PC Owners Thread

[Scherrman]

Would this be a pretty good laptop? The price is right.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-i...lid-state-drive-black/5872507.p?skuId=5872507

 

[king3pj]

Would this be a pretty good laptop? The price is right.

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-i...lid-state-drive-black/5872507.p?skuId=5872507

Seems like a decent laptop to me. I haven't been in the market for a laptop since I was in college so I can't say how it is in terms of price compared to other laptops but it should perform pretty well in games.

The 1000 series GPUs are so power efficient that Nvidia doesn't even make mobile GPUs anymore. They just put in the full desktop version of the GPU and run the clock at a slightly lower speed to reduce the power requirement and heat output. That is a mobile CPU from Intel but it shouldn't hold you back too much. All Intel i5 or higher CPUs from the last 5 years or so still do pretty well in games.

The x50 GPUs from Nvidia certainly aren't near the top of the power charts but they do pretty well for high to medium settings in most games at 1080p. The 1050 Ti is a little better than the GTX 960 yourbeliefs had in his previous build. That laptop is not going to be a gaming powerhouse the way a desktop could be but it should do pretty well for gaming as long as you don't care about max settings at 60 FPS in the most demanding games.

ASUS GTX 1050 Ti STRIX OC 4 GB Review

 

[yourbeliefs]

That GTA V FPS is a bit deceiving. Shouldn't they give SOME notes about the other graphical settings like Texture filtering, shadows, etc?

 

[Scherrman]

Seems like a decent laptop to me. I haven't been in the market for a laptop since I was in college so I can't say how it is in terms of price compared to other laptops but it should perform pretty well in games.

The 1000 series GPUs are so power efficient that Nvidia doesn't even make mobile GPUs anymore. They just put in the full desktop version of the GPU and run the clock at a slightly lower speed to reduce the power requirement and heat output. That is a mobile CPU from Intel but it shouldn't hold you back too much. All Intel i5 or higher CPUs from the last 5 years or so still do pretty well in games.

The x50 GPUs from Nvidia certainly aren't near the top of the power charts but they do pretty well for high to medium settings in most games at 1080p. The 1050 Ti is a little better than the GTX 960 yourbeliefs had in his previous build. That laptop is not going to be a gaming powerhouse the way a desktop could be but it should do pretty well for gaming as long as you don't care about max settings at 60 FPS in the most demanding games.

ASUS GTX 1050 Ti STRIX OC 4 GB Review

Is this basically the same thing?

Amazon product ASIN B074Q54GSR

 

[king3pj]

That GTA V FPS is a bit deceiving. Shouldn't they give SOME notes about the other graphical settings like Texture filtering, shadows, etc?

I linked the actual GPU review that benchmark came from. On the GTA V benchmark page it says all settings are set to very high with MSAA turned off. MSAA is a FPS killer in that game with all GPUs at all resolutions so most people turn it off for a big performance increase.

 

[king3pj]

Is this basically the same thing?

Amazon product ASIN B074Q54GSR

Yes. It looks like both laptops have the same GPU, CPU, RAM, monitor resolution, and SSD so performance should be similar. It's hard to say which is better. It's going to come down to battery life, build quality, and which has better cooling. Cooling is huge because the big problem with some gaming laptops is that they run too hot and have to throttle the CPU and GPU to reduce temperatures. If one cools better than the other this will happen less often.

 

[yourbeliefs]

Free fan made Mario game. Get it before the inevitable C&D.

Newer Super Mario Bros. DS

 

[yourbeliefs]

If you have a computer with an Intel microprocessor from the past decade, I'm afraid there's some bad news..

https://gizmodo.com/report-all-intel-processors-made-in-the-last-decade-mi-1821728240

 

[king3pj]

If you have a computer with an Intel microprocessor from the past decade, I'm afraid there's some bad news..

https://gizmodo.com/report-all-intel-processors-made-in-the-last-decade-mi-1821728240

While this has caused some problems with things like servers, this article claims that it doesn't actually impact game performance. There is much more detail in the full article so it's worth reading but I am posting the most important part here.

Chill Out, Gamers: New CPU Patches Aren't Messing With Your Frame Rates

Alcorn told me that most users aren't ever going to do the kinds of things with their computer that will make the CPU slowdown occur. "Any requests from the operating system that go outside of the user space and go into the kernel are going to take more time," he explained. "That is going to incur latency penalties for certain classes of operations...normal amount of latency for that kind of operation is 150 nanoseconds. Now it's going to go into the 400, 450 nanosecond range."

For most end users, they'll never notice a difference. "The client type desktop applications, gaming included, execute almost entirely inside of the user space," Alcorn said. "So they're not really doing a lot of calls to the kernel. They don't issue a lot of system calls. The performance impact is negligible."

Tom's Hardware has been running tests on patched and pre-patched systems since it figured out what's going on. It's early days, but Alcorn said that the results between patch and pre-patched results have all been within the standard of deviation you'd see if you ran repeated benchmarks on a system. "There's essentially no difference," he said.

The one place gamers might notice a difference is in load times, especially on older hard disk drives that work with spinning platters. But if you're loading off a hard disk drive as opposed to a solid state drive, your games were already loading slowly. On an SDD the games load so fast that most users may not notice much of a difference either way.

 

[yourbeliefs]

While this has caused some problems with things like servers, this article claims that it doesn't actually impact game performance. There is much more detail in the full article so it's worth reading but I am posting the most important part here.

Chill Out, Gamers: New CPU Patches Aren't Messing With Your Frame Rates

Good to know that PUBG and Tacoma's awful performance won't be made even worse when I patch my system. ;p

Actually Tacoma runs okay, but when I load up saved games there's a good minute where it "chugs" and I get PowerPoint performance at times.