Octopus Overlords

Isgrimnur wrote: ↑Thu Feb 01, 2018 8:51 am

hitbyambulance wrote:the MSI motherboard in my work VR PC just died, a week outside of the 12 month warranty

Email them anyway. The worst that can happen is they don’t help.

yup, going to. waiting on the purchasing guy to give me the receipt for it so i can fill out the registration.

for future reference, the only symptom i received that the motherboard failed was there was a 'click' sound and the machine immediately powered off, never to power back on again. power supply tested fine with shorting the pins (fan came on) and the voltage was good on each of the VCC lines (tested with a DMM). the only LED that lit up on the mobo was some kind of 'overcharge protection' light.

That's basically what happened to me. Though I wasn't able to test everything else. And I don't remember which light would light up on the MB, just that it was only one light.

Looks like I may finally be approaching the end of the tunnel after 3 months. I have limited hope that I'll get my computer back by the end of Feb.

RMA request submitted. we'll see if they accept or reject, now.

EDIT 1: doesn't matter too much, as the team lead just purchased a replacement mobo (minus the built-in AC wireless) for me from Amazon.

EDIT 2: RMA granted!

I kept hearing about how miners are raising video card prices. I figured it was maybe $50 more. I went to newegg and looked at 1070 model cards from EVGA and holy $#@!. A normal $400 card is $1000. In fact all 1070s are over $1000 each hahahah. Nuts.

Yeah, it's depressing. I was thinking of building a new PC this year, but not if GPU prices stay in crazy-town.

I've seen several sites that I typically read for hardware reviews, and for the first time in...forever, for multiple categories), they are writing things like DO NOT BUY NOW, or WAIT, as opposed to where the MSRP would typically show.

Thankfully my GTX 760 is still running games fine for me, since I am only doing 1900x1200 @ 60Hz. Can run pretty much anything at that refresh rate. It doesn't hurt that I am usually so far behind playing the latest and greatest games, that I have never needed the hottest video cards.

Mine broke yesterday so at the worst time of course.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2018 5:48 pm Mine broke yesterday so at the worst time of course.

Oh, word? How come you didn't say anything?

Z-Corn wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2018 6:39 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Mon Feb 05, 2018 5:48 pm Mine broke yesterday so at the worst time of course.

Oh, word? How come you didn't say anything?

Cant tell if serious Ive posted about 15 post in the general forum under random and started a looking for vid card in trade since yesterday Im using my fallback card..a 10 year old GTX 260 ...ugh. I think it would stutter on Pong.

OK, so I got my parts the other day and finally built yesterday.

Couple of notes:
1. Wow, things are so much easier than they used to be! Not to mention the speed on installation from a latest gen SSD, but also the way Windows just activates itself so nicely with a major hardware change.
2. Amazing difference in speed in some games already noted, specifically Planet Coaster and Civ V (load times).
3. Drive formatting/RAID installation is also soooo much easier than it was the last time I did this. I had an "EZ RAID" function in the BIOS that just did it for me. And of course the past couple of iterations of Windows have been pretty good in this area, IMO, with their formatting and partitioning disk tool.
4. UEFI BIOS. Wow! First experience with a GUI BIOS.

Some people were claiming that you would not notice a difference between speed going from a 1st Gen SSD (3GB/S) to a modern one. Not true. I can absolutely feel it. Also boots in half the time or less, and there is a noticeable difference in "snappiness". I considered going to an NVME drive, but I knew I was already going to be getting quite an upgrade in speed with the MX500 (6GB/S), and I am on a budget, so I feel comfortable with my choice there.

Overall a great, easy experience, not to mention cleaning what seemed to be about 3 pounds of dust and debris out of my computer case and surrounding area.

Congrats! A new system is always a fun time isn't it? Its like getting a big haircut....lighter faster feeling

As Deadpool would say..."what in the ass!??" ....Here in the US at places like Newegg or anywhere video card prices are insane. A 1070 is like $1000 and a 1070 ti is $1200.

But I wondered about non US like Europe so checked England and they are normal priced over there! ....Im looking at 1070ti for 450 sterling and such. ARGH.

https://www.novatech.co.uk/products/msi ... ing8g.html

http://www.microcenter.com/product/4887 ... Video_Card

not quite $1000

I "inherited" a Dell XPS 15 laptop from a previous client, and decided to upgrade the 32 SSD m.2 cache drive to a larger and faster one. Noticed also that the battery seemed to not be keeping a charge, so ordered a replacement battery as well.

When I opened the laptop up, I noticed that the battery I received (generic, eBay) was twice the size of my existing battery inside the computer.

Fortunately, my plan was to just use the existing 1TB drive in there as slow, secondary storage for music, videos,, photos, etc because what I had to do (to make the battery fit), was remove the TB HDD to make space for the larger battery. Worked out well really, because while I gained a slight bit of weight, I gained a LOT of extra battery power, since those HDD's do suck down the juice.

Added a modestly sized 256GB SSD (m.2 NVME) and wow...completely different machine. The speeds are ridiculous now, even though they were not bad before.

I would like to be able to say that upgrading from a last gen SSD (6GBps) to a lower tier NVME SSD drive (16GBps) made a noticeable difference, but the way Dell configured the cache SSD in RAID with the HDD, makes that hard for me to say. Most online articles I have read say that there is not nearly the noticeable jump in speed from old SSD to NVME, as there is from HDD to (old) SSD.

I do notice that there is already a misconception out there about SSD formats and speed. m.2 is just an interface that can include older gen SSD drives that are no faster than their non m.2 counterparts (like the cache drive in my XPS that I replaced). NVME is the new SSD interface that has theoretical speeds that are more than double the speed of older SSD formats.

Bottom line, just because a drive has an m.2 connector, does not mean it's faster than your 5 year old Sandisk SSD. NVME definitely does mean that, however.

What would you guys recommend for a new hard drive (SATA)? I started to look on Amazon, just to see what was out there, and immediately noticed things like WD Red and WD Blue. Haven't even yet looked at other brands. What is the difference between Red and Blue? Is WD better than/about the same as/not as good as Seagate? (I used to think they were about the same, but what do I know?)
I'll probably get a 1TB or 2TB. This will be for my spousal unit's pc.

Red is for Network Attached Storage. Blue is desktop. Black is desktop performance. Purple is for surveillance systems.

A guide.

Thanks!

Bad Demographic wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 3:33 pm What would you guys recommend for a new hard drive (SATA)? I started to look on Amazon, just to see what was out there, and immediately noticed things like WD Red and WD Blue. Haven't even yet looked at other brands. What is the difference between Red and Blue? Is WD better than/about the same as/not as good as Seagate? (I used to think they were about the same, but what do I know?)
I'll probably get a 1TB or 2TB. This will be for my spousal unit's pc.

SSD or HDD? SATA can be both.

Carpet_pissr wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2018 12:02 pm

Bad Demographic wrote: ↑Sun Feb 25, 2018 3:33 pm What would you guys recommend for a new hard drive (SATA)? I started to look on Amazon, just to see what was out there, and immediately noticed things like WD Red and WD Blue. Haven't even yet looked at other brands. What is the difference between Red and Blue? Is WD better than/about the same as/not as good as Seagate? (I used to think they were about the same, but what do I know?)
I'll probably get a 1TB or 2TB. This will be for my spousal unit's pc.

SSD or HDD? SATA can be both.

I was looking for a HDD. Thanks to Isgrimnur I knew to look for a blue or black WD - although I suppose I should have done more research to see if there are better choices than WD. I ended up getting a 1TB black WD (this is for my spousal unit's pc). Thanks for asking, because I didn't even think about if SSDs were SATA.

If you HAVE to get a mechanical then WD Black is great. I used them. Still have one as backup and storage.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Mon Feb 26, 2018 2:06 pm If you HAVE to get a mechanical then WD Black is great. I used them. Still have one as backup and storage.

I should learn about SSDs. I'm easily at least 6 years out of date with technology and things change so fast.

The short answer is that you want an SSD for your boot drive, and a mechanical one for data. And if you have any game that you play that requires quick read times, the SSD should be big enough to hold a game as well. At current standards, one or two is all you'll be able to fit on a reasonable budget.

My Cyberpower rig came with:
500GB WD BLUE SSD 2.5" SATAIII 6.0 GB/s
2TB HDD 3.5" SATAIII 7200RPM 6.0 GB/s 64MB CACHE

With WD SSDs, do the colors mean the same thing as with HDDs?

Looks like it. There's only Black, Blue, and Green, however. Green is listed as high-speed access, but the sizes are smaller.

BTW, Samsung has finally dropped the pricing on their 850 Evo replacement, the 860. Currently about $20 more than the Crucial I mentioned previously, if I were buying today, I wouldn't flinch at getting the 860 instead.

I want to, but this is a VERY BAD TIME for hardware, unless I buy a preconfig'ed PC, and even then it's iffy.

GPU prices are at all-time highs, and DDR4 prices are like double from last year, isn't it?

Kasey Chang wrote: ↑Sun Mar 04, 2018 9:34 pm I want to, but this is a VERY BAD TIME for hardware, unless I buy a preconfig'ed PC, and even then it's iffy.

GPU prices are at all-time highs, and DDR4 prices are like double from last year, isn't it?

Actually SSD prices have been dropping lately, and will probably continue to do so for a while.

Speed difference in drives. Note he mislabels the 10000rpm as 1000 in the video. I was surprised there was a 10 sec difference in the SSD and M.2. Also Ive used them all except a M.2.

Ha, thanks for posting that. Quite a few deals on SSD drives today and yesterday, and I was just this morning looking for speed tests (real world) between NVME and SATA III SSD's. Interesting. Now I'm wondering how much REAL WORLD difference there would be between a 4 channel NVME drive and a 2 channel one. I'm guessing if he had done that comparison, you might see a few seconds difference there as well (probably not 10 though).

Good stuff!

For reference, today you can get:

512GB ADATA XPG SX7000 M.2 PCIe NVME Solid State Drive SSD
$127 shipped

That's pretty good, prices are continuing to fall obviously.

If you don't want or can't use the m.2 format (NVME), there is this as well, also a very good value:

480GB ADATA Ultimate SU650 3D 2.5" Solid State Drive SSD (ASU650SS-480GT-C) For $115.50 - 15% w/ coupon code SAVE15 = $98.17.

The M.2's reminds me a lot of the old days, when they are mounting a hard drive to the expansion card

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcard

EDIT: EXPIRED

Wow, fantastic deal for anyone looking to upgrade the guts of your PC:

Newegg.com has this for $509.99 - $10 Rebate = $499.99. FS

i5-8600K 3.6Ghz
ASUS Prime Z370-A LGA 1151 ATX Motherboard
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 3000Mhz

Higher end parts than you would find on a pre-built as well.


I did a similar upgrade recently and even though I am still using my GTX 760 graphics card from ages ago, it really sped up a lot of games (that I didn't think were sluggish before), and added a lot of zip all around to the system.

Newegg deals are pretty fantastic when it's available.

Woot has an HP Omen i5-7400 w/16 GB RAM, 1 TB HD, NVIDIA GTX 1060/3GB refurb for $540. That's pretty darn good. Most similar systems are in the 800-900 range new.