I haven’t found that I need them
Windows 10 occasionally tries to “update” my Nvidia drivers with different ones that follow an entirely different version numbering scheme though? I honestly like that they’ve pushed everything driver related into Windows Update to the extent that’s possible and it mostly works but this seems less than helpful
hasn’t the GF Experience stuff moved to being registration only? it’s mostly useless too, the only thing of real value lurking in there is the Shadowplay suite; the ability to autoset settings for games really has no basis in what a given system can actually run (my other compy with a C2Q with a 760 can max out Battleborn at 45-60 fps while the GFE app wanted to knock everything down to medium to low) and, again, registration only (maybe)
AMD’s drivers continually make me regret owning AMD hardware
but you are doing mankind a favor, since you can afford to buy PC parts.
somehow you have to make it look like you aren’t the biggest looser on earth, I say, and virtually hug my AMD R9 380 OC and Phenom II X4 965BE. That’s why we got those RYZEN CPUs, and why most of us can afford anything more powerful than a half-assed i3. See the “sudden” slashing of prices after ryzen cpus shipped for what intel has been doing for way too long …
I bought an Intel CPU because I don’t hate myself enough to let AMD write my storage driver
I continue to be reasonably happy with windows 10, the only main source of instability is ext2fsd – it’s the only app whose settings regularly get blown up after major windows updates (the CREATORS UPDATE just got pushed through for me last night), and it sometimes doesn’t write back changes to the linux disk after a bad shutdown (which is technically the worst data loss I’ve ever experience on a regular basis but pretty much all that I’m actively writing on there is videos I’ve torrented and games installed via steam/origin so eh)
Are APU’s like the A10 viable for multi-platform stuff like Nier 2? I’m not big into the idea getting a PS4 and having yet another collection of discs that will be redundant in 5 years time. I am currently running an old c2q9500 with a battered old radeon 6670 so I need a whole new system at this point.
Maybe kind of if you’re fine with turning settings down and lowering the resolution. Otherwise, no, they won’t be doing console-level stuff at 1080p60 for the majority of games
Yeah I thought it was a long shot. I was hoping by this point the APU’s would have come a bit further along. Thanks.
the only really good value and sufficiently-powerful-for-the-titles-that-are-optimized-for-it APU is the one in the PS4
just like how the only really good tegra is the one in the switch
Intel’s slowed down on their graphics, haven’t they? I remember the Intel graphics we got on those Brix mini-PCs was something like +50% over XB360 in 2012, or year +6.
yeah, Ivy (2012) was the really big graphics jump for Intel (the year after Sandy, 2011, which was the really big CPU/affordability jump after no one really wanted to buy first-gen iX Nehalem). Broadwell (2014) was another good jump but that also sold in very small quantities because of early 14nm production issues so most people didn’t see those same boosts until Skylake Iris (if anyone has actually bought Skylake Iris). they’ve actually kept up relatively steady improvements, the difference is that discrete GPUs (and games’ target requirements) finally started moving again value-wise last year due to widespread 16nm availability, and GPU power still pretty much increases linearly with power consumption, so Intel’s 20w GPUs don’t look quite as impressive now that there are 200w GPUs worth buying.
prior to that it was “well, Ivy can play all of my old 9800GT-level stuff, as well as every interesting Unity game that’s come out in the past few years, a PS4 is actually a better value than any discrete DX11 GPU.” now I guess we’re sort of past the window where the PS4 is a no-brainer, but it’s worth noting that PS5 will almost certainly have hardware backwards compatiblity, since there’s no chance they’ll be off of x86 next generation.
Are they even going to bother with a PS5 or will it be endless updates to the PS4?
I think it’s an open question, marketing-wise. Certainly there’s very little that would compel them to scrap most of the current infrastructure in three years.
There will probably be either a shift to ARM or AMD will offer Zen-based custom APUs, dramatically increasing CPU performance on a similar power envelope (a large part of the goal with Zen’s design was drastically lowering TDP from Bulldozer and Piledriver)
I sure hope the console cycle finally dies. It’s absurd and nobody would put up with it for anything else. What if Kindle introduced an e-reader generation cycle where they only started releasing new books on the new generation and gradually drip-fed onto the new store “remastered/virtual” books I already own for me to re-buy
i actually should probably updo my mobo n chip to suit this hideous gtx1080 slab
what’s a good one now, mini or otherwise
current thing
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/X58_ProE.html#hero-specification
i guess i want another 3-channel ram one to save me abandoning the perfectly sound 24gb i have in here already
“get the last gen mid-to-high-end product” is still always the good advice unless the current gen is known to be amazing. this gets irritating with mobos – I was afraid I fried my Z77 ITX mobo the other day and I would’ve had to upgrade to skylake for no reason had that been the case, since desktop CPU improvements have been so flat that anything 2011-2014 has actually gone up in value if it was at all niche in the first place
idk if there’s any reason not to get a 6600K but that + a matching zotac or asrock Zxxx ITX mobo would be my default assumption
I got this CPU and mobo for $250 in 2013 and the current equivalent would be like twice that now in non-USD denominations 
I have a conundrum: I want to (eventually) switch to a mini-ITX build from my huge old tower that I built in the days before good prosumer NASes (2011) that used to house many harddrives but now is mostly cavernous. However, spending $ to build a new system nets something around a 10% performance increase over my OCed 2600K. What’s in the pipeline for desktop CPUs that would be a significant performance upgrade at an affordable price. Eg, are octo-cores going to hit the $250ish mark? Is there an architecture shift that will lead to a big performance boost, etc? Or is there a big PCI-E update in the next year or two that will prevent me from upgrading my GPU?
Nothing on all counts I’m afraid. Intel miight push hexacore chips harder but you probably don’t care. Desktop nvme storage is maybe nice?