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Eagle's latest toys

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RogerBK

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Post Tue May 10, 2011 2:47 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

Sheizenhammer wrote:
SlntCobra1 wrote:PICS OR IT DIDN'T HAPPEN! YOU KNOW THE RULES OF THE INTERNET! LOL! jk but seriously, that sucks! How did it happen?


Well, if I remember rightly, what happened was something like this:

It went bang. Go figure.

:P

(Seriously though: the power supply blew up. I opened it and there was a hilarious little crater-mark around where one of the components was supposed to be. XD)


LOL, it should have been so fucking awesome to see your PC blow... I would fucking laugh 2 hours unstoppably. And then I'd cry.
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lol, it was hard to put the image in the signature... :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:
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ByteSlinger

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Post Wed May 11, 2011 3:09 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

I've seen PCs blow. It's not pretty. Usually the motherboard and all the internal components are caked in dirt and dust from years of never being cleaned. Heat builds up around the CPU and the capacitors eventually super-heat and crack, leaking all over the place. But that goo is hot enough to set some of the dust on fire, and between the motherboard shorting out and the dust in flames, within moments a $1,000 PC has been turned into a very poor substitute for a George Foreman grill.

I've also seen the reduction circuit in the power supply (the part of the coils that reduce 120V down to 12V and 5V) short - and for a few moments, raw 120VAC is blasting through a 5V motherboard. Yeah, the internal breaker will kick in - but not before the motherboard has more dark lines in it than the back of a 90-year-old lady's legs. It also takes out the CPU and the RAM chips, and sometimes the internal circuitry on the hard drives. It's rare - but like sex, when it happens, it's spectacular! :D
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Sheizenhammer

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Post Thu May 12, 2011 10:16 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

Since this particular PC was less than 3 months old, it didn't really have the "dust all over it" excuse. Chances are, it was just badly made.

Also, just for shits and giggles, here's the report on it I got back from the repair shop.
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MwMike

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Post Wed Jun 01, 2011 4:18 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

Looking to build a medium-range gaming rig soon, I thought I'd ask you lot, being more knowledgeable than me (and less likely to link me to Falconguide then tell me to fuck off than /g/), what would you think of the following build?

CoolerMaster Storm Scout Case
ASUS P8P67 Motherboard
Intel® Core™ i7 2600K Quad Core 4x 3.4GHz 8MB Cache (8 Threads)
Corsair 600Watt PSU
Coolermaster Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
Corsair XMS3 8GB (4x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz
1TB 7200RPM SATA II HDD
nVidia GeForce GTX 570 1280MB
802.11g WiFi PCI adapter

I'll also be buying a cheap keyboard, mouse and speaker. And a 22-24 inch-ish monitor.
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ByteSlinger

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Post Wed Jun 01, 2011 8:56 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

MwMike wrote:Looking to build a medium-range gaming rig soon, I thought I'd ask you lot, being more knowledgeable than me (and less likely to link me to Falconguide then tell me to fuck off than /g/), what would you think of the following build?

CoolerMaster Storm Scout Case
ASUS P8P67 Motherboard
Intel® Core™ i7 2600K Quad Core 4x 3.4GHz 8MB Cache (8 Threads)
Corsair 600Watt PSU
Coolermaster Hyper 212 CPU Cooler
Corsair XMS3 8GB (4x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz
1TB 7200RPM SATA II HDD
nVidia GeForce GTX 570 1280MB
802.11g WiFi PCI adapter

I'll also be buying a cheap keyboard, mouse and speaker. And a 22-24 inch-ish monitor.


Not a bad start. I'd consider the following upgrades just to keep it edgy for a while:

a) Bump your PSU to 1000Watt - if you ever decide to add more hard drives or another video card, you'll need the extra juice

b) Get TWO 1TB drives and set them up as a mirror RAID (Raid 0) - If one fails, the other drive keeps running until you can swap in a spare

c) I'm assuming you're running Windows 7 64 bit - or are you one with Linux? If you're using Windows, get the "Pro" version and make sure you install the "Virtual XP" environment. You can literally open up an XP Session inside of W7 that is fully compatible with all your old stuff.

d) If you could swing it, go for 12GB RAM - I recommend the Corsair Vengeance™ — 12GB Triple Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMZ12GX3M3A2000C10)
(They also have 16GB kits, and are designed to be overclocked!)

e) the nVidia is nice, but you may want to consider the ATI Radeon HD 5970 2GB unit. Generally a better performer than the 570, with plenty of GPU RAM and power to make every game run smooth as silk

It's like this: you're going to spend a chunk of coin on this rig now - but if you spend a little more, it'll be beefy enough to last a few years before you need to upgrade it again. There's nothing worse than putting together a rig with above-average parts - and then in a year, realize you need that monster video card - or you should have mirrored that drive which just crashed after uploading 12 years of newly converted digital home movies.

Please realize that these are just my ideas - use them as you see fit. I hope it was at least a little helpful!
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MwMike

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Post Thu Jun 02, 2011 4:37 am

Re: Eagle's latest toys

ByteSlinger wrote:
a) Bump your PSU to 1000Watt - if you ever decide to add more hard drives or another video card, you'll need the extra juice


Will do, or at least go quite a bit closer to that.

b) Get TWO 1TB drives and set them up as a mirror RAID (Raid 0) - If one fails, the other drive keeps running until you can swap in a spare


I'll check how much I can afford at the time, and if so I'll definitely do this. Hard-drive failure is quite a bitch.

c) I'm assuming you're running Windows 7 64 bit - or are you one with Linux? If you're using Windows, get the "Pro" version and make sure you install the "Virtual XP" environment. You can literally open up an XP Session inside of W7 that is fully compatible with all your old stuff.


Right now I'm dualbooting WinXP and Debian, but when I have a bit more power (ie. not on a £400 dying laptop), I'll be upgrading to seven for my Windows partition.

d) If you could swing it, go for 12GB RAM - I recommend the Corsair Vengeance™ — 12GB Triple Channel DDR3 Memory Kit (CMZ12GX3M3A2000C10)

Woah, 12GB? :3 Most I'd ever had previously to this 2GB stick was 512MB. :3

e) the nVidia is nice, but you may want to consider the ATI Radeon HD 5970 2GB unit. Generally a better performer than the 570, with plenty of GPU RAM and power to make every game run smooth as silk


I'll definitely look into that card, perhaps with a smaller monitor to make up for the expense.

Please realize that these are just my ideas - use them as you see fit. I hope it was at least a little helpful!


It was very helpful. I'll try to take as much as I can from what you've said, however the whole thing depends on whether I have the budget by January-Februaryish. I don't want to be saving up any longer than that, Skyrim ain't gonna wait for me. :3

Thanks a lot, Byte. :D

Edit: Looking at predictions of budget, the most of that lot I could probably do is bump the PSU to 850watts and add a second 1TB hard-drive with striped RAID. Possibly a bit more or a bit less, I really have to look at how I'm saving money in the next few months.
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SlntCobra1

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Post Thu Jun 02, 2011 2:51 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

This is the MAIN reason I'm not in the I.T. field. And damn if I ain't glad about it. All I need to know about computer specs are the video card, how much RAM I'll be getting, the hard drive space, how fast my internet connection is, what OS am I getting, what kind of hardware addons can I get, how much speed will the USB ports have, and how good of a resolution can I get on the screen. As long as I know all that, I'm just fine.

Anything more, and all I hear is "herpa derpa derpity herpa derp."
:lol: :lol: :lol:
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MwMike

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Post Thu Jun 02, 2011 4:16 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

SlntCobra1 wrote:As long as I know all that, I'm just fine.


I don't think we went too far past that point. I'm obviously quite a newbie to computer-building myself, but I intend to learn more over the years. This is only my second build (first one being a novelty machine made out of extremely old parts I found for about £50 overall.
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Sheizenhammer

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Post Thu Jun 02, 2011 10:41 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

ByteSlinger wrote:It's like this: you're going to spend a chunk of coin on this rig now - but if you spend a little more, it'll be beefy enough to last a few years before you need to upgrade it again.


This is my single biggest beef with the whole IT / computer industry. OK, computers go obsolete; it's a simple fact of life. What I don't like about it is that the rate at which they're going obsolete seems to be increasing too. The first computer we ever owned lasted a good 5 years before really going obsolete (i.e: new games / programs simply wouldn't run on it), and my own computer after that lasted at least 4 years before going obsolete too. Nowadays, the things are rendered useless within a matter of months if they only have standard-spec parts in them, and even purpose-built gaming PC's don't fare much better. The one I have is already struggling to play new games on anything besides the minimal settings, and it was specifically marketed as a games PC. Admittedly it's not a top-end PC, and the game in question has had more than the usual amount of flak over its minimum system requirements, but for fuck's sake, the top-end ones cost a goddamned fortune however you want to look at it (either buying or making yourself), and neither that game nor any amount of others are worth that kind of money. : /

If this keeps up, buying / making computers will become pointless. By the time you get it out of the box, it'd be obsolete.
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MwMike

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Post Fri Jun 03, 2011 6:53 am

Re: Eagle's latest toys

I've found that the rate of hardware advancement seems to have been slow the past few years, in the graphics side of things anyway. Where many of the old-school PC developers are now producing cross-platform (for consoles that are now half a decade old), they see they'll be making more money on consoles and thus not pushing too far on the newer PC hardware - there's less reason for hardware developers to keep pushing so hard when there's little software to make use of your improvements.
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SlntCobra1

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Post Fri Jun 03, 2011 1:19 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

See? THIS IS JUDGMENT DAY! THE TERMINATOR MOVIES ARE RIGHT! SKYNET IS COMING! RUN FOR YOUR NO GOOD LIVES! :o :o :o :shock: :shock: :shock: :? :? :?
95% of teens would cry if the Jonas brothers were about to jump off of a 10 story building. I'm one of the 5% who would bring popcorn and invite friends.
CLICK MAH SIG!!!!
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ByteSlinger

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Post Fri Jun 03, 2011 2:19 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

SlntCobra1 wrote:See? THIS IS JUDGMENT DAY! THE TERMINATOR MOVIES ARE RIGHT! SKYNET IS COMING! RUN FOR YOUR NO GOOD LIVES! :o :o :o :shock: :shock: :shock: :? :? :?


Relax, my rampant redneck. It's all going to be okay. Even if Skynet were to happen, it would have to deal with ME!!!! I'd have all of those t-1000 units hand-in-hand on a chorus kick-line singing "Dancing Queen" while wearing pink tutus. Talk about a minor reprogramming job. Or, since it is self-aware, I'd program in a little paranoia so that it thinks all of the terminators are going rogue, so they'd be ordered to kill each other.

The final stroke of death would be to download the ENTIRE IRS TAX CODE logic and rules into its main CPU - and then tell it to figure it all out. It would wind up in a CPU-locked coma, going in mental circles while the CPUs melt down from thermal failure.

Here, have some warm cookies and your soy milk - I made your favorite - chocolate chip oatmeal. :D Feel a little better now?


Oh, and as for hardware becoming obsolete versus software - the answer is obvious: the tools to create new and better software are much faster than the actual design, implementation and manufacturing of any hardware. You can make a software change in a program, test it and have it out in a few weeks. But try to change how a motherboard works and that will take months to retool. Hardware will always be playing catch-up to software, and, no, you'll never get a machine that won't be obsolete in a few years. HOWEVER: you need to be realistic about what you'll really be doing with the system. Right now, you are young and you have the time to play games and spend countless hours on-line, if you wish. You need a machine to play those games - and you may be replacing it every 2 years, if you can afford it. But unless you grow up to be a PAID game designer and/or tester, real life will creep in, and your free time becomes rare. You'll need time for your day job, and then time for dating / courting and eventually marriage and a family. You'll want to spend time with friends and family, so now your on-line time is used to check e-mails, chat, and play the occasional game. It won't be that important to you anymore.

So, buy what you can afford, and play what you can - and don't worry about obsolescence. As long as the rig does what you want it to do, it's not obsolete to you...
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Sheizenhammer

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Post Fri Jun 03, 2011 11:11 pm

Re: Eagle's latest toys

ByteSlinger wrote: You can make a software change in a program, test it and have it out in a few weeks. But try to change how a motherboard works and that will take months to retool.


That's kind of the point: Why the hell are software companies going as fast as they can, knowing full well that hardware isn't keeping pace? Why make programs that only the top 1% of computers can actually use? Unless it's really specialised software (the kind you don't normally see in ordinary stores), doesn't that somewhat ruin your own product's market potential? It just doesn't make sense, in my opinion, to make software and then wait for hardware to catch up, when you could've just toned it down a bit and avoided having to pay your staff in I.O.U's for a couple years. :?

ByteSlinger wrote:and then time for dating / courting and eventually marriage and a family. You'll want to spend time with friends and family,


Oh, if only you knew just how many levels of wrong are in the above line...
I won't (further) derail the thread with this, but trust me, I was laughing at this one for quite some time before posting. Hell, I'm still chuckling at it a little now. ;)
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