Best posts made by creayt

Seeing a ton of different options for my new rig on NewEgg, how does one choose which RAM to go w/? They have what appear to be fancier options like Corsair Vengeance ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820233265 ) and then what appear to be higher rated generic options like G.Skill ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231705 ).

I don't really know anything about RAM other than general compatibility ( I think my laptop, ASUS G751 w/ an i7-4720 HQ takes DDR3 1600 ), so as far as voltage, timing, cas latency, I'm not informed enough to know what kind of performance advantage or other differentiation each option holds. The laptop sneakily OC's its graphics card under the hood on this particular laptop, but I don't think offers any proc or RAM OC-ing, though I'd love to be wrong on that.

Any guidance on how to pick RAM would be great. I'm now deep in love w/ this laptop as it delivers on almost every one of my needs for a portable workstation, and actually somehow feels slightly snappier than my Xeon 1240 32GB workstation, which is... amazing.

@thecreativeone91 said:

Did you return the MSI?

Sure did. It had a few dealbreakers, mostly a

1. Very subpar screen
2. MISSING LEFT WINDOWS KEY WTMFF how do you use a PC in 2015 without the left Windows key? I tried mapping it to the Caps Lock key but it was just a productivity killer.
3. Got super loud under even weak load.

The great news is the new ASUS, which was a few hundred $ cheaper, delivers on all of those fronts. Under the most intense load I put the MSI under it's still just about silent. It has these giant vents in the back and pushes all of the airflow out that way so you never feel it. It's even cold enough to use to game on your lap, which I did last night. Played a few rounds of Dota 2 on my lap in bed while watching The Fly w/ the gf. Super duper impressed w/ the ASUS so far with the singular exception of it being very ugly. But it also somehow, even w/ a GTX 965 instead of a 970 like the MSI, is able to do my 3 27" 1440p monitors AND its built-in screen, which the MSI could not.

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt

$90/G3258 dual core intel
$130/FX6300 hex core AMD

For $40 I think it's worth it

Agree. Though you can get an unlocked Intel quad that turbos to 3.7Ghz out of the box for $105 on Amazon.com ( i5-2500K ).

I ordered a new motherboard, water cooler, case, and power supply to perform a transplant on my current Xeon 1240 v2 / 32GB / 850 Pro system to use for the next X months while I gain overclocking knowledge and while the Skylake processors slowly materialize. But then I read somewhere that they're actually going on sale next week after the Gamercon conference ( or whatever it's called ). If that's true, should I probably just cancel my current mobo etc. orders and wait? What would you do?

I'm thinking I can buy an unlocked SkyLake and OC mobo and then just run everything at stock while I learn the process of OC-ing, and with that approach will get the best of both worlds without sinking the $$ into the Xeon migration, which will also let me keep it as a server for side use.

Thoughts? Do Skylake K procs indeed come out next week as far as anyone knows?

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt said:

Can anyone recommend any subtle little accent lights

One or two of these should do it

Hahahaha, I'm not sure my CX750M can handle it.

I just noticed that my shiny new 970 is only pushing my 3 monitors at 59 Hz. It does give me the option of swapping to 60 if I go into the list all modes section of the Windows monitor configuration panel, but... wtf? Why would it do this? Are there any downsides to my manually setting all of them to 60?

@MattSpeller said:

yup if anything will tell you, this will

http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/

Just what I need, thanks!

@creayt said:

I'm not sure what you guys are talking about. The CPUs aren't that powerful. 32GB+ in a laptop is a minimum for me and I don't even run VMs, just multitask.

It's not that the products I develop use 32GB of RAM, it's that all of my tooling, web browsing, Creative Cloud apps, and debugging, etc. all ad up to more than 24 GB and I think rapid mode uses a handful of GB ( used to be limited to 1, I think I read that it maxes out at 10% of system as of the last few updates so somewhere around 3 GB ). There are certain projects I've written that do a heavy amount of complex relational data assembly and caching at startup and serve that from a RAM cache, so it's nice to allocate 10+ GB to that when I'm working on it, but that's not at all times. In any case, I've tried working on 8, 16, and 24 GB and inevitably get the Windows pop up that the OS is running out of RAM.

I'm excited for the days when containers come to Windows and my workstation has as much RAM as my server ( 256GB ).

Probably my most frivolous purchase in years.

Backplate for the GTX. Seems to add a certain je ne sais quoi.

@MattSpeller said:

Return / sell the 970 for 2x 960's? You don't really need SLI if you're not gaming either - $0.02

Unrelated: I'm going to be digging into developing for Oculus soon and the minimum requirement is a 970, so I have to stick w/ at least one of those.

@MattSpeller said:

@creayt or just a generic card to give you more monitors, not sure if you'd see a benefit from another 970?? This is quickly heading outside what I know about.

I think you're right, in fact there's a note on that SLI page about when you do have 2 identical cards that support SLI about not being able to use a 2nd or 3rd in any way BUT SLI. So close call if that's true. Thx.

@MattSpeller said:

$100, no fan, 1x DVI, HDMI, DP

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814500356

I actually have that old Radeon 5750 lying around, I suppose I could pop that in and put some of this stuff to the test, though the idea of having all of the NVidiaware installed and all of the AMDware installed makes me

TREMBLE IN FEAR.

It's a beautiful thing, this GTX 970 business.

Running a 27" Dell 3840x2160 @ 60hz w/ 3 OTHER 27" 1440p screens all at 59 or 60Hz without a single hiccup on this single card.

I had no idea what I was missing in the graphics card department.

Does anyone know how to get Windows to observe the surround setting for the task bar? Even though the resolution settings sett it as one big slab, the task bar seems to only want to span one monitor.

Having image upload issue again btw.

Looks like they just went on sale. The decked out 512GB SSD model is now $1149.

http://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?storeId=10151&catalogId=10051&langId=-1&catEntryId=960658&quantity=1

New 17" HP models just came out

6th gen quad
RealSense 3D hardware
GTX 950M still

just ordered one. Can't take the i7-5500u seriously when the i7-6700HQ is available in the same chassis now.

And now I wait another 3 weeks, sigh.

If anyone else is interested, coupon code Envy25 takes 25% off of them. Mine took off almost $500 ( but went for every upgrade, you can get by a lot cheaper if you don't want the embedded 3D scanner ).

@scottalanmiller said:

@creayt said:

@scottalanmiller said:

It has an embedded 3D scanner? Seriously? LOL That's freaking awesome.

It's the Intel 3D RealSense hardware, which is a few different embedded cameras and sensors that work in conjunction w/ software, one of the features I saw somewhere was scanning objects into 3D models... sounds pretty sweet, haven't read any reviews yet.

I assumed that that was the "why" people were getting it, but amazed that it is in an Envy laptop!

The more I watch the cooler this looks.

There's one demo of a guy scanning his face into a laptop and then a video game superimposes his likeness onto the main character as he plays it.

Win 10 Pro
i7-5820k
Water cooler
32GB DDR4-2133
NVidia GTX 980
256GB SSD
802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/bluetooth

$1585.49 after taxes. It's a prebuilt but supports overclocking and most people w/ a similar model are reporting 4.0-4.5 without touching the internals at all. Because it's a prebuilt, there's no 980 TI option or I'd go w/ that. Wondering how much of a frog I'm eating versus building something similar from scratch, plan on using an 850 Pro in Rapid Mode to get much higher speeds than any M2/PCIe SSDs on the market right now.

Thx.

I don't play games, the occasional round of Dota 2 really. It's for web development and 3D modeling. Will be running a full serverware stack ( IIS, MySQL, J2EE app sever, Node ) locally 100% of the time, some VMs off in the background w/ Ubuntu and Windows, and some other random stuff.

Mostly I care about instantaneous responsiveness, which I'm finding I can't achieve w/ my new XPS 15 Skylake 6700HQ, 16GB DDR4, PCIE SSD, 960M laptop, probably because it's thin-ish and self-throttles a lot.

So, no, no gaming. The wifi will be for web browsing and remote desktop but ( didn't mention this, sorry ) is also moot because I don't have a wired option in the office I'm in. Good point though, thanks.

But anyway, back to the matter at hand!!!

Does this seem overpriced? I'm ok w/ it being a little bit overpriced, and just sold my previous home-built Xeon GTX 970 workstation last week, so I'm not afraid to build, but overall the prospect of this arriving at my door in a week ready to plug into my new 40" 4k monitor sounds much better than waiting or and assembling a bunch of parts if it's not a total wallet rape.