Dim

I don't disagree with you in concept. In my experience, though, locking would just exacerbate the issue... Merging retains commentary and allows a place for active discussion of hot topics. The alternative is either the mods (and by extension LMG) look like silencing nazis or that people just create new topic after new topic because they want to comment and can't. Or both. Usually both. Edit: I should clarify that mods don't work for LMG. They are autonomous. Not everyone understands this, though, so optically it still can look like LMG are the silencing nazis.

Why? I don't think that's a transparent approach and would run counter to the standards the company holds itself to. Or pertains to hold itself to, depending on which side of the fence you're on. That said, there are likely a metric asston of new threads being created, and I'm sure the mod team is extremely hard at work merging them into the main two.

To give an update on this one, the receiver (Yamaha RX-A3080) is in and functional and I'm super happy with the result. I'm not an audiophile or anything like that so all this shit is new and exciting to me Now I can play games and watch movies in the living room with 5.0 (for now) surround which feels much better, as well as listen to audiobooks in the master bedroom without Chromecast Spotify splash screen on the TV (what I've been dealing with), as well as 'Party Mode' with Yamaha MusicCast to play Spotify all throughout the house and choose the volume levels per zone. The TV also look super clean with zero wires or devices... The PS5 can now boot up the receiver and auto-set to "9ch surround", and the receiver can also boot up the PS5. Fucking wild. The only caveat is that the HDMI and Optical cables are dead from the source to the master bedroom, so I ended up having to give up on that. It actually would not have mattered anyway as my TV in the bedroom does not have an optical or HDMI ARC input - go figure. We'll see if I have any problems in future, but so far it's looking/sounding 10/10.

Thanks for the info man - basically what I've found is someone willing to sell a Yamaha RXA3080 for $2400 AUD The unit is used but the seller is reputable (a local A/V small business who uses the unit personally) This has 3 zones 9 channels and seems to tick every box I need simultaneously. I've got him coming around next Wednesday to install - would be awesome if it's all good for $2400. It is on the upper end of my budget but seems like a good solution. The only slightly inconvenient part is having to change the inputs via the receiver... We'll see how we go!

Thanks for the advice man! I actually made the wrong assumption and looked more properly - there is no subwoofer cable anywhere, there is only an optical capable and HDMI from the bedroom to the receiver point. I might have to put some more thought into this; I don't hugely need the patio ones. Can I go a 7-speaker with HDMI ARC to the 5 in the living room and with optical to the 2 in the bedroom? Or would that require faffing about with the buttons? All sound in both instances would go through the TV; the bedroom one uses chromecast though... Damn, that changes things again doesn't it. Means I need ARC there too which I wouldn't have because it's in the... Dammit. Thanks for the help man! Maybe I just go with a 5.1 for the living room for now Any ETA on surround sound becoming less involved in the future

Hi guys! It's been many years since I've been on here, so I'm glad to see the community is still going strong. I'm looking for some advice on a subject I know absolutely nothing about! I bought a house recently and there are speakers with relevant cables all throughout. There are 5 speakers in the living room, 2 in the master bedroom and 2 out in the patio. There is a central speaker cable source for all 9 cables (none of which are labelled, cheers previous owners...). It also includes two HDMI cables and two sub cables. One sub and one HDMI goes to each of the mounted TV stations in the living and bedroom. I'm basically after what amp (or two, if need be) I can use to connect all of these to a central source. I. E. I want 5.1 surround in the living, 2.1 surround in the bedroom and 2 whatever speakers in the patio, which I presume is a 9.2 three-zone amp with two subs in each of the rooms. I'm guessing both of these would use HDMI ARC... Please let me know if I'm off base with my assumptions - I'm a software consultant, this is really not an area I have expertise with... Any ideas on amps I can use to suit this purpose as well as recommendations on subs would be great! I do have a bit of a budget ($2000 - 3000 AUD)... I also believe there's a bit of a shortage of solid amps in Australia at the moment but if you can provide any advice on what would work that would be hugely helpful. Thanks!

Get an SSD. You can fit it in your budget. Let's break this down a little. The case is fine. The CPU and cooling are fine too. GPU is fine, generally with hard drives you can move up to 2TB without too much expenditure, but if you don't have many storage needs it's fine. The motherboard could be a bit cheaper, it's probably going to cost you a significant amount. It doesn't hurt much to get a motherboard that fits only your requirements (rather than one with a bunch of features you don't necessarily need). The power supply is a little overkill for what you're going to be running. Do you plan to add another R9 390 in in the future? If so, it's fine but if not I'd drop that down to a 550W or 600W if you can. The monitor is pretty meh, but if you can see it in person and tell the quality firsthand, it's a preference thing I guess. It won't blow you away but it's fine. The RAM is pretty overkill, you don't need 2400MHz RAM. It might be cheaper where you are, but where I am to move up from 2133 to 2400 is like a $100 difference. Just make sure it's DDR4 and you're fine. Grab an SSD. It doesn't have to be 500GB or even 250GB, just a plain 120GB SSD at minimum will improve your general use speeds significantly. Doesn't even need to be a new SSD or a particularly fast one like an Intel 750 Series. The best price to performance SSDs are usually Samsung 840/850 Evos. If you lower the PSU wattage to 600W, maybe lower the RAM, maybe lower the motherboard you can fit a 250GB SSD in that budget pretty easily. You don't need to lower them drastically, but last generation 120GB SSDs go for $70 (where I live, which is typically 30-40% higher cost than USA) which is absolutely nothing compared to your PC spec costs.

"I don't want Windows 7 Professional, I want the Ultimate version because it's faster" Do these people even read breakdown charts?

In Australia you're looking at nearly $1000 for a 980 Ti - it's not worth. I got the second 680 for $250 AUD which is ~$195 USD; where I live that's insanely cheap

Tested Skyrim. It did not run better at all with SLI -- micro stuttering was noticeable and frame rate was within margin of error. No improvement through SLI (running with ~105 mods). Tested GTA V. Huge improvement with SLI, in the neighbourhood of 55% improvement. Minimal stuttering. Overall, scaled extremely well with the second card. Everything was set to Very High with MSAA off and Anisotropic Filtering at x16. Advanced Graphics were not chosen. Edit: SLI minimum should read 32.0 - the graph length does reflect that, though. 970 comparisons to come!

Second GTX 680 4GB FTW+ arrived in mail today; testing fps tonight and tomorrow for the 970.

This. When I was in high school (waaaay back in year 7, 2007), I got into the system we used for monitoring assessment pieces and gave myself admin rights. I told our IT staff when I did, so the IT head bought me lunch. If you put yourself in the shoes of the school, really all you did is go somewhere on their network you weren't meant to. If you'd told the IT staff of the flaws in their system, I'm sure they would have appreciated it... Instead, you made the staff have to work out who got access, how they did it, and how widespread the problem was. Edit: in the case of the above comment, you still didn't come to them first and you didn't take it seriously. That said, because you did raise the issue with them rather than just continue to abuse the system, I personally believe a two-day suspension is unfair.

I stand corrected -- I know the 770 is the refresh model with faster memory, but wasn't too sure on the 960. I agree -- they're great in theory, but I want to know real world performance so I'm doing my own hands-on comparison

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the 680, 770 and 960 all have the same chipset, so I think it will be as well (it should). The main comparison I'm making is the 970 to 2x680s moreso than the 980 (purely because I don't have one) -- I think they should perform similarly in most games, some will obviously perform much worse with SLI and some might perform better, but I'll be testing that logic anyway. Gonna go with Skyrim (100+ mods), GTA V, FarCry 4, and probably a couple others like Tomb Raider (SLI should win out with that one). I'm more interested in the direct real-world performance figures than the theoretical ones, but you are right that in theory it won't perform that amazingly. Still a better option for me to grab another card than a new 970 or 290 since these used cards can be hard to sell

You do if you want to utilize the total 4GB. If you run dual 680s, one is a 4GB and one is a 2GB, you will only be utilizing 2GB of total memory since the memory used is mirrored on the cards. Since I play at 2560x1440, I do need more than 2GB.

Hey guys, I know this topic has been absolutely done to death, but I've found a lot of SLI posts that are focused on the 2GB version of the 680, so I made a new one. I currently have a GTX 680 4GB FTW+ (was the top card when I bought it a couple years ago), and I now have the opportunity to get a second one of the same card for under $250. Currently my card performs nicely, but it does get outshone fairly easily by the current generation of top tier cards. So, I'm hopefully going to grab this second 680 4GB and crunch some numbers, do some benchmarks, etc. which I will be posting here for direct comparison to the GTX 970 and 980 (I can't get my hands on a 980, so I'll probably be taking those numbers from reviewing websites etc.) When I first bought my system, I chucked an 850W power supply in with the intention of later running SLI. It has since taken me 6-12 months of searching local websites constantly for someone to finally post an advertisement for a 4GB GTX 680 (of any description), so I am very excited to see how this performs!

EVGA GTX 680 4GB FTW+. Not actually the rarest of course, but damn I want to SLI my current card for better fps in GTA V and these things just don't seem to exist anywhere!

Well, my setup is portrait 1280x1028, landscape 2560x1440 and another portrait 1280x1028 (PLP). I do pretty heavy coding and stuff and honestly I find this hits the sweet spot. I might want another one on the top, but honestly I'd just use it for Facebook... For actual work I'm fine with three screens. For gaming, a single 2560x1440 works well with my graphics card (GTX 680); I don't really need anything more superfluous.

Oh sorry I read through and forgot about that bit >.< I had a Google and found this topic (you've probably already seen it) and it doesn't seem to be of much use. I guess if you programmed a similar thing to Ultramon yourself (or paid someone to do it) you might be able to uncap the framerate but it would probably be jittery due to the actual software. Sorry