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March 29, 2024, 02:15:55 PM

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buying a really good computer

Started by kittens, May 14, 2021, 06:38:57 PM

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Chedney Honks

You can get all the grot you want through yourself phone nowadays mate.

kittens

well lads i bought an "Alienware Aurora R12" through "Dell Computers". it has an 3080 in it which i am told is good. 2363£ in the end. however my bank cancelled the transaction as they thought it was fraudulent and the order is in limbo and there is no way to progress with my order and the dell customer services are ignoring me. and even if/when i am able to pay, i have to wait a whole fucking month for it to arrive. absolute waste of time. fuck computers

mobias

Your bank should clear the payment once you've verified it. Its pretty good going getting a rig with a 3080 in it for that price and having to wait a month isn't too bad considering people are still waiting for 3080's they pre-ordered last year to turn up.
Get yourself a 4K monitor if you haven't already got one. I've got a 3080 and its definitely at its happiest running at full 4K resolution, its what its optimised for. Total beast of a card though. You'll hit the ground running with your machine when it turns up. Seeing ray tracing work for the first time in Cyberpunk is incredible. A new version of GTAV is coming out later this year too with ray tracing and lots of new eye candy. Coming from console gaming to PC its difficult to know where to begin. Its just a whole different world. 

Sebastian Cobb

How much does processor/motherboard matter these days? I have an old pc doing nothing with an m488t/ Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.4ghz and would like to casually play Stellaris and Workers and Resources, could I get buy with an ok graphics card and a few sticks of ram or is this thing practically e-waste?

I'm guessing probably the latter since I turned it on to find out the processor and bios moaned because the battery has gone flat.

Ferris

Also when calling the bank to get the transaction unblocked, be sure to say you are really unhappy and mention how much inconvenience the whole thing has caused you.

If you register a formal complaint with the bank for stopping a purchase you legitimately tried to make, they'll bung you anything from 10 to 50+ quid depending on which bank you're with and how thick you lay it on.

Free money thanks to your old pal Ferris.

Sebastian Cobb

Last time that happened to me it was for the deposit on the flat I was moving to and I didn't find out about it until I got to the letting agents (HOUSE since they operated from there). This resulted in me having to phone them while they aggressively drove me to the train station, spending half their time fucking about on their phone while driving, and letting me out when the bank said it had gone through. Mint.

Ferris

I spent a month adjudicating the compensatory amounts for exactly this for a big bank. My plan was basically to increase the amount as much as possible because I fucking hated the bank, and if I saw they had direct debits for charities or whatever I'd hung a few quid extra on top. If the FSA is reading this, I am joking hahahaha.

kittens

will a 4k monitor make that much difference? i have 2 1080 ones at the moment. through giving Dell this money i get £60 worth of vouchers with them but i  imagine 4k monitors cost a heck of a lot more than that and this purchase has cleaned me out

seepage

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 29, 2021, 05:03:27 PM
How much does processor/motherboard matter these days? I have an old pc doing nothing with an m488t/ Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.4ghz and would like to casually play Stellaris and Workers and Resources, could I get buy with an ok graphics card and a few sticks of ram or is this thing practically e-waste?

I'm guessing probably the latter since I turned it on to find out the processor and bios moaned because the battery has gone flat.

I've still got an i7 930 from 2009 with a 2014 GTX 750 Ti for playing Steam strateby games and it seems fine. An i3 with a U mobile chip from 2016 is definitely too slow. Got a very cheap 2020 i5 to put in a NAS and it's faster than my main i7 PC from 2015, lol.

mobias

Quote from: kittens on May 29, 2021, 06:07:28 PM
will a 4k monitor make that much difference? i have 2 1080 ones at the moment.

It makes a huge difference over 1080p. Its night and day in terms of clarity and general image quality. There's much less of a difference between full 4K and 1440p and you can get 1440p monitors relatively cheaply. To be honest though you're sort of wasting money if you're getting a RTX3080 as its very much made for 4K gaming. The RTX3070 is cheaper and aimed at the 1440p market, as is the 3060ti.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: seepage on May 29, 2021, 06:09:42 PM
I've still got an i7 930 from 2009 with a 2014 GTX 750 Ti for playing Steam strateby games and it seems fine. An i3 with a U mobile chip from 2016 is definitely too slow. Got a very cheap 2020 i5 to put in a NAS and it's faster than my main i7 PC from 2015, lol.
Yeah, compared to the cost of even a pedestrian graphics card it doesn't seem like it's much to upgrade it, but it seems a shame to waste it. I should really check how much it uses idling, I could be talking out my arse there.

I've got a hp microserver with vmware on it for nas stuff and some docker containers for plex / vpn / torrents etc, at some point that might want an upgrade but I reckon it might be a bit hungry on the electric to replace that.

Sebastian Cobb

Quote from: mobias on May 29, 2021, 06:18:11 PM
It makes a huge difference over 1080p. Its night and day in terms of clarity and general image quality. There's much less of a difference between full 4K and 1440p and you can get 1440p monitors relatively cheaply. To be honest though you're sort of wasting money if you're getting a RTX3080 as its very much made for 4K gaming. The RTX3070 is cheaper and aimed at the 1440p market, as is the 3060ti.

Yeah when lockdown happened I picked up a 32" AOC QHD monitor for less than £200. Dunno if it's responsive enough for gaming but it's got a decent enough picture. My main gripe is the lack of a vesa mount but aftermarket conversion plates that go into where the stand is meant to exist.

El Unicornio, mang

Quote from: kittens on May 29, 2021, 06:07:28 PM
will a 4k monitor make that much difference? i have 2 1080 ones at the moment. through giving Dell this money i get £60 worth of vouchers with them but i  imagine 4k monitors cost a heck of a lot more than that and this purchase has cleaned me out

Not enough to get into debt for. I mean it's one of those things, if you got a 4k monitor or TV you'd probably not want to go back to 1080p, but I've never watched a film or played a game at 1080p and thought "this doesn't look good enough". Games still look amazing. So I've held off on the 4k upgrade. Same with fps, I'm fine with 60 (although the Oculus Quest now has 120 but it's more noticeable in VR). Only really worth the upgrades if you have the extra cash.

That said, you can get a good 50" 4k TV these days for around the 300 quid mark, so they're certainly not crazy prices. Monitors are pricier and generally smaller, they have some benefits regarding response times, etc but you might not need one unless you're into serious competitive gaming.

mobias

Top tip for getting cheaper decent monitors. PC World, under the Curry's name, sell refurbished and stuff slightly cheaper on eBay. I just got a lovely big 32 inch 4K Samsung monitor from the Curry's eBay store for 250 quid. It was advertised as only having the box being opened, otherwise it was all totally brand new. Saved £80. The only downside is you do only get 12 months warranty on it. Its definitely worth looking into though because I'd been in the market for a new monitor for a while and prices did suddenly shoot up by about 50 quid or so right across the board in the last month or so.

One thing to mention if anyone is considering buying a cheap 4K TV to rig up to a PC for gaming. Its definitely an option but just make sure it has the Chroma 4:4:4: codec built into its software. If it doesn't screen text will appear slightly blurry and fuzzy. A lot of TV's do have that codec built into them these days but some cheaper ones don't. It may not bother some people either way but my slightly older 55 inch 4K Samsung TV doesn't have it and I find I can't use it for code editing or anything where I need really crisp and clear text. 

Zetetic

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 29, 2021, 05:03:27 PM
I have an old pc doing nothing with an m488t/ Phenom II X4 965 @ 3.4ghz and would like to casually play Stellaris and Workers and Resources
Both of those have published system requirements. Stellaris might struggle a bit? W&R:SR will probably be fine unless you manage to cover the whole map or something.

Edit: I continue to play games with an i5-4570 from 2013 (and an 8GB RX480) and I feel like I'm only just beginning to nudge against it being an issue. And the mostly because I want to be able to include bus routes from the West Midlands when doing stuff using OpenTripPlanner, rather than games. The i5-4570 has roughly twice the single-core performance of your X4 965.

Dex Sawash

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 29, 2021, 06:21:26 PM
Yeah when lockdown happened I picked up a 32" AOC QHD monitor for less than £200. Dunno if it's responsive enough for gaming but it's got a decent enough picture. My main gripe is the lack of a vesa mount but aftermarket conversion plates that go into where the stand is meant to exist.

Tellys are so light now that the last few I hung with picture hanging wire. Won't work if you need an articulating mount, obvs.

Sebastian Cobb

#46
Quote from: Zetetic on May 30, 2021, 12:52:47 AM
Both of those have published system requirements. Stellaris might struggle a bit? W&R:SR will probably be fine unless you manage to cover the whole map or something.

Edit: I continue to play games with an i5-4570 from 2013 (and an 8GB RX480) and I feel like I'm only just beginning to nudge against it being an issue. And the mostly because I want to be able to include bus routes from the West Midlands when doing stuff using OpenTripPlanner, rather than games. The i5-4570 has roughly twice the single-core performance of your X4 965.

I did check the minimum resources but I didn't find them too helpful as they are typically based around a fully built computer of a certain age, it doesn't tell you if you can let a bit of cpu slide if you have a better graphics card and more ram.

If it's just a few games I might try and look into seeing if I can use a cloud gaming service or something in aws to rent resources, I don't think I'd ever get my money's worth if I spent a few hundred quid on a graphics card. RTS's are probably more tolerent to a bit of latency compared to, say, fps's I guess.

Zetetic

Mostly edit glitch, but:

Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 30, 2021, 02:27:04 PMit doesn't tell you if you can let a bit of cpu slide if you have a better graphics card and more ram.
Hmm. I'm not sure I've ever come across anything where that's the case at the lowest end.

touchingcloth

#48
Quote from: Sebastian Cobb on May 30, 2021, 02:27:04 PM
I did check the minimum resources but I didn't find them too helpful as they are typically based around a fully built computer of a certain age, it doesn't tell you if you can let a bit of cpu slide if you have a better graphics card and more ram.

If it's just a few games I might try and look into seeing if I can use a cloud gaming service or something in aws to rent resources, I don't think I'd ever get my money's worth if I spent a few hundred quid on a graphics card. RTS's are probably more tolerent to a bit of latency compared to, say, fps's I guess.

What's the state of streaming gaming these days? For things where insanely low latencies aren't critical I'd assume most people's internets are good enough these days that playing remotely makes a lot of sense when compared to shelling out for hardware.