Computer Forum Chat Thread

[Xuvial]

Mod will move it if it's build-related, either way people will respond to his question because it's in the right forum. Like 80% of questions are build-related anyway and the main Computer forum has become more of a "Computer News Discussion" place.

[Drunkenvalley]

Which is honestly a fair bit boring. I understand the desire for content specifically, but I find it's a bit zealous.

Anyhow, I've ordered a GTX 680, which is supposed to arrive at the website's quarters on Wednesday, and hopefully shipped onwards to me the same day... I hope there won't be any "OOPS NVM WE DIDN'T GET ANY" moments on the site.

[BicycleMafioso]

Meh, the computer forums were intended to being a tech help/problem forum, and with all the "halp me buy x" it scared them away. Being divided is a far better idea and gives you a better overlook.


/opinion

[Deleted]

How easy would it be to put a window in a side panel (and make it look nice)?

Buy yourself one of those little Dremel machines with the disc cutters (they usually come with a selection) and that should go through your case (aluminium or mild steel) no bother.

I bought this one a while back and it's perfect for case modding. I've even used it to repair the plastic fairings on my bike and it's been great.

Mark out the area you want to cut with masking tape and draw your lines on it. The cutting discs and little filing tools are small enough that you can make good clean lines and fairly smooth curves if you are careful. You can probably find clear PVC at a local craft/hobby store which you can drill holes in to mount some extra fans if you need to.

Good luck.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

So...Graphics Card brands:

Anybody know anything about Powercolor? They have an HD 7950 for €330. Any reason why it is 30-50 euros cheaper than sapphire/gigabyte/xfx?

[BicycleMafioso]

It's less expensive because it's less known and they compete with price as a good argument. They hope people will buy it to attract long-time customers. There's nothing wrong with their products or their aftermarket solutions, but, I'm unsure of the warranties or customer support - I haven't delved in them at all.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Sounds good then, I'm always a bit skeptical when I see a product 20% cheaper than everything else on the market.

[Cyanotical]

Err no I was referring to i5 2500K, which sorta squishes an i5 750 in games >_< it's really quite a huge jump in stuff like WoW, Skyrim, BF3, etc. Don't get me wrong, i5 750 is still pretty decent for gaming.

I remember when i5 750 was the quad-core gaming beast of it's time and we were recommending it in all our builds. Good times! And then SB came around to literally face-fuck every other CPU in the world :O

the performance difference from first gen to second gen core-i's was rather huge, even going from my 990x to the 3960x was a huge improvement, but i doubt we'll get a repeat, intel seems to have dropped the ball for overclockers/enthusiasts, both with the thermal problems on IB, and the lack of unlocked E5 Xeons

perhaps AMD can pick it up with a revised bulldozer design??

otherwise, i think those who want to overclock on 22nm or smaller are going to have to start getting familiar with phase changers

[Adappy]

So I've caught the water cooling bug... and guess what I'm thinking of doing with my old CM690II Advanced... /revs his dremel tool

(the fan on the far right is hard to see, but it's 3x120mm fans next to each other )


Edit: on an unrelated note, anyone know where one could buy some replacement motherboard standoffs? I stripped the threads in a couple of the ones in this case (did it when installing the motherboard that used to be in it, just now getting around to fixing it)

[BicycleMafioso]

Mm, but it's not really not fair to expect the same effect as going from i7 990x -> i7 3960x or i5 750 -> i5 2500k
Both were architectual changes.
A better comparison would be to compare the i5 750 to the i5 650 and the i7 960 to the i7 970, and then from i5 2500k to the i5 3570k
Because the three were die shrinks.

Or Sandy Bridge to Haswell.

I didn't expect huge upgrades, but hey, there were some light points. The overclocking could be a bit better, but I think we set the bar a bit too high with Sandy Bridge.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Just as I think I have decided on a motherboard, i'm starting to have second thoughts on the AsRock Z77 Extreme4 :/

Anybody want to make the case for the Extreme4 or any other Z77 board between 100 and 200 dollars?

[kidsafe]

Do you want a motherboard that crams in as much hardware value per dollar? ASRock.

Do you want a motherboard with some nice firmware/software features as well as a Super I/O fan controller? Asus.

Everyone else? Meh. Gigabyte and MSI really don't seem to offer anything more than ASRock does. EVGA's motherboard team kind of had a messy divorce with half of them going to Sapphire.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

For Asus, it is basically a toss-up between these motherboards

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Int...ABERTOOTH_Z77/ 182 euros

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Int...55/P8Z77V_PRO/ 172 euros

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Int...t_1155/P8Z77V/ 154 euros

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Int...155/P8Z77V_LE/ 135 euros

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/Int...155/P8Z77V_LX/ 115 euros

I have space in the budget for any of them, but of course don't want to spend more than I have to. Although the marketing for the sabertooth seems rather gimmicky.

[BicycleMafioso]

I have space in the budget for any of them, but of course don't want to spend more than I have to. Although the marketing for the sabertooth seems rather gimmicky.

Interesting. As someone who is a fan of it (harr harr), mind telling me why you think this?
The 5 year warranty, added thermal dissipating shroud (removable without voiding warranty, afaik, and not too hard to do), good VRM and power phases, dust covers, good and optional software features for monitoring temps as well as a neat colour scheme matching Noctua fans.
That plus the more 'ordinary' functions sounds pretty sweet to me.

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

I meant more the "military grade" and "The Ultimate Force (TUF)" branding just sounds like marketing folks going wild, and I can't see the "Thermal Armor" doing much more than looking pretty.

The features are pretty awesome (although there is no way in hell I am running two 40mm fans) and the 5year warranty even seems to be valid outside of the USA and Canada.

Part list permalink / Part price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor (€177.20)
CPU Cooler: Arctic Cooling ACFZ13-PRO 49.7 CFM Fluid Dynamic Bearing CPU Cooler (€27.54)
Motherboard: Asus SABERTOOTH Z77 ATX LGA1155 Motherboard (€182.60)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB Low Profile (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (€41.99)
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive (€63.44)
Hard Drive: Crucial m4 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk (€119.60)
Video Card: Sapphire Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card (€342.79)
Case: Fractal Design Arc Midi Tower ATX Mid Tower Case (€74.80)
Power Supply: Corsair 650W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply (€104.95)
Optical Drive: €15.73
Total: €1149.65
(Prices include shipping and discounts when available.)
(Generated 2012-04-23 21:37 EDT-0400)

What I have come up with. I get windows 7 home premium from university for free.

[Xuvial]

For me it was the awesome price, coupled with the fact that it had the highest buyer rating on Newegg compared to any other P67 motherboard (at the time) - indicating that P67 Sabertooths had next to no chance of turning up faulty/DOA. The ridiculous 5 year warranty also caught my eye. I'm sure the "military grade" part really does mean a more robust architecture and manufacturing process, they wouldn't offer such a warranty (with such a satisfaction rate) otherwise.

Atleast it overclocked as easily as pie and that was important for people who were just getting into SB overclocking (as simple as it is). It was my first ever *proper* gaming build and I needed a foolproof motherboard. This came with Asus's sexy UEFI, simple 8+2 phase design, 8x/8x SLI capability, etc etc.

"Oh look" I thought idly to myself, "this mobo resembles a TANK. I'll take it." Thermal armor was the icing on the cake and I keep that for purely looks. I regret nothing <3

[BicycleMafioso]

Military Grade is something that I think they are following in MSI's "Military Grade II"-footsteps, who are now up to III I think.
The TUF-thing, I think is more meant to be cool for their home buyers, on account of Asians thinking acronyms in the Latin Alphabet and in English especially are cool.

The Thermal Armour does do a fair bit of heat dissipation, not to mention having temperature nodes (on the Z77 at least) so you can monitor the temps in Windows.
It's meant to take punishment, and their confidence in its ability to do so, giving it a 5 year warranty is good enough for me.

</sales person off>

[Cyanotical]

there is a real military grade of IC chips and components, its mainly for EMP and physical shock resistance, as well as voltage tolerance, but i doubt either MSI or Asus are using the real military grade components, otherwise a motherboard would cost about 10 times what they do

[kidsafe]

I meant more the "military grade" and "The Ultimate Force (TUF)" branding just sounds like marketing folks going wild, and I can't see the "Thermal Armor" doing much more than looking pretty.

The features are pretty awesome (although there is no way in hell I am running two 40mm fans) and the 5year warranty even seems to be valid outside of the USA and Canada.

My personal reasons for liking the Sabertooth boards are 1) all the thermalcouples / more independent fan headers than other P8Z77 models, 2) Asus was forced to implement a better layout for all its headers/connectors because of the shield. Notice how the USB 3.0 header on the Sabertooth is at a right angle unlike on any of the other models.

"Military spec" WRT to motherboard marketing just means "hey we're using slightly better mosfets, coils, caps, etc."

[Butler to Baby Sloths]

Parts are now ordered.

Part list permalink / Part price breakdown by merchant / Benchmarks

CPU: Intel Core i5-2500K 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($179.99 @ Microcenter)
CPU Cooler: Noctua NH-U12P SE2 54.4 CFM CPU Cooler ($69.99 @ NCIX US)
Motherboard: Asus SABERTOOTH Z77 ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($235.99 @ NCIX US)
Memory: Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($44.99 @ Newegg)
Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($74.99 @ Amazon)
Hard Drive: Crucial m4 128GB 2.5" Solid State Disk ($159.99 @ Newegg)
Video Card: Gigabyte Radeon HD 7950 3GB Video Card ($407.55 @ Newegg)
Case: Fractal Design Arc Midi Tower ATX Mid Tower Case ($109.98 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair 650W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($109.99 @ Newegg)
optical drive: DVD burner for €15
Total: $1393.46
(Prices include shipping and discounts when available.)
(Generated 2012-04-25 06:41 EDT-0400)

Total came to €1208.11 including shipping. Should arrive early next week. Processor was 177 euros, the graphics card €350 and the motherboard €180.