Rennn

As mentioned, I have a Logitech G510 keyboard. I first bought it because I thought I would use the extra gaming features like the LCD performance monitor/HUD thingy, or the multiple extra programmable keys. However, after having it for about a year I don't even use any of the extra features, and the keyboard itself is large enough that it barely fits on my desk. I actually want to downgrade to a "worse" keyboard, and the Corsair Raptor K40 looks about perfect because it's just a solid, basic keyboard with a nice aesthetic and LED backlit keys (the only feature I really like about the G510). However, I need to get rid of my G510 and I'd like to get at least a little of my money back. What would be likely to get me the most money for it? Right now my two main options are eBay or a pawn shop. I've noticed that used in the same condition on eBay that they run from $20 with no watchers, to $70 with dozens of watchers, so that's highly confusing, and is making me think a pawn shop might be the better option.

Gaming keyboards tend to be better wired. Unlike a controller, a keyboard doesn't need to be moved, so it seems pointless to get a wireless keyboard for a desktop rig. It'd just be more work replacing batteries. I don't know about mice. :s

These are possible keyboards with different colored WASD/arrow keys, for not a lot of money. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823126327 (this one has blue LED backlighting, idk if you'd want that or not) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823816019 (this has programmable LED backlighting, so you could set it to any color) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823201048 (cheaper option without as many extra features)

It's easier to see jaggies at 200 ppi on a phone 4" away from your eyes than on a 50 ppi plasma 40" away from your eyes. So is 200 ppi not enough, but 50 ppi enough? It's only angular resolution that is meaningful, not ppi. And you can control it by placing the display where it needs to be. As I already pointed out several times, people typically sit 1-3 feet back from the monitor, if it's on the same desk as their keyboard. Sitting across the room from a low DPI screen isn't practical for many people; that would require a whole room dedicated to entertainment media. Your analogy is somewhat flawed, I suspect anyone who holds a phone 4" from their eyes wouldn't even be able to focus on it. 8-12" would be more practical.

DPI is a meaningless metric with regard to computer screens. DPI only has meaning for paper. Games aren't really designed with any sort of dpi or ppi in mind. You can say that it's meaningless all day, it won't change the fact that it is incredibly easy to see jaggies at a low DPI while sitting at a typical PC distance (given that keyboards and monitors are usually on the same desk). Either way, isn't this sort of a pointless argument since he can't afford a good 32" screen?

You can usually get acceptable keyboards and mice $20 each. Like these, just as an example. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA3SD1E68992 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16826146010 They're not great, but they're still practical and should be reliable. The monitor is actually quite important (why have a strong video card if it's going to be displayed on a faded screen?), but if you only have $150 to work with, Asus and Acer have some okay monitors for that price. Of course, always be sure to connect to the screen using a DVI or HDMI connection. Displayport isn't supported on most screens, and VGA is blurry as hell.

I went with a Gigabyte Nvidia GeForce GTX770 4gb. I was out at Best Buy today and found a nice $99, 24" HDTV. It's made by Insignia, http://www.insigniaproducts.com/products/televisions/NS-24E40SNA14.html, it has VGA, DVI and HDMI ports. The video that was running on it looked nice. The only apparent drawback is that the base and stem don't swivel, it's fixed. I will take a closer look at that Asus. It's only $20 more and if it's better that isn't a big investment. Oh, yeah. Definitely go for 1080p. A 770 will handle it easily, but I'm sure you already knew that. The problem with judging screens is the companies that make them create their own rating systems and just assign flashy names to whatever they want. Some companies have contrast ratios of 1000:1, make it partially dynamic, and call it 100,000,000:1. The most consistent way to determine monitor or TV quality is too just look at it. The second best way is to find a company with a good reputation and get one of their highest reviewed models. :s The TV you found may be good, but I can't help but be very suspicious of a $100 TV, it just screams "will die in a week".

Anyone who isn't doing CAD or pre-printing work? It's just fine for games, you don't really benefit from more resolution - finer detail it could show doesn't exist to begin with. It's perfect for movies, they don't even get higher resolution. It's all right for everything else. Anyway, quality TVs really begin at 32". It's not fine for games, imo, unless you're several feet away. From 1-2 feet away the DPI should be near 100 or it's easy to see pixels, which ruins the image quality, even with antialiasing. Older gamers are probably happy with lower DPI, which makes sense as resolutions used to be like 380x240, but new games are meant to be played with a DPI of at least 80, preferably higher. Daggerfall for example, wouldn't benefit at all from a resolution higher than 480p, and most of the quality is present at its locked resolution of 240p or whatever the 4:3 equivalent was. PS3 games are made to run at 720p, their LoD is all set up for that. PC games, however, have pretty extreme detail. Running at a DPI lower than 80-90 steadily decreases that detail. Of course, DPI doesn't even matter if the screen is so big that the game simply doesn't have enough detail to fill the space.

Yes, but who wants to stare at a 32 inch 1080p screen? The DPI is way too low. Unless you sit a meter back from your monitor, you don't want a 1080p or 1200p screen larger than 25-26 inches. I have a 24 inch (23.6 inches of actual screen) monitor and it's almost not dense enough. As you mentioned, there aren't really any good HD TVs for $140 either. The ones larger than 20 inches start to get acceptable around the $300 range. I would recommend this monitor instead. It's a couple inches smaller, but it's an IPS panel of reasonable quality, which you'll really appreciate if you care at all about color accuracy and viewing angles. Normally the advantage of a TN panel monitor like the one you posted is a quick refresh rate and response time, but it's not very good in those aspects, meaning it doesn't really have any advantages over an IPS panel. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824236363 Edit: What video card are you using for your new system? 1600x900 or even 1360x768 might be a safer resolution for a video card like a GTX 750 or r9 250, etc.

That's certainly good to hear. CDProjekt is one of the best PC-focused devs, I'm glad they're not having serious problems.

I know the game mechanic itself can't be blamed for lag and hacks, but nerfing the over-exploited mechanic is still the most practical way to fix it. Saying FromSoft should have just done away with lag, for example, is very unrealistic and idealistic. Open world online games will always/almost always be laggy for a large percentage of players, developers need to plan around that, not ignore it or hope it goes away. The rest of it, I have no opinion on, since I haven't played the game yet.

I'm worried about a few of the changes you mentioned, but I almost can't tell if you're trolling about the second half of your post. Decreasing backstab effectiveness and decreasing invasions are some of the best things that could happen to the series, considering people used them to cheat so often. Plus, with lag considered, people backstabbed me in Dark Souls when they were standing 10 feet in front of me. Anything to decrease that is an improvement. it's worth mentioning that no boss in Dark Souls 1 took me more than 2 attempts, except for the Bed of Chaos which took me about 18 tries because I didn't know the collapsing floor wasn't random. Most of them took me one attempt. The Capra Demon killed me twice, the Gaping Dragon killed me once, eh... Let's see... The second Asylum Demon killed me twice. I got Gwyn easily the first time, but he killed me repeatedly on NG+ since I didn't level my health or armor at all from the beginning of the game so on NG+ they were one-hit kills. Same for the Four Kings. I'll be getting the PS3 version in about a week, I suppose I'll find out then.

A. Graphics mods slow it down. Mods to replace textures and change lighting will usually slow it down. ENB slows it down a ton. Complex mods like Footprints can slow down weak PCs. Mods that add dozens more people or animals to the world will slow it down. Mods that effect specific things (like adding a house, adding a single person, adding a dungeon, rebalancing stuff, adding spells, changing quests, etc) will not slow the game down, however. B. If the mod is a plugin (the kind where you check the box), then no. If it's a replacer (a mod without an .esp file to check), then they can depending on the texture and mesh detail of the replacer. C. That depends entirely on the mod. D. See above. Quest mods and armor mods are generally fine. HD textures will slow it down. Increased followers can slow it down if you have a lot of followers nearby. E. No, and no. Neither of those will slow anything down. F. Not by enough to matter. G. Yes to the first question, "maybe" to the second. H. Tweaks are generally unsafe. Some can corrupt saves. Be careful, don't trust people. Test tweaks for yourself extensively without overwriting your saves before you use them permanently. I. Disable antialiasing. Don't set anisotropic filtering any higher than 8x. Other than that, I'm not sure because I don't use AMD graphics. If you have a list of mods you use (or want to use), post them and we may be able to identify mods that hurt performance. In Skyrim's options menu, shadows are the biggest framerate drop. Turn those down first if you're getting poor performance.

Textures make a huge difference.

The sound is likely related to shutting down, when things start overheating the board shuts the machine down by flushing RAM, sending termination signals for forced component poweroff and finally initiating full system powerdown by shutting the board down (imagine that serial execution in a matter of milliseconds). By the way, you're telling someone who doesn't know what part of a PC is what to flash the BIOS? You nuts? @mase18 DO NOT flash the BIOS, you may as well brick the machine if you don't know precisely what you're doing and you're 100% sure you want to do it. BIOS is a firmware interface that makes the software communicate with hardware, updating it is not like updating a program where you can reinstall if things go wrong. Gigabyte desktop motherboards have dual-BIOS so they can recover from a failed flashing, some others also have failsafes but most motherboards don't. Put simply - if the flashing fails your laptop becomes an expensive paperweight. All I meant by saying it wasn't related was that the sound wasn't causing the problem, I worded it poorly. Flashing the BIOS is really not hard, but perhaps I had too much faith in humanity to assume he would actually Google it and not just click a bunch of buttons. He may need to flash the BIOS, but that can be revisited if nothing else works at least.

It's very hard to find any information on that model of laptop. I was eventually able to track down the rest of the laptops specs, and it is a gaming laptop. Or close enough, anyway. It should be able to play Skyrim on high settings at a good framerate if it's the version with an HD 7660G + 7670M for graphics (which I'm pretty sure it is...). The sound wouldn't be related directly to it overheating. The speakers could make a popping noise from random feedback when the laptop shuts down suddenly, but that wouldn't cause any problems. I was just trying to rule out the possibility of a faulty battery. As for the A10-4600m, that sounds like an APU. It's a new-ish thing that AMD (the company) is using instead of CPUs for most of their laptops. I have a few possible things to try. 1. Update your BIOS, DirectX, .NET Framework, and video card/APU drivers. You'll need to find the correct BIOS and drivers on your own, but here's DirectX and .NET. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=17851 http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35 2. If that doesn't work, try removing the battery and running the laptop plugged in. Does it still shut down randomly? 3. If that doesn't work, get a can of compressed air and blow it through the vents in short bursts to dislodge accumulated dust that could interfere with cooling. What antivirus do you use?

It may be related to heat. PCs shut themselves down to protect the components once they get too hot. When laptops shut themselves down randomly, heat is the problem 90% of the time. The popping noise isn't really indicative of anything, it could just be the speakers. As for it being a gaming laptop... The name "gaming laptop" gets thrown around a lot, and it doesn't always mean much. The specs you listed aren't very specific, but it looks powerful enough for serious gaming to me since the "dual graphics enabled" means it actually has 2 graphics cards working together. That's popular for gaming laptops since it distributes the mass and heat of the video cards more efficiently. Do you have the exact model name?

Dxtory works in Skyrim for me, but I don't use ENB or many graphics mods.

Very unlikely to ever happen. Skyrim's engine isn't meant for multiplayer. Making it work requires a lot of hacky programming and external programs, and even then it's pretty much unplayable.

Okay. For general Skyrim optimization, I recommend either 4x or 8x Anisotropic Filtering in Skyrim's options and no antialiasing. The SMAA injector is an option to remove the worst jaggies for nearly no performance drop. http://mrhaandi.blogspot.com/p/injectsmaa.html Shadows are by far the largest framerate drops in Skyrim's options. Here's a video of someone playing Skyrim with the same graphics chipset as that Dell laptop. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CaWTLoXAcwc

The two laptops I suggested would run Skyrim well on medium-ish. The more expensive two laptops you suggested *should* run Skyrim on low at good framerates. I don't know from experience though, because I've never used integrated Intel HD 4000 chipsets. I'm just basing that on benchmarks. Benchmarks say that they would get about 30 fps (good) at low settings at 1366x768. It might run better, it might run worse. Idk. If you were building a desktop, those are good part choices. I would have recommended almost the same things. However, I would recommend the new GTX 750 SC instead. It's significantly faster than the 650, and actually takes less power for only $10 more. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814487026 Also, this CPU is faster and the same price. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113287 Wouldn't you also need a case and an operating system? Something like this could work for a case, since you're short on space and would have a Micro ATX motherboard. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147123

Alt+Tab almost always crashes Skyrim for me. I would say don't do it.

The 3GB GTX 780 will offer higher performance in everything, including heavily modded Skyrim. Going from 3GB to 4GB of VRAM isn't very important, but the speed increase from a 770 to a 780 is. You'll need to be sure you have a strong enough power supply unit though. Then again, your CPU might limit you too much for you to even see a difference between a 770 and 780. Your PC is old enough that you won't get astounding performance just from sticking in an ultra powerful graphics card. If I was in your position, I would probably get a 770 and use the leftover money you could have spent on a 780 to upgrade other parts of your PC.

Somehow, I'm guessing $1000 is out of his budget...