The "Quick Questions That Don't Deserve A Thread"...Thread. v5 - Hardware & Software

[QUOTE=Dantz Bolrew;46989534]Would it be okay for just an emergency pc? It's only $175 usd. You think there might be a better alternative?[/QUOTE] Used / refurbished Lenovo Thinkpads and Dell Latitudes are great in that price range. You may only get a Core 2 Duo or a first gen i7, though they're just fine for day-to-day laptop stuff. Throw an SSD in there if you have money leftover and they'll run circles around new cheap laptops.

I don't know why but lately my PC has been acting very slow. If I'm watching a movie on VLC Media Player, it'll keep on crashing every 5 minutes, but not CTD. It'll keep looping the same audio but the video is frozen, and if I try and close the window, it won't close and carries on running. Task Manager will also take ages to bring up. I dunno why this is happening, I restarted and everything but no luck. It's like accessing the hard-drive is slow and tough for my PC, cause when I was deleting files, it took ages to do so and it'd load them up slowly. edit: installed windows update and now pc works like a charm again. weird.

So my computer can run TF2 max settings pretty elegantly with 300 FPS consistently, but if i try to record with FRAPS and frames capped at ~90, the game chugs down to barely handling 50 FPS any time i move my mouse. Any idea what might remedy this? All i could think is get an SSD or upgrade my CPU, and i'm really not sure what'd help.

[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;46991751]Recording with fraps takes a lot, and as far as I'm aware it still locks your frame rate at what ever you're recording.[/QUOTE] Yes but even if i set the lock to 200 it still chugs down to 50 regardless

I've not been into gaming recently but I want to get back into it sometime in the next year, what kind of price am I looking at for building a gaming rig these days? I was thinking of just buying parts with each paycheck I get until I have them all to put it together, so I'll probably leave the CPU and graphics card till last.

[QUOTE=Punchy;46991779]Yes but even if i set the lock to 200 it still chugs down to 50 regardless[/QUOTE] Specs? FRAPS stresses different parts of your computer than most games do, you might be underspecced for it.

[QUOTE=Punchy;46991723]So my computer can run TF2 max settings pretty elegantly with 300 FPS consistently, but if i try to record with FRAPS and frames capped at ~90, the game chugs down to barely handling 50 FPS any time i move my mouse. Any idea what might remedy this? All i could think is get an SSD or upgrade my CPU, and i'm really not sure what'd help.[/QUOTE] Fraps is the problem, it's not a very reliable video recording tool. You should try OBS, or if you have a recent Nvidia graphics card, Shadowplay will do the trick.

[QUOTE=Lordgeorge16;46991807]Fraps is the problem, it's not a very reliable video recording tool. You should try OBS, or if you have a recent Nvidia graphics card, Shadowplay will do the trick.[/QUOTE] OBS seems to slam the quality down to 2005 unregistered hypercam, and shows 1 frame every 5 seconds (even if i'm playing at ~60 while recording) [QUOTE=gman003-main;46991801]Specs? FRAPS stresses different parts of your computer than most games do, you might be underspecced for it.[/QUOTE] CPU i5-4670k, GPU Radeon HD 7950 8GB Ram Mobo ASRock Z87 PRO4 500W PSU 1TB HDD Had this build for a while, i'm happy to upgrade it but i've just not had any issues with it until it recently bugged me how it starts having a heart attack if i try to record more than 20 seconds, and when using SFM it only chugs along sometimes.

[QUOTE=Punchy;46991723]So my computer can run TF2 max settings pretty elegantly with 300 FPS consistently, but if i try to record with FRAPS and frames capped at ~90, the game chugs down to barely handling 50 FPS any time i move my mouse. Any idea what might remedy this? All i could think is get an SSD or upgrade my CPU, and i'm really not sure what'd help.[/QUOTE] Fraps recording is generally limited to HDD speed (other than the obvious FPS cap you can set in the options), as there is next to no compression so your writing 4 GB files within a minute or two at 1080p.

[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;46992043]Better off switching software. OBS is a much better alternative that isn't Dxtory(OBS is also free as well) You can easily manage your bitrates and frame rates for a much much less performance hit.[/QUOTE] That is of course if you have a hardware encoder. The H.264 encoder is pretty murder if your playing a CPU intensive game. Quicksync (Intel GPU) and NVENC (Nvidia GPU) work pretty well though.

[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;46992081]An i5 4670K can do ok with h264 at 1080p at 60 fps as long as the FPS in game is capped. Maybe Quicksync is he has his iGPU drivers installed would do ok I haven't exactly extensively tested quicksync (simply cause it crashes but it's been a few updates so I might give it another go) Shame he doesn't have a nvidia GPU because otherwise NVENC would be possible.[/QUOTE] Quicksync works pretty well on my laptop, but has stutter issues on my desktop in some games (no matter the resolution). Its really odd, as OBS shows no frame drops, but it obviously is. My 2500k can barely handle the software encoder in a lot of games though. It just drops too many frames. Unless someone can post some settings for it, which would help him out too.

[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;46992043]Better off switching software. OBS is a much better alternative that isn't Dxtory(OBS is also free as well) You can easily manage your bitrates and frame rates for a much much less performance hit.[/QUOTE] It's just that OBS seemingly has 30 handfuls of problems for me. It won't capture fullscreen games unless i open them AFTER i start recording, and even then they'll glitch out and get stuck at a loading screen even when i get ingame, then when i manage to actually record ingame footage the quality is terrible and frames are sometimes nonexistant. I used it months ago and it was fine but it seemingly gave up and stopped trying alltogether. Even tried reinstalling, to no avail. As of now every time i record it just goes to a blackscreen if i open TF2. I could play it with borderless windowed but then a bit of the bottom and right side of the screen are cut off from my monitor, even if it's set to the same res as my monitor.

[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;46992144]Up the bitrate. Don't have fraps running. Game Capture should capture everything. Pretty much anything that can count as an overlay except for steams own overlay don't have it running.[/QUOTE] That fixed most of my problems, thanks. [URL="http://puu.sh/eTIXF/1b0d5dd0aa.mp4"]But what's odd is, it seems to record smoothly, but to me while i'm recording it feels like it's at 40 FPS when i move, even if it's a steady 100.[/URL]

[QUOTE=~Kiwi~v2;46992188]That's it dropping frames. Cap the frame rate of the game or possibly drop the profile to ultra fast. Quality may take a hit by doing that however. You can change profiles in advanced options.[/QUOTE] Yes, ultra seems to accommodate it at the cost of lower quality. I'll probably set it to super and then mess with bitrate i suppose. thanks.

[t]http://i.imgur.com/hNh37Yz.png[/t] [t]http://i.imgur.com/svMSwjf.png[/t] [t]http://i.imgur.com/V3iDPDf.png[/t] Decent rig to purchase?

[QUOTE=QuickSnapz;46992677] Decent rig to purchase?[/QUOTE] Put it together on pcpartpicker

I just got my third monitor but im having som trouble settings up a wallapper. its off center or something like that, take a look [url=http://i.imgur.com/qLR5HAU.jpg?2]here[/url] and [url=http://i.imgur.com/DMcAQEX.jpg?1]this is the image im using[/url]. The center of the image is on the right screen for som reason. This happends with every wallpaper.

Is there any good software for organizing hard drives. Like I stated before I have like 3 HDDs. SSD is C drive, don't mind that being seperate, but the other two annoy me with the file structure. I want to make it so my user account is on another hard drive with a bigger size, but it's on the SSD, so I have to change it over and its just annoying me to no end. Also can somebody suggest good speakers with a sub woofer. Have an old Creative set that is dying on me.

I also would like drive organization software.

[QUOTE=Lizart;46994353]I just got my third monitor but im having som trouble settings up a wallapper. its off center or something like that, take a look [url=http://i.imgur.com/qLR5HAU.jpg?2]here[/url] and [url=http://i.imgur.com/DMcAQEX.jpg?1]this is the image im using[/url]. The center of the image is on the right screen for som reason. This happends with every wallpaper.[/QUOTE] Are your monitors properly ordered in Display>Screen Resolution? (3-2-1 should be the order for your wallpapers to work). [QUOTE=Over-Run;46995118]Is there any good software for organizing hard drives. Like I stated before I have like 3 HDDs. SSD is C drive, don't mind that being seperate, but the other two annoy me with the file structure. I want to make it so my user account is on another hard drive with a bigger size, but it's on the SSD, so I have to change it over and its just annoying me to no end. Also can somebody suggest good speakers with a sub woofer. Have an old Creative set that is dying on me.[/QUOTE] For this are you meaning everything including your appdata folder? Windows 7 (8.1 should also have this) you can right click on some of the user folders like My Documents, Music, etc and go to the location tab to designate where the folder physically is. However moving actual user files like your appdata folder is too tricky to really bother with and can really cause more damage than good. Also for Speakers are you looking into a basic set of 2.1 speakers or something more expensive like the Logitech Z623? --- My current setup is 2 670's but i am upgrading and grabbing one of the 970 FTW+'s shortly for my birthday. The issue is it only has 1 DVI port when i use DVI for both my monitors. Will i have any quality difference between the cables if i use my DVI cable for one monitor and a Displayport to DVI cable for the other?

[QUOTE=Adamnetwork;46996580]My current setup is 2 670's but i am upgrading and grabbing one of the 970 FTW+'s shortly for my birthday. The issue is it only has 1 DVI port when i use DVI for both my monitors. Will i have any quality difference between the cables if i use my DVI cable for one monitor and a Displayport to DVI cable for the other?[/QUOTE] You won't have any video differences, but grabbing a DVI to HDMI cord would be cheaper, and wouldn't require any conversion because the video signals are the same.

[QUOTE=Adamnetwork;46996580]Are your monitors properly ordered in Display>Screen Resolution? (3-2-1 should be the order for your wallpapers to work). For this are you meaning everything including your appdata folder? Windows 7 (8.1 should also have this) you can right click on some of the user folders like My Documents, Music, etc and go to the location tab to designate where the folder physically is. However moving actual user files like your appdata folder is too tricky to really bother with and can really cause more damage than good. Also for Speakers are you looking into a basic set of 2.1 speakers or something more expensive like the Logitech Z623? [/QUOTE] Ah yeah I get you, I tried that before but seemed to cause issues. I just want to make windows think the C drive isn't my main drive and the other hard drive is basically. And I currently have a 7.1 setup so would like something like that, imagine money isn't an issue.

Okay guys, question on Windows OS's. I need to know which versions of windows 7 and windows 8.1 I need to buy to be able to install them on systems I build and sell to people. Everywhere I look the answers are fucking backwards from each other. I have a copy of Windows 8.1 that I bought when I built my main computer, it's the full version, can I install that on other systems without fucking up my computer?

[QUOTE=Smallheart;46998630]Okay guys, question on Windows OS's. I need to know which versions of windows 7 and windows 8.1 I need to buy to be able to install them on systems I build and sell to people. Everywhere I look the answers are fucking backwards from each other. I have a copy of Windows 8.1 that I bought when I built my main computer, it's the full version, can I install that on other systems without fucking up my computer?[/QUOTE] One license is good for one install. You need to buy a new copy for any new system you build. A $99 OEM copy will do fine.

I thought there were system builder licenses?

[QUOTE=Smallheart;46998666]I thought there were system builder licenses?[/QUOTE] You can usually find a 5 pack of system building licenses too, haven't seen one in a while, but I haven't been looking.

[QUOTE=Smallheart;46998666]I thought there were system builder licenses?[/QUOTE] yes, the system builder license is the OEM license one per computer, you're supposed to stick the license key sticker on the computer

So there isn't a version that's like a one time purchase available for install on multiple machines?

[QUOTE=Smallheart;46998738]So there isn't a version that's like a one time purchase available for install on multiple machines?[/QUOTE] Not even for massive manufacturers.

If I have 2 1080p monitors, but I'm running a game on one, and I have other windows (usually a web browser, Steam, and sometimes Skype) open on the other, will I notice a hit to my performance? This is assuming that I would have these on in the background anyways. I wanna know for a PC I'm buildiung, which will have a Geforce 970 GTX 4GB and 8GB RAM.