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[Alexios]

Will it make a visible difference? I was thinking 8GB dimms for later additions to also be by 8GB.

I'd like a better case but they don't have many models in the local online stores without going 3x the price of those and I'd rather pay more for the actual working parts if it won't cause any problems in practice.

If my 1680x1050 LG monitor hadn't broken down forcing me to revert to this 1280x1024 one I would be able to skip that purchase for a while and put that money into a better case instead, but it did.

 

[mkenyon]

Yeah, it will be at half speed pretty much.

Where is local? I might be able to do a bit of searching to help out.

 

[Alexios]

Greece. I was checking out www.plaisio.gr and www.you.gr primarily. The latter seems cheaper overall, not for certain products, so my selection was based on the availability there. I also used to use www.multirama.gr but they seem to have next to nothing in terms of PC parts these days and also www.e-shop.gr which I don't really trust anymore. There are probably more stores I don't know enough about though, there's this site www.skroutz.gr that you can search for stuff and it finds the best price. I'd also rather avoid getting each part from a different store if it won't lead to much gain anyway.

But I doubt you can navigate any of that...

 

[1st Course]

Guys, i just got a pc, was reinstalling and the picture went...went out and bought a vga cable to see if it had switched to that and nothing happened... long story short...i turned it off and on again and im getting nothing..

HDMI says the mode is not supported and the VGA PC mode on my tv just goes black for a second and changes channel

Am i fucked?

Have you tried DVI? get yourself a DVI to HDMI cable if you can and see if it will work.

 

[mkenyon]

Out of curiosity, how much are the cases you listed?

 

[Alexios]

~50-60.

 

[mrklaw]

So I'm thinkin about building a new PC. My current build is from Q3 2009, how much do you think I can sell it for?

Phenom II X4 955 3,2Ghz
Noctua NH-U12P SE2
Sapphire HD4890
XMS3 8GB DDR3 1333Mhz
WD black 500GB
Gigabyte GA-MA770T-UD3P
Corsair VX 550W
Antec 300

couldn't you keep most of that, just swap out the motherboard/CPU/GPU? maybe add an SSD for the OS/apps. Might work out cheaper than selling

 

[mkenyon]

http://www.plaisio.gr/ypologistes-a...utia/BitFenix-Merc-Alpha-Midi-Tower-black.htm

Blickow.

 

[Alexios]

Yeah that was my choice when I was choosing the parts on that site but then I switched to you.gr. I suppose it's not that bad to divide between two stores wherever they're priced best. But I'd never heard of that brand.

 

[mkenyon]

BitFenix is a pretty great company. I've used a lot of their products extensively, and that Merc has a finish that feels incredibly classy. Extremely well built and featured for the price.

It does benefit from adding in a second 120mm fan, but not necessary.

 

[kennah]

Yeah that was my choice when I was choosing the parts on that site but then I switched to you.gr. I suppose it's not that bad to divide between two stores wherever they're priced best. But I'd never heard of that brand.

They're relatively new and fucking amazing.

 

[Rubbish King]

Have you tried DVI? get yourself a DVI to HDMI cable if you can and see if it will work.

I dont have one >.<

 

[sestrugen]

Will the Budget-Solid Starter PC on the OP be enough to play the following games at Medium to High quality @ 1080p?

Civilization V
Anno series
Europa Universalis
Source games
World of Warcraft

 

[EsotericManiac]

I dont have one >.<

I got one at Wal-mart some years ago. It would fairly cheap

 

[Kadey]

Gigabyte errr newegg sent me a new card. I'm still having the same problems.

Anybody know what could be wrong? Took a pic of how I have it hooked up and what I'm getting. Monitors are not turning on as if it's asleep and the red lights are on the motherboard. I put my old GPU in and everything turns on fine.

 

[Alexios]

Alright, nice... Thanks a lot...

This is my new selection atm, with prices.

CoolerMaster HAF 932 Advanced - 131,98 &#8364;
Gigabyte Z77-D3H - 114,49 &#8364;
Intel Core i7 3770K - 309,90 &#8364;
Corsair Vengeance 1600 DDR3 2x8GB - 99,80 &#8364;
Gigabyte Radeon HD7970 3GB OC - 395,00 &#8364;
LG 1080p LED 22EA63V - 172,61 &#8364;
Microsoft 600 Black Wired Keyboard - 11,75 &#8364;
Logitech Speaker System Z323 - 42,41 &#8364;

Total: 1277,94 &#8364;

Plus my old stuff:
CoolerMaster Real Power M700 PSU
2x250GB Seagate HDDs
250GB Storejet Transcend
LG DVDRW
Logitech G400
Crypto Wireless USB Adapter

Around the same &#8364; as before with double the RAM and much nicer case then

Edit: I forgot to add the CPU cooler. I'll see if I can fit one I have first in this case, or just keep the stock.

 

[brentech]

Is there any great reason play games above 1080P

If I buy a new system that's my intention, so I just want to make sure buying a new monitor that supports 1080P tops isn't going to creep into some problem.

 

[mkenyon]

Gigabyte errr newegg sent me a new card. I'm still having the same problems.

Anybody know what could be wrong? Took a pic of how I have it hooked up and what I'm getting. Monitors are not turning on as if it's asleep and the red lights are on the motherboard. I put my old GPU in and everything turns on fine.

Unplug everything ancillary. USB, DVD, USB 3.0, anything on your motherboard that is not absolutely required to boot and get a picture.

Not even kidding, in my old PC, the Sabertooth motherboard had a one off incompatibility with a MSI Lightning Extreme 580 and the onboard USB 3.0. If I unplugged it, I would get a signal. If I put in a different video card with it plugged in, I would get a signal. Weird things have been known to happen.

What PSU do you have, what is your old video card, and what is the new one?

Will the Budget-Solid Starter PC on the OP be enough to play the following games at Medium to High quality @ 1080p?

Civilization V
Anno series
Europa Universalis
Source games
World of Warcraft

Yes. Civ V will chug hard between turns with that processor though.

I dont have one >.<

What resolution did you have your PC set to? Oftentimes, there are strange incompatibilities with TVs and PCs where you have to get a precise resolution in order to even get an image.

Is there any great reason play games above 1080P

If I buy a new system that's my intention, so I just want to make sure buying a new monitor that supports 1080P tops isn't going to creep into some problem.

120Hz.

 

[Kadey]

Unplug everything ancillary. USB, DVD, USB 3.0, anything on your motherboard that is not absolutely required to boot and get a picture.

Not even kidding, in my old PC, the Sabertooth motherboard had a one off incompatibility with a MSI Lightning Extreme 580 and the onboard USB 3.0. If I unplugged it, I would get a signal. If I put in a different video card with it plugged in, I would get a signal. Weird things have been known to happen.

What PSU do you have, what is your old video card, and what is the new one?

PSU model: PC Power and Cooling Silencer Mk III Series 600W Modular Power Supply

Motherboard model: ASRock P67 EXTREME4 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67

I'm replacing a 560 ti with a 7950. Well, trying to.

 

[Vossler]

Having a weird issue with my gtx 670's. Yesterday, I moved all my parts to new case, cleaned the thermal paste/reapplied, and added another gtx670. (Same model as my current one). Booted up, it was fine, even received the popup that the system was sli-compatible. Went into Nvidia control and enabled sli. Today, I am remoting into it, yet I only see one of the 670's listed in the device manager. I re-installed drivers, only thing I can think of is that the sli-bridge is loose, or the power may not be reaching the second one. PSU is 850 watt OCZ gold.
Any other ideas?

 

[mrklaw]

Will the Budget-Solid Starter PC on the OP be enough to play the following games at Medium to High quality @ 1080p?

Civilization V
Anno series
Europa Universalis
Source games
World of Warcraft

GPU should be ok but the CPU might be a bit weak. If you can stretch to the next one up with the i3, that'll give you longer legs, and you can update the CPU later on for an i5 when you get the chance

 

[iavi]

You do get what you pay for when it comes to motherboards. This Biostar TZ77XE3 has had little annoying issue after little annoying issue, and completely fucked itself during a bios update; I had to hard reset the cmos in order to even get the screen to come back on.

The 'no boot device' error that I've been having has nothing to do with the HDD, or cables, it's the bios just not seeing it. I've found a flawless workaround: If I go into the bios management, save, then exit, it'll boot properly. Shit like this.

I'm tempted to do my upgrade to an Asus Sabertooth sooner than later, but I can't; that's basically a rebuild, and I have to get some life out of these parts.

 

[mkenyon]

Yes, yes I'm glad we've all discovered the issues with averages. However, just because FPS has issues determining worst case scenarios (why would you look at a mean and think it'd do that?) doesn't mean it's not useful in some situations. If I know a time period and a fps, I know how many frames I rendered. I'm rendering 15-20% more frames on an identical GPU that can work 11% faster. That doesn't make sense to me, and I was hoping for a more in depth explanation that just "Lol fps is bad."

I apologize for the flippant response, I didn't think that through. To give you a longer explanation:

The frames you are comparing, are you certain that the comparison is free of variables? Are you running the exact same benchmark in the exact same fashion with the exact number of programs up and running?

To give you an idea, in order to get consistent benchmark results, I have to run the exact same bench 5 times in a row and pull from both median and aggregate data. Scott Wasson gave me this tip

Exactly repeatable tests are nice, but they're not always possible. (Ask a biologist!). Look at the test sequence videos in our recent reviews. Some involve a simple walk through an area (Guild Wars, Skyrim, Hitman) that we can repeat with precision and others involve combat (Borderlands 2) that we can't replicate perfectly. Either way, we test each sequence five times for each GPU or CPU being tested and we report the median result for each metric (FPS, time beyond X, etc.)

Check out these Farcry 3 benches that I couldn't get consistent. This was even after 5 total runs per MHz stepping:

That was in a tightly controlled environment with repeated runs and it's still reporting numbers that don't exactly make sense.

When you are looking at FPS, using the first reference run as a standard, if your polling times were .33 seconds different the second time around, then the data can come out differently. If you take a frame latency graph, and find the FPS data by adding each 1000ms of information together, then switch it to 1300ms/2300ms/3300ms the second time, the results can vary by quite a bit.

So to answer your question, you would have to account for many many more things to make sure your reading is accurate.

 

[lifa-cobex]

Wondering if anyone could help me on this?

Thinking about buying GTX 660 http://www.ebuyer.com/397601-asus-g...l-dvi-hdmi-displayport-pci-e-gtx660-dc2o-2gd5 but I'm a bit worried about it fitting in my case. It seems quite big.
I have the Antec All Black 302 case http://www.ebuyer.com/391870-antec-all-black-300-case-0-761345-15321-8

Anyone have this case/ card that could possibly enlighten me?

 

[Appollowexx]

Paid off my final build:

Lian Li PC-6B Midi Tower
Intel i5 3570k (3.40GHz)
EVGA GTX680 4GB
Asus P8Z77-V LX Motherboard
WD Green 2TB HD
Corsair 8GB 1600mhz DDR3 Vengeance
Corsair 650W TX ATX/EPS 80 PLUS Bronze PSU
Coolmaster Hyper 212 EVO

Total Price £1047.49 from amazon.uk

Parts will arrive by Saturday and hopefully I will build on Monday. Back to the ''master race''.
I plan on picking up a 256GB SSD to pair with the HD in a few months time, then finally adding a further 8GB of DDR3 to end with 16GB. But £1000 was my budget an I'm already slightly over so I've restrained for now... first world problems.

 

[Kadey]

MK.

Your idea worked a little. I was able to get to windows login screen with that. Everything seems except my monitor still doesn't display a picture. Computer turns on and it gets to that point all the while the display isn't showing. Still an improvement over the red lights thing.

 

[derder]

Does anyone know what sort of performance I can get out of this if I attach it to my desktop and share the desktop on the network? I continue to backup my blurays and see this as the endgame of my collection before 4k comes out.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111168

 

[mkenyon]

Next I'd try different cables from the PC to the monitor.

Does anyone know what sort of performance I can get out of this if I attach it to my desktop and share the desktop on the network? I continue to backup my blurays and see this as the endgame of my collection before 4k comes out.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111168

It'll depend on your RAID array and your network speed.

FWIW, out of the sys admin guys I know, they all swear by the WD Sentinels, QNap, and Synology offerings.

 

[derder]

It'll depend on your RAID array and your network speed.

FWIW, out of the sys admin guys I know, they all swear by the WD Sentinels, QNap, and Synology offerings.

It'll be on gigabit on a home network with JBOD.

Those options are so $$$

 

[mkenyon]

The WD Sentinels include RE4 (enterprise) drives. The Synology options aren't too much more than what you have listed.

But trust me, when it comes to file storage, having the most reliable and smooth operating device is priceless. Can you imagine losing all of your data?

 

[Tattooth]

This may seem like a silly question, but I want to be sure before I upgrade.
After I upgrade my motherboard, I can still use my secondary hard drive right?
Can I put essential stuff from my C drive onto my secondary drive and then after the motherboard is in, move it all back?

 

[Kadey]

Same thing MK.

 

[mkenyon]

Do you have other PCI-E power cables you could try out? Maybe molex->PCI-E adapters even.

 

[derder]

The WD Sentinels include RE4 (enterprise) drives. The Synology options aren't too much more than what you have listed.

But trust me, when it comes to file storage, having the most reliable and smooth operating device is priceless. Can you imagine losing all of your data?

It's JBOD, I won't lose all of my data. I'll also be using WD Reds. I'm not too concerned with it.

 

[IcyRhythms]

May want to sell my PC so building this new one doesn't hurt the pocket very much.

Realistically, how much do you guys suppose I could get for

i72600K
GTX 570
Asus Sabertooth MOBO
Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
8GB Vengeance RAM
Cooler Master HAF 922 Case

 

[garath]

May want to sell my PC so building this new one doesn't hurt the pocket very much.

Realistically, how much do you guys suppose I could get for

i72600K
GTX 570
Asus Sabertooth MOBO
Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
8GB Vengeance RAM
Cooler Master HAF 922 Case

Just out of curiosity, why are you building a new one? that's a great machine.

 

[VE3TRO]

So guys I'm going to attempt to build my first PC but I need to find out what will be the best config for what I want to do on it.

I'll be wanting to run games at high detail settings while at 1920x1080 and I will also like to use it for video editing.

I would personally favour the video editing over the gaming so I'm looking for a powerful CPU which can encode H.264 in real time or quicker for 1080p video. Not sure in regards to GPU. At the moment I use a 580 GTX with CUDA enabled in Premiere Pro CS6.

Been looking at the Intel Xeon E5-2687W @ 3.10GHz (Turbo Speed: 3.8 GHz) but it's quite alot in price and I'm trying to have a budget of £2000 but I can go over as long as it's not too silly.

 

[IcyRhythms]

Just out of curiosity, why are you building a new one? that's a great machine.

I just enjoy having new things. I will probably just give it to my girl like I had originally planned so we can start playing some PC games together and go ahead and start building the new one anyway. She's more of a console girl. I would just like to know what some of you think it's worth at this point.

 

[FireRises]

I just enjoy having new things. I will probably just give it to my girl like I had originally planned so we can start playing some PC games together and go ahead and start building the new one anyway. She's more of a console girl. I would just like to know what some of you think it's worth at this point.

what are you targeting for your new build?

 

[IcyRhythms]

what are you targeting for your new build?

Difficult to say at this point because I'm not really sure. I just know I want something considerably more powerful. Twice the amount of RAM or more, something in the 3770K range or perhaps a bit higher, a definitely not anything weaker than 680. I may even want to go with a 690 or Titan. My concern with building at this moment is none of us really know what games will be doing in two years. A setup like the one I want to build at first glance someone would probably say "that's a REALLY nice rig" but in two years, will the new consoles force even more upgrading?

 

[Cronen]

Hi PC GAF. I have a query and I hope you can help straighten this out for me!

I'm currently running Windows 8 32bit on this machine. Within the next few days I'm building a brand new PC for myself, all brand new parts except from my HDD which I'll just be transferring from the old machine to the new one.

Now I know that you can't simply upgrade from 32bit to 64bit, and that the only way to do so is to get a Win8 DVD and install the 64bit version on to the machine, which would essentially wipe the HDD and the computer clean. What I would like to know is - if I did this, would I be able to use my activation code that I got when I bought Windows 8? Or is that activation code locked to the current PC? I ask because I know that with 32bit I'm locked to 4GB of RAM, and ideally I would like to go beyond that if possible.

Many thanks.

 

[Kadey]

I give up. I'm just going to ebay it.

It's just not going to work with my setup for some reason.

Do you think it's the card itself? What are the chances of running into two defective cards?

 

[FireRises]

Difficult to say at this point because I'm not really sure. I just know I want something considerably more powerful. Twice the amount of RAM or more, something in the 3770K range or perhaps a bit higher, a definitely not anything weaker than 680. I may even want to go with a 690 or Titan. My concern with building at this moment is none of us really know what games will be doing in two years. A setup like the one I want to build at first glance someone would probably say "that's a REALLY nice rig" but in two years, will the new consoles force even more upgrading?

Yeah I know what you mean. I do think the consoles will drive more upgrading in a few years but a 3770k should handle almost anything for another 3 years, by that time you'll want to do a GPU upgrade anyways.

 

[tarheel91]

I apologize for the flippant response, I didn't think that through. To give you a longer explanation:

The frames you are comparing, are you certain that the comparison is free of variables? Are you running the exact same benchmark in the exact same fashion with the exact number of programs up and running?

To give you an idea, in order to get consistent benchmark results, I have to run the exact same bench 5 times in a row and pull from both median and aggregate data. Scott Wasson gave me this tip



Check out these Farcry 3 benches that I couldn't get consistent. This was even after 5 total runs per MHz stepping:



That was in a tightly controlled environment with repeated runs and it's still reporting numbers that don't exactly make sense.

When you are looking at FPS, using the first reference run as a standard, if your polling times were .33 seconds different the second time around, then the data can come out differently. If you take a frame latency graph, and find the FPS data by adding each 1000ms of information together, then switch it to 1300ms/2300ms/3300ms the second time, the results can vary by quite a bit.

So to answer your question, you would have to account for many many more things to make sure your reading is accurate.

Everything was held constant when I benchmarked (Heaven benchmark). I even allowed the GPU to cool down and then waited for it to heat up to 40C before benchmarking. However, this is not just from the benchmark. I compared FPS in GPU limited situations in Planetside 2 before and after and I was again 15-20% greater. The same was true in TF2.

However, after looking at this in more detail last night, I think I found an explanation. I have a Gigabyte card that runs stock at 900Mhz, however, the memory frequency was left untouched. Thus, I'm thinking the memory clock was limiting performance moreso than the card clock.

 

[EsotericManiac]

Do you guys think most PSUs I purchase would fit into my dell case (XPS 435mt)?

 

[Alexios]

Alright, nice... Thanks a lot...

This is my new selection atm, with prices.

CoolerMaster HAF 932 Advanced - 131,98 &#8364;
Gigabyte Z77-D3H - 114,49 &#8364;
Intel Core i7 3770K - 309,90 &#8364;
Corsair Vengeance 1600 DDR3 2x8GB - 99,80 &#8364;
Gigabyte Radeon HD7970 3GB OC - 395,00 &#8364;
LG 1080p LED 22EA63V - 172,61 &#8364;
Microsoft 600 Black Wired Keyboard - 11,75 &#8364;
Logitech Speaker System Z323 - 42,41 &#8364;

Total: 1277,94 &#8364;

Plus my old stuff:
CoolerMaster Real Power M700 PSU
2x250GB Seagate HDDs
250GB Storejet Transcend
LG DVDRW
Logitech G400
Crypto Wireless USB Adapter

Around the same &#8364; as before with double the RAM and much nicer case then

Edit: I forgot to add the CPU cooler. I'll see if I can fit one I have first in this case, or just keep the stock.

Following this up, would I perhaps be better off switching to a comparably priced GTX 670 model (plain non OC Gigabyte GTX 670 is 386,90 &#8364? From a quick search the various tiers of these models seem to perform similarly despite the difference in RAM amount so I was wondering if I should maybe get that for the physx games? This didn't occur to me previously until I saw Batman in one of the 7970 reviews which reminded me of the physx implementation in various games like that which I currently turn off (even though I have an Nvidia card, it's too old for that stuff). Every time I'm close to finalizing these things happen!

 

[mkenyon]

Everything was held constant when I benchmarked (Heaven benchmark). I even allowed the GPU to cool down and then waited for it to heat up to 40C before benchmarking. However, this is not just from the benchmark. I compared FPS in GPU limited situations in Planetside 2 before and after and I was again 15-20% greater. The same was true in TF2.

However, after looking at this in more detail last night, I think I found an explanation. I have a Gigabyte card that runs stock at 900Mhz, however, the memory frequency was left untouched. Thus, I'm thinking the memory clock was limiting performance moreso than the card clock.

Very interesting. Maybe when VRAM is heavily loaded with maxed out heaven, increasing memory clock has a more profound effect. If you have the time, would be really cool to see:

1) Stock
2) Stock with increase mem clock
3) OC core with stock mem clock
4) OC core and mem clock

May want to sell my PC so building this new one doesn't hurt the pocket very much.

Realistically, how much do you guys suppose I could get for

i72600K
GTX 570
Asus Sabertooth MOBO
Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
8GB Vengeance RAM
Cooler Master HAF 922 Case

I sold a similar system with a 670, SSD, and two 1TB Spinpoints for $1000. So maybe $700 or so.

I give up. I'm just going to ebay it.

It's just not going to work with my setup for some reason.

Do you think it's the card itself? What are the chances of running into two defective cards?

I have no idea. It has to be cable (as in DVI) or power related. Did you try different outputs from the back of the card? Try using a displayport adapter to DVI?

Do you guys think most PSUs I purchase would fit into my dell case (XPS 435mt)?

Probably. The BP550 from the OP is what you will want.

Following this up, would I perhaps be better off switching to a comparably priced GTX 670 model (plain non OC Gigabyte GTX 670 is 386,90 &#8364? From a quick search the various tiers of these models seem to perform similarly despite the difference in RAM amount so I was wondering if I should maybe get that for the physx games? This didn't occur to me previously until I saw Batman in one of the 7970 reviews which reminded me of the physx implementation in various games like that which I currently turn off (even though I have an Nvidia card, it's too old for that stuff). Every time I'm close to finalizing these things happen!

The original benchmark comparisons are a bit outdated. Right now the 7970 is going to be a better pick, and will continue to improve to the point of surpassing the 680 over the next few months.

 

[Alexios]

The original benchmark comparisons are a bit outdated. Right now the 7970 is going to be a better pick, and will continue to improve to the point of surpassing the 680 over the next few months.

That's impressive, thanks, sticking with that selection then!

Changed the case too if you noticed, went for a pricier full tower thanks to the savings.

Is there a new review/benchmark of this model vs others so I can marvel at it? Or at least a very similar one?

Gigabyte Radeon HD7970 3GB OC

 

[Dave_6]

Thought I would post this here. Long story made short, I need to sell this EVGA 4GB 670 that I bought from mkenyon a few weeks ago. I've had other things come up and building a PC is not in the cards right now so I need to unload the couple things I have bought. The only thing I have done with it since I got it is take it out of the box and check it out. Been sitting on my kitchen table ever since.

I'll take what I paid for it which is $300 shipped (Paypal only). Thanks guys.

 

[mkenyon]

It's a solid card. Has a backplate and is all pretty: