Building a gaming system

[ElNono]

The Mini will likely get demoted to a small server box. It's actually still pretty darned fast with an SSD, even if it's SATA II. There's always a Asterisk/Hylafax/Contact/Calendar server to run in the office.

[TDMVPDPOY]

You want my old Athlon 64x2?

no

gave most of my old gear to friends who needed a computer...

[jeebus]

http://www.flappyplane.net/

lefty ElNono

[ElNono]

http://www.flappyplane.net/

lefty ElNono

crofl...

[baseline bum]

http://www.flappyplane.net/

lefty ElNono

What are they singing? It's catchy.

[jeebus]

What are they singing? It's catchy.

one of the most popular nasheeds imo. lefty's ringtone tbh

[313]

Why? That's what they did with the 670 and 680, rebranding them as the 760 and 770 with slight changes. I'd be shocked if next year's 70 series model isn't a rebranded 980 for about $400. I figure Nvidia will release a 960 Ti sometime this summer that will be a farther cut down GM 204 from chips that failed to make the cut for GTX 970s. It's not a bad time to buy a 970 right now for $300 with Witcher 3 and Arkham Knight thrown in for free. Well, unless you think AMD is going to hit it out of the park with their R9 380/380x cards. But I bet those will just be rebranded R9 290/290x just like the R9 280x was a rebranded HD 7970GHz, the R9 280 was a rebranded HD 7950, the R9 270 a rebranded HD 7870, and so on. I'm betting AMD's only interesting cards are going to be R9 390/390x.

I'm just always looking forward to new tech is all. I'll happily buy a rebranded 970 next fall, though. Or whenever they release new cards.

[baseline bum]

one of the most popular nasheeds imo. lefty's ringtone tbh

I'd get it, but you know it's going to be the only good song on the album.

[Cry Havoc]

My 760 still holding its own two years later

My dual 6950s are chugging along pretty well after over 4 years.

[Darius McCrary]

Cry havoc builds new computers every month then Jacks off to them

[Cry Havoc]

Cry havoc builds new computers every month then Jacks off to them

Only when the new GPUs come out.

[baseline bum]

Only when the new GPUs come out.

What do you think of the R9 390x costing $850 and only having 4GB VRAM?

[DJR210]

What do you think of the R9 390x costing $850 and only having 4GB VRAM?

Wow, what a piece of . I was unaware of that.

Cry Havoc

[Cry Havoc]

What do you think of the R9 390x costing $850 and only having 4GB VRAM?

Disappointing, but a bit early to say how it's going to stack up. If it stomps the an X and is cheaper, that's a pretty huge feather in the cap for AMD. I'm not sure this sudden race to X amount of RAM is the best way to squeeze out high performance in games right now.

I'll be interested in the 380x to see if it's performance is better than the 980. It's very likely that one or two of them will be going in the next computer I build, either the 980 or the 380x.

[ElNono]

That HBM design is pretty cool, tbh... in theory anyways. They really need to work on getting rid of the 4GB limit.

[baseline bum]

That HBM design is pretty cool, tbh... in theory anyways. They really need to work on getting rid of the 4GB limit.

Is VRAM bandwidth much of a bottleneck right now? Is HBM going to actually make a difference in GPUs this year?

[ElNono]

Is VRAM bandwidth much of a bottleneck right now? Is HBM going to actually make a difference in GPUs this year?

It generally always is, because when you look at the GPU frame processing, it's always reading and writing to frame/depth buffers. The more parallel cores you have, the more passes for extra quality, the more bandwidth you're gonna be eating. And even more so heading into 4k, with huge framebuffers. While modern GPUs have caches, they're really small (< 4MB), and mostly used for instructions, registers, constants and textures, or to pre-fetch certain memory area. Plus you can have caches with HBM too.

The theory behind HBM is cool also not just for bandwidth, but also for power efficiency and size. A much, much wider bus means you can clock it less often and still have the same or more bandwidth, reducing power usage and heat. The stacked memory also allows for more compact cards, less metal piping for heat dissipation, and should be cheaper too.

I'm saying in theory, because in practice a bunch of things could go wrong. The much bigger bus width means the interconnect has to be very close. There's a lot of precision electronic in that interposer layer. Would be interesting to see the yields they get on that.

AMD is only going to produce one high end card with it, so they're going to start slow on what's likely a low-demand product. But if it works, it should be pretty good. Although I'm sure NVidia is working on something similar.

[baseline bum]

It generally always is, because when you look at the GPU frame processing, it's always reading and writing to frame/depth buffers. The more parallel cores you have, the more passes for extra quality, the more bandwidth you're gonna be eating. And even more so heading into 4k, with huge framebuffers. While modern GPUs have caches, they're really small (< 4MB), and mostly used for instructions, registers, constants and textures, or to pre-fetch certain memory area. Plus you can have caches with HBM too.

The theory behind HBM is cool also not just for bandwidth, but also for power efficiency and size. A much, much wider bus means you can clock it less often and still have the same or more bandwidth, reducing power usage and heat. The stacked memory also allows for more compact cards, less metal piping for heat dissipation, and should be cheaper too.

I'm saying in theory, because in practice a bunch of things could go wrong. The much bigger bus width means the interconnect has to be very close. There's a lot of precision electronic in that interposer layer. Would be interesting to see the yields they get on that.

AMD is only going to produce one high end card with it, so they're going to start slow on what's likely a low-demand product. But if it works, it should be pretty good. Although I'm sure NVidia is working on something similar.

Nvidia is supposed to have HBM in their next generation, but not in Maxwell. So are you expecting big things from the AMD flagship then? Would you anticipate it demolishing what's out there right now? Not that I'd pay $850 for it, no way I want to pay early adopter prices for HBM.

[ElNono]

Nvidia is supposed to have HBM in their next generation, but not in Maxwell. So are you expecting big things from the AMD flagship then? Would you anticipate it demolishing what's out there right now? Not that I'd pay $850 for it, no way I want to pay early adopter prices for HBM.

I'm in wait and see mode. Intel is also moving to eDRAM as we discussed. It's obviously what everybody is moving towards to try to improve the equation of performance, power and thermal.

Until we get some benchmarks, it's all up in the air. It's clear though that adding more and more compute cores isn't going to scale if your memory access remains the same.

I don't think it's worth paying the premium right now, but it's interesting to see how everybody is tackling this.

[DJR210]

Damn, Razer is getting ing carried away now..

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...8807575&type=1

[baseline bum]

Damn, Razer is getting ing carried away now..

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?...8807575&type=1

Razer is for gays and twelve year olds

[DJR210]

Razer is for gays and twelve year olds

The Razer Nostromo is the , but other than that it's Logitech for me

[Cry Havoc]

I never thought I'd EVER be typing these words, but a friend of mine just picked this up:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16834259370

Obviously not for what newegg has it for.

But HP legitimately made an AWESOME looking laptop. I couldn't believe it. It's under 5 pounds and has a very good processor with a solid GPU. It looks great and the build quality seems to be very good. With the lights on it looks pretty flashy and with the lights off it looks like a very clean computer. all the way, HP should have advertised it more, because it's among the better laptop designs I've ever seen. Now, go ahead and laugh at me, but that's pretty ing impressive from a company that hasn't made anything of quality since their printers circa 2003.

[illusioNtEk]

Wow thanks for sharing this.. Looks like HP is back in the game.

I wonder if Best Buy will have a displayed model.

[Cry Havoc]

Wow thanks for sharing this.. Looks like HP is back in the game.

I wonder if Best Buy will have a displayed model.

It's ing awesome. Seriously. The keyboard is great, the laptop is insanely lightweight, and the screen is an IPS, which is BEAUTIFUL in person.