Off-Topic Thread

raymix

Any idea what time it starts today?

Serephucus

Usually 18.00 GMT.

Monotype

More like 18:10, by the time you get access. The first day gets hammered by servers. Subsequent days are usually never anywhere near as bad and usually have no problem seeing the deals immediately.

IrishStuff09

Aaaand we're live

ED E

Search on the store appears broken.

Far cry3 + BD is all gaben is getting me for today.

Monotype

Hope they put Left 4 Dead 3 on discount.

Competition is fierce these days in the PC market so I'd be surprised if I buy much given that there's been many good deals in the past year.

Sarz91

Looking to pick up a new GPU. Sold my R9 290 a while back and I'm looking for something in or around £200. The problem I have is should I buy something like a 750ti to tide me over until the 880/870 or should I go for a 760/770/280x now?

ShadowHearth

Sarz91 wrote: »

Looking to pick up a new GPU. Sold my R9 290 a while back and I'm looking for something in or around £200. The problem I have is should I buy something like a 750ti to tide me over until the 880/870 or should I go for a 760/770/280x now?

880/870 most likely going to be in a region of 600eu anyway. I would wait and see whats going to happen as when 880/870 lands, the 780 and 780ti will drop in price a lot.
You could just buy something on adverts to do you for now and save up some quid for October.

glynf

If anyone is interested, I'll be selling two EVGA 780's soon as the 880's are available.

Serephucus

glynf wrote: »

If anyone is interested, I'll be selling two EVGA 780's soon as the 880's are available.

Might just take you up on one (or if you catch me on a really good day, two) of those.

Rebel Rebel

Hi gus, I need a little help, lately my PC has some times refused to start the first time i start her up. it could take a few goes at pushing the on/off button even on the MB itself. Yesterday we had a power cut and to took me an age to get it back running, this morning the same thing.

While i had the side cover off the case checking thing everything looks to be ok and contented, power was going to the the led for the power and reset button on the MB. After awhile of checking the 3pin plugs and not getting it to work, i got frustrated and started to flick the on/off switch on the PSU, then suddenly it kicked into life. Now the system is on, every thing is running ok but the MB is showing a 80 code.

Any idea what could be causing this or is there something failing in the system.

System

ASUS P9X79 Deluxe
i7-3930K @ 3.2GHz
16GB Corsair RAM
H100
GTX 660Ti
Corsair AX650 PSU
120GB Samsung 830 SSD boot drive
240GB Samsung 830 SSD drive for work
2TB WD Caviar Green storage drive
120GB SAMsung 830 SSD to cash the 2TB HDD
Running Windows 7 HP

I built the system in Sept 2012

ShadowHearth

looks like Club3d droped another fantastic card.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DQYp6VU58Y

..Brian..

Rebel Rebel wrote: »

Hi gus, I need a little help, lately my PC has some times refused to start the first time i start her up. it could take a few goes at pushing the on/off button even on the MB itself. Yesterday we had a power cut and to took me an age to get it back running, this morning the same thing.

While i had the side cover off the case checking thing everything looks to be ok and contented, power was going to the the led for the power and reset button on the MB. After awhile of checking the 3pin plugs and not getting it to work, i got frustrated and started to flick the on/off switch on the PSU, then suddenly it kicked into life. Now the system is on, every thing is running ok but the MB is showing a 80 code.

Any idea what could be causing this or is there something failing in the system.

System

ASUS P9X79 Deluxe
i7-3930K @ 3.2GHz
16GB Corsair RAM
H100
GTX 660Ti
Corsair AX650 PSU
120GB Samsung 830 SSD boot drive
240GB Samsung 830 SSD drive for work
2TB WD Caviar Green storage drive
120GB SAMsung 830 SSD to cash the 2TB HDD
Running Windows 7 HP

I built the system in Sept 2012

Can you try another PSU?

ED E

ShadowHearth wrote: »

looks like Club3d droped another fantastic card.

Tempting me to dump my Club 7870...

frozenfrozen

I get that same thing sometimes also running socket 2011. Only way to fix it is flick the psu on and off a few times. Doesn't effect anything else, just sometimes a delay between pressing the on button and the boot, or else it'll just not turn on until it's been plugged out and switches flicked and randomly messing about with it.

3930k, h100, samsung 830 in common with you. Different everything else. If you find out a fix let me know because it's fairly annoying!

glynf

..Brian.. wrote: »

Can you try another PSU?

Rebel Rebel,

I had a similar issue before and as Brian suggested a new PSU sorted it.

ZeroThreat

Sarz91 wrote: »

Looking to pick up a new GPU. Sold my R9 290 a while back and I'm looking for something in or around £200. The problem I have is should I buy something like a 750ti to tide me over until the 880/870 or should I go for a 760/770/280x now?

why did you sell the r9 290? It's somewhere between gtx 770 and 780 in terms of performance. Was it a reference card with too much noise/heat produced?

Rebel Rebel

It was my first build so it is my only PSU, am i right in thinking it is not worth risking running the system on what could be a faulty PSU.

Surprise to hear it is a common problem.

glynf

As its a decent brand PSU, it has over & under voltage/over current protection your motherboard etc. should be OK, though if its acting up best to get rid of it-its not worth the risk. You could check the 12V output from the PSU and also mains voltage in case. Brownouts can easily fry electronics, especially in rural areas due to supply issues. This from the lazy bollox with a UPS in the shed for the last 6 months I've not bothered to hook up.:o

Sarz91

ZeroThreat wrote: »

why did you sell the r9 290? It's somewhere between gtx 770 and 780 in terms of performance. Was it a reference card with too much noise/heat produced?

Ye it was reference. Noise and heat just got the better of me. Was also looking for an entry level gaming pc at the time for my brother and swapped the 290 for one.

yawhat!

ZeroThreat wrote: »

why did you sell the r9 290? It's somewhere between gtx 770 and 780 in terms of performance. Was it a reference card with too much noise/heat produced?

Its more or less the same as a 780. Much much stronger than a GTX 770

Gumbi

yawhat! wrote: »

Its more or less the same as a 780. Much much stronger than a GTX 770

This.

Yeti Beast

"Intel set to launch Core i7 ‘Haswell-E’ processors in mid-September"

Decisions, decisions.

Serephucus

Dat 5820 tho.

Baked.noodle

Russia wants to replace US computer chips with local processors

Russia’s Industry and Trade Ministry plans to replace US microchips Intel and AMD, used in government’s computers, with domestically-produced micro processor Baikal in a project worth dozens of millions of dollars, business daily Kommersant reported Thursday.

The Baikal micro processor will be designed by a unit of T-Platforms, a producer of supercomputers, next year, with support from state defense conglomerate Rostec and co-financing by state-run technological giant Rosnano.

The first products will be Baikal M and M/S chips, designed on the basis of 64-bit nucleus Cortex A-57 made by UK company ARM, with frequency of 2 gigahertz for personal computers and micro servers.

The Baikal chips will be installed on computers of government bodies and in state-run firms, which purchase some 700,000 personal computers annually worth $500 million and 300,000 servers worth $800 million. The total volume of the market amounts to about 5 million devices worth $3.5 billion.

Lu Tze

Baked.noodle wrote: »

Russia wants to replace US computer chips with local processors

Big hit for intel/amd if it runs to conclusion

Baked.noodle

I wonder if it has anything to do with the NSA. Hardware encryption back doors etc.

Edit: http://www.prisonplanet.com/intel-ceo-refuses-to-answer-questions-on-whether-nsa-can-access-processors.html

Addled

just saw this over on maximumpc, really good news if you have a GCN radeon card!
The "Gaming Evolved" Raptr client can now capture h.264 video in real time with minimal performance hit.

This is hardware accelerated using the Video Codec Engine on GCN based Radeon cards:

http://raptr.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35035

I remember there was someone working on this as part of Radeon pro who has since been employed by
Raptr so I guess this is the fruit of their labour:

http://www.radeonpro.info/2014/03/important-announcement-about-radeonpro/

Son Of A Vidic

Baked.noodle wrote: »

I wonder if it has anything to do with the NSA. Hardware encryption back doors etc.

Edit: http://www.prisonplanet.com/intel-ceo-refuses-to-answer-questions-on-whether-nsa-can-access-processors.html

I'd say it has all to do with that and a growing mistrust of American based suppliers/manufacturers.

Gumbi

Any tips lads, a bit of a problem here. So I opened my PC, took out my GPU and reseated it. No biggie right? Just wanted to check something on my card (de dust it a bit).

Boot up PC again. Playing SC2. Audio starts to crackle and stop altogether. Thought it was the game. It affects the whole system. i reboot and reseat the audio jack in the motherboard. I get sound back but it's staticy and crackly. Now there is no sound whatsoever coming through either the mothersound audio port or the audio jack on my case (which is of course connected to my motherboard).

I updated my BIOS, my Realtek audio drivers, no joy. Cleaned out the ports. no joy. Any tips? The speakers are working correctly, I verifed that separately.

Baked.noodle

Try uninstalling the Realtek drivers altogether and let Windows use the generic drivers. I haven't used them in years. At least if this doesn't work it should rule out a software problem. Another less than perfect solution is using the Graphics card audio on your HDMI port as a substitute. Just plug the speakers into the output on your monitor.

Gumbi

Baked.noodle wrote: »

Try uninstalling the Realtek drivers altogether and let Windows use the generic drivers. I haven't used them in years. At least if this doesn't work it should rule out a software problem. Another less than perfect solution is using the Graphics card audio on your HDMI port as a substitute. Just plug the speakers into the output on your monitor.

I don't have a speaker output on my monitor unfortunately, if that's what you mean. Not do I have an HDMI port on it - the main disadvatage to an otherwise great value one.

I could also get a cheapo usb sound card ob amazon (only 4 pounds).

But I would like to address this issue. I hope it's a software issue but given all the static and crackly stuff I experience before the sound completely stopped I've a feeling it's a hardware issue - although why it would happen after opening my case to reseat my GPU I just don't know.

I'll give the windows drivers a shot thanks.

Gumbi

No dice with the drivers . Hmmm. That sucks. I guess I'll have to grab one of those usb sound cards from amazon fot now and decide whether I want to do a motherboard RMA or not.

Baked.noodle

Ya, my HDMI monitor has a headphone port on the back. Have you overclocked the PC? In my experience overclocking can sometimes do funny things to a motherboard, especially when it's hot out. Back when I bought the board I'm using now the NIC stopped working with no apparent explanation. Dropped back the clock a bit an it magically started working again. You should have another look at the audio/USB etc. header connection on the board, just in case it has been dislodged when removing the card. The USB sound card would probably be a good solution but I would be concerned that the fault might not be only sound related. If it's a new board and you can live without the PC I would get it RMA'd.

nesf

I had issues with this machine with the Realtek on-board sound. I ended up needing to disable it and use a PCI sound card instead. Annoying but it just wasn't playing nice with the other components and updating drivers made things worse not better.

I had no luck with this board though, one pair of SATA ports failed also.


The card I use is this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Express-Normalizer-Virtual-Speaker-Shifter/dp/B007RMMYFI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403563505&sr=8-1&keywords=xonar

It's not too expensive at £25 and sounds just fine to be honest and does all the things I need it to do. The extra features are all pretty much ignorable, most people will never use them or tinker with the card once it's installed.

Gumbi

nesf wrote: »

I had issues with this machine with the Realtek on-board sound. I ended up needing to disable it and use a PCI sound card instead. Annoying but it just wasn't playing nice with the other components and updating drivers made things worse not better.

I had no luck with this board though, one pair of SATA ports failed also.


The card I use is this one: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Express-Normalizer-Virtual-Speaker-Shifter/dp/B007RMMYFI/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403563505&sr=8-1&keywords=xonar

It's not too expensive at £25 and sounds just fine to be honest and does all the things I need it to do. The extra features are all pretty much ignorable, most people will never use them or tinker with the card once it's installed.

Did the onboard sound fail work for some time and then fail at some point? I've had this board for a year now and it has served me well until now.

Baked.noodle

I wonder if you did a Windows system restore to yesterday. It's a long shot but who knows.

Just thinking about what you were saying about crackling audio, and the only time I experienced this was with speakers that were powered over USB. The speakers were pluged into the green output port on the motherboard and If I plugged the USB power cord into my PC I got crackling audio, but If I used a USB wall plug I didn't get any interference. It's probably not relevant to your issue, but perhaps the crackling audio was power related and then it just failed as a result of it.

Gumbi

Baked.noodle wrote: »

I wonder if you did a Windows system restore to yesterday. It's a long shot but who knows.

Just thinking about what you were saying about crackling audio, and the only time I experienced this was with speakers that were powered over USB. The speakers were pluged into the green output port on the motherboard and If I plugged the USB power cord into my PC I got crackling audio, but If I used a USB wall plug I didn't get any interference. It's probably not relevant to your issue, but perhaps the crackling audio was power related and then it just failed as a result of it.

I'll give it a shot for sure, nothing to lose. My speakers are powered from the wall though, so no power problem.

nesf

Gumbi wrote: »

Did the onboard sound fail work for some time and then fail at some point? I've had this board for a year now and it has served me well until now.

I was getting BSODs and system crashes. Different problem.

nesf

Baked.noodle wrote: »

I wonder if you did a Windows system restore to yesterday. It's a long shot but who knows.

Just thinking about what you were saying about crackling audio, and the only time I experienced this was with speakers that were powered over USB. The speakers were pluged into the green output port on the motherboard and If I plugged the USB power cord into my PC I got crackling audio, but If I used a USB wall plug I didn't get any interference. It's probably not relevant to your issue, but perhaps the crackling audio was power related and then it just failed as a result of it.

Your issue there sounds like the speakers weren't getting clean power from the USB socket on the keyboard for some reason (possibly there was too much power being drawn from the group of USB ports they keyboard was plugged into). You can get crackling sound from electrical interference and I've experienced this with on-board sound many years ago and more recently when a GPU was too close to a PCI card (due to a dual GPU set-up) and whenever this card was under heavy load there was a lot of interference in the sound. The sound wouldn't stop though.

Baked.noodle

I wasn't powering the speakers through my keyboard, just out of a USB port on the back of my motherboard. I have a few USB hard drives, USB mouse, USB head phones, wireless keyboard receiver, an XBOX controller and a wireless USB NIC with a high gain antenna plugged in so almost every USB port used. Keyboard is old fashioned PS/2. Probably overloaded (PC can fail to boot if two hard drives are plugged in with everything else) and perhaps that could have caused the unclean power you speak of. I didn't test it extensively as I had a USB wall plug handy and that did the trick.

nesf

Baked.noodle wrote: »

I wasn't powering the speakers through my keyboard, just out of a USB port on the back of my motherboard. I have a few USB hard drives, USB head phones, wireless keyboard receiver, an XBOX controller and a wireless USB NIC plugged in so almost every USB port used. Probably overloaded (PC can fail to boot if two hard drives are plugged in with everything else) and perhaps that could have caused the unclean power you speak of. I didn't test it extensively as I had a USB wall plug handy and that did the trick.

From what I remember, each gang of USB ports in a PC (usually groups of four at most) act like an external hub that's powered off of one port. So the maximum draw allowed is 500mA (2.5W at 5V) across the grouped ports which isn't that much if you're running multiple hard drives and similarly heavy power use (by USB standards) devices. Especially given speakers can draw a fair bit themselves usually.

Gumbi

Hey guys, any suggestions for a friend for a 150 euro monitor or less. I'm thinking a nice 22-24inch 1080p one, but I forget what we recommend as standard here! Thanks.

Bazzo

Gumbi wrote: »

Hey guys, any suggestions for a friend for a 150 euro monitor or less. I'm thinking a nice 22-24inch 1080p one, but I forget what we recommend as standard here! Thanks.

Something like this is fairly standard fare I think.

Gumbi

http://www.amazon.co.uk/BenQ-GL2450HM-Widescreen-Multimedia-Compatible/dp/B005OPLG0O/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1403624637&sr=8-2&keywords=1080p+monitor

I suggested this, good price, plenty of reviews, nice size (don't wanna go higher than 24 inches for 1080p) and LED screen. Think I've all bases covered?

Wossack

I'd try for an IPS panel if possible too (edit: I dont know if that Benq one is or not)

Bazzo

You have to pay a little over budget for the LG IPS panels: http://www.hardwareversand.de/en/60+cm+%2824%29+/150349/LG+24MB35PM-B.article

EDIT: That BenQ is a TN panel, not an IPS.

EoinHef

This one is gonna be slightly over budget with delivery and its 23" but it has the AH-IPS LG panel,have the previous model and like it. As usual the LG stands are not great,probably its only defect imo

http://www.hardwareversand.de/en/58+cm+%2823%29+/158494/LG+23MP65HQ-P.article

Genghiz Cohen

Stretch for an IPS, it's totally worth it.

Redfox25

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

Stretch for an IPS, it's totally worth it.

for sure