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I've got a system with an i5 3570K (not overclocked) on a Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD and 8GB 1333MHz RAM. Would I see any noticeable performance difference with 8GB 1600MHz RAM instead?
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Jun 29, 2015 13:09
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WattsvilleBlues posted:I've got a system with an i5 3570K (not overclocked) on a Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD and 8GB 1333MHz RAM. Would I see any noticeable performance difference with 8GB 1600MHz RAM instead? No.
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Jun 29, 2015 13:15
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I'm thinking about replacing my Corsair VX550 as it's over 6 years old, is the Seasonic S12II-520 Bronze a good buy for $73? Two things I'm looking for is long power cables for my hard drives since I'm using a Fractal Design R4 case and have 5 hard drives installed, I find the VX550 cables a bit short but overall it's been a great PSU and the second feature is noise, I'd like a quiet PSU. Thanks
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Jun 29, 2015 13:22
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WattsvilleBlues posted:I've got a system with an i5 3570K (not overclocked) on a Samsung EVO 850 250GB SSD and 8GB 1333MHz RAM. Would I see any noticeable performance difference with 8GB 1600MHz RAM instead? Forget about the RAM and overclock that CPU!
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Jun 29, 2015 13:35
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whatupdet posted:I'm thinking about replacing my Corsair VX550 as it's over 6 years old, is the Seasonic S12II-520 Bronze a good buy for $73? It's was a decent PSU for its time but you certainly wouldn't buy it now, you can get excellent gold rated units for that price. Look for a Rosewill Capstone, or a gold rated seasonic or XFX PSU.
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Jun 29, 2015 13:44
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HalloKitty posted:Forget about the RAM and overclock that CPU! I would, I've got a Hyper 212 EVO, but when I built the machine (May 2012) I tried overclocking it with a guide for Sandy Bridge CPUs, which is a different kettle of fish compared to Ivy Bridge in terms of overclocking. I was told that, whatever settings I'd applied, it would potentially harm the life of the CPU, so I took it back down to default. Also, the overclocking thread is too complicated for me because IQ. If someone could even suggest what settings I could safely use for an Asus P8Z77-V LX with the i5 3570K, I'd be grateful. Should I just  to the overclocking thread?
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Jun 29, 2015 14:25
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Okay here goes... I built a PC with help from some people on here about 5 years ago and I am (still) ignorant of making good choices. I've had a good time with it but it is showing its age. So, this is what I have: Processor: Quad Core Intel i5 750 @2.67 ghz MOBO: MSI H55M-p31 (ms76-36) Graphics card: Nvidia Geforce GTX 460 RAM: 8 gigs DDR3 SDRAM HD: SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 ST1000DM005/HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive PSU: CORSAIR Enthusiast Series CMPSU-550VX 550W ATX12V V2.2 SLI Ready CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Certified Active PFC Compatible with Core i7 Power Supply The hard drive and RAM have been replaced/upgraded in the last year or two. So this still works but my girlfriend is getting into gaming and wants to play some of the newer bigtime RPG games at high settings, such as Witcher 3 and Fallout 4. My PC struggled a bit with Witcher 2 so its probably a good idea to upgrade. I'm aware I probably need a new GFX card but will I also need a new processor and Mobo? I know next to nothing about motherboards so if anyone could recommend me some compatible things for me to order online then I'd be your bestest friend and be your sidekick in an online game of choice. A while back I posted on reddit looking for help but it turned into a giant AMD vs Nvidia nerdwar which I'm hoping to avoid. I normally live in Turkey but I am in the US for a few weeks right now and this is the only time I'll get for at least a year to buy any of this stuff since the price in Turkey is astronomicaly high for any of this stuff. My budget is around 500 USD but thats not a hard limit, just my ignorant idea. The Turkey thing might be important in another way in that it is extremely hot and I have no A/C so I will be unlikely to want something that has temp problems like overclocking or (from what I hear) certain AMD cards. Thanks in advance for helping this savage barbarian. Mr. Grapes! fucked around with this message at 14:48 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 14:40
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Moved to a different country 5 years ago, have been running everything off of an old Acer laptop, but new job requires two screens and extensive usage of office 2013, and I can't be bothered converting back and forth between free excel knockoffs and the real thing. Country: united kingdom What using for? Exclusively for Microsoft office and data analysis. Will need to run R, SPSS and SQL fairly extensively without giving up. Budget: cheap as possible. Can see online, for instance, a refurbished Lenovo M58p with 4gb ram, dual monitors and wireless keyboard and mouse, £143.88. No idea though if this would meet my needs (imagine it would?) Software: as above, bulk will be office 2013, with R, SPSS and SQL. No gaming, no server management, etc. What would you all suggest?
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Jun 29, 2015 14:43
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Keep in mind Office 2013 will only run in Windows 7 and above. The M58p for example seems to have shipped with Vista at best, so unless 7 is on there as part of the refurbishing you'll have to buy a license.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:15
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Okay here goes... I built a PC with help from some people on here about 5 years ago and I am (still) ignorant of making good choices. I've had a good time with it but it is showing its age. So, this is what I have: Hmmm, you need a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card and power supply at the least, what case do you have and what speed is the RAM? You will also want to grab a SSD if you can afford it and a new HDD. Here is what I came up with. It includes an SSD which is a huge boon but can be omitted if you really cannot afford it. I also included a good cooler since you said it would be hot, you might be able to skip the RAM depending on what RAM you already have, if you can't reuse your old case there are some good, cheap options out there for that.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:28
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The Lord Bude posted:It's was a decent PSU for its time but you certainly wouldn't buy it now, you can get excellent gold rated units for that price. Look for a Rosewill Capstone, or a gold rated seasonic or XFX PSU.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:33
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Mourning Due posted:Moved to a different country 5 years ago, have been running everything off of an old Acer laptop, but new job requires two screens and extensive usage of office 2013, and I can't be bothered converting back and forth between free excel knockoffs and the real thing. Please do not buy a Core2Duo system in 2015. I'm not familiar with the system requirements for R or SPSS but I imagine that you'll want to look around the outlet/refurb sections of Dell/Lenovo/HP for an i3 system.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:35
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Heads up, the EVGA Supernova G2 850W PSU is on sale on Newegg with a $5 code(EMCATNX22) and $35 MIR that brings it down to $110, pretty nice deal if you want a PSU with a 10 year warranty.
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Jun 29, 2015 15:48
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Krailor posted:Please do not buy a Core2Duo system in 2015. Thank you for the heads up! Haven't kept up with conventions etc for PCs for years, so feel totally out of the loop. For instance, I can see a M81 small form core i3 4gb ram 250gb storage win 7 pro for £113.99, without monitors, keyboard etc, and I have no idea if this is a good deal or not. Other option: might it be smarter for me to go with a returbed Lenovo laptop, and hook that up to two monitors, so that I can take it on the go if necessary? Or would a laptop that can run office 2013 well need to be quite modern (read: expensive)?
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Jun 29, 2015 15:57
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:Hmmm, you need a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card and power supply at the least, what case do you have and what speed is the RAM? You will also want to grab a SSD if you can afford it and a new HDD. Thanks for your help! I currently don't have access to my PC (its back in turkey!) but my case is a http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16811119088 COOLER MASTER Centurion 541 RC-541-SKN1 Black Aluminum bezel, SECC chassis MicroATX Mini Tower Computer Case I don't think I need WIn 8 as I have Win7 and prefer it. Do you think the case is still good?
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Jun 29, 2015 16:15
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Thanks for your help! I'd get a new case if only because you can get a good one quite cheaply and it will make building the new rig much easier. I've added a nice, cheap case to the parts list and taken Win8 off, as long as your windows license can be used on a new computer you should be fine: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/VDWn4D BTW, do you have a decent monitor? If not you should ask about a decent 1080p IPS one in the monitor thread, no sense in having a nice video card if your monitor can't display the nice images from it. 
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Jun 29, 2015 16:26
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Okay here goes... I built a PC with help from some people on here about 5 years ago and I am (still) ignorant of making good choices. I've had a good time with it but it is showing its age. So, this is what I have: You can keep your RAM and your hard drive (assuming you're happy to decommission your old PC). Also your DVD drive and maybe your case as well if it isn't total rubbish. That's basically all that's useful. If money is tight you could get a new GPU now and replace the rest when you save up but your current CPU will be holding you back. Hot or not, ambient temperature will not be an issue with any sane PC. You can use this as your purchasing guideline but be aware your $500 budget is really, really tight. I'm not including an operating system in this pricing - if you have windows 7 on your current PC and you still have your install media, you should try and reinstall it and reactivate it - Microsoft is pretty good about letting you do that (you may have to ring the phone serives) as long as you aren't actually trying to use one copy of windows on 2 PCs at once. Then you can take advantage of the free upgrade to windows 10. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i5-4590 3.3GHz Quad-Core Processor ($189.95 @ SuperBiiz) CPU Cooler: Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO 82.9 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler ($26.98 @ OutletPC) Motherboard: ASRock H97M PRO4 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($69.98 @ Newegg) Video Card: Sapphire Radeon R9 280 3GB Dual-X Video Card ($149.99 @ Newegg) Case: Cooler Master N200 MicroATX Mid Tower Case ($34.99 @ Newegg) Power Supply: EVGA SuperNOVA GS 550W 80+ Gold Certified Fully-Modular ATX Power Supply ($59.99 @ NCIX US) Total: $531.88 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-06-29 11:24 EDT-0400 Consider this a bare minimum - if you can stretch your budget further: - I strongly recommend having an SSD - 250gb Samsung 850 EVO is ideal. It will make your PC much snappier in day to day use. - The graphics card I selected is at the lower end of what I'd currently consider adequate for 1080p Gaming (I assume you have a 1080p screen already?) if you could afford to spend more, a 280X for around $200 - 220 US would be a decent step up.
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Jun 29, 2015 16:29
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whatupdet posted:Thanks, I'll either get the $100 SeaSonic G Series SSR-550RM or $110 Rosewill CAPSTONE-750. Depending on exactly what you have, you probably don't need anything larger than a 450w PSU - certainly no more than 550. You can get capstones and seasonic G-series PSUs from 450w and up, gold rated XFX PSUs (XFX rebadges seasonic) from 550w and up or the new EVGA GS series (also seasonic) from 550w. AVeryLargeRadish posted:Hmmm, you need a new motherboard, CPU, graphics card and power supply at the least, what case do you have and what speed is the RAM? You will also want to grab a SSD if you can afford it and a new HDD. This is quite an odd list - Well over budget for a start, and I wouldn't suggest someone buy a core i3 unless their budget was tighter than his is - he can afford an i5 plus a perfectly reasonable GPU, if not a 290. A 500gb SSD? that's a bit of an indulgence considering you've also only given him an i3 CPU. He also doesn't need 650w of PSU, and while I'd be perfectly happy with an RM series PSU if I couldn't get anything better, it's a B grade product - why buy that when you could be getting a seasonic or superflower built PSU? He has DDR3 RAM, and a newish Hard drive - he doesn't need either of those things.
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Jun 29, 2015 16:41
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The Lord Bude posted:Depending on exactly what you have, you probably don't need anything larger than a 450w PSU - certainly no more than 550. You can get capstones and seasonic G-series PSUs from 450w and up, gold rated XFX PSUs (XFX rebadges seasonic) from 550w and up or the new EVGA GS series (also seasonic) from 550w. EDIT: Looks like I can get a fully modular EVGA 220-GS-0550-V1 80 PLUS GOLD 550W for $90 after rebate. whatupdet fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jun 29, 2015 |
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Jun 29, 2015 16:55
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The Lord Bude posted:Depending on exactly what you have, you probably don't need anything larger than a 450w PSU - certainly no more than 550. You can get capstones and seasonic G-series PSUs from 450w and up, gold rated XFX PSUs (XFX rebadges seasonic) from 550w and up or the new EVGA GS series (also seasonic) from 550w. Huh, on the SSD pcpartspicker must have been having some weird problem because when I put together the list the cheapest 250GB 850 EVO was showing as $150 so I thought he might as well get the 500GB one for $16 more, now that I look there is the 250GB for $100 which is a better choice for his budget. For the PSU I was filtering for fully modular and the cheapest Seasonic was like $105, I guess the semi modular ones would be fine too and they are only $75. As for the CPU I thought the i5 was only a tiny bit faster in gaming and such, so doubling the price for an i5 seemed overkill.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:08
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One of the computers at work is really slow. It's an old pre-built computer, the Dell OptiPlex 380. I'm currently scanning it for spyware and was wondering, if I swapped it with a solid state drive, would that help much? Its only being used to run a small enterprise software and browsing the web so nothing super intense. Ultimately, I'll probably replace it with an Optiplex 3020M one day but if a solid state drive is cheaper, I may go down that route instead.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:49
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so who makes the good harddrives these days? I need to to upgrade my storage. I see that I can get a Seagate Archive 8TB drive for the same price as a WD Red 6TB. Now this would be strictly for media storage (and streaming via Plex) as I will be buying a 500gb SSD for running games off of.
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Jun 29, 2015 17:52
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MrBling posted:so who makes the good harddrives these days? I need to to upgrade my storage. MrBling posted:I see that I can get a Seagate Archive 8TB drive for the same price as a WD Red 6TB. Now this would be strictly for media storage (and streaming via Plex) as I will be buying a 500gb SSD for running games off of.
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Jun 29, 2015 18:16
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If I'm building yet another computer for the purpose of recording music and VERY light image/video editing, should I still look to i7 or will an i5 suffice?
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Jun 29, 2015 18:27
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NovaLion posted:If I'm building yet another computer for the purpose of recording music and VERY light image/video editing, should I still look to i7 or will an i5 suffice? i5 non-K is the best value of the whole lineup, if that meets your needs stay there and enjoy your savings.
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Jun 29, 2015 18:29
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whatupdet posted:I don't have a requirement for more than 450W as I'm only running an X3 Athlon II, onboard video since my Sapphire card poo poo the bed, 5 hard drives, 1 optical drive and 3x140mm fans but the cheapest Capstone PSU's on Newegg were $95, the 750W is on sale for $110 is gold certified and has 8 SATA connectors which is why I linked that one and the Seasonic's were in the range of $90 and up. I didn't look into XFX or eVGA but maybe I'll check to see if they are cheaper. Yeah, those new EVGA ones are very good value now that capstones are getting rarer.
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Jun 29, 2015 18:36
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:Huh, on the SSD pcpartspicker must have been having some weird problem because when I put together the list the cheapest 250GB 850 EVO was showing as $150 so I thought he might as well get the 500GB one for $16 more, now that I look there is the 250GB for $100 which is a better choice for his budget. For the PSU I was filtering for fully modular and the cheapest Seasonic was like $105, I guess the semi modular ones would be fine too and they are only $75. As for the CPU I thought the i5 was only a tiny bit faster in gaming and such, so doubling the price for an i5 seemed overkill. Don't forget to check XFX, which is always seasonic, and also Capstones (Superflower) and EVGA (G2 and GS only, Superflower and Seasonic respectively). Superflower is just as good as seasonic. Personally, semi modular is all you need at normal person wattage levels - all the hard wired cables will be used anyhow, the modulars are just for extra sata connectors and poo poo. Honestly on a budget there is nothing wrong with a non modular PSU like the capstone or some XFXs either. The i5 will make a fair difference in some games, not to mention non gaming tasks - a 1080p gamer doesn't strictly need a 290. Sure it's fabulous to get a 290 or 970 and get max fps if you have the money for it, but lets cover the basics first. i5 + 8gb RAM + r9-280 + 250gb SSD + quality PSU and budget (quality) case. That in my opinion is the standard thrifty gaming PC - beyond that are the luxury upgrades you get if you can afford it. Drop down to the i3 only if the person can't afford the above. That's my opinion anyhow.
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Jun 29, 2015 18:45
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The Lord Bude posted:Don't forget to check XFX, which is always seasonic, and also Capstones (Superflower) and EVGA (G2 and GS only, Superflower and Seasonic respectively). Superflower is just as good as seasonic. Personally, semi modular is all you need at normal person wattage levels - all the hard wired cables will be used anyhow, the modulars are just for extra sata connectors and poo poo. Honestly on a budget there is nothing wrong with a non modular PSU like the capstone or some XFXs either. Hmmm, does this look better for him? http://pcpartpicker.com/p/bbXmhM
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Jun 29, 2015 19:25
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The Lord Bude posted:You can keep your RAM and your hard drive (assuming you're happy to decommission your old PC). Also your DVD drive and maybe your case as well if it isn't total rubbish. That's basically all that's useful. If money is tight you could get a new GPU now and replace the rest when you save up but your current CPU will be holding you back. Thanks for the extra info... I assume if I am keeping my hard drive intact then my Win 7 install will just still be there? Pardon my ignorance. The 500 USD is not a hard limit and I guess I'd be willing to roll closer to 6-700. My monitor isn't 1080p but I frequently hook my PC up to a big TV screen which is pretty nice so for the graphics hogs I tend to just play them on the couch with the Xbox controller. As for a case the real problem is that its all bulky and I can't get that to Turkey so easily - my confidence is especially eroded since the airline just lost all of my luggage on my flight back here with zero chance of recovery.
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Jun 29, 2015 19:33
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Mr. Grapes! posted:Thanks for the extra info... For the Windows install, you really want to back stuff up and do a new install when you move to a new system. Windows will detect that they system is pretty much new and you will need to call MS to get them to activate windows for you, at least that was how it worked for my last rebuild, dunno if anything has changed since then. There are compact cases, but it might make more sense to do most of the assembly, leaving the CPU cooler off and packing some newspaper inside so stuff does not move around, and ship it to your destination address via UPS or Fedex, it will cost a bit but it will be much more secure than having baggage handlers possibly stealing your stuff.
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Jun 29, 2015 19:48
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:An Archive drive is not meant for general purpose storage. It's a data center drive (specifically cold storage) that uses drive-managed SMR and can result in unpredictable performance characteristics in other environments. Would it be that big of a deal as a media storage drive, though? Because if you're writing once, then reading many times, that's kind of ideal for this type of drive (and I'm no fan of the idea of SMR, seems like a dirty hack). But I imagine it would be hell in a RAID array, all those small rebuild writes taking many times longer.
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Jun 29, 2015 20:16
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So I ditched the CS550M for an EVGA GS 650. The GS are ok like the G2, right? My understanding is only the G1 EVGAs are bad, is this correct?
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Jun 29, 2015 20:24
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INTJ Mastermind posted:Has anyone had a build where something didn't go wrong? The weirdest thing happened to me where the computer would randomly blue screen and reboot if left idling anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes. Everything was perfect when I was using it. I wound up just leaving a VLC window paused in the background whenever I wanted to download a large torrent or something for a whole year. Then I decided to try some new RAM sticks, and it went away! Welp... Not going to bother to investigate much, since it's a 5-year-old machine and I'm replacing it with a Skylake system as soon as that comes out, but it's nice to finally know why.
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Jun 29, 2015 20:48
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Dr. Video Games 0089 posted:One of the computers at work is really slow. It's an old pre-built computer, the Dell OptiPlex 380. I'm currently scanning it for spyware and was wondering, if I swapped it with a solid state drive, would that help much? Don't waste an SSD on that 380.
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Jun 29, 2015 21:51
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HalloKitty posted:Would it be that big of a deal as a media storage drive, though? Because if you're writing once, then reading many times, that's kind of ideal for this type of drive (and I'm no fan of the idea of SMR, seems like a dirty hack).
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Jun 29, 2015 22:09
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Star War Sex Parrot posted:Depends on what he means by media storage drive. To a lot of people that can mean stuff like running torrents, if we're being honest. If it's truly going to be a write seldomly, read often setup then I suppose SMR could work. Ah, I guess so. I use a separate drive as a scratch disk, then move the stuff off onto other drives, resulting in nice sequential writes.
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Jun 29, 2015 22:19
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Are there any good, cheap 3TB HDDs out there? Like how do the WD green, caviar green, red, black and so on compare in reliability and performance for desktop usage as a secondary drive to an SSD? What about other brands?
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Jun 29, 2015 23:18
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:Are there any good, cheap 3TB HDDs out there? Like how do the WD green, caviar green, red, black and so on compare in reliability and performance for desktop usage as a secondary drive to an SSD? What about other brands? I've got a toshiba that seems alright so far, it's just under 2 years old. According to the Blackblaze reports 3tb drives aren't very good just in general, but if you need one HGST seems to have the lowest failure rates. This just came up in the storage megathread so there's some posts around here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2801557&pagenumber=312#post447165723
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Jun 29, 2015 23:44
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AVeryLargeRadish posted:Are there any good, cheap 3TB HDDs out there? Like how do the WD green, caviar green, red, black and so on compare in reliability and performance for desktop usage as a secondary drive to an SSD? What about other brands? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822149396 I've had two running for a year so far processing lots of Dxtory recordings and have no complaints about them, they're drives from the formerly-flooded Hitachi factories that Toshiba bought if that's worth anything. They're favorable compared to WD Reds of the same size, at least according to Backblaze. https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/
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Jun 29, 2015 23:47
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Rexxed posted:I've got a toshiba that seems alright so far, it's just under 2 years old. According to the Blackblaze reports 3tb drives aren't very good just in general, but if you need one HGST seems to have the lowest failure rates. This just came up in the storage megathread so there's some posts around here: One thing to keep in mind which was brought up in the thread and might have skewed their 3tb stats is that a large majority of the 3tb drives that failed for them were purchased right after the severe Thailand floods of 2011 which really screwed HD manufacturing in general. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the manufactures loosened up on their QC in order to get some product out the door and back on their feet. I'm not so sure their findings show that 3tb drives have worse failure rates; rather it might be that drives manufactured around that time have worse failure rates. Krailor fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Jun 30, 2015 |
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Jun 30, 2015 00:12
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