92 replies to this topic

[Striker1980]

Whilst I appreciate what Teralitha has tried to do I fear I must agree with what others have said, whilst the advice is generally in the correct direction there are some glaring omissions in the post and some misleading/misinformed advice too.

I too am not quite as 'tech savvy as many of the guys on this forum but by the same token I'd be very wary of posting information that guys like Vulpesveritas who really seems to know his jazz have said, but with less accurate information.

As others have said, most people here aren't trying to be nasty but it probably is worth reading up on more of the technical aspects of what you are posting on.

Edited by Striker1980, 19 June 2012 - 01:31 AM.

[Vulpesveritas]

Teralitha, on 19 June 2012 - 01:03 AM, said:

Yes you can, ive seen it happen. Unless youve seen it happen, you wont think its possible. but I know.... It was a case of an older motherboard and that couldnt handle it. Motherboards nowadays can probably handle anything but they still get hot, and wont last as long without proper cooling.

Wow... you do realize there are a large number of possible reasons for that to happen other than it was the power supply's wattage? Among which;
1. Cheap PSU that failed.
2. PSU which slipped past QC
3. Damaged PSU
4. Damaged motherboard connectors, increasing resistance on the motherboard, leading to higher heat creation.
5. The motherboard was already bad.

As a larger PSU will carry the same current over the motherboard as a lower wattage power supply for the same components. So the wattage of a PSU has no negative connotations, other than that overall power efficiency tends to be lower as the efficiency 'sweet spot' is generally between 40% and 60%.

My only real advice is to learn more on hardware. There's always something you don't know. I myself don't know nearly as much about computer hardware as I would like to. So I keep trying to learn every day, and I never will claim that my information is going to be 100% correct, although I will back it with whatever knowledge and sources I may have.

Unfortunately, a single point of personal experience is not something to make a conclusion off of. It would take a much larger sample size for anything remotely accurate of a conclusion to be made.

[MaksKiller]

intel core i7 2670 2.2Ghz
8Gb DDR3 1333
2Tb HDD
ATI Radeon 6970 2G GDDR5 FullHD+3D
Mon 120Mhz
Mouse Saitek RAT9
Headset Logitech G35

[Snib]

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind." -Terry Pratchett

Thread title has eight and a good bit of disinformation. OP should take is own advice, " If you dont know what GHz means", you'd better shut up about it, and post in the correct forum section next time.

[Teralitha]

Snib, on 19 June 2012 - 01:24 AM, said:

"Five exclamation marks, the sure sign of an insane mind." -Terry Pratchett

Thread title has eight and a good bit of disinformation. OP should take is own advice, " If you dont know what GHz means", you'd better shut up about it, and post in the correct forum section next time.

Yes I am insane, and I posted in this forum because everyone looks here first for computer info, not realizing there is a tech forum.

[BenEEeees VAT GROWN BACON]

Teralitha, on 19 June 2012 - 01:35 AM, said:

Yes I am insane, and I posted in this forum because everyone looks here first for computer info, not realizing there is a tech forum.

Dude, as I've said take this as a learning experience, just accept that while your intentions were good you still made several mistakes. Accept that and learn from it.

If you keep on fighting it will just be more painful for yourself and it will fan the flames.




As of now:

Edited by BenEEeees VAT GROWN BACON, 19 June 2012 - 02:27 AM.

[Phelan KellWard]

Teralitha, on 19 June 2012 - 01:03 AM, said:

Yes you can, ive seen it happen. Unless youve seen it happen, you wont think its possible. but I know.... It was a case of an older motherboard and that couldnt handle it. Motherboards nowadays can probably handle anything but they still get hot, and wont last as long without proper cooling.

Just as others have said, I'm not trying to be nasty about this. But do you know anything about electricity? A 12v rail, is a 12v rail. It will supply 12v to the motherboard and that is all. The only way that you will fry a motherboard with a PSU is just as Vulp said, there has to be something physically wrong with the PSU or the motherboard in order for that to happen.

Now I will admit that I have fried my MB, CPU, and PSU before, but I think that it was a case that the MB was old, and that the PSU had a fault in it that cause the whole thing to go on me. So I do know what you are talking about happening from experience.

[Blackfire1]

This is kinda in the wrong section.

[BFalcon]

Mick Mars, on 19 June 2012 - 12:14 AM, said:

The OP is the perfect case of knowing just enough to be dangerous.

For the record:
Core count is not such a big deal, as most games only use 1 anyway. This is changing quickly, and if you do play the newest games, a cpu upgrade may be in your near future if you are running something more than 5 years old.

Agreed on the first point.

Actually, multiple cores would still be useful - you can tell programs to only run on certain cores, so you can tell games to keep core #1 clear for the system and teamspeak (for example) to only run on the last thread, allowing your game to access more capacity on whatever threads it CAN use... it's a little-known trick and you need to be very careful not to overload one core thread, but I used to use it all the time when playing EVE Online to help speed things up.

As for PSUs, good grief, you could put a 2 kW PSU on a system that only needs 350W and you'd not harm it a bit - going UNDER is more likely to harm something, not least the PSU itself.

With regards hard drives, everyone using Windows 7 and above should be considering a 120Gb SSD (£75 now) for their system drive (with library redirects to a secondary hard drive for user files). It makes a huge difference, especially where a game needs disc access.

Ter, getting bored trying to troll about 360 torso twists, so you move to this?

[BFalcon]

Vulpesveritas, on 19 June 2012 - 01:15 AM, said:

Wow... you do realize there are a large number of possible reasons for that to happen other than it was the power supply's wattage? Among which;
1. Cheap PSU that failed.
2. PSU which slipped past QC
3. Damaged PSU
4. Damaged motherboard connectors, increasing resistance on the motherboard, leading to higher heat creation.
5. The motherboard was already bad.

If it's an old Mobo, it might also have needed the CPU voltage to be manually set - if it's REALLY old, then that would have been done with jumpers on the mobo - something that the newer techs sometimes don't realise.

[CW Grayson]

Teralitha, on 18 June 2012 - 11:23 PM, said:

The full 16 GB is available. I have win7, not sure what the bit is offhand.
@Others, I never said I was an expert, The goal of this topic is to warn the less tech savy players to research and educate themselves to avoid being duped into buying a crap computer that wasnt made for high end gameing.

Not being an expert is no prob, but giving false advice is.
Like you say, you have win7 but not sure with bit-version. ONLY 64bit OS's support >4GB ram, win7 32bit does not. So if you still running vista64bit you're fine, but if you have win7 32bit you're not.
Or telling people, too big a power supply can fry your rig, sorry that's just bs. MAYBE if i put in a 4TW power supply it will burn my comp from the heat output, but that wouldn't fit in any normal case, even not in any normal room.
Most power supply vendors lie about the stable output anyway, so when you add all powers needed from the pieces in your rig together it's never a bad option to add ~100w on it, just in case.

Edited by CW Grayson, 19 June 2012 - 04:40 AM.

[GHQCommander]

AlienWare for me. I need more lights around me for my in-home mech setup

[Schrecken]

Dont listen to this man. (OP)

[CCC Dober]

Alright gents, I see you're busy bashing the OP, so I'll be brief ...

I have built a couple rigs in the past and spent the time in between with upgrades and/or replacing faulty/fried components.
What I want to know is the following. Is there an established method/tool that creates an overlay of a performance and cost graph?

The reason why I ask is simple. In the end it all boils down to find that sweet spot where both graphs intersect. Then you have to figure out how you get the sweet spot closer to your available budget. So you select different components. As you see it's a very boring and repetitive process, especially when you have done it a couple thousand times. The question stands: is there a tool for it?

Thanks in advance =)

P.S.: I have also thought of using a quick and dirty percentage method, where I simply assign percentages of my budget to the components according to their relative importance/impact on performance.

Edited by CCC Dober, 19 June 2012 - 05:55 AM.

[Nexx Nisshoko]

Teralitha, on 18 June 2012 - 11:23 PM, said:

@Others, I never said I was an expert, The goal of this topic is to warn the less tech savy players to research and educate themselves to avoid being duped into buying a crap computer that wasnt made for high end gameing.

Thank you Teralitha, this has helped me make a couple of choices that I had been stuck on.

[spellfire]

1200 watts of goodness in my system yay for gold rated

[BFalcon]

Dober: sadly not - as someone who has to monitor the prices for his business, they change almost daily, so it would be a real pain to have to keep all the databases up to date - especially for multiple countries, as a website would (ultimately) have to be.

It's all part of the "black arts" of computer design, with even experts disagreeing as to which would be the better area to invest money in. I'm a great believer in SSDs, having used a pair of 60Gb for 2 years now with a 1Tb drive backing them up - one is for system (windows 7, x64) and the second is for priority games (I used to play Arma 2 which is pretty disc-intensive). As a result, I'd strongly recommend £75 be spent on a 120Gb SSD for your system and key games. Someone else might tell you to forget it and go for a gaming HDD instead...

If there was such a site, I'd love it, but then it'd also be hard to determine the exact requirements of the customer... that's part of the job that people like me do...

[CCC Dober]

BFalcon, on 19 June 2012 - 05:59 AM, said:

Dober: sadly not - as someone who has to monitor the prices for his business, they change almost daily, so it would be a real pain to have to keep all the databases up to date - especially for multiple countries, as a website would (ultimately) have to be.

It's all part of the "black arts" of computer design, with even experts disagreeing as to which would be the better area to invest money in. I'm a great believer in SSDs, having used a pair of 60Gb for 2 years now with a 1Tb drive backing them up - one is for system (windows 7, x64) and the second is for priority games (I used to play Arma 2 which is pretty disc-intensive). As a result, I'd strongly recommend £75 be spent on a 120Gb SSD for your system and key games. Someone else might tell you to forget it and go for a gaming HDD instead...

If there was such a site, I'd love it, but then it'd also be hard to determine the exact requirements of the customer... that's part of the job that people like me do...

Yeah, I get the black arts reference and prices can be very volatile indeed. Tbh I'm not really looking for a holy grail, more like a tool/method that allows to cut time when working with on a budget and several conditions. It'd be incredible to have several rigs and their relative performance next to the price listed at the push of a button. Real time access to prices wouldn't be all that critical if there are enough alternative rigs to choose from. Chances are that one of them still is reasonably priced at the end of the day.

Wishful thinking =)

[Sarriss]

I was going to make a big long post about what you should look at and shouldn't but really enough has been said, so I'll go with the obvious. If you want to upgrade or do a full PC rebuild then do your research. Figure out what processor you want first, then you can figure out what board, the board will let you know what ram works and so forth. Do your research, budget appropriately and give yourself some room to upgrade components later. PC building is an art as much as a science.

[Giverous]

lol, stopped by to point out all the wrongness in this post, but it's been done already, and a little more tactfully than i would have done considering just how bad some of the advice is :/