Gaming your Machine

Tools    





The People's Republic of Clogher
I'm getting really good at taking things apart now. Putting them back together is improving too!

Bought a new mouse last year and the general consensus was that the Logitech G502 was top of the shop. I picked one up and mostly agreed - The scroll wheel, however, was among the worst I'd ever used: Loose, rattly, slippery and so bad that I boxed the mouse up and bought a Razer Deathadder.

Turns out there's a mod to replace the wheel with one from the earlier Logitech G500 so I picked up a brand new spare from eBay for a couple of quid and set about destroying a £45 mouse which still had an intact warranty. It's now one of the best mice I've ever used.

From this:



To this, in about half an hour:

__________________
"Critics are like eunuchs in a harem; they know how the Tatty 100 is done, they've seen it done every day, but they're unable to do it themselves." - Brendan Behan



there's a frog in my snake oil
Hah nice

Come on now, Elite pilot chair (preferably suspended in a rotating globe). You know you can do it
__________________
Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here



The People's Republic of Clogher
How's your 970 on the noise front? I was that close to buying a 980 this morning - It had dropped to £334 on Amazon but after I'd gone away to think about things, it had gone back up to £440.

It won't be the last time things drop this low, I expect.



there's a frog in my snake oil
Pretty sweet actually. Obv only kicks in at 60C+, and AAAs only seem to take it to around 70C (so seems airflow ain't too bad in the box), but yeah it's noticeably quieter.

Now my gf rags me about the keyboard clicks instead

*EDIT* Oo and that was a mighty drop. Yeah, daresay it won't be the last.



The People's Republic of Clogher
I wish the damn things would stay at £500 so they won't tempt me.

A silent keyboard? Something with Cherry MX Reds and large O-rings would be my choice but still would sound a bit clacky clacky when pommelled.



there's a frog in my snake oil
Nah sod it, then she'd tell me to stop giggling. I'm not wearing a gag



The People's Republic of Clogher
I think I've done a bad thing...

Firstly, does anyone want to buy an MSI GTX 780? £150 ono...

I've only gone and bought one of these:



In my defence, it was kind of an experiment - Since I've become decrepituded (had to sell a house, mountains of debt etc) I've not had so much as a credit card but decided the time was right to test the financial waters. 980TI for £19 a month over 3 years? Sign me up!

So I signed, digitally, and they accepted.

Should have it, all being well, by Wednesday. Scan Computers, if anyone's interested.



there's a frog in my snake oil
You are incorrigible sir

Nice way to do it tho, especially when it's all about future proofing

I'm still waiting on my eBay auction to see if I've clawed back some of my crazy outlay... (Got a handy 25 quid for the 450w PSU, but the card sale is def the main event! 12 watchers, 19 hours to go...)



The People's Republic of Clogher
The market for second hand PC tech never ceases to amaze me. You'll probably end up with £40 for that PSU.

I sold 8GB of four year old RAM a while back with one of the sticks having a cracked heatsink (fully disclosed in the auction, natch) and got nearly £45. You can get 8GB of the same speed new on Amazon for under £40 today, sometimes under £30.

I might just keep the 780 - The world's most overpowered PhysX card? Nah, I think the new GPU will swallow whatever PhysX the five games released with it in the next three years all on its own. In fact, at 1080p (and I've got no intention of going to a higher res), this card should do me until well after it's paid for.

When you look at it like that, it'll eventually save me money!

EDIT - The only 780 I see on eBay coming to the end of its auction is at £151 and it's for a Zotac model which has noisier fans and a worse heatsink than mine. I'll start the auction, though, at £100.



there's a frog in my snake oil
Hah yeah, I got some endearingly confused questions from my PSU buyer after the event, about whether it could run the GPU he wanted. (It could - but def got the impression he hadn't quite done his research )

I'd be surprised if I get a grandiose amount for the 7850, but I have jumped '4 levels', so there was always gonna be outlay involved . Will be fun to see if the auction takes it somewhere silly . I'm thinking I'll prob get 50 quid for it though.



The People's Republic of Clogher
£20-30 for the 7850 maybe? Although I got £30 for a 'broken' 6870 which I'd forgotten I had recently.

Turns out it's running perfectly for the new owner.



there's a frog in my snake oil
I've started it at £35 . It only takes a few out of the 14 to lose their heads, but yeah not expecting much more than that really



The People's Republic of Clogher
Yeah, there are loads of people who just want to be able to connect their PC to a monitor and we sometimes forget that VRAM and terraflops don't matter to them.

My old 560ti is going strong in my old PC. I'd thought about swapping it with the 780 (and selling the 560) but there's no reason to - I don't game on it and I'll get more for the newer card.



there's a frog in my snake oil
Woo, £47.70 in the end for the 7850 . I'm happy with that. Now I've only spent slightly over 200 quid. Totally ethical...



The People's Republic of Clogher
It's kinda scary great that you can justify it like that.

The 980ti is now ensconced in my case.

Old:



New:





It's the first time in years where I've not bothered to check the dimensions of the GPU before buying it. This case is gonna be the longest serving part of my rig, I venture, although the 980 is the same length and only a smidge wider than the 780. The new Nvidia 'no fans below 64c' thing is an added bonus. Thankfully there's an LED'd logo on the side which tells me it's actually working when I boot - My OCD would kill me otherwise...

I'd realised that the card would only really pay off in a year or two, such is the diminishing returns in performance between top end GPUs. Then I ran the Valley benchmark:

780, pretty highly overclocked:



980:



Wow.

I'll be playing around with this for a bit.



there's a frog in my snake oil
Dear god, the copper! All that steampunk... and all those frames

To save you any future expense I'll post you my Google Cardboard (it folds flat ) and you can check out Elite in VR



The People's Republic of Clogher
Heh, yeah. It has crossed my mind that I now have a machine running the recommended specs for Oculus but I'm expecting that thing to cost £500 on its own...



there's a frog in my snake oil
Yeah it's gonna be a long while before those beasts are anywhere near affordable. Still, at least you're set up

(Now that I've got a card interface that allows me to change the native aspect ratio I could actually have a go at fudging Google Cardboard into working - the Elite dual eye view is stretched and correcting for it is a load too much. Adds an extra layer of faff to an already extraordinarily faffy process, but I am intrigued to see what even a very basic version of VR would be like )



The People's Republic of Clogher
I'm immensely intrigued by VR but, living where I do, doubt very much that I'll be able to try before I buy. Many many reviews will be consumed, especially those by glasses-wearers ... and people who couldn't see those magic eye pictures so common in the 90s.

Talking of Elite, I've been playing around in GeForce Experience. It's a tool I don't use unthinkingly but it's useful when you're struggling to run a game adequately - Comparing notes to your own best settings with those Nvidia say you should use is interesting. For me.

GeForce Experience tells me that I should be using dynamic super resolution for Elite, just like it did with the 780. On the old card I was getting massive amounts of lag with 1500p downsampled (probably because I had half the VRAM I do now), not any more! It's also recommending DSR for Dark Souls 2.

That setting was unplayable for me before.



there's a frog in my snake oil
I'm running most of my games on the Experience preferred settings at the mo, with the exception of GTA. (I'm not convinced it takes my poopy processor into account to be honest). It is a bit annoying when it tries to reset your custom set up every time it updates the ideal settings (I've got it set to 'ask me'), but I quite like most of the plug-and-play results so far. It's got Elite on downsampling too and it looks grand