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When using this resource, please read the opening post. The Tech Support forum regulars have helped create countless of desktop systems without any compensation. The least you can do is provide all of the information required for them to help you properly. |
On June 10 2014 12:51 Intact wrote:
I need some advice about mini itx builds. My situation is that I'm currently in the states, only having access to a somewhat crappy laptop. In the summer I will go home to Sweden and then head off the a university in Scotland in September. My desktop could certainly use some upgrades but I don't want to move a full size tower overseas.
Here is my idea: When I get home to Sweden I buy a mini itx case, strip the HDD,GPU and PSU(depending on size) from my desktop and buy an upgrade kit with a mobo, CPU and ram to spice things up a bit. Could you feasibly carry a mini itx with you in luggage or something similar?,
Also, I know some mini itx cases require special PSUs, but do you use normal mobos? The upgrade i was thinking of contains:
Intel® LGA1155 Core i5-3470, Socket-LGA1155, Quad Core, 3.2Ghz, 6MB, Boxed w/fan
MSI B75MA-P45, Socket-1155
Crucial DDR3 BallistiX Sport 1600Mhz 8GB KIT
Could I fit that in a Fractal Design Node 304 Mini-ITX case and have it be somewhat portable?
From my experience it could be cheaper to buy parts in the USA... If you find the right sales/deals you could end up saving on transport costs (and you can probably get away without paying tariffs if you unbox them).
Check online retailers (amazon.com, newegg.com) to see if you can buy the same (or better parts) for cheaper.
(others already covered other points)
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I'm pretty sold on trying to make something work in that case. I'll have to check my PSU to see if it is 140mm but otherwise I'll just buy a new one. Haven't used an optical drive in years so that doesn't bother me.
Thanks for your input.
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United Kingdom20342 Posts
His temps are like >10c worse than mine using the same cooler and fan speed, even though he's using a 760 at stock and i'm using a 770 (8 smx vs 6) at maxed clock speeds
He's hitting like 80c with 60% fan speed on windforce, which is too hot for a GPU of so little power consumption. It could be kept at like 60 with a really good setup - 780ti with same cooler can pull twice as much and stay under 80c with more aggressive fan profile and good airflow. It doesn't have to be great, but something more functional than a single, low RPM exhaust fan that's miles away from the GPU, it wouldn't surprise me at all to gain 5-10c off, and it was planned anyway to buy a few fans. £20 for three fans hurts budget though. At that point, i might have even considered just buying like a h440 - i mean, that comes with four good stock fans i think among other stuff and it's only like £40 more.
Anyways, he got them, will see what happens ^.^
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Okay everyone, final update from me. I exchanged the HDD at Memoryexpress, and it was in fact defective. The new one they gave me installed Win 8.1 in about 15min; I was elated. Build is super stable so far, and I actually quite like Win 8.1 (never thought I'd say that).
In the near future I'll be getting a CPU cooler so I can start OC'ing (NH-D14). Also I'll be getting a Crucial MX100 as well for games and maybe OS.
This thread and the ppl in it have been an awesome resource, btw. My initial post didn't require much feedback, and I feel like that shows how much I've learned in the 5 months I've been lurking this single thread, to where I knew exactly what I wanted, and I knew that what I selected would get me the performance I wanted.
Anyway back to lurking!
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On June 10 2014 21:15 Cyro wrote:His temps are like >10c worse than mine using the same cooler and fan speed, even though he's using a 760 at stock and i'm using a 770 (8 smx vs 6) at maxed clock speeds He's hitting like 80c with 60% fan speed on windforce, which is too hot for a GPU of so little power consumption. It could be kept at like 60 with a really good setup - 780ti with same cooler can pull twice as much and stay under 80c with more aggressive fan profile and good airflow. It doesn't have to be great, but something more functional than a single, low RPM exhaust fan that's miles away from the GPU, it wouldn't surprise me at all to gain 5-10c off, and it was planned anyway to buy a few fans. £20 for three fans hurts budget though. At that point, i might have even considered just buying like a h440 - i mean, that comes with four good stock fans i think among other stuff and it's only like £40 more. Anyways, he got them, will see what happens ^.^
Same volts as well? There's some sample variance by chip, of course.
Also, if you're talking about Gigabyte Windforces, it's not the same cooler.
+ Show Spoiler [images] +
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Two Questions:
Is this video card a decent future-proofing replacement (Can get it down to ~200 with discount code/rebates, if there are better cards in that price range). My previous MSI GTX560 TI is pretty much out of commission so I need a replacement.
Assuming the new card is worth it, will it work with my current mobo (not too good on figuring out the compability stuff)?
Thanks!
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Yes, all video cards will work with your current motherboard.
But there is no such thing as future proofing as this would depend on game development, what you want to play, and whether you are getting a 4k display in the near future.
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I see, thanks  . I guess I was considering it in the sense that I wouldn't necessarily want to be able to play every new iteration of Battlefield or Crysis in HD but rather just most average titles in decent quality (preferably Very High/60 fps but I wouldn't mind turning things down) without having to replace it for a while. I can see how changes in game development could make that expectation impossible though. Haven't heard of 4k Display before but looks interesting!
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On June 09 2014 07:21 skyR wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2014 07:10 guitarizt wrote:
Would a pentium d, pentium g, or amd 3850 lag for sc2 team games? I see everyone going for i5's on here. Is it better than something like an fx 8350? Pentium D would be unplayable since it's like 10 years old. The rest would play the game reasonably well but of course you'd lag in team games. Yes, the i5 is better than the FX8350 for lightly threaded applications.
Lag in team games would make me sad. Also, I just read yesterday that a guy running an i5-2500k not overclocked was having some lag in age of empires hd team games which is what got me craving a new cpu anyways. I guess aoe hd wasn't made very well and it sounds like it's even more of a cpu hog than sc2. I get lag mid to late game in 1vs1, and it's unplayable in team games. I have to look at the fog of war and macro blind.
I'm leaning towards an i5-4670k now, which sucks because I might have to piece buy the parts over a 2 month period and super skimp on food. I should trust my former self that needed at least a 2500k @ 4.5 GHz for sc2. I was playing seriously then and now it's just for fun, but there's a reason virtually every build in here is an i5 or i7.
On June 09 2014 07:23 MisterFred wrote:
A Pentium G (I own a pentium g850) will occasionally give you problems in big 4v4s, or 3v3s where, oddly, everyone gets near maxxed, but generally it'll be good enough for team games unless you're obsessive. A Pentium G should be about as good as an fx 8350 for SC2, but of course the fx 8350 will be better for other things. The Pentium D will just be crap.
For SC2, you should generally ignore AMD processors, as per-core performance is far, far, far more important than overall capability.
If you're building a new computer & don't care about much other than SC2 & price, I think there's some overclockable pentium that just game out...
P.S. the i5 would be better than all the above options, except in terms of cost.
Nice, I googled the cpus and it looks like the i5-4690k just came out. I'll have to look into it and I'm even considering trying to hold out for broadwell, but that probably won't happen.
I did see the sc2 benchmarks where intel > amd. I really do only care about sc2 (I run everything on low) and price. I only plan on playing rts's and d3, but I don't have too many complaints with d3 even running on my athlon x2 4000+ with geforce 8600gt.
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United Kingdom20342 Posts
On June 11 2014 04:55 guitarizt wrote:Show nested quote +On June 09 2014 07:21 skyR wrote:On June 09 2014 07:10 guitarizt wrote:
Would a pentium d, pentium g, or amd 3850 lag for sc2 team games? I see everyone going for i5's on here. Is it better than something like an fx 8350? Pentium D would be unplayable since it's like 10 years old. The rest would play the game reasonably well but of course you'd lag in team games. Yes, the i5 is better than the FX8350 for lightly threaded applications. Lag in team games would make me sad. Also, I just read yesterday that a guy running an i5-2500k not overclocked was having some lag in age of empires hd team games which is what got me craving a new cpu anyways. I guess aoe hd wasn't made very well and it sounds like it's even more of a cpu hog than sc2. I get lag mid to late game in 1vs1, and it's unplayable in team games. I have to look at the fog of war and macro blind. I'm leaning towards an i5-4670k now, which sucks because I might have to piece buy the parts over a 2 month period and super skimp on food. I should trust my former self that needed at least a 2500k @ 4.5 GHz for sc2. I was playing seriously then and now it's just for fun, but there's a reason virtually every build in here is an i5 or i7. Show nested quote +On June 09 2014 07:23 MisterFred wrote:
A Pentium G (I own a pentium g850) will occasionally give you problems in big 4v4s, or 3v3s where, oddly, everyone gets near maxxed, but generally it'll be good enough for team games unless you're obsessive. A Pentium G should be about as good as an fx 8350 for SC2, but of course the fx 8350 will be better for other things. The Pentium D will just be crap.
For SC2, you should generally ignore AMD processors, as per-core performance is far, far, far more important than overall capability.
If you're building a new computer & don't care about much other than SC2 & price, I think there's some overclockable pentium that just game out...
P.S. the i5 would be better than all the above options, except in terms of cost. Nice, I googled the cpus and it looks like the i5-4690k just came out. I'll have to look into it and I'm even considering trying to hold out for broadwell, but that probably won't happen. I did see the sc2 benchmarks where intel > amd. I really do only care about sc2 (I run everything on low) and price. I only plan on playing rts's and d3, but I don't have too many complaints with d3 even running on my athlon x2 4000+ with geforce 8600gt.
4690k isn't really better than 4670k - Devil's Canyon (4690k, 4790k) are like 8c cooler, but that doesn't really add any headroom to i5. With high end cooling and 20c room temp, you can already do 1.3vcore = 70c @ 100% CPU load average on hottest core on i5, but sc2 is far far cooler - it's hard to make 8c make a real difference. If both are similar price and you don't plan on delidding - great, but it's not a miracle chip.
Unlocked Haswell pentium should be very cheap and might run well in sc2 compared to other stuff. I've heard $70 and pretty cheap mobo's to OC it should be available. Pentium @4.7ghz might be significantly behind i5 @4.7ghz for example though in sc2 because of stuff like cache - i'm not really sure - and it will definitely lack a lot of punch for other programs, as you have only two cores and no AVX or AVX2 instructions. In a video encoder, i5 might perform as much as 3x as fast. 4670k/4790k is "the" option for a best CPU, as it's not really beaten outside of loads that scale with Hyperthreading or the 5+ cores of ivy-bridge-E right now, and has the full force of Haswell for those tasks that don't scale well onto many cores, but need fast ones.
I've seen some ridiculous benchmarks for sc2. I'm pretty sure Haswell has like a 1.5x lead over Piledriver clock for clock with everything else the same in the system, but i've also seen a Piledriver/270x system being outperformed by me by >2x! consistently, in cpu bound situations (sc2 low graphics) and another 4770k+a 7950 on low graphics being outperformed by over 1.5x sometimes. Because of that i wouldn't hesitate to pay extra for the same "graphical" performance on nvidia if it came to it, because this kind of thing is massive performance differences and just not documented properly.
I think it's true for wildstar as well, but i can't actually test it without an AMD GPU - i might roll back to pre-337.50 and see if substantial performance differences happen there. If so i'l probably post here because it seems like it'll be a pretty popular MMO
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On June 11 2014 06:07 Cyro wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2014 04:55 guitarizt wrote:On June 09 2014 07:21 skyR wrote:On June 09 2014 07:10 guitarizt wrote:
Would a pentium d, pentium g, or amd 3850 lag for sc2 team games? I see everyone going for i5's on here. Is it better than something like an fx 8350? Pentium D would be unplayable since it's like 10 years old. The rest would play the game reasonably well but of course you'd lag in team games. Yes, the i5 is better than the FX8350 for lightly threaded applications. Lag in team games would make me sad. Also, I just read yesterday that a guy running an i5-2500k not overclocked was having some lag in age of empires hd team games which is what got me craving a new cpu anyways. I guess aoe hd wasn't made very well and it sounds like it's even more of a cpu hog than sc2. I get lag mid to late game in 1vs1, and it's unplayable in team games. I have to look at the fog of war and macro blind. I'm leaning towards an i5-4670k now, which sucks because I might have to piece buy the parts over a 2 month period and super skimp on food. I should trust my former self that needed at least a 2500k @ 4.5 GHz for sc2. I was playing seriously then and now it's just for fun, but there's a reason virtually every build in here is an i5 or i7. On June 09 2014 07:23 MisterFred wrote:
A Pentium G (I own a pentium g850) will occasionally give you problems in big 4v4s, or 3v3s where, oddly, everyone gets near maxxed, but generally it'll be good enough for team games unless you're obsessive. A Pentium G should be about as good as an fx 8350 for SC2, but of course the fx 8350 will be better for other things. The Pentium D will just be crap.
For SC2, you should generally ignore AMD processors, as per-core performance is far, far, far more important than overall capability.
If you're building a new computer & don't care about much other than SC2 & price, I think there's some overclockable pentium that just game out...
P.S. the i5 would be better than all the above options, except in terms of cost. Nice, I googled the cpus and it looks like the i5-4690k just came out. I'll have to look into it and I'm even considering trying to hold out for broadwell, but that probably won't happen. I did see the sc2 benchmarks where intel > amd. I really do only care about sc2 (I run everything on low) and price. I only plan on playing rts's and d3, but I don't have too many complaints with d3 even running on my athlon x2 4000+ with geforce 8600gt. 4690k isn't really better than 4670k - Devil's Canyon (4690k, 4790k) are like 8c cooler, but that doesn't really add any headroom to i5. With high end cooling and 20c room temp, you can already do 1.3vcore = 70c @ 100% CPU load average on hottest core on i5, but sc2 is far far cooler - it's hard to make 8c make a real difference. If both are similar price and you don't plan on delidding - great, but it's not a miracle chip. Unlocked Haswell pentium should be very cheap and might run well in sc2 compared to other stuff. I've heard $70 and pretty cheap mobo's to OC it should be available. Pentium @4.7ghz might be significantly behind i5 @4.7ghz for example though in sc2 because of stuff like cache - i'm not really sure - and it will definitely lack a lot of punch for other programs, as you have only two cores and no AVX or AVX2 instructions. In a video encoder, i5 might perform as much as 3x as fast. 4670k/4790k is "the" option for a best CPU, as it's not really beaten outside of loads that scale with Hyperthreading or the 5+ cores of ivy-bridge-E right now, and has the full force of Haswell for those tasks that don't scale well onto many cores, but need fast ones. I've seen some ridiculous benchmarks for sc2. I'm pretty sure Haswell has like a 1.5x lead over Piledriver clock for clock with everything else the same in the system, but i've also seen a Piledriver/270x system being outperformed by me by >2x! consistently, in cpu bound situations (sc2 low graphics) and another 4770k+a 7950 on low graphics being outperformed by over 1.5x sometimes. Because of that i wouldn't hesitate to pay extra for the same "graphical" performance on nvidia if it came to it, because this kind of thing is massive performance differences and just not documented properly. I think it's true for wildstar as well, but i can't actually test it without an AMD GPU - i might roll back to pre-337.50 and see if substantial performance differences happen there. If so i'l probably post here because it seems like it'll be a pretty popular MMO
The g3258 @ 4.50 GHz looks pretty damn impressive. It's only $75 and performs similarly to an i3-4330 which is $126 right now. At that price point I might be happy because I'd be skeptical that $130 would be worth it for something like an i5-4670k. It'd be nice if there were some benchmarks out on the g3258 for cpu intensive games. eta is june 20th on amazon and june 25th on newegg.
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Canada8159 Posts
Hello, I'll be spending some time in this thread for the next little while
+ Show Spoiler +What is your budget?
~1000$, little flexible
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1680x1050
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
SC2 / dota 2 / newer games as they come out, preferably on higher settings
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Streaming, being able to load a youtube video or stream with games running in the background
Do you intend to overclock?
No, but maybe in the future
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
No
Do you need an operating system?
No
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
I'll get a new monitor and desk, these are separate from my budget
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
anything that works is good for me
What country will you be buying your parts in?
Canada
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
Cheapest
If there's any other info required let me know
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On June 11 2014 09:01 Jer99 wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Hello, I'll be spending some time in this thread for the next little while + Show Spoiler +What is your budget?
~1000$, little flexible
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1680x1050
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
SC2 / dota 2 / newer games as they come out, preferably on higher settings
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Streaming, being able to load a youtube video or stream with games running in the background
Do you intend to overclock?
No, but maybe in the future
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
No
Do you need an operating system?
No
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
I'll get a new monitor and desk, these are separate from my budget
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
anything that works is good for me
What country will you be buying your parts in?
Canada
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
Cheapest
If there's any other info required let me know
Which monitor do you intend to get?
ASUS ROG PG278Q 1440p 144Hz G-Sync?
1440p Ultrasharp?
1080p Ultrasharp?
1080p 120Hz?
21: 9?
4K?
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Canada8159 Posts
On June 11 2014 09:39 skyR wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2014 09:01 Jer99 wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Hello, I'll be spending some time in this thread for the next little while + Show Spoiler +What is your budget?
~1000$, little flexible
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1680x1050
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
SC2 / dota 2 / newer games as they come out, preferably on higher settings
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Streaming, being able to load a youtube video or stream with games running in the background
Do you intend to overclock?
No, but maybe in the future
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
No
Do you need an operating system?
No
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
I'll get a new monitor and desk, these are separate from my budget
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
anything that works is good for me
What country will you be buying your parts in?
Canada
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
Cheapest
If there's any other info required let me know Which monitor do you intend to get? ASUS ROG PG278Q 1440p 144Hz G-Sync? 1440p Ultrasharp? 1080p Ultrasharp? 1080p 120Hz? 21: 9? 4K?
I haven't put much thought into this, I was just gonna get a new monitor nothing special. Nothing super expensive either, 150-200 max
Something enjoyable to watch streams on i guess, i don't really know what i'm looking for in a monitor i've had the same one for years
I've narrowed it down to a 120hz monitor
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On June 11 2014 10:00 Jer99 wrote:Show nested quote +On June 11 2014 09:39 skyR wrote:On June 11 2014 09:01 Jer99 wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Hello, I'll be spending some time in this thread for the next little while + Show Spoiler +What is your budget?
~1000$, little flexible
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1680x1050
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
SC2 / dota 2 / newer games as they come out, preferably on higher settings
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Streaming, being able to load a youtube video or stream with games running in the background
Do you intend to overclock?
No, but maybe in the future
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
No
Do you need an operating system?
No
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
I'll get a new monitor and desk, these are separate from my budget
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
anything that works is good for me
What country will you be buying your parts in?
Canada
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
Cheapest
If there's any other info required let me know Which monitor do you intend to get? ASUS ROG PG278Q 1440p 144Hz G-Sync? 1440p Ultrasharp? 1080p Ultrasharp? 1080p 120Hz? 21: 9? 4K? I haven't put much thought into this, I was just gonna get a new monitor nothing special. Nothing super expensive either, 150-200 max Something enjoyable to watch streams on i guess, i don't really know what i'm looking for in a monitor i've had the same one for years I've narrowed it down to a 120hz monitor
120hz is really only useful if you're happy playing games at lower settings so you can get that higher framerate (unless you have really good hardware which 1k won't get you), AND you find games at 60fps to be too jittery.
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Also, you can't get a 120 Hz monitor for $200. At least, not a worthwhile one.
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My build is finely done. Must say, i am abit nervous.
Need all the guideness i can get.
MOTHERBOARD Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 5
HARDDRIVE Samsung SSD EVO Basic 840-Series 500GB
PROCESSOR Intel Core i7 4790K 4GHz, 8MB
MEMORY Corsair 16GB (2x8GB) CL10 1600MHz VENGEANCE LP SVART
GRAPHIC CARD MSI GeForce GTX 770 4GB TwinFrozr GAMING-series + Watch Dogs
HEAT SINK Noctua NH-U14S
PSU Corsair AX 760W 80+ Platinum Modulär
CASE NZXT H440W Silent Ultra Svart
Operating system Windows 7 Professional 64-bit Swedish OEM, SP1 - I want an OS that support good for professional use.
Iam buying everything from the same site. For a price they will set all the pieces
together and test the computer. They dont wanna montage a
2400ghz memory card or else i would have got that.
They dont have the crucial SSd hardrive.
The computer is for gaming and
professional use=editing, rendering(3d rendering to), encoding, benching.
1)I still might change the motherboard. Waiting for more reviews on the motherboard, I found one just recently, it sounded like
they thought it was a good motherboard for its price but i dont understand much tho:
The bad
Lacks DisplayPort output
19mm narrower than full ATX
No onboard debug LED
That displayport, is it for G-sync on monitors? I might be interested in that in the
future. The other stuff iam 100% clueless about.
Iam willing to spend more money if necessary.
2)Waiting for the CPU to be released. I guess its gonna be a good one so no worries for
a bad CPU? I mean the overall quality.
3)I need a new monitor. That is good for gaming and professional use.
My preferences:
120hz+
1080p
IPS(?) I guess.
16: 9
G-sync: Seems its a relatively new "technique". If there are GREAT monitors right now with
good price with it i want one, if not, i can wait.
EDIT: Around $300 for the monitor unless the screen is a "Monster" for all-around use, iam willing to put up to $700.
Its okay if its better for gaming than professional use if its for $300 aslong as it feels alright with the other
Thanks for reading. Hope i didnt forget something!
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There is no 120Hz IPS. EIZO has a 120Hz VA that uses their own strobe backlight called Turbo240 rather than Nvidia G-Sync. It also costs like $700 so I guess that falls under $300+? See: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/eizo_fg2421.htm
Motherboard video outputs are not relevant unless you are running three or more displays as both the GTX 770 and GTX 780 support at least three monitors and you populate the video card video outputs before you populate your motherboard's.
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There are no 144 mhz with ips either?
Hmm..
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There are no IPS above 60Hz unless you want to get a Korean model and overclock it yourself.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/pFbMc7W.jpg)
