The Tech Random Crap Thread
- Thread starter DarkAudit
- Start date
Yes, it's important to remember when people say they don't want to touch it, that's what they mean.
Also, plenty of people swap shoe insoles, especially people with high or low arches.
I guess this means you’re not gellin’
Man, I just missed all kinds of important requirements he listed.
Oh, wait...he didn’t actually mention the turnkey requirement until a couple of hours ago. Before that it was just “not looking to build one” which is why I didn’t spec out a list of parts like I usually do.
But at this point I don’t think my recommendations are being taken seriously anyway since every one of them gets shot down as soon as I make it, and with increasing hostility, so I suppose it’s best at this point if I just stop trying to help.
—Patrick
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I mean, you're not wrong, but it's like if I was asking about a car, and what I was looking at, and you suggested a frame that needed a new suspension and engine but, when finished, would be 15% faster than what I was looking at.
Well, I mean yesterday when GB suggested one that needed an upgraded power supply and graphics card, I out and said, "I don't want to have to do that."
Look, I apologize for the hostility, and some of what you've said has been helpful. At the very least it's given me some food for thought. I understand that you're going off what you consider to be straightforward and simple modifications.
Well, I mean yesterday when GB suggested one that needed an upgraded power supply and graphics card, I out and said, "I don't want to have to do that."
Look, I apologize for the hostility, and some of what you've said has been helpful. At the very least it's given me some food for thought. I understand that you're going off what you consider to be straightforward and simple modifications.
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GasBandit
Staff member
I remember mocking Word because it needed like 10 floppies to install. Wordperfect only needed 1. How stupid inefficient could a word processor be that it needed an entire 14 megs of install media?!
Also remember when Adobe Photoshop went from 3 floppies to hundreds of megs on a CD. Wuh. Tuh. Fuh. was up wit DAT.
I've installed Win95 from floppies.
I also remember getting the PC CD-ROM version of Master of Orion (I) and then later discovering the entire installer only used something like 21MB out of the 650MB CD.
--Patrick
At least 7 more speculative execution attacks* discovered in modern [x86/x86-64] processors
Gah! Enough already!
--Patrick
*e.g., Spectre/Meltdown, etc.
Gah! Enough already!
--Patrick
*e.g., Spectre/Meltdown, etc.
@Null you could browse through www.ibuypower.com
Don't be scared of the high prices, they have cheaper models and you can tick down some options along the way. It's like building your own, except they build it and warranty it for you.
But a refurb from Newegg will probably still be cheaper (but not always by much)
Don't be scared of the high prices, they have cheaper models and you can tick down some options along the way. It's like building your own, except they build it and warranty it for you.
But a refurb from Newegg will probably still be cheaper (but not always by much)
Also, just post whatever you're thinking about here, and I'll give you a thumbs up or a thumbs down depending on if it's good for what you want. I've been in your shoes, you don't want detailed explanations of how things work, you want "buy this and that's all you need"
And I can do that for you. Assuming I have internet access when I get home, I'll even shop around for you.
Well it seems the hard drive space is a sticking point. I've got a 2 TB drive now with 8 GB RAM, and most affordable options are looking for 16 GB RAM with 500 GB storage, which isn't enough. And I'm too ignorant about it to know if that's easy to upgrade or possible to upgrade on various models.
So I might just have to wait a couple years and buy a $1000 machine and hope the occasional blue screens I've been getting don't get more frequent.
So I might just have to wait a couple years and buy a $1000 machine and hope the occasional blue screens I've been getting don't get more frequent.
GasBandit
Staff member
I know you don't want to mess around with the internals, but it is actually pretty trivial to put your old hard drive in your new computer. That way, you can have your new computer's 500gb storage just be for the system installation, and you can use your old computer's 2tb for other storage.
(Assuming cracking open the computer is verboten) Do you need that storage to be internal? If you don't mind slower speeds, you might be better off getting a computer with a hard drive that can fit your games/software/whatnot on it, and then buying an enclosed hard drive (e.g. WD MyBook) that you can set on top of your tower and plug in the back (USB3 ones are very affordable these days).
You could also buy a hard drive enclosure (an external hard drive, minus the hard drive) and pop your 2TB drive into it. Requires a screwdriver and following instructions. After doing that, your old hard drive becomes a yuge USB drive.
Take a look at this:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16883794778
A few things I kept in mind when shopping for you. I wanted you to have at least an i5 processor, and this one has that, and at least a geforce gtx 1050. This computer uses an AMD equivalent, and while I prefer nvidia over AMD, I strongly believe that when buying on a budget, brand loyalty is something to be avoided. This build will get you the most bang for your buck on your budget, which I admit I cheated a little bit on because it's $50 over. The current markdown on this I felt was too good to pass up.
As for harddrive space, this comes with a 1TB harddrive. As this will eventually fill up, you should know that while I know you're very against having to open the computer, putting in new harddrives is not hard at all. Load up a youtube video, they are literally plug and play. And if all else fails, any place that does PC repair will happily install it for you, maybe even for free. So buying a 5TB megadrive later down the road is always a possibility. Same with RAM. This only comes standard with 8gb, but it's DDR4 and should be plenty for what you need, and if you ever want to upgrade it, it's literally something you just plug in down the line should you ever choose to.
figmentPez
Staff member
If the new computer has a free drive bay, it's easy. If it doesn't have any room to add drives, like mine, it's a pain in the ass.
I've got an 8gb RAM drive currently. So basically I'd be trading harddrive for graphics card. Hmm.
I didn't know that.
RAM drive... hehehe, I won't make fun of you for how wrong that sounds, I know this isn't your area.
There's more to RAM than just how many gigabytes. The speed of the ram is much more important, and if your computer is as aging as you say, this ram is definitely better. And like I said, you can always add more for around $20-$50 in the future.
This, along with some of your other comments, I have a question: What do you mean when you say 8GB RAM drive, and what are you using it for? RAM is not typically used for a "drive" though "RAM drive" has been a thing for decades, it's a very specific, non-amateur concept, hence my asking you.
This is the heart of my inquiry: why do you need 16GB of RAM? I run Virtual Machines at least sometimes, so I have that, but why does a consumer need 16GB these days? Are you doing video editing or something?
I'm not trying to shut you down, and I understand your "I want a box I don't need to touch" approach (that's reasonable, though that's not me), but I need to understand why you believe you need certain things.
I just want to be to play newer, more demanding games than I currently can. I guess 12 GB would be fine. I don't need to be cutting edge, but what I've got isn't hacking it.
12 is an odd amount. You'll want 2 4 gig sticks for 8 and then later upgrade that to 4 4-gig sticks for 16 if you really need to, because ram runs in pairs. Like I said before, the speed is more important, and 8 gigs is plenty with 16 future proofing
Thank you for answering that part, however you still did not answer: "What do you mean when you say 8GB RAM drive, and what are you using it for?" Is that just using the term "drive" there not knowing what else it might mean? That's OK, I'm just asking what's up, as it sets off alarm bells is all.
Also RAM isn't a factor until you hit the limit on it. A game that WANTS 4GB of RAM to itself, but only gets 3 will slow down, but if you have 8, and it wants 4, getting 16 will NOT he Then it can improve performance, but for games, even the cutting-edge ones, 8GB is more than enough for any of them. (somebody here please correct me if I'm wrong on that one) The "more RAM will speed you up" thing is a legacy from the 90s when EVERYTHING was limited by RAM. It really could make the difference. Nowadays though, "enough" isn't hard at all. "Not enough" RAM however is just crippling. It's a very hard cutoff these days between one and the other.
GasBandit
Staff member
I am pretty sure he meant he has 8 gigs of ram, not an 8 gig ram drive.
Null - a ram drive is system memory (RAM) that is sequestered off and made to pretend to be a hard drive, for purposes of faster (albeit much more temporary) load times.
Empyrion definitely wants 12+ gigs all to itself. I'd say 16 gigs is the minimum for a new gaming PC. 8 gigs barely suffices for me at work, these days, and I don't even game there.
figmentPez
Staff member
As someone who is running 8GB of RAM, no, it's not plenty. There are a lot of games where more would be much better. Also, web browsers are terrible at memory leaks, and having over 8GB would be really nice sometimes, even if the solution is just to close and restart my browser.
figmentPez
Staff member
Gas already mentioned Empyrion. I'll add Just Cause 3, and presumably JC4 as well. I'm going to assume that modded Fallout 4 can use more than 8GB. And I'm betting my load times into Arkham Knight would have been improved if it didn't have to move a lot of other programs out of memory to make room for itself (The devs say "For Windows 10 users, we’ve found that having at least 12GB of system RAM on a PC allows the game to operate without paging and provides a smoother gameplay experience. "- source). Middle Earth: Shadow of War and Forza Motorsport 6 recommend 12GB of RAM. Quantum Break, Darksiders 3, Dishonored 2, Star Wars Battlefront, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, and Wolfenstein 2 all recommend 16GB of RAM, with 8GB being the minimum requirement.
And you can add in a lot of other games if you want to to be able to Alt-Tab to a web browser, or just leave it running while you game.
GasBandit
Staff member
This cannot be overemphasized. Chrome and Firefox are now both absolute SHIT at memory management. My 8 gig work pc chokes under the memory load firefox puts on it now. It's technologically offensive how sloppy developers are these days. At home, I have to close chrome when I play empyrion like some kind of fucking peasant.
Nobody bothers with code optimization anymore. It's practically all "eh throw some spaghetti in javascript, everybody's computer is powerful these days."
I take offense to the "nobody" comment. However, I also have DAILY experience with developers who just know NOTHING about memory management, why its important, and why you should care.
I don't know what the solution to this is, but it's definitely not whatever the common practice is.
Ok, allow me to restate: if your goal is a budget gaming PC looking to minimize upfront cost, 8gb is fine. If you have to choose between 8gb of fast ram, or 16gb of slower, you are going to get better performance going with the faster now and doubling it at a later time if you need it.
figmentPez
Staff member
I think that's too broad of a generalization. Especially if you want to consider using one of AMD's Athlon chips with integrated Vega GPUs (which are a valid option for budget gaming, assuming you can find a system based on them). Even if you do use a dedicated graphics card, the performance difference will depend greatly on just how much slower the "slower" RAM is.
Also, some of the systems Null has linked to have ONLY two slots for RAM, like mine does. So there's no option to add RAM, you can only replace, which changes the cost to upgrade significantly.
I know we had the size of assets v. code discussion earlier, so we sorta touched on this previously, but resources/assets, especially for things like games (meshes/textures), are going to take up more room now when they’re designed for 1080/2k/4K/5k than they did in 1998 when high-end PCs would max out with 1 or 2GB of RAM and 1280x720 was considered ”gigantic.” And while modern OSes say they will work in 4GB RAM, the amount of disk paging required is going to choke whatever apps you want to run with it, so I’m already telling everyone who will listen to consider 8GB to be the minimum required for “productivity” computing, and 16GB the minimum for more demanding users (graphic arts/gaming/Chrome users/music/other RAM-hungry apps). Another thing about modern OSes is that if you are not using all of the RAM for your apps, the OS will try to use some of your unused RAM as a disk cache, which will most certainly speed up your computer IF you are still bottlenecked by the 550MB/s max speed of SATA storage.
—Patrick
Sure, but my understanding is that only a minority of games had moved to 64-bit (finally). Obviously many have done so for a number of years now (Fallout 4 being a good mainstream example of such), but I thought that it was only "some" on that front? Is that mistaken? That's why I was going with the 8GB number, since for 32-bit applications, few even CAN try and use 3+GB, and 4GB is the absolute limit (without nasty tricks in the 90s that basically only professional databases used). Thus even with Windows bloat, 8GB would be enough.
If most newer games are 64-bit though, the sky is literally the limit, and I bow to others' experience on what's "becoming typical" these days for RAM usage. I simply may not have noticed, since as I said, I've been running 16GB for years due to (a past need) of running VMs frequently, and thus just "already had it."
Apple stopped supporting 32-bit apps at all on mobile with the release of iOS 11, and they announced when 10.14 was released this October that it will be the last macOS to support 32-bit code. NVIDIA ended all support for 32-bit OSes in April, AMD ended it in October. Steam support for XP/Vista will end on Jan 1, 2019. No word from Microsoft yet on when they’re going to end support for 32-bit code, but they’re still pushing out updates for WinXP Embedded, sooo...who knows.
Skyrim was the first one I kept hearing about, because while the vanilla game can run in a 32-bit memory space, it was already close enough that patches/updates/mods pushed it to the point where people with only 4GB just couldn’t run it because it would run out of RAM, and Skyrim is almost 10yrs old. I’d say the writing has been on the wall for quite a while now.
—Patrick
I hesitated about posting this, but I'm just going to toss this out there and let other people dissect it.
Pros: 8th gen Intel ( i5-8400), 16 GB DDR4
Cons: $510, slower GPU (RX-550)
Pros: 8th gen Intel ( i5-8400), 16 GB DDR4
Cons: $510, slower GPU (RX-550)