The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

http://www.zdnet.com/supercool-sony...ol-pcs-better-than-thermal-grease-7000001327/

Have been hearing whispers about this for a while and am now curious as to how they perform.

 

Interesting, can't say I'd heard of this...

 

I would be very interested to try it out but knowing the way this world works it'll be punishable by death just to have one due to some stupid copyright.

 

So sadly seems to be the way these days.

On a display-related note, fingers crossed as after a bit of soldering, my 3008WFP seems to have been brought back from the dead. 2 days down and so far so good...

Someone here at the LAN I'm currently at has one of the retina Macbooks. Starting to get seriously peeved that sort of display technology isn't offered outside of a discrete apple device. Yes, windows looks absurd on it, but there are other potential uses for that sort of image density!

 

I've used these in military applications and they work great. I've never tested them against thermal grease so I can't support the 3 degree drop claim in the article but they really work well. I used them in a very compact no airflow box were I had to sink the heat to the top of the case to keep the power controller box cool in a rack mount server setup and again it worked great and we had no overheating issues where we probably should have.

 

Good luck on the solder job Sam! Have been using my home-repaired X38-DS4 for over a year without issue *knock on wood*

I also am a bit peeved about the Retina Displays. It's not like Apple has a patent on LCDs over a certain resolution... or do they? Just watch, somebody will release a product with one and Apple will sue

IN all seriousness though the retina display on my iPad 2 is incredible but again, the ole' iPad is due for a visit to the firing range

 

The explanation I was given was that - try using windows on a retina display. It's only really possible with your head about as close to the display as it would be if you were sending a text/email from your phone. For a sizeable PC display, that's just not realistic.
But of course, we don't need the full 300dpi resolution, just somewhere in between. e.g. 2880x1800 at 24" would be 140dpi and that would be good enough for a lot of uses, or 3840x2400 at 30", again, 150dpi. That would be ample.
Fortunately the 30" 2560x1600 displays already have a good 101dpi, but still, having 3840x2400 pixels on a display is perfectly doable now, graphics cards support it, windows kind of suppports it (it turns out the lock screen in windows only supports a hardcoded max res of 2560x1600!), interfaces support it with displayport or HDMI, so why don't the displays exist?

What I'm hoping is for Apple to produce a Cinema display with displayport that offers this sort of resolution quality. That will either present a viable option to purchase, or get other manufacturers interested in manufacturing said displays.

Interestingly, Intel thinks this sort of display tech will actually start becoming common next year. I sincerely hope their prediction is accurate!

 

Really not interested due to the inherent demand of running things at those resolutions.

 

Not so much for running games (although a couple of older strategy games I can think of would be pretty spectacular at that res), it's more just desktop real-estate. Being able to work with windows that large makes a lot of previously impossible things realistic.

 

Yes please! Hurry up and begin producing mega resolution monitors! LOL!

 

At an affordable price. Such things do exist, just not for less than 5 figure price tags.

 

Sorry. I do mean in the typical sense. E.g. Newegg for 300 - 600USD

SLI/crossfire could become quite commonplace if such resolutions become abundant Imagine running Crysis on a super res display!

 

Supporting Jeff's argument, running Crysis at 2560x1600 is challenge enough for now!

Stuff like this adds to the argument:


Personally, I don't think Crossfire/SLI can ever really be the answer for it. We really need a modular stream processing interface to come into existance - have a master output card and then just attach additional (ideally speaking also with an external option, to eliminate internal power/heat/space constraints) stream processing units you can plug in with a cable/into an extra PCIe slot.

To actually pull off top-tier titles from a couple of years from now (assuming that's when 4K monitors become buyable at the top-end of the consumer market) with a fluid frame rate, you're going to be looking at a requisite 10-20x fold increase in rendering power over the current best single GPU. Not happening any time soon

Also, what about 120Hz or 3D?

 

I haven't seen the difference in 60 - 120hz. Not saying it doesn't exist. I'm saying I haven't SEEN them compared. The only electronic shopping I do is online

Ha ha! I've been thinking of a form of modular processing unit for some time now! It shouldn't be a problem to add on a secondary CPU/GPU via PCI-e. Granted it probably couldn't be solely handled by windows/OS. It would probably need intervention from the bios as well

 

The difference between 60 and 120 is very readily apparent for me. It has much more of an effect with video than games, for what it's worth.

Also, Sam, holy crap, is it a memory limit? Any unnecessary settings a la Witcher 2's "Ubersampling"? As of right now that seems like an impossible title even for super top-end hardware. Crysis was never that bad even relative to the hardware available at the time...

Also FXAA sucks hard and is the most horrible looking thing ever conceived. Every time someone recommends enabling it in games I'm like "are you effing blind man?" It's like smearing Vaseline on a fogged up lens. PC gaming is getting a glut of noobs with no clue about graphics lately...

 

Could loose motherboard stand-offs cause a PC to not start up? Because originally I thought the PSU was faulty. But I prime 95'd for a while without troubles. This is a system that somebody said I could have. I also however reset the Ram. He handed it to me, said it wouldn't run. Initial run froze upon entering windows. It was then that I re-seated the Ram. I also made sure the Electrical cord connected to the PSU was very good. I've had one instance in the past, where this was an issue. Seems to run fine now though. I swear, whenever I try to find a problem, it disappears.

Clearly the builder of this PC, only finger tightened the Stand-offs. Not good enough in my opinion.

 

Oman7,

Looks like a vibration issue then, as in the loose stand-offs!

Russ

 

Well, I may never know exactly what it was. I have it pieced apart for selling now
Thanks Russ.

 

I've had stand-offs ground the board out and cause that problem many times so stand-offs are a possibility but so is RAM sticks not properly seated too.