Sentient68k

Certainly straight forward enough. Thank you!

Okay so first off, I know that sounds really weird to do. Who the hell would run a high end AMD card along side an older mid-level Nvidia card? I have a couple of reasons: 1) I have an Oculus Rift and I like to do development work on it. Because I like to do development I also have 3 monitors for work space and unfortunately this can cause some usability issues when working with the Rift. At best I have to disable one or more monitors to get things working right which is a bummer and kind of screws up any workflow I might have when using all screens and the Rift at the same time. I could offload my secondary screens to the 550Ti to help resolve some of this. 2) I also work in Blender and the Cycles renderer can make use of my Nivida GPU (but not my AMD GPU yet) for boosted rendering speed with CUDA. Even an older card like the 550ti is useful for the task. However I'm not sure if my power supply will be adequate. Granted the odds of both cards being close to peak at the same time are low but it could still be a stability issue I'm sure. So here is the power supply I use: EVGA SuperNOVA NEX 650 G 80 PLUS GOLD Certified 650W And my hardware configuration is (or would be): AMD 8350 4.0Ghz Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5 Motherboard 16GB DDR3 1600 (4x 4GB) Corsair Hydro H60 CPU Cooler Samsung 830 256GB SSD Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache 2x 120mm Fans 1x 200mm blue LED fan Asus DVD RW SATA Drive Gigabyte GV-R929OC-4GD R9 290 PNY Nvidia Geforce 550ti As far as I can tell my 650 watt PSU should provide enough wattage. Especially given the 80+ Gold rating. However I have heard there can be worries about how much amperage is provided over the rails which would power the graphics cards. I'm having a little trouble getting solid answers on amp usage for these cards. Does anyone have advice on if this could cause some issues or does it seems like this would work out fine? If it helps here's the stats on the PSU from the Newegg page: Thanks in advance for any help!

PERFECT! This case is exactly what I need for my little Steam box build and it's not even expensive! Can't wait for this to become available. The cable management will be a pain though...

The general advice here seems to be "Don't make it a business if you can't be super dedicated to it." Not too surprised! I think I'll be looking more for opportunities to build custom rigs for friends or something or just building personal projects. I'm really starting to think this building it has more to do with wanting to explore case modding rather than just building things out. Lots of people can buy some nice parts and put it together in a clean case. Modding is a craft. I think I might experiment with this on a new build I plan to try out once my finances recover from the holidays. I want to build a nice little living room Steam box using an APU and since it's going to exist in my living room I want it to be a conversation piece as well as a utility. If that goes well I think I'll look more into modding and maybe instead of building PCs from scratch I'll explore commissioned mods or at least selling items that can be used for modding. Baby steps though of course - I need to do my first real custom job. Hi there! Do you happened to be hiring?

Competing with NCIX would definitely be way to high a goal to hit of course. I should say that part of the plan, at least as I was imagining it, was to specialize in smaller rigs as a start. Machines that are good for playing indie games or using as a Steam streamer in the living room while still having at least a little kick on their own for local play. Or even small boxes just for running Linux. Generally situations or builds where you may not even need a dedicated card. Starting this way would help keep costs down and the cost of potential damages down. That way a rig is relatively cheap to fix and replace. It's really not something I would expect to get orders for all that often so unless it was a business that somehow did get popular enough to live off of on its own I wouldn't anticipate it consuming such a majority of my free time. I wouldn't be surprised if that's ignorant though and maybe you're right. Opening a Shapeways store probably is the better path to try and maybe the time spent designing and engineering will get me into a position where I could dig into case modding rather than building and trying to sell full PCs.

That's pretty unfortunate, man. I've been lucky really. Everything that's been shipped to me pretty much ever has always ended up getting to me just fine and in good shape. I'm sure I'd notice more problems if I was shipping more often as a business though.

Good thing to consider! I don't know that UPS is statistically more skilled at busting boxes than anyone else but I would say the obvious course of action would be to make a claim on UPS' insurance but in the meantime I would want the customer to send it back (the seller, myself, paying for shipping back) while I would go through the unfortunate process of both making and substantiating the insurance claim and building a fresh rig to send to the customer - likely on expedited shipping. Of course no matter how you slice it that build would likely end up as a partial profit loss but realistically that's the risk to be taken when running a business. It wouldn't be fun for me or the customer naturally but as they say "shit happens". In the end you really just have to hope that the problems are rare enough that you make it in the black even if you do have problems. Of course the real solution to that problem would be doing everything possible to prevent it in the first place. Which means paying a little extra for decent and secure packing material. I would say some extra bubble wrap and foam are worth the investment. For context working in a data center means I've had to deal with plenty of sticky hardware failures that sometimes involve customers who have businesses relying on the hardware we maintain. It's all about keeping a cool head, communicating clearly with the customer, and maintaining respect. As long as you show someone you have a genuine interest in solving their problem (and I do because it sucks for me too) I've found people usually stay pretty calm. For the ones that don't...well you can't win them all but you can try your best.

I don't think the SDK for the original Xbox leaked. That's the biggest difference here. I'll grant though that yeah it's most likely easier said than done. I think the odds are much better now than before though. And please correct me if I'm wrong about the ever getting access to the actual SDK on the original Xbox.

That sounds solid to me! Lightmass is multi-threaded and I have an AMD 8350 myself. It fully utilizes all 8 cores when I'm compiling maps and it more or less runs very nicely. Your 4790K should do just as well. I doubt you'll hit any bottlenecks too hard.

It really shouldn't even be that hard considering it's all an X86 PC with an AMD graphics card running Windows. Once they've figured out all the proprietary stuff I bet an Xbone emulator will be a cake walk to get working with decent performance.

I was always fascinated with how electronics and video games worked. This lead me to take apart a lot of my electronics as a kid including my NES and I even managed to fix one or two things by accident! In high school I learned some basics about electronics engineering as well and eventually decided I wanted to build a PC of my own once a friend of mine convinced me it was time to move off my "media laptop" at the time. Ever since then I've just gotten progressively more in-depth. I've spent time playing with Arduinos, game engines, and building progressively more high-end PC rigs.

There are other viable options but there's nothing wrong with an R9 290 either. I mean there's always going to be better stuff coming out over time so don't get too hung up on if you got exactly the best part at the given time. The Nvidia 900 series cards probably would've been a better choice right now but then who knows if AMD won't roll out cards next month that are even better (or whenever the 300 series cards come along)! I work with UE4 on a regular basis with an R9 290 in my rig and performs just fine so I wouldn't be too worried for now. Something else to keep in mind too: Your CPU might matter a lot more for development work. Compiling code and crunching through lightmap generation will benefit from that along with more RAM if the engine you're working with utilizes that kind of thing.

The buzz in the VR community says we may be hearing some cool stuff about Oculus but nobody really knows if there will be new stuff or just demos of things we've already seen. Hopefully they'll at least have their latest prototype there for more people to try but it'd be nice to hear some software-related announcements at a minimum. Some are also hoping we may get a date or CV1 or maybe get a glimpse at what it will look like. Who knows! Besides that I'm pretty curious to see if AMD has any cool announcements or prototypes to show off.

Hey there, LinusTechTips community! I'm pretty new here and this is my first real post on this forum so forgive me if this isn't quite the right sub-forum to go to. I set a New Years resolution for myself to start a small side business. I have some options I've been considering like opening up a Shapeways shop to sell 3D prints but I've been giving serious consideration to opening a side business building made-to-order rigs through a website. I'm sure I'm not the only one here who feels this way, but I get tremendously excited putting together parts lists and building a new PC - even if it's not for myself. This feeling was only exacerbated by watching videos like those on the LinusTechTips channel because now every day I'm bombarded with cool parts and cases that make me itch for find a reason to toss out my current rig and build a new one. Given that I think I should try to scratch that itch and make a dime or two on the side. I'm not expecting this to really be something highly profitable and I know it can be a hard market to stand out in but I feel like it may just be too much fun to not at least try. I have the skill set needed as far as I can tell to bring up the idea with fairly minimal start up costs - I'm capable of running a server, building a presentable website, and I certainly know how to build PCs. I currently work in a data center where handling hardware is my day-to-day work and the experience lends itself well to putting together a rig (or several) in a timely manner too. My question to you guys is what kind of issues do you think I need to consider before jumping into this? What do I need to fully understand? Obviously there are things like tax laws and probably business licenses and such to consider but what makes the core of a PC building business? How much do I charge for my service? How much variation should I offer in my services? How do you go about properly handling things like warranty claims? There are other questions too like what kind of market do I try to cater to (small PCs, fancy big-rigs, etc) but what I'm getting at is I don't know what I don't know. Is it really as simple as following local business laws, setting up a website, and trying to attract orders? If anyone has any experience either running any kind of similar business or working at one I'd be happy to hear what you have to say. Thanks!

Sure, why not! I'll let this be my first post. If I won this processor I'd rebuild my rig around it (since I use AMD currently) and utilize that power for building VR experiences in Unreal 4. The faster I can compile maps the better!