Be Excellent To Each Other

O.K I know people get grumpy when I talk about PC gaming hardware in the PC game thread. So I figured I'd start a new one.

So to kick it off. I see Intel have released the I3. It's also very cheap at around £94 for a dual core entry level (also, I didn't know I5 was only dual core !).

I saw a benchmark and sadly it's crap. It got pretty much pwned by a Athlon X4 620 costing £60. So it's basically a Celeron then. Why are Intel so fucking crap at making cheap low end cpus?

At least I know AMD won't have to worry about going out of business then.

http://www.madshrimps.be/vbulletin/f22/ ... rks-68833/

Article there. I mean, sure, the I3 does win some things but nowhere near enough to make it £35 more expensive and require a more expensive board and ram.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/item/593341/q ... tb-hd-ati-?

Seems like that is a rather good price, right?

Not bad at all ! Especially with Ram prices the way they are

Didn't you already just start a new PC hardware thread?

This is PC Gaming Hardware.

So what's talking about buying a new graphics card, then? I'm confused.

If you want to discuss PC hardware threads maybe you start a PC hardware thread discussion thread?

To be fair, the i3 is intended to be a cheap, low-power processor. It's certainly not meant for a gaming PC, so I don't doubt that the benchmarks are shite.

I'm rebuilding my PC with the Core i5-750, which I've heard nothing but good things about. I'm slightly worried about how easy it will be to use SLI or Crossfire with future graphics cards as the P55 architecture of the chip and all Socket 1156 motherboards allows for an absolute maximum of 16 PCI-E lanes, so two cards get 8 lanes each, but everything I've seen suggests the i5-750 is still a better gaming processor than anything AMD has at present. I certainly hope that's the case, since I could've saved myself £60 by getting a Phenom II X4 965 BE!

All I need now is a decent case as my NZXT Hush, as much as I love the look of it, isn't too great at keeping things cool. I wish you could get the Acer Predator cases seperately as they're lovely looking machines, much nicer looking than anything Alienware has ever produced.

FWIW: the i5-750 is a proper quad-core chip, but it doesn't have Hyper Threading, so it's a bit of an anomoly in the i5 range.

I ENJOY CIV 4

I ALSO ENJOY CIV 4. IT IS A GOOD GAME. SOME OF THE CARRIAGES ARE QUITE RARE.

How fast can a PC like that do the 'cards bouncing out along the screen' animation after winning a game of solitaire, and are there benchmarks to compare against?

What are the heat dissapation & power consumption of these devices?

We have a stream of this at work. It was causing a specific bug in a driver many moons ago. So yes: There are benchmarks for this

Three to the power of ten on the ratio of 180101893 : 1.

I'm only beginning to understand the I5 range tbh. It's almost like someone at Intel said "quick, take all the existing cpus and call them all I5". It seems that the newer ones now are all dual core so it might end up that you can only get quads on I7? god knows. Once again they've done their best to make it as confusing as bloody well possible

I wasn't aware that I3 was supposed to be a cheap processor tbh. I read about how it's really low nm etc but had no idea it was low end. Well, at least as an AMD owner I don't have to worry about AMD going out of business any time soon. I don't think AMD will ever be able to compete at the top end tbh. I think it would break every rule of the company (cheap chips).

God I wish my 4890 would arrive

I dunno. Back in the days when Pentium 4 was Intel's top processor, AMD were knocking the shite out of them in terms of bang-for-buck and I don't necessarily see why that can't happen again.

Always being a sucker for the underdog, I almost feel a bit dissappointed with myself for going with another Intel processor, but everywhere I've read says to go for the i5-750 over the Phenom X II 965 BE - although I gather there's really not a lot in it.

In fact... I'm ashamed to say that in the end part of my decision came down to the fact that the Maximus III Formula motherboard looks a bit nicer than the Crosshair II or III. I don't even have a bloody window case, so I won't even see it once it's installed! Plus the RoG Connect function looks like something I might get some use out of, since it will allow me to use me Acer Aspire One to piss about with my main PC's settings.

Old Man Afterthought picked up a PC for his charity yesterday for £50 It's got a proper version of XP on it and everything. he's mightily chuffed.

I've been flashing BIOSes today.

I hope the heating was on.

My new motherboard and CPU arrived yesterday, the RAM and the cooler today. Somewhere along the line I appear to have become the computing equivalent of a MaxPower reader.

Good to hear

So it's 5770 for me. It's almost as good as the 4890 and uses 75w. I got my leccy bill today.. Will deffo be glad of the power reduction. The 280 used over 200w IIRC.

I've checked out the 5770 on youtube and it's a pretty darn impressive card for the cash. I only paid £120 for it too.

How does that work? Do you have a video of the card sitting there, all huge and ridiculous, blasting out heat? Or is it a blurry, low-framerate (Youtube after all) video of a game played on one where it's impossible to make out the nostril hair rendering matrix or ants on the grass renderer?

It was a review with posted scores of benchmarks in certain games etc

Edit : here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhXrShvE ... r_embedded

Thank you for humouring me and answering the question anyway.

Seriously though: Does the AMD require a fan that is twice the size and twice as loud?

The fan in the 4890 was actually the same as the 280gtx. On performance the two are about level.

However, what AE said about them being about the same as mid range cards got me thinking. The Radeon 5770 isn't quite as fast as the 4890. However, it is faster than the 260 GTX and only costs £120. So after many hours of looking around and admitting to myself that it would run everything perfectly well enough (and seeing the latter*) I decided to go with the modern card.

*

As for heat? My 280 idled at 56c and the 5770 idles at 32c.

You were talking about getting 3 of these right JC?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/512MB-XF ... PCI-E-Card

Nah, they're the plop ones. It was these.

http://videocardshop.co.uk/product.asp? ... S-250X-ZDF

But tbh I'm going to see how one of these 5770s goes. If it runs all of my existing games then I'll just leave it be. Not sitting in a sauna and having too much power on tap would be nice for once.

So you are getting a 360! Happy days.

Right, that's it, next time I want a PC I'm just going to fucking buy a ready made one and bollocks to all this fuck shit fuck fuck ARRRRRGHHHH!

New motherboard won't boot. Constantly power cycles. Does this with regardless of if a graphics card is plugged in or not. Does it with both, one or no memory sticks installed. Is getting on my fucking nerves now.

I've sent an email to ASUS to see if they can help, plus posted about it on their technical forum, so I'll give it 48 hours, then eBuyer will be getting it back and I'll be asking for a refund. And then I think I will just go and buy a ready-made PC from somewhere.

Flash the BIOS. Ahahahaha

No, f-pr0t the tarball. You might need to be running teh Lunix to do this.

I used to build PCs for a living and I never had these problems before. Oh, dear God, I can feel the Cult of Apple drawing me back with their wonderful computers that have never given me an ounce as much shit as this bloody thing has.

I thought you are going through all this to play games?

Must... resist...

Heh!

Yeah, I was, but it's left me with only one working PC and that's netbook. I'm getting very tired of the constant fucking about with this thing and would just like a PC that switches on and lets me do some things. That would be nice. If it can play games too, wonderful.

Bloody hell, two weeks ago I had a working PC that was a little behind the cutting edge, but still worked. Trying to replace the motherboard with a swankier one ended up with me fucking the until-that-point working processor. So I decide 'sod it, I'll upgrade the whole bloody lot!' and buy a brand new motherboard, processor and RAM and now, about 500 quid worse off, I have something that won't quite turn on. This grieves me somewhat.

I'm glad I followed JC's advice and didn't end up building my own PC last year.

And now you see why I love Alienware so much (when you're not flashing their bioses and replacing their parts, ooer).

Right finally got time to sit down and reply properly (been cooking all day).

That's the problem with building PCs. If you have a single duff part there is absolutely no way to know what one it is unless when you buy the parts you buy two of everything which as we know is not really logical. PCs have always been notoriously difficult to troubleshoot should you run into a problem when building one because it's not like a duff ram stick will shout out "I'M DEAD HEY OVER HERE". I want to say I think it's your PSU tbh. Especially after all the probs you had with the other machine. But I don't even know if you're using that same one. Thankfully when I went from Core 2 to Phenom I had enough parts to keep the PC running should I run into a problem. And I did, three ferkin times. TBH I am just pretty relieved that the bastard works right now and can't wait to get a normal gpu back in it and do some gaming.

But aye, upgrading is worrying enough for me now, I simply don't have the patience to be doing full builds any more. Especially with the way everything is mass produced these days and thus nowhere near as reliable as it once was. And this is basically the reason why I love Alienware. Because (well, up until very recently) they could build the willy stiffening machines I dreamt of owning without me having to think about ordering everything and getting it all to work. Sadly that has changed a bit since they became Dellienware but I still think Dell are OK.

It's a shame that companies like Vadim went bust tbh. I mean yes they were expensive but fuck me they knew how to build a tidy PC.

Right, I have now calmed down a bit. There's a little button on this motherboard which activates a function ASUS call 'MemOK'. It's for when you've fucked up overclocking your memory sticks from what I can tell, as it makes the computer boot up with safer memory settings. Now, if I hold that button and turn it on, it boots. I'm actually typing this, from Windows, on my PC right now.

That would suggest the memory is at fault, but I actually don't think it is as the power cycling thing happens even if no memory sticks are installed - whereas holding the MemOK button allows it to boot (and then obviously fail to post since there's no memory installed). And it isn't the power supply as, although I did certainly have a duff one once, I've since replaced it and, again, here I am typing a post on the affected PC, so the PSU must be doing something right. No, I'm fairly convinced it's the motherboard.

What has enabled me to calm down is actually trying things out now that I am in Windows - even with everything at it's default settings (I can get into the BIOS but not actually change anything because of this bloody fault) things are lovely. My PC is a hell of a lot nippier than it was previously and the sound card this came with makes a colossal difference (not to mention the fact I can finally play games in 5.1 surround sound on my amp). Once I've got this computer working properly it's going to be utterly fantastic, so for that reason I'm sure I can put up with a little more inconvenience while I have to return the board to eBuyer and wait for a replacement.

And then... and this is the best bit... I can finally stop fucking about with this bloody machine and actually use it properly!

Where did you get yours from? I might get a half-decent PC at some point and I might just buy a complete system next time.

Good god. Don't tell JC.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/mother ... herboard/1

Oooh mummy.

Why the hell would you spend all that money, plus electricity bills, for that? Why are people so obsessed with folding at home?

It certainly isn't trusted as remotely accurate by any protein folding specialist I know. It's pointless.

Yeah, all my protein folding specialist friends fold their proteins at work now, sometimes on the bus but never at home.

Yoyotech.

Also following JC's recommendation I bought a PC rather than make one, in my case from Overclockers. But it later transpired that they are Nazis.

Yes, I would also recommend to everyone that they buy a PC and don't make one themselves.

I've never had any trouble building PCs, fortunately. I'll still build my next one, I reckon, unless I find something a lot cheaper than I could source the parts manually.

The only trouble I have is keeping up with the hardware market and knowing what's good. A quick bit of research does the trick there, though.