TwOne

At school I've had to run multiple Virtual Machines using VMware Workstation lately. However, I've had instance where the hard drive would be utilized constantly, which meant the host system was pretty much unusably slow. I've been looking at the Resource Monitor, and found out that VMware spends a lot of the 'hard drive active time' writing to disk. I've been looking for a storage solution to speed up the operation of my Virtual Machines while keeping the host system usable, without much success. Currently, my laptop has a single WD 7500BPVX (WD Blue 750GB 2.5" 5400RPM laptop drive). It also has an mSATA expansion slot, but for me it doesn't matter if I have to use an external enclosure. Requirements: - atleast 192GB of storage - less than €100 (I live in the Netherlands, prefer to use national shops) - can handle a lot of writing to big files

A while ago I bought a Rapoo 7100P after just needing a new mouse for my laptop, but lately I have been feeling it is too small for me, especially when using it for long periods of time at school and my recent internship. So I'm looking for a new mouse again. It has to be under €60, preferrably under €50 (the Netherlands). I'd like to have two side-buttons. My hands are 17.5 cm (6.9 inches) tall and 9.5 cm (3.7 inches) wide and I palm grip. I really like my G402, but it gets really sticky when my hands sweat and the cable really doesn't like frequent transporting. I also tried a Roccat Kone Pure once, felt really nice, but it's too expensive. Something with the size/shape like that would be great.

I'll try replacing the fan splitter first. I happen to have a second one luckily.

I use automatic fan speed in the UEFI BIOS, nothing else to control fan speed outside of MSI Afterburner for my GPU.

So, a while ago I upgraded to a new motherboard, CPU and memory. There were no problems, except that my motherboard had only one fan port. No big deal, I got Noctua fan splitters and connected them to my two fans in my Corsair SPEC-03 and all is good. Until a few weeks ago. I noticed some random whining sound when the PC has been on for a few hours, it sounded like one of those electric tools the dentist uses (it also changes pitch pretty quickly). I decided to take a look inside the case and listen where the noise was coming from. It was coming from the back exhaust fan, which somehow also wasn't spinning. I pushed the fan blades and it started spinning on it's own, stopping the noise. After 5 minutes it stopped again and started making the noise again. I touched the fan splitter cable and it went spinning on it's own again, I didn't hear the sound any more until I reboot the system. Could the fan be broken, or might it be just the fan splitter? It's a fan that came with the case, and the splitter is a Noctua NA-SYC2. EDIT: Title gore, I meant spin on it's own.

It may cause bottlenecking in newer titles. I have a similar system right now with a Q8300 (2.5GHz, otherwise almost the same) and a 750 Ti (once again, slightly faster) and experience high CPU usage in games that are CPU intensive. In those games you mentioned, bottlenecking will most likely not be a problem.

I don't really play anymore games, but when I do, I feel it's difficult to quit playing Skyrim. Fun thing is that I never used to be into RPGs until Skyrim and Borderlands 2.

I know. Luckily my class is full of techies like me. I was discussing DDR4 RAM with a guy who normally isn't that smart, but it feels good man to talk to people who know what they are talking about.

Some could argue that he was an Intel insider.

So, to confirm, you guys would still pick the i3, even with 4GB RAM and to upgrade the RAM later over the FX with 8GB and overclocking out of the box? Just to be sure. I know both options will be miles ahead of my current set-up, but CPUs are a strange thing to me.

The X4 980 still performs really well, but it will not guarantee good performance for the coming years. In fact, in CPU intensive games you will probably not see much of an difference. For GPUs, I recommend getting an GTX 760 if you can find one.

It is. To get Skylake into budget I had to cut the RAM from 8GB to 4GB.

About €10.

I already have a 750 Ti, so I am fine there.

So, I have been saving up and wanting to buy a new CPU, motherboard and some RAM for a while now. However, I don't know what to decide on, with Mantle and DX12 around the corner offering great CPU core utilization, and the FX-6300 performing on par with the i3, and having some OC headroom. But the i3 is pretty much unbeaten in single-threaded workloads, plus has better upgrading path, DDR4 support and some other cool stuff like M.2, SATA Express, USB 3.1 and USB-C (stuff I probably won't use in the coming 5 years). I've paved out two options, I can take the FX-6300 with a CPU cooler, budget motherboard (that covers what I need) and 8GB DDR3-1866 RAM. Or, I can go the i3 route, H110 motherboard and 4GB DDR4-2133, and upgrade to 8 or even 16GB later. Here are the combos I am thinking of: (I can only spend about €225, and I live in the Netherlands) option A (AMD): AMD FX-6300 (€108,90) Scythe Shuriken Rev. B (€26,80) Asus M5A78L-M LX3 (€42,95) I had my doubts on this one, but people have reported to get 4.4-4.6GHz on it Kingston HyperX Fury blu HX318C10F/8 (€44,90) total: €223,55 option B (Intel): Intel Core i3-6100 (€135,50) Gigabyte GA-H110M-S2H (€59,80) Crucial Ballistix Sport BLS4G4D240FSA (€26,50) total: €221,80 Most demanding games I will be playing are Battlefield 4, Grand Theft Auto V and Cities: Skylines. I want something that'll hold me over for a while without having to upgrade much later. I currently have the GeForce GTX 750 Ti.