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[AzyWng]

Turns out there was an update I hadn't installed yet.

Restarted and now Deltarune has sound.

It is glorious.

[Lord Shonus]

Oddly enough, I also have a (minor) sound issue.


I recently purchased an Oculus Rift, which I am keeping permanently connected to the PC so I don't have to keep crawling on the floor swapping cables. All is well... except for having to manually switch between "Speakers" and "Rift Audio" depending on what display I'm using. Is there a small program or option that I can install to put a tray icon to quick-swap? OS is Windows 10.

[Frumple]

... so I'm looking to get a new computer since steam is saying to hell with vista users and I'm probably kinda' overdue anyway considering I'm still on vista to begin with, but I've been using the same laptop for the better part of a decade and never really kept up with trends on the subject to begin with. Have a budget of around 1k USD, but less is largely better.

Not looking for super performance, but I'd really like a legitimate upgrade (over a HP pavilion dv7 notebook) largely able to play games that aren't fairly low end/from a decade ago. 3+ ghz cpu, more than 4 gigs ram, I-have-no-ruddy-clue-what-GPU-is-vaguely-decent, etc. Been like 5+ years behind things for most my life and it'd be nice to change things a little.

Know desktop/building it is more cost efficient, but I also kinda' don't want to deal with it and just a better laptop would be much less trouble space/etc. wise (well, either that or figuring out how kvm switches work and using my current laptop as basically-a-console or something), so... yeah.

Any advice? Suggestions for a decent-ish rig in that price region?

[Urist McSpike]

Oddly enough, I also have a (minor) sound issue.


I recently purchased an Oculus Rift, which I am keeping permanently connected to the PC so I don't have to keep crawling on the floor swapping cables. All is well... except for having to manually switch between "Speakers" and "Rift Audio" depending on what display I'm using. Is there a small program or option that I can install to put a tray icon to quick-swap? OS is Windows 10.

I have the same issue with the HTC Vive.  I haven't tried it, but I did find this tutorial for using voice commands.

[Starver]

well, either that or figuring out how kvm switches work and using my current laptop as basically-a-console or something

I think you mean Remote Console (or similar), as KVM switches are simply a hardware connection of multiple computer I/O ports selectably switched to I/O through (typically) one set of peripherals.

Look up something like VNC (there are many others out there, not sure what the current state of play is with them though) for using your laptop as 'dumb terminal' to any new hardware.  (Which, assuming you don't stash it in some air-conditioned cupboard/rack elsewhere, isn't actually going to save you trouble with space. Desktops/underdesks are just better value if you don't think you're going to haul it about at all, including making it far more possible to incrementally/radically upgrade their components in future.)

Can't help you with latest hardware. I'm sort of looking at maybe a laptop (for explicit portability) that is decent and which comes without Win10 (or isn't too much of a waste for it) that I can make into a (probably) Fedora box with minimal problems with hardware driver issues. But that's a different problem to yours, and is at an early stage of research too.

[wierd]

... so I'm looking to get a new computer since steam is saying to hell with vista users and I'm probably kinda' overdue anyway considering I'm still on vista to begin with, but I've been using the same laptop for the better part of a decade and never really kept up with trends on the subject to begin with. Have a budget of around 1k USD, but less is largely better.

Not looking for super performance, but I'd really like a legitimate upgrade (over a HP pavilion dv7 notebook) largely able to play games that aren't fairly low end/from a decade ago. 3+ ghz cpu, more than 4 gigs ram, I-have-no-ruddy-clue-what-GPU-is-vaguely-decent, etc. Been like 5+ years behind things for most my life and it'd be nice to change things a little.

Know desktop/building it is more cost efficient, but I also kinda' don't want to deal with it and just a better laptop would be much less trouble space/etc. wise (well, either that or figuring out how kvm switches work and using my current laptop as basically-a-console or something), so... yeah.

Any advice? Suggestions for a decent-ish rig in that price region?

In the 1000$ ballpark, there are several options.  The question is if you want another laptop (there are quite a few offers that would be more than adequate in that price range) or if you want to build or buy a desktop.

For 1000$, you can buy all the parts you need for a nice desktop system,  (or get a prefab one, but those tend to have dangerous levels of marketing fluff injected, and inflated pricetags.)

Other than "gaming rig", what exactly are you looking for in a computer?  What OS do you want to use on it? Etc.

[Frumple]

One that works

Less tongue in cheek, there's not much I do with a computer that a gaming rig wouldn't manage just fine. Don't do anything like video or photo editing, which is about as hefty an other hobby I can think of, hardware strain wise. OS... honestly, probably win10? Haven't looked at 11 much besides vaguely osmosising some stuff about renting licences and whatnot that makes me kiiiinda' leery. I sorta' want to stop using MS junk, but also aren't really at a place life wise where I want to go through the process of learning to use a notably different OS, particularly one that's notably iffy (if better, these days) on game compatibility et al. The less frustration and effort I have to deal with, the better. Can always dual boot later on :V

Similarly, I probably really should build one myself -- I don't exactly have the funds to legitimately justify the luxury/inflated price of prebuilt -- but I also really, really don't want to deal with the frustration or potential troubles of building a computer for the first time while I'm juggling all the other shit I'm dealing with. If it weren't for steam deciding to fuck me out of my couple-hundred bucks worth of library I'd probably hold off for a while longer

... anyway, beyond all that, the only thing I've really internalized as desired is the vague hardware specs mentioned. Having a CPU that's stronger than 3 ghz is my proverbial man's romance right about now. I've never owned a computer that went over 2.3...

Look up something like VNC (there are many others out there, not sure what the current state of play is with them though) for using your laptop as 'dumb terminal' to any new hardware.  (Which, assuming you don't stash it in some air-conditioned cupboard/rack elsewhere, isn't actually going to save you trouble with space. Desktops/underdesks are just better value if you don't think you're going to haul it about at all, including making it far more possible to incrementally/radically upgrade their components in future.)

That'd be better, aye. Had seen mention of networking stuff together, but that's an actual name to put to software, so thanks, ehehe. Probably a good better idea than the nonsense I was thinking about, so long as the "console" piggybacks the actual computer's graphics without issue.

The big thing space wise is I'm basically using half my bed as my "desk", and my room's small enough there's not really a better option. The ideal is basically a tower beside the bed with console-ish whatever sitting where the laptop currently is. The problem being current monitor design and the apparent utter lack of things-not-stupidly-priced that would keep a LCD monitor from falling over while standing on a bed mattress (as old/cheap as my own, anyway). Similarly, there's not really space for a stand with an arm or particularly decent place to screw one into the wall -- it's a fairly awkward space to work with, all things considered. Using a laptop as a dumb console is probably the cheapest solution I've seen so far (particularly since I already have a laptop to use), heh.

[wierd]

For the most part, Inte's i5 chips have been pretty solid.  However, AMD has released some very nice and inexpensive chips. 

When I meant OS selection, I was also including the likes of OSX and pals. (many PCs can in fact run OSX. For real.)  Since you dont want to do dual booting and the like, this is fine.

I still find that win7 serves my gaming needs just fine.  I have yet to see a title that wont run on win7 64bit. Win10 has been a roiling boil of inflamed pus in terms of reliability, stability, and ease of use.  I have avoided it like cancer. Getting a legit copy of win7 is no longer possible however.  I would still suggest it none the less.

I will go component hunting and see what deals I can scare up.   You should be able to make a very nice but not top-of-the-line gaming PC in your budget range.  (For top-of-the-line, you are looking at over a grand for JUST the video hardware, which is NOT worth it in my opinion. Yes, the RTX 2080T is hawt. But not several thousand dollars worth of hawt.  especially since in a few months, you will be able to get a lower priced offering that also has raytracing engine.  If you do not care about the new raytracing tech, then we can get you a very serviceable card for around 300-500$ or so.) 

If you go with a pre-built one, avoid ones that proclaim being a gaming rig.  Go for a workstation, and then amend it. 

See for instance, this HP pavilion which comes with a rather shitty radeon card. (It *IS* a desktop, afterall. BUT-- it has a nice Ryzen R7 architecture, 16gb RAM, and a 1TB hdd all in the package. That could easily run past the asking price, since you still need a chasis and a power supply which you also get here.  We can replace the PSU with a nice Rosewill if we need to.)

You can get a nice GPU to replace that card, since it is discrete graphics.  You can hang onto that POS card, and use it for any other system builds you might to later, or sell it on ebay or something.


I can probably find a better offer than that pavilion-- it's just pointing out that you can often get suitable parts (that you can reuse later! Like that RAM and CPU) inexpensively in such packages.  You just have to be wary of oddball proprietary form-factor motherboards and the like.  Always do full research before making a purchase, which I have not done here.  This was just meant to point out that you can often get a reasonable deal with prebuilt equipment, if you stay away from things claiming to be "Gaming PCs".

A gaming PC, is just a PC with some souped up parts inside.  Like a really fast CPU, lots of RAM, an SSD, and a fancy graphics card.   High end workstations tend to have many of the same parts, because they too are performance systems, but because they are not "elective purchases", and are instead for doing actual work (Like heavy engineering tasks, which are memory and computation expensive, much like a game is) and are purchased by corporations to do actual work with, the market forces go to work FOR you, instead of against you, and you can get much better deals, since the makers expect smaller margins on the sales.  You just have to be mindful of what it is you are looking at.

[wierd]

OK, now for a really legit breakdown analysis.

I am going to assume the following:

1) Intel > AMD, per this benchmark run.

2) Intel i5 9600K looks like the most bang for the buck.

3) Socket 1151 has that CPU, and has many inexpensive but powerful motherboard offerings.

4) You want to be able to update this system with better/more parts later, so you want the most potential perks in your existing purchase

5) You really dont care what the system chasis itself looks like, as long as it functions as expected/can accept the board sourced.

6) You want the best video card for your price budget

7) You want to be able to have a very nice SSD, *AND* a spinny disk.

You will want an aftermarket cooler that will fit in the case

9) You will want a quality aftermarket PSU to drive it now, and in the future.

10) your top budgeted price is 1100$.  (1000$ +/- 10%, for an allowed range of 900$ to 1100$)

11) You already have a keyboard, monitor, and mouse.

----------------------

First up-- CPU.  We are going with the i5 9600k in socket LGA 1151 format. Here are our retail contenders for the source.

Amazon weighs in at 275$-ish.

NewEgg weighs in at 280$-ish.

Pricewatch hints at a lesser retailer, CompSource. CompSource appears to be a "to order" barebones PC reseller. They sell individual parts, as well as combo packages.  We will examine what parts we are interested in looking at, then see if they can give us a better deal as a combo later.

Compsource weighs in at 268$-ish.

Compsource has our lowest cost sourcing option. Note, this is for the CM8068403874404 chip ID. Not for the BX80684I59600K.
What's the difference?  The CM number does not come in a fancy box, or come with a heat sink. (this is fine, we want an aftermarket one anyway. Source.)

-----

Next up-- Motherboard

There are many to pick from, but we want one that will do both Xfire and SLI, which has at least one m.2 socket capable of accepting an nvme SSD.  Why NVME capable?  You like your SSD to be the fastest you can get, right?  Thought you did; not all M.2 sockets can do NVME. Keep that in mind.  We have a preference for a board that can accept one of the "Very long" style M.2 SSDs as well, because we want to be able to put a huge honker in there if we can afford it. Of available choices, we also want to pick the one with the best user rating (newegg 5 star rating required), at the lowest price. It needs to accept at least 16gb of DDR4 2666 ram.


Here's a list of boards that meet my criteria.

ASUS ROG Strix Z390-H (179$ newegg) (193$ amazon) (186$ compsource)
MSI MPG Z390 GAMING EDGE AC (190$ newegg) (190$ amazon) (194$ compsource)
ASRock Z390 PHANTOM GAMING SLI/ac (168$ newegg) (190$ Amazon) (198$ Compsource)
GIGABYTE Z390 AORUS PRO (180$ newegg) (181$ Amazon) (172$ compsource)

Looks like our winner is the ASRock board from Newegg. Here's the listing.

--------

Next up-- RAM

We want 16gb of DDR4 2666 memory, and we want it both reputable and cheap.

Kingston  (229$ newegg) (144$ amazon) (158$ Compsource)
Corsair (141$ newegg) (125$ amazon) (141$ compsource)
Hynix (152$ newegg) (180$ amazon) (150$ compsource)

Looks like the corsair amazon listing wins.


---------

Next up-- SSD

We want a 1tb SSD in M.2 format. We want reputable, fast, and cheap-- all together.

I am not going to break down the full research price thing on the SSD, because I have been doing this for 4 hours now.
Suffice to say, I found a 1tb NVME M.2 SSD from Crucial on Newegg for 170$.  THIS IS CHEAP. Especially for NVME.

----------

Next up-- Spinny disk

We want a nice fast SATA spinny disk. This is for all that porn, pirate isos, torrented stuff Music files, movie files, the swapfile, and the browser caches.
We really DO in fact, NEED a spinny disk.  We do not want firefox/IE/Chrome to destroy our SSD with its incessant use of browser cache containing millions of tiny files getting overwritten all the damn time, or to be killed by the windows swap file, which *WILL STILL BE USED* even though we have spec'd 16gb of ram!

We want a reasonably fast SATA one, that is at least 1tb in size, from a reputable manufacturer (FU seagate, go to hell) that is inexpensive.


WD Blue (44$ newegg) (50$ amazon) (44$ compsource)
Toshiba (48$ newegg) (48$ amazon) (52$ compsource)
Hitachi (55$ newegg) (59$ amazon) (113$ compsource)

WD Blue looks like the winner.  Will give Newegg listing

----------

RECAP-- Current cost projection:

CPU -- 268$
MB  -- 168$
RAM -- 125$
SSD -- 170$
HDD --  44$
-------------
775$ so far

----------

Next up -- PSU

We need a 500W PSU.  A good one. (Graphics cards are hungry. REAL hungry.)

Rosewill (60$ newegg) (60$ amazon)
Corsair (35$ newegg) (40$ amazon)

Looks like corsair at newegg wins.

-----------

Next up -- System Chasis

Other than cooling considerations, a case is a case, is a case. We preferrably want a full atx case, to be certain this board will fit, and that our aftermarket cooler will too.

Here's a nice looking thermaltake view 22 for 50$

------------

 Next up -- Aftermarket cooler

We need something that is affordable and will do the job.  Feel free to upgrade this later.

Cheap thermaltake 95w cooler, 15$ from newegg


------------

RECAP #2

CPU -- 268$
MB  -- 168$
RAM -- 125$
SSD -- 170$
HDD --  44$
PSU --  35$
ATX --  50$
COOL--  15$
------------
875$

This gives us a graphics card budget of around 225$, topping at our projected ceiling of 1100$.

This gives us the following cards:

GTX 1050TI (newegg listings)
Radeon RX570/RX580 (newegg listings)

IF YOU CAN, **DO** source a better cooler than the one specc'd!!   Getting good parts trumped getting good/adequate cooling in this build.  The goal was to make a build that can be updated later.  A better cooler is very strongly advised!!

[Frumple]

That helps. Mildly overwhelming, but helps

Thanks, yeah.

[wierd]

I cheesed on the RAM, the PSU, and the cooler.

You can put much faster ram than 2666 in.  That board does much faster.   It will also cost you a lot more.  This is a future upgrade option; the board supports it.  For now, it will get you reasonable performance, and for most games (other than DF, which is memory and CPU bound), the graphics card will be the bottleneck before the RAM will be, with this build.

The PSU is serviceable, but is a lower end corsair.  Snobs will turn their nose up at it, saying it cant be used to light up a runway sustainably power two RTX2080TIs in SLI configuration.   For this build, we need to try to make up in cost where we can, and still get a serviceable unit.  This is one area where an upgrade would be needed in the future if you decide to go batshit crazy and try to be insane with your future purchases.

The cooler really is inadequate.  You really should get one of the 50-60$ coolers, but doing so will cut into the graphics card budget.  I would rather you get a reasonable GPU now, but that is an elective decision.  The 15$ thermaltake is about equal to the stock cooler that would have come with the full retail CPU.  You really want the BIG cooler, since this is a 9600K.  The "K" means it is frequency multiplier unlocked--- which means you can OverClock that little whore.   To do that, you WILL need a bigger cooler.  A much bigger one.  At stock frequencies, the weak cooler should provide reasonable service though, but it's borderline.  I would personally get a 50-60$ cooler.

 

[Gentlefish]

What's the problem with a SeaGate drive? Honestly curious since I haven't heard much kerfluffle about them.

[wierd]

They have ludicrous failure rates.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-failure-rates-q1-2017/

Seriously-- see that failure rate for the 4tb drive? 36%!!!

[Gentlefish]

Well thank goodness the 10TB HDD I won from them doesn't seem to have that fail rate wow!

[BigD145]

Laptops in the $1k range that are pretty solid? A Lenovo y7000 will do you well. Go solid state C drive and a standard platter drive for everything else.