Tech General Chat

[X S]

Anyone have any experience with RAID controller cards? I have an old mobo with SATA II, and I want to hook up my new Samsung EVO 500GB drives in RAID 0, but I also need it to be the boot drive. I've been looking at this card, but I'm worried it might not be able to handle a drive as the system/boot drive. Anyone have any experience with this?

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816150041

[Sombra]

no experience myself but here's linus' raid card sh*tting bricks

 

so envious of all his network

 

 

[X S]

So just an update: I took the gamble and purchased the card. It literally works like a separate BIOS on top of my old legacy BIOS, plus takes the RAID load off my CPU. It also allows me to use the RAID 0 as a boot device. Well, it's like 200% faster, everything from booting up to opening up programs such as Skype, Firefox, etc. I have yet to try it out on GTA V, but I assume it should help improve performance. Apparently RAID 0 allows me to double the speed of the drive, which is why I wanted to go this route. I'm very happy with it.

 

Some pics for pleasure:

 

 

Edit: Just wanted to mention that I do backups every month, so I'm not really stressing a failure of the RAID setup.

Edited January 17, 2016 by X S

[Anotic]

hey guys, i'm looking at selling my 970 and upgrading to a 980ti, and i'm stuck between these two... at the moment i'm leaning towards the strix

 

ASUS GeForce GTX 980 Ti Strix 6GB

https://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=32546&cPath=876

 

EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti Superclocked+ ACX 2.0+ 6GB

https://www.pccasegear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=32212&cPath=876

 

help me decide pls

[TheMcSame]

You can pick up a strix for $1099 from IJK and an ACX for $1099 at CPL. Out of the two I'd probably go for EVGA tbh. Though personally, I'd probably go with MSI's Gaming 6G, $1070 at UMart.

 

That being said, if you don't really plan on overclocking, the strix would probably be the way to go. Out of the lot though, MSI seems to provide the best bang for buck GPU out of the lot at stock speeds.

Edited January 21, 2016 by TheMcSame

[Andreaz1]

I'd personally go Asus as I've had nothing but good experiences with them but I know EVGA has also received high praise so you can't really go wrong.

[sivispacem]

Depending on your screen resolution a second GTX970 might provide a better return. Higher average frames at both 1080p and 1440p in many games, it's only beyond there that the extra VRAM really starts to make a difference. Minimum frames can vary though.

 

Of course that'll depend on your workload and appetite to deal with the occasional issue.

[Sombra]

Had a sort through all my leftover/spare parts to see what was there.

 

 

Asus v3-m2nc61p

2GB Hynix ram

Athlon X2 215

Athlon 7550

4 drives (i got another 2 somewhere)

 

Eventually this will turn into a file server, it's probably a bad idea putting 6 IDE drives in a matx case but f*ck it lol. Probably going to use the X2 215 since apart from its cpubenchmark score being 133 points higher than the 7550, it's also 65w tdp compared to the 7550s 95w and its 2.7GHz compared to 2.5GHz. Looks like I'm going to need a PSU, board, heatsink, raid card and two more IDE cables which should be pretty easy to find for cheap on eBay.

 

fun project time

[Kampret]

Crimson somehow managed to f*cked up OpenGL acceleration for my legacy card. Downgraded to 15.9 and FAH is at full swing.

[DEALUX]

You can pick up a strix for $1099 from IJK and an ACX for $1099 at CPL. Out of the two I'd probably go for EVGA tbh. Though personally, I'd probably go with MSI's Gaming 6G, $1070 at UMart.

 

That being said, if you don't really plan on overclocking, the strix would probably be the way to go. Out of the lot though, MSI seems to provide the best bang for buck GPU out of the lot at stock speeds.

I'm pretty sure you can overclock both of these. Mine has a very similar design to the Strix one and I can overclock it close to 1.5 Ghz without going above 70 °C.

 

Edit: I watched an older NVIDIA presentation about the new Pascal video card series and they were saying that they are supposed to be 10 times faster. What does that even mean? It sounds a little like marketing bullsh*t. A card like that would seem to bottleneck any CPU in existence right now.

Edited January 26, 2016 by Kristian.

[sivispacem]

The bottlenecks between CPU and GPU are not just a product of the raw performance of either but factors such as tasking. DX12 shifted a large degree of workload onto GPUs which was traditionally done by the CPU and incorporated proper multithreading for tasking and allocation, so in DX12 environments processor utilisation is much more efficient.

 

It's kind of moot anyway, given that the 10x figure is pretty tongue in cheek, as NVIDIA themselves have said. The two interesting figures are 3x the theoretical memory bandwidth and double the single precision compute performance.

[Sombra]

f*ck ide cables

[TheMcSame]

I'm pretty sure you can overclock both of these. Mine has a very similar design to the Strix one and I can overclock it close to 1.5 Ghz without going above 70 °C.

 

 

 

Edit: I watched an older NVIDIA presentation about the new Pascal video card series and they were saying that they are supposed to be 10 times faster. What does that even mean? It sounds a little like marketing bullsh*t. A card like that would seem to bottleneck any CPU in existence right now.

I wasn't saying they couldn't overclock though. Some people choose not to overclock and imo, those cards would've been the ones to go for.

 

As for pascal. It's x10 faster for deep learning apps, not games. The two stress the GPU in completely different ways.

Edited January 26, 2016 by TheMcSame

[Chewie]

f*ck ide cables

I hate those huge strips. I had to use those in this computer I took a couple years ago.

[yoječ]

Damnit... I've stumbled across this monitor and it just seems too tempting.

 

http://www.lg.com/us/monitors/lg-29UM67-P-ultrawide-led-monitor

 

Shame I haven't got Radeon to utilise AMD Freesync, but at least this display is capable of 75Hz regardless of the card, so that's a bonus nonetheless.

What are your thoughts on 21:9 dispays? I have seen one live and it seemed quite interesting, but I didn't get a chance to play around with it that much.

 

The biggest downside is that I'd have no place to put my legs on the desk anymore I'd also have to rethink how to light up my desk, as my desk lamp won't fit the way it used to.

[sivispacem]

I really like 21:9. That monitor looks great but I'd really want GSync rather than Freesync.

[yoječ]

True that, but to be fair G-Sync displays are far too expensive at the moment. I love the technology but I'm not willing to pay that much extra for it.

[sivispacem]

I read somewhere that NVidia were going to eventually provide driver compatibility with Freesync. That was quite a while ago though...

[Craigsters]

Hope I posted this in the right thread, sorry in advance if I didn't

 

Windows update or something missed up system restore and my G:drive

 

 

My G-drive had disappeared when I activated my pc from sleep and steam was trying to install, and the security to do with system restore was turned off, I turned that back on and when I restarted my PC my G: drive came back and steam started normally!..

I fixed it thank goodness

Did this happen to anyone else today or recently?

[sivispacem]

Cheers for this hint in the "Post your desktop" thread Blaze.

 

 

How you planning on painting them? I've never painted plastic/pc stuff but as someone who's into graffiti a fair bit I can tell you that Montana Gold has a very good colour selection at £5 a can and it certainly beats going to Wilko and buying their own brand sh*te for £4 or getting Painters Touch which is £7 and has a sh*tty colour selection.

Well, I picked up some Montana Gold today, in Light Shock Yellow. Two coats of grey modeling primer, five coats of Montana and my SP120 fan rings are looking great. Just waiting for them to fully harden before I slot them back in.

 

Also got some yellow braided SATA cables coming for that splash of colour (coincidently looks to be a very, very similar yellow). Might braid some of the H100i cables myself too.

[Sombra]

No problem man, Montana is so good and beats most of the generic store stuff. Post pics when they're back in

 

Had an absolute fiasco lastnight, SSD decided to sh*t itself with a "disk read error" which is apparently common when it's not properly powered off (had a power cut few days ago) so I spent two hours trying to power cycle it since Crucial and other sites recommended that which did absolutely f*ckall. Was still recognised in BIOS and whatnot so using my thinkcentre which as a single core Celeron with 1GB of RAM is not fun, but I made a live ubuntu stick to test it and everything was still accessible on the drive and SMART analysis said drive was healthy. Somehow managed to copy over a Windows ISO from my main PC on Ubuntu live to the Thinkcentre which decided to cap itself at a 2MB/s transfer rate which took f*cking forever. Plugged USB into Thinkcentre, reached around the back to plug in the mouse and felt some resistance which turned out to be the USB drive f*cking snapping in half at the port. At this point I rage quit and watched X-Files all night planning to go down to Wilko's and grab a new memory stick even in the rain and 40mph winds.

 

Well that went down the drain when I woke up with the f*cking flu so I got an old IDE drive which I was using before I got an SSD so the install/parts were pretty much the same, cloned it using Paragon (after using a SSD I NEVER want to go back to mechanical drives for boot lol) and restored it to the SSD which I'm now posting from. f*cking technology man.

 

[Ryan]

SSD decided to sh*t itself with a "disk read error" which is apparently common when it's not properly powered off (had a power cut few days ago).

I've never had any issues with my three Samsung SSD's when they have abruptly shut down due to a loss of power. Is it just an issue with Crucial SSD's?

[Sombra]

Mine's a Sandisk Ultra but the majority of the advice seemed related to Crucial drives and looked to be a common thing with the Crucial M3 drives. That's what I get for buying a cheap SSD lol if it happens again I'll just spring for something like a Samsung 840.

[yoječ]

I think that could be just down to luck (or rather lack of it). I've heard similar stories about different branded SSDs, but it seems like an extremely unlikely scenario. That never happened to me thankfully.

[Midnight Vibes]

I'm considering formatting my laptop to free myself from Windows 10 and instead run Linux, specifically Mint 17.3 Cinnamon, because I'm sick of the problems my laptop constantly has with Windows. I don't game on my computer as of yet and probably never will on this laptop, so that's really a non-issue for me. I've live booted Mint from a USB for a few days just to try it out and it is quite pleasant. I have a little bit of experience with Android and its terminal so using the terminal in standard Linux is perfectly fine to me. If I did decide to wipe I'll at least keep my product key in case I ever decide to use Windows on the laptop again. I'll be backup up any important files I need onto an external HDD just in case, but getting a separate HDD/SSD for Linux isn't really an option since I'm short on cash at the moment.

Is this a good idea? Is there anything i should take into consideration or be aware of? Would I be better off formatting and then partitioning my drive to dual boot just in case?

Edited January 31, 2016 by IAmTheWhiteDeath

[yoječ]

Well - it's entirely up to you.If yo don't need Windows at all, then there's no need for the dual boot.

 

I'd just check if everything works and if there are no driver issues on Linux, because that might be a problem.

[Midnight Vibes]

I went ahead and just did it, making sure to disable safeboot and install via legacy mode just in case. Everything's going smoothly apart from a minor issue I had due to me being an idiot.

[sivispacem]

Well, my £150 X99 board is well and truly f*cked.

 

In fifteen years of building systems I've never had a failure like this. Was fitting some of my shiny new Gubbins to my system and access to my SATA3 ports is kind of obscured by my GPU.

 

So, I go to remove it via the quick release.

 

Nothing happens.

 

Okay, I think, it must already be released, so I lift at the opposite end and then...

 

*CLICK*

 

Now my 970 won't go back in or come out. Release switch does nothing. This is...problematic.

 

Unscrew mobo, disconnect all the cables, remove H100i, take it out of the case onto my workbench, still can't solve the conundrum.

 

Resort to "if all else fails, jiggle it".

 

Jiggle

Jiggle

Jiggle

 

Snap.

 

Out comes GPU

Out comes top PCI-E socket

 

Pins are bent to f*ck. Assuming the GPU survived, no visible damage. The same cannot be said for the board.

 

 

Yeah, I think that's buggered.

 

Ticket already submitted to MSI for RMA. Fairly sure there's been some sort of fault with the locking mechanism which has caused the whole débâcle. No idea whether they'll honour it but if they don't, then I doubt I'll be buying any other MSI boards...aside from the X99A MPOWER I'm probably going to replace it with tomorrow.

 

[Sombra]

I've always just pressed up on the tab part of the GPU that locks in to get it out but f*ck that is some terrible luck right there. If that's a second PCI-E slot on the picture you could try the card in there although I'd be skeptical of booting anything on that right now. f*cking technology.

 

Can you recommend any somewhat cheap 120/140 fans? I don't need those crazy ass high airflow Noctua's or w/e since I'm just running a Phenom X4 and a GTX460 but I'd like to get rid of the eternal rave party that is NZXT case fans lol.

 

jesus christ I actually can't believe the PCI slot came off the board I mean I killed a PCI slot on my last Asus board somehow but it just died it didn't f*cking come off.

Edited February 1, 2016 by Blaze

[sivispacem]

Yeah, the tab did absolutely f*ck all, hence my assertion the board was f*cked from the off. I'm fairly set on the whole "buy a new one, build again, if they accept my RMA then just sell it" approach but...yeah. As I said, fifteen years of building systems and nothing like this has ever happened to me. I've had PSU caps explode, motherboards catch fire, but never a board try and munch the f*ck out of a GPU.

 

Oh well, at least the replacement fits my colour scheme.