is probably only going to be a thing for pc gamers. The current gen of consoles will only be able to do 4K if the game is very simplistic looking due to the extra horse power needed.

If I was optimistic I'd say consoles need about 5 years. But I'm a pessimist so I'd say consoles need 10 years. 

Liquid cooling is what happens when the kind of young man who puts a spoiler and blue underlights on a Toyota sedan is more into games than he is into cars. 

I had kind of forgotten about VR, but I agree it's probably the coming thing for a lot of video games. I don't see watching movies or TV with it though.

Maybe a real video wall will become practical. I can certainly see the value of 4K monitors if they're 80" or larger and hang on the living room wall.

I think I may have to upgrade my video card this year. If I do, I can probably squeeze another year or two out of that computer. 

I could definitely see VR head gear taking the place of current iMax/3D movie theatres. 

I wonder what they'll try to sell us after 4K. Isn't that close to the resolution limit of the human eye?

It just depends on the monitor size. 4k @ 40" might be a stretch. 

Oh you guys don't think liquid cooling is necessary? Perhaps I'll downgrade it to the H80 instead, save $70. The CPU cooling is like the 4th most expensive thing I think!

Looked into pricing on monitors that go above 60hz and they're double the price. Yep think i'll just stick with my 60hz. or I could get a 60hz 4k 28" monitor: http://www.pbtech.co.nz/index.php?z=p&p=MONSAM9282&name=Samsung-LU28E590DSXY-28-UHD-3840x2160-1MS-Response

But I don't think the image quality is worth the price. 

I used to be an AMD person and aftermarket coolers were pretty much a necessity. In 2007, starting with the Core2Duo, I switched to Intel. I've always just bought their boxed processors. They come with a heatsink and fan and a 5 year warranty. I've not had any problems at all. 

Strictly for overclockers IMO. A good quality aftermarket fan cooler is all you need! Don't use the stock cooler that comes with Intel CPUs they are shit 

The stock Intel coolers are fine. I've used them on every computer I've built since 2007 and there have been zero processor or fan problems. 

I pretty much overclock everything but never watercool. Too much money, time and maintenance.

Configure your case correctly, use quality fans, sinks, etc. and you'll be just fine.

The first thing I did when I got my 4790k was delid it, level it via sanding and applied liquid ultra and OC'd it to 5ghz with great temps. That's probably a little excessive and not for everyone.

I just recently got my gtx980 to 1.5ghz core / 8ghz mem!!! the thing is a beast!!

@ Rick - In my experience, intel coolers are fine for typical consumer use in a well configured case. They tend to last quite a while. However, for anything beyond that, the performance simply isn't there. 

i still have one of these: http://www.thermaltake.com/products-model.aspx?id=C_00001476

been with me for 5 years (or more? it's been so long I can't remember). excellent cooler, super quiet, used on 3 CPUs so far. i'll be sad when the lga1150 socket goes away. 

"typical consumer" Lol, well that pretty much describes me and everyone I've built a computer for in the last 20 years.

Games, movies, music, YouTube and random web browsing... yep, that just about covers it. 

Maybe this is a software question rather than a hardware question, but here goes:

So I've been playing a few Quake 3 Arena maps for inspiration (and curiosity to see what some people whose Q1 maps I know have done for Q3) and then suddenly two of the maps I had in my baseq directory stopped working, as in, the little preview screen that you normally see just showed a Q3A logo and the map name was scrambled and the game wouldn't load the map. I tried deleting the maps and replacing them with fresh downloads but no dice.

Then I read on the internet that if files randomly become corrupt, that can be a sign of the start of HDD failure. Might this be the case? Or is Q3A (I run it via ioquake on Linux) known to be quirky?

I also heard some disturbing noises at one stage, but this was months ago and went away: a sort of a krrr-click, krrr-click. I thought back then my HDD was about to die, but as I said, the noises went away and never came back. 

Also: if I do need to replace the HDD, is it worth going for an SSD when the laptop isn't that great to begin with? Will it help at all (in terms of speed) with mapping, or is mapping more reliant on memory + CPU? 

If you don't have a good back up, make one now.

There are utilities to scan and check hard drives.

If it turns out that it needs replacing, go for an SSD unless you need a really large capacity (over 500 GB). 

I tried deleting the maps and replacing them with fresh downloads but no dice.

can you also try this:

rename the broken map to something else
unzip a fresh copy
try to run the fresh copy

i think if you overwrite a file and the size is the same, the hdd will just reuse the same sectors instead of writing to a new place on the disk. if you rename, the original will keep the sectors it is using and the hdd will need to allocate a different part of the disk to the fresh copy of the map.

if this makes the map work, then that definitely indicates that the original copy became corrupted on the desk.

have you tried running a disk scan? also, try getting speedfan and then checking the SMART info on your hdd to see if it is reporting errors of failing health checks.

regarding ssd in any computer: in all but the first piece of shit computer, and ssd is going to be a huge performance boost. it is the single best upgrade you can do to your computer; plus, ssds are quite cheap now. 

first = worst

why are words failing me. :S 

Ok, you've sold me on the SSD option. :)

I think I have the most important stuff backed up, but I'll double-check (I'm not on the computer with the suspect HDD at the moment; I'm using my really shitty backup computer at the moment that's only good for light internet usage as I was afraid of sudden catastrophic hard-drive failure on my main computer without a proper plan of action at the ready).

speedfan is Windows-only, I think? But it looks like badblocks will work for checking the HDD under Linux. And thank you for the tip about renaming the map files; I'll try that too.


I've heard that with HDDs, you should try not to use too much of the drive's capacity, as in, your HDD shouldn't be 90% full, as this will slow down the system. If true, is that the case with SSDs as well? I'm just asking because on my budget, I'm looking at SSDs with a smaller capacity than my currently 60%-full HDD... 

No noticeable slowdown on my ssd when it's full. 

 

The manufacturer of the drive should also have utilities for checking for problems and reading the SMART info.

The only issue I can think of with a too full drive is that Windows Defrag requires some free space to run. That's not an issue with SSDs because defragmenting them is not recommended. 

well, i don't know if it's still like this for ssds, but you should partition the disk to something like 90% for the actual usage, and leave 10% unpartitioned to give the drive room to move things around. i forget the details but you can google that.

also, look into using linux on a usb stick to do a complete drive copy bit for bit to your new drive. you can continue where you left off like you never changed hardware. 

 

Still haven't got round to sorting out my primary computer (thanks again for the responses!), but my back-up computer (an old netbook) has some odd issues too, and as I haven't been able to find answers on the rest of the internet, I thought I might ask here...

So the odd thing is that whenever I start up the netbook, it opens a few applications automatically: a File Manager window, an image viewer programme and one or two other things. Basically, it behaves as if it's remembering the last few things I had open before I last shut the system down. The problem is, these are not things I had open; I had them open a few months ago when this started happening -- it's as if the system keeps restoring itself to a state from a few months ago.

I'm using Linux Mint, and under System --> Sessions and Startup I've made sure that none of these applications are set to auto-start, and that the system does not save my session when I log out.

So I've been wondering whether this is a hardware problem, and to my complete layperson's mind, it seems like there could be something wrong with the ram? As in, it never gets cleared and keeps "remembering" stuff it should long ago have discarded? Or is that a laughably misinformed idea? 

Ram forgets everything as soon as power is cut. Sounds like a software problem to me.