Oxide_44

I'd like to win the keyboard because my keyboard now has Cherry switches, and I'd really like to try another kind of switch. But also it does not have programmable back-lighting, its either on, or off. Which kind of sucks, but mech keyboards are a little too pricey for me to just buy a few and keep the one I like as my daily driver. ....I don't have a Twitter....sooooo I'll just stick with the post and hopefully that'll be good enough.

I'd really like to have the Magnus because I used to have a Zotac MAG back in the day of the Nvidia Ion, and I always thought the form factor was pretty slick. That and I could do some decent gaming on it, and that in itself is awesome.

I would like to try a FinalMouse, because well....I....umm....well, frankly I've never heard of the darn thing.

I love mini PCs, used Zotac ones before but I'd like to see what Intel has to offer. Also need something to use as install fodder for SteamOS

You don't have to delete it, just go back and edit your first post

Yeeeah, going to have to agree there. OpenCL/GL is really a strong suit for an AMD card. For a monitor, I use 3 ASUS PA238QR's, they are 1920by1080 IPS panels. Meant for color work, but I also use them for gaming sometimes and they do just fine. Here's the thing, are you looking to do work on this thing or are you looking more for gaming? Because if you are using this as a workstation I would strongly recommend an AMD Firepro for Maya. If you are just gaming and the whole "rendering" thing is just something you may do from time to time, then really it doesn't matter what graphics card you get as long as it works. Going to have to be a little more specific if you want someone else to part out your system.

It has a better feature set and more on-board options and will probably be more reliable. Graphics card can be added later if he decides to play something that needs more oompf. Could still build a system for cheaper, but yeah as far as pre-builts go, that should be a pretty good option.

Uhhh, for the 5 minutes it takes to put a card into a slot I'm not sure what the big deal is on that, but ok. And yeah I would say ASUS would be a really good option.

Asus makes pre-builts, and they are not half-bad. Honestly anything with a CPU will run what he wants to run. My advice for him is to invest in a cheap prebuilt (A6 or Intel i3) and just shell out some cash for a non-powered graphics card; http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00ILALU28/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00ILALU28&linkCode=as2&tag=jayz05-20&linkId=OKXUCWGKPJSZUPN5 <--- This would be a good option for a pre-built.

Video driver took a dump. Unistall it and reinstall, if the issue happens again on other inputs, rollback the driver to a previous version and you should be good.

Then yeah, your temps are just fine. Chrome and Skype are where your bottleneck may very well be, especially Chrome. Also SuperAntiSpyware will conflict with Mbam in most cases.

That setup should be ok, but I would advise against a HP. The price of those are way too high, and upgrading those models are a no-go. Newer HP pre-builts are also not exactly built with quality in mind these days either. For $500 you can probably find a better pre-built.

Then that seems to be the root of your issue then, if your load times are hanging then it is to do with the CPU. Unless you really see a thermal spike under load on the CPU it sounds like something is eating a lot of resources all of a sudden. This can be caused by either a driver conflict or by an excess of background processes. Pull up task manager and see what is currently running and where it is coming from. Programs that can eat a lot of resources are usually Anti-Virus programs, Updaters, and malware. Do you have an A/V program installed? If so, which program? Did you update any drivers recently?

Lauching Photoshop takes forever because of the WD Purple you are using, it is not meant for everyday read tasks.

Can you get into your UEFI? On a Win8 system the UEFI should control boot priority, but it is really awful about checking properly if the bootmgr is availble. Also a black screen can be caused by a RAM failure, best way to check that is also from the UEFI and run a diagnostic, the dignostic options change from UEFI to UEFI based on manufacturer. Also there is a problem in Win8 that can corrupt its boot setting, causing a black screen after the Windows 8 logo. This can be fixed by allowing the system to boot cycle three times until Windows 8 pulls up the system dignostics, at that point select advanced options, and choose "refresh my operating system without deleting my files". That should knock loose any program/driver compatibiliy settings that may be messing with startup.