Dear Friends and Members of the Pc Players Group,
I decided to create a place dedicated to post technical informations and talk about hardware, graphic cards, monitors and all that.
The creation of this thread doesn't imply by any means that hardware talk is frowned upon in the main Thread.
However, if the info gets very, very technical and long exchange between fellow experts a little hot-headed, please take the discussion here.
Have fun!
Hugs and kisses,
Ashen
Yeah, I had this thought that I would be perfectly content gaming on a laptop, til I built the experimental desktop. Thanks to DisturbedJim83 and MatrixGirl for giving me hardware envy. 
I was reading a review and a set of memory benchmarks for some PC2400 DDR4 memory the other day. Most of the benchmarks were ran at OC'd to 3000 MHertz. The units tested were within a few MIPS of one another, with the lower Column Address Select (CAS) units winning, as expected.
What completely seemed to slip by both, the reviewer, and the commenters, was that the control unit, running at 2400 MHertz, handily defeated all the submissions, including its own 3000 Mhertz test runs. I can't understand how these people can't see the obvious.
People can't seem to get out of their own way when evaluating memory overclocking. Any clock multiple that adds CAS cycles will hurt memory performance for common computing tasks. One would think that, by now, this phenomena would be well known, but apparently not.
The other shoe that needs to be dropped in all this is being forced to run at a higher than rated voltage. Push the heat up enough to put any IC into its heat throttling mode and you get some real performance hits. This presupposes that the IC has a heat throttle mode and is capable of gracefully degrading performance instead of a catastrophic failure.
One should be so lucky.
BTW, I was running a parts picker at Newegg, checking a build price for my "Next Computer To End All Computers For The Rest Of Time (NCTEACFTROT)," and I had to quit at $4500 to ROFL. Like I'm going to spend that much on a computer. Fat chance. The NCTEACFTROT is now, officially, on hold until I win the lottery, which will be very hard, since I don't choose to play.
On a lighter note, the price of my chosen mobo is down to $508. lol. That's a savings of $11. I might be tempted to throw $1000 at a mobo, CPU and memory just to ****** the old ball and...ugh....my soul-mate off.
Yeah, that's the funny thing about computers. You'll build that monster $4000+ PC and it'll go obsolete before you finish building it. Welcome to the tech world where everything ages at 10X pace.
I never actually buy new hardware until the software demands it. I built this computer to run Skyrim. I've replaced the Video card recently and I tweak storage when I feel like it. That usually happens just because and not from any actual need. Storage is where I like to stay ahead of the curve.
I generally buy compute last and only as a last resort. There is actually some compute headroom available for this system, but I'll never buy it. This motherboard is getting a little long in the tooth. I'm kinda waiting to see what the Z107's bring to the table. They should push some peripheral systems into the next gen, fairly firmly. Maybe not. Who knows?
It seems to appear that is how PC games will be.. Poorly optimized ports from console. Thankfully we have all the good stuff from Kickstarter and Steam Indy finally releasing.
Things are pretty bad when you buy an expensive title, knowing that you will have to wait a year for all the bugs to get ironed out, if they ever do. I have already made the transition to a dedicated runner of modded games. I've never said this on the forums, but DAO is only replayable with mods. Lot's of mods. The DLC's were forgettable except for Awakening. I just wish I could forget some of that, but it is moddable, too. DA II is moddable and there are a few mods that make it more playable or at least more appealing, visually.
Then there is DAI. It is moddable, sometimes. For the life of me, I can't figure EA/ Bioware out. Not supporting modding is one thing. I don't want to accuse them of actively being anti-mod. But if they're not anti-mod, they're doing an excellent imitation of it.
Is all this drama just unthinking disregard for a portion of the player community? Or are they so insecure that the idea of someone outside their control improving the game beyond their inclination or abilities so bad that they are willing to resort to sabotaging the efforts of their "competition"?
I don't know and I don't care. The result, in a results based economy, is starting to drive my opinion in a direction that they shouldn't want to explore.
It is hard to form an accurate view of what another person is actually thinking at any given time. All one can do is look for the acts that demonstrate their actual values as opposed to their stated values or even they values they think they hold.
My gut feeling is that their culture has no idea what they are thinking or why they think it. Their have been a lot of accusations of lying made against the developers. I don't think they are lying so much as reacting to a problem domain they didn't foresee. In my not very humble opinion, they certainly should have foreseen the reactions they are experiencing. What do you think?
@ManleySteele It's unfortunately the byproduct of the frostbite 3 engine. It's not a great engine when it comes to modding due to DICE's hesitation on sharing it's engine tools. According to them, it's too complicated to release to the public for use. Rather convenient , don't you think?
As you probably know, I'm a storage geek. Our friends at Intel dropped a consumer storage bomb onto the market earlier today in the form of a PCIe SSD designed for consumers. The NVMe 750 line of storage cards runs NVMe natively with standard OS drivers for consumer OS's.
If you are a storage geek like me, you may have looked longingly at some of the NVMe offerings for NAS arrays and wondered when they would arrive at a price under $3-4 per GByte. Wonder no more. Intels new consumer devices are under $1.00 per GByte. The 400 GByte unit lists at $389 and the 1.2 TByte unit is $1029. That's still a lot of money, but the 1.2 TByte unit writes a 128K block @ 1200 MB/S and it reads the same block at a blazing 2400 MB/s. That's more than double the write performance of a typical consumer SSD and almost 5X read performance. Not too shabby.
The 400 Gbyte unit is only $40 more than I paid for my ASUS RAIDR Express 240. I so want one or two.
Intel has announced that the Skylake processors, based on the 14nm process and the Z170 chipset will begin shipping to manufacturers in May. What does this mean to us? We should see the first products (almost certainly a few notebooks) in the June/July timeframe.
No announcement for the Skylake S (The desktop part), but with the shipment of the Z170, the desktop processors should begin to be sampled around the same time.
The Z170 supports DDR4 and DDR3L. Not much other info at this time. Stay tuned and I will try to keep everything up to date.
A 2-core Skylake processor is 64% of the size of the same processor on the 22nm process ( Haswell)
Tom's Hardware is my favorite, but there are others that are just as good.
Ok I am going to break down and get a new system. I keep having an error and my fans and power supply are needing replaced. i had this system built in 09 so its now very dated. I was looking at using my tower which is a cooler Master..a big ass one in the front clear panel. I was looking at buying a 990 GTX, and a new power supply at least 900. I want a strriped raid5, And will be putting windows 10 on it eventually. I want a 42 inch monitor for my center and Ill keep my 2 27 inch ones on the sides for now. ANyone have any suggestions to add? Ill be looking to build this in the beginning of June. Actually I am having my IT college son build it.
Each SSD you add will only cost you about 10 watts of power, so you can go crazy with those if you want. Spinning drives cost around 20 watts, each so you'll make around 100 watts of power draw per 5 drives. The controllers power draw is negligible unless they require a supplementary power cable. The motherboard itself draws between 30 and 60 watts with nothing attached. Memory power is hardly worth mentioning. The two big power draws on any system are processors and graphics cards. Start with 200 to 250 watts for all systems except processors and graphics cards and you should be able to easily figure a power budget that will cover anything you need unless you go crazy with fans, pumps, and lights.
I have 2 top fans with no lights. One in the back one on the bottom and one on the inside on the GPU. Red lights on the side fans and I may change those to blue now. I must admit I like the pretty colors ...SO I will be keeping that tower. I live in a very dusty place though and have issues with always cleaning out my systems. AT least once a month. I don't think there is anything else I can do about the dust issue. I was just debating with my husband though over the cost of the 990 vs a less expensive card.
Fans that are attached to the motherboard fan controllers are in the motherboard's power budget. I should have made that clear before. Only fans, lights, or pumps that use a power supply lead need to be accounted separately.
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