Teh Official "Dude Where's My Forum?" Thread, Brought to you by the minds of Box, and her fiancée, Lorelei Options

[Box]

Blue and red were available on the fifth gens, but the 6th gen only had black or black/beige. Then there were various seat differences, but all vinyl was black. You must be colour blind.

[Box]

Well, the RAM should get here tomorrow. So that'll be fun.

[Bitter]

That reminds me, I need a decent mini ITX board and case, I think I like some of the cooler master offerings for case but I'm so behind the times on intel 1150 mini itx stuff. I gots me a haswell i3 but a micro atx board and I'd like to make this a little cube next to the TV for media and some gaming so I'm thinking something with some overclocking possibilities for board and maybe a gtx750ti 2GB for video card. I have a spare 500W PSU i'm not using that should be able to drive it all, 8GB RAM 1866, and a nice heat pipe tower cooler, as well as a 250GB 850 EVO SSD. Plenty of parts, just need something to connect it all together. I understand the Z chipsets are the best for overclocking?

[Box]

Probably, as it works with their unlocked i5 and i7 processors and overclocking is done through BIOS at bootup.

[Bitter]

I know how to overclock (ramp up base clock, hope board and ram keep up), I'm just not up on what chipsets have what features right now, research is in order. Not shelling out for an unlocked processor at the moment, going to recycle my i3 4130 into this as it's mostly going to be doing browsing/htpc duty but some RTS's on big screen could be fun! 1920x1080 with 40 or 50 inches of screen space for CnC sounds like a blast.

[Box]

Outside of what's available from out of the box I don't know either. Depending on the games a dual-core 3.4 ghz processor with 8gb of RAM and dedicated 2gb video card should be fine. I leave all my gaming to consoles though as I've never been able to convince myself to spend as much on a computer as I have on cars.

[Bitter]

I usually buy last years mid grade stuff on discount or used so I don't spend a lot, also snagging things on sale like the SSD for $100.

[Box]

I buy everything used, let someone else lose their ass on it.

Anyhow, speaking of BIOS I went through it just now and for some reason multi-core processing was disabled along with the Intel Virtualization Technology. Sure enough after booting up there are drivers for the processor being installed. That and I turned the fan to silent mode, thing would get ridiculously loud. I never bothered with overclocking since it's a laptop so I never thought to go traipsing through BIOS.

[Bitter]

most laptops (all I think) don't have any overclocking options in bios.

[Box]

Probably not any since they're so limited on cooling capability, though there might be some gaming specific laptops that're the exception to the rule.

[Box]

I've been going and looking and what could be done with this thing processor wise, but for what it'd cost I might as well just replace the entire thing. Would either stick with Fujitsu or go with a Panasonic, I've never been impressed with any of the other manufacturers. I do know Acer is crap, brother has one of their Aspire(to own something better) laptops and it's decided to stop charging batteries. Not the charger, not the battery, and the only other known fix is to update BIOS but it refuses to because it's "not plugged in and or battery life is under 20%"

[Bitter]

Honestly all entry level and cheap laptops are or can be crap, there was a period a few years back where everyone had problems because of the new ROHS solder. I've got a Toshiba something or other that seems OK. My mother has a newer Dell that's been good to her. Dell's seem fairly reliably built within the past 3-5 years, something socket G2 (I think) is easy and cheap to upgrade with i3's and i5's costing in the under $100 used on ebay, use DDR3 (also cheap), and have SATA2.

[Box]

Don't even get me started on ROHS. I have a spool of silver bearing solder, screw that lead-free garbage.

HP has seemed decent enough, I think the biggest issue with the HP whatever desktop is that it's still on Vista. Which they own Compaq now. Acer owns Gateway and eMachines, and Lenovo owns the IBM brand of personal computers. I hear Dell has turned things around since getting off the stock exchange and going private, that and they do own Alienware now. Then you have Sony, Samsung, and Toshiba. Of course Fujitsu and Panasonic, which I've actually been pleasantly surprised with the T4220. I tried to talk my brother into getting a Fujitsu, but he insisted on having a large screen for cheap.

[Box]

Side note, Fujitsu and Panasonic aside since they're still made/assembled in Japan, I wonder as to how many actual computer manufacturers there are. We know about the brands that share ownership, but as with everything else I get the suspicion that all the brands are made in the same couple of factories. It wouldn't surprise me at all if Acer and Asus made the majority of computers out there for the other companies as well.

It's sort of like how Samick makes all the Squier, Epiphone, and entry Ibanez guitars among others. They just slap on whatever logo at the end of the assembly. Ghost manufacturing I believe it's technically called. In any case it'd be interesting to find out such with the computer industry.

This post has been edited by Box: Apr 23, 2015 - 9:17 AM

[Box]

RAM arrived and took all of five minutes to install. Really haven't tested things out yet, but I redid the Windows Experience Index and processor calculations per second went from a score of 4.4/7.9 to 5.5/7.9 and RAM operations per second went from 4.8/7.9 to 5.5/7.9 so enabling multi-core processing and changing out the RAM made a decent improvement. Of course the thing that's really holding it back now is the integrated Intel X3100 graphics...

Also apparently it's only utilizing 3.25/4.00 gb, thanks a lot 32-bit Windows.

[Bitter]

I think you can bump that up a little with PAE.

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wi...v=vs.85%29.aspx

IIRC I was able to address 3.8 GB of 4GB with some switches and options and editing something or other on XP, not sure how much of that would apply to Win7.

[Box]

Thanks, will give that a go. Would be nice to have close to all the RAM I paid for.

[Box]

According to that it's already enabled since DEP is supported, but it still only shows 3.24 being usable so I don't know.

Interesting though is I went into system information and here's what it says:

Installed Physical Memory: 4.00 GB
Total Physical Memory: 3.24 GB
Total Virtual Memory 8.10 GB

Anyway, it seems to run a fair amount better than before and the Windows Experience Index showed it.

[Bitter]

Also, the "video card" shares system memory and takes a hunk of that as well, in BIOS you can set the amount, you want to set it to use the largest amount it can.

[Box]

I'm going through and futzing with that currently, hopefully can get it to work a little better as it's really what's holding the rest of the computer back.