PC Tech Thread

If you want to use it for gaming and movies also, I wouldn't go ultrawide, I'd just go big. I have a 32" 1440p monitor that's perfect for that kind of thing, and roughly the same pixel density as a standard 1080p 24" monitor so you don't have to use weird scaling like with a 4k monitor

No, those people probably have some level of musical skill.

the 34" ultrawide. does it have a mode for smaller resolutions where it just adds black bars to the sides?

I would assume so, but I've got this one hooked up to a mac so it only lets me select resolutions that fit the ratio. On Windows maybe?

I would have thought that most video players would handle that on full screen, even if OS/video card settings/monitor doesn't?

Also, remember a 34" ultra wide is only as physically tall as as a 27" HD shaped screen. So most video, shown with black bars at sides will be only as big as it would be on a 27". Although not sure if the screen in your photo is HD shape.

Screen shown is a 24" 16:10 1920x1200 dell

https://www.amazon.co.uk/DELL-860-10161-UltraSharp-U2412M-Monitor/dp/B005LNDPPS

this is how it's usually used so width is preferable to height anyways.

looking up the features on the screens they have a mode called dual-link which displays one hdmi and one displayport input side by side on the screen. so i could have a second display and watch tv at the same time on one screen if i wanted.

think my minds made up just need to wait for some invoices to be paid.

Yeah, I suspect I've gone over the top with mine...
Dell messed up when replacing a monitor. Replaced it twice.

I went for a 32" LG monitor.

A bit of a kerfuffle over the PC though-ordered one that ticked all boxes and price, was then told out of stock :(

I could have a Dell XPS 8910 withProcessor: Intel Core i7-6700 Processor (4 Core,up to 4.0GHz,8MB Cache, 65W) 256gb SSD, 16GB DDR4 RAM, 2TB SATA and NVIDIA GTX 1070 for £960

OR... for £1500:

Zoostorm StormForce Inferno, 3.0TB HDD, 512GB SSD (M2), Intel Core i7-6700K, Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer C Universal Water Cooling System, Asus Z170-P Motherboard, KFA2 GeForce GTX 1080 EXOC Graphics Card, 32GB (4x8GB) Kingston HyperX RAM

The cheaper option is more tempting even if it's Dell certified refurbished, as I can always upgrade RAM/graphics and atm I'm not sure if I'll notice the difference in performance, but the Zoostorm seems like it's as futureproof/beefy as I'd ever need straight out the box. I know fuck all about Zoostorm as a company although they do give a three year warranty as standard...

basically

What's your use case again? Sorry. IMO go with the cheaper option. Both are really really powerful machines. I don't see the point of a biggish ssd and a big spinner, either get an ssd that fits everything or don't. Guess if you had a massive movie collection? I doubt you'll be over clocking so you don't need the K, and you only really need the 1080 if you are gaming competitively or at 4k. Or maybe a video pro using premier.

Thanks for the insight chap. It's mostly for 3D design applications like Cinema 4D/3D Studio Max with some CAD/Illustrator/Photoshop at the moment, but I also do some Photogrammetry and video editing at 1080p and this is something that might be expanded in future as I'm planning on getting a UAV license later in the year to do aerial survey stuff.

I kind of get the video card aspect but not really sure how all this translates into performance for particular programs-I'm Mac based atm but a lot of the 3D/CAD stuff is PC orientated so that's why I'm making the change. I'm just getting really frustrated with machines at Uni that aren't powerful enough to run 3D apps as it takes 20 times as long to do anything because of repeated crashing... I'd pay another £500 to avoid dealing with that over the next year as with so many assignments I want to be able to work as effectively as I can at home and spare myself the caffeine fuelled purgatory of the computer labs.

Which app are you/will you be using. Better to find whether they're optimised for a particular card or CPU before you splash out on something that may not help at all.

I checked out 3DS Specs and they only recommend NVIDIA QUADRO or AMD Firecrest, but apparently that's a really outdated position based upon what's now substandard chip architecture so tests with 'consumer grade' quad core cards like the GTX 1070 actually show a better performance. I think the main problem after that is bottlenecks with RAM amounts so pure professional machines used for lots of complex rendering have 64GB, but any system with that amount that I've seen is $$$$$$$$$$$

The only pooter I could find with 'pro' Quadro spec within my budget was https://www.europc.co.uk/dell-precision-3620-mini-tower-workstation-windows-10-pro-64-bit-intel-xeon-e3-1240-v5-3-5ghz-16gb-ram-256gb-ssd-dvdrw-4gb-nvidia-quadro-k2200-dell-3-year-warranty-119910.html?utm_source=google_shopping&gclid=CJO2is3Z9NICFW0R0wodyMYDwA

again, refurbed but half price of the normal unit and almost identical in spec in every other regard as the i7 is also quad core but higher frequency so I could use the difference in price to boost the RAM to 32gb?

No probs, sounds like you do need some power... have you also considered Hackitosh if you are coming from macOS? Although if you are not too fussed about keeping macOS and all your apps are in W10 it's prob not worth the hassle, feels a bit whorish but by sheer coincidence I have one for sale on here...

Can anyone help me out with something really tedious? I know I could figure this out given time and possibly ordering the wrong thing, but I suspect someone else can look at it and know right away.

I've finally got round to upgrading my PC (mainly used for video editing). I've previously ran an external hard drive enclosure thing that plugs in via eSata. I've just discovered that my new PC doesn't have any eSata ports. I presume I just need to add an eSata card, but I'm totally confused as to which one I should be adding - here's a picture of my motherboard - presumably I need some sort of PCI express card? If so, which sort?

Am keen to get it up and running again soon (plus also I want to see how much better games run on it and can't justify trying that until I've got the work stuff sorted).

I can supply better pictures/more details.

Thanks!

Pretty much any PCIe eSATA card will do.

SATA 3 supports faster transfer than SATA 2. This is academic for a standard HDD but may make a difference if you were to move to an SSD.

You could also consider a USB3 to eSATA cable, or a new USB3 enclosure (assuming it's a standard HDD inside).

The top slot looks like a PCIe x16 slot, so it'll take any PCIe card, and the second one down a legacy PCI slot - ignore that one.

I'm pretty committed to just getting to grips with pc atm, cheers tho.

You still think the cheaper option will be plenty plenty?

I also don't know what I'm talking about for 3DS Max.
Still, I done a Google, then rambled some..

Having a look at
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AutoDesk-3ds-Max-2017-CPU-Performance-823/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/AutoDesk-3ds-Max-2017-GeForce-GPU-Performance-816/

Reckons the 6700K is a very good CPU for the price. It's multi core but not massively so (and 3DS doesn't scale well to loads and loads of cores). But the single core performance is also good. Better than a 6700 (4GHz vs 3.4 for the 6700).

1080 doesn't look much faster than a 1070. But that's probably down to drivers somewhat, so you'd probably see the 1080 pulling away (very slightly) as everything matures.

I doubt a 256GB SSD is going to be any different to a 512GB SSD unless they've got a lousy model in one or a great in the other.

Maybe worth checking on the Dell what the motherboard is and whether you can upgrade memory easily. Some boards only have 2 slots (so you'd have to throw away the 2x8 rather than just buying 2 more)

All that lot said, both machines will be quick.

My home machine is a 3770K with 32GB RAM and a 980Ti. It's old now and it still flies for just about everything.

Looking at the benchmarks in those links it seems like there's only really a few % between the top end systems.
So Zoostorm will definitely be faster. But not much. Certainly not 50% faster. Depends how much £500 is to you over the course of its lifetime.

(oh, and unless you're a pro and need the support then don't worry about the Quadro cards. They're spendy and not much faster than the 1070/1080 cards. You're paying for the support you'd get from 3DS and it being industry standard, rather than the price/performance.
Just looking at that Quadro card on the Dell refurb you mentioned it seems woeful compared to a 1080
http://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-Quadro-K2200-vs-Nvidia-GTX-1080/2839vs3603)

Thank you - that's the reassurance I needed. I've got SSDs but was going to stick those inside the PC, so this is just for some older hard drives. I also just found a 2TB drive I forgot I had so am going to try and do some reorganisation and reduce the overall number of drives.

whats @duncs said.
I used to run a 950 which most PC gamers would tell you is barely worth calling a card, especially at 1080. Played games like GTA on decent (medium to high) settings just fine. A 1070 is loads more powerful (and I am sure that translates to 3D gubbins too not just games).

@chrisbmx116 @duncs

thanks very much again for the input-a big outlay so good to have reassurance I'm not going to be either stuck with a pig in a poke or alternatively, spunking money up the wall on too much capacity that I won't need/use. Will go with the cheaper Dell and hold some cash back for more RAM if it looks like it needs it.

I'd also be concerned that the Dell would make upgrading potentially more tricky. See @Ordinata's PSU experiences for example. Reckon on 16GB RAM being a bare minimum for any 3D or video-related stuff these days, particularly if you want to be running other applications simultaneously. Photogrammetry can be very memory intensive.

The processor in either is definitely decent enough and there's no point having the 'K' unless you want to overclock it, something which shouldn't be necessary anyway.

As previously said, forget about the Quadro or AMD equivalents. Completely pointless waste of money, even for most professional applications outside proper full-on CAD.

What photogrammetry software are you using? Both Reality Capture and Photoscan rely heavily on GPU rather than CPU for processing, so the 30% more CUDA cores in a 1080 would definitely be beneficial for that.

I checked and the Dell8910 has one 16gb RAM card installed and another 3 slots up to a maximum of 64gb, so should be ok for that.

If just paying an extra £500 for the 1080 I might hang off and see how the 1070 performs in real life usage-most comparisons I've seen are quoting a c.16% difference in favour of the 1080 for rendering which doesn't sound life or death. I think Unity and Autodesk cloud services will also take the strain off anything genuinely meaty.

I've just been using Photoscan as I got a free license through my old Uni that's never expired-it's actually one of the few programs that has run ok on my Mac 2011 powerbook

I'd honestly just build one yourself. Couple of youtube videos and bobs ya uncle. Its electric lego. I had never even used a PC before let alone built one when I built my Hack...

I checked and the Dell8910 has one 16gb RAM card installed and another 3 slots up to a maximum of 64gb, so should be ok for that.

RAM running in single channel mode? [sucks teeth and shakes head]

In truth it may well be one of those things that you need to benchmark in order to tell the difference. Wouldn't be surprised if things like photo/video editing and 3d stuff were the sort of applications which benefit from dual channel operation tho'.

Does seem a strange way to spec a new machine. Makes me wonder if it's simply because 1x16GB module is a bit cheaper than 2x8.

I am debating upgrading to i7-7700k from an i5-3570k (oc'd to 4.2Ghz). I've got this feeling that the old i5 is holding back my 1070GTX. Any thoughts ? It's been 4 years for the cpu+mb, so I feel I got good use out of it.

Was bugging me in ME:Andromeda that I can't get a decent frame rate. Although that's probably cuz ME:Andromeda is buggy POS (but fun game).