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New computer/laptop advice thread

Started by Barry Admin, January 18, 2020, 10:39:27 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Neomod

Quote from: seepage on March 17, 2021, 12:57:40 PM
I reckon so. Not sure how fast the integrated Intel HD 2500 graphics would be for video encoding though. The PC is small form factor so a bit of a squeeze inside, bit like a laptop. Looks like you could add a video card up to half the length of the case at later date. You'll need to find DDR3 memory if you want to upgrade the 8 GB to 16 GB.

Cheers. Apparently it's big enough inside to add a Geforce 1650[nb]other graphics cards are available[/nb]. Will a graphics card help with displaying video when editing or is it just games? As you can see I am clueless.

The only game I'll be playing on it is Eurotruck as I have an xbox for my gaming.

seepage

The video encoding part of the graphics card [hardware-accelerated encoding] can be used to write the edited version of a video, if you enable that option ((or it's enabled by default) which might be faster than just using the CPU. Playback (decoding) doesn't matter so much but having said that, I never could play 60fps 4K video smoothly with hardware-accelerated decoding enabled in VLC but I can with my current 1660 Ti. 

olliebean

Quote from: Neomod on March 16, 2021, 07:31:58 PM
Is this going to be ok for Music, Art and a bit of video editing, maybe upgrading later to play Eurotruck?

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01H5N8XRQ/?coliid=I3A16T0SP9S3LL&colid=13YP0J196HSTL&psc=1&ref_=lv_ov_lig_dp_it

I don't know about those things specifically, but that happens to be the exact PC I bought a couple of years back, so if there's anything in particular I can try out easily and for free and let you know how it handles it, give me a shout. I'm happy with it because it was cheaper and a lot faster than my old one, which I'd had for 11 years so not surprising really.

Zetetic

#183
I think GPU-accelerated H.264/H.265 decoding is a lot more common and important[nb]Not least for battery life?[/nb] than encoding to be honest - I thought the latter was only really seriously used in the context of streaming.

Sebastian Cobb

#184
Quote from: Zetetic on March 17, 2021, 04:24:02 PM
I think GPU-accelerated H.263/H.264 decoding is a lot more common and important[nb]Not least for battery life?[/nb] than encoding to be honest - I thought the latter was only really seriously used in the context of streaming.

Certain video tools can take advantage of CUDA as well as standard hardware acceleration to provide extra grunt for some tasks. Although that might be specifically to provide advantage to a the machine learning aspect of an upscaler I was looking at.

I imagine whether encoding comes down to dedicated hardware or a collection of gpus (or even just a cpu) comes down to whether you are doing it offline or on the fly.

Neomod

Quote from: olliebean on March 17, 2021, 03:56:28 PM
I don't know about those things specifically, but that happens to be the exact PC I bought a couple of years back, so if there's anything in particular I can try out easily and for free and let you know how it handles it, give me a shout. I'm happy with it because it was cheaper and a lot faster than my old one, which I'd had for 11 years so not surprising really.

Oh right. How loud is it and did you upgrade it at all?

seepage

If I convert a video in HandBrake to H.264 without selecting 'Nvidia NVenc' as the codec, then CPU = 100%. If I do select it then typically CPU = 60%, and under 'GPU Engine' in Task Manager the task is listed as 'Encoding'. Similarly, if I take a clip out of a video with the Windows Photos app, the task is also listed as 'Encoding'.

Zetetic

The Windows Photo app thing is interesting.

My general impression that stuff like NVENC wasn't in widespread use[nb]outside of streaming, as I say, where latency is more important and reducing CPU usage more important[/nb] because the quality was worse than CPU-only encoders like x264/x265. But I might well be behind the times.

(Noting that some tools can offload some processing of the video stream prior to encoding to the GPU using OpenCL in the way that Cobb hints at.)

olliebean

Quote from: Neomod on March 17, 2021, 05:41:58 PM
Oh right. How loud is it and did you upgrade it at all?

No upgrades (unless you count an external portable HD), although I've been meaning to spend £30-odd on an extra 8GB for it. (It's upgradeable to 32GB, should you need that much, although the RAM will cost you more than the PC...)

As for noise, it depends where you put it - I started with it on my desk, under my monitor, which was loud enough to be annoying. Now I've got it under my desk and I can hear it but I don't tend to notice it when I'm using it. (It's on a carpet, I imagine it'd be louder on a wooden floor.) No noticeable increase in fan noise when the CPU is stressed.

Neomod

Quote from: olliebean on March 17, 2021, 09:36:13 PM
No upgrades (unless you count an external portable HD), although I've been meaning to spend £30-odd on an extra 8GB for it. (It's upgradeable to 32GB, should you need that much, although the RAM will cost you more than the PC...)

As for noise, it depends where you put it - I started with it on my desk, under my monitor, which was loud enough to be annoying. Now I've got it under my desk and I can hear it but I don't tend to notice it when I'm using it. (It's on a carpet, I imagine it'd be louder on a wooden floor.) No noticeable increase in fan noise when the CPU is stressed.

Thanks...

Oh just one more thing. Is there room enough for a second hard disk?

olliebean

Quote from: Neomod on March 17, 2021, 11:04:49 PM
Thanks...

Oh just one more thing. Is there room enough for a second hard disk?

The drive bay holds one 3.5" or two 2.5" disks, so there should be room for a second 2.5" disk alongside the included SSD. You'll probably need a Y-splitter for the power cable. I decided to go with an external disk instead, just for convenience.

Neomod

As an aside an acquaintance of mine who is also buying a windows 10 machine wondered if he could still[nb]allegedly[/nb] use his hooky software or has windows 10 killed piracy now?

jonbob

An acquaintance of mine has reported no issue with 'Arthur Daley style' snide goods installed, but this person is is allegedly using a copy of Windows 10 that might not be completely legit

olliebean

An acquaintance of mine is using a completely legit copy of Windows 10, and has reported no issues with various pieces of software that they acquired from a mush in Shepherd's Bush.

BeardFaceMan

I'm looking to get a 10 inch tablet, doesn't have a lot of other requirements other than that. Obviously a nice bit of RAM and a decent processor would be good, something that can run the latest Android software, that kind of thing. Are there any brands that I should be avoiding?

Wilbur

I spent a bit of time recently looking for one to use to read the papers and ended up with a Samsung Galaxy 6 lite. It doesnt have all the stuff I'd like such as wireless charging but I refuse to pay £700 for a tablet. £300 seemed a massive indulgence as it was but for reading the papers you need a decent screen or the resolution is rubbish (and I no longer buy the papers so I save money there). The cheaper ones all seemed lacking in one way or another.

BeardFaceMan

Quote from: Wilbur on June 05, 2021, 02:45:41 PM
I spent a bit of time recently looking for one to use to read the papers and ended up with a Samsung Galaxy 6 lite. It doesnt have all the stuff I'd like such as wireless charging but I refuse to pay £700 for a tablet. £300 seemed a massive indulgence as it was but for reading the papers you need a decent screen or the resolution is rubbish (and I no longer buy the papers so I save money there). The cheaper ones all seemed lacking in one way or another.

That was actually one of the ones I was looking at, the other one was the Galaxy Tab A7 which is about 100 quid cheaper. Although they seem to be doing a 70 quid cashback offer on the 6 Lite at the moment, so that might be the better option.

Dex Sawash

The G6 Lite comes with a stylus too, I think. Been picking that and one of the other Galaxy tabs up and putting back before I go pay for last 6 months. Samsung has promised 4 years of major OS updates on most of these.

BeardFaceMan

I think my PC, or at least my hard drive, is about to shit the bed, everything is running slow or crashing, it takes ages to start up. Had it about 5 years now, are the tools in Windows 10 decent enough to diagnose any hard drive problems or are there ones I should download?

JamesTC

Quote from: BeardFaceMan on August 14, 2021, 09:25:22 AM
I think my PC, or at least my hard drive, is about to shit the bed, everything is running slow or crashing, it takes ages to start up. Had it about 5 years now, are the tools in Windows 10 decent enough to diagnose any hard drive problems or are there ones I should download?

Lterally happened to me in the last few days. Started to run slow with a bit of crashing. Ran some of the W10 tests (things like chkdsk) which claimed to fix it but when a HDD is dying you aren't going to sort it with any of the tools. They didn't really diagnose any issue, it was just clear that the HDD was failing. I bought an SSD which arrived yesterday and I set it up to clone the HDD. It had an error half way through. I decided to try moving files to an external harddrive, delete everything aside from W10 from the HDD and then clone what was left. It crapped out just as I was finishing deleting everything. Thankfully I also have a PC which I could create a recovery USB drive from.

I'd say before any diagnosing, create a recovery USB drive if you do not have another computer to take it from. Then back up any important files to an external drive. You don't want to be doing any diagnosing before getting the important stuff saved as any tools or diagnosing can push it over the edge when it is currently failing.

On the bright side, with the SSD, my laptop is faster than it has ever been. The HDD really had been throttling it in the three years I have had this laptop.

BeardFaceMan

I learned my lesson last time I had a crash so now I regularly back up my stuff to external drives, to the point where I even download everything to a different drive, I try and leave the main drive alone as much as possible. The main drive I have now (which may be SSD, were there some sort of cheaper, semi-SSD drives available a few years ago? It may be one of them) has my operating system on it and I only use it to install programs and games on it, everything else is used on or downloaded to a different internal drive and then backed up to externals.

I'll have to look into some cloning software then. Buy a drive, I'll uninstall all the games and programs from my main and try cloning Windows over. Whenever I've done this in the past I've done a clean Windows install and that's a pain the fucking hole. Any good free cloning software or is it something you really want to be spending money on?

JamesTC

Macrium Reflect is the only free cloning software I could find. But if the harddrive is failing, it may struggle to clone as it did with mine.

On an SSD, a new install from a recovery drive doesn't take long at all. I think it was around 20 minutes from turning it on to getting onto the desktop.

Wilbur

There are othere free options but I usually use Macrium reflect as despite its rather confusing interface its one of the better options (I have non free alternatives but still use Macrium usually).

BeardFaceMan


BeardFaceMan

OK, I have a new hard drive so should I create a recovery USB drive first, just in case something happens while cloning? How would I go about doing that, I think I have some USB drives here.

JamesTC

Type in "create a recovery drive" into the search bar and it should come straight up with the place to create it. It is just a USB to reinstall Windows onto the new hard drive with if anything does go wrong.

BeardFaceMan

OK, I've got that going, says it'll take a while. So this is in case my drive fucks up while being cloned, I can install windows on a new drive and use this USB to recover all my settings?

JamesTC

Just the OS, I believe. I'm not sure if it has personal settings on. You said that you don't have personal files on there, so I assume it won't be too much of a problem with a fresh restore?

It is just easy to always have a USB recovery drive in case you have to replace the disk drive. Particularly if you don't have a convenient way of getting one without your laptop. I would have been screwed if I didn't have my gaming PC to create one when my laptop HDD failed.

What I did find when starting with a fresh restore is how easy these days it is to restore everything. Firefox saved all my bookmarks, logins and search history so it was just a matter of moving everything off the external hard drive and re-downloading a few extra programmes like Audacity, Inaudible, LibreOffice and VLC, and I was set.

BeardFaceMan

Yeah, I only keep programs on there now so reinstalling windows isn't a problem really if it does crash, it's more the arseache of reinstalling all my programs. Especially if I have to reinstall my DAW and all it's plug-ins, that'll take fucking hours on it's own. Things haven't been too bad with the slowness and crashing lately so I might try a clone overnight tonight.

I should be doing this USB thing regularly though, just in case, that's a good idea.

olliebean

I try to run portable versions of software as much as possible, or failing that virtualised versions using Sandboxie or Turbo, so that switching to a new computer or recovering from a Windows reinstall is as simple and quick as possible.