Right now, the best card for 1080p single monitor gaming is a Geforce 970. It's roughly $300 and will play everything at ultra at 1080p. You can play Witcher 3 on ultra with all the bells and whistles at that resolution and get 60 FPS. It'll last you at least 2-3 years or until you decide you want to get a 1440p or 4k monitor.
Honestly, I couldn't tell you much. HBM is intriguing, but until more real world benchmarks come out, there isn't a lot I can base an opinion on. This is a weird time for upgrades because a lot of change is happening. Intel is going to be releasing a new CPU in the next couple of weeks. AMD is working on an entirely new core architecture that's supposedly going to blow the doors off of Intel. DDR4 is out. Oh, and DirectX12 and Windows 10. All of this stuff is happening now, or in the next few months.
http://www.techspot.com/news/61590-...mance-reportedly-revealed.html#commentsOffset who know if these slides are true, but if they are. Intel really hasn't improved anything in 4-5 years maybe more. They get such little gains in each generation. Which is sad because they are still better right now then AMD. Back when AMD was actually competing each company were making noticeable gains with each generation. Now that intel doesn't have any competition in the i5/i7 segments not much is changing. If you have any i5/i7 series there is no reason to upgrade. I will probably end up getting either the i5-6600k or i7-6700k when they come out just because my process is 9-11 years old and doesn't do as good as it used to.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9483/intel-skylake-review-6700k-6600k-ddr4-ddr3-ipc-6th-generation http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/Intel-Core-i7-6700K-Review-Skylake-First-Enthusiasts So this is really weird for Intel. The K version which is the unlocked are going to be the first one released, normally they are 6 months after. So it looks like the leaked reports were true, not much difference, so no reason to upgrade unless you are like me and have a ancient dual core system. There is no difference between DDR3 and DDR4, which doesn't really surprise me at all. I am still probably going to wait until the new year for my new system, wait till the price of these and ddr4 drop, and by the time the new PCI-E v4 spec should be out.
Fucking Ubuntu. As I've said previously, Win10 fucked up my MBR as well as somehow managed to drop my Ubuntu partition from the table. Attempts to recover failed, so I redid a fresh install. That shit took 6 fucking hours. apt-get update took an hour and a half, as it was taking forever on the "reading package list". I thought it was tied into the SSD, ftrim, or some BIOS setting that was causing insanely slow disk IO. It took over an hour just to copy the files off of the USB live install to the drive. What. The. Fuck. Well, back up to the start, and I then notice something... the image I'm using to boot is the 32-bit installer, not the 64-bit installer. The fucking Ubuntu site has the 32-bit installer linked to the 64-bit download. So I then go grab the 64-bit download, and it goes great. Then it blows up on the latest Nvidia drivers, and blows up my X install, so X is no longer working... or found in my path. So, 4th time's the charm, right? I go grab 15 instead of 14 LTS, and it installs like a fucking dream... should have done this in the first place. Needless to say, though, I've spent the day doing 4 separate installs of varying durations, and am now in the process of re-downloading probably 100GB of steam games, and setting up my development environment. And drinking. Heavily. Fucking computers... they're fun when they're working, but holy shit they suck balls when they're not. SO, moral of this story... if you're installing Ubuntu these days, double-check that you're downloading and using the correct image or shit can get fucked up.
Ok, so, while I was disassembling and reassembling my computer 328904703908 times to install the graphics card (Thanks for the advice everyone!) I decided to attach an SSD I had lying around. I hooked it up to a SATA port and power and, eventually, made it into the BIOS where the SSD was on the list of drives. Ok, good. But then when my computer boots into Windows (Windows 7 Ultimate) it shows the two regular HDs but doesn't show the SSD at all in the list of drives to navigate to. If it's in the BIOS list, how can I get it to show up in Windows?
Go to your start menu, it should say "computer" above where is says "control panel" right click and go to "manage". It should say storage on the left hand side and under that it should say "disk management". Check there, it might be that the drive is not formatted right for windows to see it.
I'd like to watch The Tim Ferriss Experiment, but it's unavailable to purchase in Canada. I'm happy to buy it, I just need to be in the US. Any ideas, anyone, on an easy way to hack this problem?
Not sure where you're trying to buy it from, but you can use a VPN to bypass most locale restrictions. "Hola" is free but can be slow: https://hola.org/ If you just want to use it as a one-time thing, that's your best bet. If you want something more full-blown, you can try Private Internet Access, which costs money: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/
Right, this is something you can use for a few minutes while you make your purchase, not designed for something to use long-term.
Pardon me if this is basic, but my laptop experiences a lot of lag and freezes when I visit script-heavy sites like facebook or ESPN.com and when I want to stream live sports through ESPN3. Oddly enough, youtube works fine for the most part. I've read that it could be my registry needs cleaning. Would anyone agree or is there something else I should be on the lookout for? Is something like Norton Utilities worth the money? I use Norton 360 and MalwareBytes which both say my laptop is relatively clean.
Dont waste money on Norton products. Use CCleaner, its a free one and will clean up your registry and your hard drive a bit more than doing a regular disk cleanup through the OS tool. Ninite.com is a good place to download decent utilities and must-have programs. Another thing you can check is your start-up programs that fire off when you boot up. Depending on your version of Windows - go to Start >> Run >> type in MSCONFIG There will be a start-up options tab. Just be careful with this so you dont screw up your computer. For any processes you are not sure about whether or not you can disable on startup, best thing to do would be to google it. Definitely dont disable things like Explorer.exe, svchost.exe, etc.
@shabamon Registry cleanings generally don't actually help anything. They certainly don't affect the moment-to-moment speed of your computer. I don't recommend registry cleaning unless you know what you're doing and how to recover things in case of a problem. I would actually try disabling Norton 360 entirely and seeing if a lot of your problems go away. Norton is a notorious resource hog. If disabling Norton fixes a lot of your problems, then you could look for a lower-profile virus scanner like Windows Defender. Disabling startup programs is generally good but better is to just start going through your applications and simply uninstalling the ones you don't need or use.
You could also try switching browsers to see if that will make a difference for you, and see what browser plug-ins you have installed and operational. And do you have a solid-state drive? Updating your drive to SSD will be the best ROI for laptop performance, and they're getting less and less expensive.
I was using Firefox but then switched to Chrome and the performance was much, much faster. I did get prompted to add the Norton plug-ins to Chrome, but I haven't done that. I'll see what happens when they're added.
My girlfriend and I just got a desktop system for home since both of our old laptops are shitting the bed and we have laptops to use from our jobs now. Anyways, what would be the best way to protect the thing from viruses/malware/etc. from the start? Neither of us are into downloading videos/games or checking out shady porn sites so that should be avoided, but are there any other preventative measures that would be good to handle while it's new?