Off-Topic Thread V3.0

K.O.Kiki

mp3guy wrote: »

Looks like these displays are finally hitting the market https://mightygadget.co.uk/asus-rog-strix-xg438q-4k-120hz-monitor-launches-in-august/

I only bought the Alienware AW3418DW a couple months ago, I wonder how much I could sell it for?

Don't bother - the hardware to run 4k 120Hz is years off!

Robert ninja

There is a small use case, though: 4K for non-120fps gaming and general use. Run fast or competitive games in 1080p to hit higher frames. Overall though yeah we're not there with the hardware and probably wont be for a while if one intends to only play the latest games that almost always run like ass no matter the hardware.

mp3guy

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

Don't bother - the hardware to run 4k 120Hz is years off!

Not if I add another 2080 Ti to my rig

Skerries

EoinHef

mp3guy wrote: »

Not if I add another 2080 Ti to my rig

Depending on the SLI scaling of certain games adding a second 2080 Ti may see no improvement at all.

That would be a very expensive paper weight in those cases:P

Robert ninja

Considering getting this https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B075TF6HFM adapter and putting this https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07GCL6BR4 NVME SSD into it. I won't get full speeds but it should still be fast enough I think.

Getting tired of small 120GB SSDs I picked up at CEX. One game fill nearly the whole damn thing and many things on HDD have performance issue due to slow reading. If they're older games they're fine but those are usually small and don't take up much of the SSD room so it's worth putting them there anyway just for the boot speeds.

Shlippery

Robert ninja wrote: »

Considering getting this https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B075TF6HFM adapter and putting this https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07GCL6BR4 NVME SSD into it. I won't get full speeds but it should still be fast enough I think.

Getting tired of small 120GB SSDs I picked up at CEX. One game fill nearly the whole damn thing and many things on HDD have performance issue due to slow reading. If they're older games they're fine but those are usually small and don't take up much of the SSD room so it's worth putting them there anyway just for the boot speeds.

1tb SSD's have come down in price loads, would this be an option instead of that m2 adapter setup?
https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-SDSSDA-1T00-G26-Internal-Speed-Write/dp/B07D998212/ref=sr_1_5?keywords=1tb+ssd&qid=1565276641&s=computers&sr=1-5

I feel m2 is fine, but only if it's built into the motherboard, otherwise it's just messing, but open to correction.

I've both Sandisk and Samsung ssd's and they're perfect for games, really doubt you'd notice any difference in speed between them and the m2!

Cuddlesworth

EoinHef wrote: »

Depending on the SLI scaling of certain games adding a second 2080 Ti may see no improvement at all.

That would be a very expensive paper weight in those cases:P

If you already have a 2080ti, I don't think money is a consideration.

Cuddlesworth

Shlippery wrote: »

I've both Sandisk and Samsung ssd's and they're perfect for games, really doubt you'd notice any difference in speed between them and the m2!

And this is why M.2 form factor is the stupidest thing that PC's have done in the last decade.

M.2 is both a form factor and a connector.
You can have Sata drive on M.2 ports, you can have PCI-Express on M.2 ports, you can have USB3.0 devices on M.2 ports.

And you can purchase a sata drive but your board could only have a Sata M.2 port or visa versa.

They should have keyed that connector differently and had a different name for its variations.

Robert ninja

Shlippery wrote: »

I feel m2 is fine, but only if it's built into the motherboard, otherwise it's just messing, but open to correction.

I was thinking of the adapter setup for future proofing, so I'd have an NVME SSD to put into directly into a newer system later on.

Shlippery wrote: »

really doubt you'd notice any difference in speed between them and the m2!

You'd be surprised. Some game performance is drastically improved by extremely high speeds. Try Deus Ex: MD. Putting that on a HDD is a feckin' nightmare. Takes like 4 minutes to boot, 3 minutes to load into any mission and quick loading about a minute. When I put it on SSD those times became fractions and even the actual FPS improved! :eek: A friend on steam says he loaded it on his NVME storage and the load times are practically gone and he can quickload without a load screen, kinda like how quickloading used to work in older games like the original Deus Ex.

To be fair it's all down to the dog-shyte Dawn Engine they used for the game but take any game that has lots of loading in and out of areas and I think there may be an argument for NVME loading. Heavily modded games like Fallout New Vegas or Garry's Mod can start to really chug.

EoinHef

Finally bothered to hook the PC up to the 4k TV set i bought last year.

Am a bit surprised how well a GTX 1080 is handling it.

Its nice to actually see native 4k on the screen. Have a PS4 Pro hooked up to it but seen as that uses dymanic res or upscaling in pretty much all the titles i play finally getting the full fat experience,including good framerates,is nice:)

Robert ninja

You going to game like that from now on or were you just testing to see the 4K?

mp3guy

EoinHef wrote: »

Finally bothered to hook the PC up to the 4k TV set i bought last year.

Am a bit surprised how well a GTX 1080 is handling it.

Its nice to actually see native 4k on the screen. Have a PS4 Pro hooked up to it but seen as that uses dymanic res or upscaling in pretty much all the titles i play finally getting the full fat experience,including good framerates,is nice:)

Make sure you're getting 4:4:4 chroma!

EoinHef

Robert ninja wrote: »

You going to game like that from now on or were you just testing to see the 4K?

Just messing about really,it was something i planned to do awhile ago but never bothered too. So i said id tidy up a bit of cable routing and add the relevent cabling while i was at it,two jobs with one stone etc.

Makin a real effort since i upgraded a few months ago to keep all cabling to a minimum and all tied down,neat etc

Ill use it from time to time depending on what games im playing. Another option. The TV can do 120Hz at 1080p as well so ill be trying that for fun:D

EoinHef

mp3guy wrote: »

Make sure you're getting 4:4:4 chroma!

I had to change some setting on the TV originally that had ratios in it,cant recall much other than i changed it though.

Also,whats 4:4:4 chroma anyway?:P

Edit: Just had look there,thats the setting i initially changed when i got the tell so all good. RTings had a setup guide and that was in it.

mp3guy

EoinHef wrote: »

I had to change some setting on the TV originally that had ratios in it,cant recall much other than i changed it though.

Also,whats 4:4:4 chroma anyway?:P

https://www.geeks3d.com/20141203/how-to-quickly-check-the-chroma-subsampling-used-with-your-4k-uhd-tv/

and

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/discover/183161/uhd-tvs-providing-4k-60hz-with-4-4-4-choma-hdmi-2-0-/

z0oT

Just noticed something during the Windows 10 installation that I hadn't before.

There's a message a little bit after starting the installer that says "Thanks for Choosing Microsoft!".

I wasn't aware I had a choice!

Serephucus

You always have a choice.

z0oT

For gaming and music production (my uses), there was never much a choice.

I wouldn't be a stranger to Linux on the desktop though - I used Debian all the way from Lenny (5.0) to Jessie (8.0) as my daily system. I haven't really bothered with Linux on the desktop in recent years, I don't see myself returning to it either. I get enough of it at work with Red Hat.

On the server though that's a totally different story. I'm playing around with Debian 10 as a server in VMs at the moment. My next goal is to master running stuff as a service via Docker containers.

Serephucus

Fair points all round. I'm going to try for RHCSA later on this year (working on LPIC atm), and as much as I'm planning on my next build being a dual-boot (Linux primary), I'm unsure if that'll stick. :P

Haven't tried CLI Docker myself, just using unRAID's noob-friendly GUI for it, but that is something I want to experiment with for my ESXi cluster.

savemejebus

z0oT wrote: »

For gaming and music production (my uses), there was never much a choice.

Have you tried Bodhl Linux Media OS?

z0oT

Serephucus wrote: »

Fair points all round. I'm going to try for RHCSA later on this year (working on LPIC atm), and as much as I'm planning on my next build being a dual-boot (Linux primary), I'm unsure if that'll stick. :P

Haven't tried CLI Docker myself, just using unRAID's noob-friendly GUI for it, but that is something I want to experiment with for my ESXi cluster.

I've tried dual booting on the desktop in the past, but I just find myself getting lazy and using Windows all the time since I'm primarly a gamer on the desktop.

For Docker via the command-line, it seems docker-compose is the way to do it. I haven't used it yet myself, but if you configure it correctly it seems you can put all the stuff you want to run in docker in a single file and bring it up or down with a single command which looks pretty cool.

savemejebus wrote: »

Have you tried Bodhl Linux Media OS?

I haven't. I always thought there wasn't much point using anything Debian-based, when I could just use Debian itself.

That could be a very ignorant view on my behalf though.

Robert ninja

I was dual-booting for years but my windows install got so bloated after a while and it even wiped a 2TB drive somehow so I uninstalled it. Been full-time linux desktop since. Don't really see myself ever going back and my only regret is not deleting windows sooner for the SSD space.

mp3guy

Robert ninja wrote: »

I was dual-booting for years but my windows install got so bloated after a while and it even wiped a 2TB drive somehow so I uninstalled it. Been full-time linux desktop since. Don't really see myself ever going back and my only regret is not deleting windows sooner for the SSD space.

I think it's best to just use whatever is right for the job. Windows for games, Linux for development.

z0oT

Part of me going off Linux on the desktop was that I used to run it without a Desktop Environment installed. My setup was Debian Stable with Openbox, and if I wanted to run software newer than the repos (which is an issue with the Stable branch of Debian), I would compile it from source, build my own dpkg packages and install them that way to avoid dependency hell.

It was lots of fun for a while. Ridiculously light weight, super stable and I could customize everything how I wanted. I learned so much about the package manager and the inner workings of the OS. However, the issue was it involved so much configuration, even getting a file browser to work properly with USB keys was a pain.

It made me realize how much a Desktop Environment actually does for you. Maybe should give Debian 10 a shot with the latest version of KDE or Xfce again, but I'd probably never use it since I only game on my desktop anyway.

mp3guy

z0oT wrote: »

Part of me going off Linux on the desktop was that I used to run it without a Desktop Environment installed. My setup was Debian Stable with Openbox, and if I wanted to run software newer than the repos (which is an issue with the Stable branch of Debian), I would compile it from source, build my own dpkg packages and install them that way to avoid dependency hell.

It was lots of fun for a while. Ridiculously light weight, super stable and I could customize everything how I wanted. I learned so much about the package manager and the inner workings of the OS. However, the issue was it involved so much configuration, even getting a file browser to work properly with USB keys was a pain.

It made me realize how much a Desktop Environment actually does for you. Maybe should give Debian 10 a shot with the latest version of KDE or Xfce again, but I'd probably never use it since I only game on my desktop anyway.

Life is too short for that really. I've gotten used to just running with whatever stock software comes with a distro.

Robert ninja

mp3guy wrote: »

I think it's best to just use whatever is right for the job. Windows for games, Linux for development.

For me linux is the right choice for gaming. I don't like where microsoft took/is taking windows, it's a nightmare future for my tastes I guess. My attitude is that you jump ship before it sinks :pac:

mp3guy

Robert ninja wrote: »

For me linux is the right choice for gaming. I don't like where microsoft took/is taking windows, it's a nightmare future for my tastes I guess. My attitude is that you jump ship before it sinks :pac:

I don't think that's going to happen. Windows has first class support from CPU and GPU vendors for drivers and the latest features, Linux will never replace Windows as the PC gaming platform.

Robert ninja

I didn't say it was. It's just going in a direction with gaming that is very different from my values. Linux is getting some great support from preservationist type communities and I find it's a much better platform for older titles. I really like steam's direction with tech right now and there's projects like https://github.com/dreamer/luxtorpeda There's always some cool new tech. It feels like a fun platform for gaming that's always going forward and has a future.

Conversely any move microsoft makes in gaming tends to have ulterior motives from their embrace extend extinguish mission. It like it's always going backwards to me as a consumer and feels doomed to stay that path because of how terrible the company is. I haven't forgotten GFWL and the lack of graphic options for games on their store when they first launched, nor the disaster that W10 with updates, resets, telemetry and MC firing the entire testing staff.

mp3guy

Can't say gaming on Windows today feels any different to 10/15 years ago to be honest.