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Breaking News: Laptop Explosion; Millions in fear of fallout
Topic Started: Mar 20 2011, 03:21 PM (387 Views)
Kay of Sauvage
Retired Knight
March 16, 2011

After leaving my laptop on day and night to download Shogun 2 from Steam, I decided to take a break from downloading to play a game of Mount & Blade multiplayer. I made contact with the enemy, put my shield up to defend against the axe thrower, and then wham! Kablooey! The screen goes black and internal parts go silent.

All I get now is a clicking noise from the motherboard when I plug in the AC power. I dissembled the whole thing down to parts and verified it. :yuk:

So, I've ordered myself a customized desktop from Cyberpower. Expected ship date is April 2. Coming from CA to me on the east coast will probably take at least 3 days on top of that too. So I'm on the Disabled List with Ghazan till then I guess :P

Here's the specs for my new $1300 investment:

Quick version: Intel® Core™ i5-2500K 3.30 GHz, Radeon HD 6850, 4 MB RAM, 24-inch screen.


CAS: Apevia X-Dreamer 3 Mid-Tower Gaming Case w/ Side-Panel Window & Temperature Display [+4] (Black Color with Green Ring & Green LED Fan)
CASUPGRADE: None
CD: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD+-R/+-RW + CD-R/RW Drive (BLACK COLOR)
CPU: Intel® Core™ i5-2500K 3.30 GHz 6M Intel Smart Cache LGA1155 (All Venom OC Certified)
CS_FAN: Default case fans
FAN: Asetek 510LC Liquid Cooling System 120MM Radiator & Fan (Enhanced Cooling Performance + Extreme Silent at 20dBA) (Single Standard 120MM Fan)
FLASHMEDIA: INTERNAL 12in1 Flash Media Reader/Writer (BLACK COLOR)
FREEBIE_CU1: FREE Game - Shogun 2 Limited Edition Coupon: Total War
FREEBIE_RM: 30 GB Kingston 2.5 inch SATA Gaming MLC Solid State Disk
GEAR1: Logitech Dual Action Gamepad [+18]
HDD: 2TB (2TBx1) SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64MB Cache 7200RPM HDD [+34] (Single Hard Drive)
KEYBOARD: Razer Lycosa Black USB Gaming Keyboard [+63]
MEMORY: 4GB (2GBx2) DDR3/1600MHz Dual Channel Memory Module (Kingston HyperX [+32])
MONITOR: 24" Widescreen 1920x1080 Sceptre X246W-1080P LCD (Viewable 23.6")(Black Color) w/ Built-in Speaker, DVI & Input [+159]
MOTHERBOARD: * [CrossFireX] GigaByte GA-P67A-UD3-B3 Intel P67 Chipset DDR3 ATX Mainboard w/ 7.1 HD Audio, GbLAN, USB3.0, 2x SATA-III RAID, 2 Gen2 PCIe, 3 PCIe X1 & 2 PCI [B3 Stepping]
MOUSE: XtremeGear Optical USB 3 Buttons Gaming Mouse
NETWORK: Onboard Gigabit LAN Network
OS: Microsoft® Windows® 7 Home Premium [+104] (64-bit Edition)
POWERSUPPLY: 700 Watts - XtremeGear SLI/CrossFireX Ready Power Supply [+10]
SERVICE: STANDARD WARRANTY: 3-YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY PLUS LIFE-TIME TECHNICAL SUPPORT
SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO
USB: Built-in USB 2.0 Ports
VIDEO: AMD Radeon HD 6850 1GB GDDR5 16X PCIe Video Card [+57] (HIS IceQ X Powered by AMD [+5])
XWNC1: * Asus USB-N13 802.11b/g/n USB 2.0 300Mbps Wireless USB Adapter [+22]
_PRICE: (+1297)




Comes with Shogun 2 for free, lol. Great, after I already bought it...

Everywhere I looked while shopping around was adverts and offers for Shogun 2. Everywhere!


P.S. I'm sending my laptop in to Acer for repairs at a set out-of-warranty price of $200. I hope they won't mind that I was left with 4 extra screws after re-assembling it. :joker:
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stoicblitzer
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Retired Knight
i ordered from cyberpower 3 years ago and after 5 weeks I had not received my computer so I cancelled that order.

here's hoping you have a better experience. :mtwcheers:
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Cole Stark of WinterFell
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Retired Knight's Apprentice
heres hoping the best :mtwcheers:
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Kay of Sauvage
Retired Knight
stoicblitzer,Mar 20 2011
12:35 PM
i ordered from cyberpower 3 years ago and after 5 weeks I had not received my computer so I cancelled that order.

here's hoping you have a better experience. :mtwcheers:

Hmm, there was an option to put the order on "no rush" which gives them like 3 weeks to send the order out and I would get a 5% discount on the entire order. But not 5 weeks, lol. There were also 2 options for rush orders too. I stuck with the default, which was 5 to 10 days. If my laptop was still working, I would have definitely taken the "no rush" option.
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Kronos

Quote:
 
So, I've ordered myself a customized desktop from Cyberpower


Build your own tbh, you'll get a much better PC out of it.
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Dinadan of Logris
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Master of Spam
You will? Prove it, tbh. :yuk:
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Dinadan of Logris
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Master of Spam
BTW Kay, how did you make the choice between ATI & Nvidia?
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Kronos

Dinadan of Logris,Mar 20 2011
06:19 PM
You will? Prove it, tbh. :yuk:

You could get for the same price except no liquid cooling, SSD, mouse or keyboard but with a better mobo, 8gb corsair ddr3 2000 ram, a 2600k and a 6950 2gb. Thats an extra $100 just on the graphics card saving right there.
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Kronos

Dinadan of Logris,Mar 20 2011
06:34 PM
BTW Kay, how did you make the choice between ATI & Nvidia?

Shogun 2 is optimized for ATI. Plus they're better cards imho.
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Kay of Sauvage
Retired Knight
Dinadan of Logris,Mar 20 2011
02:34 PM
BTW Kay, how did you make the choice between ATI & Nvidia?

I just looked at the recommendations for the best gaming graphics cards for the money for the month at Tom's Hardware:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-g...990,2879-4.html

So that gave me the ATI 6850 or the Nvidia GTX 460 1-GB as probably the best values (or the 150 dollar versions on the previous page), compared to the next best value which was $250. It said something about ATI having support for multiple monitors, so I figured that'd be more likely to be useful than the 3-d support on the Nvidia. But it more or less was a toss up.

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Dinadan of Logris
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Master of Spam
Aha, OK. I was hearing Nvidia is better for FPSing. Any thoughts on that?
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Kay of Sauvage
Retired Knight
Kronos,Mar 20 2011
04:21 PM
Dinadan of Logris,Mar 20 2011
06:19 PM
You will? Prove it, tbh.   :yuk:

You could get for the same price except no liquid cooling, SSD, mouse or keyboard but with a better mobo, 8gb corsair ddr3 2000 ram, a 2600k and a 6950 2gb. Thats an extra $100 just on the graphics card saving right there.

I didn't see it like that. The first thing I did was go to Newegg and Tiger Direct to see what it would cost to build my own computer from parts. I came up with over $1100 even while missing a few essential items and assuming slightly lower end CPU (no "K" version i-5) GFX (768 MB version of GTX 460) 1 TB HD and no SSD, plus put it up to $1300 after adding a $150-200 monitor, and not counting labor.

In the end, I got better stuff than I picked out, but for the same price.

And I kinda need a keyboard and don't want the crappy basic one that comes with every computer. More than 4 gigs of RAM seems to be a waste. The SSD for the OS will probably be really nice. I don't know what a "better" motherboard is exactly, other than having more slots for things I'll never use.

Regarding the CPU:

Quote:
 
CPUs priced over $225 offer rapidly diminishing returns when it comes to game performance. As such, we have a hard time recommending anything more expensive than the Core i5-2500K, especially since this multiplier-unlocked processor can be overclocked to great effect if more performance is desired.
Quote:
 
[The i7-2600k] doesn't sound like much of an improvement, and frankly it will make remarkably little difference when it comes to gaming. The $100 spread between the Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K is only recommended if you want to brag, because you're probably not going to notice any appreciable frame rate difference. The Core i7's strength is only really exploited in heavily-threaded workstation applications, rather than games.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming...ion,2866-4.html


So stop bragging, lol :)
I really only know what I've read. I'm not a hardware expert, and anyway I'd gladly pay someone 100 or 200 bucks to select the proper components (compatible components) I need and to professionally put them together for me.
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stoicblitzer
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Retired Knight
I just upgraded to a GTX570 and 8gb ram. i'm not a big fan of ATI, but my reasoning is kinda ###### so i won't go into it.
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Paul of Exidur
Retired Knight
I bought from ibuypower which I believe is the same owner and virtually the same as cyberpower.

Yeah, I could build my own but to be honest the savings isn't as big building your own as it use to be.

I got i7 960
12gb Ram
Gtx560 ti

I figured I'll be good for a couple of totalwar releases. I'll go SLI with next release.
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Kay of Sauvage
Retired Knight
Paul of Exidur,Mar 20 2011
10:56 PM
I figured I'll be good for a couple of totalwar releases. I'll go SLI with next release.

If your motherboard supports it, I think you can still get another identical graphics card at any time and put it in SLI. Though, I think ATI is SLI, and Nvidia is referred to as crossfire.

I actually was planning on getting a 2nd card for SLI sometime in the future when the card is really cheap and I actually could use the extra power. But for now, I think my setup will be able to do max everything for a while.
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Kronos

Kay of Sauvage,Mar 20 2011
09:22 PM
Kronos,Mar 20 2011
04:21 PM
Dinadan of Logris,Mar 20 2011
06:19 PM
You will? Prove it, tbh.   :yuk:

You could get for the same price except no liquid cooling, SSD, mouse or keyboard but with a better mobo, 8gb corsair ddr3 2000 ram, a 2600k and a 6950 2gb. Thats an extra $100 just on the graphics card saving right there.

I didn't see it like that. The first thing I did was go to Newegg and Tiger Direct to see what it would cost to build my own computer from parts. I came up with over $1100 even while missing a few essential items and assuming slightly lower end CPU (no "K" version i-5) GFX (768 MB version of GTX 460) 1 TB HD and no SSD, plus put it up to $1300 after adding a $150-200 monitor, and not counting labor.

In the end, I got better stuff than I picked out, but for the same price.

And I kinda need a keyboard and don't want the crappy basic one that comes with every computer. More than 4 gigs of RAM seems to be a waste. The SSD for the OS will probably be really nice. I don't know what a "better" motherboard is exactly, other than having more slots for things I'll never use.

Regarding the CPU:

Quote:
 
CPUs priced over $225 offer rapidly diminishing returns when it comes to game performance. As such, we have a hard time recommending anything more expensive than the Core i5-2500K, especially since this multiplier-unlocked processor can be overclocked to great effect if more performance is desired.
Quote:
 
[The i7-2600k] doesn't sound like much of an improvement, and frankly it will make remarkably little difference when it comes to gaming. The $100 spread between the Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K is only recommended if you want to brag, because you're probably not going to notice any appreciable frame rate difference. The Core i7's strength is only really exploited in heavily-threaded workstation applications, rather than games.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming...ion,2866-4.html


So stop bragging, lol :)
I really only know what I've read. I'm not a hardware expert, and anyway I'd gladly pay someone 100 or 200 bucks to select the proper components (compatible components) I need and to professionally put them together for me.

There's no possible way you got better stuff than what you picked out.

As for the i7, it'll overclock better than the i5 but you're right that it doesn't offer much if any more performance for gaming at present. Apart from the overclocking the big advantage it has is multithreading which we won't see how it benchmarks until probably BF3 comes out later this year, but games will be using it more in the future. In 2-5 years time at the back end of your PC's lifetime is when you'll notice the difference.

If you're using win7 4gb is absolute minimum, I have 4gb and thats currently the bottleneck for my PC, 6gb seems to be the sweet spot currently for gaming so I'd recommend 8gb. A better motherboard has many unseen benefits apart from the extra slots, overclockability being one of the main ones.

I could select you compatible components if it's not too late to cancel the order. As for labour costs, it took me 45 minutes the first time I built a pc, now it's around 30 and the majority of that is applying thermal paste and the CPU heatsink/fan. It really isn't worth paying for labour costs as it's rediculously easy. The only thing that may need some specialized expertise is overclocking which it doesn't appear they're doing for you anyway.


BTW ATI is crossfire, Nvidia is SLI :D :P

EDIT: for now that GFX card and RAM is good enough for ultra settings in S2 with reasonable framerate. But it won't be at those resolutions for the next tw game. I'd seriously recommend 8gb and the 6950 which you can unlock to give the same performance as a 6970.
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Kay of Sauvage
Retired Knight
Eh, I'd be worried about breaking stuff and not putting the CPU on right if I built it myself.

And I understand that it shouldn't cost more to build my own, but I probably was selecting stuff I didn't need, like 900 watt power supply cause I wasn't sure about power requirements, and a higher priced motherboard because I wasn't sure about all the features I needed or if super cheap boards were cheap for a reason (low quality). So that's where the "savings" came from.

I'm mainly looking for value, not the cutting edge. I don't mind playing with settings turned down. I was fine playing on my laptop until games became unplayable due to poor frame rates at the lowest settings. So I see the higher end stuff as just delaying my need to upgrade in the future for a few months, but at a cost of about 50% more now. I'd rather buy a $200 processor every X years than a $300 processor every X years + 4 months.


As for extra RAM and improved video card, shouldn't those be easiest to upgrade later when needed? I can add 2 more dual-channel 2 GB RAM chips to get a total of 8 GB RAM, and I can add an identical video card in crossfire to get more graphics power.
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Dinadan of Logris
Member Avatar
Master of Spam
Meh I can't get a i5-2500K for $200..

25% VAT.
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Paul of Exidur
Retired Knight
Kay of Sauvage,Mar 20 2011
10:48 PM
Paul of Exidur,Mar 20 2011
10:56 PM
I figured I'll be good for a couple of totalwar releases. I'll go SLI with next release.

If your motherboard supports it, I think you can still get another identical graphics card at any time and put it in SLI. Though, I think ATI is SLI, and Nvidia is referred to as crossfire.

I actually was planning on getting a 2nd card for SLI sometime in the future when the card is really cheap and I actually could use the extra power. But for now, I think my setup will be able to do max everything for a while.

Yes, I am aware of that. Perhaps I wasn't clear. What I was trying to say was that my graphics card is enough for S2TW and I would just go SLI aka Dual Cards with the next TotalWar Release and I would still probably be able to run the new Release well.

I know what SLI and Crossfire are.
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stoicblitzer
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Retired Knight
your epeens r bigger than mine.
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