General computer talk/advice

The MSI card is nice. It runs cool and is very quiet too. What is wrong with the R9 270?

 

Nothing wrong with it at all, but I'm getting some FPS drops in the more GPU intensive games and it's struggling to run modded Skyrim and GTA IV. The 970 is nearly twice as powerful. I'm just doing an early upgrade really, AMDs 300 series looks very promising but I'll get a 970 because I WANT IT NOW and I don't want to wait

And I want to play some new games (FC4 for example) and I want to max them out.

 

Far Cry 4 can be maxed out no problems. The card handles it at 60fps and it is truly a spectacle to look at especially on an IPS screen the game looks amazing. I just hope your skyrim mods dont need more than 3.5gb of vram

 

They're fine with 2gb. It actually runs at 40-50 fps most of the time, but the tree mods kill muh shading units and I get 20fps and stuttering in places with trees. Overclocking helps, but with AMD's drivers any OC over 980MHz crashes the game or drivers.

I'd disable the tree mod but it looks so good.

 

People say I'm crazy, but I'm honestly glad I switched my 770 for a 280x. Overclocked it gets about the same performance (Tahiti and GK104 area nearly the same clock for clock, just kepler tends to clock higher), has more memory bandwidth, and 3GB of VRAM. Most of my games use about 2.1GB, but with better textures I'll be well over 2GB. I can still play most games maxed at 60fps, so I'll still use this card for a while.

 

I'm sure you know that it's possible, but said otherwise for brevity or sidestepping disaster when the other guy buys a cpu that doesn't fit (or if laptop manufacturers do some rubbish like soldering the cpu to the mobo now). I swapped out an i3 350m for an i5 540m a few years ago on my old HP notebook. Got myself an extra bit of usability from what used to be a really weak pc.

Of course, it's still shite at running games.

 

Since there's no info on the web, what exactly can one expect from an overclock on a 750 ti?

I've been running mine at exactly 1400MHz stable since I got it. No overvolting. Is this normal, or is my card a lotto winner?

 

Pretty much everything 2nd gen i3/i5/i7 comes in a bga package now, soldered (and high impossible to do by hand). Very very few are socketed and typically its only high end gaming models and a few business models too. Older stuff, was still more common to solder than socket. In a soldered bga chip, the board itself acts as a heat sink to aid cooling, a socket is thicker, adds cost and insulates heat from the main board. It may kill upgrade ability, but a soldered chip does make more sense for a laptop.

Same actually goes for GPU too, very very few do have removable cards, but on new machines they aren't standardised connectors and you have to get one specific to your machine (there was once a standard but its dated and not really supported anymore). Most just go for sticking the GPU core etc on the laptop main board and simply not populating it on the non dedicated graphics models, as they aren't hand solderable you can't upgrade those machines.



Basically leaves it as a safe assumption that a laptop is not upgradeable anymore.

 

You can always replace the entire board. Although that's like buying a new laptop :|

 

Finally decided the worst operating system has to be bloody Ubuntu

 

*Ahem*

Vista.

 

*ahem*

Windows ME

 

*Ahem*

Windows 95

 

AHEM

OS X

 

Do you use OS X on a daily basis?

I do, a little less than Windows 7 but I have no problems with it, there are a few design and coding kinks that Apple needs to sort out instead of Facebook integration, but OS X has served me well for 9 years.

 

Everything is wrong with OSX. They can't even use the standard control/alt keys, fucking hipsters.

 

Ubuntu is still worse than all of the above.


If anyone is contemplating switching to it because it's faster than windows, well vista was faster than Ubuntu 10 let alone the current Ubuntu versions which literally require 4gb of ram to run at all. I tried out on 1gb, lol, so slow, windows 8 will actually run in 1gb just fine, #! Will run in 256mb just fine (although large web pages may cause you to go into swap regularly) and in a VM with 1gb of allocated ram its still faster than Ubuntu on the actual hardware, Ubuntu in a VM is painful (with hyper v).


Unity desktop is ugly.
Unity desktop is unintuitive (windows 8 to me is genuinely more intuitive).
Unity desktop is slow.
Unity desktop is temperamental at best (differing sets of search results for searches made straight after each other???).
Ubuntus stock software ckllection is poor both for newbies and the experienced Linux user.

In short. Ubuntu is a piece of crap.
Vista and osx are both usable at least.

 

I almost haven't used Ubuntu after 9, but I tried 13 once and it was utterly terrible.

 

I use #! as my distribution of choice, although development has ended. Dunno if someone else is taking on crunchbang or its distro hunt time, or maybe its learn to build your own distro time, I dunno. I like it though.

 

I love #!, but also Linux Mint is fine for everyday use, and I like Wary Puppy for old PCs.