The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

Agreed. I love the docking stations. I'm desperately in need of a USB 3.0 dock. Either my E-Sata cable is toast, or the control board in the dock is damaged in such a way, that E-sata connections don't work properly. Frequent dropouts. Or... it's the E-sata ports on my mobo. Time will tell, when I purchase my up to date board. At least I have it's 2.0 port for the time being. I typically average 20 - 25MB/s.

 

You a fabricator DDP? Well good on you I try to be... but my skills are limited. I can certainly use current technology though, coupled with others, to achieve some interesting results

 

Yeah, I'm not big on exterior/interior lighting either. Aesthetics are almost pointless to me. But I do like the look of my CM HAF I prefer to not have a sore thumb. But if said sore thumb has high performance, I can look beyond it

 

That's the best way to do it!

 

WHAT!!!

 

SPAM??

 

DDP... you guys are slacking. You need to anticipate those attacks, before THEY do! LOL!

 

Ha ha, just teasing. But I think you knew that

 

Old warships or WWII?

 

Very cool. Wish I had the time, I use to build everything from cars, aircraft, ships, and rockets in wood or plastic kits. Then I got into RC's and still have some decent size helicopters (6ch.). Would like to get into Jet RC's and some of the WWII aircraft, worked with a good friend that had a P-51 Mustang that was really cool (40 size engine) and looked similar to this:

 

Hmmm, ddp knows more than just warships.

Well, it took me about 8 hours to catch up on everything, but I distinctly remember that skydreamer in norway was going amd at one point in time, to maximize his limited budget. But the next time I turned a forum page, he was back to intel. How did that happen?

I’m back since summer having finally shaken my total addiction to Tomb Raider. Estuansis mentioned how great the graphics are, and I got hooked on following the lovely Angelina Jolie - uh I mean ... Lara Croft all around the island (the island from hell.)


Here she is, at high altitudes as usual. This is 2560x1600 everything maxed - I get about 40 fps, sometimes more.


Mostly, from my perspective, the most exciting discussions have been about the 4k monitors – starting a couple months ago - which might impact Sam next summer, and which will likely impact me in early 2016, and which currently are out in the range of $3500 to $4500. I initially was shuddering to think of the pixels, but after looking it up, the new 4k are twice the width, twice the height, of present 1080p, in other words 3840x2160, a total of 8.3 megapixels – and “only” a bit more than twice the pixel count of any high-res screen, like Stevo's, Sam's, or mine.


The gal likes to get wayyyy up on top of everything - well above the cloud layer.


Okay, twice as many pixels – well – allowing for future hardware improvements, and $5,000-6,000 for a new build in 2016, including the monitor, not so far out of line as I thought. That pixel count, 8.3 megapixels, is not much more than typical eye-finity multi-monitor setups, which can run 6-8 megapixels easily.

Sam said he has one on his shopping list for mid 2014 – as for me, I’ll wait two years – beginning of 2016 is probably my earliest. I always let Sam work the bugs out, lol.


The game is not for anybody who is afraid of heights:


Over on the gaming thread, Estuansis hoped I could finally settle down and enjoy one hardware platform for a while – I just inherited an older i7 940 that I’m trying to gradually ramp up to 4 ghz. My 9450 is feeling the strain, and one core is at 100% most of the time in Tomb Raider where I have all graphics totally maxed – so it passes the 71 degree thresh-hold occasionally, causing a crash about every 3 hours. That’s not too bad.

Based on thinking my 9450 was at 425 frames per second on a video converter program that I use as a benchmark, I was excited to see how fast the i7 was, and I thought I could end up with 50% more power. But I screwed up - I looked at my chart again today, and that 425 number that had stuck in my head, was at stock clocks before I overclocked, so the 9450 is presently at 519 on xp - or 509 on w7. In other words, it is faster than I thought. Using the w7 number of 509, I will get "only" a 30% raw cpu performance boost by overclocking to 4ghz (from present 2.91.) I guess that would be helpful - and might last me until the big upgrade in early 2016.

Again, for then, I'm thinking $5k will cover it - well maybe 6k.


Here’s Lara Croft in one of the many many tombs you will find all over the map – after all "Tomb Raider." At one time she says “Not another tomb!” Estuansis raved about the graphics and he was right - wave a torch around - the lighting is superb.


But mostly she likes heights – there is more death-defying going on in this game than anything else you will play. And the falls and her deaths are very dramatic – you see her tumble down and crash against the rocks, or taking a wrong turn floating down a river, she takes a large stick of wood right through the gut, or a pipe through her neck. Pretty gruesome – but no blood. Nothing red.

If you shotgun a bad guy right in the head as he climbs up to your platform, you get a big splat of brown on the screen. That is nice to see, because you know he's dead, but I suppose the lack of red was necessary to please the censors and get the game a PG13 rating. That’s okay with me. Omega will add the nude mod, but as for me, I don't need breasts or blood.

So she gets killed with pipes through her throat – but no red stuff, - it still has its gruesome effect. She has the pipe through her throat and out the top of her head, and she kind of groans for a second. You can feel her thinking, like – “Damn this can’t be a good thing .... my luck finally ran out.” Every time she jumps and just barely makes the next ledge, I tell myself “There is no way that anybody could defy death like this! over and over again."



Of course, now that I think about my $5k 2016 budget, that’s chicken feed compared to Stevo’s $20 to 30k sound system – there is a serious audiophile for sure but forced to go “midrange” because of budget constraints!! What am I complaining about, a lousy 5 grand!!


Here's the last shot. I thought it was cool that when she comes out of the water, you see her footprints on the sand, but they realistically disappear one by one very quickly. I was impressed by that level of detail.


You guys were talking about enclosures for a while. I like esata - way faster than usb - and for enclosures the Cavalry - newegg has them - very nice fans, the sunon maglev in fact. The whole build quality is good. On the other hand, I found out on a one-drive enclosure, it is possible to mod a tiny 25mm fan inside an aluminum case that does not have a fan, and drop hard drive temps 10 degrees. The fan has to be mounted on rubber bands to avoid having its vibration affect the drive, thereby cutting transfer speeds in half. That was a goofy project, but I do use that external drive (it was a gift) all the time - it has every possible connect option, esata, firewire, two types of old firewire, and usb 2.0.

As for you guys discussing docking stations, for sata drives, I like the koutech dual esata port pci-e card carried at amazon which runs about $35.



It supports the koutech power over esata cable at $18 which is handy.




I can take a raw drive, pop that cable on it, have it come hot swap into disk management, and test it, transfer data, clone to it, whatever, no external case required.

Rich

 

I think 'mid-2014' might be a bit on the ambitious side Rich, time will tell. To have it at any point in 2014 would be nice, but that really depends on there being some price cuts. If the Ultrasharp 32 retains its launch price throughout next year I think christmas 2014 is likely to be the absolute earliest. Now only being just about to receive my first month's proper full salary, I'm still in the process of paying off bills for other things like the various server upgrades.
Since early summer 2012 when the server upgrades began, I've spent roughly £2600 ($3500 pre-tax) on hard disks, and the server case itself, RAID controller and cabling also cost an additional £900 or so ($1200+tax)
The LAN PC build was fairly inexpensive, but given the motherboard fiasco when I ended up with two boards, it ultimately cost me about £500 ($670+tax). Around the same time as the server I also purchased the two 23" 1080p Dell displays (one for work, one that originally covered for the 30", and is now the secondary at home / display I take to LANs as it's the lightest) - and they were £175 each ($235+tax).
All in then, even without any direct performance upgrades in the past 18 months I've forked out the equivalent of, after 20% VAT is applied, $7000 in PC hardware. Paying that off is taking a fair while!
Realistically, other an in an emergency I can't justify buying components that will put me back into any reasonable amount of debt. Right now, the Asus PQ321QE is £3000 - that's very slightly larger than the credit limits on both my overdraft & credit card combined, and the equivalent to 2 1/3 months' worth of salary (post-tax of course). I fully expect the Dell to be somewhat more expensive. The question is, how much more?

 

Wow, my next build could be the most expensive yet! Ultrasharp 32, GTX Titan, probably a new power supply, since my current(700W) would be brought to its knees by the Titan LOL! And those are just the more expensive items. Here's hoping my tax return can get my wee/little business going I suspect Ultrasharp 32 is gonna be upwards of 2K. At least the 30" appears to be coming down. I wouldn't be opposed to one of those either.

I am aware of the hardware needed to run at the super resolutions. Not much of a gamer, I simply like real estate Oh, and I never run AA :S

 

The Asus version of the same display is $3500. Let's face it, it's not exactly common for Dell displays to cost less than their Asus equivalent, so i think $4000+ is on the cards, possibly $5000 at launch.