Shog

Honestly these games look attractive from the outside but they need a shit ton of patches/mods to fix
 
L.A Noire is locked to 30FPS 
GTA4 and Bully are really crappily optimized(Plunbat Level) and
GTA SA can't use mods
Max Payne 3 and L.A Noire require Rockstar social Club accounts 
GTA4 needs games for Windows lLive so you'll have to find a mod to get around that
There are only 3 games here that are on Mac and 0 for lInux

Which Apple product isn't overpriced compared to the competition? 

It sounds dead and wouldn't surprise me.
Seagate hasn't been good lately..
 
Try swapping out the SATA port your barracuda is connected to.
Go into diskmanagement, if you can't find it there it's most likely screwed.

Taxes, shipping, import duties and then retail markup, combined with the quantity of the order makes up the price. 
 
Everywhere complains about the price in their country. For the computer components, a hell of a lot of them come from the US, so pretty much everyone other than the US and Canada have significantly higher prices. 
 
If they were going to fix the unfair pricing, Europe wouldn't be the biggest problem, it would be places like Brazil, Singapore, the Philippines etc. where things are ridiculously expensive. 
 
EDIT: a lot of the time it's not even the manufacturer that's the issue, it's the government and retailers, with higher taxes and higher price markups. The manufacturer likely sells at the same price to everyone, but costs go up after that. 
 
EDIT 2: You're also assuming that for-profit companies care about fairness. They want to make money, not make things easier for people in Eastern Europe.

Good deal, the c920 is also $50, I prefer to just buy the c920 used on ebay though, it's not really a wear and tear item. 

As compared to other economic systems which might simply not produce more ram! Hahahaha

And you canadians still complain about your prices? Try the other side of Atlantic. 

@Shog, @W-L, @Revan654
 
I got all the but the last 3-way sata chain finished today (see pic) I ended up changing the design of the 24pin slightly due to having difficulties finding all the paracord colors without getting nailed for shipping. (Paracord supply is quite limited in my country.) I think the final result looks pretty good if I do say so myself... Although I had a bit of a scary time when I first plugged the cables into my rig. Despite spending over 2 hours checking the cables in every conceivable way: I made sure the 24pin cable was exactly the same as the stock one and that the EPS and PCI-e cables outputted power the same as the specification and the stock cables. I also powered up my old core 2 duo OEM system to make sure nothing was amiss.
Despite all this, when I first turned on my rig it failed to POST with memory issues. I honestly thought I had killed it, as it still failed to POST with the stock cables. Although nothing smelled or looked fried. After spending the entire evening swapping GPUs and RAM out with my brothers rig, it turned out that the CPU, water block and back plate needed to be reseated.
 
i'm probably gonna spend tomorrow cable lacing, and getting everything put back into the case. I'll make sure to send a pic when its all done.
 
Thanks everyone for all the help and information.
Also, @lsstefan Did you manage to get all your cables sorted out? I'd quite like to see a pic of the final result.
 
Quick tip, the Molex Minifit-JR 8-pin connectors that claim to be PCI-e compatible are NOT compatible with 8-pin GPU PCIe connectors. I ended up swapping the dud connectors onto a couple of the stock EVGA cables to get compatible connectors. Maybe buying from a PC modding shop rather than mouser would have been a better idea.....
 
If anyone wants a parts list I am more than happy to provide one, as I have managed to find some quite good 16AWG cable that is quite stiff, and has fairly thin insulation, so doesn't add alot of bulk. I also have parts numbers for SATA, 4 and 8 pin EPS, 24 pin connectors and the 6,10 and 18 pin connectors found on my EVGA supply.
 
Come to think of it, does anyone have any bright ideas for the pile of paracord innards I now have? Seems a awful waste to just throw it away.

The degradation we're speaking of is that it's limited by the VGA specifications. The monitors performance won't decrease at all since it's always only had a vga connector! You'll get better image potential with only an hdmi, but hdmi to vga will work fine. 

Only the PCIe and MB cables will be in plain sight. The EPS cables will be visible on close inspection, and the sata/molex will be hidden. You are right about the white strip. On reflection I don't like it much either. 
 
@Shog, @W-L, @Revan654 
I totally get where you are coming from with cable ratings. Having done the math and having had a chance to think about it a bit more, I definitely think the 19AWG is too small for most of the lines.
Assuming that my CPU draws 200w over a single 8pin EPS cable (AI suite actually says 150w and its over a 8 pin and a 4 pin):
200/4 = 50w per cable.
50/12 = 4.16A per cable. (I=P/V) 
Assuming the GPU draws 215w (max listed on EVGA.com), all over the PCIe cables:
215/6 = 36w per cable
36/12 = 3A per cable. 
 
Those numbers are absolute worst case scenarios, and obviously the 19AWG is not suitable for handling the load. As it turns out I have some 18AWG cable (probably not enough) in my parts bin and can purchase 18 and 16AWG cable at relatively low cost. I'm thinking I might mix and match what wire I use for what purpose, to reduce cable volume:
Motherboard: 16AWG
EPS: 16AWG
PCIe: 16AWG
SSDs and 2.5" HDD: 19AWG (these should draw under 1A combined)
SP120 led hub and LED strips: 19AWG (its waaay thicker cable than the wire going to the hub or strips)
D5 pump: 16AWG (36w, 3A pump)
 
I have looked at the specs of the default wires on my PSU. The unsleeved parts of the EPS and PCIe cables are too short, so no useful text is visible, but the majority of the motherboard cable wires are 16AWG. The SATA and molex (somewhat strange naming, since all the connectors are actually made by molex) chains look to either be 16AWG. Although its quite thin cable, the total thickness of the 16AWG EVGA wires is around 0.2-0.3mm smaller than the 18AWG wire I have. Although this could just be the insulation. If anyone has actually measured the conductor diameter of the cables, that would be really helpful. Later tonight when I have some time, I will measure the resistance of the evga cables. (dw, I know multi meters aren't that accurate and plan to use the 4 wire kelvin method, theres a very good video on YT about it, but only LTT videos are allowed right?) Based off that result, I will aim to get cables that are the same resistance.
 
@CableMod Sorry about the shipping confusion, not quite sure where I was looking. I do like the carbon sleeving, thanks for reminding me about it. However ordering the entire set of cables would wind up costing me around $200 US. I'm currently looking at being able to obtain all of the parts for around a 1/4 of that price. Agreed I will have to assemble them, and that will take some time and equipment. However I have a decent amount of experience doing this sort of thing, and all the right equipment to make doing a project like this quite easy. The only cable that is looking slightly difficult is the motherboard, due to some duplicate pins, but I should be able to sort that out pretty easily.
 
Thanks everyone for all the help.

Go to a store and sit in chairs till you find a good one

is your timezone set correctly?

But still... It's a crazy good deal. You should buy it, because it's such a good deal.

Crazy good deals should always be used. Have you bought yours already?
 
Btw, what about battery life?

Does not matter. But you HAVE to buy it @Daniel644. Crazy good deals should always be used to the max.

* I JUST HAD THIS ISSUE MYSELF * 

My cpu was sold for $11, really old cpu. I bought the guy a prepaid shipping label to send it back to me and apparently he'd rather keep the "broken" cpu because he never shipped it. 

*edited to add*
You don't give him the return until you get the cpu back, in which case you can pop it in and test it and say yeah this is my cpu and it works fine. Then open a case with ebay and at minimum you get your shipping costs and fees back. 

* I JUST HAD THIS ISSUE MYSELF * 

My cpu was sold for $11, really old cpu. I bought the guy a prepaid shipping label to send it back to me and apparently he'd rather keep the "broken" cpu because he never shipped it. 

*edited to add*
You don't give him the return until you get the cpu back, in which case you can pop it in and test it and say yeah this is my cpu and it works fine. Then open a case with ebay and at minimum you get your shipping costs and fees back. 

He said he has a masters in electrical, not a minor in English  

Gamers bought out RX 480s the moment they hit shelves at launch. Maybe they are hurting the people that need it for compute.

Link the deal, not pc part picker. That being said this is "4 hours" old and already corrected. 

Seller with no feedback offering thousands of products well below MSRP...
 
Not a scam at all.

since you got the gpu for free, just use the budget set for the graphics card to get yourself a ryzen 1600 and there shouldn't be much bottlenecking.

Just because it costs $400 doesnt mean it's a graphics card you'd use for gaming. It might be a workstation graphics card. However if it's a GTX970/980 then go for it
 
Also dont invest into FM2+, get the g4560

M.2 is simply a form factor and connector. You can get both SATA and NVMe based M.2 drives. SATA M.2 drives are just SATA drives with a different form factor, they still go through the SATA controller and have the same limitations as regular 2.5" SATA drives. NVMe drives use the NVMe communication protocol, which uses the PCIe bus rather than SATA. The bandwidth provided by the PCIe bus is significantly greater than that of SATA and the communication standard allows for significantly faster maximum throughput. In real world terms, NVMe drives are good for large sequential read/writes and are about the same as SATA drives for random read/writes. So really, NVMe is good for large data transfers but doesn't really offer any benefit for booting, use as an OS drive or for gaming type workloads that are mainly random read/writes. 
 
The Z270 platform has a total PCIe lane budget of 30 lanes. 16 provided by the CPU, mostly set aside for high performance devices like graphics cards. The Z270 chipset should have 14 PCIe lanes, mostly used for things like M.2 NVMe drives, PCIe storage, PCIe WiFi cards and so on. 

16 from the CPU that are set aside for graphics and 24 from the chipset. I believe the chipset's PCIe lanes will be used up somewhat by any high bandwidth devices like Thunderbolt and USB 3.1 Gen2 controllers. It's unlikely you'll actually have 24 PCIe lanes available to use, but you should have enough to the point where it would be difficult to fully saturate all of the lanes without a bunch of PCIe expansion cards. 
 
EDIT: The M.2 drive will use 4 lanes from the chipset, having no impact on the graphics card whatsoever.