Posts by Benjamin King2

Have you actually tried asking on their official support forums yet? And honestly—why on earth would you even need a BIOS update for this?

Just borrow a power supply from somewhere else if you want to run some tests.

Wait, you actually want a monitor with a built-in TV tuner?

Tyler Castillo14 said:I’d grab that Samsung for $1585, but my GPU is just a GTX 1060—it doesn't have a D-Sub port. Could I run it through an HDMI cable instead?

Of course you can.

Honestly, you're better off grabbing a decent 23" display than some absolute bottom-tier 24" garbage:

At $433, finding a actually reliable 24" monitor is basically mission impossible—you can find the exact same model in a 24" version, but it’ll set you back nearly $533:

Make sure the date and time in your BIOS matches what you have set in Windows. Also—does Windows Update actually run when you try to trigger it?

I only had one shot at testing ECS and overclocking on a P67 version, and man, that 2600K was running like an absolute beast at 4.5 GHz. Only catch was—it wasn't even a board from $100—I picked it up for something around $200 somewhere.

Sarah Roberts80 said:Thanks, Benjamin King2!

I’ve already got my photos on DVDs, but I need a solution for video. So—is there really no better way to store videos and pictures long-term? How long does an average DVD actually last compared to a hard drive?

Optical media will last a lifetime if you don't wreck it—you know, keeping it in a case so it doesn't get scratched up, avoiding heat, humidity, and all that fun stuff. I actually have some CDs at home from twenty years ago that still work perfectly fine. Just one rule: never, ever lend your DVDs to anyone. 😁 As for hard drives, well, there are a million ways things can go sideways—electronics, mechanical parts... there's no such thing as a guaranteed lifespan. It is what it is.

I’d probably go with Toshiba—the only exception being Black if I absolutely needed that extra performance boost, regardless of whatever warranty situation is going on.

Jerry Lopez87 said:I'm thinking about picking up an internal drive.
Tell me—how much does cache actually matter here?
Is there even a noticeable difference between 32 and 64 MB of cache?

Since I don't really have anything massive to fill it up with, capacity isn't my main concern—whether it's 500 GB or 1 TB doesn't move the needle for me—but looking at the prices, they're basically identical, so I might as well go for the 1 TB one.

It looks like price fluctuates based on the warranty, too. Apparently, these WD Black drives come with the longest coverage.

So, what's the smartest play? Grab the one with the longest warranty and more cache memory?

Up to $150.

Look, cache might actually show up in some specific RAID setups, but on a standard desktop? You aren't going to notice a damn thing. Those Black drives are performance drives—they're great if you're doing heavy lifting like video editing where you're constantly dumping data. If you just need a place to stash files, there’s zero advantage other than that longer warranty. Though, honestly, you won't find a Black drive at that kind of price point easily. Usually, a 2-year warranty is pretty much the industry standard for drives right now.

Sarah Roberts80 said:I need a recommendation for an external drive. Looking for something around 2TB just to store family photos and videos—so speed, size, or aesthetics don't really matter. It'll just sit in a closet and be used occasionally to dump new photos onto it.
What's the most reliable and long-term way to save family photos?
These look like decent deals:

You could also grab this one; it's cheaper than the options over at E-DIGITAL:

The absolute safest and most durable way to do this is to have at least one backup copy. 🙂 Honestly, burn your photos onto DVDs—they'll probably outlast a hard drive any day.

You could probably grab this one if you aren't planning on lugging it around everywhere:

Honestly, the motherboard doesn't even matter—as long as it has a SATA connector, you're golden.

Adam Thompson said:I'm torn between these two processor setups. The total cost—including boards and coolers—is landing in pretty much the same ballpark for both. I’m planning to pull the trigger early this summer, so right now I'm just doing my homework. The goal is gaming and some light video editing at home using Handbrake.

Option 1 (i5):
Intel Core i5-4670K box – 3.4 GHz ($532 - Micro Center)
Gigabyte Z87-HD3 ($259 - Micro Center)
Cooler Master - Hyper 212 EVO ($25 - Best Buy)
Total: $871

Option 2 (i7):
Intel Core i7-4771 box - 3.5 GHz (around $200)
ASUS P8H77-M PRO ($204 - Best Buy)
Total: $2612 (give or take a few bucks depending on the final CPU price)

There might be an Intel Core i7-4790 hitting the shelves this summer too, pushing up to 4GHz. It should basically replace the 4770 at a similar price point.

Which combo is the better long-term bet?
An overclocked 4670K hitting maybe 4.2GHz, or the 4790 with Intel Hyper-Threading running at 4 GHz?

Right now, games seem to favor higher clock speeds. That said, I have a feeling future titles will lean more heavily into multi-threading—where that 8 vs 4 thread ratio might actually start to matter.

Well, it really depends on how far you're trying to peer into the crystal ball. 😁 When it comes to multi-threading, Intel Hyper-Threading is pretty much inferior to AMD architecture—like, significantly so. Intel’s whole thing—their real strength—is single-thread applications. There's also this other factor: software is designed based on what hardware is actually out there, so you get this lag—usually a 3-4 year gap—before software finally catches up enough to actually utilize that hardware properly.

That's why making any kind of solid prediction for the future is a headache; hardware is always going to be one step ahead of the software, and by the time those highly optimized games actually drop, a ton of new hardware will already be sitting on store shelves. Long story short: if you grab an i7 today, don't go thinking it's some magical guarantee that it'll be more future-proof than an i5 processor.

Look, $33 you've already got the 270x card, so picking up a standard 270 doesn't really make sense—it’s just not worth the cash at this point:

If you want to jump up to a GTX 760, you’d need to shell out an extra 100 bucks or so--$50, but honestly, the performance leap is massive enough to justify it.

Just head into Disk Management, wipe those partitions on the drives, then create some fresh ones and format them. Honestly, the BIOS has absolutely nothing to do with this.

Benjamin King2, grab that SATA boot driver from the ASUS ROG Maximus site and just bake it right into your Windows XP install using this: http://www.nliteos.com/download.html

DV (whether you're looking at NTSC or PAL) was basically designed for watching stuff on a TV set, not for playback on a computer—and since we're dealing with an H.264 codec here, there's no way this was intended for a standard TV broadcast. You should just leave the resolution and aspect ratio exactly how they were in the original Windows Media Video file; all you really need to do is convert that AVI into an MPEG-4 AVC. If I’m following your logic correctly, that is. Just grab Format Factory and run the conversion through that—it’s much less of a headache.

Microsoft actually pulled the plug on retail versions about five months back—and if my math is right, they’re cutting off OEM sales by October too. Honestly, your best bet is just to try and track down a copy somewhere else out in the wild.

Maybe try plugging it into a different computer just to see if you’re still running into the same headache. You really ought to rule out the basics first—like checking the cables, the USB port, or the power adapter—to make sure one of those isn't actually the culprit here.

Jason Harris5 said:That exact same one—the one that's supposedly "fixed." Or do you honestly believe importers just sent all that junk back to the manufacturers and got perfect replacements in return? And that’s why the wholesale cost for Kingston dropped by such a massive chunk?

Look, I don't have any inside intel on that—I'm not out here grinding in hardware sales or anything. I'm asking because, about three years ago, I picked up a desktop rig and an SSD (Mushkin Callisto deluxe) with a SandForce controller, and it was smooth sailing—zero issues. Since then, I've gone through at least five or six more Mushkin's SSDs (both Callisto and Chronos models) and, again, absolutely nothing went wrong. Is Mushkin actually the only brand not peddling total garbage?

Hey, if you want to mess around a little, go right ahead. 🙂 Personally, I think the real bottleneck is going to be having only 640 MB of available VRAM.