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United Kingdom20321 Posts
On August 14 2015 09:44 Mistakes wrote:Show nested quote +On August 13 2015 16:15 darkness wrote:On August 13 2015 14:04 jinorazi wrote: omg 970 is huge.
oc'ed to 3.6ghz on i7 920, installed 970. arkham knight runs flawless on max settings now :3 Yes, I'm surprised Intel CPUs are relevant after so many years, but I guess that's for GPU intensive games only? The i7-920 started choking hard on SC2 in 2012.
It always choked hard on sc2 with lots of units (2010) nothing special in 2012, aside from the added physics system that impedes performance further in certain situations if you have it on
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On August 14 2015 09:40 Cyro wrote:Show nested quote +So i have 16 GB ram and my computer only uses about 9-10 gb of it when i have chrome + a game open but then why is windows 10 telling me that i'm running out of memory and may need to close some programs?
That message also pops up when you're running out of VRAM to the point where it affects performance. I got it a lot with my 970 especially when playing VRAM intensive games in windowed or windowed fullscreen modes (as opposed to true fullscreen) because then the desktop can eat a few hundred MB of VRAM and leave only ~3.3GB for the game. You can monitor VRAM usage in a pretty cool lightweight application called "gpu-z" - what GPU do you have and what game, settings, resolution etc is it? --- @MarwanBaki - cool, glad you like it :D
Gtx 960 2gb All I play is league, dota, csgo,, and path of exile.which I think are potato tier games so I just put them on max settings. I only play fullscreen windowed mode. Maybe I should tone down the settings a bit. I don't really mind that
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United Kingdom20321 Posts
Don't think you should have to, you can check vram usage with/without game running and confirm if it's getting high (>~1.7GB) under any circumstance or not
aside from that i'm not sure what would cause that message, it seems to pop up when the paging file is used excessively - that's not a good thing, but disabling the paging file entirely will just cause crashes in a lot of the situations that would make the message pop up
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On August 14 2015 10:44 Cyro wrote: Don't think you should have to, you can check vram usage with/without game running and confirm if it's getting high (>~1.7GB) under any circumstance or not
aside from that i'm not sure what would cause that message, it seems to pop up when the paging file is used excessively - that's not a good thing, but disabling the paging file entirely will just cause crashes in a lot of the situations that would make the message pop up
yep, not even using a lot of vram
i upped the max virtual memory on the paging file from 1 gb to 2gb as samsung magician advised me to do. Should that be fine? Or should i just let the system automatically handle it?
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On August 14 2015 12:39 IceHism wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2015 10:44 Cyro wrote: Don't think you should have to, you can check vram usage with/without game running and confirm if it's getting high (>~1.7GB) under any circumstance or not
aside from that i'm not sure what would cause that message, it seems to pop up when the paging file is used excessively - that's not a good thing, but disabling the paging file entirely will just cause crashes in a lot of the situations that would make the message pop up yep, not even using a lot of vram i upped the max virtual memory on the paging file from 1 gb to 2gb as samsung magician advised me to do. Should that be fine? Or should i just let the system automatically handle it?
When I had that memory problem, Internet seemed to suggest it could be the paging memory as well. I've set mine to automatic as far as I remember.
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I'm thinking of finally upgrading my pc and one or two simplistic questions rather than a request for a full build guide. I am ignorant to say the least. My target is to play new and upcoming games such as Witcher 3 DA:I at close to max settings in 1920x1080, although the majority of time is spent playing heroes and dota to be honest,
My current build is an i5 760 (not over clocked) 8 gb of 1666mhz RAM, a P7P55 LX board and a 2gb 7870 ddr5.
It's getting pretty slow, although that may be something to do with the hd having 750/1000gb filled? Good 2-3 minutes to get going, doesn't like streaming while gaming etc. ( plan on getting into you tubing as well) I know the 760 is good for ocing but I have no cooling and haven't been dedicated enough to really look into it over the 5/6 years I've had it, at some point its time to just buy a new one right?
My question is really centred on the fact that I'm almost certain I want to upgrade, but I'm not convinced there's a need to bin the GFX card just yet, and might be worth splashing on this in a few years time when there's a few more demanding games that interest me out there. Let's say I buy a i7 7970k, a good Z87 motherboard, 16gb of quality RAM and a couple of good hard drives, am I going to be able to do the above (should I be able to do this already?) , and, most importantly, in two three years time when I buy a really good card upgrade, is it likely to be compatible? Or is the 7870 not good enough to run something like the Witcher on high settings even now?
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7870 is not good enough. I was in same boat as you. I7 920 with 7850 or something. I just got gtx 970, overclocked the i7 to 3.6ghz and running witcher 3 on max.
Get a new gpu first then if it's not good enough, you can upgrade and still use the gpu.
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United Kingdom20321 Posts
On August 14 2015 12:39 IceHism wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2015 10:44 Cyro wrote: Don't think you should have to, you can check vram usage with/without game running and confirm if it's getting high (>~1.7GB) under any circumstance or not
aside from that i'm not sure what would cause that message, it seems to pop up when the paging file is used excessively - that's not a good thing, but disabling the paging file entirely will just cause crashes in a lot of the situations that would make the message pop up yep, not even using a lot of vram i upped the max virtual memory on the paging file from 1 gb to 2gb as samsung magician advised me to do. Should that be fine? Or should i just let the system automatically handle it?
I think the default (or just a good value) is half of the system RAM that you have - but ideally the paging file shouldn't be used. Windows is a bit awkward with wanting to use it when there seems to be no good reason, it's not smart enough to always make the best performance choices
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Let's say I buy a i7 7970k, a good Z87 motherboard, 16gb of quality RAM and a couple of good hard drives, am I going to be able to do the above (should I be able to do this already?) , and, most importantly, in two three years time when I buy a really good card upgrade, is it likely to be compatible? Or is the 7870 not good enough to run something like the Witcher on high settings even now?
you probably mean 4790k, at this point we have 6700k replacing it (and z170(?))
you're probably not running out of RAM, but 8GB isn't a huge amount any more.
7870 will struggle with GPU intensive games on max settings, especially with Witcher running it on max max setting is way harder than running it on "almost-max" settings. Stuff like hairworks and foliage density killed FPS when i played it a bit at launch and adding shadows+ambient occlusion hurt a lot as well
performance when trying to record gameplay is probably due to CPU+GPU (well, probably CPU and the method that you used to record), not hard drive. You can benchmark the HDD anyway to check its performance and make sure that you're defragmenting regularly, because HDD's need to be defragmented regularly to maintain their performance - like on a weekly basis, or even multiple times per day if you're saving and deleting huge amounts of files. The more often you do it, the less time it will take. That's good habit to have even if it's not a problem for you, because hard drives are already slow enough without fragmented files everywhere. Storage shouldn't affect your FPS when standing around doing nothing, main change is load times (and sometimes HDD's cause stuttering when new stuff is forced to load in)
what program/settings was you trying to stream/record with?
GPU's are using pci-e which is on all motherboards and they'll probably still use it for the forseeable future
You might be fine just buying a 970 and recording using NVENC on the graphics card which should work well - but the CPU could limit you a lot in the near future, depending on what games you want to play with it. Either GPU or CPU would be a pretty huge change in performance, especially if you ran new stuff @ overclocks, but they would help for different stuff. You could plausibly say doubling GPU performance would double FPS in Witcher but not do anything for Starcraft 2, while also the reverse; doubling CPU performance would double performance in sc2 but not help Witcher. In this case i think an i5 760 is ok for witcher, not amazing but enough for you to be mostly GPU limited there especially when looking to turn up settings instead of maintain a very high framerate
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1034?vs=1354
SSD's are also cheap now so you might want to consider a 120-250GB model if you're getting a new motherboard - that would improve compatibility and force you to reinstall operating system anyway, so it's less trouble to throw one in at that time
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Anyone have any idea whatsoever on which Z170 motherboards should be avoided and which ones shouldn't?
Talking around on oc.net (with sin himself) it seems like a true phase count of 4 is acceptable these days, what matters more is phase quality.
Well that's all nice and dandy but for some reason just going for the cheapest Z170 doesn't seem like so great an idea. But I'm not sure what to compare anymore. All the released reviews out there suck
http://www.ldlc.com/navigation-p1e48t3o0a1/z170/
the boards I would have my eyes on are those under €150 (unless the GA's SLI motherboard is legitimately worth it or something)
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United Kingdom20321 Posts
On August 15 2015 00:55 Incognoto wrote:Anyone have any idea whatsoever on which Z170 motherboards should be avoided and which ones shouldn't? Talking around on oc.net (with sin himself) it seems like a true phase count of 4 is acceptable these days, what matters more is phase quality. Well that's all nice and dandy but for some reason just going for the cheapest Z170 doesn't seem like so great an idea. But I'm not sure what to compare anymore. All the released reviews out there suck http://www.ldlc.com/navigation-p1e48t3o0a1/z170/the boards I would have my eyes on are those under €150 (unless the GA's SLI motherboard is legitimately worth it or something)
I have the same problem, looking to make a purchase pretty soon too. I'm sure most stuff would work on a basic level but comitting to something to use for 2-5 years is hard. I want good CPU OC, need to look into those u.2 NVME adapters more, want low DPC latency etc. Some features like dual bios and an error code readout would be good but i think that's more common now. That might push my price point higher than yours a bit
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I might just wait a couple of months to let everyone sort things out themselves.
€260 for an i5 6600k also feels like a good €60 too much. Not sure which boards are good, etc. I might just fudge it and stick to my 4670 for now. I'm more interested in the novelty of overclocking than I am for the more performance. I'm not doing much which would require for me to have a beefier processor, though it would be nice to push Starcraft 2 FPS up a bit more.
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On August 15 2015 00:35 Cyro wrote:Show nested quote +On August 14 2015 12:39 IceHism wrote:On August 14 2015 10:44 Cyro wrote: Don't think you should have to, you can check vram usage with/without game running and confirm if it's getting high (>~1.7GB) under any circumstance or not
aside from that i'm not sure what would cause that message, it seems to pop up when the paging file is used excessively - that's not a good thing, but disabling the paging file entirely will just cause crashes in a lot of the situations that would make the message pop up yep, not even using a lot of vram i upped the max virtual memory on the paging file from 1 gb to 2gb as samsung magician advised me to do. Should that be fine? Or should i just let the system automatically handle it? I think the default (or just a good value) is half of the system RAM that you have - but ideally the paging file shouldn't be used. Windows is a bit awkward with wanting to use it when there seems to be no good reason, it's not smart enough to always make the best performance choices -------- Show nested quote +Let's say I buy a i7 7970k, a good Z87 motherboard, 16gb of quality RAM and a couple of good hard drives, am I going to be able to do the above (should I be able to do this already?) , and, most importantly, in two three years time when I buy a really good card upgrade, is it likely to be compatible? Or is the 7870 not good enough to run something like the Witcher on high settings even now? you probably mean 4790k, at this point we have 6700k replacing it (and z170(?)) you're probably not running out of RAM, but 8GB isn't a huge amount any more. 7870 will struggle with GPU intensive games on max settings, especially with Witcher running it on max max setting is way harder than running it on "almost-max" settings. Stuff like hairworks and foliage density killed FPS when i played it a bit at launch and adding shadows+ambient occlusion hurt a lot as well performance when trying to record gameplay is probably due to CPU+GPU (well, probably CPU and the method that you used to record), not hard drive. You can benchmark the HDD anyway to check its performance and make sure that you're defragmenting regularly, because HDD's need to be defragmented regularly to maintain their performance - like on a weekly basis, or even multiple times per day if you're saving and deleting huge amounts of files. The more often you do it, the less time it will take. That's good habit to have even if it's not a problem for you, because hard drives are already slow enough without fragmented files everywhere. Storage shouldn't affect your FPS when standing around doing nothing, main change is load times (and sometimes HDD's cause stuttering when new stuff is forced to load in) what program/settings was you trying to stream/record with? GPU's are using pci-e which is on all motherboards and they'll probably still use it for the forseeable future You might be fine just buying a 970 and recording using NVENC on the graphics card which should work well - but the CPU could limit you a lot in the near future, depending on what games you want to play with it. Either GPU or CPU would be a pretty huge change in performance, especially if you ran new stuff @ overclocks, but they would help for different stuff. You could plausibly say doubling GPU performance would double FPS in Witcher but not do anything for Starcraft 2, while also the reverse; doubling CPU performance would double performance in sc2 but not help Witcher. In this case i think an i5 760 is ok for witcher, not amazing but enough for you to be mostly GPU limited there especially when looking to turn up settings instead of maintain a very high framerate http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1034?vs=1354SSD's are also cheap now so you might want to consider a 120-250GB model if you're getting a new motherboard - that would improve compatibility and force you to reinstall operating system anyway, so it's less trouble to throw one in at that time
Thanks very much.
I'm not sure how much detail you need but I'm new so using OBS streaming at 2400 Bitrate, 1080p and 30FPS. It's just about OK now that I've turned a few of the settings down in Heroes, but I don't understand this because the majority of Heroes settings are apparently GPU based and I wouldn't have thought the 7870 would struggle with this game.
I have up to £1500 to spend, but I don't want to blow it unnecessarily. Like you say SSD's are now cheap so certainly one of those to go with a new motherboard. I currently have a 1TB, 7200rpm HDD. While it's unlikely I will fully build my own PC from scratch, this must be perfectly reasonable to use in the new build if I just wipe it before getting a new system rather than buying a new one which will likely be the same - unless HDDs have seen any progress in the last 5 years?
CPU and motherboard - it depends if the new models you mention allow me to stay within budget or whether the i4790k will "last". As I say I keep reading that there's a lot to be had from the 750/760 i5s with good OC and cooling, but there must come a point where even with this I'll get a significant performance leap for streaming and other general PC usage by just getting something relatively modern? I do play plenty of CiV and CK2 where I assume I'd notice this upgrade too.
GPU - almost max is fine by me, I can live without shadows for example, but I do like the majority of settings to be at least "high". I tend to buy a new PC once every 5-6 years and generally only change the GFX card in the meantime, around say a new Elder Scrolls game or god forbid a decent new Multiplayer FPS. So, while I could stretch to a Geforce 970/980 right now, if it's not urgent i.e. I could live with the 7870 plus other upgrades for now for pretty high settings, I can then go for a c£400 card in two years time when even more demanding games come out, which would be great for the remainder of the PC's lifespan. I mean I assume that just whacking a 980 in my current build is a total waste of time bar making the Witcher look good?
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United Kingdom20321 Posts
On August 15 2015 01:35 Incognoto wrote: I might just wait a couple of months to let everyone sort things out themselves.
€260 for an i5 6600k also feels like a good €60 too much. Not sure which boards are good, etc. I might just fudge it and stick to my 4670 for now. I'm more interested in the novelty of overclocking than I am for the more performance. I'm not doing much which would require for me to have a beefier processor, though it would be nice to push Starcraft 2 FPS up a bit more.
Euro is worth a lot less than it was 26 months ago. Haswell launch price in GBP converted to euro at todays rate is about 240 euros.
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On August 15 2015 01:46 Immersion_ wrote:Show nested quote +On August 15 2015 00:35 Cyro wrote:On August 14 2015 12:39 IceHism wrote:On August 14 2015 10:44 Cyro wrote: Don't think you should have to, you can check vram usage with/without game running and confirm if it's getting high (>~1.7GB) under any circumstance or not
aside from that i'm not sure what would cause that message, it seems to pop up when the paging file is used excessively - that's not a good thing, but disabling the paging file entirely will just cause crashes in a lot of the situations that would make the message pop up yep, not even using a lot of vram i upped the max virtual memory on the paging file from 1 gb to 2gb as samsung magician advised me to do. Should that be fine? Or should i just let the system automatically handle it? I think the default (or just a good value) is half of the system RAM that you have - but ideally the paging file shouldn't be used. Windows is a bit awkward with wanting to use it when there seems to be no good reason, it's not smart enough to always make the best performance choices -------- Let's say I buy a i7 7970k, a good Z87 motherboard, 16gb of quality RAM and a couple of good hard drives, am I going to be able to do the above (should I be able to do this already?) , and, most importantly, in two three years time when I buy a really good card upgrade, is it likely to be compatible? Or is the 7870 not good enough to run something like the Witcher on high settings even now? you probably mean 4790k, at this point we have 6700k replacing it (and z170(?)) you're probably not running out of RAM, but 8GB isn't a huge amount any more. 7870 will struggle with GPU intensive games on max settings, especially with Witcher running it on max max setting is way harder than running it on "almost-max" settings. Stuff like hairworks and foliage density killed FPS when i played it a bit at launch and adding shadows+ambient occlusion hurt a lot as well performance when trying to record gameplay is probably due to CPU+GPU (well, probably CPU and the method that you used to record), not hard drive. You can benchmark the HDD anyway to check its performance and make sure that you're defragmenting regularly, because HDD's need to be defragmented regularly to maintain their performance - like on a weekly basis, or even multiple times per day if you're saving and deleting huge amounts of files. The more often you do it, the less time it will take. That's good habit to have even if it's not a problem for you, because hard drives are already slow enough without fragmented files everywhere. Storage shouldn't affect your FPS when standing around doing nothing, main change is load times (and sometimes HDD's cause stuttering when new stuff is forced to load in) what program/settings was you trying to stream/record with? GPU's are using pci-e which is on all motherboards and they'll probably still use it for the forseeable future You might be fine just buying a 970 and recording using NVENC on the graphics card which should work well - but the CPU could limit you a lot in the near future, depending on what games you want to play with it. Either GPU or CPU would be a pretty huge change in performance, especially if you ran new stuff @ overclocks, but they would help for different stuff. You could plausibly say doubling GPU performance would double FPS in Witcher but not do anything for Starcraft 2, while also the reverse; doubling CPU performance would double performance in sc2 but not help Witcher. In this case i think an i5 760 is ok for witcher, not amazing but enough for you to be mostly GPU limited there especially when looking to turn up settings instead of maintain a very high framerate http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/1034?vs=1354SSD's are also cheap now so you might want to consider a 120-250GB model if you're getting a new motherboard - that would improve compatibility and force you to reinstall operating system anyway, so it's less trouble to throw one in at that time Thanks very much. I'm not sure how much detail you need but I'm new so using OBS streaming at 2400 Bitrate, 1080p and 30FPS. It's just about OK now that I've turned a few of the settings down in Heroes, but I don't understand this because the majority of Heroes settings are apparently GPU based and I wouldn't have thought the 7870 would struggle with this game. I have up to £1500 to spend, but I don't want to blow it unnecessarily. Like you say SSD's are now cheap so certainly one of those to go with a new motherboard. I currently have a 1TB, 7200rpm HDD. While it's unlikely I will fully build my own PC from scratch, this must be perfectly reasonable to use in the new build if I just wipe it before getting a new system rather than buying a new one which will likely be the same - unless HDDs have seen any progress in the last 5 years? CPU and motherboard - it depends if the new models you mention allow me to stay within budget or whether the i4790k will "last". As I say I keep reading that there's a lot to be had from the 750/760 i5s with good OC and cooling, but there must come a point where even with this I'll get a significant performance leap for streaming and other general PC usage by just getting something relatively modern? I do play plenty of CiV and CK2 where I assume I'd notice this upgrade too. GPU - almost max is fine by me, I can live without shadows for example, but I do like the majority of settings to be at least "high". I tend to buy a new PC once every 5-6 years and generally only change the GFX card in the meantime, around say a new Elder Scrolls game or god forbid a decent new Multiplayer FPS. So, while I could stretch to a Geforce 970/980 right now, if it's not urgent i.e. I could live with the 7870 plus other upgrades for now for pretty high settings, I can then go for a c£400 card in two years time when even more demanding games come out, which would be great for the remainder of the PC's lifespan. I mean I assume that just whacking a 980 in my current build is a total waste of time bar making the Witcher look good?
I'm not sure how much detail you need but I'm new so using OBS streaming at 2400 Bitrate, 1080p and 30FPS
You can't easily encode using x264 @1080p30 / 720p60 with that CPU especially at stock
I have up to £1500 to spend, but I don't want to blow it unnecessarily. Like you say SSD's are now cheap so certainly one of those to go with a new motherboard. I currently have a 1TB, 7200rpm HDD. While it's unlikely I will fully build my own PC from scratch, this must be perfectly reasonable to use in the new build if I just wipe it before getting a new system rather than buying a new one which will likely be the same - unless HDDs have seen any progress in the last 5 years?
Around a week ago you could get an 850 evo 250GB for ~£62, for reference of how low prices are now
You could re-use the HDD without even wiping it, though reformatting is quick and easy way to get rid of all of the junk. Main concern there i think would be that HDD's don't last very long, if it's 5 years old it's quite likely to die soon (though a lot of them that make it past 2-3 years old actually last a long time)
CPU and motherboard - it depends if the new models you mention allow me to stay within budget or whether the i4790k will "last". As I say I keep reading that there's a lot to be had from the 750/760 i5s with good OC and cooling, but there must come a point where even with this I'll get a significant performance leap for streaming and other general PC usage by just getting something relatively modern? I do play plenty of CiV and CK2 where I assume I'd notice this upgrade too.
They're quite decent at OC but stock is considerably lower performance and there have been 3 major CPU generations since then. Performance at the same clock speed has improved by around 50% (i don't know exact number) and you can run them around 4.5 - 4.7ghz fairly easily, as opposed to the ~3ghz at stock, ~3.5 - 4ghz ish at OC for your current CPU.
You might want to use NVENC on a recent nvidia GPU for recording games with less performance hit and no CPU load, at the cost of needing bigger files for the same quality video
So, while I could stretch to a Geforce 970/980 right now, if it's not urgent i.e. I could live with the 7870 plus other upgrades for now for pretty high settings, I can then go for a c£400 card in two years time when even more demanding games come out, which would be great for the remainder of the PC's lifespan. I mean I assume that just whacking a 980 in my current build is a total waste of time bar making the Witcher look good?
I just checked prices, 970 is actually a bit cheaper than i thought. You can get a good one for ~£260 so i think it's worth doing that + getting an i5 6600k, z170 and a good ~240GB ssd. 970 is a little bit deceptively named and more in the upper-midrange area rather than nipping at the heels of the flagship GPU's this gen, so keep that in mind. There will be good GPU upgrades available in late 2016 to 2017 but it's much faster than what you have for now and gives that GPU encoding option, though you wouldn't neccesarily need it with a 6600k.
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Learned a small formula on some other forum for a way to quickly determine and compare speeds of ram with different cas latency and frequencies. It's as follows: ( CL / Frequency ) * 2000
What you are referring to there is known as RAM 'access time', or more casually as RAM 'speed' or 'performance', which is basically the time it takes in nanoseconds for the RAM to locate a single piece of information and make it available to the processor (a very rough definition). So for example: ( 13 / 2133 ) * 2000 = 12.18ns ( 15 / 2666 ) * 2000 = 11.25ns lower is better.
Perhaps something to think about when trying to figure out what's more important between a memorys frequency and it's cas latency.
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United Kingdom20321 Posts
Good rule to go by, but higher frequency RAM with a similar number there usually will be better
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On August 15 2015 09:36 Cyro wrote: Good rule to go by, but higher frequency RAM with a similar number there usually will be better
My math may be rusty, but I think higher frequency RAM will produce a lower number in most cases and would wind up being better by that formula.
But I last attempted serious math sometime in the late 90s.
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United Kingdom20321 Posts
My math may be rusty, but I think higher frequency RAM will produce a lower number in most cases and would wind up being better by that formula.
1600c8 and 2400c12 will give you the same number but the 2400c12 would be better in more situations
pretty hard to say straight out for RAM because performance is dependant on a huge list of secondary and tertiary timings, you get some notable performance differences between 2 kits that look the same on the surface depending on the chips used for them
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Any suggestion which 128 GB SSD I should buy for my laptop? Got it from Christmas 2009, I hope it has AHCI.
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I'd say get the cheapest one that's not 840 evo or some weird brand
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Crucial MX SSDs or Samsung 850 EVO are the go-to, off the top of my head.
I can vouch for Crucial having a very easy RMA service to work with.
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