Post your desktop/PC

[HaRdSTyLe_83]

On 4/27/2019 at 3:32 AM, Banana said:

Just built my first rig, amazed I didn't break anything. Nothing too crazy:

my first pc was prebuit and i remember watching videos on youtube how to exchange the GPU lol.

 

 

On 4/23/2019 at 3:43 PM, Dryspace said:

Your picture looks more like it was taken in the sleeping quarters of a spaceship than anywhere on Earth.

Its just the attic of my home, some stuff are just there bcuz my garage is full and i dont want to throw them away, that is why the desk ended on that small corner of the room.  i cant remember the last time i sat on the couches or used the 37" tv i have behind me with the Ps4. i also have a 49" 4K tv  just for Netflix and hbo and it can rotate to both sides of the room

 

Edited August 18, 2019 by HaRdSTyLe_83

[TheGodDamnMaster]

 

Built my new computer today.

 

Intel Core i9-9900K

MSI GeForce RTX 2070

Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB

Samsung 950 PRO M.2 512GB SSD

WD Blue 1TB HDD

MSI MPG Z390 GAMING PRO CARBON AC 

Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower

 

[Dryspace]

1 hour ago, TheSpectre said:

Built my new computer today.

 

Intel Core i9-9900K

MSI GeForce RTX 2070

Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB

Samsung 950 PRO M.2 512GB SSD

WD Blue 1TB HDD

MSI MPG Z390 GAMING PRO CARBON AC 

Antec Nine Hundred Black Steel ATX Mid Tower

Nice. I also use Samsung/WD for SSD/HDD.

 

If you need more storage space, the 4TB WD Blue WD40EZRZ has lately been on sale at Newegg for $79.99 shipped. That's $20/TB, which is about the best deal you can find on HDDs unless you go with lesser brands.

[TheGodDamnMaster]

Damn, this processor is great. I'm hitting 4.8GHz and averaging 59C.

 

[vizs]

i fixed the perms so dw

Edited June 9, 2019 by vizs

[Misumi]

New lighting work in progress. This was supposed to be finished last year, but I couldn't find the time.

 

 

The lights are essentially replicas inspired by this awesome retro-futuristic space ship room

 

 

 

[Straypuft]

On 6/12/2019 at 2:16 AM, KDA said:

New lighting work in progress. This was supposed to be finished last year, but I couldn't find the time.

 

 

 

The lights are essentially replicas inspired by this awesome retro-futuristic space ship room

 

 

Where might one find those lights?

[Misumi]

They are custom built.

 

 

 

[KyanoAng3l0]

Recently "upgraded" from my dead old Sony to an Asus ROG Strix Scar. For free. As an IT guy and gamer who spent years w/o a PC, it's one of my best birthday gifts ever. I'm a lucky lad.

Specs + gear:
Core i7-8750H @ 2.2–3.9GHz
8GB + 4GB DDR4-2666 RAM (Flex Memory dual channel)
Intel UHD 630 + GeForce GTX 1050 Ti w/ 4GB VRAM + 120Hz 17.3" display
256GB SSD + 1TB HDD
Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi HD ext. card + Logitech Z120 speakers
Logitech G103 mouse + Asus Cerberus Mat Mini pad

My desktop is mostly the same as the last time I posted it on this thread, but it's now my download location for easier and quicker access to my DLs and the icons are automatically aligned and organized with Fences. I've gave my Start10 button and menu and taskbar ROG Strix Scar-themed skins and use FalconX to auto center my taskbar icons.

 

(The downloads part is above the folders and hidden in this shot. Fences lets you hide all or certain groups of icons by double-clicking an empty space on the desktop.)

Edited July 3, 2019 by atheoAng3l0

[TheGodDamnMaster]

Just set up my TV to function as a second monitor for 4k gaming.

 

 

 

[Ingramsl]

My Windows XP theme for Windows 10

 

 

 

[WHAT!?]

You know it'd be great if MS would just release some retro theme packs that just turned 10 into whatever version you preferred the look of. I can't imagine it would be a difficult prospect for them. That XP theme is nice though.

 

::EDIT::

I guess I should be on topic. This is Windows 7 so it wasn't too hard to get that 95/98 feel. I just run this on a little sleeper machine I built. It can do all the modern things but it looks like an old Pentium II. I know I'm going to need to upgrade it to 10 soon though. I just, you know. Don't want to.

 

Edited August 17, 2019 by WHAT!?

[Guest]

If it makes you feel any better I still refuse to move from Windows 7 on my main rig.

[Dryspace]

1 hour ago, blaze said:

If it makes you feel any better I still refuse to move from Windows 7 on my main rig.

Of course you refuse to downgrade from Windows 7. I'm trying not to think about the day when Windows 10 is required for games.

 

It's unfortunate that the large majority of the ~75% Windows 10 installations reported by Steam are the result of a new computer purchase with the choice of Windows 10 or Windows 10.

[sivispacem]

There's no objective reason to shun 10 for 7. 10 handles basically everything better and they've backported all their spookware into 7 anyway.

[Dryspace]

3 hours ago, sivispacem said:

There's no objective reason to shun 10 for 7. 10 handles basically everything better and they've backported all their spookware into 7 anyway.

I don't have to run Windows Update in 7, though. But yes, there are objective reasons. It's enough to point out the fact that Windows 10 just doesn't work well, or at all, with games older than a few years, without having to go into other details.

 

I've come to find over the past few years that when a person fails to recommend a game on Steam for technical issues, it's almost certain he's using Windows 10. Sure, if a person only plays the latest games, that's not a problem, but I regularly play Windows games from the last 15 years--as of now, Windows 7 handles all games, past and present, whereas 10 doesn't.

 

Eventually, that will change, but as of now...

[Guest]

I've thrown hundreds, maybe thousands of applications at Windows 10.   All have worked perfectly, as intended.   I agree some need "tweaking" to work/perform..  Google can help if you hit a brick wall.  

[WHAT!?]

Eh, I use 10 on my main PC. You do have to go through and make sure the telemetry/reporting "spookware" stays shut off every time there is an update. Which nobody really likes to have to do (and is something I honestly just overlook at this point) My main gripe with 10 is when you start deciding you want to poke at it and change features or dig under the hood, you start running into all of Microsoft's apps that are supposed to take the place of the legacy stuff. Like Control Panel for example is largely supplanted by the Settings App which in some scenarios doesn't have either the options or the admin access (or both) required to preform the task at hand, which generally sends the user to the search bar to have to look up the Control Panel anyway. You'd need to use the search bar because for some reason in one of their previous updates Control Panel was removed from the sub-menu you'd get from right-clicking on the "Start" button. At least in 1903 the search feature is finally good again. In fact search is working well to the point that its the main way I tend to interface with the OS because the metro start menu is still just straight garbage... which is why I use classic shell. (which I'm sure most everyone knows about) That's what you're seeing in that Windows 7 screen shot I posted and it still works just as well in the latest version of 10. 

 

Another example is changing time and date. You'll run into an app that thinks it can do it. It can't. You need to go to the Control Panel. Adding networked printers from a server? Control Panel. The settings app thinks it can. It can't. At least not on my network. Then there are some things I used to be able to do through the address bar in Windows Explorer that I now need Computer/Print Management for. I feel like 10 is slowly being groomed to force users into an new way of interacting with the OS and it feels like MS is still trying to figure out what that is and how it should work, all while their OS has already made it out to the public. 10 isn't the end of the world, but it is a little odd and disjointed. At its core it is a very functional OS in terms of the sheer amount of devices it supports. I do get nostalgic for some of the old machines I used to own, but... some of that fades when I load up DOS/98 on original hardware and start having to play driver roulette and manually assign IRQ addresses. Nit picks aside, I use 10 daily and with some tweaks its not bad. 

 

As far as gaming goes, I had to do some workarounds even for 7. Motocross Madness absolutely would not run without some hacks. Most of the really old games (Doom, Duke 3D, Descent, Quake, ect) I'm running those in source ports. (Which are great btw). I've actually got a version of Need For Speed III that runs better on 10 than it ever did in XP. So far if it runs on 7... it seems to also run on 10. At least for what I have on hand. I think it depends more on the game than the OS. Thief II for example, I have that on old hardware in Windows 98 and it doesn't run at all aside from loading the menus. Haven't bothered to figure that one out yet.

 

 

[Dryspace]

If I'm shown to be wrong about something I'll admit it, but when it comes to games, I'm only going on the experience I've collected. I honestly can't count the number of times I have encountered a negative Steam review indicating that a game doesn't work, that I know runs on my Windows 7 system, and in which the user is running Windows 10 (even when an older game can't be expected to run on it, but that's a human issue ).

 

My position really has two main points: I don't think a "serious" gamer should use 10 if he can avoid it, as it causes problems that one doesn't have with 7 (just as 7 can cause problems one didn't have with XP--though not to the same extent in my experience), and that I'm not in the habit of replacing things that currently work just fine for me. Microsoft has a lot of reasons for wanting me to use 10, but I don't. If it were mere protest, I would be suffering. But I'm not.

[sivispacem]

12 hours ago, Dryspace said:

I don't have to run Windows Update in 7, though. 

10 Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate give very nearly the same level of granularity over update management as 7. Not that I necessarily think forcing critical patches onto users too lazy to bother updating is necessarily a bad thing. If MS had been more aggressive in it's distribution of the patch for MS17-010 and not left it up to orgs and users to update, WannaCry would never have happened.

 

As a power user, a few quick registry tweaks and you can continue running an outdated, vulnerable system to your heart's content.

 

12 hours ago, Dryspace said:

It's enough to point out the fact that Windows 10 just doesn't work well, or at all, with games older than a few years, without having to go into other details.

It would be if it were true, bit I see absolutely no evidence that it is. The underlying kernel for 10 is not substantively different to that of 7 and 8 except for in a few specific places such as how credentials and authentication are handled. There's no real architectural reason why stuff that worked on 7 doesn't work on 10. I've certainly never had issues with games from the late 90s- except, oddly, with GPU drivers which have absolutely nothing to do with Windows.

 

I also don't buy into the rise tinted view that things "just worked" on older OS'. As someone who regularly has to deal with NT4.0 (!) and irregularly AIX (!!) in his $dayjob I say with a certain degree of conviction it's not true. Remember the 3DFX/D3D wars where you were effectively barred from half the gaming market based on your hardware choice? Nothing consumer ever worked on W2000, I remember having to manually NOP out the version checking on installers. Nothing ever worked on XP64. Win7 didn't work properly to SP1 (coincidentally the same time they patched LSASS to stop it storing plaintext credentials in readable memory (d'oy)).

 

7 hours ago, Dryspace said:

I honestly can't count the number of times I have encountered a negative Steam review indicating that a game doesn't work, that I know runs on my Windows 7 system, and in which the user is running Windows 10

I stopped trusting user's ability to troubleshoot issues a long time ago. People complaining about games not working in Steam reviews tend to be those who have literally no idea what they're doing and utterly incapable of even basic troubleshooting. 

 

Where issues do arise, it's generally with third party drivers. MS coding practices tend to be pretty stellar but with other OEMs it's an absolute crap shoot. The OS gets blamed for these issues but in reality every time Microsoft roll back a patch due to issues, it's down to some janky third party driver or library coded by literal chimps that's causing an unexpected behaviour.

 

 

As for "serious gamers should avoid 10", I think that depends on your use case and underlying system. I can't even run 7 properly on my hardware as it's handling of NVMe drives is a total hack job with no functional garbage collection, no functional wear levelling and throttled read and write rates. CPU and GPU performance are inferior due to lacking instruction set handling.

[HaRdSTyLe_83]

16 hours ago, Dryspace said:

I don't have to run Windows Update in 7, though

 

How is that a good thing? i like my OS to be updated and not have the amout of security flaws of win7.

 

@Dryspace: none of my steam games have any problem working in windows 10, even megaman

Edited August 20, 2019 by HaRdSTyLe_83

[Dryspace]

6 hours ago, sivispacem said:

10 Pro, Enterprise and Ultimate give very nearly the same level of granularity over update management as 7. Not that I necessarily think forcing critical patches onto users too lazy to bother updating is necessarily a bad thing.

I don't have a conviction on this point, but I would not automatically concede the concept of a 'critical update'. I understand the concept of a patch that is meant to address a vulnerability or other security issue of course, and have always applied these (and usually only these) updates unless there was a legitimate reason not to.

 

But I also know that, in the consumer realm, serious problems are almost entirely a result of user incompetence or oversight, rather than forced attacks that are divorced from a user's activities. Since building my first PC in 2003, and my first gaming PC in 2008, I have had only one serious virus, and I have never at any point installed antivirus software. I fortunately did not lose any critical information, as I dealt with the situation appropriately upon discovery, and had been reasonably non-lazy about backups.

 

6 hours ago, sivispacem said:

As a power user, a few quick registry tweaks and you can continue running an outdated, vulnerable system to your heart's content.

I won't argue about vulnerability, but come on--a version of Windows is only "outdated" because Microsoft decides that it's outdated. No individual or business asks for an entirely new OS every 4 years.

 

6 hours ago, sivispacem said:

I also don't buy into the rise tinted view that things "just worked" on older OS'.

And I would never suggest it.

 

2 hours ago, HaRdSTyLe_83 said:

How is that a good thing? i like my OS to be updated and not have the amout of security flaws of win7.

 

@Dryspace: none of my steam games have any problem working in windows 10, even megaman

I don't think that failing to apply security patches is a good thing, but I do think that having control over the software that one paid a few hundred dollars for is a good thing. Usually there is a tradeoff between cost and control. My own experience with Windows Updates, as well as what I've learned about updates to Windows 10, makes me averse to any inability to decline or remove changes to the operating system.

 

The Megaman Legacy Collection wouldn't be an example of an older game, but nonetheless I don't dispute your testimony, or those of @WHAT!? and @sivispacem. I genuinely came to a conclusion based upon my experience, but I'm willing to look further into the issue.

[sivispacem]

5 hours ago, Dryspace said:

But I also know that, in the consumer realm, serious problems are almost entirely a result of user incompetence or oversight, rather than forced attacks that are divorced from a user's activities. 

I broadly agree, but the proliferation of capabilities throws a spanner into this theory. Plenty of exploits out there that require no user interaction, ranging from browsers to email clients. If vendors forcing people to patch results in less global security incidents then it's a good thing in my book.

 

5 hours ago, Dryspace said:

Since building my first PC in 2003, and my first gaming PC in 2008, I have had only one serious virus

I would posit this is probably due to good fortune rather than being necessarily indicative of anything more compelling. I've not had a virus issue on any of my systems, except the sandbox I use to manually test malware in, but I've had AV solutions catch things like drive by exploits and prevent them before they can have an impact.

 

5 hours ago, Dryspace said:

No individual or business asks for an entirely new OS every 4 years.

Actually, businesses can and do. Along with things like 802.1X, the move from 7 to 10 is a huge deal in most businesses, especially those that are already on the cloud service adoption journey. MS has been clever with things like their deployment model; it's actually easier in many cases to roll out a whole new standard build or to upgrade large numbers of client hosts en masse than to manually patch many *nix systems. 

 

The biggest drivers tend to be the Active Directory changes. The more from 2012R2 AD to 2016 is a pretty big deal from a security and architecture perspective. You have to remember that the consumer OS space is pretty trivial in terms of revenue, and that consumer OS' are basically hand me downs. People (well consumers) think of things like W10 in isolation but they're primarily much larger parts of much more complex ecosystems and there often just reasons for the 3-4 year release cycle.

 

5 hours ago, Dryspace said:

Software that one paid a few hundred dollars for is a good thing

Do people really pay hundreds of dollars for Windows? Retail versions are generally about £75 for a multi-use and ~£50 for an OEM license, or much cheaper if you're happy to use resellers. A full E3 Enterprise subscription is ~$84 per seat anually, and that includes a lot more than just the OS.

[WHAT!?]

4 hours ago, sivispacem said:

Do people really pay hundreds of dollars for Windows? Retail versions are generally about £75 for a multi-use and ~£50 for an OEM license, or much cheaper if you're happy to use resellers. A full E3 Enterprise subscription is ~$84 per seat anually, and that includes a lot more than just the OS.

I do have to take a little bit of an issue with this statement (and I honestly hope you prove correct and provide a source as I constantly find myself in the market). I have not seen legit OEM versions of Windows 10 Pro for less than $100.00. However I'll admit I don't really scour the market. I mainly stick to Amazon, New Egg or the good ol' Slick Deals. 

[sivispacem]

64-bit Pro OEM DVD is currently £59.90 on Amazon UK.

[AZAZEL]

I for one don't miss the days of multiple disc installs and hours of waiting for the files to be moved onto a hard drive. Buy a Windows 10 license online, copy the OS files onto a USB flash drive, format the PC, and the install is over in 10 minutes tops. I love the future.

[Guest]

6 hours ago, sivispacem said:

64-bit Pro OEM DVD is currently £59.90 on Amazon UK.

That's great value.   Windows 7 at it's peak would set you back £250+ for the disc and licence.

[Guest]

The only reason I haven't particularly moved away from 7 (aside from classic theme) is simply compatibility and ease of use with old specific programs (ie tools for older GTA games) that simply run like sh*t or don't have adequate replacements, or the games themselves taking the piss to run. It's also probably placebo in my mind but with me running relatively older hardware (dual x5650 xeons, gtx 970) it feels like 7 runs better? Again probably all in my head but if it ain't broke don't fix it.

[WHAT!?]

6 hours ago, sivispacem said:

64-bit Pro OEM DVD is currently £59.90 on Amazon UK.

Y'all get the better OS deals I guess. There is an independent seller on Amazon US that has it for $72.00, but any official MS seller has it for $105.00 or higher.

[Dryspace]

17 hours ago, sivispacem said:

Do people really pay hundreds of dollars for Windows? Retail versions are generally about £75 for a multi-use and ~£50 for an OEM license, or much cheaper if you're happy to use resellers. A full E3 Enterprise subscription is ~$84 per seat anually, and that includes a lot more than just the OS.

This is good news if true. I can't see myself replacing my 2014 4770K build for another two years, so I've never researched prices on Windows 10. I get a Newegg mailing daily, and was going from the sales I've noticed.

 

I first noticed 10 Pro 64 bit OEM at $139.99 on sale for $125.99 + $2.99 S/H on 9-25-17. It's currently $149.99, with the lowest sale price being $119.99 Free S/H on 11-23-18. The key code prices are the same.

 

I noticed 10 Pro Full 32 & 64 bit (USB Flash Drive) at $199.99, on sale at $179.99 Free S/H on 6-30-19, and again on 7-30-19.

 

Edit: At least on Newegg, I've never seen a version higher than Pro.

Edited August 21, 2019 by Dryspace