Desktop Computers

nate_sl said:

Yeah, I bought a gaming laptop with an i7 and I will not make that mistake again. The whole computer is bottle necked by the shitty processor.

Browsing the premise options, it looks like if you want a rig that doesn't cut corners somewhere you're looking at more like $2k than 1. Maybe I should just build.

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There's nothing wrong with an i7, it's essentialy equal to an i5 in most gaming situations. That's the problem though, it costs more and it isn't any better(for gaming), so most people would rather save some cash, get an i5, and spend the saving on a better video card or a bigger SSD or something more useful.

2014 is gonna annoy the shit out of me...

Looks like titanfall is releasing in Q2 and that's the next game I wanted to buy a new rig for. Now unfortunately, Intel Haswell-E chips won't be out until later in the year, and of course they are on a new socket, and the mobos support DDR4 and PCI-E 4.0. I at least hope Nvidia Maxwell (gtx 800) is out before Titanfall... I feel like the support for unified virtual memory is a big step.

It'd suck to have to pull the trigger early and upgrade in April/May on a system that was gonna piss me off by September.

Joeboo is spot on. Up until like 2 weeks ago I had been using a Core2Quad with a GTX460. And, if you want the truth of it, I could have easily waited another year or maybe even more. Everything ran, and it even all still looked pretty good. In retrospect maybe I should have, but I got a bit obsessed with building a new PC and am overall happy with the results.

Honestly, there is no better time to be a stingy PC gamer (I am very stingy )

Christ, my case came in today. I just ordered this shit yesterday.

God damn, Fedex, wtf.

I actually thought that guy typod i7 meaning i5 or i3. What's better than an i7 in a laptop? And don't say something like 2 i7's.

I bought an MSI laptop for $1,400 in the spring of 2012... It has an i7 (which one I can't recall, and I'm not on it atm), 12 gigs of RAM, a Nvidia 570m GPU. It plays some games fine, particularly ones that seem to stress the video card more than the CPU. Farcy 3 for instance runs pretty friggin good.

Other games though, (Rome II recently) will be running fine at ~50+ FPS, then will suddenly dip to a crawl for about 5 seconds at a time, I assume as the processor catches up to the GPU. After that 5 seconds, it will pick back up to around 50 FPS. This cycle repeats every 20-30 seconds. The other thing I considered is maybe it has a weak power supply?

I will be the first to admit I don't know much about PC hardware, but all in all I was expecting much better performance out of that laptop than what it has given me. The other thing is that it seems to have a lot of strange errors (Blue screens, fatal run time errors, etc.). No idea if its a hardware conflict or what, but the last PC I built ran great for 3-4 years and played many games well. It almost never had issues. It was a desktop however.

nate_sl said:

Other games though, (Rome II recently) will be running fine at ~50+ FPS, then will suddenly dip to a crawl for about 5 seconds at a time, I assume as the processor catches up to the GPU. After that 5 seconds, it will pick back up to around 50 FPS. This cycle repeats every 20-30 seconds. The other thing I considered is maybe it has a weak power supply?

I will be the first to admit I don't know much about PC hardware, but all in all I was expecting much better performance out of that laptop than what it has given me. The other thing is that it seems to have a lot of strange errors (Blue screens, fatal run time errors, etc.). No idea if its a hardware conflict or what, but the last PC I built ran great for 3-4 years and played many games well. It almost never had issues. It was a desktop however.

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Sounds like a heat issue. I was having the exact same problems you described on my old Asus gaming laptop until I started using a decent cooling pad.

McCheese_sl said:

Sounds like a heat issue. I was having the exact same problems you described on my old Asus gaming laptop until I started using a decent cooling pad.

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It does run very hot. Will have to see about getting a pad.

Yeah you gotta treat high performance computing like any other high performance section of an industry. You gotta monitor shit and adjust as needed. The newer rog laptops have massive heat exhausts for that issue alone. High performance and mobile is almost an oxymoron. There is so much heat to deal with in such a confined space that its almost a miracle there's gaming laptops in the first place. Let alone stable ones.

mkopec_sl said:

I agree high performance and laptops don't mix. I'm sure there are exceptions, but why go with a laptop for $1500-$2000 if you can have better performnce, bigger screen from a $1000 homebuilt box. Are people that much into gaming on the go?

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In certain situations it makes sense.

I bought one of the Asus gamer laptops back in 2009 because I knew I would be doing a lot of long-term, international traveling in the near future but I wanted to be able to game no matter where I was. It's the only thing that made a shitty week in Istanbul bearable, and it kept me sane when I was out in the boon docks in some third world shit hole without anything else to do. As an aside, Steam also makes this really great because you can just preload a ton of games, switch it into offline mode, and you've got an enormous gaming library at your finger tips no matter where you are.

If you're just going to move from your couch to your bed to your desk then I agree it's stupid to buy a gaming laptop. Since switching to a desktop pc last month I do find myself missing being able to lay in bed and watch a movie, or put my laptop on the table while I'm cooking dinner, but I figure that's a job for tablets nowadays, anyway.

McCheese_sl said:

In certain situations it makes sense.

I bought one of the Asus gamer laptops back in 2009 because I knew I would be doing a lot of long-term, international traveling in the near future but I wanted to be able to game no matter where I was. It's the only thing that made a shitty week in Istanbul bearable, and it kept me sane when I was out in the boon docks in some third world shit hole without anything else to do. As an aside, Steam also makes this really great because you can just preload a ton of games, switch it into offline mode, and you've got an enormous gaming library at your finger tips no matter where you are.

If you're just going to move from your couch to your bed to your desk then I agree it's stupid to buy a gaming laptop. Since switching to a desktop pc last month I do find myself missing being able to lay in bed and watch a movie, or put my laptop on the table while I'm cooking dinner, but I figure that's a job for tablets nowadays, anyway.

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Or mount a tv and stream it with widi

660Ti is probably ~20% more powerful. However, don't buy a 660Ti at this point unless you find one heavily discounted. If you are going to spend $250 on a video card, get a 760, its another 10-20% more powerful than the 660Ti.

I think the $50 jump from a 660 to a 760 is definitely worth it. There is really no market left for the 660Ti, being the same price as the 760 which is more powerful.

I personally have a 660Ti and I love the card, but I bought it before the 660 or 760 existed.

mkopec_sl said:

I agree high performance and laptops don't mix. I'm sure there are exceptions, but why go with a laptop for $1500-$2000 if you can have better performnce, bigger screen from a $1000 homebuilt box. Are people that much into gaming on the go?

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I travel pretty much full time for work. A gaming laptop is really the only solution since I just don't have a ton of interest in console games.

Gnomedolf_sl said:

Thanks for the info. Are there any of the 760's that are known for quiet running?

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MSI GTX760 TFis quietest 760.