Gaming your Machine

How's your 970 for the dreaded coil whine? My 780 had it but only at super high framerates - I ended up moving the PC a bit further away so I couldn't hear it above the speakers.

The 980 seems ok. Could hear it a bit during the GTAV benchmark (which was frigging colossal at max settings minus the advanced graphics stuff) but compared to the 780 it was basically silent.

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"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

I genuinely haven't noticed it. Bizarrely GTA only takes it up to 60C as well (I must have been too kind in my setting snaffling ). Far Cry 3 maxed seems to work it more, going up to 70C. I've mainly been playing with headphones on for that so possibly it's there and I haven't noticed. I think I might have lucked out though and got a balanced one! (Fingers crossed!)

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

One thing I've noticed about GTAV is that when I run it in 60HZ display mode my GPU is only running at 50%. When it's set to my usual 120HZ the 980's at 90%+ most of the time and temps are in the 70s.

120HZ is great if a game can manage it all the time but for beefy stuff like GTAV (where it's jumping between 70 and 100 a lot of the time) a locked 60 is fine.

Must give Far Cry 3 a spin actually. It was a real pig when first released but subsequent patches have smoothed things out. Unfortunately for the game, the patches came too late for me as my 'don't care any more' moment had long since passed.

My screen is 60hz so it's a no brainer for me (I like no-brainers! )

(Yeah I think a few hours in I might be pretty much done with FC3! I do really like the way they've handled the animals and the island, but the story hasn't really caught me. It never helps that the story missions often tend towards being linear / dull. I'll probably give it a few more goes, see what else there is to do, but might just have got my 3-quids-worth out of it )

Yep, the FC3 story is awful. Playing as a dislikeable dude-bro is alright if he's some kind of anti-hero I suppose but not when it's played straight like this.

Decided to keep the 780 and put it in the old PC. May as well have something decent as a backup if something happens to the main rig.

I ran the Valley benchmark for a giggle and got results pretty similar to yours - low 50s average whereas the 780 was getting mid 60s in the main PC with standard clock speeds. AMD processors are sh*te, basically...

Shhhhh, I could fit a decent Intel CPU quad into my machine. BUT I MUSTN'T!

Luckily the giant AMD liquid cooler is still sitting there like a blocky moral guardian. He won't make it easy

This is the kind of thing you'll be looking at but that combo should give you quite a few years before it becomes a bottleneck.

Personally I'd go for a full ATX mobo (which won't cost much more, if anything) but not sure how well it'd fit in your case.

Phew.

Random PC instability? First thing I look for is a dodgy PSU.

I'd been having occasional GPU crashes recently, both on the new card and the old one, but thought nothing more of it apart from the latest Nvidia drivers weren't great. PC started locking up yesterday and I figured it had to be the PSU.

New power supply arrived this morning and it seems to have cured the problem. In fact, I went as far as to install my old PSU in my second PC (which is rockin' a really old budget one) and it crashed after 20 minutes. I guess that it was giving me inconsistent power outputs or something.

I ended up with a 750W Fractal Design Integra M for under £60. Didn't really want to spend any more money on my PC this month but this one was a necessity.

Oo good catch. Nothing is allowed to go wrong with mine! I'm probably over my monthly budget about 20x over

That said...

I'm eyeing up a new headset for down the line. My current pair are an old work set held together by packing tape, with a microphone that makes me sound like a tiny Brian Blessed in a giant tin of pebbles.

I've still got the structural remains of my old Turtle Beach set, which actually had a pretty decent mike (still use it for voice-dubbing), but they do seem to be famed for fracturing into shards.

I've got an 8 channel / 7.1 soundcard (Realtek ALC887-VD) so reckon I'll plump for some budget 7.1 capable ones. The Plantronic GameCom 788s are probably the best that I've seen to date. Ideally I'd like to spend a little bit less, so long as I can get something robust and 1.7-ready.

I had a pair of those, so does Yoda.

Decent quality but my fat old head found them really uncomfortable. If you're at all normal you should be ok, though. It's got Dubly Headphone built in so you don't need to worry about your soundcard being 5/7.1 headphone compatible although I think I prefer native stereo now as opposed to algorithm surround.

Razer do a free surround headphone program that you can try out with any headphones to see if you like it. http://www.razerzone.com/gb-en/surround

I use standard audio headphones - Audio Technica M30X - which are a step up in quality from any all-in-one set I've used. My mic is an overkill Snowball but I picked it up for £30 in a 24hr Amazon sale a while back.

Yeah saw it could be USB or 3.5 - there seemed to be some general blather on the net about running native being a bit better, but I'll go with whatever works

Cool cheers will check out the software. I've got a feeling I get along with it, as I think my Turtle Beaches were running 7.1 via the USB. Certainly soundscapes in games like Elite felt much more alive and positional before those headphones tanked it.

I had a pair of Triton headphones years ago that had multiple speakers in them for 'true' 5.1.

They were awful and got returned within a day.

I've become really snobby about the way things sound in recent years, hence a pair of studio monitors for my PC and the same as headphones. The sound's not for everyone, to be honest.

I'm definitely not in the connoisseur range (decades of drumming have put paid to that ) but I do know my office hand-me-downs are like listening with half an ear, which is covered in marshmallow

So what's lacking with simulated 7.1 for you? Is there a trade off with quality?

The sound of studio monitors isn't for everyone, I mean. I'm all about purity, maaaaan.

The Dolby Headphone (and Razer equivalent) stuff is very impressive and I actually preferred that to the 'real' surround of the Tritons. My soundcard has Dolby Headphone built in but I never use it. Just prefer good stereo to manufactured surround, I guess.

I'm not even much of a fan of Dolby ProLogic on the TV.

Trying to figure out whether the Dolby Atmos stuff being used in Battlefront is something I'll be able to access with headphones. (I like the idea of having not just simulated 'surround sound' but also the upper horizontals in games like that, for hints on where incoming danger is. Battlefield was always very good at signalling the jingle of kit and the environment of shots etc).

You'd think it'd be for expensive amp & ceiling speakers only, but it seems they've got a simulated version for headphones too, using the cunning 'what part of my body has this bounced off' trickery. As far as I can figure out the next-gen tablets running it have inbuilt hardware support, but there's some software called 'Jaunt' which allows machines with the necessary processing umph to decode the info too.

TLDR - Don't think I'll be buying any kit for this

*EDIT* Will be getting the Windows 10 freebie though. Possibly the basic Dolby 7.1 software it comes with will help.

Did you try the Razer software? The digital bouncing actually works.

I've decided to get a new PSU for the spare PC as well now - It has become a Frankenstein Steam Box and with the 780 inside, the old 700W cheapo PSU is struggling. It's not failing like the one from a few posts up (and it's 7 or 8 years old as opposed to the recently binned one's 4) but under the 780's mighty heft the fan is going 100% and it doesn't sound happy. Better safe than sorry, especially if I'll now be using this PC more often.

I bought the 650W version of the Fractal Design PSU which is in the main PC.

Incidentally, I'd recommend Flubit for anything you intend to buy from Amazon. Flubit price for the PSU: £48, Amazon price: £65!

It sounds like a group of Amazon merchants who're partnered with a company who takes less of a cut from their profits than The Man. I've had stuff from Flubit arriving in Amazon packaging...

EDIT - Yep, I'll be getting W10 for both my PCs as well. Played around a bit with the preview and liked what I saw - It's W8 with a proper start menu, essentially.

Also - DX12 and wireless functionality with the Xbone controller.

Nah still haven't tried Razer, I'm not gonna get much computer time over the next few weeks.

Oo, Flubit looks very natty

(PS, if I ever start building a second computer, stop me! Or play loud dazzling noises in surround sound )

I'm not building it, as such, just repurposing old stuff from whatever PC is the newer one. I've done it for years as part of my 'rolling upgrade' process - Chance a bit of your PC every year or two so you're not facing one huge bill when you find that everything has become obsolete at once.

If I could, I'd get a smaller case for the Steamy Box but it's got a full size motherboard so will probably not get anything more compact than what's currently wrapping it. It can sit in the corner behind the sofa and bookcase with a long HDMI cable connecting it to the TV and bloody well like it!

Flubit's great ... when I remember to use it. The 6 things I've bought from them have saved me £35 compared to Amazon prices which isn't bad because Amazon's usually pretty keen.

Just remembered this - If you're still after a headset, the one getting great reviews is this.

HyperX are usually RAM manufacturers, with names like Fury, Savage, Beast and Derek. Oh, gamers.