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kidlewis

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Oh I can relate when it comes to feeling stingy with game prices. These days I rarely buy anything on PC full price unless it has some sentimental worth to me as a series like I bought Doom because of the previous three games. Though Steam sales have killed any need to buy a game on release, but on the other hand I find it does promote bulk buying and I never get around to playing a quarter of what I've bought. 

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On 9/2/2016 at 11:42, villarule123 said:

Thinking of dropping down to 1080p 144hz with Gsync from 1440p 60hz.

Anyone got a 144hz with Gsync? Is the difference that much? 

I don't have a 144Hz Gsync but I have used one on several occasions..

144Hz on a screen that supports it is sublime provided you are running the game at 144FPS, it looks insanely smooth and feels great as well due to lower input latency.. My issue is the resolution and how you will have adjusted to life at 1440p. You will be used to how crisp and nice that resolution makes everything look and at 1080p it just won't look that crisp anymore, now 1080p is still great but largely only for those that have stuck with 1080p and nothing else. 

I play at 1080p but I also play many of my games in 4K DSR because 4K even on a 1080p screen looks crisp and tasty. The issue is 4K DSR runs like 4K which means The Division, Rainbow Six Siege, Crysis 3 and more are largely off limits at least at max settings. In times like that where the 4K DSR is off the games look worse than they should because my eyes are used to the crispness of 4K DSR. 

So 1440p vs 144Hz? I would have to ask what do you largely play? Also what hardware are you running? 144Hz is a hard refresh rate to hit a lot of the time.. Gsync will help there but I feel like it may not be worth it if most of your playing experiences are in the 60-100FPS range. 

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40 minutes ago, Daweii said:

I don't have a 144Hz Gsync but I have used one on several occasions..

144Hz on a screen that supports it is sublime provided you are running the game at 144FPS, it looks insanely smooth and feels great as well due to lower input latency.. My issue is the resolution and how you will have adjusted to life at 1440p. You will be used to how crisp and nice that resolution makes everything look and at 1080p it just won't look that crisp anymore, now 1080p is still great but largely only for those that have stuck with 1080p and nothing else. 

I play at 1080p but I also play many of my games in 4K DSR because 4K even on a 1080p screen looks crisp and tasty. The issue is 4K DSR runs like 4K which means The Division, Rainbow Six Siege, Crysis 3 and more are largely off limits at least at max settings. In times like that where the 4K DSR is off the games look worse than they should because my eyes are used to the crispness of 4K DSR. 

So 1440p vs 144Hz? I would have to ask what do you largely play? Also what hardware are you running? 144Hz is a hard refresh rate to hit a lot of the time.. Gsync will help there but I feel like it may not be worth it if most of your playing experiences are in the 60-100FPS range. 

I bought a Asus PG278Q the other day. 1440p 27in, G-Sync, 144hz 1ms.

It was pricey but it's so good! Cost me about £150 after I sell my old monitor. 

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21 minutes ago, villarule123 said:

I bought a Asus PG278Q the other day. 1440p 27in, G-Sync, 144hz 1ms.

It was pricey but it's so good! Cost me about £150 after I sell my old monitor. 

Oh nice! That sounds awesome :D 

I had a feeling my reply may have been too late, but it looks like you got the best of both worlds with that new monitor rather than the proposed trade off in your other post. 

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So I'm having a small issue with my PC at the moment. When I start it up, occasionally my games will be messed up and run at 20fps (every game does this) but when I change the monitor's refresh rate in the settings (120hz then back to 144hz) it will make everything run normal again.

I'm hoping it's just another shit driver update by Nvidia as it's only just started happening. 

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  • 1 month later...

FREE GAME ALERT. :P 

These have all been given away before this year, but you can get them all if you missed any. No catch other than having to install Uplay.  Mostly older titles, but it's well worth picking up. 

https://club.ubisoft.com/en-us/ubi30

 Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

 Splinter Cell

Rayman Origins

 The Crew

 Beyond Good & Evil

Far Cry: Blood Dragon

Assassin’s Creed 3.

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On 01/06/2016 at 16:32, Davkaus said:

I'm torn now.

When it was between the 1080 and the 1070, I was going for the 1080 all day long. The 1070 is too good to waste on 1080p 60hz, so I was tempted to go balls to the wall and get a VR headset and maybe a 4k monitor with the GTX 1080.

Today has changed everything, AMD have announced their new rx480 card. The performance is on par with the GTX980 (about 75-80% of the performance of the 1070), but the price is $200, compared to $380 for the 1070 and $silly for the 1080...If their numbers are right and it's the same performance as a 980, nothing is going to work that too hard at 1920*1080 60fps.

It seems a good idea to grab one of those to tide me over for a couple of years until 4k monitors and cards powerful enough to drive them drop to more sensible prices.

What did you go for Davakus? 

Edit - I'm pitting the Nvidia 1060 6gb vs the Rx 480 8gb. Both in the £230-250 range. Bench scores seem to put the Nvidia on top. 

Edited by dont_do_it_doug.
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I went for the 1060 in the end, I have the 6gb EVGA SC edition, which is pretty much silent. 

I've thrown Fallout, Doom, Witcher 3 at it, and it's a solid 60 frames at highest settings. 

Having said that, make sure you're reading reviews from the last month or so. Right now the 480 seems to be the better buy, they've made a lot of headway to improving performance on both DX11&12. 

On average it's getting better results now, though there are some major titles where the 1060 does better. If it were me buying right now, I'd go for whatever has the best price in the sales. They're both good cards, and you never know what will change in the next driver updates.

 

 

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42 minutes ago, Davkaus said:

I went for the 1060 in the end, I have the 6gb EVGA SC edition, which is pretty much silent. 

I've thrown Fallout, Doom, Witcher 3 at it, and it's a solid 60 frames at highest settings. 

Having said that, make sure you're reading reviews from the last month or so. Right now the 480 seems to be the better buy, they've made a lot of headway to improving performance on both DX11&12. 

On average it's getting better results now, though there are some major titles where the 1060 does better. If it were me buying right now, I'd go for whatever has the best price in the sales. They're both good cards, and you never know what will change in the next driver updates.

 

 

That's the exact card I'm looking at (the 1060 EVGA SC), overclocked straight out of the box. Thanks for the advice! I like the idea of going with the AMD, purely because I like to be different and everyone goes for the Nvidia GPU's, so if the performance is pretty much the same maybe I'll change my mind before I hit buy.  

I'm thinking I can get away with saving money on the motherboard for my build. I'm looking at the Gigabyte Z170-K3 which is only £100. As a complete noob, what difference does a more expensive motherboard offer performance wise other than extra ports (USB 3.1 for example)? Surely all the power is coming from the graphics card and the processor? 

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12 hours ago, dont_do_it_doug. said:

One other thing I do not understand is PSU's. So any advice you can give will be gratefully received. 

The best advice I can give is to use this once you're sure what other parts you're going to buy, they've done all of the hard work for you: http://outervision.com/power-supply-calculator

Quote

I'm thinking I can get away with saving money on the motherboard for my build. I'm looking at the Gigabyte Z170-K3 which is only £100. As a complete noob, what difference does a more expensive motherboard offer performance wise other than extra ports (USB 3.1 for example)? Surely all the power is coming from the graphics card and the processor? 

Do you know which CPU you want? That's the most important thing, so you can make sure you're looking at motherboards which support the right socket type. 

The main difference you'll find with mid-range motherboards is that, as you say, they just lack some ports, and their overclocking results will not be as good as higher end boards. Avoid the budget end as they'll be using cheap components, and they'll often not support overclocking at all, some cut corners on the very basic ports like onboard graphics as well, which you might never use, but you'll kick yourself when you need to troubleshoot if you don't have them.

The Z170-K3 looks like a pretty decent mid-range board, seems to get good reviews! The potential 'gotcha' I see with it is that it doesn't support SLI. Not a problem for you if you go for the 1060, as the 1060 can't be SLId anyway, but it's Crossfire implementation is also poor. You will only be rocking a single GPU right now, but when it starts to slow down, this will take away your option of grabbing a second cheap one for Crossfire, and mean that you'll want to buy a new single GPU (and as a general rule, you'll be upgrading your GPU long before you need to think about swapping the CPU and motherboard).

If it were me, I'd spend a few quid extra on something like the Z170 Extreme4 which supports SLI, Crossfire, and has a couple of USB 3.1 ports as well, in an attempt to future proof a little.

Edited by Davkaus
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Thank you! I like the look of the Extreme4, 

I'm deffo going to go for Skylake, probably an i7 6700k in the hope I won't need to upgrade it for a loooong time. It seems like good economics to me to buy the best processor I can afford knowing it will stick around for a while. 

So in terms of what I want hardware wise;

  • Motherboard (ASRock Z170 Extreme4)
  • CPU (i7 6700k)
  • CPU Cooling (ARCTIC Liquid Freezer 240)
  • GPU (Gigabyte Nvidia GTX 1060 Xtreme)
  • RAM (2x4gb Corsair DDR4 3000Mhz)
  • PSU (EVGA Supernova G2 550)
  • Case (?)
  • SSD drive (Crucial MX300 525gb)

Anything I'm missing? What about additional cooling, fans and what not? Are they integrated into the case? The smaller the better and I'm assuming the 'ATX' motherboard fits into a micro ATX case? Like these - http://www.ebuyer.com/store/Components/cat/Computer-Cases/subcat/Micro-ATX-Cases 

Edited by dont_do_it_doug.
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Oh no, sorry I missed this, but ATX motherboards absolutely do not fit in to microatx cases, you either need a bigger case, or a microatx mobo.I hope you didn't order the parts yet. :P 

Cases will come with fans, but often have space for additional ones to be fitted, they're also often quite loud, so you might want to either read reviews to check for noise, or replace the stock fans if you case about the volume.

There's no optical drive, which in 2016 (for another few hours), is pretty acceptable, I can't remember the last time I used mine, but I just thought I'd mention it in case you ever have a need for DVDs or blu rays.

 

Edited by Davkaus
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