FMod

The usual term is "OEM". They can also be called Bulk or Tray (for CPU). "Builder series" might not be understood. There's usually no box, just a bag. But these products aren't sold under the counter, you'll usually find them on the seller's website or in their price list. Warranty might be affected, e.g. Retail CPU have 3 years, while Tray/OEM usually 1 year and come with no heatsink. That said, with a big retailer that can't keep track of their inventory you aren't necessarily saving money, e.g.: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819106004 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103943

The problem is they made the 6-key Ins/Del cluster rubber dome. I could never get used to that, so still take out a Filco with MX Brown keys for serious typing. But K90 for games because of macros and MM controls, two things I absolutely have to have for games (need to be able to adjust the volume instantly). There are some alternative options, though nothing similar visually. Although it's not quite that impressive first-hand with backlight off (have to turn it off in darker games, and I touch-type anyway).

Oh, I was referring to 20-30-key pads used for games only. Qpad 85 is a conventional full-size. Out of full-sizes IIRC he already has his eyes set on K90, or has one, I'm not sure.

I suppose it depends on the definition of handling. 30 fps average with occasional dips is still playable, while 60 fps average with 30 rock bottom is the comfortable level.

Graphics card is a possible weak spot. CPU is OK since Skyrim only needs two cores. GT 650M is a ~600 GFLOPS board, you have the weaker GDDR3 version. It's only about the equivalent of a desktop GTS 240. I tried running Skyrim on a desktop GTX285 and it runs but not too pretty, GTS240 is about *snip* half that. I suppose you'll be customizing settings between medium and high. Turn off the daedra-damned shadows, keep your NPC view distance moderate, don't install big texture mods (because GDDR3) and you'll be OK. Almost nothing really. But it's a two-core, so it will be able to pretend it's a quad-core when needed.

Hopefully this is just overly opaque sarcasm. OS is a tool, you want your tools to work, not just look cool. Everything else equal, a cooler looking tool is better, but everything else is not equal, and picking tools based on their looks makes you one. I still prefer XP, and if they fixed XP-64 compatibility, updated it for DX10-DX11, and I think that's it, maybe add Trim... well, they'd sell a lot fewer Win7 and Win8 copies, that's for sure. XP is faster, smaller, runs applications better, and it does everything an OS needs to do. However there's no way to have DX11 on XP and newer hardware drivers start being a concern, might get scarce after 2014, so the upgrade is being forced on you. Windows 8 seems to have a smaller footprint than 7. That's good. There is, however, one problem. Metro UI is horrible for k+m use. It screams "get a touchscreen". Well, right. I'll go get a touchscreen for my 2560p projector and a fishing pole to use it.

No, on a hard drive, always use a fixed size, minimum=maximum. Set it to 4096 min, 4096 max then.

True. Most SSD can handle full home load with capacity to spare. That's why there's no need to offload anything. Doesn't even matter if OS and games are on separate SSD or the same one, they multitask very well. But it's not really that a modern CPU+RAM+connection (particularly not PCI-E) on a home PC are so weak that they would bottleneck first. Quad-core Nehalems and SB are very powerful, easily capable of handling much more workload, and DDR3 RAM is even more overprovisioned. What bottlenecks is the software. It's not parallelized enough, not performance-oriented enough, and often just not doing all that demanding a job, to take full advantage of SSD IOPS throughput. A server with a lousy Celeron CPU will easily overload four consumer SSD, even one of which a 3960X wouldn't come close to using up at home. In other words - you won't get to make use of a Ferrari in NYC, driving as an average citizen does... but if you're a chase cop, you will have times when it's helpful even in NYC.

That's an issue with HDD, because they suffer from fragmentation, including that of free space, and extending the pagefile is an issue, shrinking it later even worse, because it gets fragmented again. SSD are really very different, it's not a factor there. A lot of things that are critical with hard drives cease to mean anything with solid state storage. As to size recommendation, here is a detailed article on the subject by Mark Russinovich (who is sort of the expert): http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2008/11/17/3155406.aspx His conclusions are: Well, I'm not trying to hack NASA, but other than that. However I also run FancyCache, which is a very intensive disk caching application. Since I only have 16 GB of RAM, it necessitates using SSD storage for level 2 cache. That is about the only thing that would overload a low-end SSD in home use.

The first generation of cheap consumer SSD with Jmicron controllers had issues like that. But they had bigger issues than that as well. Quality first generation drives and all starting with the second generation - that's any Intel, any Crucial, any OCZ starting with Agility 2 - don't suffer from this. These drives can take about 8-12 years in a consumer PC, running 24/7, with OS, temp and paging file on the SSD. And in 8-10 years, it will be worth very little either way. It's already happening, I see people using older SSD like thumbdrives (because they're still much faster than the best USB ones), and it's only been 5 years since consumer SSD hit the market. These drives still have as much as 60% of their write cycles left, and now, out of a PC, they'll barely use up 1% and take the rest to their landfill grave. Or you might buy a new, bigger and better SSD, and install games on your old one. Games write very little in their install directory, when at all, so once again, you just won't need these write cycles. If you have multiple equally fast or comparably fast SSD, then yes. In my case, I've got a few older SATA SSD and a new Revodrive. The Revo is pretty nifty. It consists of four already fast SSD, put in RAID0, on a PCI Express board, with a high-performance hardware controller running them. In total it has about 10x the performance of the better of earlier consumer SSD. That's quite a bit of performance. It's enough to handle an OS, with pagefile and everything, and run Metro 2033 or modded Fallout 3, and act as cache for 6 other drives, and still have a lot to spare. Not sure really. Are there any third-party tests confirming that? So far what I know indicates otherwise. SSD are not just faster hard drives; they are closer to RAM than they are to HDD. Hard drives can only read one file at a time, one sector more precisely, one task. If they are forced to do two things at once, they have to jump there and back, slowing down to a crawl. SSD don't have this limitation. We're talking 100-200 IOPS versus 10,000-50,000. It's not horse versus car, it's horse versus supersonic missile. A single SSD can handle the random IO workload of a whole array of 15,000 rpm enterprise HDD and still be faster at it - faster by so much that they are used to cache such arrays. And not special expensive units, plain old X25-E. Put simple, a modern consumer PC, handling modern consumer workloads, doesn't generate enough IO requests to choke even a low-cost modern SSD. Just set it to be pretty small - as little as 256MB minimum - and let the OS expand it as needed. Unless you use the pagefile hard, you won't need more than a couple gigabytes. And if you do use it hard, you'll want it fast. On SSD, don't use fixed size, they don't have fragmentation issues like HDD do. With HDD you're buying storage space, with SSD you're buying IOPS throughput. So the best way to make use of one is to put as much of your I/O workload on the SSD as you can. That will use more cycles, but if you can afford to buy it, you can afford to use it. There's a lot of write cycles in there, more than you're likely to ever use.

I doubt that was the cause of the failure. Newer SSD have advanced write minimization and wear leveling algorithms. Older SSD have brute force overprovisioning and older much longer-lived flash memory. You'd have to run it in a database web server torture environment day and night to wear it out in a year. My best SSD contains the OS, and the pagefile, and temp folders, AND intensive caching (Fancycache MBU) for hard drives. (That's not your grandma's Smart Response, it goes hard on the drive.) Its estimated write cycle lifetime, by SSDLife, is 1 year that has passed and still 6 to go. That's less than the usual 10 years. Am I worried? No. Once it has 3 years estimated (mind you, SSDLife lowballs), I won't care. I'll have a better one and that one will do all the hard work. The now-old SSD will now contain games, or it will be put in a laptop (well, it won't, it's PCI-E, but if it could be). So its remaining 3 years will turn into 15 or more, because games don't write to their folders. Will I care then? No. It will become so small and worthless in 10 years that I'll put it into some netbook or maybe it will be too small even for that, I'll give it a eSATA cable and use it like a thumbdrive. That will turn its remaining 5 years into 25. And in 25, I won't even have a use for it at all. Better not to. The paging file is architecturally required and it always improves performance. It's not spare RAM; windows uses it, most of the time, to reserve space that isn't actually being used. No page file means waste of RAM and generally greater bugginess. About 2GB is the essential minimum (2GB is maximum 32-bit program address space). If you actually need all the 16GB, the requirement goes back up to about 8GB, or even more, per commit charge.

That's not really "had to". It's like buying a new car, but leaving it in the garage and driving your old car daily so that you don't wear the new one out to much. Placing the paging file on SSD is good for performance, and that's what you buy a SSD in the first place. You probably don't buy one with your last dollar either, so in 10 years' time, when it wears out, you'll long have lost any use for it. Always manually unless you have a SSD. Doesn't matter much, as long as min==max, for HDD. For SSD let the OS manage. Size-wise, 1.5x system RAM is a very old recommendation. Today a better one is about 4GB for systems with 4-8 GB of RAM, and about 2GB for systems with 12-16GB, assuming you mostly just play games, don't really need that much RAM and only bought it because it was cheap. Too large a pagefile slows your system down and fragments more. Too small will result in unnecessary RAM usage. For proper sizing, you need to measure your peak commit charge and set it to (peak.commit-RAM)*(1.5..2) times that. Of course the number will be negative for most any gamer, so default to 2-4 GB as set above. NB. This advice will probably be also obsolete in 2-5 years; if you're reading this in 2017 and your games are true 64-bit, you need more.

Unless you need serious work in Photoshop etc, better stick to i5-3570K, it's the same thing as 3770K, minus hyperthreading. For case I'd rather take Define R4: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352022

Use a TV. Have I said "You haven't played Fallout till you've played it on a good TV" already? I think I have - http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/740528-dream-machine-contest/page__view__findpost__p__5928195 Well, I only said it because it's true. There are games where a substandard display will do, but FO3 isn't one of them. All modern monitors are pathetic compared to modern top of the line HDTVs. Well, except for a few OLED and 56" HDR Sony models that cost like a not-so-lousy car. If you already have a good HDTV, use that, just get a low coffee table to put your kb+m on. Get a tenkeyless mech keyboard, or outright a gaming keyboard (sadly none are mech). No, 16:10 doesn't stretch anything, it works fine. Still.

This is not a specialist hardware forum and I'm not going to run around telling people they're wrong, but this just isn't so. TX650V2 is built by Seasonic, it's their model, they literally just put a Corsair sticker instead. It lacks modular cables and it's louder than some of the fancier PSU, but it's an old and very well known platform. 650W is enough for an overclocked SLI rig. It's more than enough, with good headroom, for overclocked Phenom II X6 and HD7970 GHz Edition (that will take about 500W). OP's going to buy a 7850, which is a 100W video card. Really a 500W PSU is enough. TX650V2 just happens to sell for a good price. I'm not sure what kind of calculator you're using. If it's on a PSU maker site, they're probably highballing everything on purpose. There's no way for a non-OC Phenom II X4 and 7850 to draw 500W. In fact, a non-overclocked component may not draw more than its TDP (except in Furmark), so it's easy to calculate. 130W+95W+25W is where you're at. That's 250W. Price and quality don't always match - a $20,000 Toyota will be built better than a $35,000 Peugeot. With CPU and GPU, performance is easy to check, so you tend to get what you pay for. With power supplies, it's not and most people never notice, so quality and price only have a weak correlation. HX series are good PSU, they are even a little better than TX V2, but AX is just that much better, and TX V2 is good enough for anyone. Overclocking today is very safe. In fact, you're tied up by so many safety checks and protections that it's one of the hardest ways to kill a component. The easiest? Do a manufacturer recommended firmware update on a buggy old Windows install. Everyone is worried about fuel economy right now, so almost everything you buy is underclocked on purpose (cars too). This manufacturer-permitted, safety-bound overclocking is really just about getting design performance back.

The monitor is important, you can't overestimate that one. Between a $1,000 rig with a 24" and a $600 rig with a 30", the latter wins by such a margin it's not even funny. Do you just play Skyrim, Oblivion, etc, or are there other games in the mix? For these games, that only really support two cores, you'd want a dual-core CPU with fast cores, like Pentium G2120. But it would be terrible value for other tasks. So only consider it if you only play Bethesda games. Otherwise that Phenom is simply the best value in its price class. There are some other changes to suggestions above. Samsung memory can be clocked much higher than Corsair for just an extra buck: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147096 That Corsair HX PSU is not good value for the money, it's not as good as it is expensive. This is the one you want: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817139020 You can't splash for a $150 case in your budget either. I'm not good with low-end parts, but I've heard Zalman Z9 isn't bad. And it's just a box, really. NZXT makes a lot of value-for-money products, their $39.99 case seems legit too. But out of what I can see now, I think this case is the best pick: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811129042 It comes from Antec, that's good quality, it's the heaviest of the lot (heavier is better), perforated, but with dust filters. Do NOT buy anything from Seagate unless you really have to. Their drives have build issues and they break down a lot. It used to be OK when you could just get most of your money back, but now they slashed their warranty to 1 year. And not only is it substandard, it's also too expensive. WD Blue is actually cheaper, and it's a fast drive - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236339 Finally, top it off with a serious video card - HD 7850. It's over 10% faster than 560 Ti, and it's a new generation one. 1GB is actually enough without mods: http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/Club_3D/HD_7850_RoyalQueen/22.html - it doesn't even make a difference. But there's too little price difference to bother, so take this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814161405 Black Edition CPU come with a decent heatsink, you can live with that. I think that's everything. That comes out to $625, or $595 after rebates. Overclock that thing after you buy it - you should get 3.7-4.0 GHz out of the CPU, 1100-1200 MHz out of the GPU, 1800-2200 MT/s out of your RAM. The lower values here should be a breeze to reach. It will give a solid boost in performance, since 7850 has about the highest overclocking gain on the market.

Actually it wasn't anywhere that insane. Just two CPU. They tried to match AMD's "4x4" platform - at that time Intel had just started contesting AMD's title as the king of CPU. Intel's Core architecture had higher OP per clock, but AMD won the quad-core race and built up a lead there. The cost was about the same as a dual-socket system today, $600 for a mobo and $1,000 for each CPU. Both platforms were lame showoffs and pointless for any practical use, especially since nothing could even use 8 cores at the time. Almost nothing can even now. Note that while, much later, LGA1366 was not a showoff, LGA2011 seems to be one - the extra cores add little, and four memory channels seem to, bluntly, not even work: the gain from o/c the RAM from 1333 to 2133 on LGA1155 is greater than from moving from 1155 to 2011, despite the latter being supposed to, in theory, have considerably more performance.

There's no point. These upgrade options are worthless. They will bring a few % of performance at most. Better get a desktop if you want to play at full power.

Haswell seems to be promising another flop. Intel is still using its inferior Trigate 22nm process (on par with its 32nm and inferior to conventional 28nm), and architectural improvements are minor and in AVX, which isn't what matters most. They know how to make a faster CPU. I'm not a silicon engineer, but even I know. However there's no serious x86 competition, so they don't care to. Intel is being pommeled in onboard graphics, so that's where all the effort, finer tech nodes and extra transistors go.

Decent PSU very rarely damage other components. Newegg star rating means nothing. It's probably all fine anyway.

There are only two kinds of AA: * Sampling * Shaders Sampling is SSAA and MSAA (but no one uses SSAA anymore). Sampling AA is superior, as it actually increases image resolution. When using MSAA, use 4x, higher modes give almost no advantage. But it doesn't work properly in games with deferred rendering. Notably it doesn't work in anything Unreal 3, so no Deus Ex or Mass Effect. It works perfectly in Oblivion and Fallout and Skyrim. Shader AA is everything else. Shader AA is just a special effect and can be implemented through plugins or even by a TV. Never combine both at once. Never combine multiple types of AA. ENB might mess sampling AA up. I don't even want to ask why would you possibly buy 2x680 and not 690, and it's unnecessary for a 1080p screen anyway. But it should handle just about any kind of AA easily. Even 16x MSAA.

I know this is a common problem. Sorry in advance for wasting everyone's time - I know I'm supposed to be one to answer such questions, but this once I just seem to be dumbfounded. In short, keyboard and mouse don't respond upon starting FO3. It happened suddenly, no config changes, just one time I start it and it's fine, then I quit, start again, and it ignores all input. Same after reset. Ctrl-Alt-Del, Alt-Tab still working, just FO3 that ignores everything. What's the solution? Clean reinstall works, but I don't want to rebuild the game again just to have the same problem repeat.

I just use FAR Powerpack. If you're used to Norton Commander and Windows Commander, its interface will come naturally. You just press Alt-F6 and presto, symbolic links. FAR is also a very powerful file manager, doing things like uploading files from an archive into a different format archive on a FTP server while mass-renaming them to a new pattern as transparently as if you were moving them around your own hard drive.

Well, there's google to find out what it is in general. It's a proprietary interface for visual physics, such as particles (it doesn't feed back into the game for gameplay physics). As for practical use, it's not commonly doing anything significant. I've probably played a few games using it, but nothing relying on GPU PhysX to make a substantial difference. The most infamous use I know of is in Arkham City, where elements animated via PhysX are disabled altogether without it, unlike using reduced element count animation as in other titles. It remains largely stagnant, since developers aren't really interested in building games for a proprietary interface that is only supported by part of one vendor's lineup. 600 series has more framerate drop from PhysX than 500 series. But it's unknown if that will continue.

For some manufacturers. Today it's as follows: Seasonic - all very good, most best in their category Enermax - most very good, some best, some good Channel Well, Great Wall, Super Flower - some good, some very good, some mediocre Delta, FSP, Sirtec, Enhance - some good, some not so good, some just bad There's also a myriad of other makers, it's impossible to list them all. Anyway, it's enough that there are a few makers with stable quality. "Premium" is meaningless. But Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum in regards to PSU refer to 80+ Certification levels, denoting efficiency. To provide high efficiency, Gold or higher, a PSU has to be at least a decent quality unit. As a result of efficiency, it will produce less heat, and usually (not always - FSP Aurum is an exception) be less noisy than less efficient unit. I believe that currently all PSU with Gold certification are good enough to be used. There's just a few Platinum units on the market, they are all very modern and high quality. Since it's so important for OEM sales, today most manufacturers use 80 Plus rating to line up their PSU. That is, they'll have Bronze, Silver and Gold (and, if they can, Platinum) lines, also rising in overall quality level and kit as you go up. This isn't a strict rule, but close to that. For brands it isn't a rule at all. And efficiency isn't all and the difference in lifetime power use between different 80+ supplies is minor. Actual maker is far more important than the 80+ level. Still, these levels are a convenient way to establish market positioning - like you would compare carmakers' lines of compact, midsize, full-size and luxury cars. For one, "category" above refers to comparing supplies within one efficiency certification level.