can someone recommend a great non-3d 120hz monitor?

11/9/2011 6:13:48 PM

price range and size would probably be a deterrminte factor... otherwise I can sell you this nice 13" 120hz monitor for 2 grand.

11/9/2011 10:24:32 PM

Pretty much all 120hz monitors are 3D. That's the main selling point. They haven't developed 120hz IPS monitors yet so they're all going to be TN panels. What size were you looking for? There's a few 22-24" ones on the market but only 2 27" ones.

11/9/2011 10:32:31 PM

^shhhh stop trying to kill my sale. lol

11/9/2011 11:15:19 PM

haha not trying to spend $2k, just reading about monitors bottlenecking SLI or Xfire output due to a low refresh rate. Didn't know if non-3d screens existed in the 24"-27" range for a reasonable price (no interest in 3d). Haven't looked at new monitors in ages so I'm out of the loop

11/9/2011 11:19:36 PM

3D tech, and 120 Hertz Input tech, are synonymous.

Get the Acer that Neo and I have, you won't be disappointed.

11/10/2011 8:37:54 AM

Aaah, kk, thanks for clearing that up, that's what I was unsure about.

11/10/2011 8:56:34 AM

Yeah the only real difference is whether they come with the 3D shutter glasses or not.

The Acer HN274h 27" one is the one we have. It's awesome.

The other 27" is the Samsung S27A950D. It's not officially supported by Nvidia for 3D, only ATI.

If you want something cheaper you can look in the 22-24" range.

11/10/2011 9:01:59 AM

Can anyone give me an idea of how much $$ I might save myself if I wait til Black Friday to buy all my components?

Do sites like NewEgg post up what deals they will offer ahead of time or do I just have to wait until Friday rolls around to see.

11/10/2011 11:54:22 AM

^^I thought y'all had the Acer GD235HZbid?

You'll probably save in the range of 10-15% over the course of the next few weeks. Online sales happen the entire month of November nowadays. Black Friday is just really for retail stores. If you shop on Black Friday and Cyber Monday you might be able to save 20% on your components, but computer hardware typically isn't discounted more than 20% that I've seen, unless it's really out-of-date, cheap quality, or cheap to manufacture (like USB drives and crap).

[Edited on November 10, 2011 at 12:11 PM. Reason : .]

11/10/2011 12:10:20 PM

No we have the Acer HN274h 27". The GD235 is too small.

11/10/2011 12:16:55 PM

my microsoft wireless entertainment desktop 7000 just died...it's within warranty and since they don't make it anymore, microsoft is going to cut me a check for the cost

anyway, what should i replace it with? bluetooth is my preference...and i'd prefer not to spend more than the $90 i'm getting back from them

11/10/2011 1:00:23 PM

I love the Logitech K800 keyboard. Love it. Paired with a Razer Mamba.

11/10/2011 3:35:51 PM

i should probably note that this will be used for gaming...from my gaming chair...in my living room, on my TV via the HTPC

no more than 10 feet between the keyboard/mouse and transceiver

11/10/2011 4:06:12 PM

If it's for gaming get the new wireless Razer Mamba. Keyboard is more preference. I've never used a gaming keyboard so I couldn't really tell ya where to start there. The Logitech K800 has incredible battery life, east to type on, and lights up so I can see it when i'm plastered.

-The das keyboard is also great but loud.

[Edited on November 10, 2011 at 4:29 PM. Reason : s]

11/10/2011 4:28:14 PM

g15. well worth the wires. I prefer 4 button wired mice too.

11/10/2011 8:31:25 PM

I second the comment about the Logitech K800 keyboard -- i love mine. I'm still using the original Logitech MX Laser circa 2004ish -- still works great!

11/10/2011 10:09:57 PM

Haha I have that mouse too. Use it at work. Finally upgraded about 4 months ago to the Mamba. I'm really missing the battery life on the Logitech even after 5 years but the DPI/sensitivity is worth it on the Razer.

11/10/2011 10:17:48 PM

Case: Corsair Carbide 400R ($99.99)
Mobo: Asus P8Z68-V Pro ($209)
GPU: Sapphire 100312-L Raedon HD 6950 ($264)
PSU: Antec HCG-750 ($99.99)
CPU: Intel i7-2600K ($319)
RAM: Corsair Vengeance 16Gb 4x4Gb ($97.99)
SSD: Intel 320 Series 40Gb SATA II ($97.99)
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm 6Gb/s ($149)
Monitor: Asus VE278Q 27" HD ($329)
OS: Windows 7 Pro x64 ($139.99)

Total: ~$1800

These are NewEgg prices. Anyone have suggestions about tweaking this?

My longterm plans are to get a second Sapphire, and get the 3D Acer monitor Neo and Stim have to use as my primary. I'll overclock this as well, but probably not push it too much.

11/11/2011 8:06:24 AM

that SSD is junk and there's better prices to be had on the ram. check out globalcomputer.com (compusa/tigerdirect with no tax for nc residents) for your 6950. I got a diamond reference board that unlocks for $260, you can get a regular xfx with lifetime warranty for $240 with deus ex 3, dirt 3, and shogun something or other. I can't attest to that monitor but if it's a TN panel, for ~$60 more you could 3x TN 24" 1080p LCDs and you've already selected a card that can run all 3.
I would look for a 128gb sata3 SSD, somewhere over 400MB/s read/write and at least 300MB/s sustained

actually, buy this http://slickdeals.net/forums/showthread.php?t=3532652 and add a ssd and more ram. if you want to upgrade you could crossfire that card with another one or just upgrade.

3 of these http://www.buy.com/prod/viewsonic-va2448m-led-24-23-6-viewable-led-backlit-lcd-monitor-10-000/219837058.html



[Edited on November 11, 2011 at 8:37 AM. Reason : having played a lot 3d setups at PAX the last 2 years, it sucked balls outside driving games imo]

11/11/2011 8:24:26 AM

Quote :

"HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm 6Gb/s ($149)"

if you're getting an SSD, why would you buy this particular drive? speed shouldn't be a priority, but even if it is, i have (2) 3TB 7200rpm 6Gb/s hitachis that likely aren't much slower and were only $80/each (though i admit i'm currently cursing windows 7 and the drives alternately trying to figure out why the GPT drives keep reverting back to RAW)

11/11/2011 9:47:37 AM

No real reason, just liked my last Seagate, but if a cheaper better option is around I'll go for it.

I figured I'd get the SSD for the SRT, and use a partitioned HDD for storage. I don't really plan on needing TOO much space.

11/11/2011 9:57:08 AM

I'd like to point out that with a quad core phenom 2, 5hdd's including 2 raptors, a dvdrw, an old school audigy platinum with powered drivebay, and a giant 6950 reference, I'm only using a 500w cooler master psu and am rock stable. no overclocks, though

11/15/2011 8:46:56 PM

you can get 100gb ssd's for the same price as that shitty 40gb intel shit. Plus you can find latest gen sata3 ssd drives cheaper then that. I wouldn't spend more than $1.5 per GB for latest gen drives or $1 per GB for slow ssd shits.

^6950's aren't exactly power hogs... Shit they use less power than the 8800 gtx's back in the day. Shit I think my 8800 gts uses more power than one of those.

11/15/2011 8:52:25 PM

Dude, you can run an i5-2500K, 16GB memory, 4HDD's and a GTX 570 on a 500W PSU... people just don't know their shit.

11/15/2011 10:20:51 PM

in this thread and on several forums I see people grabbing 600, 700, 850w psus to run a single card. I honestly don't know what to attribute to people being misinformed, as it's not like there's a lot PSU advertising

11/16/2011 1:38:53 AM

Most people who get beefy psu's either got for these purposes:
1) On sale price, as cheap or cheaper than lower wattage psu
2) Future upgrade to add a 2nd gpu

And I agree, getting a power psu when you know you aren't going to get a 2nd gpu down the road is a waste of money considering you can find a decent 500w psu for like $30-40 easily. Shit I got my ocz 700w last year for 40 AR.

@Sayer: The Antec HCG 750 is a waste of money for $100. The EarthWatts 750 has been seen for half that and is the same product. I wouldn't spend anything more than $70 on a 750, specially when Black Friday is just right around the corner. I ditch the i7 2600k and go with the i5 2500k, you really don't need the 4 extra logic cores unless you plan on doing some intense cpu calcs for something like content creation. Save the $100.

I'd also shop around on the mobo, plenty of great offerings from Asus, Asrock, MSi and Gigabyte that are around the $120-160 range that'll fit your build just as good with the same specs. I'd look at the Corsair Series 3 ssd, although they are a bit pricey for regular price, but I'd say ditch the ssd plans till you find them on sale. No need for them really unless you want the gloat factor. Its nice to have, but honestly, you can be fine without one.

As for the regular hard drive, if you can get by with some hard drive you have now that you can harvest from an old system, its stupid retarded to spend $150 on a 1tb drive right now considering the prices are inflated due to the floods in Thailand. Prices will probably start to normalize in 3 months or so, but they won't get back down for atleast 6-12 months of what industry experts have said. I'd keep an eye on black friday for a drive, but its doubtful that we'd see any good sale price on drives for a while. Remember, those 1tb drives used to go for $50.

I'd also throw in the cheap Cooler Master 212+ cpu cooler for $25. its a nice and a great value.

11/16/2011 2:51:52 AM

Thnx for the advice guys

I've been trying to read up and figure out the difference b/t the i5/i7, and I was beginning to lean towards the i5. The extra $100 didn't seem to make sense.

Good call on the motherboard too, Amazon has it for $130.

11/16/2011 8:09:19 AM

Unless you are going SLI/Crossfire you should buy a PSU that meets your needs, which most new builds under full load won't peak over 400W, which is about 4 amps.

[Edited on November 16, 2011 at 8:33 AM. Reason : -]

11/16/2011 8:12:32 AM

^Yeah will be going SLI/Xfire. I'm going to wait and get the second card a little later.

11/16/2011 1:24:05 PM

^^please read #1 reason

Quote :

"On sale price, as cheap or cheaper than lower wattage psu"

If you shop around, you can find 600-750w power supplies for $50 or less AR,AC; specially since black friday is around the corner. It's always better to have more power and not need it than need it down the road and not have it. Even if its just a few extra bucks between a 500 and a 750, I'd go with a 750. Less stress overall and more headroom.

^^^ the i5 2500k is basically the same chip as the 2600k but without HT. It'll still perform about the same as the 2600k is most programs; very few apps take advantage of more than 2 or 4 cores anyhow, besides content creation or pro/business apps.

As for the mobo, I'd look at the Asrock Extreme3 Gen3 board. Its $115 on newegg AR and comes with a shit ton of features, plus it has v3.0 pcie slots and supports ivy bridge.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813157271

[Edited on November 16, 2011 at 1:32 PM. Reason : ]

11/16/2011 1:32:00 PM

Debating between a 1200 watt and 1500 at the moment. Hmmmm.

Quote :

"very few apps take advantage of more than 2 or 4 cores anyhow, besides content creation or pro/business apps."

I'm so glad I have 8. Half the stuff I use utilizes all of them. I've even seen 5-6 cores in games. I don't know what the deal is there. I guess the game is running plus something else in the background.

V yup. For 3 1200 is recommended but 1500 would give me 80%+ all the time.

[Edited on November 16, 2011 at 1:34 PM. Reason : s]

11/16/2011 1:32:13 PM

why would you need that much power? you plan on running triple or quad sli?

11/16/2011 1:33:05 PM

This is my buddy's system


he rocks 4x 480's with a 980x with everything LC. He runs a 1200w psu for just the cards and an 850 for everything else in a custom mountain mod's case. Another one in our clan runs a similar system but with 3x 580's although he doesn't pull the same amount of power.

11/16/2011 1:41:59 PM

That's a waste with only 1.5GB per card on the 480's (what are the 580's?). I assume he's doing Nvidia surround? You'd hit the ram limit on most of the newer games in surround. People easily hit 2GB+ with Nvidia surround. With only 1.5GB it would be painful.

11/16/2011 2:01:11 PM

he built this last year when the 480's were new... So its a bit dated right now, still plays fine. He won't upgrade till the next gen stuff comes out. He was going to do 580's but it just didn't prove to be that much better for the cost.

And the 3gb 580 has only recently come out at the last leg of its product line. I'm just surprised we haven't seen a lot of other cards dishing out higher vram on mid range cards, like a 2gb 560 or a 3gb 570. It's not like those chips are insanely expensive.

11/16/2011 2:09:46 PM

yeah 2-3GB 560/570s would be nice.

So something else I noticed. Pretty obvious but wanted to point it out. VRAM includes everything your system is running. So if you have a few videos up, browser, etc that's counting against your VRAM. So if you're getting close to the limit just close everything else out. Pretty obvious but I didn't really think about it until recently.

[Edited on November 16, 2011 at 2:24 PM. Reason : s]

11/16/2011 2:23:35 PM

Quote :

"It's always better to have more power and not need it than need it down the road and not have it. Even if its just a few extra bucks between a 500 and a 750, I'd go with a 750. Less stress overall and more headroom"

That's not true. Most PSU's are rated for 80% efficiency when they're passed 50% utilization, some 75+% utilization. If you aren't loading your PSU you generally aren't running it efficiently.

11/16/2011 8:35:33 PM

do you even understand the 80+ categories? this isn't 5 years ago, its separated into bronze, silver, gold and platinum. They will tell you exactly how well they perform at different loads. 80+ should have 80% or better at 20-100% load. The rest is various steps better (82, 85, 87, 90).

I have 80+ gold so it'll hit at least 87% between 20-100% with 50% having 90% (mine actually performs better than this but doesn't get the titanium rating).

It also depends on what psu you have, some actually run pretty damn efficient at low wattage even at lower 80+ ratings (some close to 92%+ @20% load on bronze), but generally at about 75% load tends to be the most efficient. Heat plays a big factor in how efficient psu will run. That's why they usually test them in hot boxes with high humidity for these ratings so in most cases, you will see better than rated efficiencies.

11/16/2011 9:11:00 PM

^

11/17/2011 11:01:09 AM

Actually this is a pretty good read, not terribly technical, but will explain it to people new to building computers....
http://www.maximumpc.com/article/features/how_pick_right_power_supply?page=0,0

11/17/2011 12:43:26 PM

So I have SLI now....

11/17/2011 4:58:20 PM

God dammit Stimwalt. Just had to one up me. How's that 120fps?

11/17/2011 5:05:36 PM

might keep the third 570 for triple sli...

11/17/2011 5:10:47 PM

i7 2600k 3.4 OC 4.2 Processor
H80 CPU Liquid Cooler
ASUS Rampage IV Extreme Mobo
16GB DDR3 Corsair Vengeance RAM
2x MSI TFIII GTX 580 3GB Lighting Xtreme in SLI OC Video Cards
Vertex 3 OCX Sata III 120GB SSD
CoolerMaster Silent Pro Gold 1200W
Acer HN274H 120 Hertz Input 3D Monitor
Corsair 400R with 10x 120mm fans

Code Name = Lightning

11/17/2011 6:30:40 PM

nothing but the best, i like it!

11/17/2011 7:52:39 PM

Just mounted my Acer. Desk has a little more room now. Both Dells still have their stands. Triple monitor VESA stands are $$$. I might eventually just get 3 full motion wall mounts.

11/19/2011 11:53:29 AM

Quote :

"I'd also throw in the cheap Cooler Master 212+ cpu cooler for $25. its a nice and a great value"

Will this fit in a Corsair Carbide 400R?

11/20/2011 1:12:31 PM

it should, the dimensions seem wide enough

11/20/2011 2:46:31 PM

gg AMD. Epic fail.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/11/bulldozer-server-benchmarks-are-here-and-theyre-a-catastrophe.ars

Quote :

"The desktop Bulldozer benchmarks were a horror show performance for AMD. The newest and greatest architecture often failed to beat its predecessor, let alone the Intel competition. There were no such disasters when looking at server workloads. Much as expected, thread-heavy server workloads fare a lot better, with Interlagos matching or beating Magny-Cours almost across the board (though AnandTech did find a couple of exceptions). However, the results fall far short of a resounding success for AMD. The results are broadly split between "tied with Opteron 6100" and "33 percent or less faster than Opteron 6100." For a processor with 33 percent more cores, running highly scalable multithreaded workloads, that's a poor show. Best-case, AMD has stood still in terms of per-thread performance. Worst case, the Bulldozer architecture is so much slower than AMD's old design that the new design needs four more threads just to match the old design. AMD compromised single-threaded performance in order to allow Bulldozer to run more threads concurrently, and that trade-off simply hasn't been worth it."

Quote :

"The situation up against Intel is even more dire. In AnandTech's benchmarks, the 6200 failed to beat Intel's Xeon processors, in spite of Intel's core and thread deficit. In others, 6200 pulled ahead, with a lead topping out at about 30 percent. The Xeons used for comparison are Westmere EP-based units; in one form or another, they've been on the market for about 18 months now. They will soon be replaced by the Sandy Bridge-E Xeon E5 2600 series. The Sandy Bridge cores in these processors are faster than those in Westmere EP, and the processors will have two cores and four threads more than Westmere EP. In massively multithreaded workloads, these processors will have 33 percent more cores, and an even bigger performance increase."

Quote :

"After the poor desktop performance, the possibility still existed that the Bulldozer architecture would start to make sense once we could see the server performance. Now the benchmarks have arrived, AMD's perseverance with Bulldozer is bordering on the incomprehensible. There's just no upside to the decisions AMD has made. All of which raises a question: why did AMD go this route? The company must have known about the weak single-threaded performance and the detrimental effect this would have in real-world applications long before the product actually shipped, so why stick with it? Perhaps AMD's anticipation of high clock speeds caused the company to stick with the design, and there's still a possibility that it might one day attain those clock speeds—but we've seen AMD's arch-competitor, Intel, make a similar gamble with the Pentium 4, and for Intel, it never really paid off. AMD is boasting that Opteron 6200 is the "first and only" 16-core x86 processor on the market. Not only is this not really true (equating threads and cores is playing fast and loose with the truth), it just doesn't matter. In its effort to add all those "cores," performance has been severely compromised. AMD faces an uphill struggle just to compete with its own old chips—let alone with Intel."

[Edited on November 22, 2011 at 11:53 AM. Reason : /]

11/22/2011 11:47:03 AM