obobski
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Posts posted by obobski
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Trouble is, the 'downgrade' doesn't actually work. (short of a reinstall......) Too many things break when rolling Win 10 back to whatever it was you had before. (like task scheduler... every single task becomes corrupt.)
I would never actually use a Windows upgrade/downgrade automated installer - always do a clean install. But you still have downgrade rights (e.g. your licence terms stipulate this) and the OEM/reseller/etc (did I mention this doesn't apply, generally, to copies purchased as OEM at retail) is supposed to (at your request) provide you with the key for the previous version, and you can get the ISOs from Microsoft/MSDN (at least for Windows 8 you can), so you can do the clean install from there. Alternately if the system originally shipped with the prior version of Windows and has the media, or an imaged restore disc, you could just go ground-up from that. :blush:
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One thing you need to understand about Nvidia cards is the "boost" clocks are a gimmick and won't net you real world gains in demanding games. You only get a core clock boost when the load is under 100%. Demanding games will push that load to 100%. If your load is under 100%, then you don't need the boost clock anyway. A straight up OC is all that matters.
MSI R9 390 gaming 8G is a good model for the price. I got one in one of my PCs, and I'm happy with its performance. The GPUs are neck and neck in most games, which one pulling slightly ahead over the other in some titles. But at the end of the day, Nvidia lied about the 970 having 4GBs of GDDR5 Vram, and they lied about DX12 support. R9 390 owners don't have to worry about Vram or DX12 support. As soon as DX12 games start getting released the 390 is gonna smoke the 970 like nobodies business. If you're playing somewhere between 1080p - 1440p, the 390 will last you a decent while into the future. I can run 1440p on Fallout 4 ultra everything except for shadow draw distance, and I'm pegged at 60 most of the time.
That isn't entirely true wrt Boost - it isn't based on "GPU load" (e.g. being at full load doesn't "cancel out" Boost) its based on the TDP envelope being monitored in real-time. If the card is sufficiently cooled *and* the load is sufficiently demanding (e.g. a heavy game) it will clock up to Boost clocks, and then reduce to nominal (or lower) clocks if thermals dictate it.
As far as "Radeon will smoke GeForce once DX12 comes out" - maybe, maybe not. Maxwell doesn't support async compute in hardware correctly, but supports the rest of DX12's features and will have DX12-drivers; early synthetic benchmarks that rely on async compute show the Radeon having an advantage but whether or not this will translate into real-world benefits is (at this point in time) completely unknown.
I am currently considering between GTX 970 and a R9 390 (Nitro) myself. I am leaning towards the 390 because of the 8GB of DDR5 memory buffer. Yes, I know that's way more than you need for any game currently out there (even the Witcher 3) but I like to mod a lot of my games heavily. And as others have pointed out above, many mods do not use VRAM efficiently. -So, the more mem buffer you have, the better if you mod heavily.
The memory issue with the 970 will only effect you if you mod heavily, and even then the slowdown is liable to be in the single digits of FPS difference.
I don't know PSUs very well, but I do know that you should always seek one with an 80+ bronze (or better) rating. A wattage of 550 will suffice to run any single card setup below a Titan. 650 watts will run almost any conceivable two card setup. 800+ watts is pretty much overkill unless you're running tri-SLI 980ti's or something similar.
That's not at all what I said wrt memory management or VRAM - 32-bit games simply can't use that much memory, and it is unknown whether or not 64-bit games of the future will be sufficiently handled by modern GPUs (just like how years ago, you could get 512MB cards that are not fast enough for modern games that need that much RAM). The extra VRAM isn't a guarantee of mods (because again, mods do not actually see the memory management of the engine, let alone physical memory addressing).
On the PSUs, that's also not entirely accurate - Titan isn't a high watermark for power consumption (the Hawaii-based AMD cards use more power, especially relative to Maxwell Titan); 550W may be sufficient depending on the rest of the system for many single-card configurations, 650W will be a problem with many dual-card configurations (many of the higher-end cards out there today have TDPs over 200W) - 850W+ is a good candidate there, and for triple or quad GPU you should probably consider 1kW+ (triple 980s is also not that high of a watermark either, as far as power consumption). You don't want to load a PSU to 100% of its loading capacity, as it will generally behave less efficiently and run hotter; ideally you load it to more like 40-60% of its capacity, so if you need 600-700W (DC side) of power, a 1000-1200W PSU is a more conservative/appropriate choice. If you're going after a very high performance machine with 3-4 graphics cards, a high end CPU (or two), lots of hard-drives, etc you may realistically need to consider a dual PSU configuration (as your DC side power draw may be well over 1000W). But for conventional systems that's very esoteric, and a single, sufficiently-sized, PSU is more often than not appropriate. Rely on thorough reviews (e.g. jonnyguru) to check out a PSU prior to purchasing, as in many cases the "manufacturer" (brand) you're shown at retail is just window dressing, and its best to know whats actually inside the thing and how it measures.
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Are you saying that it would be cheaper to upgrade my current laptop, rather than to buy a new computer? I have considered that, but as I mentioned, on the technician's advice, my particular laptop is actually rather difficult to open up to do so. He let me watch him clean my machine, and I saw that even that required a lot of effort, so even if I wanted to build my own machine, I would at least need to get a computer that is easier to open up to replace parts with. Probably, the PS4 is better, though.
In terms of modding console games, I have seen some videos of Oblivion mods on Xbox, but those mainly consisted of changing equipment numerical values or colors. Basic stuff. Nothing, like adding new races or items. On a side note, I've also seen nude mods of Street Fighter and Soul Calibur, but I'm not sure where to even start on that, as I'm not sure if Street Fighter has PC versions, but I know that Soul Calibur does not. Still, I digress.
Laptops are generally never upgradeable, at least in the way you would need. So no, there would be no upgrade path there, and that's not what I'm suggesting (and it is a big part of the reason that you're looking at a much higher initial cost for a gaming PC). Console modding is outside of Nexus' TOS because it generally violates the game's EULA, at least for games like Oblivion on Xbox 360; Fallout 4 (and afaik only Fallout 4) is getting "legit" or "legal" mods on Xbox One, and as far as I've seen that's exclusively for Xbox One, not PS4/Xbox One. It wouldn't do anything for you for Skyrim, but it would be more functionality/options than with PS4 (at least, if what I've read is correct, and PS4 isn't allowing mods).
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qwertyzeldar has some very good suggestions there. I'd add to make sure that you get SKSE - even without SKSE plugins the newest version has some memory patches that can improve performance and stability, but lots of stuff use SKSE these days. I'd also personally add Capes'n'Cloaks (I think that's what its called) - its a small mod but it adds (imho) a lot of ambiance to the game with various characters wearing (as the name implies) capes and/or cloaks.
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Yes, I did confirm that my computer can run vanilla Skyrim perfectly. It's just that, for me, the main "lure" of Skyrim is its mods. Also, it's not that the textures and whatnot are missing. It's just that they don't load in time. For example, I enter a new cell, and I see texture issues. I save the game, exit to the desktop, load the save, and that fixes it. It's just that it gets tedious to do so every other time that I enter a new cell. I also only experience CTD when the game is forced to do something "flashy", such as during the Potema battle. $1000. Whoa. Yeah, probably the PS4 is the more economic choice.
Interesting - I understand what you're seeing now, and I've honestly never seen that happen before; I even remember running Oblivion on a GeForce FX and not having that happen (that's uh, probably a lot worse than what you're experiencing with Skyrim in terms of performance too). On the pricing, the biggest hang-up is that you have to do everything "from scratch" - if you had an existing desktop you could probably just upgrade from there, but you don't, so it's either an all new laptop, or an all new desktop, and there's a price floor that will run around the cost of the PS4 just to get you a Windows licence, power supply, hard-drive, case, monitor, etc and then you've got the "guts" on top of that - motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, etc. You may have luck finding a used computer that can fit into your budget and accomplish what you want, but I wouldn't pursue that route if you aren't technically inclined (e.g. willing to do some/lots of work on it to make it work). If you're up for building a machine it may be worth perusing ebay and seeing what you can do. Of course, I still would agree with my original thought: if all of this money and effort is just to run some mods on Skyrim, versus buying a PS4 and having multiple other games you want, it still may make more sense to get the PS4. Just a random side thought in that vein: I've been reading that Xbox One will allow mods for Fallout 4, so if the next-gen games you want are on Xbox One as well, that may be worth thinking about/looking into if you're after modding and a Bethesda game in the future.
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I'm not sure I'd consider Steam a "win" for PCs, or users in general, especially if you're also going to cite "freedom" or "customization" as primary selling points. :ninja:
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As long as it doesn't overheat, it should work just dandy (that doesn't mean you can just load it up to the gills like its bottomless - even the best gaming machines have their limits, so eventually expect to hit a point where you *are* hurting performance in a noticeable way and then you have to decide what you want to back off of (e.g. remove a mod, lower resolution, lower draw distance, etc). I'd say keep an eye on how warm its getting, don't set it on something like a pillow or blanket (e.g. something that insulates/traps heat), and if you notice it getting very warm, get a "laptop cooling pad" (its a plastic thing with a fan or fans on it to help cool down the machine) for when you're gaming. :blush:
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Well, desktop or laptop doesn't matter - you aren't going to build or buy a brand-new gaming computer for $350-400 in its entirety, especially as you have no parts to re-use. For future reference, the NVS 3100M is very nearly equivalent to the GeForce 210M; it should run "base" Skyrim just fine, but performance with mods is not guaranteed (for any system) and if there are mods that don't work, that's just a limitation of the machine (and I will add that having been playing with mods since Morrowind, I've never experienced things like missing textures or other problems if the mod makes the game's requirements "higher" than it was previously - performance just takes a nosedive and it can create instability (if the mod A) sucks B) is improperly installed C) is conflicting with something etc). Just my 2c though.
Another piece of the puzzle may be that you have a Quadro, and not a GeForce; they are built from the same GPUs (and largely separated by drivers), but I've experienced games in the past to have issues with Quadro cards (and they're rarely officially supported). That isn't to say "Quadro can't game" but a certain degree of quirkiness may exist in some titles. A decent gaming computer will run you closer to $1000 altogether; if it's really looking like spending that just to run a few mods, I'd probably pass on the few mods and enjoy Skyrim as-is, and get your PS4 and assorted games.
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Got the monitor issue resolved. The computer still has other problems, but at least that is out of the way. And of course, it was an embarrassingly simple fix (7 needed to update).
I really appreciate the trouble you're going to in order to help me, obobski. My computer has a core i7-2600 CPU and 8GB RAM. The hard drive was 1TB (it is now 2). I can't remember the original graphics card specs, but I upgraded it to an NVIDIA GeForce GT 730 some time ago. We don't think the power supply will support the better graphics card, but I don't know about the rest of the computer. As I said, I'm pretty ignorant in these things.
The hard drive spins up (you can feel/hear it) and doesn't make any abnormal noises. I don't know if we tried going into the BIOS to look for it-- I'll have to ask my boyfriend if that's one of the things he tried. I'll let you know.
Thank you!
See if the drive appears in the BIOS; if its spinning up normally (or as normally as we can ascertain at this point) I'm inclined to believe there's an issue with its formatting/partitioning and not the physical hardware. OFC more testing is really required to know for sure.
On the machine itself, the i7-2600 is perfectly suitable going forward, so I'd say let's just upgrade your existing machine and go with it. To figure out what kind of PSU it has, it'd be easiest to just take the side panel off and see what the sticker on the PSU says. If you have a normal size case you could just spend your budget on a new PSU and a much more powerful graphics card and be set - the 2600 is fast enough to keep up, and 8GB is enough memory (and adding more RAM is cheap if you ever needed to in the future).
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Simply, what you want is not possible. You are coming from a laptop, which means there's no recycling of parts in a new machine, and you're looking for a high performing gaming system for under $400. As far as the other thread you linked - I have no idea what the other poster is talking about, nor did you provide complete specs. Go to Windows' search (start menu -> search or start screen -> search) and type in "dxdiag" without quotes, and run dxdiag.exe; you can say no to checking if drivers are signed (it doesn't hurt anything to say yes it just takes extra time to do something we don't need to do), from there you can get an idea of what hardware your machine has. On the first tab you will have "System Information" - what is listed for processor, and memory, and then click over to the next tab (Display) and what is listed under Device (we just really care about name, chip type, and approx total memory). That'll tell us exactly what directX is seeing as far as CPU, total memory, and graphics controller. If the machine is running Skyrim it likely does meet the requirements/specs for the game, and you are either having trouble with improperly installed/configured/etc mods or needing to update a mod or similar - if the machine was inadequate, performance wise, you would generally experience slow-downs and stutter and such, not texture errors and frequent crashes (the exception to this one is if you're overheating the machine and its shutting down due to that, but that would hopefully be fairly obvious if it were the case).
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Thank you both for trying to help me. Please be patient with me, as I understand very little that you've talked about. But I'm trying. :wink:
First off, I need to clarify my first post. I'm not trying to put the "failed" (suspected) hard drive back in...I think it may have sounded like I was. The new hard drive is a Seagate Desktop, 2TB.
The computer with its new hard drive and new install of Windows 7 has been hooked to 2 different monitors now with two different cables, and did the same thing with both of them-- sometimes it boots up like a charm, sometimes it doesn't. Poor old thing.
So it looks like from your advice that I should check if there was a "master/slave/or other" setting, and/or clear the CMOS...I will investigate both of those unless told otherwise. For anything very involved, it may have to wait until mid-week when I have more tech-inclined help in the house. :smile:
Thank you!
There is no "master/slave" setting for SATA - I have no idea why he wanted to go down that line. Clear the CMOS and see if it resumes booting normally. Drivers not being loaded in Windows would have no bearing on POST failing or the machine not booting into Windows, and with Windows 7 if the machine has an Internet connection it will (eventually) find all of the drivers it needs via Windows Update and install them automatically (along with potentially hundreds of other updates (it will, by default, install all required/essential updates from Microsoft - many of these are important security or compatibility patches), depending on how up to date your install media is).
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Isn't Nox available on GOG now? Is there any difference (if you know) between that and the original version?
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Random guess: something related to GPS?
It doesn't appear in the user guide:
https://kindle-fire-updates.s3.amazonaws.com/Kindle_Fire_User_Guide.pdf
Either in the example screenshots or mentioned by shape or description.
On the hunch of it being GPS related, I did some searching, and found this discussion that describes similarly what you're seeing:
http://www.amazon.com/forum/kindle?cdForum=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread=Tx1LU7T670D4L7Y
And this help item from Amazon, showing an "older" version of (what that thread purports to be) the same icon:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=201589080
Try turning location services off and see if it vanishes - if it goes away that's probably what it was.
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There is no master/slave selection for SATA hard-drives (it's an irrelevant setting since SATA does not share devices on the same controller channel - its serial point to point). That's a PATA/ATAPI thing. Those pins are serving a different function, either for manufacturing/diagnostic connection, or to jumper the drive into a certain operating mode (e.g. limit to 32GB, limit to SATA I, etc). They are *not* setting master/slave. Example, which looks pretty similar to your second picture:
http://knowledge.seagate.com/articles/en_US/FAQ/193991en
None of those would have an impact (nor would master/slave selection) on the issue described, for two reasons:
1) The jumpers don't magically move. So unless the poster is lying and changed more settings than they're describing, it was previously working and now isn't, it won't be from magical jumper walk.
2) None of the changes that can be wrought by those jumper settings will cause the drive to disappear, unless it were a PATA/ATAPI drive and two drives were set as slave or master (which will throw an error on boot, not fail to POST).
It's also a more or less dead line of inquiry because a dead hard-drive won't cause POST to fail - it will throw a disk error once the BIOS finishes booting and looks for a bootable disk.
As far as issues with the BIOS itself, that may be possible, and that's where clearing the CMOS would be easiest. It may also be a hardware issue, and I provided a rough idea of how to nail that down further; without more troubleshooting its impossible to speculate in a more accurate way wrt a hardware issue or similar though.
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Turns out it's 1080p widescreen, I think Speccy / HWMonitor was drunk at the time. I had to launch a game to find out, as I can't find the screen resolution setting in Windows 10. Seriously, where's the good old right-click resolution? Either way, it's still low end resolution compared to some of the setups people have.
Oh then just use the 1080p #s from the link I provided - still good to go with the 960 though (it'd only really be a problem if it was 4K or something equally huge). :blush:
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Awesome. So, double checking my understanding - 4GB VRAM is better for if I want to play with shiny HD textures? But do stuff like sunshafts and shadows come from clock speed?
Ehh...that's heavily generalized/simplified, but not entirely wrong (e.g. larger textures have a larger memory footprint, and shader effects benefit from more processing power). I'd go with the cheaper 4GB card - the performance delta up to the overclocked once is very small (if even noticeable), and the extra RAM will eliminate any debate/worry about VRAM capacity. The 380X that Thanelze mentioned would be somewhat faster still, but may cost more, and uses more power (which isn't a big issue given your PSU but still worth noting); not a bad alternative consideration but the performance upgrade you're looking at either way (960 or 380X) over your 750 is pretty significant, so you should be set. Especially running at 1680x1050.
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Huh. So... which protects me better from my framerates tanking random dumps on me? Which can I run with super shiny shadows, godrays and particles out the wazoo?
It depends on the game and settings and blah blah - the 960 is a fine performer, but performance with mods cannot be guaranteed for any platform.
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no i wasnt saying they were 'the deciders' i was saying that they are assuming people dont want it so they are getting rid of it.
But that assumption isn't coming out of thin air - it is likely the case that people, at least the majority of people, really don't want it (or aren't using it, even if they say they want it). Unfortunately that's how businesses work - they try to sell the most products to the most people, and minority viewpoints sometimes get left out.
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Ooooh, that makes sense. So there's not much point getting the really expensive one - it's basically diminishing returns, and I probably won't need the power anyway. And the extra VRAM on the middle one (4GB) should pad out any differences with clock speeds or something?
Noice, thankies.
Yes it is diminishing returns for the >£200 one; you may be able to get the next-tier GTX 970 for that kind of price (I don't know you'd have to look), which would be faster. The extra RAM will not, however, "pad out the differences" - the overclocked 2GB model will perform slightly faster than the same-priced 4GB model (and on-par with the overclocked 4GB model, if not a bit faster, owing to its faster memory), but it makes more sense to me to go for the extra memory than the slightly higher clocks. That said, on a 1680x1050 monitor, your memory requirements will be somewhat lower than a more common 1080p monitor would want.
Give this comparison a look:
http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/1888-evga-supersc-4gb-960-benchmark-vs-2gb/Page-2
For the few games they had that actually needed more VRAM at high resolutions/settings, the 4GB card had a slight edge, but otherwise the performance is similar (and notice at lower resolutions the differences get even smaller; and their "low resolutions" tend to be 1080p or 1440p; at 1680x1050 you're somewhat below that too).
Those cards also don't have equal clocks, which will impact performance results. The EVGA is clocked 1279/7010 with a GPU boost of 1342; the Asus is clocked 1253/7200 with a GPU boost of 1317 (using the Asus OC software; stock it is 1228/1291) - the differences in some of the Gamers Nexus results are likely due to the EVGA card being slightly faster (e.g. the 1-2 FPS variations at 1080p in some games), whereas the big differences in other games can likely be (properly) attributed to VRAM (e.g. AC Unity). Those small differences serve as a reasonable illustration of the diminishing returns on the overclocked card.
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I had the same question in mind and haven't decided yet to rather go for a 4 GB or 8 GB version, 8GB surely sounds cool but thats only barely usable if you play games like Fallout 4 or Skyrim with ENB and modded 4k textures everywhere.
If you are a Student like me, you should go with the cheaper one, but if you have a good job, save the money and wait for the next paycheck and buy a 980 GTX TI, the 970 is simply not worth its price, also I consider that VCard a scam because nVidia lied about the specs and DX12 support.
All of the 900 series don't support DX12 async compute; it's a limitation of Maxwell. I agree with it being a big problem that nVidia lied about it, but what kind of impact it will have real-world remains to be seen (there are no DX12 games on the market yet, and DX12 requires Windows 10, which only represents about 9% of the entire segment (and how many of those are actually gaming computers?)).
Skyrim won't use 8GB of memory of any kind - Fallout 4 *may* as its a 64-bit application, but presently that isn't a requirement (but again, after a few years of modders getting into it, it may).
If you're looking at the 980 Ti, I'd also look at the Radeon Fury series - they're much more comparable to the 980's performance than the 290/390. That said, all of these cards are very powerful, and for modern games shouldn't be an issue, performance wise.
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No need to get combative friend - nobody is here to fight. Perhaps a picture may be useful though, as what you've described is not making sense as written.
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Ah. CORS = Corsair, I think. Although there's somehow a dead moth in mine now.
I'm not much of a fan of Gigabyte. Mostly because my MoBo had faults, and they were pretty unhelpful with it. The USB ports used to flicker rapidly, turning on-off-on-off. I thought it might be my peripherals, but anything in the affected ports would do it. Luckily, it stopped after a couple of months, but it crippled my keyboard / mouse when it happened.
I'm still curious as to why Scan rates the 4GB cheaper version of the GPUs as mid-range while the others are "high end". There's hardly any difference between it and the top one that I can tell. 38 less MHz... oh, I guess the boost is lower too. Hmm. What does the Boost even do?
Oh, Corsair is totally fine - that PSU should be no problem, unless the moth damaged something. :laugh:
No pressure on Gigabyte - they're one of the "better" brands but there are alternatives. Since you're in Europe (and I always forget this exists), you should have Gainward and Leadtek too - also fantastic choices for nVidia cards.
No idea why Scan rates what it does like it does; there really isn't a significant difference between those cards. As far as "Boost" - newer nVidia GPUs have a feature known as "GPU Boost." It's a dynamic clocking scheme that acts as a power and thermal management mechanism - the GPU will lower its clocks when idle or not doing very much (e.g. play an old game), and will raise its clocks when working harder. The first # listed as GPU clockspeed is the nominal clockspeed that Boost will target, the second number is the maximum number it will target - it will aim for the maximum until/unless it reaches a thermal limit at which point it will back off of it (trying first the nominal value, and then lower values as needed to cool the GPU). With a decent cooling solution it may run at the Boost clock more or less continuously under load, if the load is demanding enough (my GTX 660 could achieve this without fuss, for example). It'd be less confusing if they didn't provide the nominal clocks, but my guess is they do it for legal reasons, since the Boost clock is considered "an ideal situation" and may not be possible in all settings/scenarios/loads/etc.
nVidia has a page about GPU Boost on their website if you want to know more:
http://www.geforce.com/hardware/technology/gpu-boost-2/technology (they're using "base" to refer to "nominal" but I consider "base" inaccurate - the actual clock floor is much lower, and that's what the GPU will target when its idle or not working very hard; with newer nVidia drivers this is done at a very granular level, so it can make adjustments more or less MHz-by-MHz whereas older drivers tended to move in larger "steps" (e.g. it'd jump 300MHz at a time), similar to how older technologies handled this functionality).
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SATA drives do not have master/slave/CS assignment pins - its a 1:1 serial interface. Hard-drives do not have BIOSes - they have firmware which is not generally accessible to end-users without specialized tools. None of this has anything to do with Windows - it's all much lower level than Windows. If Windows borked something it'd likely be the MBR or its own boot-loader; a damaged MBR would make it hard (potentially impossible) for another Windows machine to read the disk, but a damaged boot-loader would have no impact on an already-booting system's ability to read the disk (it just would mean the disk itself couldn't boot, and you'd get NTLDR errors when attempting it). If the test system can see the disk in BIOS and the disk is able to be observed starting/spinning the physical hardware is probably okay, and I'd move on to testing it with manufacturer's diagnostic tools at the low-level, and depending on that to a higher-level application to check over the filesystem and Windows installation.
None of this would have a bearing on the monitor not getting a signal - first thought there is always check the cable (the "going to sleep" is the monitor's way of telling you its not getting a signal), and if that's not the issue, try with another monitor (it may be the monitor itself is exhibiting problems; don't have another monitor? try the monitor on another device). If the fans aren't cycling down that may indicate the machine isn't POSTing correctly and the BIOS fan management isn't taking over, and that's a problem - I'd try clearing the CMOS and seeing if that resolves the issue, and if not, check the memory and perform a diagnostic boot (strip the thing down, add one device back at a time and boot, when it stops beeping in error you've either found your culprit or rebuilt it); the problem will exist somewhere in there.
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Looked up that Asus; it appears to have originally shipped with Windows 7 so it *should* work as long as you have all the appropriate drivers installed. Monitors themselves don't require drivers, but some have INF files that provide Windows with more information about the monitor's capabilities (and usually a "friendly name" for the display, so it shows "Asus [model number] on [graphics card]" instead of "plug'n'play monitor on [graphics card]").
Anyways, spec-wise, the Asus website is far too broad in terms of how that machine could be configured - do you have more specifics? On the high end it may have a Core i7, 16GB of RAM, a 4TB hard-drive, Blu-ray burner, GeForce GT640 graphics card (which should be able to run Fallout 4, likely on lower settings), etc but on the low end it may have a Pentium, integrated graphics, 2GB of RAM, etc. Where does yours fall in that mix? I'm asking because if its on the very low end, just adding a high performance graphics card may not be the best idea - it would likely end up significantly bottlenecked.
As far as the hard-drive - not being recognized by itself doesn't always indicate failure, but if the SATA controller in the other machine is working and able to access other drives, that's a good sign for the other computer and a potentially bad sign for your disk. Can you hear or feel the disk spinning up when powered? (it will vibrate softly as it spins up - I don't mean "dance off the table" but you should still be able to feel it) Does the system's BIOS see the disk? (e.g. go into BIOS on the other machine with it hooked up - does it show the disk at correct capacity and such?) It may be that the contents of the disk are corrupted or damaged (e.g. the MBR) but the disk itself is not damaged, or it may be that the disk died (e.g. if it isn't spinning up that's likely a good indication its toast).
Windows 10 hate topic
in Off-Topic
Posted
Nothing at all new or scary here - just like the article's lead-in says. Just yet another piece of your digital footprint that, at least in the USA, can be accessed via court order - that's been business as usual for years and years.
Windows 10 Pro doesn't allow full control over forced updates as did Windows XP-7; only the Enterprise LTSB does that. Similar for telemetry - only Enterprise allows all telemetry services to be disabled, so your machine is still phoning home (and often via unencrypted channels) to report usage data, logging information, etc (they're extremely unclear about what, specifically, it is logging and reporting, how that data is handled, etc). The Update process also does (as in this has been documented and it exists in the EULA) remove applications that don't comport with Microsoft's vision of your computer (e.g. they have already been caught removing speccy and CPU-Z, and re-setting default application preferences back to Microsoft utilities (which is an EXPLICIT violation of the stipulations of their anti-trust restrictions)).
Sources: http://news.softpedia.com/news/windows-10-threshold-2-removes-some-desktop-programs-during-install-496120.shtml
http://news.softpedia.com/news/windows-10-threshold-2-automatically-reinstalls-all-previously-removed-apps-496165.shtml
http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20150902/PC05/150909997/1052/3-windows-10-privacy-gotchas