Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

Post by ian »

Silverstone mini ITX case with 600W PSU: Free
Gigabyte HD6950 with decent cooler $35

plan to sell the case for a few bucks.
swap out my media computers 5870.

put the 5870 in one of those cheap PC's I was given, then sell that on ebay.
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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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Sold the core 2 quad with an old, beat up, noisy 5870 in it for $250 :oshocked: If I knew old crap was worth so much I'd have never stopped building computers..

Total cost for me was about $40 (fuel, video card) and 2 hours work (building, cleaning, testing and listing).

Now I'm going to do the core 2 duo and see if I can make $100 off that..

I also picked up some more free stuff.. (hard drives, case, power supply and monitor) will promptly sell..
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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So the guy buying the c2q is interested in some other stuff.
So I'm going to parade my old (but good, LBH) hardware out there and I'll make it earn!

I've already sold him the 6950 for $50
So I'm gonna set everything up on a table, and then sell him part at a time.
Because apparently, what I regard as old, worthless SHIT... other people think is pretty good. lol

This single sale will net me at least a new kb and mouse...
Thinking the best logitech has to offer.. $200 each
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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This new 6970 I picked up for $40 fits in my media PC's case with HEAPS of room to spare despite it's massive arctic cooling cooler:

Image

GOT A WHOLE HALF MM TO SPARE!!! :olol:
It's a thermaltake armor.. so it's NOT a small case, The cooler is 290mm long. and pokes out past the card by a fair bit, I even had to choose my hard drive connectors right.

This cooler goes for $90 US. :oshocked: and will work on the newest AMD and nvidia cards.. including the RX 480 and GTX 1080 :hyper:
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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I've found the biggest problem of my monitor.
RANT!!!
When I push the OK button, instead of changing inputs (Like every monitor ever made) It just shows me what input is currently in use.
THE THING ONLY HAS 3 INPUTS, IT'S NOT THAT HARD TO REMEMBER WHAT INPUT I'M ON.
WHAT I NEED is to change to the inputs so I don't have to fuck around for 3 hours in the horrible menu just to go from display port to mini display port.

This problem has only come up now, because I've gone back to a single monitor, but still need 2 computers. It has PBP, but I only need to see the second computer for about 2 minutes at a time.

BAH!
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

Post by ian »

Quite a significant Video Card downgrade.. :olol:

from crossfired Fury Nanos to a single GTX 570. I thought the card was dead... no, it just can't display from HDMI or DP out of the box.
So good work on that nvidia. Even ATI cards would do it out of the box since the 5000 series, which are a whole year older. :olol:

Will probably be swapping to crossfired r9 290x's until Vega comes out, and if Vega is shit, going team green
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
PREY the Lords of Lore my Soul Calibur to Take
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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I have decided to fix my computer so I can rescue a couple of things. I need a video card. and A second, cheap, temp SSD will make the whole process easier. I am hoping for any GPU under $100 that Has Display port and will output will output at 4K, I don't care about anything else, it just has to meet those 3 requirements.

If I can't find a card under $100 and small SSD under $75 locally by days end, my next post in the tech buys thread will probably look like this:
Gigabyte AORUS GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Waterforce Xtreme $1499
Samsung 850 Pro 2TB SATA SSD $1249
:olol: no time to dick around waiting for shit.

Hoping there's a clearance on something like an R 370, 380, 460, 550 or even a GTX 1030.
Haven't been too many bargains since mining took off, but a couple of weeks ago there were Asus Strix R9 380's being cleared for $109, so hopefully something like that comes up. (They're damn good cards) I'd stretch to $120 for a really goo
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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In other Awesome news, a few months ago I picked up a corsair Graphite 380T http://www.corsair.com/en-us/graphite-s ... i-itx-case
And was planning to do the ITX build I've wanted to for about 3 years now. I recently discovered watching Awesome hardware (Pauls hardware is the only tech youtube channel I can tolerate) that these cases are worth a LOT OF MONEY

So basically, I plan to sell the case and buy a corsair 250D and a decent PSU
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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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Got desktop up and going. Monitor, keyboard, mouse and speakers are all at the back of my cupboard.

Used my TV as a screen, and my laptops mouse to move some files around.. Can't find external Hard drive so I gave up and spent all night testing and reviewing cheap computer parts.

Will put review of cheap fans up tomorrow, and might get a cheap KB / mouse to use in the meantime.
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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Currently setting up a Retro build.
Not sure whether to go with an AMD athlon XP 2400+ or an unknown Pentium 4 I picked up yesterday.
2003-2004 era, got everything I want except a video card.
am building for GTA Vice City, Midnight Club 2 and No One Lives Forever 2. but what will probably happen is I'll build it, install the games and then never play them.
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
PREY the Lords of Lore my Soul Calibur to Take
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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I've been playing around with this $200 laptop I got, doing some benchmarks, seeing what it can actually do.

It's pretty decent, 15.6" Full HD screen, GTX660M 2GB GDDR5 GPU, Intel Core i7-3630QM (Proper quad core, not this bullshit with newer mobile i7's being dual core), 8gb of 1600MHz DDR3 (expandable to 16gb) Bluray Combo drive.

Battery life is pretty decent at about 2 and bit hours with intel graphics, just shy of an hour on the Geforce.
The only problem I've found with it is the keyboard by steel series.
It has a crap layout where the arrow keys are cramped in between the numpad and the QWERTY keys so every time I go to hit shift, I'm hitting arrow up, every time I go to hit control, I hit arrow left, and when I want 0 I hit arrow right, and vice versa.
And the biggest problem for any laptop is the keyboard isn't backlit.. Why oh why can't the keyboard be backlit.
This was a $1700 laptop in it's day.. for anything over $1200, even back then you'd want a backlight.

A nice surprise was when I opened it to put a hard drive in, I saw a spot for an Msata SSD, then an option in bios for it as well. I'm really considering getting a 256gb Msata drive and a bigger hard drive (only has an old shitty 200gb spare sata 2 I had lying around at the moment)

it's from 2012, so I've been playing some period games, which it's actually holding up pretty well at.
so far GPU intensive games I've tested:
Battlefield 3 (2011)
Dirt 3 (2011)
Burnout Paradise (2008)

Battlefield plays and looks smooth at 1680x1050, with mostly low details. This was the biggest surprise, I was expecting it to do much worse. It was smooth enough for me to play a couple of rounds and still do fairly well at. I had some pretty beefy hardware to play it smoothly back in the day at 1920X1200.

Dirt 3 was performing like absolute SHIT at anything above 800x600 and I couldn't believe it was that bad so I had to do extensive tweaking.
In the end, I was able to get a silky smooth 60FPS minimum at 1366x768 on low to medium settings, simply by turning mirrors off.. Mirrors on, on any DECENT settings: jitters, dropped frames, tearing, SHIT. mirrors off. Perfect.

Burnout paradise was something I really wanted to sink my teeth into. As most of you probably know, I've played this game A LOT!!!
Was able to play on full HD at mostly medium settings. looks amazing, and still plays brilliantly.
does something weird though.. It appears to drain more juice than my cheap universal power adapter can supply, so computer thinks I keep unplugging it and plugging it back in. Must get a more beefy power adapter.

Games I've yet to test:
Overwatch (2016) Newest game I own, so I'll try it.
GTA 5 (2015) well that's when it came out for PC anyway, should be interesting to see.
Goat simulator (2014) this game is too much for a 4th gen desktop i7 and crossfired fury nanos. Hope it doesn't catch fire.

Next I threw a couple of CPU/RAM intensive games at it for fun and turned off the GTX660M
Minecraft (2011)
Don't Starve (2013)
and for some reason clicker heroes (2014)

Not much to say.. with a proper CPU and enough RAM to do the job, the computer just shat all of these in at full settings.


And now I get to the critical part.. I really like this computer, and I have laptops starting to pile up (4 decent ones at the moment between 2012-2014)
So do I keep this, and ditch the others, or do I ditch them all, some other spare PC stuff, and get a new decent laptop?

A modern one of these (they have backlighting now) seems really appealing.
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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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Got an SSD and trying More games on laptop.
Overwatch runs like shit.. Menus all setup, go to tweak graphics, apply changes, they work.. Get into game and it auto goes to like 640X480, Lowest of the low quality, still plays like shit, and GPU uses 1.2GB of VRAM and reaches 80 degrees in 60 seconds.
Sure its a bug or some other sort of game issue (It is blizzard after all)

Trying GTA 5 next. Takes too long to install :(

Also trying multiple windows options.. 7 works best by a mile, but 10 is almost as good aside from a few driver quirks.
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

Post by OrangeRibbon »

ian wrote:Got an SSD and trying More games on laptop.
Overwatch runs like shit.. Menus all setup, go to tweak graphics, apply changes, they work.. Get into game and it auto goes to like 640X480, Lowest of the low quality, still plays like shit, and GPU uses 1.2GB of VRAM and reaches 80 degrees in 60 seconds.
Sure its a bug or some other sort of game issue (It is blizzard after all)

Trying GTA 5 next. Takes too long to install :(

Also trying multiple windows options.. 7 works best by a mile, but 10 is almost as good aside from a few driver quirks.
If you want just gaming you might want to stick with 7. There was an optional update specially for gaming that broke most games. Even though it was optional, the people that wrote it are paying attention to 10 right now.

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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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OrangeRibbon wrote:If you want just gaming you might want to stick with 7. There was an optional update specially for gaming that broke most games. Even though it was optional, the people that wrote it are paying attention to 10 right now.
Yeah, I'll probably go back to 7, just to get rid of the few small oddities (trackpad scroll is odd, wifi and BT switch turns it both off or both on, and sometimes the GTX won't engage, just freezes and stays on the intel graphics) It came with 8 and the previous owner did the free 10 upgrade, so I figured since it's already got a licence I'd give 10 a go.

7 has all the drivers manually, instead of set and forget, but it all works and performs roughly the same. Although the boot on windows 10 is instant, 7 takes a couple of seconds, once in and using it, there is no measurable difference in performance.
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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Laptop handles gta 5 really well. Medium settings, shadows low 1920 x 1080. Never goes under 45 fps
REALLY HAPPY WITH IT.

Next computer project is to put my 4790k and a 1080ti into the oldest shittiest case I can possibly find.
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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ian wrote:..Medium setting..
Image

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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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This a rock concert.. not the bleedin... SPLISH SPLASH SHOW
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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No awesome at the moment.

Will have time for more awesome when I've left work and am bumming around squandering all the money I've saved.
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
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ian
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Re: Ians CURRENT topic of AWESOME!

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ian wrote:Thu Jan 12, 2017 9:36 am
Will probably be swapping to crossfired r9 290x's until Vega comes out, and if Vega is shit, going team green
I did go to 290x's, and vega was and is shit, I went team green for the first time in my main rig in I dunno about a decade...
Now to clarify, VEGA 64 for $599 WOULDN'T have been shit. VEGA 64 for $859+ IS SHIT!

I'm waiting for a DECENT 1080ti to hit <$999
If I should Die Hard Arcade before I Alan Wake.
PREY the Lords of Lore my Soul Calibur to Take
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