General computer talk/advice

thunderbolt 3.0. Not firewire.

Thunderbolt 3.0 is essentially a PCIe 3.0 x4 slot bought out onto a cable with an extra datachannel for displayport 1.1 at the same time.

The current gen GPUs arent really bottlenecked at that limited PCI count. Maybe something like a 980Ti or a Titan X will hit the bandwidth cap but in general, a full desktop class GTX970 can be run from it just fine.

Only issue. The NVidia and AMD display drivers currently freak out with hot swapping of a PCI card.


even before we were always able to get external PCIe slots that plugged into a thunderbolt port. Know a guy that uses it with a pro PCIe audio interface and another that runs a RAID controller off of one. Its just until they went full 3.0 (it was 2.0 before) there wasnt the bandwidth for full hardware accelerated GPU.

 

Learned something new again. Good.
I was wondering how reliable those thingas are, because well, there must be a reason why so little builds with external GPUs exist. Why? Is it just the freaking out drivers, or is it impractical? Or is it just that nobody wants to produce those?

 

or that thunderbolt 3.0 is also new?

 

That might be a bit of a cause either.
MIGHT.

 

Thunderbolt 2.0 was too slow to do it reasonably. 3.0 is new.

 

Now THAT makes sense now.

 

I've got another vintage tower on its way. I know absolutely nothing about it, apart from a hint that it uses an Intel processor of some description.

Please let it be a Pentium II, please let it be a Pentium II. I'd even take a Pentium III 1000.
--- Post updated ---
Well damn, that Optiplex isn't worth it. It has an Intel 810i chipset in it and only supports 512 mb of RAM.

Shit, back to square one.

 

Do you remember the "Best PC Of 2004"-thread? Somebody please build one with an Athlon 64 FX-57. Please!
EDIT: 512MB? That's crap.

 

Well, good news is that that vintage tower is actually 2 vintage towers. One is an actual tower style and one is a desktop style. The bad news is that they're both Packard Bell's. Oh well, torn down, and parted out for money. I may keep one of the Pentium 75's for my collection.

 

What's wrong with Packard Bell? My mum owns a Platinum 2010* with Windows 98 on it. I used to use it when I was younger.

*Very similar to this: Link to a pic

 

So I'm planning on getting a second R9 280X for crossfire, any chance I'll see better FPS in BNG? Or is crossfire still a bit iffy.

 

Packard Bell is about as low quality as you can get. They were sold primarily at large retailers like WalMart. Yes, WalMart sold Packard Bell computers. But I don't hate the fact that they're Packard Bell's, I'd love for the desktop variant to work, because it's really cool. I'd just prefer if it were a Tandy, AST, or a Dell. (Actually, an AST would be about as reliable as the PB)

 

Ha, I had a AST once it had a Pentium 100 in it.. Thing never worked... Literally, every time I booted it up I got this weird beep code, 3 short 4 long and 1 fast.. Never found out what was causing it, I replaced everything in it, the CPU, ram, GPU, PSU, I even reset the CMOS. In the end I just junked it...

Looked like this.

 

huh, reading the posts about older computers, i've just realised that other than my current Lenovo, my family has never used anything other than HP's and Compaq's

 

So I can forget the dual R9 280X's because my R9 just died... Startup blue screens lead to no display at all then no post... So now I'm stuck with this HD6870... Back to Nvidia on payday I guess. Screw AMD with a fancy stick...

 

I think you now have the ultimate question in front of you again: R9 280X/380X or GTX 970? Power or up to twice the VRAM?

Also: What kind of fancy stick do you mean? Super long screwdriver?

 

so, very soon i may finally after about 3 years have an actual dedicated graphics card

so that's going to be fun

 

Budget?

 

It says EVGA 750Ti, so about 150€, I'd presume.

 

Hati warned you (and me iirc)

That sucks though, it somewhat puts me off getting a 390 as the 7870 I had failed in a pretty similar way you're 280x did. Although it was 3 years old, overclocked and used pretty much 24/7. I would go GTX 970 or 980 but I'm really not a fan of the Nvidia drivers :/