Be Excellent To Each Other

Awesome job JC, been really interesting watching this build come together

Thanks

For the GPU I have ordered custom made cables with captive combs. The combs are those plastic things that separate each wire. Basically I have ordered this



And this



Only instead of being in two lumps they will be in one 14 hole comb X 4. So four combs going down the cable. As soon as I hook those up and fit the motherboard cooler cover (top of the board, nasty bare alu heatsink) it will be finished and I can start my next project lol.

If a 980Ti existed that would fit in my case I could be tempted to take a punt on one at around £300, but 27cm is absolutely the longest card that will go in - (as I found out with my old GTX480, which required me to push the hard drive cage back a few millimetres with some considerable force to squeeze the card in) - and there aren't any 980Tis that short.

Certainly in GTAV multiplayer my 970 is absolutely maxed out and bobbing around the thermal limits all the time even with the fan let loose at top whack, whereas the CPU still has some room for manoeuvre.

Again you leave me confused. A half decent case can be had for £40 these days.

You need to stop buying Mercs mate

It's not the cash that bothers me, it's the amount of knobbing about required to transplant a PC from one case to another. Yeah I know realistically it's just half a day's effort but I still can't be bothered because my PC is pretty close to end of life now anyway.

I dunno, maybe it's a possibility, I'll be taking a week off once the schools go back so maybe that'd be something to set a day aside for.

Whilst you are at it throw in a X5650 or X5670.

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Intel-Xeon-Pr ... SwIgNXrPfI

Hex cored and lower die size than your existing chip so should do 4ghz easy. Would make a nice upgrade over what you have now, and give you a bit longer to make up your mind

Not only JC has superior modding skills, I've been doing a bit of EXTREME PC CUSTOMISATION myself this evening.

Following on from my exhaust fan failing the other day, I suspect the main culprit is the side intake fan on the windowed side of my PC, which doesn't have a dust filter on it, and has pulled in a fair whack of dust over the years onto the CPU fan and rear exhaust fan. (The front intake does have a dust filter behind it already.)

One masterful mod later, and the side intake now has a dust filter too.

If anyone wants step-by-step instructions or a pictorial guide as to how I achieved this, I'll be happy to help.

Very neat work

Needs more LEDs.

Is that parcel tape? hard core man, hard core

Can you take pictures from a few more angles please Hearthly. Also, you should probably watermark or put some form of identifier on your pics so that no one else can misappropriate your work.

Brilliant!

Ooohhh a half-length GTX1070, doesn't seem to have gimped clocks or anything either. (It's actually clocked a bit higher than the Founder's Edition.)

As there's no such thing as a half-length 980Ti, and the prices don't seem to be going below £350 anyway now, maybe this 1070 could give my PC a final shot in the arm to keep going for a while longer.

GTX980Ti performance in a half-length card, that's quite something.

At work the thinking on GPU is changing again and we are moving back to PC's with 4 gaming cards in them again.

We dug out some of the Fire Strike testing, in 2013 we had a score of 20539 for a rig with 4 Titans in it

Today the score is 20505 with one ASUS ROG Strix GeForce GTX 1080. Its overclocked, score without this is 19840.

Insane performance increase in 3 years and the 1080 uses a fraction of the power as well

Not really PC gaming hardware but not sure where else it'd fit and it's not worth its own thread.

So then, yes, inkjet cartridges, they're bastard expensive things, we all know that already. Our printer since 2009 has been the excellent Canon MP-640, it's one of those all-in-one jobbies, every computer in the house can print to it, scan from it etc, the Canon software itself is pretty good, the drivers are solid, you can whack a USB key into the front of it etc.

It takes five cartridges in the form of the three normal colours and two different blacks which it chooses between depending on what it's doing or something. Either way it all seems to work fine and generally speaking the cartridges all run out around the same time.

On average we've been getting through two full sets of cartridges per year, the prices of which have remained somewhat consistent, at around £70-£75 for two genuine Canon sets of five cartridges. (They're a bit cheaper if you buy them in twin-packs hence the doubling up, and only one delivery charge.) Expensive, but comes with the territory of inkjets I suppose.

So at the end of last week the time came to place another order (thanks to a flurry of printing from Mrs H and Jnr, including some full sheets of 100% coverage A4 of which I very much disapprove), and it appears that in the POST-BREXIT apocalypse landscape inkjet cartridges have got more expensive too, to the extent that the usual order from Ebuyer was coming in at the best part of £100 including delivery - for fucking ink!

Something inside me snapped, and after I'd totally trashed the house and killed several innocent bystanders, I decided to turn to the dark side of compatible style cartridges from Amazon.

I know the quality isn't supposed to be as good and they can be a bit leaky and all that shit, but I'm at the point now where I'll just take a punt on them, and if the worst case scenario comes to pass and they trash the printer I can always buy another one for not much more than the cost of a couple of sets of genuine cartridges.

This is how much ink we got delivered from Amazon for £11.95 (we have free delivery through Prime). This much genuine ink from Ebuyer would have cost nearly £200 (!).

Hopefully they'll work properly, of course. Mind you, if they do, I'll feel like a bit of a mug for having stuck with the genuine Canon cartridges for so long......

I use a HP printer with instant ink. Looks like it will save me a lot.

£50 pages a month works out £2.99 a month. I think.

I fucking hate printers with a burning passion. Just this afternoon I was doused in toner by a fucking HP shitbox. Curse them and all that use them. Such wasteful machines! Half of the ink or toner that you buy goes straight into a waste container.

Burn them all, I say

I agree with Davpaz but still... I buy the cheap cartridges off Amazon and I think as long as you keep using your printer so the ink doesn't dry up, they're fine. Sometimes they haven't lasted as long but I'm ok with that as I save a load of money this way.

The last two I bought were £9.95 for the two. I've printed off a fair bit since having them and I can't tell the difference. I've even printed some game covers at super high quality and they've been fine.

HP printers are the worst known to mankind. Seriously avoid.

Particularly the "Shitbox" model.

Seriously, what marketing department said OK to that.

Well, the official name is the Colour LaserJet C5325, but we all know the truth.

Now the LaserJet 4n... that was a fine printer.

How many LEDs did it come with?

No more than one

I have an Epson all in one, after burning through the set of starter cartridges I ordered some new "full size" ones.

As we use this model as standard for all remote users, I found another set of starter cartridges in our workshop and thought I would use them to tide me over until the larger ones arrived

The printer refused to let me use a 2nd set of starter cartridges!!

Also seen the same sort of thing on an HP that cost me £1500 for one of our offices, the yellow full size cartridge was subject to a delivery cock up so I tried to use the starter one with 3 more full sized ones and again refused to let me.

They are a bit out of order dictating what you can and can't use, not like in my case I was using any 3rd party products!

I've been looking into getting a colour laser printer for the home but overall running costs don't seem to be much lower than inkjets, plus lasers can be slow to start up as well, and they often don't seem to do the 'all-in-one' stuff as well either, plus they can be bulky.

TBH if these hooky cartridges off Amazon work OK we'll be laughing, even if they only last half as long as the genuine ones we'll still be laughing.

I'm really not sure how they knock the things out for 60p each though, and have them be any good at all.

I couldn't go back to using inkjets, although I don't need colour printing so I went for a Samsung wireless all-in-one mono thing. I don't bother with official toner cartridges though - the last one cost me £14 from Ebay has been just fine.

PRINTER NEWS:

The first set of cartridges are in, and they seem to work fine. They're not as luxuriously packaged as the official Canon ones, but they do each come in their own box and airtight plastic bag, and they have a similar little retaining plug thingy that needs to be twisted off. Had a couple of specks of ink come out of one of them once I'd taken the plug off, but other than that no leaks at all.

The printer accepted them fine, reports its ink levels as replenished, and is printing normally - no obvious difference in quality.

For 60p per cartridge (including delivery) I really wasn't expecting much at all, but this appears to be promising.

£100 for two sets of cartridges for a £150 printer? You can fuck off with that.

I imagine the only real difference is likely to be in the longevity of the print, but unless you're using it for archival printing or something that's unlikely to be a huge concern.

Exciting new Intel CPUs released! You too can now experience 66% MORE PERFORMANCE THAN....... a five year old PC.

Fucking amazing.

Seriously, that's the sales pitch.

How old is (the processor in) your PC? Because mine's about five years old.

I've still got my ancient old i7-920 from November 2008 (I bought it second hand in 2011).

Doubtless a new PC would be a lot faster than what I have now, but since I mostly only play WoW, Hearthstone and fruit machine emulators, there doesn't seem much point. For NEW SHINY GAMES (which I play very little of) I've just accepted dropping down to 1080p and compromising on the pretties rather than lob two grand at a new PC.

Anyway, the point is, when the sales pitch is 'new PC is up to 66% faster than a five year old PC', surely the response is, 'I should fucking think so too'.

Hi welcome to console gaming.

1080p is for peasants.

Doesn't matter dude, your CPU is totally being bottlenecked by the crappy aftermarket parts in your printer anyway.

Those printer cartridges are ace, Jnr went on a printing frenzy a few days ago, the sort of INK ARMAGEDDON that I used to find rather upsetting, knowing the cost of replacement cartridges.

Now I'm just like, yeah, go nuts, print to your heart's content.

My only regret is sticking with the genuine Canon cartridges for so long, hundreds of pounds wasted there over the last few years.

Someone at work asked my permission to print off a single page (for personal use, a form or something), I thought it was quite a sweet, innocent thing to ask.

Great printer chat, love to hear more stories x

The length of the average email in Outlook if you print it is one page.

If you add on the signature about being a paperless office and please save paper by not printing this email it takes it to 1 page and 1 line.

That's before you consider the amount of extra hard drives needed to store those signatures, and how much extra electricity it takes to process them. It's a tiny amount but it adds up to stacks.

They should also mention the fact that if you overclock a skylake processor to the same speeds as a Kabylake, it ties in every test.

Although I don't see "0% faster than last years processors at the same clock speed" going down well.

I've managed to acquire an i5-4590 and 8gb DDR3 from a dead PC at work. Just need a new motherboard and cooler and my gaming PC might be good again. I'll have to upgrade the graphics card soon enough anyway. What's the best in the £100 ish range currently?

Essential

If you're really trying to stick to £100 then the closest you'll get to a viable graphics card at that price point is the Nvidia 1050, which is basically the Pascal version of the 750Ti (which was Maxwell), the 1050 has the same number of stream processors as the 750Ti but with a very hefty bump to the clock speeds. (£110 is the cheapest 1050 on Overclockers at the moment.)

The 1050Ti adds on an extra £30 for not a massive amount more ooomph, you may as well stretch out to the 1060 at that point.

And if you're getting the 1060 may as well get the 1070 etc

The 1050ti seems. Good. Any AMD cards worth considering?

Hahaha

Well the question was asked about a £100 graphics card and you recommended a £140 graphics card that doesn't punch much harder than a £110 graphics card. The 1050Ti makes no sense when the 1060 is £185.

The 1050 and 1050Ti are both 1080p cards where you'll need to nip and tuck the graphics settings to get good framerates, whereas the 1060 is more of a 'just max it out at 1080p and forget about it' card.



No.

My monitor is 1080p. I don't Anti-Alias. I'd rather have frames than shinies

The 1050Ti is faster than the 1050, but not by much, it's whether or not you want to stretch out to £140 for the modest bump to performance the 1050Ti affords, given that you could sacrifice a minor shiny or two to get the same framerates out of both cards.

The Ti does have 4GB of RAM though (as opposed to 2GB), but once again it's whether or not you'll really be pushing into '2GB isn't enough' territory given the resolution and settings you'll be running at.

Obviously there are endless benchmarks out there you can refer to, which generally look something like this: