typographie

CPUs don't "support" DirectX. All you need is a video card with DX12 support, Windows 10, and an up-to-date video card driver.

Oh… you'll also need a game that actually uses DirectX 12.

You should have a retail copy, not an OEM copy (if you bought it).

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16832416806

Both OEM and Retail (boxed) copies are available for purchase. OEM's a bit cheaper, so a lot of people go with that. In retrospect, I'd rather I spent the extra ~$20 five years ago.

This is a bit convoluted, I'll do my best…

To start off, I have an older system (listed in my profile) running an OEM copy of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit. I plan to get a new Z170 board with Skylake CPU when they are released. I'm aware that the OEM license is registered to my motherboard, but from my research it sounds like there's a good chance I can get that moved to a new motherboard by calling Microsoft's phone activation line.

My complication, though, is Windows 10. I could be ready to install Windows 10 as early as this evening. I know this is still a bit speculative at this point, but does anyone have any insight on whether or not upgrading to Windows 10 will make it harder (or somehow easier, maybe) to convince Microsoft to let me reuse my OEM license on a new board? Should I wait until I have my Skylake system to upgrade to 10, or will it not matter?

Another issue is that I have in my possession a product key to upgrade to Windows 8.1 Pro. Presumably if I used that, I would get the upgrade to 10 Pro. It's not a huge deal, but it would be convenient to be able to use it if I can. But again, will that screw up my ability to move the OEM license?

Battlefield is an excellent game, no?

To people who like it's style of competitive FPS, yes. I can certainly understand why someone with the CS:GO mindset and play style doesn't care for Battlefield, though.

We don't know. Wait for product reviews, don't go by brand name.

I just purchased a gtx 970 and already knew about the 3.5GB of vram,is this really a issue or bottleneck?

I don't think it's ever been proven to be an "issue" at 2160p, for that matter.

Though by issue in this context, I mean a situation that is unplayable because of the 3.5/0.5 GB VRAM partition, that otherwise would have been playable if all of the VRAM ran at the same speed. Obviously it's easy to find games/settings that are unplayable at that resolution on the 970.

Yeah, and the standard is 1440p=2k. The spec isn't changing. Everyone accepts it, even professionals.

Very rarely do I hear professionals use the term 2K to describe any resolution. It's very careless terminology. Even 4K isn't really "correct."

You kind of have to feel around blindly for it if you don't know what you're looking for, and the Gaming 3 only has a single PCIe x16 slot so looking at your other slots won't help. If you're having trouble finding the release lever with the card now covering it, find a photo of the board (like this one) that shows it.

Jesus, what's with this forum's logic today?

"HOW DARE MICROSOFT FORCE ME TO PATCH ZERO-DAY EXPLOITS, UNACCEPTABLE, I WANT TO PERSONALLY DECIDE WHEN I FIX MY SECURITY HOLES"

I get the point, but that might be a sliiiiight mischaracterization. I just don't want it eating up my download bandwidth without my approval because, chances are, it will be when I'm trying to use that bandwidth for something else. I usually still install my updates the day I'm notified that they're available, but when I know it's not going to hurt my ping in games or cause my Youtube/Netflix video to buffer.

I don't think most people have knowledge about the data collection going on in Windows 10. Just look at all the denial going on in the 8chan thread.

I don't think those worried about data collection know much about it, either. If you can't prove it, it's just an insinuation.

Old components are old.

Old game is also old, just to keep the comparison apples to apples. The i5-760 was only a year or two old when BF3 was released, and the HD 7850 wasn't even available yet.

If neither the CPU nor GPU are reaching 100%, then something else is restricting performance. Could be related to memory (I'd expect 4 GB to be fine for that game, though 90–100 FPS is certainly what I'd call "fine"), or it could just be that BF3 isn't well-optimized to run consistently at such a high framerate.

What would happen if I used 8 sticks of ram inside of it, would it just not work, or would it register them?

I'm sure it's been said by now, but if you did this you'd simply have two sets of memory installed in a quad-channel configuration. Works perfectly fine.

You can use as many DIMMs as you have slots, as long as they're installed in matching sets of four (or two for dual-channel), and in the slots your motherboard tells you to for each channel (usually every other slot).

None because once they start remastering, it won't stop. RIP New innovative games

I suppose but I can see big companies like EA and Ubisoft just outright abusing a remastering year.

Games have been getting remastered for years, did you think it was a new idea or something? If anything is aborting new, innovative games, it's the corporate release cycle and the over-reliance on E3 hype trailers, pushing pre-orders, and DLC monetization schemes. EA and Ubisoft are perfect examples of that, and they don't really remaster anything. Remasters probably don't test well in their focus groups or something.

Also worth mentioning is that many of the games we'd actually want remastered were far more innovative than some of the triple-A bores we tend to get today.

For me, The Witcher (1), and Journey on PC.

Why is half of your Czech cereal box printed in English? Sigh, it always makes me feel guilty that my Anglophone culture is so contagious.  :unsure:

I love these photos, so randomly hilarious.

They should have made a i3 model to...

I think that just underscores what a makeshift, half-hearted effort Broadwell is at this point. But hopefully that's further evidence that a Skylake i3 (and all the rest) will be coming in August or early September as rumored.

Its just a Intel version of APU I think they should name it IPU!

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9320/intel-broadwell-review-i7-5775c-i5-5675c/9

Unlike an APU, Broadwell looks like it can hang in there with Haswell in pure CPU gaming benchmarks, it's just the pricing that makes them so pointless to us. At these prices, the fast integrated GPU and low power demands makes them look like they'd be perfect fit for an iMac, and not much else.

So what happens if you reinstall windows 7 in 3 years time because you don't have the win 10 media?

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/software-download/windows10ISO

Media is free. You can download the ISO from Microsoft's site. We rarely pay for installation disks in 2015, we pay for product keys.

My understanding—as someone who hasn't had the opportunity to actually try it yet—is that once you take the upgrade to Windows 10, your old Windows 7 key will activate a clean install of 10.

Drivers are "out," there were drivers out during the Windows 10 preview. Though there appear to be some issues for some Nvidia users. In particular, it looks like the Nvidia driver for Fermi cards (GTX 400/500) cards has been delayed due to compatibility issues with WDDM 2.0 (Source). If you're using one of those cards, it may be wise to wait a bit to take the upgrade.

YES BUT MY PRODUCT KEY DOESNT WORK ((

I haven't done it myself yet, but my expectation is that you need to take the upgrade first. Then your product key may be valid for a Windows 10 clean install.

If you haven't gotten it yet, don't worry. The first people to get the upgrade are Windows Insiders. Next will be people who reserved, probably those who reserved first. If you didn't reserve, you may be waiting several days to a week. This is a free upgrade for 85–90% of the entire Windows installed user base, it's necessary stagger out the updates to divide the load on their infrastructure. It could take a couple of days for yours to appear.

Remember how bad SimCity and Diablo 3 were on launch day? Imagine if they had been free for every Windows user.

So… not to be 'that guy,' but did no one notice this in the technical preview? Was it just not happening in the technical preview?

With skylake rumored to be coming out soon, is it still worth it to get ddr4?

It may be if you're buying a Z170 motherboard and the price comes down enough. Though the performance difference is marginal at best, especially for a gaming system.

Something I don't see a lot of people mentioning is the rumor that Skylake will support DDR4 and DDR3L. DDR3L is low-power, 1.35 V DDR3, which makes sense because DDR4 is also generally 1.2–1.35 V. If that's true, I'm unsure if current 1.5 V DDR3 will be safe to use. I don't want to burn out an IMC.

well so that means its normal to see this cpu usage?, if so then thank you dude u got me.

Possibly, yes.

You have all these different components that contribute to the framerate that you finally see. The one that hits it's limit (100%) first is the one that determines performance. If you have no framerate cap in place, and your video card is powerful enough to stay out of the way, then yes, it's normal to see 100% CPU utilization.

Turn on Vsync and see if the load % goes down. Spoiler: it will.

Depends on what you want to do with it. If you're playing at 60 FPS, there will probably never or rarely be a CPU bottleneck with that configuration. If you're shooting for 144 FPS, you're probably going to hit a CPU limitation in many games before you get there. Additionally, some games care more or less about your CPU than others. There's some games out there you could play with a Phenom II and a high-end video card and still be GPU-bound.

Bottlenecks are not a one-size-fits-all yes or no. But to answer your question more directly, I think an i5-4590 and a GTX 980 are a fine combination.

What's the rest of the build, and what monitor are you using? Easier to recommend hardware if we have the whole picture.

The GT 730 is a very low-end card, and won't be very appropriate for current generation games. If you can afford something better, get something better.

I currently have BFH on ps4 (yea I still play console every now and then), but I just found out that there are still thousands of active players on B4 on PC. Do you guys think I should switch over? BFH still has an active community on PS4, but the thing I really hate about it is how you have to unlock weapons for both criminals and police. I want to have the same loadout no matter what team I'm on. Is BF4 this way as well?

 

Thanks for the suggestions, hopefully this doesn't start a war lol. 

Interesting thing is that Hardline completely flopped on PC, yet it still has a healthy console player base. The opposite is true of BF4, I hear.

Battlefield 4 does not have faction-specific weapon unlocks. That was solely a thing used in Hardline to attempt to make each team feel more distinct and push the theme harder. BF4 has a single unlock tree for each weapon class that all three factions share.

BF4 is frequently discounted and very worth buying today. There is a ton of content compared to Hardline. You'll have to decide for yourself if larger maps and a greater emphasis on vehicle combat are interesting to you, though.

8 GB is enough right now. I'm starting to run up again my limits sometimes, though. Wouldn't hurt to have 16 GB, but it's just as easy to do later.

Then I started seeing some benchmarks of AAA recent games and most of them at 1440p max settings don't go past 70-75 fps...

If you could keep every game at 144 FPS, you wouldn't need Gsync. From what I understand, 70–75 FPS with Gsync has the perceived smoothness of much higher framerates.