Desktop Computers

Eomer_sl said:

Yeah, not gonna lie, once I looked it up and saw the specs I was pretty damn tempted to pick one up for myself to replace my Dell 24" Ultrasharp, which is getting on 6-7 years old.

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You won't regret the purchase.

Ichu_sl said:

Tell me how glorious it is Mire. I want to live through you.

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Got it yesterday, installed it last night. Used it for about 3 hours before bed.

This this a fast monitor. It's the selling point. It's not 4k, it's not IPS. Browsing the internet, watching videos and reading word documents is the same experience with any other TN panel. A high end TN panel mind you... Every day usage sees no benefit. However, I did noticed how solid my mouse cursor remained when trying to zip it around the screen as fast as possible. Even when dragging and dropping, icons remain solid and CLEARly visible as they move around.

The monitor is very well built and the stand is incredible. The screen doesn't wobble when you go to rest your arms on the desk or accidentally hit the desk with your leg. The side bezels are very very thin and it just looks nice. Marmac decided to play Ikargua vertically and it was a nice sight to see. I can see why this monitor was 3x the price of my 1440p Korean monitor but...I'm not one to buy a monitor because it has a solid stand and looks good, I bought this thing for one reason only: Gsync.

Gsync works great. It works every time but from what I understand, it only works in full screen mode (I haven't tried playing anything in a window yet). The increased smoothness not only comes from there being no tearing but because of the speed of the monitor. Tearing is gone. Completely. Forever. I've been waiting since the Quake days not to have to fuck around with vsync ever again. The chore of dealing with tearing after spending hundreds of dollars on video cards is gone forever. I remain humble...

Now, this monitor might not be for everyone. To use this thing properly, you cannot be playing games at 30fps (in my opinion). The closer you can get to 144fps, the more the monitor shines. Games are absolute butter when playing at 70fps or higher (See BF4 with 2 GTX 780s). If you have a GTX 770 or lower, I would consider an upgrade before buying this. The monitor needs to run at a high frame rate to justify spending 800 dollars on it.

Other considerations:

4k. Marmac brought over his 4k Samsung monitor @ 60hz and the resolution jump between 1440 and 4k is HUGE. The problem is, curved 21:9 4k IPS Gsync monitors don't exist yet. If you can hold out for 4k IPS Gsync please do. I bought into Gsync early in its life and I understand that I had to pay through the nose for its early adoption. I would also like to have a 4k display but I won't do it without Gsync. As soon as a 4k 21:9 IPS Gsync monitor is out, I will be replacing this Rog Swift.

In order to combat the lack of 4k, 2 980s are being shipped to me and I plan to downscale 4k to 1440p. We'll see how that goes...

I use that exact same blower at my work IT shop. It is a beast!

lanx_sl said:

do you have this?
Amazon.com: Metro Vacuum ED500 DataVac 500-Watt 0.75-HP Electric Duster 120 volt: Home Improvement

if not you should, it's pretty much a micro leaf blower you will find many uses for it.

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Sold! Great recommendation.

I'm after some advice..

I currently have a 5+ year old i7 970 pc with some shitty old Radeon card, cant remember exactly but it's a hd6XXX that is dying on me. But it has good ram in it and a great 1kW psu and a nice Antec case.

Just bought a R9 270X with 4GB and decided at the same time to upgrade my 1TB WD Black to a Samsung 840 (then use the old drive for file storage).

I've got a 'spare' pc that has a slightly better cpu (i5 6500) with a newer motherboard (supports sata3 etc) so my thinking was to swap the spare mobo/cpu into my main case with the new card and SSD.

Now I can easily transfer the OS onto the SSD but I reckon I'll have issues as Windows 7 will cop a strop with the new mobo/cpu? Is there a way around this?

I'm not a pc expert by any stretch of the imagination but my current thinking was...
Transfer OS to SSD then get this in place (only on sata2 but OK for temp)
Install new GFX card
..This is where it may fall down, when I swap the mobo/cpu will it refuse to boot on me?

Or can I just install all the hardware at once?

Is it worth all this hassle for a tiny cpu upgrade and a move to SATA3?

I want to avoid a fresh install if I can, deep down I reckon that's the best way but it's a pain in the arse to transfer all my old stuff about.

Cheers

I had a thought (oh dear)..

If I install the new graphics card in the old pc, transfer OS to the SSD and install that in the old PC.
Can I then swap out the mobo/cpu then boot from the win7 disc and do an install repair?

Yes, I really don't want to do a fresh install!

Kalaar Kururuc_sl said:

I had a thought (oh dear)..

If I install the new graphics card in the old pc, transfer OS to the SSD and install that in the old PC.
Can I then swap out the mobo/cpu then boot from the win7 disc and do an install repair?

Yes, I really don't want to do a fresh install!

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Just reuse your copy of windows on a new build and when it comes time to activate it, call the number. Tell them you had a motherboard die and they will activate you copy on the new pc. Worked 3 times for me so far.

Kalaar Kururuc_sl said:

I had a thought (oh dear)..

If I install the new graphics card in the old pc, transfer OS to the SSD and install that in the old PC.
Can I then swap out the mobo/cpu then boot from the win7 disc and do an install repair?

Yes, I really don't want to do a fresh install!

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You almost never want to swap a boot drive from one PC to another with a different motherboard. There is SO much hardware on a motherboard that windows has to load drivers for, that you're almost guaranteed to have some problems switching to a different motherboard. Do a fresh install, it could save you a ton of headaches down the road with crashes, freezes, and random errors. 95% of the drivers in your PC are for motherboard hardware devices. You don't want all the old ones lingering around.

Cheers,

I'm not worried about having to re-activate the OS as it's a proper boxed copy rather than an OEM.

I'll back everything up and give it a go, nothing to lose if it goes tits up, can just reformat the drive and back at the fresh install option.

I've seen that sysprep thing mentioned during a Google search but as I know just enough to be dangerous I thought it better to ask direct advise

Cheers, much appreciated. Ssd is currently cloning the old hdd so we will doon see.

Jesus SSDs are fast. I didn't even have a connector for the SataE so using the 6gb interface for now. Next SSD I'll make sure to order the right one.
Still I put together everything tonight in about 20 minutes, booted and everything has been flawless since.
Total time from boxes to everything installed/updated and games installed including AA/Rift/WoT and WT has been under 2.5 hours. Just waiting on the final windows updates now.

Only issue I had was my GSKill ddr3 ram was showing 1600 instead of 2400 but after bumping the freq to 24 and changing the voltage and timings to what was suggested on the card it now shows 2400 properly.
This i5 4690 is blazing compared to my old e7500 duo core honestly wasn't expecting such a jump.

On the post above noticed mine was set to AHCI by default so hopefully everything is as it should be. Sure seems so.

Also went from a bronze to a gold PSU 550 to a 650 watts same brand from old PC.
CPU shows it should be using more watts, same video card as I had before but at idle I am ~50 watts less. Sitting at around 100 watts average in browse/desktop mode. I was ~150 before idle.
It'll only be a buck or two a month difference but still, it'll pay for something eventually.

Ya my Reads is 520 but write only 315.
So my write is above spec and read is just below max spec. Max spec for this SSD was 550/300.
Next year I'll invest more in it and a new gpu this 256gb crucial was budget friendly since I had to buy some other things I wasn't initially planning on at $110.
Of course after it shipped Newgg had the 512gb version for like $180

Well, I got the SSD working just fine in the 'old' pc. Took around 4 hours to clone the drive, but the I was limited to usb 2 so I just went and watched tv while it did it's thing. New gfx card is up and running. Can't believe the difference the ssd makes, wow starts up so fast and also looks so pretty with a working gfx card

Slight hiccup with the old hdd, even when slaved to the ssd the system stil tries to boot off it and gives me a no-boot-drive error. Probably boot order priority in the bios but it was close to midnight and I couldn't be bothered with it last night.

Will fix that issue then when I get my blood pressure back down (for some reason building PC's winds me up, what with putting in screws in cramped ass spaces that require digits with 32 joints) I'll take a stab at breaking it all by swapping the mobo/cpu