I use my Kyocera Hydro Wave in the shower every morning. I think it was 60$
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in a major brand-pivot i’m slowly talking myself into a vidcon pc - steam and the like seem to be the only ~digital storefronts~ that aren’t charging £55+ a game, it’d be nice to return to dog days or dragon’s dogma without having to dig out the ps3, i have some decent components lying around etc.
is now a good time or are Great Innovations around the corner??? i was looking at an i5 6500 + 6gb 1060, which i’m assuming is going to be good for a while if i don’t care about >1080 resolutions or palmer luckey shit
You’re good.
Seems like Intel won’t wake from their stupor until phones are faster than desktops, and we just had the first big jump in graphics cards in 4 years and it’ll probably be as long until the next, though prices will go down and speeds go marginally up. You’re also past that point where the 1060 is faster-enough than baseline consoles that it can handle inefficient ports of console games (though we’ve yet to see how the rolling baseline of PS4 Pro, Xbox-whatever changes this assumption).
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so I’ve been promising to upload pxxx of the PC I’ve built for my dad a while ago, and now i’m doing exactly that:
let’s see if I still can get the components together:
- PSU: be quiet PURE POWER 9 400W CM
- CPU-Fan: Noctua NH-L9x65
- Case: Corsair Obsidian 250D
- CPU: Intel Core™ i5-6600 (3.3GHz x 4)
- mobo: ASUS H170I-PRO (mini-ITX)
- RAM: Corsair 16GB DDR4-2133
- SSD: Samsung 850 Pro 2,5" 256 GB
plus:
there’s always sth left when fiddling w/ PC-parts:
- not used: 2 case-fans, Noctua NF-A8 PWM
=> $$$ 790 bucks with shipping.
The CPU with 210, the mobo with 120 and SSD w/ 150 bucks were the most expensive out of the lot.
Only requirements from side of my dad was that it needs a DVD-disk-drive (so this had the most impact on form factor here … and also because I wanted to option to upgrade to a real™ GFX-card later in the lifecycle of this beast, if needed) and that he wanted to continue to use an ancient vector-grafxxx-program called “designer” (version 6 or 7).
I went down the dual-boot route w/ win7 x86-64 & ubu-gnome 1604.1 LTS, though that designer-version wouldn’t play along nicely w/ win7-64bit … so I installed Wine and lo and behold, that worked better. Madness, but to be expected! The best bit about this?
You can copy&paste vector-graphics via clipboard between designer and inkscape, a program that supposedly has seen some input from former designer-devs - that would explain why, a few issues with fonts aside, you can c&p data from a program of 1998ish into 2016 software. Madness, I tell you …
anyway! Little did he know that he’d receive this gift, until he discovered me sitting in his study and copying files from his old machine onto this new one #twisted
Has been running pretty good for ~1-2 months now, i.e. no hiccups.
So, looks like bathtub-period could be over soon, ~fin~ for now.
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Kaby Lake is going to be released very soon (like, January) and it should drive down the prices of the very acceptable Skylake stuff that’s out now (the 6xxx part you mentioned is a Skylake CPU)
Also AMD’s Zen will be coming out around then and while it remains to be seen if its worth the hype it might get Intel to cut prices some more
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yeah that’s true, there are certain retailers like microcenter in the US that aggressively clear out their stock of last year’s intel CPU when the new one is released, it’s … significantly more exciting than any of the new features in the CPUs.
Hey @felix, I’m looking to get either a small form-factor desktop or a laptop that will be a Windows 10 machine and will sit alongside some other equipment at work.
Important things I need are: 1. Should be close to, or nearly silent because it’s for our control room (this thing will be a Web Browser/Skype/audio backup machine, so it won’t be doing anything very intense. Might hook up a webcam to it for some clients), 2. USB ports because I need to attach some outboard Audio hardware. 3. Probably need an ethernet port, thought I guess I could add a USB ethernet dongle if I needed to.
We’re willing to invest in something that will hopefully last a few years of moderate use, but since I usually build my own stuff or just buy Mac, I’m not sure where to start. It doesn’t need to be powerful, it just needs all the stuff I listed and it needs to be (hopefully) durable.
I’m terrible with silent stuff because my signature style is putting mid-high end components in a case that’s too small for them. seriously consider one of Intel’s NUCs, though.
~140 for the barebone and probably another 150-200 for the needed parts (CPU, RAM, storage)
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Yeah, get a NUC. An i3 one is like $300 and this one has a free combo with 8gb of RAM: https://m.newegg.com/Product/index?itemnumber=N82E16856102092
I prefer them to similar non-Intel ones because the non-Intel ones cheap out on stuff like the ethernet controller and UEFI. With an actual NUC you know you are getting well supported Intel stuff.
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I really wish someone would make a quality handheld bluetooth trackball for when I’m steam-streaming stuff that needs mouselook to my notebook. I guess this is what steam controllers are for.
cool I will use this as my starting point. thanks!
IT’S TIME
AMD made a thing and it isn’t terrible and also it’s cheap
edit: it should be noted that, perhaps because of this, I’ve already seen price drops in Kaby Lakes here and there
i’m waiting in the wings for good mobos to be released, and tech-sites seem to suggest that you can already order boards for the ryzen7-lineup.
Still undecided whether I should go for the 1700 or 1800X … last time I bought a CPU, i went for the best-you-can-get model, which is currently shifting bits & bytes like crazy to display that window I'm typing in, and I never - _never_ - regretted going for the Phenom II X4 965-BE.
But then I’ve had that urge to go for a slim/tiny box that still punches above its height (=> mini-ITX), a hard decision to make … (but if I’m honest, I just want the 1800X, period.)
I just did mini ITX with a 90-watt CPU and full-length GPU using this case and I love it and it has thermal/sound headroom to overclock like normal; only restrictions are you need a low-profile CPU fan and a blower-style GPU.
Fits in my luggage or transporting to demo my VR stuff nicely, normally stands vertical behind my monitor but can be set horizontal in an entertainment center at a moderate thermal penalty.
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I am super hype for ryzen, but I really want to see those benchmarks
Gotta figure out if this is finally the year to favor cores over single threaded speed
52% IPC gains don’t actually seem like enough to match intel for single-threaded speed, but if it is, I’m really excited to see what intel does next…
Everything points to the R7s being the cheap workstation CPUs for highly parallel tasks while still having enough single-threaded performance to not get completely blown away like Bulldozer et al were by everything since Sandy Bridge
Which pretty much points to the R5 1600X (6c/12t) as the gaming Ryzen CPU, since seemingly the 8-core models don’t have a ton of overclocking headroom. Of course, we won’t know that until it comes out or if someone bored enough takes the OC software and replicates the part in a R7 CPU (have I talked about how AMD made an OS-level OC utility with per core speed and voltage control)
before I forget, because of the spirit of the topic, it should be pointed at that the AM4 platform isn’t launching with its ITX variant chipset (though Biostar seems to have full-fat X370 and B350 boards in ITX form, supposedly)
biostar is kind of yuck, though – are there any signs of asrock or zotac making AMD mobos?
I’m still largely interpreting all this as “10nm intel is actually gonna be good once it gets here” but still curious