Be Excellent To Each Other

Best we all keep our bollocks to ourselves, I'd have said.

You can play with my bollocks. Big c

Thanks man.

I only come here for the bollocks, frankly

Did you return the card in the end Bamba?

Got a new one yet/got it fitted and working?

I contacted the company to say the card was faulty and the guy said he'd just give me a refund as he didn't have any more of those in stock; which I was happy to accept. In an unrelated drunken incident of immense idiocy I wrecked my mobile phone last weekend so not only will I need to pick up a new one (which I was going to anyway as the new Galaxy Note is being announced in a few days) but I won't obviously get any money back from selling the old one. Put all that together and I've decided to hold off on getting a new new gfx card for the moment. I'll doubtless be back in this thread at some point in the next couple of months to check what the best buy card is at the time and then we can start the whole process again!

Thanks again for everyone's help in the mean time!

Worst PC upgrade ever.

Yep.

Are you sure?
Also - was it not insured?

I don't physically have the handset due to idiocy so there's nothing for me to sell. And I don't bother insuring my phones because I never lose or break them. Well, unless you count the last two phones I've owned of course. *punches self in face*

Moot considering you don't have the phone now, but is it not covered in your house insurance?

I never separately insure mine, either. I don't break things, and I've easily saved £700+ (at a low £5/month over 12 years) by not having insurance. Go go gambling.

Note sure, I'm living with my girlfriend so it would technically be her house insurance so I never thought to check. In the end it's only going to cost me £250 (price I'd have got selling my old Note before buying the new one + the money I spent on a temp replacement phone) so it didn't seem worth buggering about with insurance and whatnot.



This totally used to describe me and it's not something I'd ever have considered. Having left my last phone in a pub in Munich and then drunkenly wrecking this one it's a policy I'm going to reconsider whenever I lay my hands on a new phone...

My bank account has mobile phone insurance included, amongst other things.

Contents insurance doesn't cover it as standard with most policies, as it's the most likely device to be claimed for. I too have got it covered as part of my bank account.

Anyone who says 'I don't have insurance for X because I never do Y' is a bit stupid, IMO. Unless you can absorb the cost without bankrupting yourself.

I don't agree; if you've got a long history of not doing Y then why would you gamble that it happens? It's all about probabilities on both sides so taking into account the likelihood of an event happening based on historical information should certainly be a factor assessing risk. If you're historically good at not losing phones you might want to think twice about paying extra money to ensure it. If you're a cack-handed spack who's forever dropping them in the toilet or leaving them on buses then probability suggest you should ensure yours. Obviously in this case I lost the bet which I'm taking on the chin, but that doesn't mean everyone who makes the same decision is stupid.

I didn't even realise there was such a thing as phone insurance.

Since they get upgraded every 12-24 months anyway, what's the point? Anyone who routinely breaks something that regularly needs to be more careful.

I've had mobile phones since 1999, number of mobile phones I've broken - zero.

And that's including a Nokia 3310 that I tried to break because I wanted a new phone but couldn't justify it whilst I still had a working one. (Seriously, I played an impromptu game of baseball with it, and it didn't break.)

If your phone gets lost or stolen a handset is expensive.
If you phone is stolen and the person racks up a huge bill.

I would imagine these two are the big reasons. I think, as an aside, that giving young teenagers hundreds of pounds worth of electronics to carry around is a bad idea.

Specific mobile phone insurance is horrifically expensive. Adding accidental damage and contents away from home to our contents cost £35pa which gives the same effect (we'd also negotiated excess to nil) or myps bank policy as stated are both far cheaper.

You're not factoring in other people's actions into this. Yeah, you're awesome at not losing your phone (except you're not, but that's not the point here). You can't account for being mugged or pickpocketed, no matter how unlikely it is to happen.

It's a good job car insurance is mandatory, or I expect you'd say there's no point to it as you're an awesome driver.

That's a dreadful analogy.

The point of car insurance being mandatory is that you can do an awful lot of damage to other people and their property in a car, and that needs to be covered.

No one kills anyone with a mobile phone. (Well, technically you could I suppose, but it'd take some serious effort.)

Back when third party car insurance was cheaper than fully comp, I always went with third party only, based on the fact I'm an awesome driver and never crash into things.

Yeah I like to live on the edge and not pay mobile phone insurance. Reckless is my middle name.

You sort of can by, say, making sure you keep your phone in zipped pocket and not living or spending much time in dodgy areas where you're likely to get mugged. If you can't do any of those things then there's a higher risk of something happening to your phone so maybe you should consider getting insurance. It's all about probabilities and risk; that's exactly how the insurance companies themselves handle it. That said, I do take your point about your own actions not being the only thing to take into account here.



You'd expect wrongly. The possible financial and legal implications of not having car insurance are a whole different set of factors; so making the assumption that because I might not have mobile phone insurance means I wouldn't insure a car doesn't follow in the slightest. Insurance is a specific bet around a specific (set of) risk(s) so unless I'd made some idiotic blanket statement like 'all insurance is bollocks' (which I haven't) then you're making a hell of a leap here.

Having picked up Quantum Conundrum for under two quid recently I'm back on the gfx card upgrade trail again I'm afraid folks. The 6870 seems to have gone up in price recently so is there a new budget champion I should be looking at? Also I'll replace the PSU as well so any recommendations for that would be gratefully received.

The current top pick in my price range seems to be the HD7770 so I was considering this. Looking at power supplies only underscored how hard it is to tell the good from the bad (and that I have no idea how to work out which wattage I need!) so I'm no further forward there.

The 7770 is a bit of a stinker, by all accounts it's slower than the 6850, let alone the 6870.

However, at the £100 price point it's pretty much still your best bet. (Unless you can find a 6850 for the same price, it's a faster card than the 7770.)

Your other option is the 7750, that can be had for less than £75, and it draws all the power it needs from the PCIE slot, no extra power requirements at all.

In fact, having had a little look into this, for the games you want to play Bamba, the 7750 might do the job, plus you won't need a new power supply (assuming that the power supply does at least supply the motherboard in a stable fashion).

Just to re-iterate, what games are you wanting to play and at what resolution?

The only 6850 I can find for £100 is this one and the reviewers talk about having to do a BIOS update to sort out really noisy fans so that can GTFF.

I'm looking at getting a new PSU for two reasons:

1) There's still an, admittedly very small, chance that the issues with the last card were down to the PSU being shit so upgrading to a decent one at least rules that out if I get any further problems.
2) The PSU is, as already mentioned, shit; and Beex wisdom has it that it's the one part you shouldn't skimp on because of the problems it can cause so I feel it's worth getting a decent one just for the sake of having it.

Given all that, I'm happy to go for the 7770 if it's a better card than the 7750 because I'll be grabbing a new PSU anyway so that's not a factor.

As for the games I play and the resolutions I want, it is usually less demanding games that I play (Dear Esther, Portal 2 and Quantum Conundrum being recent examples) but I'm not really being driven by that or predicted resolutions (which I don't really care about) as I just want a decent budget card and I'll play whatever games come up at whatever performance level that card will allow.

I'm not going to start playing lots of games on my PC so there's no need to spend loads of money; but I still want to be able to play stuff like Quantum Conundrum if I see a decent deal on it without the screen filling with horrible artefacts or the gfx driver crashing every five minutes. That's my motivation here in a nutshell.

Just buy any decent branded PSU and you should be fine Bamba, you're not going to be putting it under much stress.

Something like this should do you fine, £47 is an entirely reasonable price for a 'proper' power supply - http://www.ebuyer.com/278634-corsair-50 ... -500cxv2uk

Cool, ta; that's the new PSU and card ordered so hopefully this'll be more successful than the last attempt!

Well it can't be any worse.

Unless something actually explodes and you lose a limb.

While we are here, I need a bit of advice.

I bought a Dell XPS 420MT ages ago, as it was a cheap refurb and did the job. Since then I have basically replaced pretty much everything, new case, new psu, new graphics card, new memory, new hard disk, full reinstall of Windows. The only thing left that is original is the CPU and Motherboard.

Now, part of the reason I replaced the case and psu a year or so ago, was that I was getting random bluescreens, it was all fixed for a while, but it has started again this week. Symptoms are when I first turn it on, I can pretty much guarantee a bluescreen within the first 20-30 minutes, the sound will start to cut in and out and then it will bluescreen. Restart and it is totally fine until I turn it off, be that in a few hours or a few days. Next time I start up it will happen again.

Looking at my temperatures, nothing seems out of the ordinary, I don't think it is overheating. I'm suspecting the motherboard is dying rather than the CPU, but who knows that this point.

I have an i7 920 2.67Ghz, which runs on a socket 1366 motherboard.

What are my options?
Replace the motherboard seems the cheapest option, but if it is the CPU, then that is good money after bad.
Replace the CPU? I'm much more inclined to believe it is the crappy Dell motherboard at fault rather than the Intel CPU. But still, good money after bad if it turns out to be the motherboard.
Replace both CPU and Motherboard. Could that be the best option? The motherboard alone costs £140 for the cheapest one out there due to the CPU, could I replace both the board and CPU for the same cost these days, and not lose any performance by going with something a bit less exotic?

If I was to just replace the motherboard, any recommendations? Not many places sell the 1355 boards.
http://www.pcupgrade.co.uk/category.asp ... 546&Sort=6
is the best list I have found.

TBH Trooper I'd just buy a CPU/mobo/RAM bundle and transplant them into the case.

Is it a 'second PC' or something like that?

I'm very impatient when my PCs start to get a bit flaky, they very quickly find themselves up at the tip

It's my gaming pc. Can I get a bundle that gives me similar CPU performance for under £200? My CPU is getting on a bit now, but I haven't been keeping up with developments in that area.

So, it appears I can get a i5-3570K which is about 50% faster than my old i7, for £175. Motherboards for that chip are a lot cheaper at £80ish.

£250 to replace both possible dodgy parts and get a performance bump? Hmmmm...
I already have 8GB of 1333 memory which i'll reuse. The extra £40 to get 1600 doesn't really seem worth it, how much difference will that really make?

How much of a nightmare is replacing a motherboard and CPU when it comes to a Windows 7 installation? Am I going to have to re-install from scratch, or will it be able to handle it?

You're basing that off a benchmark rather than clock speed, I hope.

If you're replacing mobo and CPU I'd always go for a fresh OS install. I'd only trust keeping it as is if I added more RAM or a new graphics card, really.

Absolutely

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Meh, not sure I can be bothered

Why would you need to with Windows7?

Why wouldn't you?

Windows 7 is a little better at handling the transition to new CPU/motherboard than previous Windows versions (apparently - I've never tested it), but I'd still do it if you want to avoid any possible conflicts.

You can do the Windows Repair thing (which it'd probably prompt you to do upon detecting different hardware), but most nerds would recommend you do a fresh install even after that.

You're changing the very foundations of your system's hardware. The previous hardware was deeply embedded in there with all of its drivers and stuff. Things are bound to go wrong if you just replace the hardware and leave it as is.

I would not rebuild, unless there were conflicts. As it takes a few hours plus setting up all your programs again.

If I was swapping to a different architecture then sure, I'm sticking with intel though, i'm sure it will be fine, what can possibly go wrong

Well, I think you're cr/lazy. What's the point in spending >£200 on new hardware if your old OS install is probably going to be a millstone? But hey, go for it!

setup multiple hardware profiles, then I find it's easier to continue.

Malc

Millstone? How so?

Lots of places online say just replace and update, and do a windows repair if necessary, but that is unlikely.

Lots of places online will tell you that the Windows Repair function either fails or doesn't do its job!

Obviously you can't be arsed to reinstall Windows, so don't. You asked whether you should or not, but you want us to say you don't need to! I think you should, and I always would, but that's me.

I want to know why it is a millstone

If there is a good reason to do a wipe i'll do it, but I can't see one. It's an honest question.

Driver conflicts slowing things down and throwing up errors. Even if you're not getting BSODs and explosions, it's likely that it'll be under performing compared to a fresh install. If you don't care about fine margins like that, don't worry about it. But if I'd paid any amount of money for new hardware, I'd want to give it the best chance I could to perform as it should. If you just want it to "work", then it probably will. If the Windows Repair doesn't fail.

But why? Once it is working then it is working surely?

I'm not an expert on this subject, but I think it's basically down to the fact that you'll have new drivers and old drivers competing against each other - some software will try to use the old drivers, some the new. It's undoubtedly more technical than that, though.

But also, "if it works, it works" isn't necessarily true. Your new CPU would probably "work" running on your old CPU's drivers, only with an increased chance of critical errors.

(I'm kinda hoping someone who knows what they're talking about will tell me I'm wrong and explain what a driver conflict actually is.)

You been reading JC's PC upgrade manual