Posts by wiredotter14

electricharbor30 said:I'm not sure how smart it is to grab an older card that just barely hits DirectX 11.2, but you can snag a 260x at a great price over at Best Buy. It’s got nearly 2 teraflops of power...

http://www.bestbuy.com/catalog/graphics-cards-geforce-gtx-series

All Radeon HD 7xxx cards support DirectX 12 on Windows 10
They're GCN cards, so compatibility won't be an issue. Plus, the 7870 is significantly more powerful than a 260x.
It all comes down to the budget, but since the OP mentioned the 7870, I assume they're looking at the used market where stretching the budget to a 7870 or better actually makes sense.

As for the CPU, that socket can handle a decent i5. That Pentium will struggle with some games or just flat out fail, so there won't be much difference in terms of bottlenecking between the cards.
My take? Just get a card that fits your current budget. A Pentium might actually hold its own with a 7870 in less demanding titles, and if you want to play the heavy hitters, you'll need a CPU upgrade anyway. Don't waste money on a weaker card like a 7770 unless this is the absolute end of the line for this PC—otherwise, it'll be useless the second you swap the processor.

P.S.

The whole "teraflops" argument is getting old.

Raymond Turner7 said:I'd honestly rather just leave them out. I don't even know if I'd bother installing old HDDs into a new build—lost track of how many I have at this point. Besides, they're basically just extra storage anyway.

Just toss them in the case. No point buying extra gear unless you actually need them to be portable in an external enclosure. If it's just for storage, who cares?
And that other thing is just designed to fill up a 5.25" bay. Total waste of money when any standard case has plenty of room for a few hard drives.

Are the drives SATA?

Can't decide between an optical drive or an external one? Why not just install them directly in the rig?

Alright, so what's the bottom line here?

Is it actually safe to order stuff from Apple and just rely on the manufacturer's warranty?

fadedorca66 said:So everything goes through Canada, and once they hit that threshold—around $220,000 if I recall correctly?—they’ll probably just vanish. 😁

Well, if they're cheating on their tax filings in Canada, they won't disappear because they can just keep playing the system. Basically, if they're screwing over Canada, they stay.

If they're actually paying VAT in Canada, they have zero reason to bail when they could just pay the lower American VAT. My guess? They haven't switched to the US system because they're feeling too high and mighty.

Timothy Kim60 said:Basically, Canada has a higher tax rate than we do (around 27-28%), and certain components (like specific GTX 970 cards) end up being cheaper there than in the cheapest German shops (and Germany only has 19% VAT if I recall correctly).

I’d actually prefer to hear from someone who has actually ordered from them and received their package—specifically, who issues the invoice and what kind of VAT was applied.

See, under EU regulations, there are a few ways IPON can operate.

1) Payment goes through an American company, applying 25% American VAT.

2) Payment and the invoice come directly from Canada, issued with Canadian VAT.
This option works if their shipments to the US stay below the threshold set by the EU for cross-border VAT accounting.

3) The payment and invoice are from a Canadian company, but per EU VAT rules, American VAT is charged. This is mandatory under EU law once they exceed the shipment threshold for the US, and based on the numbers they claim, hitting that limit is easy.
This is the most logical setup, unless they’re shipping less than they claim or just ignoring EU rules entirely.

It would be helpful to know where the invoice originates for things like taxes and warranty claims.
Under EU laws, you have 14 days to return goods NO MATTER WHAT—if you buy something online, you can return it within 14 days without questions asked. (Except for underwear, CDov, digital content, and adult toys). Of course, this applies to the seller, which is whoever issues the invoice. (Not to mention the whole warranty situation).

BTW, I noticed on their site that you can purchase using a VAT number, allowing for the transfer of tax liability (assuming you're ordering for a business and calculating the VAT yourself to claim input credit).
(This pretty much rules out the first option I mentioned).

electricharbor30 said:Look, games stash textures in VRAM. Usually, every time you hit a new area, it loads more stuff up. If you're playing massive open worlds or running everything at max texture settings—where you might need 4GB just to hold it all—you'll see the benefit. Otherwise, if you don't have the headroom, the system ends up constantly pulling over 2GB straight from the disk...

You didn't actually give him any real facts.

People have run tests on this already, so check it out and see what those extra 2GB of RAM actually do.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/di...2gb-4gb-review

The 380 isn't some beastly card. I doubt he’ll even touch that 2GB limit because, honestly, with non-high-end titles at 1080p, he'd be better off just turning down the AA or something. That’ll boost his FPS and lower the VRAM usage anyway
(let's be real, if he actually wants decent FPS)

By the way, the GPU isn't going to fry the hard drive; it'll just borrow from the System RAM
Just look at the attached (I'm running a 2GB 7850)

crimsonstag84 said:Patriot Signature DDR3 1600MHz, 4GB
Intel Celeron G1820 processor Zalman micro Tower case Black
Zalman micro tower case black, ZAL-ZM-T1 plus
ASRock H81M-HDS R2
Power Supply AKYGA AK-P3-500 Pro 500W, DC 3.3/5/±12V, 1x120, Retail
Retail Samsung DVD±RW 24x black, bulk
Patriot SSD Blaze R545/W430, 120GB, 7mm, 2.5"

Total: $600 Best Buy

I've seen tons of negative feedback online regarding those Patriot Signature sticks, regardless of the warranty you get.

I was actually planning on grabbing those exact ones, but I ended up going with
http://www.bestbuy.com/crucial-ram-4gb...64ba160bj.aspx

The price difference is less than $3.25
When I bought my Crucial set, they also had a 120-month warranty.

electricharbor30 said:Look, I didn't even know what any of that was for myself... and honestly, if you want to trust those reviewers, go ahead. I won't.

Fine then, run all the numbers yourself, write up a whole blog post about it, and let us know how it goes.😉

electicharbor30 said:http://www.gpuzoo.com/Compare/ASUS_G...US_GT730-2GD3/

Comparing the 128-bit and 64-bit versions of the NVIDIA GeForce GT 730... probably why review sites don't touch the 128-bit model. If you went with the DDR5 version, you'd actually get some decent memory bandwidth—enough to maybe turn on antialiasing without everything crawling to a halt.

Might be a dumb question, but how did the GT 730 go from being Fermi to now being Kepler? That's a completely different chip architecture.

electricharbor30 said:edit: wrong link, but this one's actually pretty well organized:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-gpus,4380.html

Fair point. For that kind of money (maybe $20 or so), you're looking at nothing but a GT 730 or maybe a Radeon 240

At $207 (Best Buy), you can grab an R7 250 which is significantly better, and once you climb above that price point, you actually start seeing cards worth buying.

Long Story Short, don't bother buying anything below $200 if you plan on gaming at all. If it's just for HD movies or whatever, a GT 730 is plenty (honestly, even an old integrated chip would do fine enough).

Jesse Hughes said:I'm running an NVIDIA GeForce GTX series 1024 MB (not sure on the exact specs)

Currently got 4GB total (2+2), planning to grab 8GB (4+4) for dual channel.

If your motherboard has 4 slots, you could just grab two more 2GB sticks and run 2GB x 4 instead.

Timothy Kim60 said:Prosecuting every single petty crime officially would be an absolute nightmare and a massive drain on taxpayer money. I agree that $667 it’s a bit high, but at a few hundred bucks, it’s just unrealistic

Yeah, but the issue is when thieves just rack up a bunch of tiny thefts. There should be some kind of system where the police can go after repeat offenders if they hit a certain threshold of reports (I knew this guy who’d pull up to the gas station, fill up less than $167 and just drive off without paying) 😵

On topic:
I tried overclocking my Club3D King HD7850 (stock 910MHz) to 1000 MHz without touching the voltage, just using the max power slider, and my PC froze on me a couple of times (running a Corsair TX750, everything else works perfectly fine)
Am I doing something wrong or is the card just refusing to cooperate?

Joshua Patel68 said:Exactly. It’s not about raw wattage—all three options have plenty of juice for this build. My main headache is the connectors. I don't want to pick a unit that's missing an 8-pin, for instance, and then end up hunting down adapters later...
The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 actually pulls less power than my old 560ti, so my current PSU could probably handle it, but it's 5 or 6 years old. I'm not risking it when I'm dropping this kind of cash on a high-end GPU..

Just Google which ones have which connectors

silvermoose14 said:What wattage PSU would you recommend for a build with a GTX 780 ti (pulling about 250W)? Is a decent 550w unit with 42A on the 12V rail enough?

I ran a radeon 7850 in Crossfire on this cheap Corsair unit (7850 TDP is 130W):

http://www.kitguru.net/wp-content/up...C_1489_DxO.jpg

That was paired with an i3.
Can we get the rest of the specs???

Zachary Patel said:Hey. First time posting here, so bear with me if I messed something up. Just wondering if anyone could tell me if this card http://www.newegg.com/asus-nvidia-gt210-1gb/p/N82E48829 would actually work on an ASRock alivenf6GVSTa motherboard? Any help would be huge. 🙂

Yeah, it should work.

crimsonstag84 said:QPI just brings you back to stock levels because you're adjusting the BCLK (and QPI has its own multiplier, clearly shown in the video).

Try ~3.6GHz at 1.27V. Did you run stability tests with Prime95? You need to run Small FFT for at least an hour, and I wouldn't want to see it climbing past 80°C during those stress tests.

Regarding temps and power draw—you can drop both if you disable Hyper-Threading (HT). That leaves you with 4 cores/4 threads, which should be plenty if you don't actually need all 8 threads (I doubt older games or WoT use more than 2 cores anyway).

thanks for the advice, think I'm good for now
Prime95 runs fine through all tests for a few hours, temps are hovering around 78°C

but QPI isn't making sense to me
Intel's site says stock QPI is 4800MT/s

My BIOS shows this instead

http://i65.tinypic.com/t64ght.jpg

What you can't see: RAM is 1604MHz, PCIe is 100, Uncore is 3200

I tried using that D.O.C.P. tool
everything stays the same via X.M.P. too

I don't see a QPI multiplier option anywhere. I'm assuming the multiplier is selected like in the image (just like picking RAM frequencies, there's no manual entry; mine seems to be 10 right now, since 1600/160=10)

crimsonstag84 said:There isn't any massive difference in load for an OC like that, let alone at idle.

Not sure which BIOS you're running... 😛

ASUS P6T SE BIOS from 2010 (0908)

Tweaked everything.
21*160=3,360
Bumped voltage slightly, from 1.25 to 1.265
RAM hit 1600 (1.5V) perfectly, which puts the uncore at 3200 accordingly

Should I be worried about the QPI link frequency or any other voltages?
Btw, couldn't find where to disable Turbo, but since my multiplier is at 21, I assume it doesn't matter.

Performance is up—both in synthetics and World of Tanks (mainly smoother FPS, fewer drops). It maxes out the AMD Radeon HD 7850 without issue now, though occasionally (rarely) I notice the CPU sitting at 80% while the GPU is at 90%, so it’s not a perfect 1:1 utilization.

crimsonstag84 said:WoT is probably the only game where you can never have enough single-core power, so pushing it to 3.5GHz from 2.66GHz actually makes sense. Go for it; you should see a decent boost.

thanks for the quick reply

Even in Red Orchestra, a single core barely scrapes by, somehow hitting over 90% usage
It actually felt like I had a heavier load on an Intel Core i5-3330 at 3.3 GHz

BTW, does this significantly impact power draw during daily tasks—you know, when the CPU isn't under load? This generation seems pretty poorly optimized to me

Anyone got a quick overclocking guide for the Intel Core i7-920, or am I stuck surfing the web for it?

I've noticed that on certain games that aren't optimized for multi-core setups, my GPU isn't always hitting 100% load.
It usually sits around 80%, while basically just a single CPU core is doing all the heavy lifting.
I'm talking about World of Tanks and Red Orchestra 2—mostly an issue with WoT, but it happens in the other one occasionally too.

Hardware setup: AMD Radeon HD 7850 at 910MHz and a stock Intel Core i7-920 (reading at 2.67GHz, though some tools say 2.8GHz).
Would overclocking the i7 actually fix this?
I'm noticing that whenever the GPU load drops, my FPS tanks from about 60 down to maybe 45.

What would you recommend for a moderate CPU overclock?
I was thinking somewhere in the 3.3-3.5GHz range.

My PSU, motherboard, and cooler are more than enough, so I'm not worried about hardware limits, but I don't want to push it too far since this rig already pulls quite a bit of power.

thanks in advance