The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Brushing aside my general opinions of that brand, 27" at 1920x1080 makes for some quite large pixels - the 27" displays do look great for multimedia, but they are treading the fine line between PC monitor and HDTV in terms of image clarity. You wouldn't want to sit too close to one at a desk imo.

The only 27s really worth buying for desktop users are the 2560x1440 models, which cost a fair bit more for obvious reasons, otherwise if sticking with 1920x1200, 24" is as big as I find you need, and at that size there's more choice of brand.

 

I appreciate where Sam is coming from. But I have a 37" 1080P HDTV not two feet away, and I LOVE it I watch movies on it all the time. Looks great I think the difference between 24"/23.8" and 27" is probably pretty negligible. But, I dunno LOL!

 

My 1080p display is 24" and can be borderline at times. A 21/22" would have been better. 27 is a little large for 1080p monitors, but should still manage to be acceptable if you have wider tolerances than someone like Sam or myself. Any larger would start getting pretty bad.

I have considered getting a 27" monitor in 2560 x 1600 but wondering if the desktop might not be too small. Meh, It would be a secondary display anyway. I won't be getting one unless I can get some serious income this summer. I do have aspirations of a new pair of video cards at the very least. Yes, pair. Gotta have Crossfire. It's an addiction. But having 2560 x 1600 basically limits me to top-end cards. Would rather not be spending 300+ per card... Maybe in the neighborhood of $200 a peice. The 2407WFP is going nowhere any time soon. Such a marvelous display

 

Double but, just played some of Metro Last Light.

Very pretty, but I can sum it up in a two words: Shoddy port.

The devs have directly apologized for the quality and performance of the port. Apparently THQ made the development process a nightmare. So far, you are unable to disable motion blur, and have almost zero graphics configuration options outside of High, Medium, Very High presets. There will be some updates soon.

As it stands, I am getting dismal performance. Methinks there also need to be some Crossfire updates as it is barely working for me. 15 FPS with it off vs 22FPS average with it on. Huh? Only 46% scaling? Metro 2033 has nearly 100% scaling. Mind you these framerates are with everything absolutely maxed in the Benchmark barring SSAA.

I have been unable to do any tweaking yet. But if Crossfire can be gotten up to snuff, and I am eventually allowed by the devs to change the graphics settings, drastic changes can be made. I aim to have it well over 40FPS average. Also consider this is in the VERY intensive benchmark, which is a scripted set-piece and not actually representative of the gameplay. In-game would be nearer 50-60FPS average.

Yes, really. The settings are really that limiting. I could drop a few things or possibly disable the horribly overdone motion blur, and gain quite a bit. Battlefield 3 was an excellent example of this. I dropped the textures from Very High to High, and made huge gains. Flipping back and forth between screenshots and staring really hard at fine details showed absolutely zero differences. The only noticeable difference was the significant gain in performance, and the reduced stuttering. I laughed and laughed when I discovered this. I can almost guarantee you Metro Last Light has a few of these settings.

 

Crossfire scaling is showing 80% in benchmarks for the HD6900 series at present, not sure on the HD6800 series. It's not ideal yet, but you should certainly be seeing some reasonable performance. It's currently only 55% for the HD7 series, so driver improvements should be on the way. (FWIW, although minimum fps scaling for Geforces is better, they too only achieve 50-60% on average fps).

Last Light in general is a fairly demanding title, with AA off you still need two HD7900 series cards to get the minimum frame rate above 30 or the average frame rate above 50, at 1920x1080.

 

Read my edits. There's a lot that can be done for performance if the devs will give us a proper graphics settings menu. And, as of currently, motion blur is forced, and not implemented very well at that.

A game this effing demanding should have proper Multi-GPU support. 40-50% is not proper. I'm being robbed of almost 10FPS, at max settings, before tweaking anything. That's quite significant.

Also, just thought it was funny. The "Ranger Mode Difficulty" DLC can be enabled by a simple registry tweak. They just inadvertently gave it away for free. I bet the devs did it on purpose, as a slap to the face of THQ. They had very bad "EA Syndrome" here, and caused many issues during development.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Confirmed that the actual game runs miles better than the benchmark. The benchmark is definitely a worst case scenario. I am currently managing 40s and 50s at nearly maxed, with poor Crossfire scaling and no tweaks.

 

Didn't this happen with the Mass Effect DLC too?

 

Well the character added by the DLC could be unlocked, but the associated story content, dialogue, and missions had to be downloaded. Really stupid too, if you understand the weight of said character's presence, and the HUGE impact he has on the story of the game. Really cheap tactic, withholding essential story elements for extra money. I thought I already paid for a full game, not part of one... I went directly to TPB after that mess. I don't even care about purchasing DLC. It's always something that never should have been DLC. It wasn't enough I bought the Collector's Edition...

 

That is exactly my philosophy. As you may recall I put crysis, warhead, and far cry 2 on the shelf for a couple of years (bought them on ebay) until an upgrade. When my 13,000 3dmark6 system showed up, with the current 9450 (stock clocks at that time in the mid-tower sonata case) and the 8800GTX with 768 MB vram, jumping me up from 6,000 points on the 4 ghz p4 plus 3850 graphics, I was able to pull out some games that had been waiting, like World at War, the treyarch cod5 title (I loved it, lol) and the two RTS games, Company of Heroes and World in Conflict.

I also initially thought at the time that Far Cry 2 at 2xAA was okay, and played about 20 hours of it.




Eventually, however, the jaggies started to get to me - it was one of those games (Far Cry 3 is another) where 2xAA is not good enough. You have to get to at least 4xAA, otherwise the jaggies start jumping out at you - you'll pass a telephone line and suddenly the jaggies will pop out - you'll pass a tower and those jaggies will literally jump right out of the screen - and they dramatically detract from the gameplay!

So it wasn't until I escalated to 20,000+ 3dmark6 points with the overclocked 9450 and the two 7950s in crossfire, that Far Cry 2 came off the shelf. Of course that one I could run 8xAA and absolutely everything maxed. There were no jaggies. And besides the improved graphics, when I discovered the joys of going everywhere using the river rather than the roads, with the incredible reflections of that duma engine - astonishing water graphics - it was like a whole new experience compared to the first time.

There were no jaggies either in Far Cry 3 at 4xAA with low to mid 30 fps, (I tried 8xAA in Far Cry 3 and while it looked in some cases like the fps was only down a couple of frames, the mouse suddenly became laggy - and later I did a thorough study proving that 4xAA and 8xAA for that game are virtually indistinguishable, but a huge improvement over 2x - maybe I'll post some of the screenshots one day.) The same upgraded Duma engine provided spectacular water reflections - sometimes I just motored around for a couple hours and didn't shoot a thing!! LOL



So I think that's a great way to look at it, Jeff. These games are too awesome (another is Bioshock Infinite) not to enjoy in the best graphics you can on that gorgeous Dell monitor, even if it means waiting until some summer money comes in for $600 worth of crossfire 7000 hardware.

Kevin, you sit 2 feet away from a 37" monitor for movies???

(At first I was thinking - Kevin, are you blind - or going blind? - but then I thought "Wait, I sit about 10" from my 30" monitor for gaming, and I used to be closer before I decided not to prop the keyboard up on the monitor feet, so who am I to talk?) But for movies I watch those on the 47" Toshiba in the country kitchen table area - and I probably sit about 8 feet away - 2 feet sounds pretty close in I'll say, lol.


Well Jeff, I said $600 for two 7000 family cards before I read your post with a target of $400, but I'm sticking to my number. Your sweet-spot argument is very valid - you don't have to hang out there on the bleeding edge to get good graphics, but why not, for petesake, build in some future proofing for "just" $200 more - yeah, it's an extra 50% above your target, but .....

Hey, isn't Mass Effect that other game that Ubi sold a lot more of than they expected along with Far Cry 3? Whoops - my bad - I found the article, it's Assassins Creed.

They sold a bunch of those, and about 6 or 7 million copies of Far Cry 3. So does anybody know anything about Assassins Creed? Is it a PC game - any good?

Rich

 

I don't exactly watch movies from two feet away I simply mean, it is two feet away from the edge of my desk. When I'm working, I sit close to my 24". I do wear glasses :S When I watch a movie, I lean back in my chair. So I guess it's closer to a meter or so away. And frankly, I think 1920 x 1080P looks wonderful on a 37". Even when close to it. Certainly smokes 480P

 

Rich, Assassin's Creed is amazing. The first game is a bit boring but the sequel and all subsequent titles continue to improve in quality with each release. Very fun games.

Am currently working on a playthrough of The Witcher in anticipation of playing The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition. Very long RPGs that don't hold your hand. Can be tough to get into but very rewarding to play.

 

Can't wait for these to come down in price!
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=22-236-407&Tpk=N82E16822236407

 

That drive was on sale for $229.99 a month ago or so. I wanted to get it but the timing was wrong for me. It will go on sale again probably soon lets hope.

 

Sam that's a really good point. I think I'm going to wait and actually see one first or go with a higher res monitor if I go bigger, this 24" Samsung still looks great. My next HDD is going to be solid state just waiting a bit for the 500GB to drop in price

 

That's a smart move and Sam is absolutely right that 1080 isn't good enough for a monitor that size. If all you do with it is watch movies then it is just fine otherwise not. A 500+GB SSD will be my next purchase too. I was very impressed with the Hitachi in a friends HP Netbook I worked on.

 

or even go with a higher res 24" with a better response time, to be honest I really don't need a bigger screen and I'm afraid the 27" may be just to much. MR-Movies which brands are you looking at on the SSDs ?

 

These things seem to be the best buys at the moment:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147187
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147193


Be careful with the 4TB WD Blacks, as certain WD Black models can be problematic. The 1TB WD Blacks were fairly reliable, but the 1.5TB derivative remains the least reliable mechanical drive currently on sale. The 4TB is unfortunately too new to have test data for - newegg reviews aren't promising, but they never are for WD drives. (I am glad I do not have the same experience newegg customers seem to have with hard disks - I don't think they're handled very well at newegg!).

I have a 2TB WD2002FAEX and so far so good (this model also has a fairly standard failure rate of 1:50, compared to WD's average of about 1:65-1:70) - notably, all larger capacity drives have higher failure rates than smaller (sub 1TB) versions, except in a few rare circumstances. Outliers are easier to spot now the companies primarily responsible for defective-at-outset products in the mechanical disk industry (Maxtor, Samsung and Hitachi) have now all been bought out.

 

yeah I was looking at the Samsung, this is impressive

 

Not bad, though if there's one thing that's worth complimenting Win8 for, it's boot time.
With an SSD and a motherboard with UEFI, I've got the full cold boot time (power button to login prompt) down to 7 seconds on my LAN PC. Seriously impressive. Worth bearing in mind the SSD in question is an old 40GB Intel X25-V (the ones limited to about 150MB/s read and 35MB/s write).

 

Now that's what I like to hear!