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People also used to mine cryptocurrency with those AMD cards when that was still a thing. I'd be a little wary of those for that reason as well.
Also there's the whole drama thing around Nvidia not supporting the Kepler based cards as well with drivers anymore/forcing really heavy tesselation which 7xx series cards aren't that good at. Personally I am not entirely sure which side is in the right here, but it should also be a consideration when buying a $300 card.
In any case, I'd probably wait until amd release the 300 series in a week and a half, that'll probably force both companies to drop the prices for their midrange cards, maybe you'll be able to pick up a 290x or a 970 for sub 300 American dollars then, dunno how that compares to Canadian though.
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United Kingdom20333 Posts
People also used to mine cryptocurrency with those AMD cards when that was still a thing. I'd be a little wary of those for that reason as well.
Also there's the whole drama thing around Nvidia not supporting the Kepler based cards as well with drivers anymore/forcing really heavy tesselation which 7xx series cards aren't that good at. Personally I am not entirely sure which side is in the right here
That was pretty silly IMO. Kepler fell behind a bit, but not that much - it was improved in a driver update recently. There's a bit of concern for Nvidia worrying more about newer tech - which i guess is relevant since we have Maxwell now and Pascal next year - but it seems alright right now.
The crazy numbers that people got like saying a 960 was as fast as a 780 (instead of being roughly a bit slower than 770) came from people using launch Hairworks in Witcher 3, which was just stupid broken. It was tesselating with a ridiculous factor to get 100k hairs on the player character and then hitting the entire head area with 8x MSAA, which was obviously a huge performance hit on either GPU, but much less of a hit on Maxwell because of the improved performance in tessellation (and maybe msaa too). That's been addressed by witcher game patches AFAIK.
AMD has controls which let you apply a hard limit on the level of tessellation applied, but that was much more necessary for them because Maxwell is around 3-8x faster (just a rough guess, i don't have the info at my fingertips) at tessellation factors of 16-32++ than the version of gcn used in the 280/280x and the 290. They needed that control to deal with games that expected kepler/maxwell level of tess performance and did not give proper options for it, creating a disproportional performance hit - though more driver-level control is always good, and i wish Nvidia offered that option too.
AMD has improved tesselation performance of GCN by a huge amount and that should be in every new die that they made from Tonga (used in r9 285) forwards (but again, not in the 280/280x or 290/290x, 295x2, etc)
![[image loading]](http://images.anandtech.com/doci/8460/AMDGeo.png)
^the factors used when it's a big performance hit are usually 32+, even sometimes 100 or more
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Used computer for 800$:
+ Show Spoiler +8 core Amd fx8350 @ 4ghz
12 gig ram kingston 1600 mhz
r9 270x iceq-x2 (IN crossfire, if I'm reading the AD perfectly)
500g hard drive
power suply 650 ocz
cpu cooler hyper n 212
fan 240mm x1
fan 120 x 3
cd/dvd
wireless card 300mb/s
gigabyte model mobo : ga-970a d3p Am3+
Screen : 27 ACL dynex
Keyboard G510s
Mouse : Mazor type-r e-blue
Sound system
windows 7 64
Used 500$
+ Show Spoiler +
CASE : THERMALTAKE V3
Power Supply TR2 600WATTS
AMD SIX CORE FX6100
RAM 8GO DDR3-1600 MHZ CORSAIR
DVDRW 24X LG
Hard Drive : WD 500GO SATA3 7200RPM
GPU - MSI RADEON R9 270X 2GB DDR5 HDMI
Windows 7
Or + 100$ to add 24 inch monitor + Razer Lycosa keyboard
Worth, not worth? Might be possible to negotiate, unsure!
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These are canadian dollars?
Overall the price is more or less what it'd cost to just buy the components yourself and build the computer so I'd personally say not really worth unless you have an aversion to building
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Canadian dollars, yes!
Actually, I love building, but I was hoping to make some huge saving by buying used.
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Assuming this thread is fine for laptop help.
So I haven't had a working laptop for almost a year now so I'm thinking of grabbing this for $390
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834318466&leaderboard=1
Thoughts? Mostly just for browsing but I'll probably use it for playing emulators, Hearthstone, and potentially games like SC2, Civ 5, and CSGO when my friends want to LAN them.
I would also love to be able to hook this up to my 55 inch TV and play Skyrim if at all possible so I would just like to know if I could run Skyrim at atleast Medium graphics at 1920x1080.
Thanks in advance for any insight.
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Maybe lowest graphics on 1366x768 for Civ5 and Skyrim. Idk about CSGO since never played it. SC2 may be playable at lowest settings 1v1 but 2v2 or so will struggle.
Benchmark wise intel 5500 is about %20 slower than my 4 years old hd 5730. I was able to play Civ5 and SC2 at lowest 720p with it but it also had a beefy (by that time's standard) i7 processor, so take what I said with a grain of salt 
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On June 08 2015 19:47 Hall0wed wrote:Assuming this thread is fine for laptop help. So I haven't had a working laptop for almost a year now so I'm thinking of grabbing this for $390 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834318466&leaderboard=1Thoughts? Mostly just for browsing but I'll probably use it for playing emulators, Hearthstone, and potentially games like SC2, Civ 5, and CSGO when my friends want to LAN them. I would also love to be able to hook this up to my 55 inch TV and play Skyrim if at all possible so I would just like to know if I could run Skyrim at atleast Medium graphics at 1920x1080. Thanks in advance for any insight.
Games like StarCraft 2 require good CPU, and I don't think 2.2 GHz is enough. Integrated graphics cards are big no (for me at least).
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Since Windows 10 will be free upgrade. I should just pick the cheapest Windows out right?
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United Kingdom20333 Posts
That's an ultra-low power rated CPU with integrated graphics, 15w combined power budget for CPU and graphics. Not really suitable for gaming.
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They work fine at 1366 x 768 for last generation games designed for 8 year old systems
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United Kingdom20333 Posts
at half of 1080p (768p) and low settings 
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it is kind of impressive that a 15watt integrated chip has the same performance as previous gen consoles
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On June 09 2015 04:59 XenOmega wrote:
Since Windows 10 will be free upgrade. I should just pick the cheapest Windows out right?
Keep in mind that what version of windows you have has a bearing on which version of windows 10 you can upgrade to. Enterprise won't get the free win10 upgrade at all. Basic/Home versions get upgraded to Windows 10, "Pro" and "ultimate" wind up getting Win 10 Pro upgrades.
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On June 09 2015 05:44 Kupon3ss wrote:
it is kind of impressive that a 15watt integrated chip has the same performance as previous gen consoles
It's even more impressive when you think a CPU does a lot more job than a light bulb, yet it can often use less power.
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On June 08 2015 19:47 Hall0wed wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Assuming this thread is fine for laptop help. So I haven't had a working laptop for almost a year now so I'm thinking of grabbing this for $390 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834318466&leaderboard=1Thoughts? Mostly just for browsing but I'll probably use it for playing emulators, Hearthstone, and potentially games like SC2, Civ 5, and CSGO when my friends want to LAN them. I would also love to be able to hook this up to my 55 inch TV and play Skyrim if at all possible so I would just like to know if I could run Skyrim at atleast Medium graphics at 1920x1080. Thanks in advance for any insight.
Thanks for all the input on this. Are there perhaps any suggestions on a laptop that can run Skyrim reasonably well? I'm really interested in the kind of price range I would be looking at. I mean my desktop can already run Skyrim at fairly high settings but I really don't want to move it around just so I can play on a bigger screen.
On June 09 2015 16:28 Myrmidon wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Skyrim on medium, 1920x1080? That's not going to fly without dedicated graphics. (Or stretching it on the very best integrated graphics given a lot more power and thermal headroom.) You'd be looking at something more like this for $800: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232576GTX 950M (is Maxwell, a low-clocked version of GTX 750 Ti). Well, the laptop has a 1080p screen, an SSD, and a faster processor too. That's the price of admission. This last-gen refurb for $500 before $50 rebate should work too: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834318576R9 275M (a low-clocked version of desktop HD 7770). You're also getting a 1080p screen here.
Thanks for the help! Going to look into these.
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Skyrim on medium, 1920x1080? That's not going to fly without dedicated graphics. (Or stretching it on the very best integrated graphics given a lot more power and thermal headroom.)
You'd be looking at something more like this for $800:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834232576
GTX 950M (is Maxwell, a low-clocked version of GTX 750 Ti). Well, the laptop has a 1080p screen, an SSD, and a faster processor too. That's the price of admission.
This last-gen refurb for $500 before $50 rebate should work too:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834318576
R9 275M (a low-clocked version of desktop HD 7770). You're also getting a 1080p screen here.
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I know these type of posts are probably frowned upon here, but a total computer-illiterate here. Planning on building my first computer from scratch, and was wondering how good of a rig this is. Critiques and suggestions are very welcome.
http://pcpartpicker.com/p/RdZgyc
Was looking to try and spend less than 800 dollars, and only looking to play stuff like Witcher 3 on like Medium settings.
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United Kingdom20333 Posts
On June 10 2015 01:57 sung_moon wrote:I know these type of posts are probably frowned upon here, but a total computer-illiterate here. Planning on building my first computer from scratch, and was wondering how good of a rig this is. Critiques and suggestions are very welcome. http://pcpartpicker.com/p/RdZgycWas looking to try and spend less than 800 dollars, and only looking to play stuff like Witcher 3 on like Medium settings.
That CPU and motherboard is a few generations old, you should be probably be buying 4'th gen parts (like i5-4xxx, h81/b85/z87/ probably forgot one more chipset) or waiting a couple months for 6'th gen release as we've already been waiting for it for 2 years
2x4GB of RAM is strongly preferred, you need two RAM sticks to run dual channel (which doubles bandwidth available)
i usually suggest source 210 case but not sure of the differences right now
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