Buying a gaming PC. Give to me recommendations.



  • SHODAN, is that you?



  • Ok, I took a snapshot of my video card's location:

    I got out the trusty ruler and there appears to be a solid 2" clearance between the right side of my existing card and the drive cage. Tight, the ASUS card is 1" longer than mine, plus it has a power plug extending out, but should be doable.

    Going to order tonight. If I'm making a huge mistake based on that photo, please tell me ASAP.



  • Additional question: would there be any point to adding the second video card and keeping my existing one? I only have two monitors to drive, so I assume not...



  • Probably will cause more harm than good if apps default to it, but if you configure it right you could have two distinct hdmi output which could be cool for multi monitor.

    But overall? Id start with the new card and keep the old as backup.



  • Yeah, that's what I figure. Besides, who knows how cooling would work with those behemoths side-by-side.

    I grew up with Voodoo 3's, man. These new things are just too big.



  • Not just cooling, but side by side drivers of things already notorious for explosions.


  • :belt_onion:

    @blakeyrat said:

    Going to order tonight. If I'm making a huge mistake based on that photo, please tell me ASAP.

    Looks like it'll be ok. Tight, but ok.

    Your hard drive mounts straight in, which makes all the difference. I literally had to rip the drive enclosure out of the front of my case because I got a smallish mid-tower that had way too wide of a hard drive enclosure. Pissed me off, but I was just not in the mood to wait another week for a replacement case.

    FYI - the power plug on my card actually goes straight in on the top of the card sticking out of the motherboard, so it doesn't require an extra inch of clearance on the end like my old GTS6800 did. I have a GTX760, but my guess would be that the 770 and 780 are the same. Checking out pics online, it seems they all do it this way now, probably because otherwise you can't fit the fucking card in any cases.



  • Well if worst come to worse, I can break out the dremel, move the HD down a few slots, and cut off the top few drive bays. I don't need the 47 of them the case shipped with.


  • :belt_onion:

    Yeah, I think you're good.
    Here's what mine ended up looking like... you can see it tucks inside the side of the hard drive enclosure. I had to snip some of the hard drive seating bracers out of there 👹


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I had to ditch the drive cage to accommodate my card, luckily I had other slots to place drives. That particular drive cage was secondary.

    Let us know how you get on with your rig after the upgrade. It'll be interesting to know how much of a difference it makes.

    To see how GPU limited you are you could download a GPU task manager. AMD have one I'd assume that NVidia have one too. I'll see if I can dig out the link for you when I get home. It's good to run it on your second monitor while you tweak your game settings. It'll help you diagnose whether you're being limited by the GPU, or Video RAM, etc.

    I've been playing Wildstar recently and the optimisation is crap. I had to diagnose which effects were raping the card the most (the Graphics card task manager really helped). Turned out that shadows and clutter were the most expensive on my card. The game defaulted to windowed full screen, so switching to full screen improved performance quite a bit, and obviously a driver update helped. They've made recent updates which have really improved the situation.



  • Dude, that's the most confusing map, ever.

    I-5 is the Red-Green-Black curling one?

    How does this prove you can't find an electronics store?


  • ♿ (Parody)

    LOL. There's a commenter on Althouse's blog. Goes by the handle betamax3000. He'll post stuff "in the voice of" some character. One of the regulars is "Terrible Reading Comprehension Guy." This post reminded me of that.

    Example:

    "Althouse has surely missed the point on this one. Hobby Lobby did not require women to wear face-covering veils: indeed, many of the sparkles and beads available at the store could be used to enhance said veil. Furthermore, her post is referencing France, not the United States: I'm not even sure if they have Hobby Lobby in France. Poorly reasoned, Althouse, poorly reasoned."



  • Is it wrong that I read 'Althouse' as 'Atwood' and found that my comprehension was not in the slightest altered by this? I just assumed another case of JDGI.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    the one in Everett closed.

    Not unless it closed very recently; I was in there two or three weeks ago.

    Points 1 and 2, yeah.


  • BINNED

    I'm enjoying my MOUS 9—brought to you by the makers of the RATs



  • I got my bits and pieces today. Trying to decide whether I wanna tackle computer surgery tonight or save it for tomorrow.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    I have a 650 ti boost 2gb and my son says Skyrim plays fine on the highest graphical settings. (I haven't gotten around to playing more than 5 minutes of it, but it seemed smooth to me. I think he plays with about a hundred mods.)

    I'll admit to being lazy and more or less getting my last couple of video card recommendations off the tom's hardware "bang for the buck" chart.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    Best Buy's website refers to video cards as "video graphics cards". Would you buy one from them? Would you?

    What's wrong with that? I prefer "display adapter" but either way it distinguishes them from video capture cards.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @darkmatter said:

    Your hard drive mounts straight in, which makes all the difference. I literally had to rip the drive enclosure out of the front of my case because I got a smallish mid-tower that had way too wide of a hard drive enclosure.

    Newer cases have a removable cage. Blakey's looks like it might come out.


  • :belt_onion:

    @FrostCat said:

    Newer cases have a removable cage.

    Irony being that my 15 year old computer case had a removable cage. My brand new 6 month old one... does not.

    Good cases do have removable cages, but is not some new-fangled technology.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @darkmatter said:

    Irony being that my 15 year old computer case had a removable cage. My brand new 6 month old one... does not.

    Good cases do have removable cages, but is not some new-fangled technology.

    1. That's only ironic in the Alanis Morissette sense.
    2. Fair enough, although I think even some cheap cases have them now.

  • :belt_onion:

    @FrostCat said:

    That's only ironic in the Alanis Morissette sense.

    Irony: a state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often amusing as a result.

    I am pretty sure the state of affairs I listed above was quite contrary to what you expected, and that was amusing to me as a result.


  • :belt_onion:

    Everyone thinking that the word ironic is used incorrectly every time it is ever used is getting old. I think people correcting others using the word are wrong about it almost as often as the people they were trying to correct.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @darkmatter said:

    I am pretty sure the state of affairs I listed above was quite contrary to what you expected, and that was amusing to me as a result.

    Sorry. Now that you mention it, I remember I had a case I bought in 2003 and threw away years ago that had removable drive cages.


  • :belt_onion:

    I would have kept re-using my old one with the removable cages, but the internal frame is bent in and it is a real bitch to get motherboards to fit.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @darkmatter said:

    I would have kept re-using my old one with the removable cages, but the internal frame is bent in and it is a real bitch to get motherboards to fit.

    Mine wasn't toolless, and it only supported 80mm case fans. My current case, a Fractal Design Core 3000 (the version with USB3) is much nicer anyway--and I threw out all the thumbscrews and replaced them with larger aftermarket ones that you can actually tighten and loosen with your fingers.



  • @FrostCat said:

    Newer cases have a removable cage. Blakey's looks like it might come out.

    It does, and did. I slide the HD down to make space to remove the cage, 4 screws and a couple of those clicky-handles and BAM. Plenty of space. Still an extra empty drive bay, too, if I ever need it.

    I got it installed. Nvidia driver picked it up without even a hiccup-- didn't even move my icons around! The wifi card took a bit more finangling due to crappy/misleading driver downloads. (Protip: ASUS network cards include the current driver in the "utilities" and an old non-working drive under "drivers". Go figure.)

    EDIT: Shoot I was gonna take a photo of it with the new card installed to compare/contrast with the photo above but... I didn't. and I ain't gonna pull it apart again.



  • With my old card, Skyrim setup detected "Ultra Quality". With this new card, it detects "High Quality". Go figure.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    EDIT: Shoot I was gonna take a photo of it with the new card installed to compare/contrast with the photo above but... I didn't. and I ain't gonna pull it apart again.

    You're not using thumbscrews? On my case, taking off the side panel, taking a picture, and putting the panel back on would take under a minute, and if I stretch I could do it without getting up.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    With my old card, Skyrim setup detected "Ultra Quality". With this new card, it detects "High Quality". Go figure.

    What does GeForce Experience suggest?



  • @FrostCat said:

    You're not using thumbscrews?

    Yes I am.

    @FrostCat said:

    On my case, taking off the side panel, taking a picture, and putting the panel back on would take under a minute, and if I stretch I could do it without getting up.

    Ok. Good for you? You get a cookie? I'm not going to crawl under my desk to make you a photo, suck it.



  • Oh yeah I guess I should re-run that huh.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    I'm not going to crawl under my desk to make you a photo, suck it.

    You keep your computer under your desk like some kind of animal?



  • Yeah. The top of the desk has two 22"+ monitors, an Xbox One plus Kinect for it, 2 pretty large speakers, Hauppauge game capture thingy, keyboard, mouse, a lot of trash. I need to find a way to squeeze my Xbox 360 up there too so I can play EDF 2025, but I haven't gotten un-lazy enough to do that yet.

    Plus my PC's silent under the desk, above the desk I'd hear the damned thing.


  • :belt_onion:

    @blakeyrat said:

    With my old card, Skyrim setup detected "Ultra Quality". With this new card, it detects "High Quality". Go figure

    That's possibly because the card is newer than the game, so it shits bricks and defaults to a sufficiently shitty quality so as to guarantee it won't blow up your computer.

    I would probably re-install geforce driver too regardless of whether it worked out of the box perfectly or not, in case there's some fancy card-specific mojo it can enable that was not previously enabled.



  • It also could be because I ran the detecter thing before I updated the driver.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @darkmatter said:

    Everyone thinking that the word ironic is used incorrectly every time it is ever used is getting old.

    Use #1.


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