eshbop

My mate currently wants my help in trying to find him a good deal on a 2nd hand laptop that he can game on. He doesn't seem to understand that laptops are terrible for gaming (especially when he wants to pay like $600-800 for it) and that he could pay a little extra for a much better experience. He already has a laptop so it's not like he wants it just because it's portable. I just don't get it...

My mate currently wants my help in trying to find him a good deal on a 2nd hand laptop that he can game on. He doesn't seem to understand that laptops are terrible for gaming (especially when he wants to pay like $600-800 for it) and that he could pay a little extra for a much better experience. He already has a laptop so it's not like he wants it just because it's portable. I just don't get it...

prime95 only test specific instructions sets. Even then it does it at an unnatural level. If you want to run prime you need to run for at least 17.5hrs for it to go through each FTT length (at 15min per length) because some chips will BSOD at specific FTT length and not others.
You want other stress test that stress all aspects of the CPU (eg PC Mark 7, AIDA64) to make sure you've go it stable. Though in saying that prime95 won't hurt as long as you used a manual voltage with Haswell. Offset or dynamic vcore settings put unnaturally high volts through the CPU when stressing using prime, which makes prime useless for homing in an OC (on Haswell). Through it is still useful to quickly (in manual vcore mode) get an idea of the vcore required for your chip at a specific frequency.

Fan controllers are pretty simple, I wouldn't worry about the brand too much.

Steam gave Sniper Elite V2 away to everyone a few months back...

Well it depends on the series. For lg their lb6300 series uses only IPS panels. However their lb5600, 5800, and 5900 are not IPS, according to the chart Amazon. The handy dandy chart does not say what panel type it is, just that it is not IPS. However I have been looking around and have found some websites claiming that the lg 47lb5900 does in fact have an IPS panel, but these are random websites that I have never heard of so who knows. LG's own website for the 5900 series has no mention of a panel type. 
 
Point being don't assume that just because it's a "good brand" of tv that It uses an IPS panel. Do some research and confirm one way or the other. Also not trying to attack eshbop or anything, just wanted to spread this bit of information.

LED is just the backlight tech. They are all still LCD's.

I guess apple is.... Putin in more effort

No actually, if the test is based on the Bechdel test then the Barbie game might pass, but things like Farmville and Candy Crush Saga will not pass.
The Bechdel test is quite literally "two female characters talk to each other about something other than a man". That is the entire test. If the main villain is a man, and all the dialog in the game is about how evil he is, then he doesn't matter if you play as 5 different and well written female role models.
If you have a Barbie game where you play as Barbie and talk to your female friend about let's say shoes, then it will pass.
 
It's a very ridged test and it's not up for interpretation if something passes or not, which is good. The test itself is pure garbage though.
I doubt that it will be the only criteria for the label. If it is then the labeling will do more harm than good (again, games like Senran Kagura Burst will pass but Minecraft won't). If it's not based on that then I fear the test will be extremely subjective.
We might end up with someone like Anita who misinterpret the message of games like Zelda. Hell, with Anita's criteria you can pretty much call any game sexist. Even her own game concept is extremely sexist according to her own thesis (see the first ~6 minutes of this video).

If I'm understanding you correctly it looks like the Power LED is in the wrong way. The PowerLED+ should be in the Upper left pin.---------------------------
| P+ | P- | __ | __ |
----------------------
| H+ | H- | __ | __ |
---------------------------
Hope that makes sense lol
If you've got it set out like that already then either the Power LED cable/s or Power LED is buggered. To test which one it is, plug the Power LED cables into the HDD LED pins (+ into +, - into - obviously) and start HDD defrag, if they light goes on and stays on you know the Power LED is fine.

My mate currently wants my help in trying to find him a good deal on a 2nd hand laptop that he can game on. He doesn't seem to understand that laptops are terrible for gaming (especially when he wants to pay like $600-800 for it) and that he could pay a little extra for a much better experience. He already has a laptop so it's not like he wants it just because it's portable. I just don't get it...

Cool,  does this mean we can expect AMD to retaliate and prove Elvis is actually dead?

FLAC files are all the craze on audio lovers nowadays. FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Compression) is supposed to give a size compression to original PCM uncompressed (wave), without any loss in quality and frequency range of the original file. 
 
Now how do you know the FLAC files you have, that you don't encode yourself (maybe downloaded/bought online) are 'real' FLAC, meaning they were encoded straight from a good full frequency range source? 
 
I found an article on the net, on how to test the 'quality' of the FLAC files you have. I'm sure many of you know about this already, but what the heck.....
 
- First you need to download a freeware program called 'Spectro', and install it. It's light and totally free.
- Run the program, open a file you want to test. It will show vital informations of the files
 
For example, I got these audio files from a website that provide various file formats for a particular song for download. So I'm assuming they do the encoding of the different formats from the same master source.
 

 
This is the result of the FLAC file testing. You can see the spectrometer goes all the way up to full 22KHz. Because the sample rate of this file is 44khz only, so full spectrometer at 22khz (44 divided by 2) is very good. You can also see other informations on the file, like the compression ratio, original size, etc.
 

 
This is a result of the 320kbps MP3 version of the same song. You can see the spectrometer got decapitated a little short of 22khz. The reason is because MP3 encoding uses a lossy compression, so you can see the loss there in the spectrometer and also in the frequency graph in the lower left.
 

 
You might have guessed, the 128kbps version got decapitated much more brutally there. 
 
You can encode a lossy, low quality MP3 (say 128kbps like above) to FLAC, but of course you won't get the full spectrum that way. 
 

 
This is the reading of a FLAC file I converted from the 128kbps MP3 source. It's the exact same with the picture before it. So although it's a FLAC file, but because it's encoded from a lossy format, it doesn't have the benefit of the lossless compression. Funny thing is, the source file (128kbps MP3) is 3.8MB, while the FLAC file is 33MB. So I was actually wasting almost 10 times of storage space, for the same exact quality. In other words, totally overkill.
 
So what's the meaning of all this? This is a way to tell if your FLAC files got encoded from a full frequency range source, or from a lossy source, like the picture above. The spectro reveals the 'true face' of the FLAC files you have. 
 

That's like, the entirety of Australia's bandwidth to the rest of the world.

Thought I was the only one.

I use brake cleaner on mine. Works great.

The architecture is basically made to scale and it should scale

Much Improved architecture + Faster clocked vRam + Less fetching + 8x more cache + narrower bus ~= Slower vRam + wider bus.

This was true for the 780ti vs R9-290X but not in this case.
Unless it's a dual 256bit bus or a single 256bit/ 9-10Ghz bus there is no way it's going to come close to the 384bit/7ghz bus of the 780ti.
 
I really hope so because I wanted to upgrade with this series.

That's like, the entirety of Australia's bandwidth to the rest of the world.

It'll get finished.
And when it is, all but the few "hardcore" PC players will have moved on. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if most already have. I certainly have.
True, it's still in Alpha. Yes it's going to be buggy and take time to develop. But issues that were present on launch last December are still present today. Adding some new items or emotes don't make up for zombies that still magically walk through walls, or that fall through the ground, become invisible and chase you until you are dead.
I'll give it a chance again in another 6 months, but at this rate I'm expecting more of the same.

I always thought the definition was pretty simple. Think of it this way.
 
Gaming is to a gamer, as hiking is to a hiker, fishing is to a fisher, or photography is to a photographer.
 
I can often go hiking or fishing or photographing, but wouldn't consider myself a hiker or fisher or photographer until the pastime become more of a passion.

i think I actually like the metal cable guard more than grommets...although that may change once I've seen an actual build in one.

Just get another GTX 770

Better value for money would be adding just 1 770...

Freesync = codename for AMD's technology (GPU hardware + drivers) that enables Gsync-like features on DisplayPort 1.2a AdaptiveSync ready monitors.
So far, the 290, 290x, 285, 260x & 260 fully support it.
Have to wait for new monitors, there will be a price premium but we are told it'll be less than Gsync.