patrick.net

I've built 7 computers over the last 20 years, one I even made the case and it had a water cooling setup. They were all fun and each one was a learning experience. Also MSI makes a barebone gaming laptop or at least they use to all you have to do is add cpu, memory, hd, and os, saved about $500 on my last laptop and it had a 680m.

yep it's good fun. new gtx1080's are out and i think i'm just going to have to get one to replace my gtx980. currently gaming at 4K/60fps but would like more details enabled.

here's a shot of the custom scene out there. really clean.

Nice, that looks really clean.

Im going to go with small case with a 1070 for my next setup.

I dropped $1500 at newegg in May for a skylake rig.

I put together a Conroe box in 2007 for Windows 7 and a Haswell box for OS X last year.

Hope to get a 1080 card to fart around with this month, before my newegg premier status expires . . .

The UPS was a great buy, damn power cut off for 2 hours last month but the UPS stepped in keeping my sleeping PCs alive.

I quit building back in 2000 when most hardware places closed shop.
The few places you could find to get hardware sold some cheap ass fross your fingers and hope it works crap.

It must have happened to me about two times. I wait so long to recieve all of the parts I Ordered online, then when I get them. The motherboard has a dead bios, or the power supply is kaput, or bad memory.
It just got to be a hassle. In the late 90's I could just run down to one of the million brick and mortar computer hardware stored in South Florida and buy and return to my heart's content.

I'm not boxing crap up and sending it back to China, plus what I paid for most of those items. Cost less than what it would have cost me to ship it back.

Laptops meet every need I have these days. I don't need a desktop town anymore. I have no problem having 4 or 5 massive Visual Studio project open at once, SSMS open with 5 SQL databases initialized and running.
It does OK.

Bellingham Bill says

and a Haswell box for OS X last year.

How is hackintosh working btw?

Not bad.

10.11 is a lot more stabler than 10.12 -- Safari will lock up the box on some sites in 10.12, usually video-related.

I've been running OS X on the Haswell for a year now, and have been perfectly happy vs. the Mac Mini alternative, which for twice the money I'd get 80% of the performance with zero upgrade/repair ability.

When the Skylake MacBook Pros drop I'll take a close look at those though, as there is just enough skeeviness with hackintosh (I go 2-4 weeks between hangs in 10.11) to want me to have a real working Mac again and the two Apple laptops I've got in the past have been real champs for me

(My last MBP died after 6 years of use in late 2014 after I left it in a car overnight in the Santa Cruz mountains -- suspect the condensing fog got it, the 2002 PBG4 finally fell apart in 2006 and I replaced it with a Mac Pro, which got taken out last year by an unsupported 10.10 update).

anonymous says

build your own PC in 3 hours or less

Building is the easy part. Shopping for compatible components is complicated, because nobody presents all the necessary specifications in an easily comparable format. Newegg Advanced Search is the least bad. Manufacturers' sites tend to be loaded with silly animation gimmicks and dividing products along target market lines rather than offering filtration by relevant specifications. I watched recently another Steve Jobs biography, describing key conversation moments in his life, and he had this recurring fight with Steve Wozniak: Woz wanted compatibility for customers to add components, but Steve wanted closed systems with total control end-to-end, which turned out to be more profitable. It's a sad irony: computers are designed and built to process information, but it's surprisingly complicated to process the information about how to design and build the best one for your particular purposes.

I have a build with an old i7 860 (yes first core gen). It is still over powerful for most things. skylake would probably about double performance, but that probably wouldn't be a life changer anyway. (I don't do games, just a bit of photo editing and coding).
So I do intent to refresh sometime but I'm really in no hurry.
Maybe kaby lake - though word is it is in fact *slower* than skylake (that's the way things are going now).
Or maybe broadwell-e, or skylake-e when it comes.
Looks like the next MBP will have just 4 USB C ports and a shallow keyboard. Not sure if they are really worth paying more, for a lower performance compared to a desktop. I have a mac book air from 5 yrs ago that is still great for mobility, web browsing and minor stuff.

Heraclitusstudent says

*slower*...(that's the way things are going now).

Why?

curious2 says

Heraclitusstudent says

*slower*...(that's the way things are going now).

Why?

Check out: http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/intel-kaby-lake/

Core i7-7700K seems to be 3.6Ghz vs 4Ghz for Core i7-6700K.
"The numbers are generally below those of the current Core i7-6700K. It’s hard to say why Intel’s follow-up would be slower. "

The fact is there's just very little scope to progress on raw performance because:
- (1) They already optimized the hell out of individual cores
- (2) they can't increase clock frequency because of physical limits (power loss, heat, etc...)
- (3) they can add more cores, but this causes generally more heat, leading to lower clock speed, and few programs can actually take advantage of multiple cores.
- (4) if they could make a 50% jump in performance, they would sell more this year but they would have to worry about what to sell you next year.

They probably make minor changes in the architecture that they see as better in the long term even if this means losing a bit of performance in the short term.
In particular they chose to focus on graphic speed (which people using graphic cards don't care about) and battery life (which people using desktops don't care about).

Quite simply we're past the end of the exponential increase in CPU power. Incrementalism is now the name of the game.

The only area that saw important gains recently are I/Os (disks and ports) and this will probably continue with technologies like 3D XPoint.

Most Helpful Site to compare components:

Tom's Hardware

I thought with cpu power they are going more in the direction of parallelism sticking more processors on than going for higher clock frequency at this point?

rpanic01 says

I thought with cpu power they are going more in the direction of parallelism sticking more processors on than going for higher clock frequency at this point?

Mainline recent Intel desktop processors all had 4 cores max. This has been the case for the past 6 yrs+.
Yes there are "enthusiast" lines with 6-10 cores (and server lines with more cores) but...
1 - they have generally slower single thread performance. (meaning regular non-parallel programs are slower).
2 - most programs are not (and most cannot) be written to take advantage of parallelism.
So more cores don't really matter.