Desktop Computers

mkopec_sl said:

LOL, why the fuck would you take that thing apart?

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Had to take the outside casing apart to remove the stand, so I could basically wall mount it instead. Then once I was in there it was the matter of just 1 more piece of metal framing coming off in order to access the panel to tape it down and fix the backlight bleed. It's a fairly easy process that tons of people do all the time, but I managed to screw it right up, I must have poked too far into the panel with my screwdriver when I was prying the panel off.

That's the cheapest you're going to find that i5. I couldn't find anything cheaper on Black Friday-Monday. But yeah, that combo will set you up for gaming for the next 4 years assuming you have 16MB RAM (you only really need 8, but 4 years).

I run SLI cards because I like three monitors.

you can easily run 4 monitors off 1 card, I run 2 off DVI-D and 1 off hdmi and could add another displayport and still get 60+ fps at 1440p in bf4 on a single monitor. Only if you wanna try to do eyefinity (ie 9k wide x 1440 triple monitor all active for single game) do you need to start doing SLI.

and yeah joe thats why as I get older I just don't fuck around with my computer much anymore. Hell, just yesterday updating my asus bios to a new version took an hour of my life, shit kept shutting down and rebooting trying to screw around with overclock modes. I attached my qnix to a new monoprice stand but I just unscrewed the base, so it still has that weird little glass pole sticking out the bottom, looks ugly as shit but I don't care not opening that shit up. In my 20s I was fearless and would readily pop out my CPU to apply new thermal paste, but now I know if I try that I will end up bending all the pins and probably my dog would eat the CPU when I turn my back.

The 770 GTX is good enough? I was looking at the R9 290 but the price has fucking skyrocketed.

Also, is that mobo any good?

That ASUS motherboard is solid, intel NIC, plenty of SATA6, USB 3.0 and PCIE slots for anything you'd ever want to do.

The 770 is a great card as well, I see nothing wrong with pulling the trigger on both, they'll keep you going for quite a while.

the *only* thing I would consider with the 770 is if you have any plans to do gaming at a resolution higher than 1080p, you might not want to settle for a 2GB card. But if you're sticking with 1080/1200p monitors for the forseable future, it's fine.

Yeah I wanted a 4gig card, but I think I'll stick with 1080 for awhile.

Just got another 680 gtx 4gb card for a fell off the truck kind of price. Hope my 750w PSU can handle me running them in SLI!

Good vid card on the cheap

GTX 660 TI Video Card $158.49 AR - Newegg 12-11-2013 - Slickdeals.net

I ran 3 x 6970 at 100% for 6 months while bitcoin mining on a PC Power&Cooling 750W.

My rule is that you should pay half of the cpu price for the motherboard and double the cpu price for a video card if you're looking for a gaming pc.

Thats pretty good. I was right about that on my build last year, ASRock mobo for $89, i5 3570k for $160, 3GB 660Ti for $320.

joeboo_sl said:

I had 2 Hanns-G 1920x1200 27.5" LCD monitors and they are solid, but I just upgraded 1 to a Qnix 2560x1440. Holy crap. For the extra $40 over the Hanns G, do it. The HannsG is $250, the Qnix is $290, both no tax, free shipping.

Although, looking at ebay right now, I'm not seeing any Qnix monitors for $290 + free shipping, maybe they pop up irregularly as various places get them in and out of stock. I think its definitely worth watching for one for a few days at least.

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I second the hanns-g had 1 and it never died it was on for like 5 years straight. I sold it on Craig's list for 80 bucks too.

Asus GTX 780 Ti DirectCU II OC review ??" best performance, dead silent [1179] | Video card reviews #ReviewStudio.net

I found their benchmarks interesting, in that they did them all at 1920x1200

why do people think video card memory has much to do with resolution... a 4k screen only requires around 300mb for frame buffer, maybe 1 gig total for triple buffering. Texture manipulation has little to do with your screen resolution, after all going from 1080p to 4k still uses the same exact 32x32/etc millions of small textures and polygons from battlefield 4 or whatever game, the textures aren't loaded extra times if you use higher resolutions and virtually no game keeps a set of textures designed for anything higher than 1080p (most probably still target 720p?)

The only real thing extra VRAM is used for is certain forms of anti-aliasing like SSAA and MSAA but even that is slowly going away as the frame buffer based AA's (TXAA, FXAA) are becoming much better and require very little extra vram beyond the frame buffer. SLI and more than 2-3GB of vram are really only good for very specialized situations (eyefinity/surroundvision multi monitor gaming), unless I am missing something?

edit: just tried tomb raider with ultimate settings, at 2560x1440 get 40 fps. At 1920x1200 get 54 fps. This is with a gta 680 so getting kinda old but good enough until next gen cards. you definitely scored with SLI 660s though, cheaper than my 680 still probably.

BF4 can use over 2GB of video ram now at surround resolutions, let alone at 4k.

Yep, when I first got my 3GB video card last year, I tested out some benchmarks spanned across both of my monitors, so total of 3840x1200 resolution, and the card was hitting around 2.1-2.2GB of memory used on the various logging utilities I was running to check it.

Most video cards will fill up all memory available to it. Doesn't mean it needs all that memory.