So yesterday during the storm I got a power surge and it blew out my computer. It won't turn on and there is a flashing green light on the motherboard. It was time to upgrade anyway but now I am forced to. The computer was old generation tech (still DDR2) My Question is: What the heck is decent nowadays? I know barely anything about the new tech. Is it worthwhile to get a gaming laptop now? I'm not looking for something that can run Skyrim on Ultra, but just something that I can play High settings for WoW and SWTOR.
Gaming laptops are never worth it. Never. Do yourself a favor and just use a desktop. Are you comfortable building one, or are you a pussy and you're going to buy a pre-built one? If you're building one the i5 2500k processor is all the rage right now from what I've seen. If you're not going to overclock it though an i3 2120 is cheaper and will do you just fine. Of course motherboard, processor, as much ram as you can afford/your mobo supports, power supply etc etc. Most new builds I see people doing these days are using radeon 6800 series or 6900 series video cards. There are quite a few models and which one you use will pretty much just depend on budget. What is your budget, anyway?
I sunk just under 2 grand earlier this year in a new PC I put together myself that could handle gaming and image intensive programs like photoshop and illustrator running at once and then some - i7 processor, 580 graphics card, 8 GB Ram, a 1TB HD and a 150 gb SSD - I doubt I'll need to upgrade in a good while and that's the way I planned it. It plays Skyrim no problem whatsoever and eats WoW running on Ultra settings for breakfast. It's really worth buying for the long run, IMO, giving you space to upgrade when the time comes.
We pay more for tech here since a lot of it comes from overseas and isn't manufactured here. I think it was more closer to $1800-1900 but there was delivery fee for the parts and I ended up getting some new speakers, a legit copy of Windows 7 and junk so all up I'd say just under 2K. Oh, that's meant to be 120 GB SSD by the way, must have hit the wrong key. The original list of parts is here http://shinraonline.com/xen/threads/building-a-new-desktop-pc.13366/ I think it was updated some though before purchase.
My budget is whatever I want to spend. (working two jobs and extra hours here and there so I got lots of disposible income) I have built every computer that I have bought. Looking through the comp, it looks like I might be able to salvage the video card. I hate Radeon's tho, I have had bad experiences with frame rates as opposed to geforce. My network card still works. Of course mouse and keyboard/speakers/monitor are good. So I can take all of it out and use my case. It's ephyn huge. Looking like I will need Motherboard CPU RAM POWER SUPPLY That's it. I think. Unless I have to buy a new video card because it ain't supported on the board. And I hope not cause that was still a really good one (was half the total cost last time I built it) Sucks that it broke after Black Friday. Fry's was doing an awesome sale on Sat.
Go intel or bust. Although AMD does have some low prices for higher-end models. Get a GTX 580, I definitely recommend it.
If you don't need to buy a new gfx card then you're good. Always the most expensive component on a gaming rig, unless you get a shitty one. Intel is expensive for not much benefit, the chipsets are currently better on intel motherboards but you have to weigh that against how much computery shit you think you'll be doing. Unless you do video encoding/streaming or like rendering shit, games will go perfectly fine and the differences will be almost immeasurable with an AMD counterpart. Video card is the clincher for gaming. And even with streaming and video encoding which I do quite a lot of I do perfectly fine with my Phenom 2 955. I mean if you want the top notch get the i7 and some watercooling and go mental, but I've OC'ed my friends 955 (exact same as mine) with watercooling up to 4.1ghz which I think is pretty good for a $125 cpu. Especially considering the i7 is at least twice that for the same stock speed of 3.2ghz. And theyv'e changed watercooling units now so you don't need a fucking engineering degree to install one like in olden days. Ram, splurge. It's relatively cheap and really helps in every aspect. Power supply, just quick napkin math on the TDP of your CPU and GFX card+a decent margin of error. Modular is nice because you can easily identify rails and avoid internal case clutter, but they usually tag rails in bigger PSU's now and you can just strips up and put superfluous cords away in some corner.
I'm pissed about how shitty the Black Friday/Cyber Monday deals have been. I'm also in the process of building a new gaming pc (fuck playing on my laptop even though it works really good on SWTOR). Any good deals on an i5 2500k? Nope! I was looking to grab a good ASUS motherboard too but again no deals. So far I have: Lian Li Lancool PC-K63 Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus CPU Cooler Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1600 Memory Corsair Professional Series Gold 750-Watt 80 Plus Gold Certified High-Performance Power Supply Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB 7200 RPM Internal Hard Drive (I got this for 80 bucks today. It's a good deal since Thailand got owned by the floods.) Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit (I also purchased this for 80 today.) I also bought some decent optical drive. My needs: LGA1155 motherboard i5 2500k cpu A quality SSD that isn't OCZ or some other shit brand that will lose all your data. For my graphics card I might get the new GTX 560 TI with 448 cores and 1.2 VRAM that gets released tomorrow. Nvidia all the way.
I've got 6 OCZ SSD's lying around now from Gen1 to Gen3 and haven't really had a hitch with them ever. Intel don't do good deals so yeah get over that pipe dream.
Sounds like the Power Supply took the load, they are shunted to pop before major damage can occur, any green and black wire in the main header plug will turn the supply on, if the fan fails to come on usually that will be the problem. Or if you have a digital meter check the output for 12 and 5 volts , but remember you must jumper green and black together to turn the supply on, you can check the output with the header disconnected doing it with a meter. I ran a kerosene heater for several years and it was not running hot enough so there was a lot of soot in the air, it totaled two of my power supplies and in general made a real mess, I'm still finding soot on some of my components and it's been two years. I since learned to run the heater white hot, never turn it down because it is designed to run full bore, in this case a 25,000 btu heater, it works like a champ.
Good call on the AMD processors. I built this PC ~1 year ago w/an AMD Phenom x4 965 and even when multitasking it has never once made me think 'I should have got a faster processor.' It's a "black edition" or whatever which is supposed to be good with overclocking but I've never fooled with it. 3.4ghz and I've head of people doing 3.9 to 4.0 ghz with the stock cooler. If you want the top of the line right now you'll have to get an i7, Hereticus. However, most people will never even get remotely close to using that processor to it's full potential, much less actually taxing it. If you don't want top of the line just to say you have it then I believe AMD has a better price/performance ratio, they just can't compete right now at the very high end. I heard the new 6 cores they've come out with recently (bulldozer, I think?) have been poorly received across the board. Also check into how many cores the games you want to play will actually utilize. I built this computer mostly for WoW and it doesn't utilize more than 2 so really the other 2 are useless unless you're multi-tasking. When I'm playing WoW on my computer I almost always have at least 1 browser window open along with ventrilo and pandora, and occasionally windows media player also. I've never seen this computer slow down at all even with all of that open. The worst I've seen is loading screens going abysmally slow when I was transferring ~10 gigs of video from one drive to another yesterday but that's a HDD shortcoming not a processor problem.
Bulldozer is the 8-core, thuban is the 6-core. Bulldozer does need to mature a bit and figure out L3 cache sharing, but the Thuban is fine. Once they start picking out excess transistors that are bogging it down and just causing unnecessary resistance like with every single new CPU ever made, they'll probably refine how it handles the cache sharing, so you might have to wait for the Piledriver revision in 2012. But again multicore has a pretty limited impact on gaming, most games are still unbelievably shit at utilizing multiple cores, and is really only truly relevant for shit like video encoding or similar. Black edition simply means the multipliers are unlocked in BIOS, so it's not so much that black edition is good for overclocking but rather that it allows it at all.
I didn't feel like spending close to 300 for the new nvidia cards so I went ahead and purchased a Sapphire 100312-3L Radeon HD 6950 2GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card. Total cost was 214.99 with a coupon for 50 (MIMKB2BACYB25). http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814102954 This should be good enough for my first graphics card.
I once had all ATI cards but started having lot's of problems, that was 6 years ago, but now I am sold on Nvidia. They occasionally have issues with new drivers but just going back to the earlier fixes the problems until the next release. The user base for ATI felt the same and sales were not great so this is why you see AMD as the owner now, they bought a good deal for a low price. Maybe AMD has a better product now that they own them. Any competition is better than none.
Finished ordering the rest of my computer parts. Anyone know of a good site for beginners when it comes to computer building? Either a youtube video or pictures would help.
Pretty simple really, just watch that you don't have any static built up when you touch boards and components, don't wear slippers or drag your feet when walking across the carpets ... Most new cases have hardware and an instruction pamphlet included. Toms Hardware forums is pretty good to ask just about any question, I guess you're going with all new stuff , if the hard drive isn't new it will have to be reformatted since the controllers are already mapped in windows to your old system. You need a good little Philips screw driver and that's all for tools. You most likely have all newer SATA drive connections, so that's pretty easy to place the operating system hard drive on the primary connector of the mother board, you could have 4 or more of those connectors but they're numbered clearly. Depending on the power supply you get you possibly might need an adapter for the newer video card, they use power in to run the cards, it is just a little pigtail wiring connector that plugs into the older ATX power connectors. Newer power supplies have those already built into the bundle coming out but it might not be there as I said. First thing that happens when you fire it up is to go into the bios and setup things there, most of the hard work is automatic, but there are a few things you have to set yourself, like the time and date, that must come before everything even if you have to reboot and go into the bios again to continue . If you have a mother board that has both sata and pata you will have the 80 wire cable for your DVD or CD, unless of course you purchased the newer sata one, so you don't need to worry about getting it set for slave on the same cable with your system drive, it will have the only flat cable used, and it will be setup by the bios as a primary drive for that controller, you can just set the little pin jumper on the drive to CS. If it is a sata type drive that uses the little four wire cable it just goes into any of the other connectors on the board. I like the new sata because it is so easy to set them up, each has a separate cable for the mother board and the setting for their jumpers should be CS. I found it is smart to have a pencil and paper so you can write down anything you change in bios, in case you need to reset it. Most bios will have what they call an optimal setting and it just sets things up so it will boot, but not always the best. Any of your add on cards like video and audio, do yourself a favor and write down all the serial numbers and part numbers for any boards you put in, event he mother board. It will just ruin your day to find it necessary to remove one just so you can search for a damned number!!! Write it down now and then you will always be able to do things much easier, especially when you have to trouble shoot or download drivers. Don't go crazy when you screw down the mother board, just a little snugness is fine for the mounting screws, over tightening a motherboard can break traces and you will have nothing but trouble trying to figure out what the problem is. Tight is when you can't turn it any more , just a little twist extra but don't try and break your wrist, with all the screws installed and snug it ain't going nowhere. Don't forget to put that thermal grease on the heat sink and fan assembly, without it the processor will shut down and may even be damaged, they say Intels will thottle down and reduce heat before they pop but I don't want to take that as the gospel. Over the years I have owned at least 60 computers, most were used but I built quite a few and only had one mother board that was dead, when you know everything is plugged in correctly and the power supply fan comes on but the computer won't do anything, it usually turns out to be a bad board or bios. Hope all this long jabber is helpful in some way.
So I just bought some pieces to build a new comp. Luckily, a good chunk of the stuff I need to buy can be taken from the old comp. ($94.99) MB BIOSTAR|TZ68A+ Z68 LGA1155 R $94.99 1 x ($46.99) MEM 4Gx2|CORSAIR CMZ8GX3M2A1600C9 $46.99 1 x ($134.99) CPU INTEL|CORE I3 2105 3.1G 3M R $134.99 1 x ($149.99) PSU CORSAIR|AX650 R $149.99 Plus since they were all combos I saved an additional $50. And it was free 3 day shipping out of NewEgg. I am so happy. I hope tho UPS is fast and gets it on Sat so I can have SWTOR loaded and ready to go.
