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The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
151–160 of 401 posts
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was surprisingly easy. I'm not saying you over-paid, but for $2,500 I could have built something pretty ridiculous. Most of my money went into processor and GPU, which are typically your two big ticket items. I trolled around Newegg looking for upper-middle tier components with a higher quantity of good reviews. A lot of the times you won't see a lot of the recently released stuff with useful reviews, so some of t…
Well now you should just post some core specs so we can test your claim. Exact CPU, GPU, and RAM amount?
Looking at the Tom's Hardware system builder challenges from a year ago or two years ago, and the comparing them to the $500 and $1000 machines that they have now in their System Builder marathons should showcase the tradeoffs in performance vs price more starkly.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#153I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems. When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just…
I would pay for a silent PC. I paid a lot for a quiet Apple PowerPC Mac pro back in the day and built a quiet PC but they are not silent and I have moved to a quieter place and I can hear them (yes the Mac runs Fedora now). I have some silent ARM machines but they don't quite cut it yet though maybe the new quad core one will.
I have seen full size ATX cases from Silverstone with passive cooling, where the entire case is machine out of aluminum and acts like an enormous heat sync. Have yet to find a good fanless power supply. The new Mac Pro supposed to be only 12DB. It's hard to beat that, most rooms have ambient noise of at least 18db.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#154I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems. When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just…
You're just not playing the latest games or doing any intensive computations, or just don't care that you could finish your task 3 times faster than on your 2008 CPU. What's your framerate in Battlefield 3 on a 64 player map at 1920x1080, high settings? Or Crysis 3?
You just picked the most expensive calculation you could, more or less, and asked how a general-purpose PC handles it.
A brand new general-purpose PC handles that situation equally well--unplayable.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#155The last few times I looked at the desktops available at Targets and Walmarts in the Bay Area, there weren't very many options. Bestbuy and Costco are somewhat better equipped. I think that, with the lower margins on desktops relative to laptops and the amount of space they consume, desktop PCs are well on their way out of being attractive to traditional brick and mortar retailers.
Haswell architecture couldn't have hit the market at a better time for laptop owners, with more powerful integrated graphics and low power use. I'm sure it isn't a coincidence.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#156With all the guide from tonymac, I enjoy building my own hackintosh with cheaper and better hardwares :P
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
In what planet? I'm not even going to use myself as an example because I do other heavy stuff with my PC, I'm going to use my non-tech friends: one of them got a new laptop with 8GB of RAM, why? because she was complaining about webapps using too much memory and slowing down her previous system. Regular users don't know or care about memory management, they don't even close old windows or tabs, its about convenience.…
4GB is plenty of RAM for a web browser with many tabs, especially with an SSD for backing virtual memory. If it isn't there is a memory leak, and if there is a leak, 8GB is as bad as 12GB. My MBA has 4GB and I constantly forget, because it is enough, and I am constantly surprised that it doesn't have 8GB. All modern web browsers save and restore sessions across restarts.
> 4GB is plenty of RAM for a web browser with many tabs,
I always up-to-date Firefox, so hopefully the memory leaks are minimal. I reboot my Linux machine every month-ish and don't exit Firefox unless necessary. I always keep a few "app" tabs pinned, only a couple of them are heavy. I have 4GB of RAM and turned swap off for an experiment. Sure enough, after a couple weeks of browsing and keeping about 25 tabs open, Firefox's memory consumption would creep up and up and eventually it would crash.
I can only guess/hope that there are memory leaks involved.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#158If only Paul let me vote twice.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
CPUs are actually getting slower after overclocking I have water cooled 2600k at 5GHz running 24/7. Bigger GPU and more cores brings additional complexity and more heat. No other CPU can handle this without blowing up.
Does it perform faster in benchmarks than later CPUs overclocked to their lower maximums? Clock speed alone is not a good indicator.
Yes, it does. Newer CPUs have cheaper thermal paste.
Re: The PC is not dead, we just don't need new ones
#160I've felt this way since I built my last desktop in 2008. I was sort-of waiting for the "gee its time to upgrade" mark to roll around in 3 or 4 years, but it hasn't happened yet. Any games I want to play it still runs very well, and it still feels very fast to me even compared to modern off-the-shelf systems. When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just…
When my friends ask for laptop-buying advice I tell them if they like the keyboard and screen, then its just plain hard to be disappointed with anything new. That's exactly what I'm disappointed with on everything new. The Thinkpad T60p, from 2006 remains superior on both points to everything new from my point of view.
I have the same laptop running debian. Even runs small VMs ok and has survived multiple liquid accidents and dropping