Doesn't matter, was forced to rush it and just got this. Is it any good?

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“One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered.”

@Zeph: Technic'ly speaking, I'm going to buy a new computer. Dang, these processors are expensive! Ha ha. But yeah, Imma upgrade my PC with new gear as soon as I get any form of paycheck >:T

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I like Samsung for laptops. That is a reasonable choice, I'm just thinking if you'd waited a week or two you could have gotten a bit more bang for your buck.


I personally prefer AMDs for cost to performance. Yes the intel Sandy Bridge is bad ass, but for way less you can get close with AMD.

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Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

I think going up to like, $200 AMD is more cost efficient.

Once you're thinking of spending more than $200 for your processor though, AMD really levels off and you're better off going for Intel, I'd say.

Honestly though, unless you're doing something processor intense, a Phenom II X4 P55 is probably enough for your needs. They cost like a $100 these days? Unlocked, pretty easy to OC to 4Ghz with absolutely no effort (I forget if stock cooler was sufficient or not).

Most games are GPU bottlenecked anyways, so you're not going to see a massive increase in performance, certainly not noticeable ones.

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Twitter | Transistor Glamor | Tumblr | MAL

You're probably right, but all I really had control over was what to pick.

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“One day you wake up and realize the world can be conquered.”

Agreed. I actually have the Phenom 955. Works just fine. Right now my bottlenecks are hard drive access speed and GPU for different things of course, most games GPU. This black friday I do believe I will get a GFX card that does HDMI sound so I can remove some of my cord nightmare behind my TV.

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Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

Yeah, the only time I've found myself CPU bottlenecked was in some REALLY busy scenarios of Total War: Shogun 2 and processing complex, late-game turns of Civ 5. Well, badly optimized code, too, but let's not count that.

Most CPU's these days bottleneck games at around 120fps. Most GPU's, if you're making the maximum use out of it, bottlenecks at 60fps at the very least. So, yeah.

That said, if you do any 3D rendering or video file encoding and the like, Intel's definitely the way to go, even with the core advantage of AMD. AMD just doesn't really do it for workstations, and unfortunately the Bulldozer didn't achieve what most people wanted it to. Hopefully the Piledriver comes out better, but who knows.

SSD's are great, Zeph. I wish they'd be cheaper, and Thailand wasn't flooded.

It's usually pretty easy to find good deals on HD 6950's or 560's these days, so I bet you'll have an easy time with Black Friday.

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Twitter | Transistor Glamor | Tumblr | MAL

Yeah I'd love an SSD boot drive, but the prices are outrageous. I'll wait out the load time and wait an extra 10 seconds to watch porn. For video cards I'm seeing some decent deals, but nothing that can't be found any other time. Maybe cyber monday.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

I completely forgot about this thread, so I'm copy/pasting from the thread I posted to spam...

Help me build a new gaming PC...

I'm out of the loop with the latest technology, I haven't bothered with building a PC since I put together my Core2Duo I bought back in 2006. The most I've done was swap out my ram for 4GB and upgrade to a Radeon HD 4670.

Anyway, here's a build I threw together on Newegg: http://i.imgur.com/sTliy.png

What I'm aiming for is PLENTY of RAM for the crazy multitasking I do and processing power to match it. I'd like to get the most out of using two GPUs, I'm not really sure what to look for in a motherboard for this. I used Newegg's PSU calculator to determine how much wattage I need, they said I need 800.

One very important thing I need to know is if Crossfire relies on games to be compatible to utilize the power or will I get all the power from both GPUs regardless of what game I'm playing?

Forgot to mention I don't want to spend too much more than $1,500. Also, should I wait for some kind of Cyber Monday deals?

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I didn't even know this site existed; Here's a list from PCPartPicker.

Part list permalink / Part price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4GHz Quad-Core Processor ($279.99 @ Microcenter)
Motherboard: Asus P8Z68-V PRO ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($179.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Corsair XMS3 16GB (4 x 4GB) DDR3-1333 Memory ($54.99 @ Newegg)
Hard Drive: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($68.95 @ Office Depot)
Video Card: XFX Radeon HD 6870 2GB Video Card (CrossFire) ($187.55 @ Newegg)
Video Card: XFX Radeon HD 6870 2GB Video Card (CrossFire) ($187.55 @ Newegg)
Case: Antec Three Hundred Illusion ATX Mid Tower Case ($69.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Kingwin 850W ATX12V / EPS12V Power Supply ($79.99 @ Newegg)
Optical Drive: Asus BC-12B1ST/BLK/B/AS Blu-Ray Reader, DVD/CD Writer ($57.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $1166.99
(Prices include shipping and discounts when available.)
(Generated 2011-11-27 06:07 EST-0500)

I just need help verifying this build. Would getting crossfire with this motherboard greatly improve gaming performance?

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You kind of need crossfire support on the motherboard or else the second video card is wasted. I do believe that mobo does have cross fire support anyways.

Also you might want to pull one of your current HDs so you have a boot drive and a data drive.

_________________
Zeph do you ever tire of being perfect? ~Dave
Zeph is still awesome though. ~Rival
I love you so much right now Zeph. ~Yoshi
I love you Zeph. You and your simple yet humorous topic-breakers. ~Coos
Zeph has left me inspired. ~Mathias
Zeph is so awesome even soulless bits of binary worship him. ~Wizard
Curse YOU ZEPH! CURSE YOU! ~JesusChrist
WE ARE SORRY THAT WE ARE NOT AS PERFECT AS YOU, ZEPH! ~Stufflikehearts
Zepherin for forum queen and writer of the best seller "how to screw your brethen up for dummies". ~ The Mirak

Never buy straight into crossfire unless there's a good deal for buying a pair of something.

Single GPU always > Double for heat and power consumption.

I've always thought of SLI and Crossfire as upgrade paths (when you need an upgrade, just buy a second, slightly outdated card rather than buying into a new card every time).

For $40 less you could get a 6970, and honestly I don't think there's a game out right now that could run under 60fps on that card, and it probably outperforms the 6870x2.

Idea being, when you start tanking under 60fps (or 30fps if you don't mind) in like 4 years, you can just buy another 6970 at a sale price as an upgrade.
That said, you're buying at an awkward time, because ATI just announced the 7XXX series which should be upcoming by end of 2012, which means you're soon going to be a generation behind despite paying current gen prices.
Though, to be fair, if 5XXX to 6XXX is any hint, the increase in power of GPU between gens isn't going to be that big, and it'll mostly be refinements or support for a new version of DirectX.

Make sure your motherboard is x16 in both GPU slots too (often a board is 16x/8x, which isn't bad but hardly ideal). Also, make sure it has enough PCe slots for all your PCe stuff PLUS 4 slots, because most GPU's these days take up the space of 2 slots (the main GPU usually takes up the legacy PC slot).

Most games can take advantage of dual GPU, and the drivers are pretty well written these days. Going triple GPU or more though, is probably inadvisable.

Check to make sure your RAM timings are at the most 9-9-9-24 while running at 1333, or else they might be older 1066 RAM advertised as 1333 with artificially increased timings.

And yeah, ideally you want two hard drives at least. The second one doesn't need to be 7200rpm though (it's the one you should be putting data like documents, pictures, videos, etc. on). You don't neccessarily need to get one right now, see what you can get from older PC's. Why I say don't do it right now, is because of the Thailand flood, so prices are higher than normal atm. Still, cyber Monday, might be able to see a good price.

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Twitter | Transistor Glamor | Tumblr | MAL

My mouse cursor keeps blinking out and it only seems to happen in the browser window. Is my Internet possibly running a program in the background that interrupts the mouse?

Try running your preferred browser in safe mode, with only the default page. Tell me how that goes.

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One time when I was high, I thought I was in an ambulance dying. Turns out I was just eating sherbert.
-stufflikehearts-

Well, I went into safe mode with networking and got an error when I tried to connect, then got the same error when I came back into standard mode. But the cursor seems to be fine now, so I guess it was nothing.

He meant use the browser's safe mode, not your OS's.

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Twitter | Transistor Glamor | Tumblr | MAL

I didn't know that the browser has a safe mode.

So tell me, why are there cubes floating over her hand?

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One time when I was high, I thought I was in an ambulance dying. Turns out I was just eating sherbert.
-stufflikehearts-

I was asked to make inquiries for someone who wants to make a forum. Any help would be appreciated.

Sorry if I'm bringing up an old topic, but I don't see an actual answer here.

Are you typing when your cursor blinks out or does it happen when moving the mouse over a link/embedded video, etc.?

Sometimes this problem can be caused by hardware acceleration and disabling it can stop it from happening inside of certain program windows. Does the mouse only behave erratically in your browser? Or does it happen inside of other programs as well?

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Actually if you read further it resolved itself.

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CAUTION: Would anyone tell me if I was getting stupider?

Thanks for the intel, though.

Alright guys, I have a compumergency. Not really, it's not an emergency at all.

I have a wireless keyboard, of which, a man who was at my house (possibly naked,) spilled a drink on. the keyboard itself works, still, somehow. HOWEVER, Now the volume keys stick, and I can't pop the keys out to clean it. Does anyone know how I would fix this? I have neither voodoo magic, or technical capabilities of any kind.

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Motherfucker, I used to be somebody.

You could poor a little isopropyl alcohol in it and blast it out with some keyboard duster.

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CAUTION: Would anyone tell me if I was getting stupider?

Does this run the risk of further breaking my wizard device?

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Motherfucker, I used to be somebody.