Be Excellent To Each Other

Also don't forget that HDMI is really the first time that there's ever been audio and video out from a single port on the motherboard. It's still a bit of an unusual concept.

It's small things like that which are relatively simple for the majority of us on BETEO but so offputtingly frustrating for so many. I'm also thinking of my mother and my inlaws (Lady T's parents and older sister in particular). I guess that's one of the main drivers of tablets, especially apple ones, it just seems much less easier to mess up a closed system. I suppose it helps that a small device like a tablet can easily be taken over to someone else's house for 'sorting out'.

That's as much an argument for a laptop as it is a tablet mind.

Oh, that's indeed true, but there seems to be a distinction for many people that a laptop is just too computery (and therefore unfriendly) so they don't want it, yet a tablet is OK because it's more like a sky+ box or a mobile phone, like something a bit simpler.

I've been frustrated recently with trying to explain to my mum how to turn up the volume on her laptop. She keeps skyping me and then moaning that it's too quiet. Doesn't reflect so well on me either, that I'm letting a trivial thing test my patience

Oh god, I don't know what it is but there's nothing shortens my fuse like parents and computers. They aren't stupid by any means but they just won't get it. So every time I show them something they have to write it down as an exact sequence. The words on the screen give them no clue as to what it is they might be actually doing, they just need to know exactly what button to press and when to achieve the desired outcome.

It's a bit like instead of telling someone some simple directions of how to drive to somewhere using a few landmarks you have to give precise instructions of exactly how many meters to go before making each turn, like programming a Big Trak, so any even slightly novel situation will see them driving blindly into a ravine. It drives me fucking insane.

It's not just parents. When I worked in tech support I'd get a number of calls per week asking if I they needed to press the 'OK' button to continue. I'd ask what options they had, and they say "it says 'Press OK to continue' - there are no other options."

I must have shown my mum how to copy files off her sd card a million times but still she can't do it unsupervised. She can copy and paste text just fine, but for some reasonshe can't apply the concept to files.

Fuck me, at least they read the message.

You can always move data of value to SkyDrive etc. Unless you have BT Infinity it will take a while as most ADSL upload speeds are not great.

A few years ago I thought I had lost all my data from one of my Thecus NAS units. At the time there was something like 10TB of data on it.

The only thing that really pissed me off was all my pictures where on there, the rest was TV and films most of which I just horded and could easily download again.
Luckily I fixed the NAS, now all my pictures and o are in 3 locations, NAS, SkyDrive and local PC.

Hello!

Right, my Graphics card is old. I need a new one. What's the best I can get for gaming for about £150?
I've got a 8800 GTS 512 just now, and think I really should upgrade it considering it's about 7 years old.

And what is the best brand now for graphics card? (Not the chip-makers, the ones that build the card.)

This is reckoned to be the best card for under £150 at the moment, will generally hoof just about anything ULTRA-ed out at 1080P assuming you've got a decent quad-core CPU behind it.

Only needs a single 6-pin PCI-E power connector as well.

http://www.ebuyer.com/584414-sapphire-r ... 220-00-20g

Your other option at that price point is a GTX660, although the R9270 (linked above) will generally best it.

There's not really a concept of card manufacturers, they're all OEM designs and the various companies just stick their own coolers and branding on them. Some may get to choose the best chip yields for their overclocked ranges and suchlike, but I wouldn't really worry about that.

What CPU do you have in your PC though? If you've got an old dual-core CPU then there's only so much a new graphics card will do for you.

I've got a Intel Core 2 Duo @ 3.0Ghz, but I plan on upgrading it as soon as I get the money to do so.
I thought AMD wasn't meant to be as good as nVidia?

You'll be CPU-bound in a lot of games if you add a new graphics card to that system, although some engines are far happier with two CPU cores than others (Source for example, likes running on two cores just fine).

As for who's 'best' out of of Nvidia and AMD, ultimately with graphics cards it all comes down to what delivers the most bangs for bucks, and at the moment AMD have got the drop on Nvidia at that £150 price point. (Not by a massive amount though, if you went with a GTX 660 I'm sure you'd be perfectly happy.)

It's not a static target though, a couple of months ago the GTX660 was the sweet card for under £150, then AMD revamped the 7850/70 into the 270/270X, gave the GPU core and memory a clock bump, and hey presto, it's the new fastest card for under £150.

Okay, thank you :-)

A sub-£500 gaming-capable PC off the shelf complete with OS. (Uses an AMD APU to save on the cost of a discrete graphics card.)

http://www.yoyotech.co.uk/warbird-kaveri-11

It's not an absolute powerhouse but there's 8GB of RAM in there and a 1TB hard drive, plus a keyboard and mouse.

Should do alright for gaming at 1080p if you're prepared to accept middle settings in more demanding games (which is generally what XBone and PS4 games run to in PC settings terms).

I specced up a budget gaming PC at PC Specialist last week for a mate at work, brought it in at £550 and that included a six-core AMD CPU, 120GB SSD and a GeForce660 - which is seriously cheap for the power on tap, but that was without an OS. (Will be capable of chucking BF4 around at 1080p at decent settings.)

It's ugly, but it's cheap. That mouse is horrid.

I'm not saying there's anything about it that's a design masterpiece, but for an (at least) 'console equivalent' gaming experience along with all the other stuff that a PC can do, it's not bad going at all, what's an XBone running to, about £430?

One of the comments earlier in this thread was that I was cheating a bit with PC prices 'cause you have to add on stuff like a keyboard and mouse, whereas this system comes with both (Along with the latest Windows OS.)

Plus it's impossible to overstate how cheap games are on PC, and I don't even mean with Grim...'s special discounts! And of course you get emulation as well, if that's your bag.

alright! Nice find. In ur opinion is that a future proof system? As in can I throw MOAR RAMS at it or a bigger graphics card in the future without overtaxing the motherboard or CPU? I like the look of that though.

Anandtech show some pretty crappy benchmarks. BioShock Infinite, 1680x1050, medium settings, 24 fps -- on a more powerful A10 than the one you link to. Sleeping Dogs was 22 fps (again, on a more powerful chip). Tomb Raider is about 24 fps, still in sub-1080p. Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition is 1080p60 on the £350 PS4, with added graphics options beyond those offered by the PC version.

The joys of recommending something you've never used over something you've never used based on pulling facts out of your arse, eh?

Had a bit of a hardware splurge this week.

Bought a Thrustmaster T.Flight Hotas X specifically for use with Elite Dangerous, and now I'm toying with the idea of grabbing Flight Simulator X as well.

Also bought a Unicomp Model M keyboard, based on one of the original IBM models from the 80s/90s. Not really for "gaming" per se, but it's pleasingly clicky and it makes it very easy to know when I'm pressing the right keys and stuff. Might try Typing Of The Dead out on it later, should be a laugh

I wasn't 'recommending' anything, although I appreciate it may look like it given where the thread last left off, but it was last posted to over three weeks ago.

I was merely observing that it's possible to buy a reasonably capable and complete gaming PC (including OS and keyboard + mouse), for under £500.

TBH I think you'd be much better off with the £550 build I specced up at PC Specialist last week, I'll dig it out and post the details here.

Note there's no OS or keyboard+mouse, but it's sporting a six-core CPU and a genuinely 1080@60 capable 2GB discrete graphics card. (GTX660.)

Here you go, £542 including VAT, and a 120GB SSD in there too. In fact that's with delivery to the IOM factored in, so it'd be cheaper than that.

Not bad going though, 1050p@30 with middling settings certainly looks achievable, and it did far better than that in some of the games. I also note that the 'quality' figures (which is what you're referring to there) specifies a rather vague mix of 'medium-high' for the settings, some of which could be pretty demanding.

Personally I'd rather spend a bit more and get a more capable CPU paired with a discrete graphics card, even if I were doing it on a harsh budget, but my basic point remains that it's a rare old state of affairs when you can buy a complete PC off the shelf with genuine gaming ability and a full OS for under £500.

So it's a rare and remarkable occasion when a PC is less than 43% more expensive than a PS4? Got it.

Well you've added on the word 'remarkable' and that's perhaps a touch histrionic, but in essence that's the gist of it yes.

All you need to do with that sub-£500 PC is plug it into a screen, (the requirement for which is identical whether you're playing on a PC or a console), connect it to the internet (see previous), install Steam, and off you go.

You have remarked upon it. It is quite literally remarkable.

Your face is quite literally remarkable.

That's not what remarkable means. It comes from a French word meaning "pay special attention to", or something.

Oddly, I had this conversation in my office last week, when I said almost exactly the same thing as you did. SPOOK.

Hard to imagine that DocG sometimes makes mistakes like the rest of us human beings. Quite remarkable, in fact.

£100 graphics card versus XBone/PS4

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... en-console

You're like the gaming Patrick Bateman without the psychosis. Or maybe with?

Don't just stare at it, eat it.

Yeah talking about PC games hardware in a thread called 'PC gaming hardware thread' - crazy old me!

Yes, just the PC hardware thread...

I think you'll find that's about been the size of it for quite a while now. (I specifically referenced BL2 loading times in this post the other day, but only because it was relevant to your comment - viewtopic.php?p=805316#p805316 - and indeed that was the only 'platform comment' in a long post otherwise dedicated entirely to the game.)

I also started the 'next gen not very next gen' thread specifically to keep 'that sort of thing' out of the specific XBone and PS4 threads.

Don't be a dick, give AE his due, the PC talk is only happening in the PC thread, which is just fine with me.

You're right, I was being a knob. Sorry AE.

I did have a good idea for a BeeX WeeX though where I nicked a page from American Psycho and instead of talking about fonts it was resolutions and FPS.

No problem old chap

I was a dick with the PC stuff in the past (truth be told I cringe a bit when I read some of my old posts), so I can understand some antipathy still being in the air. Obviously I can still be a total cock in lots of other ways, but the PC stuff at least should be confined to the relevant locations these days

<group hug>

<fondles bottoms>

<predicts storms>

Interesting new graphics card reviewed at Eurogamer today, in terms of raw power it's nothing overly exciting (pretty much matches the PS4 in terms of grunt), but it's fairly cheap (£115) and sports very low power consumption. Doesn't need any extra power connectors at all (can draw everything from the PCI-E slot), runs very quiet and cool, and is very small too.

It really is a dinky little thing, about the same size an old Soundblaster card they're saying, exactly the sort of thing you could drop into a cheap PC and as long as it's sporting any sort of reasonably modern quad-core CPU - you're set for high quality 900p or better gaming at 60FPS.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digit ... -ti-review

I saw that and am genuinely considering picking one up even though I really don't need it. There's probably something wrong with me.

If I could get one in the media centre PC I'd definitely have one, but unfortunately that will only take half-height cards (there's a passively cooled Radeon 6450 in there at the moment which has more grunt than the integrated Intel HD3000 graphics on the CPU but is still pretty shit).

As Eurogamer themselves note about Nvidia's new architecture, the potential for higher end cards is pretty mind-blowing in terms of the performance they'll be able to deliver with massively lower power requirements, and of course power equals heat and heat equals noise - none of which we like.

In their test PC the total power draw with the 750Ti and an i7 CPU was the same as a PS4!

I've got an aging 2.33GHZ Q8200 CPU in my machine, that's not going to be a bottleneck for any gfx card upgrade is it? I've currently got a 1GB HD7770 card in my machine which is rarely stretched as my PC's mostly an indie games machine so I'm not even sure if it's worth upgrading that at all if I'm honest. Desire for shiny possibly not justified by any need for shiny.

Ok, let's go!

I am interested in purchasing a PC for playing games, [totally legally] downloading vids and music, running Office and the like and, that's about it I suppose. PC's don't do much else than that do they?

My specs are as follows:

I'm a numpty so I need to be able to open the box plug it in and go. No wiring, opening the back of anything or buying other stuff to shove inside. I would definitely electrocute myself so that it completely off the table.

The "rig" must come with stuff to make it work. Like, I dunno, a keyboard or something.

It must be capable of sitting under my telly (alongside the PS4, PS3, PS2, Xbox 360, Wii and TiVO boxes) and must connect to my telly. Via HDMI. Gotta be HDMI. (That's right, right?)

So I've got it under my telly and I'm tapping stuff into my keyboard and I'll be wanting to run that STEAM thing that everyone loves so much.

Then it's gotta play some games. I would like to play the Indie stuff but also, I dunno, stuff in 3D. I probably ain't going to be too bothered about playing Battlefield 4 with EYE BLISTERING MAX OUT but I'll want something better than what I get on PS3/360 right?

So, that's it.

Oh, and I'll probably want to buy from somewhere where I can purchase online with that paypal stuff so they've got to be reputable and stuff. Natch.

Oh, and under £500. Cheers.