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BusinessWallet posted:I guess I don't understand what you mean. My co workers said that they didn't increase the RAM in the iPhone because it would have decreased battery life. I argued that was not true. Who was right? It's impossible to know for sure. Apple engineers sat down and weighed a bunch of pros and cons: power consumption, design complexity, cost, user experience, and so on. Power definitely would have been a factor, but unless you happen to know senior people at Apple with uncharacteristically loose lips or have bugs in Cupertino, you can't really say whether it was the deciding factor.
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| # ¿ Mar 13, 2012 16:13 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 08:19 |
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Ixjuvin posted:I know exactly dick about modems and routers and networking and setting up internet things, but I'm the one responsible for buying my house a new modem/router. Our current one has poo poo out (getting a max of ~125kB/s on a ~1.3MB connection) and I'm apparently the only one who would actually like to be able to do more than buffer one youtube video at a time. The 'home networking' megathread is pretty much useless to me because I am a layperson and don't have enough knowledge to separate the information that's useful to me from the technobabble You're probably not going to see a significant speed increase with the same service on a new modem. The transfer speeds you're looking at on your computer are in kilobytes per second, but Verizon quotes you a speed in megabits per second. Eight bits to the byte mean that your theoretical maximum speed on the wire is 162 kB/sec; with overhead for whatever protocol you're using and the rest of the internet, 125 is about what I'd expect to see. Since the limiting factor is what Verizon gives you rather than the modem itself, just switching out the modem won't give you a magical speed boost.
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| # ¿ Mar 18, 2012 17:59 |
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. We have Verizon DSL, is there any generally recommended router? Verizon's actual websites are totally unhelpful and just want to sell me telephones.
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Ixjuvin posted:Holy poo poo you're right, I was reading it as megabytes the whole time I don't know about Diablo 3, but a lot of games use surprisingly little bandwidth. If you're the only person using the connection, then you can probably have a good experience. If not, you might still be able to finagle things with QoS to give your game traffic priority, although that would require a fancier router and housemates willing to go along with the plan. There's no getting around bandwidth requirements for other stuff, though; streaming video is always going to be low quality on a ~1 Mb/s connection, and patch days are always going to be painful.
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| # ¿ Mar 18, 2012 18:36 |
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. Thanks for helping my dumb rear end, I guess it's time to just pay through the nose for cable or something, else I will never be able to enjoy Diablo 3.
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Skilleddk posted:I'm wondering about where the bottleneck is in my computer. I know my stuff is pretty much top of the line. But when I look at game benchmarks at review sites with the same hardware as mine, their results are always much higher than mine. For instance, they list a 2600K with 4 GB ram and a 5970 running BF 3 maxed at ~~58 fps, 45 lowest. How are you recording frame rates? Are you sure you're using the exact settings used by the benchmark configurations? For instance, Crysis 2's DX11 tessellation performance is notoriously awful; if you just wind every setting to absolute max, you'll end up with a small quality improvement and a big performance hit. And, of course, keep in mind that anybody on Youtube can tell you whatever they want about how they have things set up. Sgs-Cruz posted:We (my research group at a large institution) are building a workstation for use with Comsol Multiphysics, Siemens Solid Edge, and MATLAB use on Windows 7 x64. It has to be a Dell – my department gets a corporate discount and they like the Dell support. (Well, maybe it doesn't have to be, but it'll have to be a drat good deal if it's from somebody else.) Budget is about $5000–$5500 (US). It shouldn't void the whole warranty to install aftermarket hardware, but it will definitely make any trouble harder to deal with. They'd be well within their rights to ask you to take your equipment out of the system and try again - exactly what you don't want to have happen when you've got an important deadline riding on whatever it's doing. If you're looking at pricing through Dell's website, try to go through your institution instead. If your account has a bunch of big orders and service contracts, they'll be willing to give quite a bit on smaller purchases of high-margin items. Come up with a configuration you want, hand it over to your contact at Dell, and ask what they can do for you.
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| # ¿ Mar 27, 2012 17:22 |
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Harold Ramis Drugs posted:My laptop is kind of old and it overheats to the point of shutting down when I play newer games (Skyrim, D3 for example). To counter this, I have been pacing myself between playing the games, and placing my laptop in a cool area for a couple minutes, then resuming. I have been using my freezer and also an enclosed area in my back yard in the wintertime. Crack it open and clean out the heatsink fins. If it's a few years old, they're probably pretty dusty. If that doesn't help, you can go further with new thermal paste or even a new heatpipe module, but you shouldn't have to put your laptop in the freezer to make it work.
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| # ¿ Apr 23, 2012 18:50 |
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Karthe posted:I'm thinking about picking up a webcam for my desktop so I can finally participate in G+ hangouts. Is Logitech the only game in town when it comes to stuff like this? If not, can you guys recommend me a good camera? Logitech and Microsoft are the big names. For just chatting with people, you're fine with whatever's on sale from either company for $20 or so. Bottom-of-the-barrel generics might be fine, or they might have incredibly lovely drivers; since the price difference is only a few bucks, you might as well go with the name brands. If you want better picture quality, some of the more expensive HD models are surprisingly good little cameras, but it'll all be compressed to poo poo for G+ anyway.
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2012 20:14 |
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Samurai Sanders posted:It's the scroll wheel, not the optical part. I mean, unless the scroll wheel is optical inside somehow, I have no idea. Mouse wheels are usually optical, but they're optical in the same sense as the optoencoders in old roller mice. There's a slotted wheel and a couple of IR LED/photosensor pairs that shine through it. If the slotted wheel gets dirty, then it can have the problems you're describing. Have you checked into the warranty? People usually don't call it in, but most MS input devices are 3 or 5 years, and they're pretty generous on the terms.
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 20:07 |
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Samurai Sanders posted:Oh yeah, so it does. I definitely don't still have the receipt though, and living in Hawaii getting warranty service would mean a week or two without a mouse and a lot of money for shipping, and that just ain't happening. Not very universal; they've gone through a fair number of incompatible revisions. You might as well try it, but you're probably going to end up using two USB ports. Seriously, though, try the warranty first. It used to be that you could just call them up, read the number and manufacturing date off the bottom of the mouse, and two days later the UPS truck would show up with a new mouse. I think they stopped doing that once people caught on that one mouse could turn into a lifetime supply, but they're still pretty generous. If it's still under warranty, I'd be very surprised if you had to pay for shipping (even to and from Hawaii). Narzack posted:As far as X-Box 360, is there a major difference in quality between compnonent and HDMI? Not really.
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2012 20:56 |
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Rukus posted:Windows licensing states that you need to use a new product key if it's a new system. Is this a completely new computer (different motherboard, CPU, GPU, etc), or are you re-using parts from your current/old machine? Legally speaking, this might be a grey area. Practically, tripping WGA is not a big deal at all. The only thing they'll give a crap about when you call is whether you're trying to use the same key on more than one machine at the same time. They won't grill you, they don't have some secret hotline to the legal department, and half the time you don't even have to talk to anybody but the automated system.
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| # ¿ Apr 30, 2012 18:20 |
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Endymion FRS MK1 posted:Are CPU fans automatic, like do they automatically keep things at a certain temp by varying fan speed? I just put in an i5 3570K and a Hyper 212+, and they seem to peak at 50C playing BF3. Is this normal temperature? They're not inherently automatic, but almost all modern hardware will do variable-speed fan control. You can usually set target temperatures and other parameters in BIOS/EFI setup; there may or may not be a bunch of other options depending on your motherboard manufacturer. 50C is a perfectly reasonable temperature under load. You might be able to push it a bit lower if you play with fan speed settings, but it's certainly nothing to worry about.
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| # ¿ May 1, 2012 18:53 |
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Alereon posted:It's related to stealing cable, which is a very bad idea. It's probably in your best interest to rent the modem, that way Comcast will replace it if it dies, becomes obsolete, or just because you want to swap it for troubleshooting. There's also no chance they'll try to blame your equipment if you rent the modem. At least around here, the modems Comcast rents out are pieces of poo poo. Sure, you can always get a new one when yours goes out - but it'll be a few days without internet while you wait for them to take care of it. The Surfboards, on the other hand, are nice and stable unless they're pushing ridiculous upstream power levels (and it's on Comcast to take care of signal issues at that point anyway). Unless you think you'll be burning through a modem every year, at $7/month it makes sense to buy your own. As far as modding the modem goes, it uncaps the bandwidth. Even if you buy the top-tier plan, you're not going to get all the bandwidth the hardware's capable of; unrestricted DOCSIS 3.0 can usually do ~150 Mb/s down and ~100 Mb/s up. And, with a modded modem, you can get those speeds on any plan, even the cheapass barely-better-than-dialup service. The downside is that it's really easy for Comcast to spot someone who's taking up enough bandwidth to serve an entire neighborhood, and like Alereon says, they'll treat you just like anybody else who's stealing cable.
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| # ¿ May 7, 2012 05:21 |
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Jet Jaguar posted:If a video card constantly gives a Code 10, replacing the drivers does nothing, and it limits itself to 640x480 with blue lines all over the screen, is it safe to say that it's joined the Choir Invisible? It's gone. Lifetime warranties were pretty common back when the 8800GTS was a good card; you might want to check to see if you're still under warranty. Failing that, you'll run into a CPU bottleneck with higher-ed modern cards, but a Radeon 6770 would be a decent match. It's also the least expensive gaming card recommended in the stickied parts picking, system building, and upgrading megathread.
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| # ¿ May 9, 2012 01:51 |
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Mr. Giggles posted:Hi guys. Im looking at buying a computer desktop from a friend-of-a-friend and am not incredibly knowledgeable about parts interactions or if I'm getting ripped off. Apologies if this is the wrong place to post. Anyways, I'm looking to get a PC that can do some gaming on modern games without catastrophic issues. You might want to look in the stickied parts picking megathread. I wouldn't buy that computer. It looks like something thrown together out of a parts drawer, and there are some significant issues. First of all, the "600 watt power supply with turbo fan button" is a huge red flag. Power supplies aren't glamorous, but they're important; a bad power supply can fry your whole system. It's critical to get a reliable power supply, which means going with a well-known brand; models from generic or no-name manufacturers can blow up under load or slowly drift out of spec and kill your hardware. A "turbo fan button" sounds like the kind of gimmick that cheap manufacturers like to put on their hardware, as well; you shouldn't ever have to worry about your PSU fan's speed. The motherboard is another sticking point. Inexpensive motherboards aren't bad - but when you get into the range of crappy super-budget models from low-end manufacturers like ECS or whatever, you can get weird stability issues. If the only thing they tell you about it is that it's an "AM3+ motherboard," without any mention of the manufacturer or model number, you can bet it's cheap crap. Past that, the hard drives are weird in a bad way. Nobody's made 80GB drives in forever, so that's probably used and coming to the end of its lifespan. And, then, it's paired with another drive that's probably ancient. Both of them will be slow, because the data density is pathetic in an age where 1TB drives are more or less standard, and 5400RPM rotational speeds are crap as well. Odds are they're parallel ATA drives, as well (the old standard for hard drive cabling), which isn't great. The 5830 is old, wasn't an impressive performer when it was released, and (crucially, in combination with that mystery meat power supply) it runs hot and power-hungry. A CD-RW drive in this day and age is a loving joke. You can't even get retail Windows on a CD any more, and DVD burners are less than $20 shipped. Just based on the rest of the components, there's a good chance that copy of Windows is pirated. Finally, "checking the wiring" isn't a great way to tell what's up. Ten minutes with some zip ties, and you too can make a pile of crap look respectable. If a prebuilt system has wires stuffed everywhere, that's a red flag for attention to detail in the rest of the build, but the reverse isn't true. e: f, b grumperfish posted:Don't bother with testing it. Crap no-name PSU, old slow processor, old mid-range videocard, ancient HDD, etc. Not worth the reliability question, and you can build a modern i3 PC for around that price that will run circles around it. I definitely agree that it's a bad buy, but $500 is stretching it to get into a complete system with monitor, OS, and so forth. There's always the alternate option, though: find something cheap in the Dell outlet, stuff a low-midrange graphics card that doesn't need PCIe power in there, and go play. Space Gopher fucked around with this message at May 9, 2012 around 17:11 |
| # ¿ May 9, 2012 05:50 |
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regenwetter posted:I just installed a Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition with an Arctic Cooling Alpine 64 Pro cooler, which is technically under-spec'd for this CPU as it is for TDP up to 90W -- this CPU is 125W but I was stupid and bought the cooler before realizing that. I searched around and found a number of people who have had success using this cooler with the 965 anyway, it just runs at max RPM pretty much all the time, but is supposedly "good enough". Is there any reason you're not using the cooler that came with the processor? It's not a fancy high-performance unit, but then, neither is the Alpine 64. If you want to read CPU temperatures, use HWMonitor and take a look at the temperatures coming straight off the CPU. BIOS usually reports from a less accurate sensor on the board rather than one inside the CPU, and Speedfan is old software that gets confused. Also, remember that hot air doesn't necessarily feel all that hot (you can put your hands in a 450 F oven just fine), and it's possible your heatsink just isn't moving heat off the processor and into the air well enough.
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| # ¿ May 15, 2012 20:06 |
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My Spirit Otter posted:I'm looking to buy a new cpu and I've landed on the AMD FX-4100 or the Phenom II x4 965 and I don't know enough about cpus to decide. They both seem to pretty pretty much the same thing and the Phenom is only 4 dollars more. I'm only using it for light gaming and web browsing, so any input would be greatly appreciated. Why have you decided on those two? AMD's desktop offerings right now are absolutely terrible.
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| # ¿ May 18, 2012 21:17 |
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Biggest enjoyable human being Ever posted:Probably doesn't want to be forced to upgrade his motherboard as well. I'd go with the FX-4100 since I noticed it has lower TDP. It's also Bulldozer, which is a horrible disappointment of an architecture. It's so bad that Alereon has promised to give anyone who buys one a mocking custom title, in fact. My gut says "Phenom" but I'd get opinions from the parts picking thread.
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| # ¿ May 18, 2012 21:40 |
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My Spirit Otter posted:The computer I'm replacing the CPU in was running an am2 phenom. It got wet in the back of my truck so I'm replacing it with an am3+ board and was jut gonna go with the devil I know. It has some radeon card in it, but since I built it 3 years ago i can't remember the name. My price range is 200 but flexible. That being said I'm not going to be gaming all the time on it. Just games like empire total war, sc2 and d3. If you're buying a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM, you have no reason to buy AMD. This is not a "better the devil you know" thing, because from an end-user standpoint, there are only two differences. The mounting system is a bit different, and the Intel options offer more performance per dollar across the board.
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| # ¿ May 18, 2012 22:53 |
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The parts picking thread is probably the best place to ask that question. I wouldn't trust that system. The "standard 650W power supply" looks like generic mystery meat which will probably blow up at less than half the rated draw. A 160GB platter drive reeks of the worst kind of cost-cutting, and will be slow just thanks to crappy data density. The fact that they can't consistently say whether the video card is a 5770 or a 6770 doesn't speak well to their attention to detail - yes, they're practically the same thing aside from some tiny BIOS-level tweaks, but I'd expect they could at least keep the webpage consistent.
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| # ¿ May 20, 2012 16:52 |
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Gothmog1065 posted:Got an interesting one. My fiancee's wireless mouse wheel is inverted from a standard wheel. There's no settings in any of the logitech programs for it, I've even done the registry edit, nothing will revert the scroll wheel back to the way it was. Does anyone have any ideas? How does the mouse behave when you hook it up to another machine? What happens if you hook another mouse to the computer that's having the problem? If the problem stays with the mouse, rather than the computer, crack it open and take a look at the optoencoder (a slotted wheel with two LED-photodiode pairs). If it's dirty, you can get weird behavior like that.
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| # ¿ May 29, 2012 04:46 |
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In most cases, you want air to flow from the front to the back. What kind of "760W power supply" did you buy? If it's a cheap eBay special, that could be the cause of a lot of your issues. And, even if it's a good brand name, eBay is home to a lot of counterfeit parts. It's not easy to fake a CPU, but counterfeit power supplies are easy. Just throw the guts of a $15 spark-spitter special in a case that says "Seasonic," and maybe a chunk of lead so the weight feels about right.
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| # ¿ May 31, 2012 12:14 |
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spoon0042 posted:I have a Core 2 Duo I'm trying to install in a new board, and I can't seem to get the fan/heatsink all the way in. The first two pins seem to be all the way in, but I've tried a dozen times with the other two and there's always a gap between the white and black parts of the pin, and I can bounce the heatsink up and down a bit. I'm afraid I'm going to break the board at this rate. Everything I've been able to find just says, push down, turn, easy. Am I correct in thinking it's not all the way in? Is there some trick to it I'm not getting? Push down, don't turn. You turn the pins to release them. Twist them against the arrows, and then just push them straight in.
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| # ¿ Jun 2, 2012 22:12 |
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enthe0s posted:Not sure if this question goes here or not, just let me know where I should go and I'll move it. This is not actually a thing. The only time Windows cares about the BIOS is at boot. If drivers aren't installing, it's because of a different problem.
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| # ¿ Jun 3, 2012 03:12 |
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Endymion FRS MK1 posted:Hm, what advantage would there be to using a RAM disk? If you need a small amount of very, very fast storage, and don't care about the "all your data is instantly gone" risk of power failure, a RAM disk is appropriate. Generally speaking, it's one of those "if you actually need it, you'll know" things, especially with the advent of reasonably priced consumer SSDs. Asrock's offering it because hey, if you blow a bunch of money on RAM you don't need, you might as well at least pretend to do something useful with it. You can disable the integrated graphics in
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| # ¿ Jun 5, 2012 21:06 |
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Rotten Red Rod posted:It's not so much that I need something to stop specifically video stuttering as I need a faster computer, and I was wondering offhand if there were any prebuilt ones people could recommend. I guess I'll look for an i5 that comes in a smaller case. If it only needs to be "somewhat smaller" than a standard PC, Dell offers quite a few small-form-factor Optiplex systems. They're DisplayPort and VGA only, but the DP port is dual-mode, so you can use a cheap passive adapter cable. If it needs to be as small as possible, I'd look at Boot Camping a Mac Mini. There used to be some prebuilt systems about the same size from other manufacturers, but these days it seems like your options are a low-performance Atom or Brazos barebones, or Apple.
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| # ¿ Jun 7, 2012 02:33 |
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sirbeefalot posted:I get an obvious input lag outputting to my TV over 25 feet of HDMI, though it's only an actual problem if I try to play a game (which I don't do on the TV, as a result). For movies and other stuff that doesn't require instant mouse feedback, though, it's fine. Quality is great, too. That's a function of your TV's input processing, not the length of the cable. Signals travel down a wire at about the speed of light; at 25 feet, that means your cable is contributing about 0.000025 milliseconds of lag. Transmission delays are only perceptible to humans over distances that span a good fraction of a continent or an ocean. As a very rough rule of thumb, 1000 miles is 5 milliseconds.
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| # ¿ Jun 8, 2012 21:48 |
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zenintrude posted:Built a computer with two hard drives: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/9axd You'll need to partition and format the drive. Start, right-click Computer, select Manage, go to Disk Mangement. You should see a physical disk with a bunch of unallocated space. Right click it, select "New Simple Volume," and follow the wizard.
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| # ¿ Jun 8, 2012 22:03 |
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Bob Morales posted:What gam3r would have a floppy drive and IDE HD? The important thing is to have the most features and the biggest "PRIMARY RIG SPECS" sig block. Who cares what they actually do?
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| # ¿ Jun 11, 2012 22:11 |
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Red_Fred posted:Today our wireless internet has been having problems. I have recently moved in to this flat so I'm not really sure of the background. I'm thinking it is probably conflicting with the huge number of other networks in the area as the flat is in a connected town house block thing. Do I just set the channel to a random one and hope it works better than auto or is there a better solution? Could it even be something else? It's always possible that "wireless network problems" could be something else, but congestion is a major problem. On the 2.4 GHz band, channels 1, 6, and 11 are the only ones worth using; they're the only ones which don't overlap with each other. The best solution is to switch to 802.11n and the 5 GHz band. There are more channels available, not as many people use it, and it's not as good at going through walls (which sounds like it would be a downside, but also helps keep out interference from three apartments over). Unfortunately, there are some downsides: a lot of smaller or cheaper devices like phones and low-end laptops are 2.4 only (if it says "b/g/n" then you're locked to 2.4; 5 GHz-capable devices will say "a/b/g/n"), and the equipment can be expensive. If you're running a cheap or old router, you might also see some benefit to a 2.4 GHz 802.11n router with multiple antennas. Newer models can pull some electromagnetic wizardry that steers the signal to clients by manipulating the phase of signals. Look for something that advertises "2x2" or better. Plus, of course, signal processing keeps getting better. It won't work miracles - if you can see fifty strong networks from your home, you're probably just boned short of a move to 5 GHz - but it can help in marginal situations.
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| # ¿ Jun 12, 2012 06:03 |
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Dijon Vu posted:I was given a "broken" 2008 HP Dv6 last year. I sysrestored it and had a free computer until a family member dropped it and broke the screen. I keep it hooked up to the tv now; it works, but one of the USB ports is noticeably bent sideways so that means the motherboard took some trauma at the least. It's a four year old example of a notoriously crappy series of laptops, with physical damage beyond the screen. You could buy a better used laptop with that $200, or a media box like a Boxee, Roku, WD TV Live, or Apple TV. Get some use out of it if you can, but don't spend anything keeping it alive.
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| # ¿ Jun 16, 2012 00:38 |
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Chewbacca Defense posted:Is there a way to disable a laptops bui/lt /in /key/b/oard? Mi/ne /is hosed obviously///// Why do you need to actually disable it, instead of just not using it? Most laptops don't have a way to disable the keyboard, because it lets you paint yourself into a corner: with no keyboard, how would you re-enable it? If you need to take it out of the picture entirely, your best option is probably to open up the system and unplug it.
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| # ¿ Jun 18, 2012 19:34 |
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Pan Ache posted:I'm looking for a program to verify hdd integrity before I transfer this disc to a new build. If you want to check the filesystem, chkdsk. If you want to see whether the drive is showing signs of failure, CrystalDiskInfo. But, if you've got some other reason to suspect it, treat it as dying no matter what CDI says. Not all drive failures show up in SMART statistics.
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| # ¿ Jun 19, 2012 05:51 |
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Install Gentoo posted:All the other 600 series cards still have XP support. The 690 still has 32 bit Vista and 7 support. Presumably they expect that if you're buying a $1,299.95 graphics card you no longer use XP, but could still be using 32 bit Vista or 7. The 690 is just two 680s on the same board. It's not supported under XP because it's SLI-on-a-stick, and Nvidia dropped SLI support on XP a while ago. Shaocaholica posted:Why? What are they running in XP because aren't all the cool new games and apps dropping XP support? An installation key that starts with FCKGW.
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| # ¿ Jun 21, 2012 17:43 |
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Shaocaholica posted:How is ripping off XP any easier than ripping off Vista or 7? Or are you saying that pirates are lazy to upgrade so vendors should support their laziness? Volume licensed copies of XP don't require activation. If you have the image, and a key that hasn't been blacklisted in Windows Update, that's all you ever need. Vista and 7 have a much more involved activation process. From the vendors' point of view, people with pirated copies of XP are still customers. Microsoft might not get their cut, but AMD and Nvidia get paid the same whether a GPU goes into a system with a licensed copy of 7, or a ~DaRkSyDe CoRp EdItIoN~.torrent copy of Windows XP. If the pirates, the "my precious rams!" people, the corporate users who think new software should be picked up on a five-year delay, and all the other holdouts add up to a big enough number to justify driver development, they'll keep developing drivers. e: Alereon posted:MS should have never released 32-bit versions of Windows 7, or not allowed OEMs to preload them. The alternative would have been to leave 32-bit-only netbooks (most of them) on XP Home. Space Gopher fucked around with this message at Jun 21, 2012 around 22:12 |
| # ¿ Jun 21, 2012 19:37 |
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Stop worrying so much. It will be fine. Don't spill anything on it, don't let the table fall over, and if you have pets keep them out of the room. Dust is not a concern; it'd get dusty inside a case, too. The biggest problem is that it will look ugly as hell until you get it inside a case.
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| # ¿ Jun 22, 2012 20:18 |
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OK, first of all, what's wrong with this board? The support list looks like it has all the early AM2 Athlons. The storage controller on 785G boards wasn't great, but it does support AHCI and so on. Cheap controller cards generally don't come with their own BIOS. That's typically reserved for the stuff on motherboards, and expensive high-end RAID cards. What are you talking about with mini-PCIe storage controllers? If you're looking at the fun-size SSDs, those aren't actually mPCIe; the electrical signaling is SATA compliant and they just use the same form factor. If you're not, I have no idea what you're looking at. Generally speaking, if you want anything better than "I'm trying to jam my system full of cheap hard drives because I compulsively click any link ending in .torrent like a rat that wants a pellet," avoid the cheap controllers. Practically any dual-core Intel CPU on the market will be faster than your Athlon. Even the low-end Celeron/Pentium line would do better, and a modern i3 with hyperthreading would absolutely thrash it.
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| # ¿ Jun 23, 2012 00:46 |
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General_Failure posted:Sorry. Saturday morning. Screwed a little nomenclature. I meant cards like these: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/New-PCI-...=item231e97cee8 If you buy most of your computer parts from ebay, I'd suspect your power supply in those hard drive failures. It's hard to counterfeit a motherboard, but power supply specs are based entirely on trust unless you've got an oscilloscope and test load. It's easy to jam low-grade crap internals into a case that says "Seasonic" (scrap steel weights optional) and sell them for a hugely inflated price. In any case, your power supply should take care of problems with the incoming electrical service, even if it sacrifices itself in the process. Your "Honda versus tractor" comparison doesn't make any sense. For the most part, x86 code is x86 code. If you're talking about virtualization extensions, they're putting support for those into Atoms these days. Unless you're in an extreme edge case - like, say, you really need 3DNow! support for some ungodly reason - even a low-end modern CPU like a Celeron dual core will be faster. A Core i3, which is the standard Intel low-budget choice right now, will absolutely dominate your six-year-old Athlon, just like your Athlon 64 X2 was faster than any Pentium 3 or OG Athlon ever released. I would be wary of buying computer parts on ebay. I know Australia gets hosed on parts pricing, and I'm sorry, but it's just too easy for shady dealers to feed you crap.
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| # ¿ Jun 23, 2012 05:14 |
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General_Failure posted:A couple of the failures were PSU related. I did end up getting an eBay PSU after all that. It wasn't sold to me under the pretense of anything. One thing I can say for it that even under severe load all the voltages stay steady so I'm happy with that. I could set up a load and attack it with my scope but couldn't be bothered. The voltages reported by your motherboard's monitoring hardware mean practically nothing. What kills hardware are millisecond-to-millisecond swings from cheap, overstressed SMPS hardware. Your ebay power supply was sold to you, at the bare minimum, under the "pretense" that the numbers on the label aren't blatant lies. If you have a scope handy, it would be a good idea to at least check up on it. The last processor to carry the Athlon 64 X2 4000+ name was based on the Brisbane core, released at the end of 2006. That was just a die shrink of the original Windsor AM2+ core, which dates back to mid-2006. You might not have bought your processor six years ago, but it is a six year old design. Your description of the "feel" of "different CPU classes" simply doesn't make sense. Yes, your Atom netbook feels slower at some tasks - that's just because it's a very slow processor. For the rest of the market, a baseline Celeron or Pentium dual-core has a feature set broadly similar to your Athlon, with a few extra years in the oven for the core logic and memory controller, and more cache per core. Higher-end processors are differentiated by clock speed and additional features - more cores, even more cache, hyperthreading, turbo mode, unlocked multipliers, better integrated graphics, and so forth. The core logic bits are the same. If your Athlon can do a thing, a modern processor can do it faster. Any difference in "feel" you've noticed can be chalked up to a combination of platform differences (which are admittedly kind of hard to untangle from the CPU proper) and the placebo effect. I'm not really recommending that you buy a Celeron, although a Sandy Bridge model would be faster than what you've got. I'm trying to dissuade you from throwing good money after bad, here. You're spending money to chase down used parts with questionable history that weren't good performers or value for money when they were new, and you end up with a crappy system that hobbles along until the next stopgap. If your "good" computers consistently self destruct within three years, something is very wrong somewhere. You sound a bit confused about how virtualization extensions work, but from an end-user standpoint, the virtualization extensions in basically all current Intel processors down to the crappiest single-core Celeron will work as well as or better than what's in your Athlon.
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| # ¿ Jun 23, 2012 07:36 |
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Shaocaholica posted:Are there any PCs in a similar size as the current gen mac mini with similar specs? Not really. If you want a small, basic computer, you can get barebones nettops, but they run Atoms and AMD E-series processors. There are also a few barebones systems that will take a low-wattage socketed Intel CPU, but they're significantly bigger than the Mini and generally take an external power brick.
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| # ¿ Jun 24, 2012 02:08 |
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unpronounceable posted:I'd still go with a Dell outlet computer as Factory Factory suggested. The AMD FX series has less computational power than you'd expect, while consuming more power than you'd expect. Benchmarks for that specific processor are pretty rare, but I'd guess that an i3-2120, like you'd find in the Inspiron 620, would perform as well or better. Given how they don't mention its speed, I expect that the HDD is pretty slow too. The FX "quad core" chips are actually two Bulldozer modules, which can be one core or two depending on how you look at them. From a very broad end-user perspective that completely fails to take all the huge implementation differences into account, it's a bit like hyperthreading: better than a single core, but not as fast as two truly independent cores. And, yeah, there's no reason to spend $500 on that Acer when Dell's throwing outlet systems with similar performance out the door for less than $400.
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| # ¿ Jun 26, 2012 20:43 |
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| # ¿ May 22, 2013 08:19 |
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Snowy posted:Thank you very much for the advice, I think we might get my GF an Inspiron 620 from the Dell outlet. Scratch and dent are tested working, but have cosmetic problems that don't hurt functionality. Say, there might be a big scuff on the front bezel. Certified refurbished are tested working, and have no serious cosmetic blemishes. They might have a little scratch somewhere where you probably won't see it day to day. Dell outlet new are systems that were ordered but never actually left the box - clearance on an older model, the customer cancelled during production, somebody refused shipment on delivery, or whatever. They should be completely indistinguishable from new; the only difference is that the system's taken a few more airplane rides than normal. All three carry a full same-as-new warranty. Among the three, I'd probably go for certified refurb, especially if it's going to be a gift for somebody else. Any of them should be safe if you're only worried about functionality.
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| # ¿ Jun 27, 2012 01:31 |
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