The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

That's about the same for the HP Netbook, it had a SAS Hitachi SSD.

I was also looking at the Intel DC S3500's but they are much more money then the Samsung's and the Sammy's are solid so I would go that route right now too.

 

The main reason I went for Intels was that they were about a long time before Samsung and used to be the only solid (no pun intended) brand. Nowadays Samsung have been in the game long enough to prove themselves, and post reliability scores that are just as impressive.

 

yeah I was looking at the Samsung brand also, probably early next year I will get one the price isn't bad right now and there bound to come down a bit

 

is win8 worth looking into, or shall we wait for 8.1

 

I don't mind it. As long as you ditch the startscreen and reinstate the start menu with a third party application (it's not coming back in 8.1 by the way, so no point waiting), it's fairly reasonable. A few things are made a bit annoying, but overall I prefer the look and feel once you're actually in the desktop - no more worrying about Aero as you get transparency without it (which means it also works in remote desktop) - faster boot times etc.

There are some applications that don't support it (HDDLed Indicator and uTorrent, to name a couple) but on the whole not too many. The main reason for me getting it was being able to pay £75 for three legitimate windows licenses. Now they're £200 each, I shan't be buying any more, and I have installed one additional copy since. I'll leave how to your imagination

 

haha, tut tut.

Might make the jump with an OS refresh and see how it goeth!

Im still shocked my system is still standing to be honest!

wonder if haswell will be worth the jump up, or just another SSD this time?

 

Depends from. Haswell is a power efficiency and IGP upgrade, but not a performance upgrade. Little by the little the generational leaps add up, but really, Haswell is to Ivy Bridge what Ivy Bridge was to Sandy Bridge in terms of performance, so on a per-clock basis:

CORE 100 -> 240 @ 2.40Ghz as per Q6600
PENRYN 115 -> 325 @ 2.83Ghz as per Q9550
LYNNFIELD 140 -> 373 @ 2.66Ghz as per i7 920
SANDY BRIDGE 155 -> 525 @ 3.40Ghz as per i7 2600K
IVY BRIDGE 168 -> 588 @ 3.50Ghz as per i7 3770K
HASWELL 180 -> 630 @ 3.50Ghz as per i7 4770K (forming 2520 as 4-core)

and, roughly:

PHENOM II 102 -> 325 @ 3.20Ghz as per X4 955 (forming 1300 as 4-core)
Bulldozer 76 -> 274 @ 3.60Ghz as per FX-8150 (forming 2190 as 8-core)
Piledriver 79 -> 316 @ 4.00Ghz as per FX-8350 (forming 2530 as 8-core)

 

may be worth it then.

God i miss upgrading my system. regret selling what i had at the LAN events

what are you currently running?

i presume the GTX7 series are more a refresh than a generation leap? will the same be of the 8 series?

 

Indeed. I'm interested in hearing about the forthcoming Nvidia GPU's.

 

I got an email about it recently, haven't checked it out :S

Ooops, that wasn't the edit link LOL!

 

Link in the blog is still accurate. Been a while since the gaming PC has seen an upgrade, or a clean for that matter.

The GTX7 series are indeed a refresh of GTX6. In true nvidia style, similar numbers does not dictate a similar product - the GTX780 is a cut down version of the GK110 behemoth featuring in the Titan, and as such comes with a good 90% of the performance of the Titan, but a fairly substantial £550 price tag.
The GTX770 on the other hand is a GK104, as featured in the GTX670/680, so consider this a rebrand of the GTX680, with a 4% higher clock speed, but only 2GB of memory, c.f. the 3GB the GTX680 has.

 

Thanks sam. I believe I have my answer.

 

Windows 8,
I can't say that I like it and the Metro is about worthless, plus I don't think square/rectangular tiles are pleasant either. Plus you get into some of the apps and it is hard to close them until you learn the work arounds, and it isn't the same for all apps. Also a lot of programs don't support the whole metro concept so you are limited on what you can install to the new Start screen. Another annoyance is that the tiles are not configurable, you're stuck with what ever size/shape they give you. I find myself wasting time going between or spending hours of tweaking just to get back close to 7. There are way to many thing hidden as well so if you are the typical MAC user you may like it because it seems simple however it lacks in power and efficiency.

I will be using it but only because I have to support others that have it otherwise I wouldn't wast my time with it.

That's my two cents worth...

 

I have none of these issues as I never use the start screen

 

The Start screen is the Metro UI, you have to use it at least to boot into. So you have used it at least temporarily.

 

Just the first time - ClassicShell, in addition to adding a start menu, bypasses the startscreen at boot.

 

That's good to know I'll play with that some too. I didn't think of playing with Classic shell when I worked on my friends Netbook as I was trying to ramp up on tweaks that would work and allow him to still take advantage of Metro..

Thanks Sam,
Stevo

 

WOW that's a great deal, cheap price for a good battery

 

Anyone know of a handy chart that shows memory throughput for different timings and speeds? Re-evaluating my stance on PC3 12800 since the timings for higher speeds appear to have come down and feeling too lazy to make one myself

edit: Figured it out. I'll probably be going with DDR3-1866 9-9-9-24.

 

I recall thinking that VGA @ 1080/1200P wasn't that bad. And I guess it isn't. But... on a 37" HDTV, the softness that's present is much more apparent LOL! But, it'll suffice for sending a signal from laptop. I guess it'll have to since that's all the laptop has. But I definitely look at VGA with one brow raised now LOL!

Running a Multiavchd job, and WOW is it making use of my X6 core!