Category: Tech

The motherboard.

The folks over at Digital Foundry set up a neat little experiment to try to get an early idea of how the PS4 and Xbox One will perform relative to each other. If you have been following the gaming console news, you probably already know that the new consoles from Microsoft and Sony are pretty identical. Both have an eight-core AMD Jaguar-based CPU that runs at 1.6GHz. They also both have 8GB of RAM. There are some differences in the memory architecture, but at launch it probably won’t really come into play much. Of course a few years developers will start taking advantages of the different memory idiosyncrasies, it is likely that the PS4 will have the edge due to its unified memory architecture and its DDR5 memory. However in the near future, I don’t believe it is going to matter much. For now, lets consider the PS4 and Xbox One equal in the CPU and memory departments. That being said, there is certainly a winner when it comes to the GPUs. The PS4’s AMD GPU has a 50% higher peak performance than the AMD GPU in the Xbox One.

Since these new consoles are basically lower end PCs anyway, Digital Foundry decided to gather up the two most comparable AMD graphics cards (keeping a 50% performance difference), sick them into the same PC, and see what the results looked like. The actual framerates are not representative of what the consoles will get since a i7-3770K and 16GB of ram were used, but you can look at the difference between the two results and start to come up with an idea of how much the 50% higher peak performance actually matters.

Digital Foundary ran a number of benchmarks and recorded the results that they got back.They determined that the PS4 was between 17% to 33% faster then the Xbox One. That is a genuinely noticeable amount when we are talking about console games that are likely targeting 30 frames per second in the first place. Its not a 50% faster result, but I would argue that it certainly does matter.

If you are interested in more details into their testing methodology and results, check out the article on the Eurogamer.

Tech

Minecraft Server

On Jul 20, 2013 3:02 pm, by NeutralX2

Some of you might know I run a Minecraft server (among other things) for NoobsParadise.com. It used to be a pretty large Counter-Strike Source community, but lost a lot of activity over the years as people moved on to newer and better games. When CS:GO came out, myself and a few others tried to re-launch the community with a new website and server, but it only managed to hold people’s attention for about six months before it wasn’t worth keeping the servers up anymore.

Anyway, during this time I also threw up a Minecraft server just for fun. That seemed to take off more then the CS:GO server, with people putting in a ton of time and creating some really cool stuff. Since I have been posting a lot of PC builds lately, I might as well show you what is currently running that Minecraft Server. It is some pretty low end hardware, but more then capable of running Minecraft with a couple of dozen people playing at once. It sits in the corner of my computer room pretty silently running the game. It has no monitor or keyboard and mouse. The server is administrated over SSH.

Biostar AMD A780L3C
AMD Athlon II X4 640 Quad Core Processor
Kingston HyperX Red 4GB Memory
Corsair CX430
Corsair 200R
Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO
Ubuntu Server 13.04

Tech

Mom PC Build October 2012

On Jul 11, 2013 11:37 pm, by NeutralX2

Since I have been posting PC builds recently, I thought I would post one I did almost a year ago for my mom. Previously she was rocking an old 2.53ghz Pentium 4 processor, 1GB of RDRAM, 80GB Hard Drive and Windows XP. While it could run word processing and do basic web browsing, the pc took forever to start up, couldn’t handle HD videos on YouTube, and was still on Windows XP. For general security and usability reasons, I wanted to upgrade her to Windows 7 and something a lot faster. I managed to put together a pretty decent build for around $500. She was pleasantly surprised when she came home one day to find a new PC under her desk.

Intel Core i3-3220 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz
Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit
Mushkin Enhanced Chronos 120GB Solid State Drive
GIGABYTE GA-B75M-D3V Motherboard
GIGABYTE GZ-ZIF138R Mid Tower Computer Case
Rosewill RD400-2-DB 400W ATX V2.2 Power Supply
Mushkin Enhanced Silverline 8GB RAM

Tech

Media PC Build May 2013

On May 25, 2013 10:25 pm, by NeutralX2

In addition to the Gaming PC Build April 2013, I also recently did a build for a friend of mine that needed a new PC for video editing. He has been getting by editing on his laptop, but wanted something much more powerful. With this new PC he should be able to tackle projects of pretty much any size and turn work around faster.

So what do you do when you are in need of a serious media PC? You go get yourself a Core i7-3930k of course. The 3930k is a beast of a six core processor with Hyper Threading, giving you a nice total of 12 threads to chew through video encoding tasks. The 3930k doesn’t come cheap though, and neither do the LGA 2011 socket motherboards that you are forced to get as well. However we decided that we should either do it right or not do it at all, and went all in.

Of course with nearly half of our budget spent on the motherboard and processor alone, we had to cut back on a few of the other components to still meet our budget. So instead of loading up on tons of RAM from the beginning, we went with a workable 16GB of 2x8GB DIMMS with the option to upgrade later on. The ASUS P9X79 LE has the ability to expand up to 64GB later on should he decide he needs it. Aside from the motherboard and RAM, the next biggest cost was going to be all of the storage. We went with an Intel 240GB SSD because we wanted the reliability of the Intel’s higher quality NAND to handle the heavy workloads he will be throwing at it. We also got two 3TB Seagate drives to use as storage. I am not a particularly big fan of Seagate, however the price of their 3TB drives cannot be beat. Plus, Western Digital doesn’t yet offer Blue drives in large capacities, and their Black drives are too expensive for this build. Six terabytes of storage might sound like a lot, but he will actually probably need to upgrade that down the line. The P9X79 has enough SATA ports for him to add additional drives down the road. The rest of the build was pretty standard.

Then we went ahead and thew in a Geforce GTX660 TI. This is the card I have been going to for a while. It has an excellent price to performance ratio, and supports some cool Nvidia only features such as PhysX and 3D Vision surround. With this card the PC is not just a great media rig, but can also kick some serious gaming ass. You can see the full specs below:

NXZT Phantom 410
ASUS P9X79 LE X79
PNY GTX660 TI
Intel Core i7-3930k
Corsair Vengeance 16GB
2x Seagate Barracuda 3TB
Intel 335 Series 240GB SSD
Corsair Hydro Series H60
LG WH14NS40 Blu-Ray Burner
Corsair CX750
Microsoft Windows 8 64-bit

Tech

Gaming PC Build April 2013

On May 25, 2013 7:35 pm, by NeutralX2

Back in April I helped one of my friends build a new gaming PC. His PC is pretty similar to mine in a lot of ways, which goes to show that I picked some solid parts back when I built my rig. The only thing I really changed up was the processor. I know this is a gaming PC and that the 3770k’s hyper threading doesn’t currently matter that much in games compared to my 3570K. However, I am betting that it is going to start to make a difference next year. The new consoles will be out by then, and you can bet that games are going to start being pretty heavily multithreaded. Both of the next gen consoles have an 8 core CPU running at pretty unimpressive speeds, so game developers are going to need to take advantage of every single core they have available. The only other difference is that he went with a 660 TI, which is a pretty solid GPU choice. I know a lot of people prefer the 7870 at this price range, but I think the support for GPU PhysX makes the 660 TI the better choice.

The full specs are: