Ranting about Microsoft and Tech Support in India

Spacekiwi wrote:actually, the new graphics cards by amd are relatively cheap even over here now. a radeon r7 260x is at 220 or so, at launch prices. it will probably drop by 30 over xmas, giving a pretty good card a pretty good price. All the Nvidia cards are way overpriced here though. A 780 costs around $1k here.
But i'm quite impressed at how wel my intel hd 3000 does. I can play far cry 2 and borderlands 1 in 1024 by 720 with medium settings and get playable frame rate out of it. An HD 4000 is apparently 60% better, and compared to the HD 4000, the hd 4600 and 5000 are apparently 60% more powerful, so upgrading to a Hd 5000 would give me around 260% of my current performance, from a integrated graphics. Im happy with that.

Similar here, you can look at almost any pricerange and an AMD gfx will provide better performance for the money.

NVidia seems to give North America special pricing or something.

And AMDs new range of gfx cards? Pricing is freaking amazing. First pricetags on the r7 260x here translates over to USD something like $130-190 depending on how you convert.
And that doesn´t include any lowcost models or shops.

And frankly, i´m very impressed by their GCN architechture, i had a very tough time trying to decide between my 6770 and the newer 7750, the cheapest card with the new GCN structure.
Finding the perfect 6770 model with passive cooling decided it(a Gigabyte high quality model, except staying the same price as similar cards with lower quality components, hard not to jump on that deal).

At the same time, i´m not so happy about NVidia´s driver history, they seemed to be improving again 2-3 years ago, but now recently they managed to release a driver update that actually introduces a bug capable of crashing the whole system ( so if anyone recently updated NVidia gfx drivers and are now getting BSODs, try rolling them back to earlier drivers ).

So i´ll stick with AMD gfx for the time being unless they screw something up.


*****

For my money, I'd got with the GTX 770 at $300.

Fireflair? A GTX 770 costs about $450-550 here.
So no, just NO!

GEFORCE GTX Titan with 6GB of GDDR5 is probably the single best performing card on the market. It also retails for almost a $1000.

Try $ 1200-1400. So totally not worth it even at $1000 though.

Where as the GeForce GTX 760 with 2GB of GDDR5 is still quite a nice card, and retails for $250.

$300-350.

Like i said, NVidia is really not nice with pricing here.

Dont forgegt tenshinai, that the Nvidia cards are out of the launch price prices and down to normal levels now, while the AMD ones are still in the hihg priced launch period. I cant wait to see what the prices on them are like in jan/feb when the prices drop into the normal price range......

And $1200 for a Titan? thats a nice price. Try 1800 here. 1200 buys a reasonably good 780, or a 690 when its on sale. Or a 6GB version of the 7990.
the lowest priced 760 we have is 360, and the lowest 770 is $600. An r9 290x that has the same performance or better, has a price 0f $450.
Thats why I laugh when I see bits about Nvidia dropping pirces to compete with AMD, because that price drop must occur in the US,UK and EU only.

Tenshinai wrote:
Similar here, you can look at almost any pricerange and an AMD gfx will provide better performance for the money.

NVidia seems to give North America special pricing or something.

And AMDs new range of gfx cards? Pricing is freaking amazing. First pricetags on the r7 260x here translates over to USD something like $130-190 depending on how you convert.
And that doesn´t include any lowcost models or shops.

And frankly, i´m very impressed by their GCN architechture, i had a very tough time trying to decide between my 6770 and the newer 7750, the cheapest card with the new GCN structure.
Finding the perfect 6770 model with passive cooling decided it(a Gigabyte high quality model, except staying the same price as similar cards with lower quality components, hard not to jump on that deal).

At the same time, i´m not so happy about NVidia´s driver history, they seemed to be improving again 2-3 years ago, but now recently they managed to release a driver update that actually introduces a bug capable of crashing the whole system ( so if anyone recently updated NVidia gfx drivers and are now getting BSODs, try rolling them back to earlier drivers ).

So i´ll stick with AMD gfx for the time being unless they screw something up.


*****

For my money, I'd got with the GTX 770 at $300.

Fireflair? A GTX 770 costs about $450-550 here.
So no, just NO!

GEFORCE GTX Titan with 6GB of GDDR5 is probably the single best performing card on the market. It also retails for almost a $1000.

Try $ 1200-1400. So totally not worth it even at $1000 though.

Where as the GeForce GTX 760 with 2GB of GDDR5 is still quite a nice card, and retails for $250.

$300-350.

Like i said, NVidia is really not nice with pricing here.

If it is not fanless, or able to made fanless I won't buy it. Goes for all components.

For all practical purposes Video Cards quit being relevant to gaming about 2-3 years ago other than insane resolution. low grade AA is taken care of, high grade makes no diff or so little its a joke IMO and honestly the shadows, you can't really tell if they are on or off. IF you sit in one spot and critique the eye candy...

I am thinking of purchasing of purchasing 3 to 4 ssd 256 gigs each for $159 USD from Tiger Direct for 3 different Windows 7 systems. Each system has been completed backed up and system image was created.

Any expert advice for setting up the windows 7 systems with ssd with be welcome.

smr wrote:I am thinking of purchasing of purchasing 3 to 4 ssd 256 gigs each for $159 USD from Tiger Direct for 3 different Windows 7 systems. Each system has been completed backed up and system image was created.

Any expert advice for setting up the windows 7 systems with ssd with be welcome.

SSD's Nothing different, nothing special. It is just a hard drive to the OS. Effectively all SSD's anymore have good memory controls on them so they do not lose memory and slow down anymore like the original models. I suggest going to anandtech.com, I used to point people to tomshardware.com but anymore its gone downhill after he sold it off, and reading up on the subject if you REALLY want to know. Otherwise, unless you are buying up an ancient SSD model, no need to read up on the subject at all.

If you are asking if the connections exists to go from SSD to your motherboard, then I would have to say, yes, since it has win7 on it. If it was XP, well that would date the motherboards possibly to the older Hard drive, optical drive, etc cable connection standard.

If you are asking if the connections exists to go from SSD to your motherboard, then I would have to say, yes, since it has win7 on it. If it was XP, well that would date the motherboards possibly to the older Hard drive, optical drive, etc cable connection standard.

Old connection standard, PATA, Paralell ATA.
Currently most used, SATA, Serial ATA.

More importantly, SSDs should not be used with OS earlier than Win7 unless you know exactly what you´re doing, as 7 is the first regular OS that fully supports SSDs, and wont do stupid things to them that will kill them early.

Tenshinai wrote:

If you are asking if the connections exists to go from SSD to your motherboard, then I would have to say, yes, since it has win7 on it. If it was XP, well that would date the motherboards possibly to the older Hard drive, optical drive, etc cable connection standard.

Old connection standard, PATA, Paralell ATA.
Currently most used, SATA, Serial ATA.

More importantly, SSDs should not be used with OS earlier than Win7 unless you know exactly what you´re doing, as 7 is the first regular OS that fully supports SSDs, and wont do stupid things to them that will kill them early.

I have approx 10 computers 5 of which all have different SSDs, motherboards running XP in the office at the moment. The other 5 are identical. We did it for the speed as we all got tired of waiting and listening to the stupid drives whine. Clearly demonstrating your claim is patently absurd. Just one of those "claims" floating around the internet that has no concrete basis in reality.

The claim that is TRUE, based in TESTING, by anandtech and others, is that it depends entirely on which SSD you bought and has NOTHING to do with the OS. Lots of early ancient SSD's were complete crapola. In this case he is buying modern SSD's, not ancient junk with modern controlers on said SSD's making TRIM/ITGC functionality complete by-gones as they are built into all SSD's anymore. Good old ones had these functions built in to start with. Crap ones did not.

The OS, in this case, win7 over XP, increases its overall speed by a tad though. Under XP, an SSD may lose a bit of its overall "size" over time, but this has likewise been proven to be bunk as well as it is near completely the problem of the SSD's controller and has nothing to do with the OS in question. Some of my computers have lost 25% of their disk volume in 5 years of constant useage. The others? None. All running XP. Once again showing that it is the SSD controller in question and not the OS.

Time for another Internet myth to die.

PS. If you actually ever used disk fragment on XP, etc you would have to be an idiot. More often then not it destroyed the data in question. In this case it won't work on SSDs.

Low and behold, I just replaced an old power supply and found out that the two system fans create most of noise on my computer. Usually, I don't care but I have to lose my office/computer room to the adopted stepson for his bedroom. That's cool because I had my own bedroom growing up most of my childhood.

As a result, I was thinking of drilling holes into the removable side wall. Next, I will install the fan with thick rubber washers. (This should reduce vibration noise coming from the fan.) This should provide enough for air to flow through for 120mm fan to 140mm fan with speed control to keep the antec box (box is probably 10 years old) cool or more precisely the motherboard and cpu. Btw: I just discovered the fan does not work on pci express video/grahic card. Tigerdirect seems to have 2 gig video card with ddr3 running for $24 + tax usd.

Relax wrote:
I have approx 10 computers 5 of which all have different SSDs, motherboards running XP in the office at the moment. The other 5 are identical. We did it for the speed as we all got tired of waiting and listening to the stupid drives whine. Clearly demonstrating your claim is patently absurd. Just one of those "claims" floating around the internet that has no concrete basis in reality.

How many average users knows that you should turn off prefetch?
That you should turn off or place the swapfile elsewhere?
That having system restore on is a bad thing with XP+SSD?
How to change the location of the temporary files folder?
How to relocate the system event log?
Disable last access time stamps?
That the partitions should run NTFS with 4kB blocks?

The above btw, are things Microsoft says should be done if running SSD with XP. How many nontechie users will even consider looking for such information? And with how deeply it´s buried on their site, none is likely to find it.

Swapfile, timestamps, event log, system restore and to a lesser degree temp files may drastically reduce the lifespan of the SSD.

And regardless what anyone claims, SSDs has a limited lifespan, all memory cells can be written a specific number of times, many times for sure, but still a limited number.

Meaning, that if you just stuff XP on an SSD without any modifications, you WILL reduce the lifespan of the SSD, the only question is by how much.

And that depends on usage pattern, anything from less than 5% to over 80% is quite possible.

Aside from that, there´s partition alignment(XP defaults to 63, which SSDs doesn´t like, anything 64 or larger that can be divided by 4 seems to be ok(and then NOT formatting when installing!)), having the correct settings in BIOS(mainly AHCI selected ), definitely moving the Spool folder if you print a lot, the remote desktop cache folder if you use that and probably a few more things i forgot or didn´t find.

So yeah, it works just fine. IF YOU KNOW WHAT YOU`RE DOING! Just like i said.

Or maybe you´re just sadistic enough to tell an average user that "it works just fine from the start, just use it like you would a HDD"?

See, this is why i always recommend against voltage tweaking when people overclock, because otherwise it´s at least partially MY fault if they burn something out.

Guess you don´t mind people wasting their money?

Tenshinai wrote:<<SNIP>>
Guess you don´t mind people wasting their money?

This line was uncalled for. Everything up to this point was a great post. Now all I will remember about it is that you took a cheap shot a someone else.