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I reinstalled windows 7. I have a 500GB HDD (not yet allocated in the picture) and a 256GB SSD. During reinstallation, I "delete"/purge both, so they both show up as "unallocated", and then choose to install on the 256gb SSD.
Here's what boogles my mind, when opening the disc manager (swedish, but still)
Why on earth does it say "100mb reserved" on m 500 GB HDD, when I clearly chose to install windows on the 256gb SSD? What does that 100mb reserved data do? will it negatively affect my performance that it exists on my HDD rather than my SSD? The idea is to use SSD primarily and then just use the HDD as storage.
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Next time, disconnect all other drives except the one you are installing to. 
What board do you have? Do you know if it's already using "UEFI" style BIOS or the old one?
You might also want to connect the SSD to the first SATA port instead of some random one, but that's technically not important for what you want (it can stay as Disk 1 instead of 0 if you want).
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UEFI style bios? I have a gigabyte h61m-d2-b3 (http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3773#ov)
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I have no idea what's going on.
I don't think you have UEFI. You have normal BIOS. UEFI can boot from a "GPT" partitioned drive and Windows will create a whole bunch of weird partitions on a drive like that. BIOS uses "MBR" partitioning and an installed Windows will look like what you see, a single large C: partition and nothing else.
I don't know what those 100 MB could be, perhaps a Windows recovery partition with the memory test and system restore and backup restore tools? It might also boot from there because the HDD is drive number one instead of the SSD because of how you plugged in the cables?
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On July 03 2014 05:24 Ropid wrote: You might also want to connect the SSD to the first SATA port instead of some random one Where is the difference between first and rest (mostly 2-5)?
Edit: I have this mystery 100mb data too since I installed my SSD. This happened when I "initialize" a new HDD/SSD.
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On July 03 2014 05:35 Ropid wrote: I have no idea what's going on.
I don't think you have UEFI. You have normal BIOS. UEFI can boot from a "GPT" partitioned drive and Windows will create a whole bunch of weird partitions on a drive like that. BIOS uses "MBR" partitioning and an installed Windows will look like what you see, a single large C: partition and nothing else.
I don't know what those 100 MB could be, perhaps a Windows recovery partition with the memory test and system restore and backup restore tools? It might also boot from there because the HDD is drive number one instead of the SSD because of how you plugged in the cables?
The last is probably true. I just googled this: http://www.hanselman.com/blog/SwitchingMyWindows7BootDiskFromDToCWithBCDBootRatherThanBCDEdit.aspx sounds very much like my problem... will give it a try
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On July 03 2014 05:36 Dingodile wrote:Show nested quote +On July 03 2014 05:24 Ropid wrote: You might also want to connect the SSD to the first SATA port instead of some random one Where is the difference between first and rest (mostly 2-5)? It's just the order of how things show up. You can see that in his screenshot. The HDD is in front of the SSD.
It doesn't really matter as you can select the boot order in the BIOS, and when working with the drives in Windows you work with the drive letters which can be set up however you want.
The Windows installation program was apparently confused by the order, but that could have been avoided if the HDD had been disconnected while installing Windows.
There can also be a real difference. On my motherboard the first two ports are higher speed than ports 3, 4, 5, 6 (SATA3 vs. SATA2). The board also has two extra ports supplied by a controller that's not Intel/AMD. Those controllers are worse than Intel/AMD in benchmarks. If it's not used, it can also be disabled and there's one driver less running in Windows which might be good.
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On July 02 2014 14:42 Cyro wrote:Maybe worth switching to a new monitor, 1080p60hz to 1080p60hz is kinda weird unless you wanted to go from tn to IPS for example. You can't really trust those specs though, like g2g response time or contrast ratio's, on the store pages
Do you think a 2560 x 1440 monitor would be a worthwhile upgrade? Prices are up above 400.
I have a gtx 770.
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2560x1440 would be a hugeeeee upgrade from a 1080p 60Hz TN.
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It should look way nicer, but it could potentially have less responsiveness. That said, I have the U2713HM and it's fabulous.
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^i was wondering whether 27 in is too big for micro purposes. If nothing else I am very used to 24 in but it looks like monitors with this res don't come in 24 in.
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United Kingdom20316 Posts
27" 1440p is basically just a 22" 1080p screen, but it has more pixels added to the sides and top for ~77.8% more area. Graphical demands go up about that much too, so you'd need etc sli770 or a single 780ti at decent clocks to run at the same graphical settings and FPS in cases where you were GPU bound
27" is really big, 24" is too big for me. I play some games with a window in the middle of screen (1280x800 on 1920x1080, so 320 pixels on left/right of my screen are black) because it hurts performance and mouse accuracy if you are forced to use peripheral vision, and i sit too close (not further than a few feet) to 24" to use it effectively. It's good for FPS/MMO games, but not so much for Starcraft, osu or even league of legends to have a too big screen.
It's nice to have higher resolution, but i would much prefer to have more DENSE pixels for better images, better text, less visible aliasing (especially when moving a camera in a 3d world) instead of just the same old pixel density that i had since a cheapish screen in 2007 and that everybody has, because for some strange reason there's no screens above ~100ppi that are not 4k that i know of, for the whole desktop PC platform
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1440s are 27", 1600s are 30". I don't think there are any exceptions there, but something new might've come around. Last I looked the 1600s still had shitty backlighting (CCFL?) and I think really really bad response times.
The main performance drawback to a 1440/1600 is the added load on the system, since it's basically double the pixels of a 1080p. It will noticeably affect your ability to stream and makes a later move to surround screen way more costly (you're basically talking 2-4 of the best cards on the market). Not to say you can't stream (I still do it fine), just a consideration.
I'm assuming that even with NVENC handling encoding/downscaling with 2x the pixels you'll still have the added streaming difficulty, but I'm not positive there.
In any event, you could also spring for some of the really snappy monitors (1080p) with gsync etc as an alternative.
Oh, and as to the comment on microing: you can always just increase the DPI on your mouse commensurate with the increase in pixels of the monitor. Should end up with more or less the same feel.
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Thanks for the advice, looks like G-SYNC is the way to go, since I'm not interested in upgrading from my 770 and I don't think I want to go above 24".
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United Kingdom20316 Posts
Oh, and as to the comment on microing: you can always just increase the DPI on your mouse commensurate with the increase in pixels of the monitor. Should end up with more or less the same feel.
You can increase DPI by 1.333x (etc 750 to 1000) but overall for some stuff, it's worse unless you just use a window in the middle of the screen, or sit 4 feet from the monitor instead of 2 feet. Cutting my game window width from 1920 to 1280 made an for an embarrassing increase in ease and effectiveness of mouse usage and i'm pretty sure it's better to play league in a pretty small area (not at 1080p, even in a 22" 1080p screen) for reaching, seeing the minimap etc, i feel like i would be a more effective player with much less effort that way after only a little adjustment. It's easier to play when you don't have to flick your eyes all over the place because as much as we wouldn't like to admit it, our eyes are pretty bad at grabbing more than one thing at a time, plus having peripheral vision.
In the end i think it comes back to i would love to have a 22" 1440p monitor, but i could talk at somebody for hours about why it's a bad idea to have a monitor over about that size for a wide variety of games
The gsync/ULMB monitors are pretty much only an upgrade from a 60hz tn, with 2.4x the refresh rate (+ variable refresh) and capability for strobe backlight if you want it, so i can't fault them unless you personally value stuff that they can't provide
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Since we're talking about resolutions, is having a 4k screen worth the upgrade? As far as I am aware, games don't actually support it yet. For example, the Lenovo Y50
http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/laptops/lenovo/y-series/y50-uhd/
It's 15.6" screen with gtx 860m
1. is it worth paying 200-300 more? 2. is it noticeable on 15.6" only? 3. is gtx 860m any good, maybe enough to run 4k? 4. opinions in general about 4k?
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United Kingdom20316 Posts
the only thing funnier than 15.6" 4k is trying to game on it with a gtx860m
that's 282 pixels per inch.. most desktop screens are around 90-110, if you get 1080p or 1440p at basically the sizes available
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4K on a small screen is a neat idea because you can run 1080p perfectly on it. A 1080p pixel fits exactly inside a 2x2 block of pixels of the 4K resolution and there's no strange artifacts. Because of this, you can work around any issues with regards to performance while gaming. You could only use 4K for the desktop and for games like Civ5 where FPS don't really matter while super sharp text and graphics would be great to have.
For the Windows desktop, you can use 200% scaling which hopefully works and looks better than things like 120% or 150% etc. on a 1440p screen. Text will be super sharp which might help for work. I don't really know what happens in Windows 8 for old programs that can't deal with 4K resolution and 200% scaling for the desktop. Apple's OS X circumvents that issue by scaling the windows of old programs through the graphics hardware. For the old programs, everything looks like it's a 1080p screen so there's no issues (except that it looks blurry for you). I'd imagine Microsoft has something similar in 8.
No idea if it's worth $200-$300 for you. 
There's two versions of the GTX 860M. One is a rebranded older 700 series chip (using an architecture named "Kepler"), the other is a "real" 800 series chip ("Maxwell" architecture). You'll want the Maxwell chip.
I don't know how good 860M will work in 4K (I suspect it's shit). I think people report that these notebook chips work fine for 1080p, but I don't know if they mean with anti-aliasing or without. If it's with AA, simply disabling that might get you a good way towards making 4K kind of playable. Playing without AA will still look great on the small 4K screen as you can't really see those tiny pixels. If all those people were already playing without AA, you'll probably have to play games in full-screen mode in a low resolution.
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United Kingdom20316 Posts
There's two versions of the GTX 860M. One is a rebranded older 700 series chip (using an architecture named "Kepler"), the other is a "real" 800 series chip ("Maxwell" architecture). You'll want the Maxwell chip.
To note here.. The Kepler one probably performs significantly better (maybe not if it has low clock speeds and you can't change them..) but Maxwell is way better for power efficiency, as much as half the power used / heat generated for same performance level so it's probably better to take almost all of the time
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thanks for the advice. I believe it says that it is maxwell on their website. also they offer an upgrade to 4gb video memory. afaik that doesn't actually help much in playing games, does it?
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