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Erkki

Damn it, but computers have become really complicated

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Yeah, I don't really like that line of thought either. For me part of the reason building a PC is such a part of PC gaming is that it's directly in the same wheelhouse that gaming itself is in. We spend a lot of time and energy trying to get the best value out of gaming (or pushing back against that notion), whether that's hours per dollar or other kinds of value, and building a PC yourself is about trying to squeeze the most value out of your dollar.

 

I would definitely go pre-built if the price were comparable. But man, I just checked some pre-builts and there is one about equivalent to the PC I am about to build for about $2600. My grand total after I get my graphic card (assuming I have to buy it full price) will be about $1600. So basically, I completely agree with you.

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I completely understand wanting to get the most bang for your buck.  The last 3 or 4 desktop computers I've had I built.  I just got tired of having to deal with researching parts, compatibility, and troubleshooting.  Plus the amount of time those things cost.  What I'm really sick of is the "PC master race" mentality where anyone who didn't build their own is looked down upon with scorn (I'm not accusing anyone here of doing that but I have sympathy for console gamers who think PC gamers are elitist snobs).

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Yeah, the mental labor of research and assembly is what keeps me from building something myself, and instead going for a pre-built machine. Yeah, i'll pay more part for part, but like I am paralyzed by the choices available to me as is, I don't want to have to make a million more choices about what each part is going to be.

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Yeah, the mental labor of research and assembly is what keeps me from building something myself, and instead going for a pre-built machine. Yeah, i'll pay more part for part, but like I am paralyzed by the choices available to me as is, I don't want to have to make a million more choices about what each part is going to be.

 

really like doing that. Not to say I don't understand completely where you're coming from, but the research, decisions, and anticipation is a huge part of pc building to me, and has become a part of my gaming experience as well. I (unfortunately, for my career) bounced off of coding, but I always loved tinkering with parts and hardware. At one point I had designs on eventually becoming a network engineer. Whoops, hitched my star to the wrong wagon!

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"PC Master Race" is a really, really un-PC thing to say.

 

Personally, I love messing around with hardware, reading about it, troubleshooting, tinkering, etc. But boy is it time consuming. I absolutely wouldn't do it if I didn't enjoy it, even taking savings into account.

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I feel like I've recently failed as a legit PC gamer because I just bought a gaming laptop. Well, more of a laptop I intend to use for business purposes but oh whoops it is quite capable of gaming. I'm tired of upgrading my PC. I'm kinda just tired of having this huge behemoth desktop tower that was a pain to lug around and setup when I was moving to my new house. I was not very excited about the prospect of buying a $200-300 processor so that I could capture video at a decent framerate and resolution.

I've been in this camp for quite some time now. I'm not a 60 fps person so for me the portability and convenience win out soooo much. I'd hate to miss being around the living room like I can be now.

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Yeah, the mental labor of research and assembly is what keeps me from building something myself, and instead going for a pre-built machine. Yeah, i'll pay more part for part, but like I am paralyzed by the choices available to me as is, I don't want to have to make a million more choices about what each part is going to be.

http://www.logicalincrements.com/

 

Just go along the row.

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After months of complaining about my RAID array and/or video card drivers crashing, I finally got my BIOS settings right to boot to a Memtest86+ USB stick, ran a memory test, and figured out I have a (very) bad RAM stick. Now I feel like an idiot for letting it go this long. Also, because I got it second hand from a computer building friend, so I'm stuck with a missing stick for the moment. I can't decide if running dual channel is worth taking out another stick, leaving me with 16gb, or if I'd get more of a benefit from having three sticks totaling 24gb but without dual channel.

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Same thing happened to me nine months ago, though I managed to diagnose it in an evening. But what a stressful evening it was.

 

Last night I was watching a Giant Bomb video when I experienced a BSOD. The machine then restarted itself and failed to pass POST, and went into an endless cycle of testing. Finally could get it to POST, but it wouldn't stay on the desktop for more than a minute or two. I tried unseating the GPU, I tried updating drivers. I ran chkdsk. Finally, I unseated DIMM No. 2 and managed to get stable.

 

Downloaded and installed MemTest86 on a USB drive, ran the test on DIMM No. 1, which I subjected to 3 passes with zero errors. Shut down the system, swapped in DIMM No. 2 into DIMM No. 1's slot, machine wouldn't POST.

 

Went to Best Buy and now I have 16GB of RAM instead of 8. The original pair is G. Skill, so I'm going to RMA the bad RAM and then probably offload the new pair to offset the cost of my 2x16GB DIMMs. Anyone in need of a 2x4GB pair of G. Skill Sniper Series RAM (1866MHz, 9-10-9-28 CAS)?

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Oh, and if you change the memory configuration and it asks you to either go into setup or "accept defaults" it means set everything in the BIOS to defaults. That gave me a heart attack when my drives were no longer in a RAID setup. Thankfully, turning RAID back on re-linked them.

Who resets a BIOS to default because of a pulled memory stick?

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Does anyone have recommendations for routers. I want it to prioritize my ping while playing games on PC over video-ads on websites that my wife browses.

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I've been mirroring my computer monitor and TV for convenience sake so that I don't have to keep manually switching which is the default monitor so that games launch in the wrong place.

This worked fine for my lofi indie games, but I decided to pick up Wolfenstein: The New Order and it decided to glitch out on the title screen.

Now, I'm not certain this is the issue but I expect my early 2013 $1000 computer is having trouble pushing 2x the pixels. I switched back to extended across displays and its been fine for one session so far.

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Had the annual red-dots-on-black-backgrounds, blue-lines-on-whites freak out the other day:

What's wrong with this computer? Why are the colors messed up?

Hm. Screen keeps blacking out. Is it a faulty cable? That's an inexpensive replacement.... nope. Is it a bad graphics driver update? That'd be a hassle... everything seems up to date but not recently updated.

Has the graphics card shorted out, cracked, broken? Oh no. Please don't be the graphics card. That's money. Uh ohhhh

Wait. It's a bit dusty in there. Better take the case off and clean it all up a bit before burial.

> clean, clean, clean <

Working again, hurrah!

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Had a scary artifact-y crash on Sunday similar to yours, Justin. Pulled the cover off the beast, scared something had broken. Checked cpu fan- giant fan still good! Checked GPU fan - not working. Oh crap this is either expensive or a long stretch of downtime during the RMA.

 

Turns out the 970's passive cooling is so good the fans don't spin until it gets >55c. Ran speedfan to make sure temps weren't completely crazy, made sure the airflow was good, put the cover back on. Seems ok?!

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My 390 is set up in a similar fashion, but I'm still using MSi Afterburner to spin up the fans way earlier and bring down the idle temps to something less insane. It also drops the temperature during game about 5-10° C.

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Windows isn't happy with my harddrive. What would be a good 2TB internal HD to go for these days?

Love,

Dibs

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A working one. I always go for WD for HDDs. And usually the green for normal stuff, red for nas. I used to get black for speedy disks, but now I do SSD for that.

I've never had any good experience with Seagate.

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Avoid the WD Greens if you're going to use it for gaming -- I had one and the aggressive power saving "feature" caused a lot of stuttering in games. It was fine for other media though.

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I never had any problems with the powersaving of WD greens. The disks do spin down fast (but do keep spinning) and I think they don't go faster than 5400rpms. But of course this could have changed a lot with newer versions.

If you're going to use it for games I'd suggest to use Blacks. You could go for Blues which are like Green except that they run at a constant speed, but they don't come in 2TB yet.

 

Note, WD green is now part of the WD blue line, and for some reason they do mention RPMs for the greens, but I doubt they have a fixed RPM now. If it spins at 7200rpm it's a real blue, otherwise it might be converted green. (There were also 5400 blues). The largest blue is WD10EZEX which is only 1TB.

 

The difference between green and black can be as much at 50% for 2TB. For 1TB this is blue and green are somewhat the same price (black is still 50%). If you have a soft-raid like most Intel motherboards have you could opt to do a RAID0 with 2x1TB Blue which is about 20% more expensive than a 2TB green disk and you will suffer a small performance hit.

 

Then again, maybe the newer GreenBlue disks are better than the Greens rohfinator used, as they no longer mention strong powersaving features.

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Yeah, it's possible that they've fixed that issue. Maybe check the reviews for complaints related to head parking or "Intellipark" -- that's the offending feature.

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I've been looking for a new big HDD to go along with my SSD for a while now, i have 2 computers one which is a gaming and graphics work pc which this would be the drive for, and another which acts as more a media pc 

 

looking at the recommendations above would a 3TB WD black be a solid choice? 

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/WD-3-5-inch-Internal-Hard-Drive/dp/B00FJRS5BA/ref=sr_1_1/280-3431458-8233345?ie=UTF8&qid=1452004000&sr=8-1&keywords=4tb+black+wd

 

or would i be better off with a blue 3tb? (i think they are a replacement for the green line, but reviews on them seem mixed)

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/BLUE-Desktop-inch-Internal-Drive/dp/B013HNYVCE/ref=dp_ob_title_ce

 

after reading about a bit a fair few people seem to like the mid range seagate drive so i guess thats back in the mix

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Seagate-inch-Barracuda-Desktop-Drive/dp/B0073Q7GU6

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The time has finally come, my PC can no longer run new games well enough even on low settings. So I need an upgrade, my current spec is an i7 920 2.6, 16gb ram, 5850 1gb and some other stuff.

 

It seems to me that I need a new CPU, board and card but I'm considering just getting a cheap card to tide me over for a bit. Would that work or would the CPU be a bottleneck?

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That chip is 7 years old, but a lot of games are getting better at pushing load off to the GPU instead of the CPU, so you might be able to get by? I have a 4 year old i5 processor and I rarely max it out.

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