General computer talk/advice

Ah... The joys of Linustechtips.

 

If only BeamNG were part of his testing suite...

 

Genius.

 

ASUS released a 75W GTX 950 that requires no PCI-E power connectors, just like the 750Ti.
So that's pretty cool I guess.

 

If that will work without killing my PSU, I'll probably get it.

 

What's your PSU?

 

350W PSU with no 80+ certification whatsoever. The brand, according to some googling, is alright.

 

You need a better PSU. Get a 500W EVGA, they're cheap and really good.

 

I'd recommend the EVGA 500B. It's 500W, and has Bronze certification. I have one running an FX-6100 and a GTX 285 no problems.

It's actually nicer and slightly better built than the Cooler Master unit I run in my system, which has no 80+ certification at all.

 

This has nothing to do with geniusly energy saving GTX 950, but have you guys heard of the W4300? Seems to be a pretty nice GPU for CAD on multi screen sytems in an ITX-case.
It's between the GTX 960 and 970 in cases of money. I wonder what it would perform like with a Xeon E3-1240 v5 for rendering.

And NO, I do NOT want to buy one.

 

It's just a lower clocked R7 260 with a crappy cooler and 4 DP outputs instead of DVI-D + DVI-I + HDMI + DP. For the price an R9 380 is probably a better rendering GPU.

 

So, why does it cost almost 3 times as much then? Solid platinum case, painted black so you can't see the platinum? Weird.
Obviously the change in price has to do something with the fact that it has a fancy name and is super-low-profile though.... They should probably just try releasing a low-profile R9 380 then. But oh well, You can't get more than a $600-card for $1000 either.

 

Because workstation. It's 'certified' for a bunch of applications, doesn't mean it runs them any better than its consumer-grade counterpart. Better QA is probably all you're paying for.

 

Okay? I wonder if they would raise the prices of consumer GPUs either if they'd just certify all of them. Someone should do exactly that.

 

That's not how enterprise GPU licensing works at all?

 

How does it work? Serious question, I actually have no idea. Didn't think it meant much other than "Yup, we tested the card with this software and it works".

 

It's probably a combination of quality control, software certification, reliability testing, and in some cases binning. Other than that, I don't really know.

 

long term support contracts etc etc

 

Been doing some research on it, it's mostly driver support. Drivers for FirePro and Quadro GPUs are optimised for CAD applications.
Apparently a few Radeon cards can be 'hacked' into a FirePro by flashing BIOS to support the drivers, kinda like the 290->290X thing.

There's also the better QC and binning. They're also intentionally overpriced, since they're not meant for consumers.

 

You were actually pretty close, I was talking to Arne