Calling all techies (or, "I need a new computer.")

[Ackermans]

So I talked to my mom and she insisted the budget be $500. For now, I guess that's the highest it'll be. Were it my birthday, I probably could've gotten away with the higher budget, but that day has already come and gone (it was two weeks ago...two weeks). If I haggle a little and step up my chore game, I can probably russle up another two hundred or so within a month because I have way too much free time on my hands and absolutely nothing to do.

 

@Aurora So, assuming that the budget is $500-$700, do you think your fiance could come up with a shopping list for me?

[Coatleque]

$500 should be plenty to buy a bare-bones pre-built off the shelf. You can always upgrade individual pieces later. As long as the system board and CPU are decent, you have a load of upgrade potential.

 

Other pieces that are easily transferred between systems:

Sound / NIC / SATA cards

GPU's

Power Supplies

Physical Drives (HD / DVD / Disc)

[Oscare]

Uh oh... now we've come down to comparing specs....

 

 

 

Intel i5, 16 GB RAM, 480 GB twin SSD RAID-0, GTX-680 w/4 GB, 800 Watt.  5.1 SB-ZxR going to Pioneer HTS.

 

8-)

Can we take a minute to talk about how huge that screen is? Because that screen is huge.

[Coatleque]

Can we take a minute to talk about how huge that screen is? Because that screen is huge.

 

Panasonic P50S50 plasma. 50", low input lag.

And I sit two feet away.

 

Keeps me warm on those cold winter nights.

[Aya]

Oh?  That thing in Coatleque's picture wasn't an aquarium?  ^^

[Oscare]

Oh?  That thing in Coatleque's picture wasn't an aquarium?  ^^

I am relieved I am not the only person who thought that at a distance glance.

50" though?! @_@ Girl, you're insane.

[Jancis]

I've never had a problem. Maybe you just need to get a better machine. 8-)

 Pffft laptops are so yesterday.

 

Tablets are the way to go. Just touch and win.

 

[111]

I've never had a problem. Maybe you just need to get a better machine. 8-)

 Pffft laptops are so yesterday.

 

Tablets are the way to go. Just touch and win.

 

 

Damn. I'm rich, but I'm not that rich.

[Oscare]

Those specs though.

HD i1895. All these quality pixels.

[111]

Oh?  That thing in Coatleque's picture wasn't an aquarium?  ^^

I am relieved I am not the only person who thought that at a distance glance.

50" though?! @_@ Girl, you're insane.

 

Heh. 50 inches? I hooked my computer up to the projector in the conference room and am playing it on the big screen.

 

[Kage]

You're supposed to use one of the smart classrooms. preferably BSIII

[Coatleque]

Heh. 50 inches? I hooked my computer up to the projector in the conference room and am playing it on the big screen.

 

One of our clients has a conference room with a full-sized video wall. That's right. Not a projector, but the entire wall is a built-in tv. Might be OLED. Not sure, but I heard the setup cost them ~$25-50k

 

The real tragedy is that they are moving out of that suite in a month, and leaving it behind.

[allgivenover]

At $500 you're not getting a laptop that can play the game better than what you have now. 

 

What you want at that price is a budget desktop gaming machine. There are many, many, many ways to do this, and it's late for me so I can't get into too much detail, but here is one way to go about building your own desktop gaming machine around that price point. Note this wouldn't have an optical drive to start so you'd have to download your games or cannibalize it from your old desktop, your old monitor is likely still usable so I didn't include that in the budget. This would be very up-gradable down the road as well.

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/C84Tzy

 

I chose these parts without considering hardware loyalties or any sort of fanboyism. That sort of subjective preference is something you have to ditch when building on a budget.

 

Let me be clear that you can definitely do much better than this example build I showed you with some time and research effort. http://www.logicalincrements.com/ is a great place to start.

[Coatleque]

The aforementioned client decided to take their video wall.

 

Here it is, not yet unpacked, but bolted to the wall of the lobby in their new sweet. I tried using a banana for reference, but you couldn't see it on the floor, so use the couch there instead.

 

[Sylvain]

I'd rather piggy back off this topic than start a new one.

 

What is the number one bottleneck for multi-screen gaming? I'd like to think it's the GPUs and video memory available but that doesn't seem to be the case with my current setup.

 

CPU: i7 930 @ 3.8

Mobo: Rampage III Extreme

GPU: 2x EVGA GTX670Sced 4GB

Memory: 12GB Dominator GT

SSD: OCZ Vertex 2 120GB

 

Game Resolution: 6040x1080

 

In most situations at maximum settings I'm getting at least 25-30 in Limsa and 45-50 everywhere else. The one thing that bugs me are the particle effects for instance zoning points (the blue warp thing outside a dungeons respective physical entry point) and walls after starting a boss fight cause 'warping' to happen where the game luls than catches back up in a sense. FPS isn't really impacted as it's all smooth but the game literally just luls.

 

One thing I know is my motherboard isn't PCI-E 3.0 like the GPUs. This I understand bottlenecks but how much I'm not sure. I've been waiting for DDR4 memory to hit the market and do a Mobo/CPU/Memory update and that's soon going to be an option.

 

Wanted to know if there's anything to be done in the meantime?

[Coatleque]

At that resolution, the only bottleneck would be the cards themselves.

 

Try disabling shadows first and see if that helps. Shading in games causes the largest video overhead, even before resolution and anti-aliasing.

 

{edit}

As far as PCI-Ex 2 vs 3, your cards are most likely not filling the bandwidth of the current bus either way. Like running a 7200 rpm drive on SATA 2 vs 3... there's no difference because the drive's physical read/write speed maxes out before the bus speed.

[Sylvain]

At that resolution, the only bottleneck would be the cards themselves.

 

Try disabling shadows first and see if that helps. Shading in games causes the largest video overhead, even before resolution and anti-aliasing.

 

{edit}

As far as PCI-Ex 2 vs 3, your cards are most likely not filling the bandwidth of the current bus either way. Like running a 7200 rpm drive on SATA 2 vs 3... there's no difference because the drive's physical read/write speed maxes out before the bus speed.

 

Shadows give me maybe 2FPS increase. Disabling all gives me about 7.

 

Using laptop settings at that resolution gives me 60 FPS easy but I still suffer the 'lul' from particle effects. Out in no-man's land I will get 60FPS steadily.

 

Also I just remembered, this game isn't technically SLI ready yet correct? nVidia has some drivers the the games way of rendering doesn't fully utilize multi-GPU configurations?

 

E1:

 

How would two PCI-E 3.0 16x cards not be filling the bus speed of a 2.0 motherboard?

[Coatleque]

Also I just remembered, this game isn't technically SLI ready yet correct? nVidia has some drivers the the games way of rendering doesn't fully utilize multi-GPU configurations?

 

Possibly? I haven't used SLI myself before. Try running it on one GPU and see if it helps? You should be able to dual monitor one GPU by using the VGA out, and one of the Digital outs (DVI and HDMI share a channel on nVidia cards, last time I tried this)

 

{edit}

Regarding your edit, just because the card is rated for PCI-Ex 3 doesn't mean it's running the entire bandwidth. There's quite a few PC specs out there that are simply that, specs on paper. You'd be hard pressed to actually use them.

 

Another example would be your NIC. I bet it's rated at 10/100/1000 Mbps. Even at full download speed, you are not using the full 1000 Mbps bandwidth because either your hard drive can't write fast enough, or the source server can't upload fast enough. Chances are it only hits 20% at max.

[LiveVoltage]

Since this is about tech, might as well throw this in here.

 

Ive been thinking of upgrading to a video card instead of using my on-board built-in graphics processor which is built into the motherboard. My built in motherboard video processing unit can handle FFXIV on normal setting with slightly beefed up stats just fine but I have been thinking about maxing out what its graphically capable of doing and I was wondering what video card would you recommend for that and wont overcharge me a price like something Invidia would sell.

 

Also, the biggest thing that MMO's typically need are a good (Preferably multiple) Large Hard Drives or Solid State Drives, Powerful Internet connectivity (while this isnt a requirement, gameplay lag will never occur with a good net connection.) A good video card and a good processor along with a sizable amount of system ram.

[Coatleque]

I was wondering what video card would you recommend for that and wont overcharge me a price like something Invidia would sell.

 

For 3D Acceleration you really only have two choices. NVidia or AMD (Formerly ATI). The two are so neck and neck that it's pointless to compare them here. Plenty of other forums exist if you care to read the specific points of each side.

 

As for budget, both sides offer models at lower prices for specific price points. For NVidia, the top-end models always end in 80 or 90 (GTX680, GTX690, GTX580, etc...). The 80 is basically the 'reference' design for the series, while the 90 is just two 80's slapped together on one board. Everything below that is an 80 that was handicapped by the manufacturer as an excuse to charge you less.

 

I would look for a 640 or 660. You can probably find something at a local Best Buy for maybe $150 or so that should handle the game with no problems. Anything you buy is going to beat out on-board Intel graphics hands down.

[synaesthetic]

Good game-playin' for cheap:

 

Find a used quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU cheap on eBay or craigslist. The Core i5 2400 is a good one. Try to avoid the ones with the "K" at the end because they're overclock-capable, and used OC chips on eBay might be something extreme overclockers have cooked out and are trying to foist off on some unsuspecting rube. So stick to the non-OC variants; you'll have a good chance of getting 10+ years of use out of. You can find them cheap, usually winning auctions around $80-100. Maybe a little higher. Be frugal!

 

Find a used GTX 570. Again, these are a few generations old so you'll find them on eBay/craigslist for under 100 bucks or maybe a little more. A lot of gamers will be trying to trade up for something newer; take advantage of that. Pretty much any brand is okay, just make sure the card looks to be in good shape.

 

Jump on Amazon and find an LGA 1155 microATX mobo. Something from MSI, Asus, Gigabyte, all these are usually good. Aim for something in the 75 dollar range; it'll be good enough for what you're doing. I don't like buying used motherboards because they're a mite more delicate than CPU and GPU.

 

Again from Amazon, pick up 8GB of DDR3-1600 RAM in a pair of 4GB modules. Should only run you about 75-80.

 

If your used CPU didn't come with the stock Intel cooler, find a new cooler on Amazon. Don't bother with crazy-expensive OC setups; just get a $20 one. It'll probably be better than the stock one, anyway.

 

Get a 500W power supply from Amazon. This is something else you definitely don't want to buy used. You can get a decent enough non-modular one from Corsair or Sentey for $35-50. Sure won't be as good as a SeaSonic, but it also won't cost $150+.

 

Time to pick out a case! Rosewill makes good cases cheap. Look for a microATX mini-tower, sans power supply. Rosewill has a nice-looking mini tower for about $37. Also pick up a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue HDD. They're cheap ($60-ish), reliable and decently fast.

 

Next up is a monitor. eBay once again is your friend. You can easily find a 24/25" 1920x1080 LCD on eBay for $70-100. It might be a bit scratched and dinged up but who cares if it works and has no dead pixels? Craigslist, too--check it. The GTX 570 should be able to run basically anything at native resolution with most of the shinies enabled. If you aren't thrilled about the prospect of a used monitor (maybe fear of dead pixels) you can get an okay-ish full HD LCD (but it'll probably be 21/22") from Amazon for $130-150.

 

Keyboard should be easy enough. On a budget but still want something fantastic for gaming and will last longer than you will? Check eBay for a used mechanical switch keyboard with Cherry MX Browns or Blacks. Browns are more utilitarian (they have a soft tactile click, two-stage) and Blacks are best for pure gaming (they bottom straight out, single-stage, no tactile click). If you don't fancy spending money on a keyboard, just get a generic dome keyboard for $10-15.

 

Mouse? Sentey Nebulus on Amazon for $24. It's a good gaming mouse and a great deal for the price. Adjustable weight, bifurcated front with separate L and R buttons (so holding one down won't impede the function of the other), some extra buttons for added functionality, looks nice not too blingy like a lot of gaming mice. It's USB and corded so no need to worry about batteries.

 

For sound? Speakers are lame, good ones are super-pricey. Go for a pair of headphones, and the ones I'd suggest are the JVC HA-RX700. They're $30-40 on Amazon and they sound like $200 Audio-Technica ATH-A900s. Seriously. Build quality is so-so, but I had a pair last three and a half years of intense use and abuse before the physical structure failed. Fantastic gaming headphones with nice boomy bass for explosions, good mids and highs for watching movies and listening to music. Super budget cans! Grab a Zalman clip-on mic for $12 to go with it and attach it to the headphone cable. Boom, you have a fantastic headset for under $50!

 

You'll need an operating system, too, and since this is a starving-student gaming rig, you have to go with Windows. No Linux for you, QQ. Pick up a Windows 7 Home Premium x64 OEM copy from Amazon for $100. Sometimes you can find extra sealed/unopened OEM copies on eBay or Craigslist for less than that, so keep an eye out if you need to shave some extra dollars off the total cost.

 

There you go, a fantastic(ally cheap) gaming rig that'll rip through FFXIV and pretty much anything else you throw at it for a price far under a grand.

[HonZoMon]

 

Couldn't resist...

 

"Don't run, we are your friends!"

[Kage]

I might have a GTX 650TI that may do it for you. It ran decently well, until I realized the issues i had were with faulty memory and not the graphics.

 

If I could ship it somehwere I could give it for free when I find it.