Posts by Benjamin King2

vividmoose33 said:So, I'm back on my old rig with the ancient GPU—everything is running fine for now. A couple of pages back, I asked for some card recommendations and laid out my whole setup. One detail: I've got a 350W Advantech power supply. Just looked at the box, though, and it’s calling for 400W or more. Since this thing is basically a vintage relic—which, let's face it, probably doesn't pull much juice—do you think I can scrape by with this PSU?

Your old card was pulling maybe 45W, and the 5670 is sitting at about 65W—it'll work fine on that power supply.

So, I checked HGspot and they've got these two sitting there at the exact same price point, $496:

Dell U2312HM led IPS 23

LG IPS236V Designer led IPS 23

Los Angeles is charging more, though—if you're paying cash, you save a bit, but if you're using a credit card, the price is basically identical.

The specs are pretty much neck-and-neck, except for one thing—the Dell is missing an HDMI port, but it does come with a 4-port USB hub, which might be useful depending on how much gear you're plugging in.

Then you just go ahead and plug in 2-2-4-4.

It should work without any drama—same frequency, same timings, same voltage. It doesn't matter if the modules have higher capacity, just make sure you stick to the color-coded slots for the matching sizes. Whatever you do, don't go mixing a 2 GB stick with a 4 GB stick on the same channel.

There's absolutely no need to delete any links. 🙂

Creative Sound Blaster Z... or maybe go with a D1 if you think the DX is a bit too pricey for your budget. Just a heads-up though—if you’re planning on plugging your headphones directly into those front panel jacks on your case, you’re going to have to reroute that front audio header from the motherboard straight to the card itself.

Well... we’ve officially kicked off $167, and we're already sitting at 750. It feels like we just started—honestly, at this rate, we'll be out of juice before we even get warmed up. 😁

Just make sure you’re grabbing DDR5—not that old DDR3 stuff—because I’m pretty sure DDR5 runs a bit higher than what you've got there. Just grab the URL straight from your browser.

Yeah, the board layout is a bit of a joke—honestly kind of nonsensical—but if you’ve got your tuner card and audio card sitting in those last two white slots, you should be fine. The fan will just end up covering one empty PCI slot anyway.

Hey, can you please just tell me which motherboard you're running? There's no way it's some tiny little thing that only has 3 PCI slots. 🙂

The GPU is going to block that next slot right underneath it because of the fan—so, honestly, just move the sound card down to a lower slot. If the graphics card fan ends up pressed right against the sound card, you aren't actually getting any real cooling benefits anyway.

http://www.linksys.com/graphics-card-details

I mean, seriously—why bother with 1 GB of RAM? With a setup like this, you aren't going to be pushing high resolutions anyway, so that extra memory is basically just dead weight—unless, of course, you just want to see the price tag climb for no reason.

The picture looks alright—assuming you don't mind using your monitor as a vanity mirror. 🙂

http://www.digitalversus.com/asus-ls..._8259_150.html

Just take a look at Task Manager and see how much they're actually eating up.

Both of them are going to pull from that 550W supply, but let's be real—the EVGA unit will actually deliver the full 550W you expect, whereas the MS one is probably only giving you about 350W of actual juice. 🙂

Yeah, you don't have it... there's this weird little mounting hole for a fan underneath the motherboard—honestly, I have zero clue what the point of that is. 😕

That version packs 384 CUDA cores—whereas the standard one only brings 336 to the table.

Xigmatek makes some really solid coolers—they’ve just been hitting the US market relatively recently, maybe appearing in stores over the last year or two. You can check out this review of the Gaia here: http://www.frostytech.com/articlevie...articleID=2595

Yeah, sure, the Katana is a bit easier to install since it doesn't require a backplate, but honestly, a backplate isn't exactly rocket science if your case actually has the designated mounting holes—which, let's be real, you probably have unless you're rocking some bottom-tier, budget junk. Besides, the Gaia is a superior cooler compared to the Katana, plus it comes with a larger, quieter fan than the Katana does.

The power supplies are solid—your GPU pulls about 220W and the CPU sits at 125W, so you've still got plenty of breathing room left over.

So, I stumbled upon this article last week about some research lab working with a Cray supercomputer—they’re looking at leveraging GPGPU for extra processing muscle and planning to bolt an entire field of 18,000 GTX690 cards onto that Cray setup. 🤦

You might want to check this out too:

If you’re looking at the 24" category, you're basically hitting a budget wall—it's pretty restrictive—but if you pivot to 23", you actually have a decent amount of variety to work with.