jaypro

What I do is put healthy foods in arms reach, and junk food in another room or downstairs. Since I'm super lazy and never leave my computer, I end up eating healthier, but still have junk food when I really crave it.

Hades is right, its all a lottery for overclocking. In my opinion I'd spring for the XFX one. I think Newegg even has a Mail in Rebate for the XFX one. My reasoning? My experience with XFX on warranty has been really nice. They have "dual-lifetime" warranty. Which means that if you sell your card, the next owner still keeps lifetime warranty. So, if you end up selling it and it breaks, they don't have to come back and contact you. EDIT: I lied. Turns out XFX switched their warranty policy for these cards. Don't bother haha. Just go Gigabyte.

What card are you running now? There is no way anyone can know for sure which card, Nvidia or AMD, will perform better on a game that is not even finished yet. My opinion would be, assuming you don't have a potato of a video card, is to wait for Battlefield 4, or at least wait for the benchmarks to come out

What is your budget? Fractal R4 is a good case.

Basically, you are paying extra over the korean monitor for warranty and easier returns. Internally, its the same monitor. I bought a Catleap before the monoprice one was available, and if I had the choice, I would go for the monoprice one. My reasoning is that even though the Catleap monitor itself is good, the stand is tilted, so I have to put some paper on one end of the monitor stand to have it stand up straight. Wasn't worth the ridiculous shipping cost to send it back to Korea.

From what I know, newegg doesn't caare about dead pixels. If you want to RMA it to the manufacturer for dead pixels you probably could, but newegg has a 30 day return policy anyway. So you can return it for any reason.

Plasma TVs are still 1080 resolution. I'd probably just save the money and get a 2GB edition. You will find it hard to use the 4GB, let alone 2GB.

Statistical validation is overkill. However, if I were to add something to their statistics, it would be minimum FPS, or some statistical "close to minimum (such as sigma shift or something). My reasoning behind this is : When the game runs at any decent FPS clip, I'm happy. 60 vs 65? Doesn't matter to me. What I want to know is if and how often I will have drops in FPS, where I can see the game getting choppy.

Oh man. Must win this !

For a $500 upgrade, assuming you have the basics -> peripherals, case, power supply (which you said you have), hard drive(s), etc. I'd upgrade your CPU, motherboard, RAM, and video card. A $500 dollar budget for just those 4 parts will get your a pretty beefy mid-range gaming computer, if that's what you are aiming for. EDIT: If you choose to stay AMD, you can skip the RAM, because it will be the same platform. If you live near a Microcenter, you can get great deals on Intel CPUs and motherboards. Things such as $140 i5-2500k. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html has a good chart on price/performance for video cards. Prices may vary from place to place depending on where you live, but I'd budget accordingly. $150-200 GPU $150-200 CPU $30 - 50 RAM $80 Motherboard

What happens to me is I spend all day at work/school thinking about the fun I'll have playing games when I get home. When I get home, I am already bored of the game before even playing it because it has been in the back of my mind all day. Another thing that happens to me, which is the worst: I crave video games right before big exams, but right after them, when I have time for games, I feel like doing anything but play games.

A similar thing happened to my friend who was inexperienced with computer building. I'm unaware of your computer knowledge, so I apologize if any of these recommendations come off as obvious. My friends issue was that he plugged his monitor cord into the motherboard video port, rather than his graphics card video port. Does your computer make a POST beep? Refer to your motherboard manual if you hear a beep besides 1 short beep. Usually they have a list of errors that corresponds to the beep/beeps the motherboard will make. If the motherboard does not make a beep at all, some motherboards come with pin outs for "speaker" which should be located in the same group as your power pins, reset pins, hdd light activity pins, etc. From there, it is easier to check what the issue is. A few things to check is to make sure everything is actually plugged in. Check all connections to see if they are fully connected. i.e. Ram pushed in all the way, mobo 4/8 pin connected all the way. After ensuring everything is plugged in, and the computer still does not work, begin taking out things one at a time until your computer will post.

Is there a reason why power supplies are grouped in the same subforum as cases? Besides the fact that cases were commonly sold with power supplies a few years ago, it seems that cases and power supplies are now infrequently bundled together.

$250 is a very high budget if you are just looking for a socket LGA 1155 motherboard that can overclock. A lot of the high end motherboards have little extra gimmicks and features that aren't necessarily needed for overclocking. I'd recommend the Asus P8Z77 line of motherboards. They all have overclocking capabilities. Start from the most basic one (can't remember the exact naming scheme they use) and work your way up for what features you want. (things like WiFi, thunderbolt, etc.)

Try looking at this chart for information on best GPU / $$. http://www.videocardbenchmark.net/gpu_value.html

Are you a student? Microsoft has free versions for people with an @edu email. This includes not only Visual Studio Express, but even includes full version of Visual Studio. The link is: https://www.dreamspark.com/

DOTA2 keys are being handed out like Google+ invites were handed out. Everyone has too many invites and not enough people to give them to. I'm sure anyone looking for a DOTA 2 invite can find someone nice enough to give them one of their extra invites. If someone were to pick up a MOBA today, I would recommend LoL or DOTA2. Those two games are on the rise, whereas I feel HoN is on the downhill. Personally, I have invested quite a bit of time in LoL, so I have grown accustomed to the mechanics and playstyle of LoL. However, everything outside the game itself, (menus, matchmaking, etc) DOTA2 dominates over all of the other MOBAs. Valve has done an amazing job making sure that DOTA2 has a robust and feature rich out-of-game client.

My usual thing for BIOS updates is, if it ain't broke, don't update. Manufacturers don't update the BIOS to add extra features, they add them to fix features. If you don't notice which features are broken, then fixing them won't matter.

My situation is that I have an 128GB SSD in my laptop and I'm looking to upgrade that to a 256GB or even 512GB SSD but haven't because I've always feared swapping out drives. My past experience has been: copy all of my documents, photos, music, etc, removing the drive, fresh install of Windows, followed by a long list of driver installations, then 3rd party software installations. I've heard that there are ways to image the drive and just copy exactly the information from one drive to another, where essentially the only difference I would notice is a lot more free space on my drive. What is the best way to accomplish this, on a laptop? (Laptop only has connection for 1 SSD at a time. Would I need an external SATA dock or a desktop to connect both drives, etc) What software is involved? On a side note: notice how I typed SS drive instead of SSD :)

To play devils advocate to everyone trying to sway you away from TN panels in favor of IPS panels. The cost of IPS panels in comparison to TN panels is significant. People always rave about how nice their IPS panel is and how they can never go back to TN. This statement is partially true. If you have a multiple monitor setup with some IPS and some TN panels, then you will notice the difference. I purchased an IPS panel for my home computer, but I was stuck with a TN panel for work. Everyday I would notice the difference coming from work to home, to the point where I discarded the IPS panel. The TN panel by itself looks nice, but only seems bad when compared to the IPS. Best advice I can offer: never use IPS and the TN panel will look fine. Regarding the bezels, with bezel correction, 10mm and 20 mm makes little difference after your eyes get adjusted to it.

It almost seems that water cooling is bound to end up like air cooling. An over-saturation of different products eventually resulting in specific products dominating either the budget-end or the high-end spectrum. Corsair's fast pace of releasing new AIO coolers is an attempt to be that "top dog" in AIO coolers. By having the ultimate flagship cooler, consumers will want to buy the budget-end coolers for the Corsair name. (What I mean for budget-end or high-end can be equated to what has happened to the Air cooler market. (i.e. Hyper 212 for budget, Noctua NH-D14 for high end)