Be Excellent To Each Other

PEW PEW

As you know if you read the Norman Tebbit thread, I have been made redundant from the job I was doing until eight weeks ago when I took a leave of absence to do some contracting for my last employer because I was about to be made redundant and aren't run-on sentances fun?

Anyway, my employer is a bit skint (hence redundancies all around) and attempting not to end up insolvent (as two of the founders are going to work from a garage for six months and turn the company around). As such, I took some kit in exchange for some of the salary from the notice perid they owe me. For £600 deducted from my gross salary, I am getting the below (prices are the amount the firm paid for the kit a year ago):



So, just like that, I'm a PC gamer again. These two 22" monitors join the 22" and 26" ones I already have at home; to line all those up, if I had a burning desire to run all four from a single computer, I'd need a 2.2m long desk front. Also: SLI baby yeah!

And yes, I did just get a Macbook Pro last week. PEW PEW PEW.

Go and stand in the corner with JC and Ruy.

I see DoW2 in your gamertag you filthy hypocrite.

What case mods do you have in mind?

Absolutely none. It's a classy "lump of aluminium" look that I am not going to ruin by hacking casewindows into it in a hamfisted manner. I did enough of that in my twenties.

That's almost as good as mine
You'll need MORE POWA.

Well that won't do, will it? When do your upgrades arrive?

Yeah I know. Plus my convoluted RAID plan I explained over IM.

For everyone else[1]: this PC has a 250Gb and a 500Gb HDD. My old desktop has a 500Gb, and my NAS has two 500Gb drives. I am considering buying two 1Tb drives for £60 each and fitting them to the NAS in a RAID-1 mirror (for 1Tb space in total), then taking the four 500Gb drives I have left over and putting them in the PC in a mirrored/stripe RAID 0+1 array (for 1Tb space in total, with fault tolerance and a healthy speed boost).

[1] actually just the nerds and not everyone at all.

Less facts, more pictures. n00b

The new NETmodels aren't too bad. I'd go with the Torvill & Dean Hucknall-Nottingham.

Well I don't have it yet, and it's in the office in Cardiff. I'll put pics up when I've fetched it.

Yay!

When I can afford them.
So ~2015, then.

Call yourself a PC gamer? Get out.

It needs to look like a truck containing Nova body kits has crashed into Hasbro.

potw.

lol pc gamerz

I say gaming PC more because I have little idea what else to use this rather overspecced bit of kit on. I'm disappointed no-one has commented on the bargain I'm getting though. That's only costing me £350 or so out of my pocket.

Rock on ! Just playing Bioshock atm. Starting to get annoyed tho cos I can't find any ammo !!

EDIT. The spec is good. The C2EE is what I've been looking for

Graphics are so so, but hey you have two. I don't know how much it will effect your gaming seeing as they only carry 512mb each.. Not sure.

I strayed away from SLI in the end because it was a bit plug 'n' pray when it comes to driver support tbh. Everywhere who did so SLI tests, crossfire tests or CF vs SLI all concluded with the same. You're better off with one card with 1gb memory.

If you need any game reccs lmk. I tend to play the FPS's and drivers as much as I can.

Deffo worth picking up Dirt (for a fiver) and some others that are on budget now. Stalker was only 4 quid IIRC even though I don't like it you might.

EDIT again. Yes that's a great bargain the CPU fetches £350 + alone on egay used.

We need JC to comment because i'm only informed about prices every 3/4 years when i want to buy a new computer.

GET IN THE CORNER! *raises stick* GO ON! GET!

Yay for the bargain! I think it's forum jealousy that has meant the low yayage. Your OMFG purchases of late has given us Tech envy (apart from your 2nd hand MacbookPro, natch)

I'll YAY for the bargain (Yaaay!), but would advise you to sell it forthwith and buy an iPhone 3GS with the money.

*raises uber-cool coolermaster CM690 case in defiance*

*smacks back of Ruy's knees instead*

That's the most stupid advice i ever heard. Unless it's to make you eat the iphone and choke to death while doing it.

I'll give a more full opinion later (I'll breakdown the parts etc) 'cos I'm hellabusy atm.

Sorry the posts are a bit slapdash... Just got done building some argos furniture (I'm still sweating from the stress) and now I gotta serve up my bbq chops that have been slow cooking since 10am.

BRB ! literally

I'd love a gaming PC to play Civ 4 and Defcon on, etc, but I don't have the room, so I'm not really feeling any PC envy.

House envy, perhaps, as you must have a mansion in order to keep all this stuff.

NO.

(Oooh, that's an interesting idea). But NO. I want to see this bad boy rock Dawn of War II on my 26" monitor at 1920x1200.

My laptop is capable of playing both of them.

Edit: To Myp, obviously.

No harm in doing that first of course...

i have a small flat in the middle of the city, but do gaming pcs occupy that much more space than ordinary ones?

Mine can probably play both, too, but sitting with a laptop staring at a 15.4" screen for hours on end isn't exactly my idea of fun. Especially when I've got a 32" screen with 360/PS2/GC/N64 underneath.

what about a vga cable? instant civ4 in megavision.

NOOOOOOOO!!!!

Not another PC vs Console thread, ffs!

You appear to be the first person to mention a console.

I have a problem with being comfy as well. I don't have a desk (no room for one), and I don't fancy slouching on a beanbag with a laptop in my... err... lap, while looking at a screen and frantically pushing at my trackpad. I think I'd end up with RSI in about twenty minutes.

Zardoz, be my guest.

Lovely case. Not my cup of tea.. I had a lian li recently and ended up giving it away with a system in. Whilst it looked lovely it was really light. I prefer my chassis big beefy and heavy. I don't carry them around and Lian Lis feel very flimsy to me. They're not, it's the alu construction. Each to his own. PSU sounds incredibly underspecced unless I've missed something?



Jammy bugger. That's about as fast as you can go on DDR2



I used to like Liteons. I don't any more. They're noisy and flimsy. But hey, it's only an optical drive and easily replaced for 15-20 quid should it die.

I do have one in my PC but it's utter crap compared to the LG above (same specs as yours) It only reads about 2/3 of my backups whereas the LG reads them all.



Never heard of it.. /googles... Aha, similar to one of the Zalmans. Not sure how good they are at actual cooling but it's very pretty




Same identical setup I have apart from the Raptor boot drive. I haven't even filled the 250 yet. Mind you, I did promise myself I would not steal much stuff any more. I believe in Karma. When my 500gb drive crapped out and I lost loads of stuff I turned over a new leaf



Keyboard is probably the same as my Alienware M$ one without the red metallic paint. Wouldn't use anything else tbh. Very very good kb for not a lot of dough.

As for the mouse? Get a Razer. My Salmosa was about 16 quid del and the best mouse I've ever used. It weighs fuck all and is lightning fast.



Porn. Absolute silicon porn. Quite simply the nicest part of the system, my fave and one I'm terribly envious of. I have a EVGA 680 TRI SLI which is pretty much identical to that ^ but that's newer and even better. Absolutely without a doubt the best motherboard I have ever used. It's able to totally split the buses on memory & cpu, hence why you can get away with running a C2EE on a 1333 bus and the ram on 800 or 1066. Fucking awesome for overclocking. My suggestion is not to OC that EE yet. Use it until it feels a bit slow (see you in about 5 years) and then overclock it to extend the systems feel good factor.




The only thing that makes me pause and then say "WTF?" First of all 800 mhz ram is what I use on a stock E4500 (well it's massively overclocked but that aside..) That system *MUST* have 1066 ram in. How can they associate the word 'value' with any system carrying a C2EE in a Lian Li? Replace it ASAP dude. I reccomend OCZ 1066. It's not that dear and will make an enormous fucking difference.




Hmm. Good brand. However, I would imagine they're capped @ 1680x1050. Ideally you want the 24" cos it goes to the equiv of 1080p. Still, you'll still laugh at how fucking crap console graphics are when you run FO3 with the cinematic texture pack and everything on ultra. It's the FSAA that really makes the difference between the consoles and PC. At first glance the games look similar (no FSAA). You do benefit from massive draw distances etc but it's absolutely the FSAA that brings PC games into a league of their own tbh.



HMM. My EVGA has dual gigabit Nvidia cards. I would have imagined the 780i would too. I'll wander off in a min when I'm done and get a pic of the mobo 'cos that don't sound right. Unless they decided to cut down? dunno man.



Just make absolutely certain it's 32bit. You're gonna lose some ram but 64bit + game = FOAD. It's just a terrible combination. I also have to admit now that I am at last beginning to fall in love with Vista. I really and truly cannot believe what a magical difference SP2 has made to what seemed like a pile of shit. And DX10 = more console killing dynamic shenanighans.



What a great way to make your customer pay £11 for some thermal compound Funny how they mention pro wiring. What happens if you don't pay the £11? do they call someone in to ghetto rig the cunt?



Aha said the clown, as he dipped his bollocks in the custard. That explains it then.



gdgd. Nvidia branded Realtek IIRC. I'm seriously considering reverting to mine because this X-FI just doesn't fucking like Vista.



They're kinda getting on a bit now and the GTS was never l33t AFAIK. It was more about the GTX and Ultra. Mind you, with a system practically being chucked into your lap for nothing and that wonderful site I found you could always put in a 280GTX for 175 nicker and it would still owe you pennies.

Let us know how the SLI thing works out. I was frightened off by driver support and incompatible games. And at the end of it 1 9800GT wasn't cutting it so I didn't want there to be a single game that didn't use both. Hence why I went with the 280GTX. I scored myself a copy of Alien Adrenaline the other day too (praise be to the AW forum) and I'll be seeing how much I can crank the fucker up soon

my sofa has perfect square edged arm-resters. I bet they are great for mousepads.

Recc replacements.

Mouse. 17 odd quid.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Product.aspx?WebP ... ce=froogle

Ram. OCZ gold ed, 1066 4GB 41 quid.

http://overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.p ... =MY-149-OC

I remember paying 35 quid for a Logitech MX510 mouse back in 04. Is that still good? Cos I'm still using it now.

i don't like logitech mouses. they are too big for my amiga mouse-used hand. I like to maneuver with the tips of the fingers. But it seems the mx518 is still a favorite.

Edit: when i was mentioning they were big i was thinking about the gamer mouses. I used regular logitech mouses for a long time

I couldn't live without the thumb buttons for moving back and forwards in browsers anymore. I just couldn't.

http://www.evga.com/articles/385.asp

That's your motherboard.

And as I suspected it has dual Nvidia gigabit NICs on the back same as mine.

It's a gaming PC mang. You can run dual mice on a PC any ways as long as they're USB.

Headshots FTW !

Whoh, just when you least expect it, it's John Coffey with a TEXT ATTACK!

To address your points in no particular order:

• See my post elsewhere in this thread for what I'm doing about the hard disks.
• As-is, the system isn't SLId. I have blagged a matching 8800 from another machine they have of the same spec. This is why the PSU is under-specced and (I suspect) will need to be upgraded.
• I will be running that Vista x64 install unless it proves to give me problems. I'm not pissing about losing well over 1Gb of RAM to a 32-bit OS.
• The Viewsonic monitors are essentially bonus freebies, I will be using it on my existing 26" Samsung T260HD and 22" Benq (to be portrait mounted).
• The CPU is, as you've noticed, a frickin' beast.
• I have at least another two DVD burners here, but that one won't be getting heavy use anyway.
• I'm vaguely dubious about the RAM too but I've been working on that machine for a year without any problems so we'll see. It's a potential upgrade down the road, to take it up to a matched 1333 bus speed.
• You're right about the network card, that text is Cyberpower's default "no additional part" text. It has dual 1Gb interfaces.
• My reading suggests a SLI 8800 GTS will keep up with a GTX 250 and trouble a GTX 260 in some benchmarks. As such, I'd have to drop hundreds on a GTX280 to significantly boot graphics performance -- which I won't be doing anytime soon, if at all.
• I might get a new mouse, but I'll be sharing the keyboard/mouse with the Powerbook. Keyboard will be one of the new Apple really thin aluminium jobbies that I am trying to decide if I like or not.

Ta for the links!

With the Mac on my desk I am using a no-thumb-button Explorer right now and I really miss them.

If it helps, I was at BMW getting stiffed £66 for 4 bits of plastic and a couple of bolts.

Which is just a fancy way of avoiding saying "But it's a PC, PCs don't matter"

I can't liiiiiiiiiive, if living is without those little thumb buttons on good mice for web browsing. I can't giiiiiiive, I can't giiiive anymoooooooore.

Given that you were at a BMW dealer buying M3 bits, I'm surprised there isn't a zero missing off the end of that sum.

Ah... erm yes... ahem.

Sorry. As you were

Also, forward and back buttons on the mouse are a work of geeen-eh-s and I heart them. Much as Mr Dimdims said before.

YAY! New PC! YAY!

It probably would've been at least double if the "tech" could've operated the computer enough to find the at-least-8 other screws, washers and clips I need to attach them. Anyway, wrong thread.

You should definitely install VirtualBox, for any non-gaming* 32bit compatibility you turn out to need. Also because it's fun, moreso on a machine that can do it properly.

* Technically, DirectX, as it now does OpenGL passthrough.