itsNikku

So my new job doesn't have free wifi. I'm trying to find maybe 3 or 4 tech or general podcasts that I can subscribe to on itunes, download before work, and play on my lunch. So far I've got Wan Show and Off Topic (non tech), any suggestions?

I see, thanks for the information. I figured they were risers of some kind, but I was a little confused on why they were all x1 slots. Now I know!

I'm going to remain cautiously optimistic here. The guy said he had troubles keeping the clock stable, so that could be due to a variety of factors. I'm willing to bet the "gaming mode" driver is probably to blame, and I doubt AMD will try to fix it as they don't view these as gaming cards. It's also possible the guy got a bad card, it's a tad unusual, but not unheard of. I think before a final verdict can be given A) we'll need more than just this guy's review and B) the actual RX Vega. I know AMD is often guilty of the hype train but I doubt they'd delay the RX line for this long if they weren't working to optimize the drivers/the cards themselves as much as they could. That said, I really hope some vega derivative comes out as a 1070 competitor. The 1070 is where I'm eyeing my next upgrade, but I'd like to see what team red has to offer in that price bracket.

I apologize if this is a stupid question...but how is one supposed to take advantage of an x1 slot? What are those small chips shown in the pictures occupying the x1 slot? Is it running the GPU's externally? And does an x1 connection bottleneck the cards' mining abilities?

1440p inValley Benchmark runs fine. The 780 is definitely capable of 1440p, the Athlon is not capable of anything. And I really didn't know about the used AMD card market, so not sure if I could have gotten a better deal there. Regardless, 60fps seems out of the question for the 860k in GTA V. But with Half-Refresh it runs smooth and I can crank the graphics settings, so that's cool. Adaptive regular Vsync seems to crash GTAV every time I load it.

I'm not sure if I can, but I'll check with newegg to see if I can return the athlon/mobo/ram. The whole PC was built very recently. As to why...it...sortof worked? Edit:I'm beyond the point of return at this point. Looking forward, it looks like the cpu should come first, and monitor second. Thanks for your help and criticisms!

So, I built a pretty bad PC. I nabbed a used GTX 780 for 180 usd, about 20 bucks less than the current gen RX 480 4g, and way less than the GTX 1060 6g. For the CPU...I got an Athlon 860k and a crap mobo with no voltage control. Max stable OC on the CPU is 4.3 GHz. Ram is ddr3 at 1866 MHz. Since about a week after the pc was built, I've been running this pc off of a loaner monitor from a friend that's 1920x1080, 60hz. I would like to upgrade the monitor to a 1440p display, but I understand that at certain points, my CPU just cannot handle the GPU load, even at 1080p. However at 1440p (via NVIDIA control panel) I see nearly the same GPU load (plus a bit more) but the CPU is still maxed What I'd like to know is: Should I upgrade my cpu/mobo this black friday and nab a 1080p monitor for keeps? or... Buy a nice 1440p monitor, as the same bottlenecks exist in the same fashion at that res, or Just wait for zen/kaby lake in 2017 and make a monitor choice then? For the budget, I've got about 370 dollars I'd be absolutely willing to spend. While zen may be advertised as super cheap and offer (potentially) i7 performance at i5ish prices, the current skylake i5's/i3's, either ghetto OC'd (via downgraded bios) or just stock (65/6600) are enticing. If black friday comes, I may just be able to upgrade the CPU/mobo/ram, but be left with a terrible budget for a monitor, considering even the base skylake prices. All that said, I feel like most of my games are still somewhat playable. By downgrading GTAV to 50hz (or gasp...30) I see very few prominent stutters that take me out of the experience. Any other games that are not CPU intensive run damn smooth at 1080p 60hz. Reallistically, my budget may allow for a 1080p monitor and an i3/z170 combo (if the price is right) but I'm not sure if that's how I want to play games for the next year and a half or more.

I found the same issues after hours of back and forth with steam support. I sent NVIDIA some information after their second BF1 driver didn't seem to fix the issue. I really hope they intend to fix it, because rolling back drivers just to play New Vegas/FO3 is A) a pain and B) seems to break shadow play somehow.