obobski
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Posts posted by obobski
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All of those are fairly small in terms of capacity - 128GB is not suitable for a gaming PC imho (you will fill it very quickly just with Windows and a few games). 500GB would be much more comfortable for that.
As far as the monitor - what kind of inputs does it accept? If it has something in-common with the GTX 980 Ti, it would work. 980's specifications are available here: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-980-ti/specifications
It may not support HDCP, however, which will limit functionality with some HD content (e.g. Blu-ray playback).
Side question: what are you planning to use to power this?
Ok, I will probably just go with the 500GB then. As for the monitor, you'll have to forgive me as I'm not sure about the inputs. It's a PnP monitor and on the back it has 3 inputs: VGA, DVI, and AC. I'm not sure if that's what you were looking for though.
For the power, I'm using a EVGA Supernova 650 GS.
Also, I was looking at this monitor: http://www.amazon.com/Acer-G257HU-smidpx-25-Inch-Widescreen/dp/B00QS0AKVK/ref=sr_1_9?s=pc&ie=UTF8&qid=1436657613&sr=1-9&keywords=acer+monitor
What do you think? I'd be able to get this one with the 500 GB, however, the price has me a bit skeptical as it's really cheap compared to other 1440p monitors.
What I did with my fiance's computer was I paired the SSD with a 1 TB magnetic drive. All the data goes onto the 1 TB drive and the OS and the applications, such as your games, go onto your SSD. This frees the SSD of some data load. A 500 GB SSD will be more future proof than anything else, but it's still very pricey. Me personally, I would use a 256 GB SSD with a 1 TB magnetic drive.
Thanks, man. Never heard of the magnetic drive, but I'll look into it. Does it replace the HDD? I recently ordered a 1 TB Hitachi 3.5 HDD which was recommended to go with the build.
Use DVI then, but again it may not support HDCP (you'd have to check the manual, or once you get the GTX 980 Ti the nVidia drivers will tell you which connected monitors have HDCP (only digital connections support HDCP (e.g. DVI)). The PSU should be fine (EVGA has been doing good things recently, and 650W should be solid for everything you've got listed).
I would generally pass on Acer monitors (or any Acer Group product for that matter) - there's a reason they and their subsidiaries have had multiple class action lawsuits against them over the last decade, and a reason their prices are generally so low: their warranties and customer service are absolutely non-existant, and build quality tends to be below average. Look at Asus, BenQ, Samsung, Dell, NEC, LG, etc instead. I wouldn't limit yourself to 1440p either - there's a lot of different good options for monitors these days.
And as DarkWarrior45 said - "magnetic" is just different terminology; I've seen it becoming more common recently as a way to deliniate "conventional mechanical hard-drive" from "solid state hard drive." Conventional mechanical drives use magnetics to read and write data to their platters, hence "magnetic disk." Both conventional mechanical drives and newer solid-state disks are technically/properly "HDDs" or "hard disk drives."
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All of those are fairly small in terms of capacity - 128GB is not suitable for a gaming PC imho (you will fill it very quickly just with Windows and a few games). 500GB would be much more comfortable for that.
As far as the monitor - what kind of inputs does it accept? If it has something in-common with the GTX 980 Ti, it would work. 980's specifications are available here: http://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-980-ti/specifications
It may not support HDCP, however, which will limit functionality with some HD content (e.g. Blu-ray playback).
Side question: what are you planning to use to power this?
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I think that 960 should be fantastic - eVGA makes some very nice boards, and that style of heatsink tends to be very good in terms of noise/performance IME. We'll have to agree to disagree on the 970 - just monitoring/being aware of the problem doesn't resolve the problem.
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I don't think you need a $1000 PC to play Battlefield 4 on Ultra settings at 60+ FPS. I'm pretty sure a $700+ PC would do you just fine. I mean, an MSI GTX 960 2G will get you 60+ FPS on BF4 and that's only a $214 card on Newegg. If you don't know anything about making PC's I would look at YouTube channels like JayzTwoCents, TekSyndacite, LinusTechTips, or JERMGaming for some info.
I suggest watching the videos in this playlist. It should help you get to know more about the potential of PC's. If you're willing to spend a bit more, you can get a solid PC without having to go as high as $1000.
"The Potato Masher" (A $356 Custom Built Gaming PC), by JEMGaming
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQbCPWtOQp0FoY_-7GwWSErWP2j7--Hh5
Also, maybe taking a look at PCPartPicker would help get an idea for what kind of builds you can get for price range:
That machine on YouTube is comprised of a variety of parts that are no longer in production and would have to be purchased used at potentially volatile prices and with unpredictable availability (even in December 2014). None of the prices for items are realistic and almost everything in that system was either purchased used or is otherwise unavailable. It is an entirely unrealistic quale.
Most of the PC Part Picker builds also rely heavily on rebates or discounts which are not a constant, and they all cut corners in one way or another (e.g. no monitors, speakers, keyboards, mice, optical drives, cheap PSUs (in some cases dangerously so)). Again, an unrealistic quale.
In both cases the reliance on used hardware and corner cutting is not something I'd suggest for a novice builder, especially as a first PC or for someone who doesn't have the capacity to test hardware and components. It's also very important to remember that these are all bottom-of-the-barrel configurations even today, and likely will not age as gracefully as a quality build as a result.
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Agreed - that system is pretty near to the minimums. That Celeron is a mobility part, a dual-core Silvermont. It isn't all that robust. Unless you missed a GPU spec, you're likely using the IGP, which while good at some things, is not going to be a great choice for running Skyrim or similar.
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Agreed, for $400 that's a bit of a stretch unless you have existing hardware you can re-use (and even then you'd probably still need more than $400). Something to consider before grabbing the PS4, however, is Microsoft's announcement that Xbox360 games will be coming to Xbox One in the fall. This may get you closer to "Fallout New Vegas on Ultra" than playing it on PS3/Xbox360 would allow. Just something to think about. I'm not aware of a similar announcement for PlayStation 4 with PlayStation 3 games, but I wouldn't be surprised if Sony does something similar in response. Both consoles will offer Fallout 4 from what I've seen, and both do offer GTA5 and other current games.
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Nothing I've ever experienced (the dialog in Skyrim, unlike many games, is actually pretty clear/intelligible IME) - do you have something like EQ or "sound enhancement" stuff running on your soundcard/audio device? What soundcard do you have for that matter? I ask this later question because some newer soundcards support dynamic range compression (you may also know of this as "night listening mode" or "variable loudness" or "smart volume" depending on which company is selling it), which would help to level out the volume differences you're experiencing.
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Not sure if it's worth going from Win 7 Ultimate to Win 10 Home. I'll probably stay on Win 7 as long as it's properly supported and compatible with new games and programms. Same as with my old Win 2000 system which I used until 2007 when I needed XP because some games I wanted to play wouldn't run on 2000 anymore.
Win7 Ultimate would not upgrade to Win10 Home, it would upgrade to Win10 Pro. There is no Ultimate edition for Win10. See here for more: https://www.microsoft.com/en-US/windows/windows-10-faq
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There is not a "version of .NET" for NMM - .NET is a very big and broad framework that lots of applications rely upon. You may try the offline installer for .NET, as the issue may be caused by the downloader (I've had this happen on slow/unreliable Internet connections in the past). Additionally, which version of Windows do you have? Windows Vista and higher will have .NET pre-installed, and should automatically keep it up to date (if your automatic updates are configured to do so), however Windows XP does not include .NET, and may be incompatible with the latest builds (as XP is EOL).
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I'm starting to warm up to the 960s. One of my biggest concerns was the 128bit rate but with the higher clock speed and memory compression, it should be quicker than my 560 at 256bit unless I'm mistaken. I have a 24" LCD synchmaster at 1920x1200 and perfectly happy with that so that's another check in favour of the 960.
Found some 4GB versions. This one in particular is a contender. Still need to check a few more sites. Now I need to determine if the 960 4GB is actually 4 and not 3.5+0.5 like the 970s. So far, an EVGA forum mod and a review state that it is a contiguous 4GB at the same speed. Nothing definitive, still looking for confirmation.
My understanding of the whole 970 debacle is that:
-A. The nvidia marketing dept posted the wrong specs and it took 4 months for the truth to come out.
-B. 3.5GB at 224bits and a separate cache of 0.5MB at 32bits. Any app or game that caches over 3.5GB will hit that bottleneck and lag heavily. Easy to do at 4k res I imagine.
If there's a way to disable the slower .5MB cache or limit the app to only 3.5GB vram, then the 970 would be a winner. Which only leads me to more questions: How much vram is really needed? Can a heavily modded skyrim with hi-res textures exceed 3.5GB at 1920x1200?
I can't break up replies, so hopefully you can follow this:
- It is not "128-bit bitrate" it is just bus width - by itself it's largely an irrelevant spec; what ultimately matters is bandwidth. Lower bus width interfaces mean smaller (and thus cheaper) chips, and low width + high speed is where companies want to go as a result. Higher width interfaces are ultimately necessary to achieve desired bandwidth targets (e.g. this is why 290X has 512-bit memory interface), especiallly as (until the very recent release of HBM) there haven't been significant improvements in memory device speed (GDDR5 has been the standard for almost ten years now). All graphics cards for the last ~15 years use compression and other bandwidth saving tricks (so don't let nVidia's PR team sell you otherwise).
- GTX 960 is continuous, that is correct. The 970's "bug" is a result of how Maxwell is put together. The 970 is basically the result of binning; they are chips that couldn't quite make the cut to be 980s (or some other "full spec" part), so internal components are deactivated to produce a stable chip. Because of Maxwell's memory controller design, this produces the interleaved memory issue that 970 faces. However, the 970 does not just address the "first" 3.5GB block in isolation - its an interleaved design. nVidia has made differeing claims about addressing this in drivers - first they claimed the card would "default" to the 3.5GB block, then they claimed they would be releasing a driver to address this, then they claimed no such fix would be possible (and afaik there is now at least one class action lawsuit pending against them over GTX 970). Most likely the final claim is accurate - the problem exists in silicon, and would have to be fixed there too. You can read more about it from Anandtech: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8935/geforce-gtx-970-correcting-the-specs-exploring-memory-allocation
- None of this is cache, it is video memory (or VRAM). All of the RAM on modern systems is safely assumed to be cacheable ("cacheable RAM" vs "non-cacheable RAM" is actually its own separate discussion), including the GTX 970's 32-bit channel.
- All 4k textures all around will cause the game to lag, as cheesyweesy says, and is generally not suggested as a result. The base game will never approach this kind of memory usage though (even with the Bethesda hi-res texture pack; it's also worth noting that generally speaking games use textures of different sizes for different purposes, and many of them are not extremely hi-res (nor do they need to be), and finally remember that Bethesda specifies 512MB VRAM for Skyrim and it will run on such a card (e.g. GeForce 7900GTX)). As far as "it is absolutely using 4GB+ of VRAM" - that's hard to say accurately. The Anandtech link above provides some discussion on why this is so - the short version is that Direct3D and Windows don't treat on-card and system memory as 100% isolated pools, and applications and device drivers can (and do) allocate more memory than they need to anticipate performance needs/requirements or for other reasons (and a lot of the "memory patches" for Skyrim will try to do this too). The game is also not the only application using memory/resources at any time.
- I'm not cheesyweesy, but I also have a 290 (specifically an overclocked 290X), and would easily regard it as among the top 3 graphics cards I've ever owned. One thing that you should absolutely keep in mind if you're going to get a 280 or 290 though - get something with an aftermarket cooler (I'd probably say this for any graphics card, except lower power (in terms of actual power draw) stuff like GTX 750 or 960).
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You can get .NET Framework from Microsoft's support website - just search for whatever version NMM needs (I honestly do not remember) and it should point you to the right place. If there's an issue with .NET not installing properly you may have problems with your current .NET install; I've had this happen on a single machine over the years, where random .NET files just vanished (best I ever figured out is that Windows Update failed at some point and never cleaned up its mess). Reformatting eventually ended up being easier than fussing with multiple re-installs of .NET, but that may not be as feasible if your machine has lots of stuff already installed and configured.
For example, here is the link to .NET 4:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17851
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I wouldn't bother with 780 as the prices have seemed to skyrocket. I've seen some 660s, 760s, and 770s still lingering at shops or online at decent prices though (if you're in the US, I think Best Buy may still have some of the nvidia-branded 770s hanging around). Really any of those, and the 960, would be an improvement over the 560. I've seen bigger gains (in benchmarks and my own limited exposure to DX10/11 games) for Kepler/Maxwell/GCN over Fermi/TerraScale (old AMD cards) in DX10/11 games (so, not Skyrim) as well - for example Hitman 5, Watch_dogs, and Shadow of Mordor (I know you mentioned neither of those, but let's say hypothetically that Fallout 4 moves up to DX10/11, that advantage would become more apparent). The 960 (and GCN Radeons) will have an advantage in supporting DX12 out of the gate, if that's something on your radar, whereas older cards may not receive as much attention. I honestly can't see why a 960 would be problematic for at least a year or two, if not longer.
On the 970 - as far as I'm aware there is no "fix" short of nVidia re-designing the card (which doesn't seem likely). Basically the GPU has to work the way it does with the memory configuration they want - they could either change the memory configuration (e.g. release it as a 3.5GB card) or change the GPU. As far as online debates, it seems to be a hot topic for some. I don't really have a dog in that fight, I'm just pointing out that it is a flaw with that card. Personally I'd pass on the GTX 970 as a result, if for no other reason than peace of mind (e.g. you aren't worrying about "will this be a problem with this game?" or constantly checking for stutter or other issues). There are plenty of bona fide 4GB cards out there if you want such a thing, although benchmarks that I've followed for a while now seem to indicate such a thing isn't really that important unless you're interested in 4K gaming (in which case, you should really re-consider the GTX 980 or R9 290X, if not the newer Radeon Fury or Titan X).
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First things first: FO4 has just barely been announced, and specs have not been released - nobody (or at least nobody who likely isn't under NDA) knows what its system requirements are. That said, I wouldn't expect a machine that can handle Skyrim to not play it. TES6 hasn't even been mentioned, so let's not even go there...
Anyways, onto the actual topic at hand: GTX 970 has a memory "bug" ("feature erratta") which causes performance problems with using more than 3.5GB of VRAM (and reportedly the card is more prone to stuttering even when not approaching that limit, due to the interleaved memory system). IMHO I would look at another model. As far as PCIe 2.0/3.0 there should be no problems with your board - I've read (and experienced) issues with earlier 3.0 cards and older 2.0 boards where having the card installed locks the system up (machine will not boot), but afaik this has been addressed on both sides and should not be a problem. Basically don't worry about this until you have to worry about it. As far as your machine "being a bottleneck" - that's highly unlikely, as CPU performance has more or less stagnated in recent years, so your 2500 won't be that far behind (if at all) more modern processors at similar clockspeed. At least in gaming. iGPUs and features like QuickSync can confer an advantage to newer processors in some other situations.
GTX 960 is a fine card, and very much worth consideration. I'd also look at AMD - the 280 and 290 series are both great performers, and you have more than enough PSU capacity for basically any modern card you want. GTX 980 is also a very good option, but again this will all depend on your budget. If you're on a smaller/fixed budget, there'd be nothing wrong with GTX 960 - it'd be an improvement over the 560 (and if the 560 was doing everything you wanted already, I'd probably just stop there and get the 960), and in a few years when they start talking about TES6 you can worry about upgrading then.
3DS will run however it will run on a consumer card (it's not officially supported/logo-certified by Autodesk or nVidia); Quadro and FirePro are likely well outside of your budget though, and unless you rely on this machine for a paycheck (or its doing something mission critical where certifications matter) aren't worth it anyways imho. The 960/980/280/290/etc should still be an improvement over the 560, as they're faster overall, however that will generally only be viewport performance (unless you're relying on CUDA/OpenCL-accelerated rendering/features/whatever).
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You'll want to focus on ENB since I believe textures are loaded in VRAM. You don't need to actually install any ENB, but only the basic helper program to benefit from the ram boost. PS. You might reconsider running everything in 4k.
Again, it will not be going over Win32 API limits. All of the application's resources (like textures) are managed/mapped thru Direct3D and the GPU driver - "VRAM" and "SYSMEM" aren't mutually independent memory banks.
You can read more about it here:
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb172584%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
https://www.gamedev.net/topic/544276-memory-management-and-gpu-memory/
http://download.microsoft.com/download/9/c/5/9c5b2167-8017-4bae-9fde-d599bac8184a/GraphicsMemory.doc
ENBoost does not violate Win32 API limits; it simply seeks to improve memory management over the default functionality of Skyrim when the application is working near the Win32 API limit (e.g. due to running a heavy ENB). It is documented here:
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I won't be upgrading right away, but one thing has been bothering me... I should be able to claim a free update of Windows 10 since the copy of Windows 7 I'm using is less than a year old, however I haven't seen the notification about claiming the upgrade when I update Windows.
I have multiple Windows 7 machines, and only one of them pulled the "notification" (its called GWX.exe) - it's distributed via Windows Update, and seems to be hit and miss based on update settings/schedule as to if the machines get it. GWX.exe is not required for the Windows 10 upgrade, nor does your copy of Windows 7/8 have to be brand-new to be eligible. Personally I'd say chalk that one up as a W - it's kind of an annoying little applet (it pops up a notification every time the machine boots, and will continue to do that until Windows 10 is launched); I removed it from the machine that received it.
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I'm almost wondering if that quest's glitch was causing the problem, because some script/scripts were running and failing in the background, and after waiting and allowing it to "clear" that load went away. Just a guess though - would probably be hard to definitively nail things down without a step-thru debugger.
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I'm planning to upgrade one of my systems as a "guinea pig" first, and then go from there for the other boxes depending on whatever that machine does (e.g. if there's a lot of compatibility problems on day 1, I'll wait for a while on the other systems). Overall I'm liking the idea of enabling DX12 and more Xbox integration though.
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Something else that's a good idea for C&C:X is to download and install Command & Patch. It's basically an all-inclusive official and unofficial patch/update for the games. Read more about it here: http://www.cncnz.com/hosted-projects/command-patch/the-first-decade-unofficial-patch/
AFAIK it does relatively little for Generals, but has more significant features for Tiberian Sun and Red Alert (e.g. enables 64-bit Red Alert 2).
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I tried AC4 (it came free with my Xbox One) - I wasn't significantly impressed with it as a "pirate game," but it does have pirates and pretty visuals (it plays a lot like Unity and other stealth/tactical games than anything else from the few hours I spent with it). On PC, I've heard good things about Sea Dogs, and its sequel (which is actually branded Pirates of the Carribbean, but reportedly has nothing to do with the movies); I picked up Sea Dogs from GOG during their recent sale, but I haven't gotten around to installing it yet - both of them are touted as pirate RPGs. I also vaguely remember a pirate mod or two existing for Morrowind and Oblivion (and the DLC "Thieves Den" for Oblivion too); I'm not honestly aware of anything of that nature for Skyrim. Certainly wouldn't be an entire game in that case, more of a gameplay add-on.
Empire Total War also includes pirates and a carribbean theater), but you cannot play as the pirates (you can fight with them though). There's also "Sid Meier's Pirates!" which I admittedly know very little about other than its existence (I think GOG sells that one too).
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It shouldn't be too hard to slide the side panel off your case and see what it says on the PSU - that'll pretty much address the question at hand. As far as the 750/750 Ti - it doesn't use much power relative to other modern cards, and is a good choice for more compact systems or if you don't have a massive power supply (or budget). It would be a good improvement over an IGP.
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SKSE doesn't "extend" the address limitations inherent to IA-32/Win32 (e.g. it's not implementing PAE or anything), it just more intelligently handles Skyrim's initial memory allocation on start-up, which is primarily meant to mitigate crashes as the game runs. AFAIK it's based upon, or similar to, SSME (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50305/? - deprecated with latest builds of SKSE). As bben pointed out, a 32-bit application cannot map more than 4GB of memory (and then, that's only on an x64 system and with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE set; on an x86 system the conventional limit per-process is 2GB, or 3GB with the /3GB flag).
For more technical explanations, see these links:
https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/memory-limits-applications-windows/
https://support2.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=889654
http://www.viva64.com/en/l/0002/
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/291988
Skyrim cannot "break" these rules; it's a 32-bit application. AFAIK Skyrim does not natively ship with /LARGEADDRESSAWARE set, which will cap it to 2GB of memory (see links above for "why"), even on x64 systems. I'm sure there's mods that address that, however (and then you would be limited to 3GB on x86 Windows, or 4GB on x64 Windows).
I agree with bben that it would be nice if the next Bethesda game were 64-bit (I'm honestly holding out hope that Fallout 4 will have a 64-bit executable, but perhaps that's too optimistic).
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I'm admittedly skeptical of the GeForce 605's ability to run the game "smoothly on high" (perhaps it can at low resolutions), but the advice you got in the other thread is not bad either. I can't see why LOOT would be a problem - if you can find the specific mod that would be helpful to see what's going on. It may be that they're requesting you don't clean the masters (which LOOT will flag and tell you to do, but you don't want to clean some files as it can cause problems (and LOOT only "knows" a few of those)), or it may be that the mod author wants their mod in a specific place (and if this is the case they should submit that to LOOT developers so its properly sorted), which you can ofc do after LOOT finishes its job.
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When you say "freezing" do you mean it locks up or crashes (e.g. you must restart the game to keep playing), or you're going along and then it "hangs" or "stops" for a second or two and/or is choppy? I ask because the GeForce 605 may just not be up to the task of the game (or the settings you've selected), performance wise, so you're getting hangs from that. Just a thought. If it's locking up/crashing that's likely unrelated to your hardware. Have you tried LOOT sorting your mods?
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Your poor performance is likely heavily influenced by mods. I had no problems hitting 100 FPS (or better) with a Core 2 Quad Q9550 and Radeon HD4870X2 (which was no slouch back when NV was a new game). amBX would take a big chunk out of that, as could some mods that introduced more NPCs, bigger textures, etc to the game. In some cases it can be a single mod that just wrecks performance for one reason or another, at that point you have to decide if the mod's content is more important than the game running well. As far as your i7 goes - CPUs have been largely stagnant for years now (ignoring advances in power efficiency, multimedia encode/decode support (e.g. QuickSync), and IGPUs - none of this is likely a factor for your usage/configuration); it should be no problem for this game, or many others. If the game runs poorly "stock" then there's something to worry about, but honestly speaking I don't think you have a problem other than running tons of mods.
if you had to choose just one of these games below to play for 10 years,which one would you choose?
in PC Gaming
Posted
I'd also vote for Morrowind or Oblivion if options - they've stood up to the test of ten years already. Fallout 3 will turn seven this fall, and I have no complaints about it yet - so I'd probably pick that. New Vegas and Skyrim have more options for mods and DLC/expansion packs, but in terms of "just the base game" I prefer Fallout 3.