CPU help

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Sudz
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CPU help

Post by Sudz »

Hey...

I have a 2 year old lappy that I am trying to sell, I want to clear out the entire thing so all my "data" is gone from it off the HD.

I do not have the OS disc or anything...

Is there anything i can do?

thanks

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Rodster
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Post by Rodster »

You can use this and it's free. 8)

http://www.dban.org/

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Post by bdunn13 »

The other one will work and prob is simpler...

but I use http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/
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Re: CPU help

Post by pigpen81 »

I need some help.

By boys (11 and 13) love PC gaming but our laptop is showing its age. My wife and I want to surprise them for Christmas.

I was wondering if there is a decent gaming PC deal? Prepare desktop.

Budget $500-800. Something that will play upper end games?

Thanks everyone,

Dennis

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Re: CPU help

Post by dbdynsty25 »

Piggy,

The sweet spot to play every game at the upper resolutions is going to be around 900-1100...so if you can stretch to that price point, you can find quite a few options on Amazon pre-built. Should last you a good 5 years at least. The video card alone is your biggest cost and the level you want will run around 300 bucks or more just to start the build. :)

Let me see if I can find a few options pre-built.

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Re: CPU help

Post by dbdynsty25 »

SkyTech Shiva Gaming Computer PC Desktop - Ryzen 5 2600 6-Core 3.4 GHz, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 6G, 500G SSD, 16GB DDR4, RGB, AC WiFi, Windows 10 Home 64-bit https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07RPCG8ZW/re ... 3Db0E82YFQ

That is what I would probably recommend. You may be able to save a hundred here or there with different manufacturers, but that is a really good baseline.

If you absolutely need to stay under 800, you can get an NVidia GeForce 1660 card and get something like this:

CYBERPOWERPC Gamer Xtreme VR Gaming PC, Intel Core i5-9400F 2.9GHz, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 6GB, 8GB DDR4, 240GB SSD, 1TB HDD, WiFi Ready & Win 10 Home (GXiVR8060A8, Black) https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07VGJDKZ4/re ... 3DbAGX6N9H

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Re: CPU help

Post by pigpen81 »

Thanks DB. We may be able to swing that.

I appreciated research! I'm not up to date on this stuff like I was pre-kids ;)

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Re: CPU help

Post by DChaps »

If you have a Micro Center anywhere close, there are a couple good deals they are currently running. I have had one of their PowerSpec PC's since 2016 that I got for the Oculus Rift and it has been great.

$849.99 ($350 off regular price)
https://www.microcenter.com/product/607 ... desktop-pc

PowerSpec G704 Gaming Desktop PC
AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Processor 3.2GHz; NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB; 16GB DDR4-2666 RAM; 500GB SSD
AMD Ryzen 7 2700 Processor 3.2GHz
NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB
16GB DDR4-2666 RAM
500GB SSD
Microsoft Windows 10 Pro
The PowerSpec G704 desktop computer is a powerful gaming machine featuring the AMD Ryzen 7 2700 unlocked processor, an ASRock B450 Pro system board powered by a 600W PSU, 16GB DDR4 2666 RAM, a 500GB SSD, and an NVIDIA RTX 2060 6GB discrete video card to provide an incredible experience playing the most demanding games in the market today! Note: This system is preinstalled with Windows 10 Pro software.
$799.99 ($400 off regular price)
https://www.microcenter.com/product/605 ... desktop-pc

PowerSpec G317 Gaming Desktop PC
Intel Core i5-9600k Processor 3.7GHz; NVIDIA RTX 2060 GDDR6; 16GB DDR4 RAM; 500 GB Solid State Drive
Intel Core i5-9600k Processor 3.7GHz
NVIDIA RTX 2060 GDDR6
16GB DDR4 RAM
500 GB Solid State Drive
Microsoft Windows 10 Home
The PowerSpec G317 desktop computer is a powerful gaming machine featuring the Intel Core i5-9600K unlocked processor, an ASRock Z390 Pro 4 System Board, 16GB DDR4 2666 RAM, a 500GB Solid State Boot Drive, and an Nvidia RTX 2060 6GB discrete video card to provide an incredible experience playing the most demanding games in the market today!

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Re: CPU help

Post by pigpen81 »

Thanks! The nearest Microcenter location to San Diego is 90 miles north.

My wife gave the green light to DB's find.

Which is the best option between the two upper end CPU's you both listed?

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Re: CPU help

Post by dbdynsty25 »

pigpen81 wrote:Thanks! The nearest Microcenter location to San Diego is 90 miles north.

My wife gave the green light to DB's find.

Which is the best option between the two upper end CPU's you both listed?
Literally don't think it matters if you're taking the top end of the one I listed, and the one DC did. Both are Ryzen based (AMD), with 2060 Nvidia graphics cards, 16gb ram and 500 gb ssds. So virtually the same. Pick whichever looks better, or is cheaper when you order. Don't think you can go wrong with either.

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Re: CPU help

Post by sportdan30 »

Scott,

What would you recommend with a budget of around $1200-$1500 with a monitor.....pre-built or build it ourselves?

We're going to Microcenter this evening. My 2011 iMac is showing its age finally and I'm nervous/excited to jump back in to the PC world. My 17 year old is most interested in gaming and I'm going to use it for productivity first and gaming second.

Thanks!

Dan

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Re: CPU help

Post by dbdynsty25 »

If gaming is secondary, then you don't need to spend more than a grand...and pre-built is where it's at these days. The machines that DC was looking at last week are right in the sweet spot. Really good for both gaming and productivity. Then pick up a nice G-Sync based monitor (to pair w/ the video card for smoother framerates/refresh)...and you'll be golden.

Something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/LG-34GL750-B-inc ... 880&sr=8-5

Can always go down to a 31 or a 27" if you think 34 is too wide, but I absolutely love mine. Especially if you're doing a lot of spreadsheets or video editing.

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Re: CPU help

Post by sportdan30 »

Thank you. That monitor looks awesome! I could get a lot of extra work done at home. I normally have around 5 different screens up and use dual monitors at the office.

My son is hell bent on building a PC, even though I'm going to be paying the majority of this purchase. :x How upgradeable are the two linked PCs?

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Re: CPU help

Post by dbdynsty25 »

sportdan30 wrote:Thank you. That monitor looks awesome! I could get a lot of extra work done at home. I normally have around 5 different screens up and use dual monitors at the office.

My son is hell bent on building a PC, even though I'm going to be paying the majority of this purchase. :x How upgradeable are the two linked PCs?
You can always upgrade them. They are using off the shelf components to make these higher end gaming rigs, so in the future you'll be able to upgrade video and ram - likely not processor because of different form factors.

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Re: CPU help

Post by sportdan30 »

Thanks again for your help Scott. Here's what we went with.

Monitor ($299 black Friday sale)

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FL ... UTF8&psc=1

PC ($1199)

CyberPowerPC - Gaming Desktop - AMD Ryzen 7 3700X - 16GB - GeForce RTX 2070 SUPER - 2TB HDD + 240GB SSD - White

An IT guy said to get Eset for antivirus. Does that sound good?

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Re: CPU help

Post by dbdynsty25 »

You don't need AV anymore. It's built into Windows and I've found it perfectly fine. And I do a lot of questionable browsing for hacks and things of that nature. For a regular home PC, no problem.

And those specs are legit. You'll be happy w/that.

However, I'd scrap that monitor. It has "freesync" which is an AMD Radeon based monitor for the refresh rates. You need a G-Sync monitor like one I listed to fully realize the graphical performance of your NVidia graphics card.

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Re: CPU help

Post by sportdan30 »

Thanks for the info. Do I need to worry that the monitor you referenced is not 1440p? Or am I reading it wrong?

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Re: CPU help

Post by TCrouch »

Only thing I'd add is that there are a bunch of Freesync monitors that support G-Sync without an issue now. I've run a few for a while and haven't had a problem...as far as my RTX 2080 Ti is concerned, the monitors are G-Sync, and I enable it the same way in the Nvidia control panel.

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Re: CPU help

Post by sportdan30 »

Dell has one for $329 although it's a 27" 2560 x 1440p

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-27-le ... Id=5293502

Better way to go?

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Re: CPU help

Post by TCrouch »

Not sure why you'd go to a 2560x1440 instead of a 3440x1440 for a 50 dollar difference, unless it's the size of the screen. But 34" isn't really that wide unless you put it 8 inches from your face, rather that at the rear of the desk. To each his own, though.

If you're running a single monitor, that extra screen space is great, whether it's for productivity or entertainment. Only reason I don't use mine anymore is because triple screens are far better for what I use my PC setup for.

But if you're going with a single monitor, the one Scott linked for $379 is a better option for 21:9 than $329 for 16:9 is, IMO. If desk space is the problem, then there's really nothing wrong with a 2560x1440 that's slightly smaller, though.

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Re: CPU help

Post by sportdan30 »

TCrouch wrote:Not sure why you'd go to a 2560x1440 instead of a 3440x1440 for a 50 dollar difference, unless it's the size of the screen. But 34" isn't really that wide unless you put it 8 inches from your face, rather that at the rear of the desk. To each his own, though.

If you're running a single monitor, that extra screen space is great, whether it's for productivity or entertainment. Only reason I don't use mine anymore is because triple screens are far better for what I use my PC setup for.

But if you're going with a single monitor, the one Scott linked for $379 is a better option for 21:9 than $329 for 16:9 is, IMO. If desk space is the problem, then there's really nothing wrong with a 2560x1440 that's slightly smaller, though.
But isn't the one Scott referenced a 2560 x 1080p?

https://www.amazon.com/LG-34GL750-B-inc ... 880&sr=8-5

I'd love to go with an ultra-wide, but am not seeing one necessarily with my price range of $300-$350.

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Re: CPU help

Post by TCrouch »

Yeah, that would make sense. Must have missed that, sorry. I gotta say I used my 3440x1440, while my wife had a 2560x1080, and hers looks beautiful, too (might actually be that LG).

The question is whether you'd want a wider screen, or pure pixel count, though. For games that support it, the 21:9 aspect ratio is nice. But the image quality of a 1440p monitor is going to be cleaner when you look at it, of course. I'm not sure this is a question anybody could answer for you, as it's based on your personal preference, but I'll say if you want to look at an image on a 27" screen and have a tougher time picking out pixels, then your 2560x1440 is the answer.

If you want a slightly wider view, the 2560x1080 will give it to you, with the side effect of having larger pixels.

But personally, I use big ass 1920x1080 monitors (32 inchers), and they're still gorgeous during game play. It's really all down to personal preference. I thought I'd really hate 1920x1080 after using 3440x1440 for years, but for what I do (80% of my time is spent racing on my PC), it's phenomenal, even though the displays are "only" 1080p.

You'd be stunned how quickly you adapt to whatever resolution your monitor supports, so the question comes down to whether you'd rather have a wider view, or smaller pixels, in the end.

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Re: CPU help

Post by sportdan30 »

That's a beautiful set up! Thanks for the information as well.

I'm so green to the PC gaming industry as you can probably tell. So I apologize if my questions are too simplistic. But, am I doing myself a disservice by going with a 2560 x 1080p monitor based on my CPU configurations? I know you answered this already. The guy at Microcenter said to build your CPU around your monitor.

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Re: CPU help

Post by TCrouch »

Well, I'm pretty sure he's talking about building the power of the rig to match the pixels you're going to try to be pushing...not the specific monitor. But everybody's opinion is going to differ, for sure. I'll probably defer to Scott's advice to you on this one, as honestly I wasn't reading it very closely until I saw the comment about Freesync, which I'd have said previously, too. But they're cheaper, and since so many actually run GSync now, the last couple sets of monitors I've purchased were Freesync without any issues.

But back to the pixel-pushing...this is probably going to veer heavily into nerd-horsepower-theory territory...you multiply W x H to find out the pixels your machine needs to render per frame, and that gives you a baseline of what sort of horsepower you're looking for in the CPU/RAM/GPU combo you choose. Then you build the rig to match the sort of frames you want to get at the resolution you are going to be running.

1920x1080: 2,073,600 pixels per frame, and you ideally want at LEAST 60FPS. And unless you exceed your monitor's refresh rate, G-sync isn't a big deal.
2560x1080: 2,764,800
2560x1440: 3,686,400
3440x1440: 4,953,600

So, what you'll see is that for the various monitor resolutions, your need for horsepower cranks up by big amounts. If you're going "budget" PC, the 2560x1080 is probably a safer bet, because you're dealing with almost a million fewer pixels per frame than the 2560x1440.

Then you look at things like 4K:

3840x2160: 8,294,400 pixels, 60 times per second. That requires a BEEFY GPU to pull off.

What actually blew my mind when I got my current monitors, though...I thought about getting 3 2560x1440 monitors for that added clarity. That comes out to be a "full" resolution of:

7680x1440: 11,059,200 pixels 8O 8O 8O 8O

Almost 50% more horsepower required than 4K....which is why I went back down to:

5860x1080: 6,328,800 pixels

(with a bezel correction, this is the resolution I run at). So while not quite at 4K resolution (because it's 3 monitors instead of 4...lol), it still requires a lot of power to push 6.3 million pixels 100 times per second, which is why I have a beastly i9, 32GB of RAM, and the RTX 2080 Ti.

But I haven't actually used a 2070 (assuming that's the card you're getting in that rig that was linked), but what I do when I go components shopping is check out benchmarks on the specific pieces I'm looking for. There are a lot of sites out there that will compare "X" CPU and "Y" card on various games at the different resolutions, and then give you a frames-per-second count on them all.

Summary...(finally, sorry)if you're just dipping into PC gaming but it's secondary, your budget PC and the 2560x1080 will perform better in any games you try to play. If you want a cleaner picture but probably 20% or 25% lower framerate, the 2560x1440 is the way to go. If you're coming from consoles where so many things are 30FPS, you might not care so much about framerate, but that would be doing yourself a disservice as a PC gamer :lol:

Sorry, my answers are about as clear as mud, but so much of building your PC is personal preference and what sort of performance targets you want to hit. But the gibberish above is what I used until I came to my current process of "pick the biggest f'n thing I can get and throw it in a case" method of building PCs.

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Re: CPU help

Post by sportdan30 »

Excellent info Terry. Appreciate it big time. A lot to think about for sure. Think I'll do a little bit more research (specifically looking at the graphics card and what it can handle).

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