The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

My 1st 1TB drive cost me $300. This 10TB not much more. When a drive has become old, or dying, my logic says might as well go larger.
I think I'm still hopeful that it was some kind of glitch. That windows is merely causing something wonky with the 6TB. I want to be close to it for several hours, while it transfers. I have a road trip today, and a birthday tomorrow. So Monday it is lol
Plan to reinstall windows, and go brand new cables. So as to eliminate any other possibility.

 

Windows 7. Given the drive was constantly being removed externally/internally, swapped with others, it may have caused some kind of confusion. I realize this is a very small chance, but I'm hopeful lol
I have read that drives can find themselves being switched to "Raw". And when mine acted up, I panicked. The only option was to disconnect it, and prepare for a backup. So, now I have a drive large enough, to take the whole backup. I'll feel quite silly if it's still fine. But I am nearing the warranty. And the behaviors that have been noticed certainly suggest a problem.

 

I have paid an average of $60-75 a piece for my 2TB green and black drives, and gotten many of my green 1TB drives around the $50-70 mark. Purchased wholesale in brown cartons from Amazon. The 4TB green was a LOT more expensive at around $160, which was the lowest I could find at the time of purchase. My WD1001FALS Black 1TB, which was a flagship high-performance model, was around $120 new which was a smash and grab steal at the time.

My Samsung 850 Pro 128GB was $90 which was a good deal at the time and the drive performs very well for a SATA III SSD. 128GB is a little constrained, but almost all of my data is on other drives so it hasn't been a major bother for me. I average over 70GB free which is ample room for any projects I might want to do. Windows 10 has actually gotten smaller since release, and already took less space than Windows 7, so it's far more than enough room for the OS.
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The Edifier S1000DBs got here. Also ordered a tempered glass stand so I could relocate my PC tower to the floor but keep it off the carpet. There is no room on the desk LOL! The speakers are MUCH better than I anticipated. Overwhelmingly good. The Polk Monitors are still a tonally superior and more transparent speaker and have a ton more power, but the Edifiers punch way above their weight. As a 9" wide, 14" tall, 20lb cabinet they are imposingly large for a desktop speaker. As a studio monitor though, they're considered to be a modest size.

I won't give a full review as there is too much to say about them. Suffice to say they have an amazing amount of power and range for their size. 120W is no joke! They're a little warm and tubey sounding but all the detail and texture in the music is spot on and they sound AWESOME in games and movies. They have astounding bass output for their size, and effortlessly outperform the small Logitech subwoofer while having much cleaner sound. Also, they are far less invasive to others at high volume, as the bass doesn't travel through the floors.

They tick every checkbox I wanted to fill and more. Really nice speakers. Couldn't be happier. Expressive, emotional sound. Really a fantastic product. No extra hardware needed, however with my Schiit Asgard 2 head-amp added in as a pre-amp, their sound livens up just that little bit more. I wasn't sure about that combination but it's a definite winner. The Schiit amp is DEFINITELY staying. Also, it's a much more convenient volume control than the tiny remote, and lets me keep the speakers at a constant volume to limit their output and prevent damage.

Edifier have made a fan! Beautiful speakers. Really well-made.

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As far as Wildlands I bought the Gold Edition when I got it, so I have all the DLC unlocked for the duration of the game's support cycle. My style is very short range with tactical movement and only minimal recon. I can clear a small base very quickly using only a silenced .45 pistol and melee if someone is drone spotting for me.

My main weapons are a silenced SMG or M4 carbine and a bolt-action sniper rifle. Sometimes I use the Stoner LMG with a silencer instead of the SMG/carbine. It's designed to be a compact LMG so it works very well in the silenced short weapon role. Plus you can remove the suppressor and very quickly take care of helicopters which can be a threat for your team. I tend not to be a sniper in the majority of games, but in this one the sniping is quite fun. It's very useful for removing other snipers and taking out gun emplacements from afar. Also works great for taking drivers out of vehicles with very little damage to the car. Probably the best way to get a racing truck or sports car.

 

Kevin nice to hear from you. A great tool that goes for about $29 is HDSentinel - and they have a bunch of hard drive tests they run, surface tests. I paid $89 for SpinRite, but it seems that HDSentinel does most of the same things at full DMA speeds, not PIO speeds. I also use the free HDTune tests, like the full error scan. I would error scan that wonky drive and see what that report is - also you can read the health - the SMART data - with the free HDTune (and the $29 HDSentinel) and see if you have any sector problems.

Again, I applaud your courage on stepping forward to such a BIG drive - but I did note recently at WD that they had all those new big sizes up to 10 TB - I just wondered how on earth they could get so much density in the drive.

Jeff, you have a pretty nice way of reviewing a speaker, without reviewing it. I am going to make a mental note somewhere to check out Edifier. If my one roommate ever decides to take off, he's taking his sunroom speakers with him. We have the 4k 48 " samsung in there, driven by that 50 foot hdmi cable from the i7. The tv speakers don't really do it, goes without saying, so he hooked up a big power amp and has speakers all over the room. If he takes them, then I might follow your lead and get the Edifiers myself. I like to pull the easy chair way up close so the field of view is almost like being at the cinema - but even with the silenced sunroom sliding glass doors, I have to watch the volume - my wireless mouse has the newer high-powered logitech wireless, and works from almost 20 feet away on the i7 HTPC. But I can't turn on the powered subwoofer at all - it goes right through all the walls - however there is still plenty of bass all over the place.

Regarding Wildlands, I like the fact that you can go to inventory anywhere you are - you don't need to be at an ammo box. So I switch to sniper all the time, and like you, I do like how it takes out all the other snipers.

The basic sniper rifle that you first get is pretty quiet - this last sniper, I forget the name - finally has the power, even silenced, to kill unidad with one shot - but it's pretty loud.

The ACR assault rifle, set to single shot, is my most-used weapon, but occasionally for the most silent kill, I'll use the pistol, which is good out to over 100 meters to my amazement. If they had a scope for it, that would be dandy. But the ACR, with 4x scope, goes out to 250meters all the time, with quite a bullet drop though. At single shot, with silencer, it is very quiet. The game allows you to kill most of the unidad, even if the bullet drops and is now hitting them in the armored chest area. But that only works if they are unaware. If they engage in combat, all of a sudden their armor kicks in, and you have to nail them in the head.

I do not use melee at all. I saw some comments about people who got tagged for "killing a surrendering enemy" when they were using melee - an early glitch I guess. So if I am that close, I switch to pistol and shoot them in the head.

That stoner LMG with silencer - yes I did notice that - the silenced aspect of it intrigued me. And then, you take off the suppressor for the helicopters. Sounds good.

I spray with my silenced ACR, which also carries the grenade launcher, and that is fairly quiet. If I am back a bit, as I mentioned, I use it in single-shot mode, but if I am moving and don't know what I'll run into, I put it back on auto just to be safe. When I switch to LMG - which I carry on my sniper position, button #1, I use one of the LMGs that allows me to use the panoramic sight - basically a red dot sight. For a long time I used the LMG that is called Llamativo - the one showing the dollar sign - it has a very high rate of fire. But I hate the sight - it blocks too much of my field of vision. I also used the unidad LMG, but similarly I don't like the small sight.

If bunches of unidad are 150 meters away, and closing in, I am torn between using my LMG with red dot, or my ACR with 4X scope and suppressor removed. The bounce of the LMG - I think I am using the SR-5 now - is hard to deal with - but it definitely packs more punch than my ACR assault rifle.

I have tried the fast trigger sniper rifles, the dragonov for example - and you can get the scopes that have two modes, red dot and high magnification - and I tried the sniper with red dot for close in - even sometimes requiring several shots for the kill - like a world war 2 game with the 8-shot Garand, using red dot and fast trigger in some closer situations.

I am always playing with the options - "what is the best way to kill all these unidad who are closing in?"

Of course, I am doing that during a 4-alarm unidad alert, with all kinds of apache helicopters targeting me!

The game is really awesome.

Rich

 

Rich, these are Bluetooth capable speakers as well. The entire Edifier line from the R1700 and up has it I think. Not the best quality connection but convenient because you can sync your phone or other devices really easily. They also have RCA input, which is what I use from my sound card. Likely the your best option for good sound. So if your cable box or streaming box or whatever you have, has some R/W RCA outputs, you're good to go. The speakers don't need a receiver or an amp or any other hardware.

The 42W(2 x 21W) R1280s for $100 will be better than TV speakers by a large margin. However if you want really solid sound, the 66W(2 x 33) R1700s are a big step up in power and quality. These are by far my recommended budget speakers. They compare very well to much more expensive speakers from other brands, which is excellent.

https://www.amazon.com/Edifier-R1700BT-Bluetooth-Bookshelf-Speakers/dp/B016PATXSI

Or if you want to really crank the sound, want a little more bass, and have a larger room, the 120W(2 x 60) R2000DBs are a really solid choice. Really good power for their size, and they also have an optical input.

https://www.amazon.com/Edifier-R2000DB-Bluetooth-Bookshelf-Speakers/dp/B016PAWJYS

Those are the two models I'd recommend. The latter one especially will have pretty powerful bass. Enough to satisfy the need for thump without traveling through the entire building; The main reason I eliminated the subwoofer.

My S1000s are another step up above the R2000s. The same amount of power, but better cabinets, better drivers, and a titanium tweeter which gives them more detail and resolution. However, they are much more expensive. For slightly more than the S1000s, the S2000 Pros are pretty similar, but offer a much wider variety of connections that allow you to use professional audio gear. I don't necessarily need that ability, so I saved my money.

In the future, when I have better living arrangements, I might just add a modest subwoofer to these speakers. Monoprice makes a solid 150W 12" sub for $100 that gets good reviews from audio publications. Pioneer also has a very well regarded budget subwoofer that's much more modest than many others which I like. 8" woofer at 100W. Said to be very good for music. Dayton Audio also has a low-profile subwoofer for pretty cheap, which would fit well in a small space.

I'd aim more expensive, however they start to get to very large and high wattage as the price and quality increases. Speaker size and power need to be balanced somewhat. Super heavy bass is not the goal. The Pioneer is probably what I'd want.

 

Thanks for the recommendations Jeff.


I bookmarked and tied the name of the bookmarks into this page so I can come back here for more detail.



HARD DRIVES - NO MORE CLONING - PARTITION BACKUP

I'm taking a short vacation from Wildlands, Fallen Ghosts DLC.

I'm still in the middle of my hard drive upgrade.

The other day I pulled two small drives out of their boxes where they had been sitting untouched for two years. They both had clicking noises - WD says they have failed - they wouldn't come into Windows and almost crashed my computer. One of them, sad to say, is the small Maxtor that animated Left 4 Dead. I can't bear to throw it away, but it has bricked for sure.

That's what happens when drives sit around not being used.

I am totally moving away from cloning in favor of Acronis 14 partition backup. The full partition backup is a file - usually about 60% of the size of the entire partition with normal compression. You can put a bunch of those files on one big drive. You use an optical Rescue CD to boot into the Acronis Recovery Environment - and when you recover the partition it is a perfect clone. So instead of a bunch of unused clone drives, you have one big drive holding a bunch of compressed partition backups.

I just ordered Quantity = 3, Enterprise 2-TB factory refurbished drives from eBay for $55 each - in my note to the seller I told him I'd be running all the HDTune tests (mainly the full error scan is the one I'll pay the closest attention to which takes about 6 hours to run - these drives are not too speedy and will average only about 80MB/sec across the whole drive.)

I still have the sunroom i7 HTPC on the test-bench, waiting for its second enterprise drive. In the meantime I watched a video from it last night - "Get Out." Outrageously terrific movie - one of the best I've seen in the last few years - almost 100% rotten tomatoes - 2 negative reviews out of almost 300. (If you don't know where to get it - PM me - I'll tell you.)

I had put the brand new 2 TB enterprise that I have been testing (the one that had the bad sectors and goharddrive.com told me to just keep it) in the i7, and in moving things around, I put all 711 gigs of movies on it. (I have them all saved on a 4 TB usb drive in the kitchen, so these were not my only copies.)

I had tested the hell out of that new drive, which had developed bad blocks in the first 1% of the drive. In my testing, write zeros and other tests seemed to clean up the drive. I couldn't decide if it was good or not - HDSentinel kept saying "this drive is perfect!"


But as soon as I tried to copy back that 711 gig folder to another drive - I got a read error!!!!!!!!!!!


HDTune full error scan showed 6 new bad blocks in the first 1%!!!!!!!!


Thankfully only 3 videos were affected, and I found them right away in the TV Series section, and fixed the 711 gigs back to new in a couple of hours.

But that taught me a big lesson. I did more reading about these drives, and at Amazon, an engineer said he encountered a 50% failure rate when these drives were introduced in 2010 - he said that the SMART module goes out - so the disk no longer accurately records the SMART data.


I KNEW I WAS SEEING BOGUS SMART INFORMATION!!!

So when the three drives show up in a day or two, I am sure at least one of them will have a perfect full error scan, so then I'll be done with the sunroom. The main drive has a 350 gig C partition, with windows 7 and xp mode with a 60 gig virtual disk - I still have a lot of xp software that won't run on windows 7, like Pagemaker. The data in the C partition is about 210 gigs, and compresses on the partition backup to only 120 gigs. The rest of the disk is a huge D partition with the movies and TV series.

The second disk also has two partitions, E and F. The first one, partition E, is a clone of the small C partition, so if there was a problem with the first drive, I could just boot right up into the second drive. Then the second huge partition F, holds My Backups, the weekly partition backups of the C partition, and various other large folders, like 50 gigs of iTunes in two libraries, 60 gig Exec which is all my installation programs including a couple gigs of video drivers, 10 gigs of various windows iso files, things like that. I might store copies of partition backups of the other two computers I take care of.

On my gaming spedo rig, I don't use partition backup, I still retain cloning, but not with disks stuck away in a box - I have disks inside the computer for cloning. ​

Then if all three disks are good, I'll do the kitchen project, removing those two small disk, a 160 and a 750, and putting in the two 2 TB drives, increasing my hard drive capacity by over 3 TB, but getting rid of a failing old 1.5 seagate usb drive in a white enclosure, which only has about 600 gigs on it - HDSentinel shows it at 9% health - it runs way too hot in a non-fan enclosure - it has turned to junk - but still reads okay for the moment. I'm slowly but surely taking stuff off it. The 4 TB seagate black usb apparently has a fan inside the black box - because it stays relatively cool - low 40, while the white one is at 52 degrees!!

I already have the weekly backups going on that computer, but I'll do the same as the sunroom, two partitions on each drive, one of them a clone of the small C drive.



OTHER WILDLANDS DLC MIGHT NOT BE MY CUP OF COFFEE

And then I'll finish up Fallen Angels. I don't know about the other DLC - looks like a lot of car-jumping mixed with a small portion of gun-fighting. I played the first 10 minutes - everybody is talking English and you don't have your team - you are a single-infiltrator pretending to be a shooter contractor. The first narco calls you "Friend-O" instead of amigo. Sounds like of lame, right? But I should give it a fair try.

Rich

Edit - my email has one last message - Just delivered my 3 drives. I better go out front and get them!

 

Anybody want to bang me across a couple of suggestions for a grafix card upgrade for this?.. only requirement is it must be Nvidia (because ati just suck on linux these days)
Preferably used.. and preferably dirt cheap..


VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GT218 [GeForce 210] (rev a2) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
Subsystem: XFX Pine Group Inc. Device 2941

As for the dos issue.. how about running those proggies in dosbox which should allow full system printer support...

 

dunno.. didn't dig that far into it recently.. just some quad thing that has been hanging around that I put into service when my old Athlon 6400+ became just too long in the tooth for 720p youtube .. it's not new.. a gamer gave it to me as a bag of junk..

Apparently (because there is no way I'm digging around in a running system at this time of night) this is my mobo..

Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. P5KPL-VM,P5LD2-VM Mainboard

→ I will return tomorrow.. if anybody wants to dump me some hopeful links feel free.. all suggestions welcome.

 

The GeForce 210 is such a broken design than ANY video card you buy will be a perfectly fine upgrade for it.

 

That is very interesting, ddp. I will swear by xp mode - it works very well and is very very true to xp. You can't run xp games, or some utilities, like HDTune. But you can go on the web - you can print - you can play videos - in most respects you think you're on xp.

For the fun of it, in googling, I saw one guy who just grabbed the whole pagemaker folder in program files from an xp install, and placed it into the program files (x86) folder on windows 7, and according to him it ran.

I never heard of anything like that!

So I tried it, pulling from my virtual xp environment, out to the host windows 7, and yes it ran, unbelievably. I loaded up a file, and it was mostly correct - just a tad off on the placement of one small item. So I do have Pagemaker installed out there on the windows 7 64-bit host, but it's so easy to go into the virtual xp environment, and get a perfect brochure with exact placement, I don't know why I would ever use it out on the 64 bit host.

On the other hand, I do now have 32-bit windows 7 on my old dell latitude d610 laptop - on both of them - because turbo tax would not support xp anymore. Those laptops are not powerful enough to host a virtual environment - but that is good to know that they might run pagemaker without much problem.

Rich

 

Revisiting Tomb Raider again before I tackle Rise of the Tomb Raider. Totally maxed, TressFX on, 1440p with 2xSSAA. Locked at 60FPS with indoor locations, and the same, but dips once in a while, outdoors. Visuals are spectacularly clean. 2xSSAA is enough to almost completely eliminate jaggies at 1440p. I have to put my eye right to the monitor, and move my character around while watching edges to see them. Leaned back in my chair it is flawlessly clean. And this is with a 32" monitor, much bigger than the usual 27" for 1440p. So the single 1070 is still a good match for 1440p, and continues to play even newer games very well. Tomb Raider is not an ugly game either. Quite eye pleasing. Awesome amount of geometric, texture, and environmental detail to take full advantage of higher resolutions.

Only Ghost Recon Wildlands requires settings turned down, and it's understandable given the insanely good, groundbreaking visuals in that game. I seriously can't praise it enough. Not since Crysis have I stopped just to enjoy the environment like I have with this game. I was playing co-op with two good friends the other day and I found a forest-covered creek with farm fields on each side. The lighting and shadowing and scene composition were just so perfect. It looked a lot like a scene you'd see here in beautiful Wisconsin. Insane near-photorealism. That's with Foliage and Shadows turned down a notch too. I was so impressed that I made my friends come join me to check out the area. They were equally amazed and we spent a good 10 minutes just chilling and talking about the graphics while we splashed around in the water and enjoyed the beauty. A game has to look pretty special to WOW me like that these days. My best friend uses a 390X with the game and has to play ~high settings and he's constantly talking about the spectacular graphics. The game does scale very well visually when you turn down the settings. It tries its best to look great even at medium or low.

I was very excited about Wildlands' visually when I saw the earliest footage of the game. It looked jawdroppingly good. The actual game really lives up to the pre-release footage. A rare case of no pre-rendered footage used anywhere. Becoming more and more uncommon.

My PC continues to run strong and a kinda wish it wouldn't. Currently for my uses Ryzen isn't an upgrade. The most intensive thing I do often enough to warrant upgrading is still gaming. Ryzen does not OC as high so isn't as fast in raw single core performance as my 4.4GHz quad core. I'm still watching for deals but my Intel setup is just such a well behaved little sweetheart *knock on wood*. It's just insanely fast for everything I do regularly. Beautiful for emulation and other intensive tasks. Difficult PS2 games at full speed such as KillZone and Shadow of the Colossus. Difficult Gamecube games like Metal Gear Solid and Rogue Squadron. Very impressive. Also of course spectacular for actual PC gaming. Really a long-lasting investment as far as PC parts are concerned. I see no real need to replace it in the near future.


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On another note, I lost my mother this last Saturday after a long battle with illness. Probably the hardest thing I've yet faced in my life. She wasn't perfect but she was a super compassionate, tolerant, and genuine person. I loved the hell out of her and it hurt pretty bad to watch her waste away because of her own choices and things beyond her control. Funeral was Wednesday. I'm still sad but I'm not hurting anymore. She died under her own power, peacefully and sleeping. As good as we could hope. No more suffering, thank whatever supreme power that may exist. Just thought my friends should know a little about what's happening in my life lately...

 

Ryzen... just talking about it makes me drool lol
Like yourself, I just can't see justifying the cost at this time. I suppose it's also knowing that when I do take the dive, there are multiple other advancements I want too. Larger faster SSD's for instance.

You have my condolences. My brother last year, and father the year before last. I think about them almost daily.

 

I just built a Ryzen 1700 build with the typical 16Gigs of Ram, Samsung 850 Evo SSD. I still do a lot of video transcoding/re-encoding, and in that respect the Ryzen top of the line CPU's are as good as it gets for now with 8 cores of power. For a serious gamer who's not into video encodes one might do well to go with Intel because they have superior single core speed, but for video Intel doesn't have anything that can rival the power and value of the Ryzen. I've never really felt that CPU played a large enough role in gaming to cause me to choose Intel over AMD, because if you're serious gamer then you're going to have some serious GPU power that's going to overlook some CPU deficit

I'm sorry for both of your losses! My mother died of cancer on February 6, 2017 at a ripe old age, but I still miss her everyday.

 

Sorry for both your losses as well guys it's been a hard year for me so I'm feelin' it.

Got me some Fostex TR90 250ohm headphones to replace my Beyer DT990s. Very comparable for less price. Very treble centric. Almost a little painful but slowly improving as they burn in. Very drastic break-in on these BTW. Will be looking at some better ear pads for it possibly. Already smoother than the DT990s.

 

Sorry to hear about your mother, Jeff. How is your dad taking it?

 

Nobody is taking it too well Rich. We're all coping differently. We'll be okay though. Thanks for the support guys

Hey guys I found some AMAZING deals on some headphones you should all look at!

House of Marley Destiny TTRs(Trench Town Rock). The best headphone House of Marley has made so far. Closed back so darker sounding and more bass heavy.

https://www.amazon.com/House-Marley...g-Headphones/dp/B00RZYD51A/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

Long story short, they went out of production because the black ones weren't selling so were a general product failure. The silver ones are still expensive but the black ones are a COMPLETELY LUDICROUS $30!!!! down from $300 retail. An absolutely ASTONISHING discount!

I bought a pair and let me tell you they are special for $30. They perform easily in the ~$150 range no problem. My review is the newest verified purchase review on that Amazon link. The build and sound are great. They come beautifully packaged with a nice hard carrying case. An absolutely supreme set of headphones for $30. Basically free.

The Active Noise Cancelling isn't anything special but it also acts as an internal EQ for the headphones so unfortunately is needed for them to sound proper. That's really the only downside of them though. They make up for any issues with their excellent sound. I'm so incredibly pleased and surprised that I found a deal like that. I wonder if they'll have any longevity issues, lol. Only time will tell. I might need to buy an extra pair So impressed I can't stop smiling.


Likewise for some open-back headphones, the Philips SHP9500S is the king of the budget world. They were originally ~$250 new as the regular old SHP9500 and have dropped to about $50-60 due to the very high demand for them and the ramping of production.

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826138190

This is a killer price for the sound quality they offer. They remind me very much of a cheaper version of my VERY expensive AKG K712 Pros. It's rare to see the AKG K712s under about $350 new and they originally retailed near $700 so huge price differences aren't uncommon. But this particlar pair of Philips falls into a special category where you get way more than the price you pay. These stand up there with $200 Sennheisers and Beyerdynamics.