turn it off and on again

[Morkula]

Just curious, why not consider building a desktop for gaming and just buying a cheaper laptop for your portable needs? I used to go the route of using a high-powered "gaming" laptop, but the battery life often sucks, they're not upgradeable, build quality is usually questionable, they're usually heavy, and the price-performance ratio is much better with the desktop/cheaper laptop route. A good desktop would probably cost you $900-1,000 and it would meet or beat that laptop, and be upgradeable to boot, and then you could get a cheap $400 or so laptop as a side device. A laptop's life expectancy is way shorter than that of a desktop as well.

Unless you just flat out don't have room for a desktop or it's not feasible, I'd honestly suggest going that route.

 

[Legendary Silke]

Once you have a decent enough desktop, though, you start to not want laptops unless you really need it. :)

Finally... after upgrading my desktop's cooling from whatever it came with, my computer isn't a mini-sauna anymore while playing games. :) This should be great for the longevity of the components within the case. It was lacking an intake fan, and could use one more exhaust fan, while the Intel stock cooler was leaving a lot to be desired.

One Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO and two Corsair AF120 Performance Edition fans later, well, it was a major improvement in terms of airflow and cooling. :D

Proper airflow is really important when it comes to desktops. I guess that if possible, get at least one intake and one exhaust, and probably also never let the amount of intakes exceed the amount of exhausts.

 

[Meganium]

I remember playing Team Fortress 2 on my current laptop at lower settings and it was smooth. Although I'm not sure how it'd be now considering I haven't done that in a while. Maybe I should install a game or two from Steam onto my laptop to find out.. hmm.

That's exactly what I did a couple days ago when I tried out my new Steam games. All I needed to do was to enable DirectPlay, install the latest version of my graphics drivers, lower the graphics settings, and badabing...I was able to play a great TF2 match with my boyfriend and his clan.

The games don't run the same way as my desktop, which is what I miss the most about. But at least I can still actually play them and not fry my laptop.

 

[Legendary Silke]

With most of the desktop Skylake Pentiums coming with the Intel HD Graphics 530 processor graphics, things just got quite a lot rosier in terms of gaming on the cheap on Intel platforms. No longer do you have to deal with efficiency or CPU power issues when intending to maximize graphics grunt on a new PC.

Though... this does mean AMD really needs to hit a home run with their next-generation CPU architecture, Zen, since their APUs are now pretty much worthless if the Pentiums are released.

 

[Centipede Chan]

2 things I have to say.

1.) On topic stuff.
So I am going to try to get a job in November, and save up to build my own computer. Nothing too fancy, but enough to game much better than this Walmart crap I have. HERE is what I will be using as my guide. Now my friends said to not go with the primary and secondary storage they recommend, but to use THIS instead for storage.

Now my question is how well would I be able to game on that? My main goal is hopefully to be able to Play Skyrim, Saint's Row 3, and Sonic Generations, which are currently my most demanding games that I can hardly play without needing to lower things so much. Oh and Mass Effect, and Dead Space 2. I plan on getting some equal or almost equal games that require much better than what I have.

2. ) the irrelevant
So I want to get acquainted with C# for the Unity engine. What are some of the best websites and such I could use to learn about it?

 

[Tsutarja]

I've honestly considered switching full-time to SSDs. My 500GB/750GB hard drives are barely at 25% full, so I don't see why I should worry about space when a 256GB SDD could probably suffice.

 

[Legendary Silke]

2 things I have to say.

1.) On topic stuff.
So I am going to try to get a job in November, and save up to build my own computer. Nothing too fancy, but enough to game much better than this Walmart crap I have. HERE is what I will be using as my guide. Now my friends said to not go with the primary and secondary storage they recommend, but to use THIS instead for storage.

Now my question is how well would I be able to game on that? My main goal is hopefully to be able to Play Skyrim, Saint's Row 3, and Sonic Generations, which are currently my most demanding games that I can hardly play without needing to lower things so much. Oh and Mass Effect, and Dead Space 2. I plan on getting some equal or almost equal games that require much better than what I have.

Try this as your starting point. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/cgNpP6

I have made the CPU the bare minimum to get by, though. Don't underestimate today's Pentiums, since they pull punches well above their weight. The GTX 950 should run everything happily at medium settings while maintaining high frame rates and consistency at 1080p, and if your display resolution is lower, you can even go higher. (It's the replacement for the 750 Ti, which is even cheaper, but it's worse.)

Hopefully this is more than enough for your needs. What's your budget, and do you already have a monitor, keyboard, mouse, and optionally speakers?

If you prefer to roll your own, try not to get an AMD CPU unless you really can't afford a separate video card. You probably should also prefer going NVIDIA as their drivers are much more efficient when paired with weak CPUs.

Might also want to tell me what you have right now.

EDIT: This is also a viable build, if budget is a serious concern. Should be quite a bit cheaper, and won't have any games refusing to start, but the single-threaded performance and efficiency are a concern. Won't be as upgradeable, either. Also, no front panel USB3.

And finally, this would be what you'd be able to get for around $660 without OS ($746 with). This is based on the pricing info of the cheapest set the guide has listed as the budget target. You can opt for an i3, but there's not enough cash to upgrade to a 970 even after the downgrade.

 

[Legendary Silke]

2 TB, storage-focused HDDs seem like... well, not exactly looking at performance HDDs seeing as we're talking about HDDs that are for backup data only...

Makes me wonder who makes the best 2 TB storage HDDs (so no 7200 RPM drives unless there's no other choice).

 

[Tsutarja]

So I'm really thinking of getting a Moto G real soon, and definitely probably before Christmas. Since I'm not one to change phones often (like others), I wonder how weird it'd feel transitioning from a Windows Phone to an Android phone.

 

[countryemo]

I decided to do a speedtest because our WiFi has been pretty iffy recently. I couldn't even get the webpage to fully load.. its still selecting the best server for the past 2 minutes or so. Videos are to watch, especially at 720p, webpages are slow to load. BBCA released the Series 9 premiere of Doctor Who on Youtube, I heard there was some difference in speed/frames. The whole day I got 5 minutes through..

 

[Legendary Silke]

So some further research revealed that our ISP had some infrastructure upgrades, which meant that they became the Oprah of internet speeds - all their tiers got speed upgrades. Permanent ones. And the prices aren't changing. They now start as low as 50Mbps and go up to 400!

Oh my!

If only they could do the same to us! I'm still stuck with a 4 Mbps connection...

On another related topic, I've added 1.5 TB of storage to my desktop, but that's via old HDDs that happen to still be working. I'd prefer to use two new 2TB drives...

 

[Tsutarja]

And in other news today, Skype dun goofed!

 

[Legendary Silke]

*ponders about how much Western Digital, HGST, or Toshiba HDD he can get after selling two 1TB externals, a 1TB laptop drive, and a 500 GB 2010 Caviar Blue, in addition to an old 1080p CCFL-based LCD monitor*

 

[countryemo]

Well my Wifi isn't total crap right now, so I decided to a speedtest since I was able to now.

At-least I can upload, haha.

We pay for Comcast's best package they have, I guess that does not transfer to WiFi :/

 

[countryemo]

Well I'm not too far from it but I guess it does pass through a semi-wall, and the fireplace (brick) too. Though its connected to the Wifi Extender and thats in the same room. Wifi in my room and the room across is good enough to watch netflix for the most part, youtube seems to take more internet and buffer, even closer to the extender.

 

[Tsutarja]

Have you tried using wifi without the extender? I've heard that although they boost wifi signal, they can also reduce speed as well.

 

[countryemo]

Decided to two test... know what, I think I'm going to test now on how it acts during usuage, not just going speedtest. Already clicked a video, switched to 720p and seems to be loading better, or well keeping up with the player better.

 

[Tsutarja]

Sometimes I forget how awesome it is to have dual monitors.

 

[Tsutarja]

I've been doing that a lot as of late ever since getting that HP monitor over the summer, and when I take my laptop to school and have to end up ditching the dual-monitor experience, it just feels so weird and foreign to me because everything is crammed into one screen instead of being able to jump between screens and have stuff on both of them.

There's one computer in the open computer lab at my college with dual monitors connected, and I wish all of them were that way! It's definitely great having PC open on one monitor and Facebook on the other for sure :P

 

[Legendary Silke]

So the other day at work, I was talking with a friend of mine who was working on a project with another co-worker, and he asked me for advice. He's working on turning a ton of small parts that are really disorganized into a grid-based system with coordinates, and he was poking at a python dictionary-based application to find parts, in accordance with their SKUs, in this grid-based system. However, I took a peek and found that all that's installed is the .NET framework, and he asked me to see if I could write out a program to search by SKUs or give information about a product at a given set of coordinates.

I hope this goes well.

So, basically, .NET Framework-only? Or am I misunderstanding things?

I wish I could afford to go liquid with CPU cooling. :P