RyanMacRocks

What OS are you running?

Afterburner is a little harder to read but shows FPS down to a tenth (ex. 59.9 FPS vs. just a 60 in FRAPS). As for issues, every recorder has them, but I stick by my previous statement that it is far superior to OBS or FRAPS recording due to the limited impact on performance and hardware acceleration.

Fury (X) wouldn't be a bad idea, personally though I would go for an RX 480 as the driver updates have shown very promising increases in performance and it is basically on par with the 1060 at DX11 and destroys it in DX12 and Vulkan. I wouldn't buy a 970 as it is barely holding on to its lead over the RX 480 and will start to fall behind as time goes by due to lesser support for older architectures.

Definitely record using ReLive. Any recording program will have a small impact on framerate (~3-7 FPS) but ReLive (or Shadowplay on Nvidea) will have the least impact. FRAPS is good if you just want to show FPS (large numbers, easy to read), and is good for recording benchmarks (not video but in a text file). I use Afterburner/Rivatuner usually because I want to see GPU/CPU usage and temps as well as framerate.

You could even cut the RAM down to 8 GB if its only for gaming and save a few dollars, plus the upgrade path is always there if 8 GB starts to become limiting in a few years.

I don't like to force my opinion on others, but this video is worth a watch: Chromebook for laptop stuff and then use remaining $1,300 to build an excellent gaming PC. However if you like to game on the go and absolutely need a laptop, the Razer Blade seems like a great buy besides the price.

Great, I'll probably go for it then.

Just before Christmas, I sold my GTX 760 2 GB, for $70, as performance in modern games was beginning to disappoint (especially with only 2 GB of vram). My plan was to buy a used 970, there were plenty used on Craigslist near me for $170-$200. But then Christmas came around and I received some Amazon gift cards, and figured I'd give the Zotac 1050 Ti Mini a try, since it seemed like a decent card for only $139. Well, after I bought it I spent a little more time looking at benchmarks, etc. and realized that I could've bought a RX 470 Armor for only $149 after rebates, and felt dumb. I immediately went to my Amazon orders and canceled the 1050 Ti order, and am about to order the RX 470, for the superior performance + I want to support AMD since I feel they have been making a great effort with drivers and creating truly competitive cards (470 & 480). However, I was reading some reviews for the 470 Armor on Newegg (since Amazon reviews are all jumbled together now) and read lots of issues with black screens, cooling, and crashes, one user even had a screw fall out of his 470 (this seems like an MSI problem not AMD however). Was it still a good decision to cancel the 1050 Ti? Power consumption and heat aren't a huge deal to me, as long as it isn't as loud as my 7970 reference. I don't have a company/driver preference as long as the software is smooth, I never had any issues with Crimson drivers when I owned my 7970.

Hi guys, I recently bought a Precision T5500 with a x5550 for $140 on Craigslist to tinker around with. However, the heatsink is a little too small for my taste and it uses the case fan for cooling which is a couple inches away and not as effective as if it were directly attached. This causes temperatures way too high for my liking, 55-65C idle and it reached up to 85C under load. This also causes the fans to ramp up for a few seconds and then shortly after quiet down and then ramp up again...you get the point. Just reapplied thermal paste, so that is not an issue. There are no fan config settings in the BIOS and Speedfan does not detect any fans. Dell's website does not seem to have any utilities for this, and I haven't been able to find another program that is able to detect the fans. Does anyone know of a program to set a more aggressive fan curve or even just manually set the fan speed? Or do I have to just buy a fan controller? Upgrading the heatsink is not an option because there is not enough room. If it matters, I am on BIOS A02, maybe there was a setting added in the newest BIOS A16? Hesitant to upgrade my BIOS unless its necessary. Thanks!

I'm guessing this is due to a dying hard drive.

It's not bad, but you should either get a 6700K instead of just 6700 to allow for overclocking, or go cheaper and get a 6600K and overclock it. An overclocked 6600K will beat a stock 6700 in most tasks for cheaper. Also, I would hold up on buying the 970 since the 1070 just came out and is significantly more powerful.

Not sure, I just heard it was the same chip but with a different cooler.

Basically a slightly better heatsink for way more money. DON'T BUY!!!

Agreed! Sorry Linus, but I've been watching Tech Yes City more than you recently.

All of them. Some might need to be turned down to medium, but I was surprised when I saw how good the performance was (looking at buying it for a friend). However, I would wait until the 1050 comes out, unless you need it right away.

I would disagree, power supply is decent enough since its Cooler Master (not great but still..). I've played a little bit of Overwatch these past few days, and my CPU usage (i5 4590 so basically 2x the power of G3258) never goes much above 50-60% on Epic settings, whereas my GPU (7970) fluctuates between 85-99% to maintain 70 FPS on Epic settings. I would upgrade your GPU first (maybe try and get a good deal on something like a 7970/7950/7870 used from Craigslist like me?) and overclock your G3258 as much as you can until you can eventually upgrade that as well. Try to grab a i5 4460 or 4590 and you would be set! However, if you are playing games like GTA V or Cities:Skylines, which are very CPU intensive, I would recommend a new CPU first.

Even with overclocking, there will be a slight bottleneck, since even the 970 (Oops meant 1070) is equivalent to a Titan X. However, it wouldn't be that terrible with a 1070, especially if you can get a decent overclock. If you wanted to get a 1080, though, I would definitely recommend upgrading to a Haswell or Skylake i5 (even something like an i5 6500 would give quite a speed boost)

I wouldn't pay $88 for a 450W power supply, even if its gold rated and modular, plus 450 Watts is pushing the limit with a 1070 and 6700K. I would opt for a much cheaper EVGA Bronze series power supply personally. Lower end power supplies get some bad rep, but honestly, I've had no problems and thousands of other people have had no problems, with 4.5 stars. Other than that, good build!

lol Seriously, though, I agree, there are lots of kids getting really into it and it can be concerning because there is still nicotine... For anyone claiming its healthier (not saying its not but we don't really know) just remember we used to think smoking and chewing tobacco improved your health, so don't believe everything until you hear the evidence.

Did you even read my post? I called them rebrands then explained below that they aren't actually rebrands, just successors on different architectures.

Upgrading to an overkill motherboard like that will not give you any more performance unless you are planning on extreme overclocking, so why are you upgrading?

Oh, ok, I feel stupid now XD. What (games) are you planning on streaming? A 6600K should be more than enough for streaming with a capture card while gaming, as for streaming without a capture card it would probably work fine for just streaming something like the WAN show but I'm not sure about gaming without a capture card.

What do you mean by streaming? Are you talking about like Steam in-home streaming?

I would get a $15 HDD off eBay and use it for either Folding@Home or an extra PC for playing with a friend.

Not really, sometimes I actually lose money..my friends usually want to pay less than the computer is worth and I don't really want to argue with them too much..if they weren't my friends I might try to haggle with them a bit to make a profit, but most people usually just buy from Alienware or CyberPowerPC if they don't want to build one themselves (even though its a terrible deal they still feel more comfortable buying from a large(ish) company). I still enjoy building computers enough to take the $20-$50 or so loss and to help a friend out.