. Hopefully I can still order. This is the stupid thing with supposed future-proofing of PCs: everything just keeps changing so much that you can't very easily upgrade just some parts 4 years later.

Well, fuck, of course it's no longer orderable... I guess PS4 became more desireable now... or maybe I should do a full upgrade of motherboard AND CPU -- 3 CPU generations have passed in 4 years.

 

[Edit] Hmm... I think my demands on the motherboard were a bit unreasonable based on previous purhcase. I just saw that some cheaper motherboards would be more or less ok, although I worry about the quality of the embedded sound chips.

 

[Edit2] Damn, well, the cheaper ones were not orderable either. But there was one ASRock Z77 board. Hope that works out, as I never had an ASRock board before.

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This is the second time in a year I've fixed this specific machine for barely a thank you, I am super over it.

 

Yeah, I've been the tech guy in my extended circle of friends and family for most of my life, but over the past five years or so, I've definitely taken steps to put limits on that, because I was tired of people driving their machines into the ground and then expecting me to resurrect them for another two or three years, with only tears and abuse if I somehow fail. I've gotten to the point where they get thirty seconds of diagnostic efforts and, if I can't find the problem or if it's going to be a multi-hour repair, I tell them to call their internet company or offer to format, and that's it.

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Yeah, I've been the tech guy in my extended circle of friends and family for most of my life, but over the past five years or so, I've definitely taken steps to put limits on that, because I was tired of people driving their machines into the ground and then expecting me to resurrect them for another two or three years, with only tears and abuse if I somehow fail. I've gotten to the point where they get thirty seconds of diagnostic efforts and, if I can't find the problem or if it's going to be a multi-hour repair, I tell them to call their internet company or offer to format, and that's it.

 

You are a smart person. He called last night and I told him I am definitely not fixing the fan, he will have to find a place that does that. I had to spend 10 minutes on the phone listening to him bitch about the issues he has having on a $1000 laptop he bought "only" 5 years ago, blah.

 

On a happier note, just picked up a MSI GTX 970 which comes with The Witcher 3 and Arkham Knights which is sweet. 

 

Well, fuck, of course it's no longer orderable... I guess PS4 became more desireable now... or maybe I should do a full upgrade of motherboard AND CPU -- 3 CPU generations have passed in 4 years.

 

[Edit] Hmm... I think my demands on the motherboard were a bit unreasonable based on previous purhcase. I just saw that some cheaper motherboards would be more or less ok, although I worry about the quality of the embedded sound chips.

 

[Edit2] Damn, well, the cheaper ones were not orderable either. But there was one ASRock Z77 board. Hope that works out, as I never had an ASRock board before.

 

From my own experience AsRock has treated me fairly well in the past reliability wise!

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He should buy a $1000 laptop with a 5 year warranty, such things exist.

 

AsRock is fine by me, my HTPC uses one of their mobos and I haven't had any issues. That said, do you really want to be buying a new mobo for an old processor you're planning on retiring in the near future? It's totally up to you, but I chose to buy a nice new mobo and a cheap processor with intent to upgrade in the next year. I haven't been doing a ton of PC gaming with my interim overclocked Pentium G3258 but every time I have it's performed well enough for my purposes. And now I'm prepared for an easy upgrade to a Core i5 or Core i7 later this year, rather than a full system install twice (once if I had theoretically only upgraded my GPU, HDD->SSD, and twice for the mobo+proc). I guess you technically could do a system image for the first upgrade, but I'm generally more comfortable just doing the whole process.

 

It does help that I do have the PS4 to float me on the AAA games, as I suppose you were alluding to with your mention of it + The Witcher 3.

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Plus everyone says ASS ROCK.

 

Time Warner was messing with my modem over the phone once and asked me why an ass rock was connected.

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That said, do you really want to be buying a new mobo for an old processor you're planning on retiring in the near future? It's totally up to you, but I chose to buy a nice new mobo and a cheap processor with intent to upgrade in the next year.

Well, the mobo has issues. Some of the USB controllers seem to be ruined, and the SATA controllers were defective from the start, but I was too lazy to get the motherboard exchanged for a new one while it was possible (didn't need an extra hard disk back then). I'll have to throw that old mobo away, but I don't also want to throw away the CPU or anything else attached. So I'm making sure it will form a functioning system before I do a real upgrade some time later (if it's even needed for a couple of years). Wish I had thought about this a bit earlier, didn't realize it had been 4 years since I built the system. Not counting the by now slow HDD, it's still 7,6 or 7,9 (max) on all points in the Windows performance index. I guess the i7 CPU has even been a bit overkill.

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I was saying that instead of buying a new (but old) Sandy Bridge mobo, you could have bought a Haswell mobo and a cheap Haswell processor with intent to upgrade to a better Haswell chip in the future. That way you could avoid having to rebuild the PC twice. But if you don't feel you really need to upgrade your processor any time soon (which honestly, shouldn't feel that old or deficient) then I suppose your method is alright.

 

For some reason I thought that Second Gen i7 was older than 4 years old, but Sandy Bridge is still solid (which I know because my wife's PC has an Ivy Bridge i5, which is still just as solid as ever).

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Usually what happens when I do a major upgrade is that I leave the old computer more or less complete so I can give it away to someone for whom it would be an upgrade (mostly my sister gets free upgrades this way). So when I upgrade to Haswell (or by the time I upgrade, maybe Haswell is old news), I can still put together another machine from the old system. I'll likely also put the current GTX 570 back then and move the new GTX 970 to the new machine (unless the standards for connecting graphics card will have changed again). So in this convoluted way, it makes sense that at the moment I just spend the ~100$ to change the mobo :)

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I got a nice new X52 Pro joystick yesterday, sat down to install the the drivers, and the install froze half way through. This isn't particularly unusual because my Raid5 array occasionally does wierd things that can stop hard drive access for a few seconds, and not all programs can handle that gracefully. Unfortunately, I wasn't even able to force-quit the installer, and when I tried to shut the machine down, it froze at "shutting down" and I eventually had to kill it. Then it froze at "starting windows" and I thought maybe my machine had just self destructed. I eventually coaxed it into booting, and it had to run a full windows HDD check, as well as a full RAID verification before it would work normally again.

So I didn't even get to play with my new toy last night, but at least everything seems to be operable this morning. I really need to get a new solution setup for this machine rather than this RAID array.

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So I checked my HDD again.  Yup, still dead (this makes it the third one in the last 5 years).  Then I tried a doing a system restore with a backup from my external drive.  Windows wouldn't boot.  After messing around some more, I gave up and did a clean install of Windows.  200+ updates later (that's not an exaggeration) and it works, but I'm starting from scratch.  I'm going to try and keep it at a minimum for now, at least until I can get a new machine.

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Wow I've never had a hard drive die even once. Are you sure it's not some other piece of hardware fucking things up?

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Wow I've never had a hard drive die even once. Are you sure it's not some other piece of hardware fucking things up?

 

That's a possibility, but everything seems to be working ok so I'm not sure what it could be.

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Fuck, so I upgraded my computer and the problem with the K400 keyboard choppiness remains. I guess it's a defect with the design of that model after all, and the PS3 driver didn't screw up my USB ports :Dhttps://forums.logitech.com/t5/Keyboards-and-Keyboard-Mice/Wireless-Touch-Keyboard-K400-bad-reception/td-p/782927

 

That problem is weird though, people reporting that the keyboard starts to lose signal when on their knees. I have the same issue, but I never thought it might be something like that. Still could be a coincidence.

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I get really bad reception with that keyboard as well. I even moved the receiver to one of the front ports to ensure line of sight and it still isn't as reliable as I'd like.

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I wonder if the K820 is better. it has a similar battery life and after experiencing the K400 battery life I don't want any keyboard with less than half a year of it.

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Yeah, I have no idea. If I ever buy another one of those keyboards, I'll probably just buy an expensive one and hope that it magically solves the problem through cost of materials. That K820 looks pretty slick in comparison to the K400, no idea if appearance indicates any better quality.

 

I think I might get this thing if it ever comes out and isn't ludicrously expensive - http://www.razerzone.com/gaming-controllers/razer-turret

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Actually maybe the K820 is too big. Might even consider the K830 for smaller size, but it has lighting and thus requires charging,

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Do any of the smart people here have any ideal if a Nvidia 970 like this would be bottlenecked by a i5 3570k (3.4ghz) with 8gb of ram?

 

The Witcher 3 looms on the horizon and i'm thinking about upgrading to a beast which can show it at its most shiny of settings and the new nvidia chips are tempting me because they seem to draw a lot less power & create a lot less heat than old top end GPU's.

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Well I'm hoping it won't be bottlenecked because I have an even older CPU - the i7 2600 (also 3.4 GHz) - and otherwise a similar system. In Batman Arkham Origins, the perf test gave me 58 FPS average (with V-Sync) with everything maxed (including AA) at 1080p, so I'm hopeful. I don't know if any other games I have are more performance-hungry so I'm not really sure, though.

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Do any of the smart people here have any ideal if a Nvidia 970 like this would be bottlenecked by a i5 3570k (3.4ghz) with 8gb of ram?

 

The Witcher 3 looms on the horizon and i'm thinking about upgrading to a beast which can show it at its most shiny of settings and the new nvidia chips are tempting me because they seem to draw a lot less power & create a lot less heat than old top end GPU's.

 

No, I don't think so. It could depend on the settings and the size of the monitor you're using. In general, modern CPU hardware above a certain vintage isn't going to be bottlenecking video games. i5 chips are still the sweet spot of the performance/price index.

 

I also hope not for personal reasons because I'm thinking about doing the same thing.

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I've seen tons of convincing arguments that say no gamer really needs a Core i7 chip unless they are running multiple displays are super high resolution. I wouldn't worry about bottlenecking at all.

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