(09-23-2014, 06:26 AM)DatKid20 Wrote: [ -> ] (09-23-2014, 06:18 AM)teh_speleegn_polease Wrote: [ -> ]To all those who responded to my question about low-end laptops: thanks for the suggestions, I'll give it some thought. Probably will end up not buying anything and spending those 3 weeks a year I'm away being bored to death, but whatever.
Also, I'm now torn between upgrading to a GTX 970 sometime soon or waiting till next gen. (Currently I have a 680.) So far, there haven't been too many situations where I felt like I really needed an upgrade... Except when playing Skyrim with an ENB and about a total of 50 graphics mods, and never being bothered to optimise anything at all, resulting in about 30-50 FPS depending on location... But I'm sure that would be easily avoidable.
At the same time, getting a 970 would almost completely eliminate me having to bother with graphics at all. Which would be especially helpful now that I have a 120Hz monitor: sometimes, I need to find a trade-off between quality and FPS; if I upgrade, I don't expect to have to worry about it except in some really demanding games/situations.
The low price of the 970 is also an argument in favour of an upgrade: even though it is almost at the top of the current CPU high-end ladder, topped only by the 980, perhaps Titan Black/780Ti (if that), and maybe a couple AMD cards I know little about, it still only costs just over $300. Compare that with the Titan's launching price of $1000, and even the 780's and 780Ti's - both of which retailed at over $600 at launch.
I wish Broadwell were here. Or better still, Skylake. I feel like I'm often bottlenecked by my CPU, but upgrading now seems rather stupid, especially since the per-core performance of the extreme models is not very far above that of my current CPU - I'd just be paying for 12 extra cores, which I don't really need.
Tl;dr: me ranting about whether to upgrade from my 680 to a 970 or not. Then me ranting about how I want to upgrade my CPU but don't need extra cores, so I have to wait for Broadwell at the very least, and perhaps Skylake. Then me using the tldr as an opportunity to rant some more.
Skylake and Broad well are coming next year. Broadwell will mostly be for mobile devices like laptops and tablets.
Yeah, that means I'll have to wait for Skylake. And "next year" most likely means that the higher-end models will be coming out towards the very end of the year... *sigh* Oh well.
(09-22-2014, 11:22 AM)NaturalViolence Wrote: [ -> ]Scratch most of that. Scans embedded/NUC AMD selection is virtually non existent. So that leaves you with three options:
1. Use an embedded board: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/gigabyte-ga-j1800n-d2h-integrated-intel-celeron-j1800-dual-core-241ghz-ddr3-so-dimm-sata-ii-3gb-s
and add HDD, psu, chassis, and ram.
2. Use a barebones NUC: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/intel-nuc-celeron-n2820-dual-core-213ghz-ddr3l-so-dimm-sata-ii-3gb-s-1-x-25-bay-intel-hd-313mhz-gpu-
and add HDD and RAM
3. Use a complete NUC: http://www.scan.co.uk/products/scan-n5-pre-built-nuc-pc-system-intel-celeron-hd-graphics-4gb-ddr3-128gb-ssd
Configure some builds and compare options. See which of those three options ends up being the cheapest once configured. I'm not going to take the time to navigate this site and compare prices of adding HDD, chassis, ram, and psu vs getting it with a kit.
So a modern Celeron's definitely enough, even without a dedicated GPU? That's great. Given the number of CPUs and GPUs we've got through in testing, my confidence wasn't high, even though we were only using Pentium 4 era celerons, and eventually a 64-bit P4. There's also a Radeon HD 5450 in the current machine, and as its box claims hardware accelerated H.264 and AVI decoding (which we were seeing crap performance in) there was worry that we'd need something more powerful.
Next question:
I'm buying a second hard drive, as mine's full, and was wondering whether I should finally get an SSD at the same time, or wait until Windows 9, seeing as I'll have to reinstall Windows. The main reason I'm not eager to reinstall Windows is because I start university in less than a week, and don't want to waste time. Unlike last time I reinstalled Windows, I'll have my previous install still completely viable on another drive, and I don't have to piss around rebuilding my Skyrim install, as Mod Organiser will do it for me, so it won't be like I have no functioning computer, but it'd still be a pain. What do the knowledgeable and experienced people here suggest? Also it's still a Samsung 840 Evo that I'd want, isn't it?
Your list of priority should look like the following:
- Get an SSD
- Get an SSD
- Get an SSD
- Get an SSD
...
But seriously. Get an SSD. Although it's better to do so, you really don't have to reinstall Windows IF you installed Windows on your harddrive with AHCI enabled in your BIOS. But even then you can change some registery in Windows if you so desire to get it working.
As for your games, install them on a different drive? Saves you much trouble and allows to do make backups of your OS drive/partition.
A week is plenty of time to set up your PC and have it fresh for uni too. I'd make a backup/snapshot/ghost or whatever you want to use of your fully installed Windows setup and put that back whenever you want a *clean* install.
I've got an 840 Evo myself and it's a great purchase at its price.
Yeah, you don't necessarily need to reinstall windows. I didn't, and everything is working perfectly.
And yeah, the 840 EVO is what you should buy, afaik.
SO to avoid installing Windows I do what exactly? If I was getting a terabyte SSD I could just clone my terabyte HDD, but even that has risks, so what's the solution?
The reason why the week is an only is because I have other stuff to do, like make sure I have my own version of anything in the house that I need, and read a boring textbook for some reason, and do a load of puzzles in Haskell, even though the functional programming is taught entirely in ML.
The Samsung EVO ones, at least, come with a cloning utility, and you can select what files and folders you don't want to clone. Then it just clones the rest.
This is of course less optimal than reinstalling windows, but most of the time it works just fine.
the_speleegn_polease Wrote:Also, I'm now torn between upgrading to a GTX 970 sometime soon or waiting till next gen. (Currently I have a 680.) So far, there haven't been too many situations where I felt like I really needed an upgrade... Except when playing Skyrim with an ENB and about a total of 50 graphics mods, and never being bothered to optimise anything at all, resulting in about 30-50 FPS depending on location... But I'm sure that would be easily avoidable.
At the same time, getting a 970 would almost completely eliminate me having to bother with graphics at all. Which would be especially helpful now that I have a 120Hz monitor: sometimes, I need to find a trade-off between quality and FPS; if I upgrade, I don't expect to have to worry about it except in some really demanding games/situations.
The low price of the 970 is also an argument in favour of an upgrade: even though it is almost at the top of the current CPU high-end ladder, topped only by the 980, perhaps Titan Black/780Ti (if that), and maybe a couple AMD cards I know little about, it still only costs just over $300. Compare that with the Titan's launching price of $1000, and even the 780's and 780Ti's - both of which retailed at over $600 at launch.
Don't bother. That's barely any increase in performance. 20nm is coming next year.
@AON
Get the 850 if you can afford it, the 840 if you can't. Stop being lazy and clone your drive.
The 850 coming out was one of the things that made me put off doing this earlier, but it's twice the price per GB, and from what I've read is only noticeably better in terms of reliability. By the time the 840 died, there'd be something cheaper and better than either available anyway. I don't really see this as an issue of what I can afford (18 years of Christmas and birthday money is a nice asset) but one of what'd best value. If everything negative that I've said is wrong, I'll gladly reconsider, but I'm not a huge fan of spending money when I don't need to.
Your assessment is accurate.