The "New Toys" Thread



Old on left, new on right.

Benchmarks:

 
I have a 960 in my HTPC, fantastic little card for the price and power usage. Easily handles everything I can throw at it.
 
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JakeRadden said:
I have a 960 in my HTPC, fantastic little card for the price and power usage. Easily handles everything I can throw at it.
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That's awesome man! Glad to have the vote of confidence, so far it's been a great little card. I needed it for GTA V, since I'm thinking of getting it, and I can keep myself occupied otherwise with other top titles at high/ultra settings.

I got the card through microcenter and apparently they have a 2 year return policy, where you can get the full refund on the card no questions asked. Which means 2 years down the road, I can put $200 towards a higher end card by trading in this card, which is NOICE.
 
LP said:
That's awesome man! Glad to have the vote of confidence, so far it's been a great little card. I needed it for GTA V, since I'm thinking of getting it, and I can keep myself occupied otherwise with other top titles at high/ultra settings.

I got the card through microcenter and apparently they have a 2 year return policy, where you can get the full refund on the card no questions asked. Which means 2 years down the road, I can put $200 towards a higher end card by trading in this card, which is NOICE.
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I have that plan on all of my cards. I've rolled the same $1000 or so from 2 7970s to 2 780s to 2 290Xs. I'll be rolling it to 2 390Xs when they get released.

Also my understanding of the plan is that, within the first 12 months its no questions asked. In the 2nd year they actually test the card. So I end up doing it every 11 months. Its about $70 for the plan on each card, but totally worth it.
 
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$100 on Newegg right now.
 
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Needed a decent headset for WoW since the one I had previously was ancient, had terrible mic quality, and hurt my head. This was ~$70 on Amazon and has quite good reviews so we'll see how it goes.
 
did you get the old version or new version ?
 
Just sent some Euros in payment for one of these:

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With express shipping it should be here before the Balkan meet.
 
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After reading on here how ridiculously cheap they could be had, I went on eBay and got myself a xiaomi miband for like 17?.

At that price, I don't care oif it doesn't do anything for me or I hate it or whatever. It arrived today and I can comfortably wear it, that's a good start. Also it counts steps, pairs with the app / my phone, and syncing takes less than 5 seconds. I am impressed already :D
 
An Asus VS247 23.6" Monitor, to replace one of my old 19" beasties, still keeping one on the side for emails. I was spoilt by having twin 22" Dells at work, so my screen at home felt tiny. Spotted this in Costco today for ?105 and snapped one up. If I had the desk space, I'd be tempted for another...

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Not exactly a brand new purchase because it's 2 months old next week, but I never got around to posting this until now. My job is taking me places these days so I had to face the fact I need a mobile gaming machine to feed my PC gaming habit while I'm away from my "big" PC.

My purchasing criteria:
  1. Reasonably priced
  2. Doesn't look like a spaceship
  3. Large 1080p display, preferably IPS
  4. Sufficient cooling to keep it from throttling but not too noisy

I ended up getting an Asus G751JY which ticks all of those boxes.



It's a 17.3" machine with an LED IPS display. Bulky, very thick and heavy chassis with hardcore cooling that remains surprisingly silent even when gaming at full stress.

How big exactly is a 17.3" laptop, you ask? Well, here it is next to my previous work laptop, a 14.1" ThinkPad, and an iPad 3:



The display in the background is a 55 incher. So in conclusion the 17.3" is large-ish but not mindblowingly big. As a desktop replacement on the go, a mobile gaming PC, it's even a bit small. It's "enough", nothing more.

It has a very deep chassis. Asus is working around that fact by moving the display inward and letting the rest of the chassis stretch out in the background. That is quite clever:



It of course weighs a lot, 5.3 kg to be exact.

So the specs are:
  • Intel Haswell i7 4710HQ (so no iGPU)
  • 8 gigs DDR3 (with two free upgrade slots)
  • NV GTX 980M
  • OCZ Vertex 4, 256GB SSD (from my previous desktop PC - the laptop came from the factory with a 1TB spinning drive which I removed instantly)
  • 17.3" 1080p 75Hz LED-IPS display with G-sync
  • Optical drive, bunch of USB 3's, etc. But only mini-DP, no full size DP! :(
  • W 8.1 64bit

Commissioning was a bitch. First I received a broken machine, with a whiny cooling fan and a terrible display panel (extremely bad light bleed). That one went back and this machine seems to be better and OK. Then I had to figure out how to install the Windows instance on the SSD. The machine ships without any installation media or a license key, and the partitioning of the HDD the machine ships with makes no sense at all. Long story short the solution was to clone the HDD to the SSD, drop a couple of partitions and resize the rest to fill the SSD. Thankfully the amount of bloatware is limited to <10 apps and they were easy to get rid of.

The machine runs one of its fans constantly even when idling on the desktop, although it's a quiet fan. The battery lasts a maximum of 3 hours with light use.

The chassis materials feel nice and solid although it's all plastic. They keyboard feels nice and it has no stupid layout quirks. The keyboard is backlit in red and the ROG logo on the lid also lights up in red. The touchpad is ok. Opening and closing the lid feels soft and solid. The headphone port is "okay" quality and drives my BeyerDynamic DT770's without any interference or anything like that.

The performance is awesome for a baggable machine. It scores 8520 in 3DMark Fire Strike Standard which is 200 points better than my old desktop PC which was rocking a desktop GTX 980 overclocked. (My current desktop PC scores 21 000 in that test.)
This laptop runs everything I've thrown at it, maxed out, at 1080p, including Dragon Age Inquisition and GTA V, at a minimum of 45fps. The only complaint I have is that the current NV drivers don't have G-sync enabled on laptops yet, at least not this one. But it has been verified to work on leaked drivers, at 100Hz no less.

Anyway, I'm happy with the machine despite it being 5 months old at the time of purchase. It's 500? cheaper than a comparable MSI and 1000? cheaper than a GIGABYTE, and considering that, it's an awesome machine. There are not so many options with the GTX 980M GPU.
 
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My idea of a normal-sized laptop is a 13 inch Macbook Air, so that thing looks humongous to me. :lol: I have a feeling it runs games better than my laptop though.
 
Perc said:
My idea of a normal-sized laptop is a 13 inch Macbook Air, so that thing looks humongous to me. :lol:
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i'm with you on that... i was fairly annoyed when they gave me a 15" laptop at work because i felt it was too big, even if most of the time it sits in its dock in the office.
 
I guess portable means different things for different people... My wife's 17" laptop is always connected and rarely moved, and I'm even annoyed at my 10" iPad since my old tablet was 8" and much more portable
 
Yeah, to me portable means basically nothing.

I said mobile gaming machine on purpose. The point of it is to sit on the hotel room table or whatever, plugged in, for gaming, but to get there a lot easier than an actual PC - thus mobile.

One of my consultants at work uses an MSI GT-series 17-incher as a work laptop. I couldn't imagine doing that. A gaming machine in this class is way too heavy if the work involves any meetings at all.

I only need a proper laptop at work. For that I have a 14" HP EliteBook, a very light machine. At home I don't need a laptop for anything.
 
:drool:
 
JakeRadden's post over in Tech Thoughts reminded me I still haven't posted my shiniest toy (cause it has the most reflective metal surface area...): an old HP DL380 G6



Sorry for not doing my usual provide a picture of mine.. I just can't be arsed to move all the cabling from my switch out of the way to take a decent picture.

The good specs:

Dual 750W hot-swap PSUs
8x4GiB (32GiB) quad-ranked 1333MHz ECC DDR3 RDIMMs

The hilarious specs:
4x 73GB, 15k rpm harddrives
Empty internal SDcard slot (eventually I'll put my hypervisor there...)
Empty internal USB2 port (don't think I'll ever use this one... my usual USB drive, the SanDisk Extreme USB3 is too tall to fit in)
Optical drive (instead of 8 more 15mm 2.5" bays)

The sad specs:
Single Intel Xeon E5506 (Nehalem, 4cores, no HT, 2.13GHz, RAM limited to 800MHz)
4 blank (rather than full) HDD/SSD carriers.

Planned upgrades:

Dual Intel Xeon X5675 or better CPUs
16GiB more RAM, for a total of 48GiB with 24GiB per CPU
HBA/RAID card flashed to IT mode with external ports (ideally an LSI SAS9206-16E) to attach to massive external JBOD boxes
EDIT: Rails. At some point I'm gonna need to rack it into a rack....

Currently runs: my router (OPNsense ftw), various VMs I bring up and down as needed for studies and messing around. Yesyes, it's a tad overkill...
 
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Take a peek at a Xeon L5632. They're cheap, 6c with HT, 2.13ghz. Great cheap 12c server.

I've been looking at getting a DL380 G6 with 2x of those.
 
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