Post What's on Your Mind
- Thread starter Ellie
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Juan J. Sánchez
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Guys, I have a legitimate question. My ex's grandfather passed away a couple of days ago. I was close to her family, so I sent them some flowers and a nice, thoughtful letter extending my sympathies. I guess I was just trying to be nice. Was this inappropriate? I'm asking because they never did reply, not even a text message. Do you think they might have considered this out of place? You know, since I'm no longer dating their daughter. It's not the first time I send someone flowers and in past experiences they have always sent a thank you message. I'm just worried I might have done something wrong. I really suck at social cues.
I'm on my old netbook...
ALL THE KEYS ARE IN THE WRONG PLACE
I can afford a new laptop but I don't want to spend that kind of money. I opened it up, can't find anything loose, but also can't find half the components. I'm lost! I can see the SSD but not the HD. Can't see the GPU anywhere. I don't know laptops.
Maybe I should build a PC, get a dudbook and use terminal server.
ALL THE KEYS ARE IN THE WRONG PLACE
I can afford a new laptop but I don't want to spend that kind of money. I opened it up, can't find anything loose, but also can't find half the components. I'm lost! I can see the SSD but not the HD. Can't see the GPU anywhere. I don't know laptops.
Maybe I should build a PC, get a dudbook and use terminal server.
Whoah.
PCs have always represented better value for money than laptops, but I didn't quite realise by how much nowadays. This is insane.
Intel core i7-4790k (4GHz quad core)
32GB HyperX Beast 2133MHz (4x8GB)
8GB AMD Radeon R9 390
120GB SSD (using my own HD)
Win10 Pro
Titan Dragonfly cooler
Corsair 450W power supply
£1,062.00
For the same price in a laptop I'd get a 2.6GHz quad core, 16GB RAM at 1600MHz, and a 2GB Nvivia Geforce 950M...
PCs have always represented better value for money than laptops, but I didn't quite realise by how much nowadays. This is insane.
Intel core i7-4790k (4GHz quad core)
32GB HyperX Beast 2133MHz (4x8GB)
8GB AMD Radeon R9 390
120GB SSD (using my own HD)
Win10 Pro
Titan Dragonfly cooler
Corsair 450W power supply
£1,062.00
For the same price in a laptop I'd get a 2.6GHz quad core, 16GB RAM at 1600MHz, and a 2GB Nvivia Geforce 950M...
That's all fine. I was quite close to my ex's family and her grandparents were like my own, so I'd do exactly the same - even if I didn't speak to my ex anymore, if I heard something had happened I'd send flowers or whisky because I care about them.Juan J. Sánchez":2pxpzpdc said:
There's a lot that could be said about the specs you posted. The desktop hardware scene has benefitted a lot from research and manufacturing processes in the mobile industry and where laptop sales have shrunk, desktop hardware sales have grown.Princess Amy":1w20ertd said:
AMD hasn't entered the mobile market and their desktop hardware reflects that quite noticeably right now (as does the company itself which is in decline).
AMD technology right now is fantastic stuff but we're still waiting to hit the benefits of it (DX12 and Vulkan should shine on AMD hardware due to being Mantle derived - also GCN is really surprisingly amazing and Nvidia's still trying to catch up to it).
This should be your baseline (£1000);
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/xc3kpg
Improve from there basically.
Step 1 would be replace that GTX 980 with either a 970 (cheaper, weaker) or 980ti (more expensive, more powerful). The GTX 980 is awkward for price to performance as it's bang in the middle of the 970 and 980ti, so it's better to save money with 970 or get more power with 980ti.
GTX 980 is comparable to the R9 390 in terms of performance.
EDIT: Did some quick digging around, looking like most people compare the R9 390 to the GTX 970 rather than the 980 like I said above.
GTX 970 < R9 390 < ( GTX 980 ~= R9 390X ) < GTX 980ti
£235.00 | £248.99 | ( £369.99 | £319.96 ) | £499.99
EDIT2: Looks like the 390X is comparable to the 980. It's tough comparing different vendors as some games run better on AMD hardware than NV hardware.
Also power/temperature efficiency is something to consider. NV have benefited massively from entering the mobile market and doing that year of GTX 800m thing; New NVidia cards are passively cooled when idle; the fans aren't spinning at all for either of my GTX 980s right now.
AMD temperatures are generally higher and the power draw is larger. As an example, my last PC was an Intel i5 with an AMD 6970HD GPU - but my current PC with an Intel i7 and two GTX 980s draws less power. Electricity bill has been a tad cheaper since using my new PC.
EDIT3: Also browse some guides here - read the comments, etc. You'll learn a lot and get inspired.
http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/xc3kpg
Improve from there basically.
Step 1 would be replace that GTX 980 with either a 970 (cheaper, weaker) or 980ti (more expensive, more powerful). The GTX 980 is awkward for price to performance as it's bang in the middle of the 970 and 980ti, so it's better to save money with 970 or get more power with 980ti.
AMD processors I'd only ever go for with media centre PCs. I find that AMD CPUs have awful performance with specialised software; but they're certainly capable of gaming.
i7 processors are still somewhat enthusiast level; get an i7 if you're planning to do a lot more than just games on the machine. An i5 is basically "Games + maybe some other stuff", an i7 is basically "Lots of stuff + games" - if you get what I mean.
An i3 is basically for non-gaming, but still specialised. AMD processors are basically gaming and web browsing.
Everything I just said is a massive generalisation for use-cases, mileage may vary.
i7 processors are still somewhat enthusiast level; get an i7 if you're planning to do a lot more than just games on the machine. An i5 is basically "Games + maybe some other stuff", an i7 is basically "Lots of stuff + games" - if you get what I mean.
An i3 is basically for non-gaming, but still specialised. AMD processors are basically gaming and web browsing.
Everything I just said is a massive generalisation for use-cases, mileage may vary.
EDIT: Did some quick digging around, looking like most people compare the R9 390 to the GTX 970 rather than the 980 like I said above.
GTX 970 < R9 390 < ( GTX 980 ~= R9 390X ) < GTX 980ti
£235.00 | £248.99 | ( £369.99 | £319.96 ) | £499.99
EDIT2: Looks like the 390X is comparable to the 980. It's tough comparing different vendors as some games run better on AMD hardware than NV hardware.
Also power/temperature efficiency is something to consider. NV have benefited massively from entering the mobile market and doing that year of GTX 800m thing; New NVidia cards are passively cooled when idle; the fans aren't spinning at all for either of my GTX 980s right now.
AMD temperatures are generally higher and the power draw is larger. As an example, my last PC was an Intel i5 with an AMD 6970HD GPU - but my current PC with an Intel i7 and two GTX 980s draws less power. Electricity bill has been a tad cheaper since using my new PC.
EDIT3: Also browse some guides here - read the comments, etc. You'll learn a lot and get inspired.
I never had a problem with AMD drivers (people say the driver is filled with bloat-ware, but I literally never had any of that).Injury":3mbfuyy2 said:
That being said, AMD has worse GL compliance than Nvidia. AMD's GL driver will try it's hardest to make what you want to work, despite it violating GL compliance (so it shouldn't work). I had problems with my RPG Maker shaders code only working on AMD because of this.
On the flip-side, Nvidia has some non-standard GLSL stuff that has caused some shader examples and snippets to not work on Intel/AMD GPUs for me in the past.
The Nvidia driver experience has been okay for me. I have problems with GTA V performance being shit after every driver update (I basically uninstall and reinstall the driver if there's been an update and I want to play GTA V).
GeForce Experience has been useful with the game settings feature. I think GFE is a pretty good application and the fact that it's optional is a plus.
Another thing is Nvidia's developer tools; they are leaps ahead of AMD. AMD's may be free and available, but they aren't very useful and they feel old. Nvidia is definitely a better platform to program for right now. That may change in the future - if AMD are still around - as the recent experiments into GCN have shown that you can do freaking anything on an AMD GPU.
As for visual quality, I think what I've always said remains true; Nvidia is higher visual quality with their anti-aliasing solutions (their AA solutions are very good) so if I wanted the best quality image I'd be going NV over AMD.
EDIT: I completely forgot to mention NV's hardware video encode/decode solutions. They are much better than AMD's when I last tested it on AMD hardware, I expect AMD have caught up by now but if they haven't then that's something to consider these days now that everyone streams everything.
Juan J. Sánchez
Sponsor
@Xilef I really enjoyed the lesson on processors! :biggrin: