Post your gaming setup!

[n0cturnal]

*snip*

Mm, dat monitor!

How are the temperatures on your GPUs? 800D isn't exactly known for its good cooling.

[Drunkenvalley]

Oh damn, the Noctua fans were literally leaking oil? That's bad alright...

[Danno]

Love my monitor. Worth every penny

After spending what I did to achieve great air temps in my 800D, I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to invest around another $100 on fans and filters. My 670s never hit above 67c when using maxed settings on Heaven and Valley benchmarks, but I use an aggressive fan curve since I can't hear them with my headset on.

The setup I found that worked best for my 800D and cooling my GPUs were to make every fan as intake (with fan filters) and only having the GPUs exhaust along with passive exhaust from the cases vents. It has worked very well. I used to have only the bottom fan as intake like Corsair intended, but the negative pressure in my case caused a lot of dust to get in, along with the cooling not being as great as it is now.

[a21fa7c67f26f6d49a20c2c51]

120Hz for FPS games and other high awareness/quick response dependant games it's a godsent really.

Sadly, nobody reacts that fast. The benefit of these displays is that they look very pretty.

For the sake of argument, let's say you're an average sized adult human-being (anybody past puberty). The length between your brain and your finger tips is going to be somewhere around 1m: you've probably noticed most people you encounter are roughly 2m tall and also that your arm span is 'close enough' to the measure from your head to your toes.

Action potentials travel 50ms/s (+/- 20%) in alpha motor neurons (the nerves that send signals to the nerve fibres that make your body move about) in your arms/wrist (see: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1557081)

Thanks to the wonders of the metric system we can see that the time a signal takes to travel from your brain to your fingers is 20ms (1m / 50m/s = 1/50s). A 60hz monitor refreshes at 1/60s or 16ms which is already quicker than a signal can get from your brain to your finger tips. if send a signal on frame A, frame A+1 will be displayed before it arrives at your fingers.

that doesn't take into account the processing time that has to go on your brain in order to respond to a stimulus. The travel time was measured by sticking electrodes on nerves, sending a shock at one end and waiting for it to arrive on the other. You don't instantly respond to stimulus that way: photons from your display hit your eye - they get turned into an image, you decide "i'm going to dodge left, that means press my left index finger, arm go! *signal fired*"

Even people you would think to be very sensitive, like race-car drivers or fighter pilots, tend to have similar reaction times to "normal people"(http://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/50/17063.abstract). I think it would be fair to put top-ranked 'videogame athletes' into a category with those sorts of people (ie: the worlds best starcraft player isn't 5x better than the worlds best military pilots). Navy pilots have a reaction time for noticing a 100% contrast 'spot' on a at 350 cd/m (pretty similar to what a good LCD today would be) screen of around 220ms with the best measure times around 140ms (see: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a178485.pdf). See a change: press a button is ~220ms, travel time for the signal down your arm is around 20ms so that's around 1/5 of a second just to say "oh look, something is different".

What does all that mean? Even if you had a brain 10x more 'sensitive/quicker' than a fighter pilot, and nerves that worked 10x faster than any human being, a 60hz monitor would still draw 2 frames before you could react. In the real world of normal brains and nerves: it makes no difference whether 10 frames or 20 scroll past before you press your kill button: your crumby ape body doesn't have the kind of performance needed to react to changes any quicker than that.
The real reason to want a 120hz screen is because it looks nice. You might not be able to react any faster but you can notice that motion looks smoother (assuming you have hardware to drive > 60 FPS) and you can appreciate the color saturation, viewing angle, contrast, etc.

[Xuvial]

Thanks to the wonders of the metric system we can see that the time a signal takes to travel from your brain to your fingers is 20ms (1m / 50m/s = 1/50s). A 60hz monitor refreshes at 1/60s or 16ms which is already quicker than a signal can get from your brain to your finger tips. if send a signal on frame A, frame A+1 will be displayed before it arrives at your fingers.

Have to stop you there, wrong on too many levels.

Firstly, the frame doesn't "arrive at your fingers", it arrives to your eyes.

Secondly, additional frames are only rendered AFTER you input further controls (e.g. move the mouse), not before. How can the game render something to your left when you haven't turned left to look over there? It will only do it as you turn, only when you move your mouse can the game begin to register and render that movement. That takes additional time.

Thirdly, you're not understanding how input lag works. When they say that it takes 16ms for a 60hz monitor to display a frame, they are referring to the maximum display time. I.e. there is a chance of you moving your mouse at the beginning of a frame and the monitor not displaying that movement until 16ms have passed until the next frame has been displayed. 120hz reduces that maximum response time to 8ms, which is excellent especially in fast-paced games.

As to the rest of your post, look up what screen tearing and ghosting is, and what 120hz does to address those. No point writing a thesis about 120hz's least significant benefit.

[Cyanotical]

Navy pilots have a reaction time for noticing a 100% contrast 'spot' on a at 350 cd/m (pretty similar to what a good LCD today would be) screen of around 220ms with the best measure times around 140ms (see: http://www.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a178485.pdf).

completely OT, but all i could think was "that's why they're in the Navy and not the Air Force" :P

what most people seem to forget that at high levels of intense game play, whether it's counterstrike or guitar hero, top players play pro-actively, not re-actively, meaning that all this nonsense about reaction time is pointless, only a bambi reacts

[Xuvial]

what most people seem to forget that at high levels of intense game play, whether it's counterstrike or guitar hero, top players play pro-actively, not re-actively, meaning that all this nonsense about reaction time is pointless, only a bambi reacts

I would go as far as saying it's 50/50 in first person shooters, you can only be proactive to a certain extent. The moment you feel (or hear) a bullet impact from behind your character and know you have 0.5 seconds to live unless you do something, it's all reaction from there.

[Idrinkwhiterussians]

Do you mean Rogue the brewery?

I do indeed. Dead guys abound...

Anyway, cleaning will commence later today and I should have pics up by tomorrow afternoon

[Deleted]

I would go as far as saying it's 50/50 in first person shooters, you can only be proactive to a certain extent. The moment you feel (or hear) a bullet impact from behind your character and know you have 0.5 seconds to live unless you do something, it's all reaction from there.

Pro CS is like 90% pre aim 10% twitch not 50/50

[a21fa7c67f26f6d49a20c2c51]

Firstly, the frame doesn't "arrive at your fingers", it arrives to your eyes.

When your brain sends a signal to motor neurons in your fingers it most certainly arrives at your fingers unless you have a neurodegenerative disease.
Light from your monitor hitting your eyes starts the the process of reacting, it doesn't end it.

Secondly, additional frames are only rendered AFTER you input further controls (e.g. move the mouse), not before.

Games render frames constantly whether you're moving or not. Reaction time is a combination of the time it takes for you to become aware of a difference in game state and the time it takes you to actually do something with that information.

How can the game render something to your left when you haven't turned left to look over there?

Reaction time is responding to things -- if a fire appears under your feat the game world will know about it before you do because the instant that event happens it won't have been drawn to the display yet. Likewise for an enemy running into view. You don't need to do anything in order for a reaction to be required.

If you're turning left and an enemy comes into view -- it's still going to be upwards of 10 frames on a 60hz display before your brain becomes aware of the "event" that demands a response and sends appropriate signals to your fingers. My argument goes that "if an extra 30 frames were drawn in that time it takes to react you don't really gain anything in terms of reaction time, but you'll experience the motion of your character on screen or the panning of the camera as being more fluid.

I.e. there is a chance of you moving your mouse at the beginning of a frame and the monitor not displaying that movement until 16ms have passed until the next frame has been displayed. 120hz reduces that maximum response time to 8ms, which is excellent especially in fast-paced games.

It's good to refresh the screen quicker - Microsoft built a really impressive rig to test how small you need to make input latency before it becomes unnoticable and they found it was down around 10ms. Noticing input latency is different from reacting to something and I mentioned that explicilty at the end of my post: you can notice the smoothness of motion). That's true for any game or even any application: lower input latency means your drawing application cursor more closely tracks your pen-tip. It's one of the reasons drawing on a Surface tablet feels better than doing it on an iPad.

As to the rest of your post, look up what screen tearing and ghosting is, and what 120hz does to address those.

Those are image quality benefits - they make things look much nicer. They won't make you react any quicker.

...Your point being? You're the one obsessing over it in the first place.

That somebody who is curious about the reasons to prefer a particular technology should be told the truth about its advantages: IPS displays with high refresh rates look nicer than TN displays: they tend to have better color reproduction, less blurring, they often support 3D, they have better view angles, etc. Getting lost in talk about something that is nonsense (reaction times) means he doesn't have the information to make an informed decision. He might opt for a cheaper panel because "he's not a pro gamer" when the better viewing angle would have been a boon for him because he often watches movies on his screen while riding an exercise bike in the corner of the room.

[Drunkenvalley]

Those are image quality benefits - they make things look much nicer. They won't make you react any quicker.

...Your point being? You're the one obsessing over it in the first place.

[Jaynith]

Here's my little corner of the house.



Just finished putting together the new build.




Case: Mountain Mods U2-UFO
CPU: I5-3570K
Motherboard: Asus Maximus V Formula
GPU: Asus 660TI DC2
PSU: sleeved Corsair HX750
HSF: Corsair H100i
SSD: Crucial M4 128gb
HHD: random 1tb
RAM: 8gb G.Skill RipjawsX

Monitor1: Samsung 27" LED
Monitor2: AOC 24" LCD
Keyboard: Razer BlackWidow
Mouse: steelseries Legendary Wow mouse (i love it =P)

Going to give it a few days to let the tim burn in before I start the overclock.

[Deleted]

love that case Jay but is it noisy with all them fans?

[Jaynith]

love that case Jay but is it noisy with all them fans?

Actually, its pretty dang silent. I have a fan controller so I set them to the lowest setting possible, and the air coming out the top is pretty chilly. The little space heater under my desk makes more noise

[DeltrusDisc]

love that case Jay but is it noisy with all them fans?

Why assume that a lot of fans is a lot of sound? It's a Mountain Mods case with what looks like a fan controller. I'd consider that probably quite silent...

[n0cturnal]

Why assume that a lot of fans is a lot of sound? It's a Mountain Mods case with what looks like a fan controller. I'd consider that probably quite silent...

Adding a lot of fans will make noise sooner or later even if they are quiet on their own.

[DeltrusDisc]

Adding a lot of fans will make noise sooner or later even if they are quiet on their own.

More fans than are in that case. 10 fans all set low or even medium that are made to be as silent as possible will still be very silent.

Besides, space heater? lol he might as well turn the fans to max.

[n0cturnal]

More fans than are in that case. 10 fans all set low or even medium that are made to be as silent as possible will still be very silent.

Besides, space heater? lol he might as well turn the fans to max.

It really depends on how loud the fans are and how many you add. Having 2 fans of lets say 19dB would make 22dB of sounds, having 4 19dB fans would increase it to 25dB and so on.

[Deleted]

Why assume that I assumed that it was noisy ? Yea Noct that's what I was getting at

[DeltrusDisc]

Take for instance my computer.
I have 2x200mm fans, 1x230mm, 1x140mm, and 1x120mm.

Most if not all are running at 40% of not even 12v. It's obnoxiously silent... for a non-sound-proofed case.