Back into the PC Master Race. It was never a total absence but still.

I was just thinking of you the other day Shifty, I'm turning the side of that case you gave me years ago in to a mounting bracket for my wife's Jeep backup cam!

Amazing where bits end up. :)
 
I have to say I recommended 500GB expecting additionnal workload such as programming or video editing which would benefit from the SSD, otherwise 256GB would likely be enough.
 
Also, I think being constrained by a budget is nice rather than frustrating. Compromises, situational things to take into consideration - simply more interesting. Where are the price/performance knees? What are the recent or upcoming shifts in technology? What can be replaced or extended easily (such as RAM) vs. what is more costly or has domino effects?
From where I stand, you made a good job within your constraints. And since there are constraints an upgrade somewhere would have to be paired with a downgrade somewhere else.

Unless you go VR, or a new generation of consoles defines a new baseline for game development, there will be little need to do much of anything with that build.
That's how I feel too. Dunno if you ever were constrained by a budget, but you need to consider balance. +24€ I'd have a Ryzen 1600, +40€ the GPU's ram would go from 4GB to 8GB -although I find the first change to be the better deal-, etc. But that money could be well spent on a SSD...

When I got my first PC I wasn't on a budget, I spent like 3000$ on it, a top notch PC for its time. 1MB of RAM cost 30€, so by those metrics a modern PC with 8GB of RAM and a similar price would cost more than 200000€. It ended up being a great PC, but I didn't have a 3D accelerator, which I bought later, a Monster 3D graphics card --expensive but well worth it.

However it was quite disheartening to discover that games and programs weren't running that well two years later, in 1997. I remember Sega Worlwide Soccer and other games of the time running close to single digits framerates. I waited and upgraded my old Pentium 100 to a Celeron 400MHz in 1999, along with 256MB of RAM. This one lasted a longer while and was my PC for some years, a SoundBlaster Live!, a Voodoo 3 PCI and a Matrox G400 AGP (was on a budget with this one, there was the MAX version of it that was slightly better but much more expensive) card gave very good results at the time.

The Matrox G400 was the first GPU with environment mapped bump mapping, afaik, and was bundled with a game featuring it. It was also a true 32 bits card, contrary to the 16 bits Voodoo 3. The Voodoo 3 performed almost 3 times better with Glide, while the Matrox was quite good at Direct3d but framerate was much slower.

In that sense, there is a lesson to learn from DF articles and stuff like that. I am not a particular big fan of just getting the most expensive CPU and GPU, memory of the market and using that for years because there are other considerations.

If a CPU performs particularly well and its coupled with an also excellent and well balanced GPU, with an excellent ratio between power and thermals, then that could be a winner. If you get the fastest CPU and GPU, you are going to enjoy a great experience from years to come, but more efficient solutions will be available some time afterwards.

If you look at the economy of each part and its impact, £50 more CPU or RAM or GPU won't net you much difference above the bottom of the barrel, but £50 of SSD can reduce operating lag to a fraction. All that time saved over the life of operation is well worth it. I get by okay on an older 120 GB SSD. So if a choice between £200 of CPU and GPU or £150 of CPU and GPU and SSD, I'd pick the latter every time.
Next upgrade is going to be a SSD and Vega, hopefully -depends on thermals and power consumption (don't want to switch my 450W power supply any time soon-.

Despite not having a SSD yet, after getting used to my laptop CPU consuming 6W of energy and its very slow operation overall, this thing feels like it is flying to me, despite the fact that I didn't use it intensely yet in any way.

While I am not into video editing -though the graphics card comes with some good MSI and AMD utilities to record video in real time with little impact-, a mechanical HD having to seek small files and constantly moving the head around to find them...there is no way it can match a SSD in productivity tasks.
 
According to AMD settings, they detected my full HD 32" TV (it has a PC mode too and it looks like a monitor) is high DPI and it supports VSR (virtual super resolution) and I was able to set it to 4k.

Everything looked smaller but overall ok given the size of the screen. Might share a screenshot soon. However printing the screen created a screengrab that was more like 1080p than 4k.

I cant wait to try some old games at 4k 60fps. Especially The Need for Speed III Hot Pursuit (the executable was recently tweaked to work directly on modern OSes) and F-Zero GX from when I had the Gamecube, this one using Dolphin.

Sure they ran on machines with lower resolutions an on CRT screens and stuff like that but the models and geometry and polygon count were good.

Those games at 4k look incredible nowadays taking into account how a modern PC can add effects and things like AF.

At 4k the screen loses the 3D effect but I am surprised by the fact that the OS detected the TV is 3D, and some resolutions are 3D compatible and 3D is enable from the get go.

That being said, while I like the concept of consoles, I don't see myself returning to consoles anymore and I have the XB1 already so it's okay with me. On a console you are more like a sitting passenger, on a PC you can adapt it to you and make a lot of things happening.
 
they detected my full HD 32" TV (it has a PC mode too and it looks like a monitor) is high DPI
Sounds like an error in detection, Full HD is only 1080p (not 4k and certainly not high DPI @ 32") google the model and see if it is a 4k TV
 
I have to say I recommended 500GB expecting additionnal workload such as programming or video editing which would benefit from the SSD, otherwise 256GB would likely be enough.

I actually went with a cheaper and larger boot drive (less than 200 USD for a 1 TB Mushkin Reactor drive) for the OS as the larger size means that it has more cells for wear leveling use which will extend its effective lifespan (even when leaving the swap file and temp files on the drive). I could have gone with a smaller and faster SSD (~500 GB for a similar price, but it would have had relatively marginal actual impact on boot and program load times at the expense of lower overall lifespan. I don't plan to ever use more than around 350-400 GB of the drive. Hence even with the swap file and temp files stored on the SSD (high amount of write cycles compensated by a lot of space for wear leveling), I expect it to easily last a decade or more unless something other than the NAND fails.

Then I invest in a fast SSD for the game drive and don't worry as much about potentially filling that up, as it doesn't go through many write cycles. And even if it does fail, there's nothing important on the drive anyway.

And then of course, I have an array of cheap (~110 USD) 2.5" 4 TB HDDs (lower power consumption than 3.5" drives, although reliability is kinda meh since they are Seagate drives) for general data storage and redundancy.

Regards,
SB
 
So Cyan, you have to report back on your impressions of your system and your efforts to withstand the onslaught of hot chicks who are attracted to you now!
Is it - nice?
 
Before that happens he may need to wear one of these
S1T6JGA.png


And yes I do own one, and yes it does make me look very sexy.....

ps:
Hence even with the swap file and temp files stored on the SSD
This will sound crazy but if you have a lot of ram (more than is being used) put the swap file on a ram drive
 
Is having a Swap file still a thing on PCs? I would have thought with 16 GB or more of ram that one wouldnt ever need a swap file unless they were doing Photoshop/Video Editing/RenderFarm type items.
 
Some programs will use a swap file regardless of how much ram you have and they freak out if
they dont find one
 
Is having a Swap file still a thing on PCs? I would have thought with 16 GB or more of ram that one wouldnt ever need a swap file unless they were doing Photoshop/Video Editing/RenderFarm type items.

Yup. At least the last time I tested back on Windows 7 with 32 GB of memory. Windows would start to behave erratically after a while and then start shutting down programs due to not having enough free memory available or erroring out with not enough memory warnings. Then again, I'm generally an exception when it comes to that as you've probably noticed in my posts about the problems I've had with the NVidia 1070 causing out of memory errors with my browsers due to my particular usage profile.

Haven't bothered to try setting swap file to zero since then.

Regards,
SB
 
Is having a Swap file still a thing on PCs? I would have thought with 16 GB or more of ram that one wouldnt ever need a swap file unless they were doing Photoshop/Video Editing/RenderFarm type items.
Windows still requires you to have one or else it can get goofy with some stuff. With an SSD it really doesn't matter though. :)

Also Davros, I want picts of you in that vest! :D
 
That's odd as I haven't had SWAP file enabled on my day to day system in close to a decade. But after checking my gaming PC I have it set to only 512 Meg, so I assume I must have experienced a program freak-out with it disabled so had to enable it. I haven't checked to see what I have enabled on my Development VMs setup on my main Server.
 
Sounds like an error in detection, Full HD is only 1080p (not 4k and certainly not high DPI @ 32") google the model and see if it is a 4k TV
trust me it is not.

This is a 1080p screenshot:
WP_20170512_00_00_45_Pro.jpg



Same screen at 4k resolution -using VSR I guess, it appears in the options by default-:
WP_20170512_00_04_51_Pro.jpg


pictures taken from the phone, sorry for the low quality.
 
@Cyan so its not a 4k TV? what make an model is it?
If your TV is only full HD, it can't display a 4k image, you may try to send it a 4k image (and from googling) it (the TV/monitor) will downscale that image to 1080p
 
Sounds like an error in detection, Full HD is only 1080p (not 4k and certainly not high DPI @ 32") google the model and see if it is a 4k TV
these are the options I get. At 4k the 3D effect is gone -guess it has something to do with HDMI specifications, at 1080p it is enabled by default-

At 1080p
Capture.png


At 4k
Capture2.png

So Cyan, you have to report back on your impressions of your system and your efforts to withstand the onslaught of hot chicks who are attracted to you now!
Is it - nice?
Yes, I might need Davros' vest, and a helmet to go with it. The other day I was at a bar, said hello to a girl there and smiled at her, she felt so hot and had to work so hard to keep her composure that it got to a point where she reached her handbag and looked for her anti-rapists spray inside as the last defense. I am harmless, I can assure, but with a great PC comes unique freedom and wild feelings of the nature.
 
@Cyan so its not a 4k TV? what make an model is it?
If your TV is only full HD, it can't display a 4k image, you may try to send it a 4k image (and from googling) it (the TV/monitor) will downscale that image to 1080p
have you heard about VSR (Virtual Super Resolution) or DSR (NVidia's equivalent)? My TV is 1080p native, purchased almost day one back in October 2013 --there weren't 4k TVs then if I am not wrong. The gpu drivers detected that the screen is high dpi and that I could use VSR, so I enabled it.

Shall share some game's screenshots at 4k when I have something to share 'cos I didn't manage to install games yet -bad weather and connection drops quite easily. :/
 
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