Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

It was 450W, not 300W. Either way, this still shows 800W isn't always necessary.

A bit more believable. They would need to be using a lower power motherboard/cpu, 2 dimms of ram instead of 4, 1 HDD, no ODD, and a very high efficiency PSU. Not exactly practical for everyone. On top of that Xtreme is going to be running two GTX 780s in SLI. You can fire up a power calculator and run the numbers yourself. 800 watts is enough, but not really overkill for that setup. With CPU overclocking it's not quite enough. The GPUs alone will consume 500 watts at load. At 85% efficiency (pretty standard these days) an 800 watt unit will output 680 watts. 500 watts (GPUs) + 110 watts (overclocked haswell i7) + 50 watts (motherboard) = 660 watts. That leaves 20 watts for the HDD, ODD, RAM, fans, lights, USB devices, other expansion cards, etc. Not quite enough. With a 90-95% efficiency PSU he could barely pull it off. Of course this assumes simultaneously 100% load on everything. Which PCs pretty much never reach. Which is why power calculators assume a max load of 90%. However I like to be on the safe side.

The Steam Machine's PSU is Gold rated, and it does skip the ODD etc. It is an extreme case. Anyway, he doesn't need to go buying a monster.

AnyOldName3 Wrote:Anyway, he doesn't need to go buying a monster.

Agreed. Dual GTX 780s is nuts.

Just got my Gigabye Brix yesterday. "Building" it took less than 10 minutes. Like I said, I suck with computer hardware, and I even managed to break one of plastic sides that holds the RAM in place (thankfully the other held up just fine).

My TV officially sucks. It's natively 1366x768 but it tells anything running over HDMI that it's 1280x720, then does upscaling. This causes serious underscan (or is it overscan? Whatever, it sucks). Fortunately anything that uses SDL's fullscreen capabilities (Mednafen and Mupen64Plus, the only emus I'm using) gets it right somehow. Runs N64 games like a chanp so far, and Mednafen seems alright (only tested Super Metroid).

Pics coming soon, gonna take a while to setup to my liking.

Shonumi Wrote:I even managed to break one of plastic sides that holds the RAM in place

How did you even......

Shonumi Wrote:My TV officially sucks. It's natively 1366x768 but it tells anything running over HDMI that it's 1280x720, then does upscaling. This causes serious underscan (or is it overscan? Whatever, it sucks). Fortunately anything that uses SDL's fullscreen capabilities (Mednafen and Mupen64Plus, the only emus I'm using) gets it right somehow. Runs N64 games like a chanp so far, and Mednafen seems alright (only tested Super Metroid).

Have you tried forcing 1366 x 768 through a custom profile? What GPU do you have?

I told you I could mess up hardware easily, which is why I've yet to build a PC of my own until now (again, a very loose use of "build", there are only three components involved with the Brix). At least nothing electrical or mechanical broke. That was my biggest fear. My cat is nothing but static electricity, so I had to chase her off last night as I put it together. I love her, but I wasn't about to lose $300 due to her "curiosity" :p

NaturalViolence Wrote:Have you tried forcing 1366 x 768 through a custom profile? What GPU do you have?

Sadly yes, but to no avail. It's an Intel HD Graphics (no numbers like 2000 or 3000 were given to the Mobile Ivy Bridge, according to Notebookcheck. I can "rectify" it using the xrandr command, but not without tearing and lot of experimentation. It's definitely the TV's fault; I've tested 5 other HDMI devices in the past two years (running Windows, Linux, and Android) and each had this issue (3 were fixable to various degrees). Like I said, for some reason, SDL's fullscreen mode results in zero cropping, so whatever it's doing works, but most OSes don't seem to do it themselves.

Anyway, the games just have to play without issue, and so far they do. I don't actually have to see the rest of the OS except for a window (KDE's Kickoff) that pops up (which I've set up to appear "centered" on my TV, same size and position on boot) so I can browse my gaming collection. I envision things going like this:

1) Power up the Brix, autologin into user account. Automatically map joystick input to mouse movements and clicks.
2) Press button on joystick to bring up Kickoff.
3) Browse games, launch with one "click"
4) Play games, live it up, get wild, cut loose
5) Press another button to close the emu, jumps back to Desktop with the menu
6) Power off. Repeat later.

Previously, this was not possible due to the limitations of my Raspberry Pi (not strong enough for a fullblown KDE install) or my ODROID-U2 (Slackware was nigh impossible to install for me, Ubuntu sucks for what I want to do), and neither had QJoypad easily available, which is pretty necessary as I need to just plug in a USB joystick and go. Most of what's left now is the behind-the-scenes Linux work that needs to be done to achieve steps 1 through 6. I've done them all separately as part of different projects and experiments, just have to put them together into the Brix. Having said that, doing an emuconsole really is a lot easier when I'm 1) not messing around with underpowered hardware and 2) not messing around with inadequate software. Slackware "just works" for me, since I've been using it so long (5 years now I think?) and with Mesa and an Intel IGP, there are no iffy GPU drivers and no requirement that an emu supports OpenGL ES 2.0.

The only downside to this purchase: it came at the wrong time! I'm pulling long shifts at work; get there early, leave late. No time to play with toys.

Bah. Just found out that my old Board actually controls the pwm fans via voltage. And I wondered why my cooling was bad. Noctua fans don't like being controlled over PWM. My old i7 currently runs at 60°C max when prime95ing.(While on 3,8Ghz). Turns out controlling them via Speedfan gets rid of the static noise they produced before. I really hope my new MSI board won't do the same thing.

If Haswell turns out to have even better temps, I'd be soooo happy.

You know NV, i owe you money know

Max with Prime 95 is 50°C at stock. I'll now overclock this beast

I accept cash only. Or a house.