New Computer - Advice

[[TC] Brad]

Hey guys,

I currently have quite a high-spec laptop, however now I'm not at Uni anymore, I don't really need a laptop, and the heat issues surrounding the laptop (is a HP) is starting to annoy me - also I want (a) bigger screen(s).

To start: Do you guys recommend either:
1) 1 large, widescreen display
2) dual screen setup
3) triple screen setup.

I would probably prefer dual-screen, however i'd like some advice from someone who currently has this setup, and how it looks when playing LFS, for example - I'm just conscious of the centre-line. Maybe if someone could recommend screens which have very narrow borders?

In terms of the actual computer: I only really play LFS (occasionally Minecraft). The main thing is probably a good quality sound-card (I love my music!), good quality displays, and to be as future-proof as possible. I obviously want LFS to be maxed out (which isn't too difficult to achieve), and some in reserve if I decide to play a high-spec game for a little while!

Any help would be much appreciated.

[Hexta]

Personally, I had 2 screens. A 19" tft monitor and 24" HD monitor.

It's handy when web browsing having 3 or 4 sites open, and maybe iTunes open as well. It starts to get annoying though when you play games and have to alt-tab just to use the other monitor. The reason I ended up selling mine!

Now my 24" HD monitor is big enough to have 2 websites open (both on half screen) but it's down to personal preference and what you want.

[[TC] Brad]

Yeah, I mean I have dual-screens at work and it is massively useful for day to day tasks, but my main concern is how driving games look with the dead-zone in the centre.

[=WOLF=[NO]]

in lfs you can adjust the offset, so the main monitor is as usual, and any extras is an extention to one of the sides.
I have tested most configurations, and zI prefer triple

[[TC]»Elmo«]

2x widescreen works quite well with LFS with cockpit view, because you sit at one side of the car, so the bezel isn't really in the way. LFS also has good multiscreen support, so you can adjust how the bezel is handled.
Single seaters and most games work better with an odd number of screens though.

Personally, I'd recommend either 2 or 3, depending on which cars/games you want to multi-screen on. Multiple screens are always better than just 1, because it makes non-gaming things so much nicer, and you get more efficient use of space when gaming (high FOV).

Ed: The main downside to 3 screens is that you'll need a beast of a graphics card to use multi-screen in the more demanding games. LFS would be fine with 3 though.

[[TC] Brad]

At the moment I'm looking at the below spec. Any thoughts?

________________________________________________________________________________​____
Computer Case Cooler Master Silencio 550
CPU Intel i5 3570K - (4 x 3.4 GHZ) - Ivy Bridge
CPU Heatsink Arctic Cooling Freezer 13
Memory Corsair 8GB XMS3 PC3-10666 1333MHz (2x4GB) - Lifetime Warranty (DDR3)
Graphics Card ATI Radeon HD 6950 - 2 GB - (PCI-E)
Motherboard Gigabyte GA-Z77-D3H (Intel Z77) - VGA/DVI/HDMI
Sound Card Asus Xonar D2X Ultra Fidelity 7.1 Hi-Def (PCI-E)
Networking Motherboard Integrated Ethernet Lan (Broadband Ready)
Power Supply Cooler Master GX Lite 600W PSU - Low Noise
CPU Compound Cooler Master High Performance Thermal Compound
Hard Drive #1 250 GB SATA-II HDD 7200 RPM 8MB (FREE UPGRADE TO 500GB BEFORE 11:59 PM ON 12-08-12)
Hard Drive #2 60GB OCZ Agility 3 SSD SATA-III, Read 525MB/s, Write 475MB/s - Silent
Optical Drive #1 LG (CH10LS28) 10x Blu-Ray Reader & 16x Dual Layer DVD /- RW Writer - Black (SATA)
Monitor #1 21.5" Asus VE228H LED, 1920 x 1080, 5ms, 250 cd/m, 1080p, HDMI/D-Sub/DVI-D
Monitor #2 21.5" Asus VE228H LED, 1920 x 1080, 5ms, 250 cd/m, 1080p, HDMI/D-Sub/DVI-D
________________________________________________________________________________​_________

Total cost (inc VAT): £1,208.72

I'd maybe prefer something slightly cheaper, but I suppose with the screens included, its not too bad.

[[TC] Brad]

Any ideas/advice on the above? I'm probably looking to order tonight or tomorrow.

[◄Chuck►]

I suppose the 250gb / or even 500gb is a bit small. Way too small for me at least.
Not sure if your cooler does fit with the rest of the configuration (physical-size-wise), depends of how the components (ie ram sockets) are laid-out on the platine.If youre not the super-gamer, you could probably save a lot choosing a boxed edition of the cpu.
Furthermore , you dont need the thermal grease as there is always a patch pre-applied to the heatsink.

[[TC] Brad]

True, I've gone for the 750gb. I'll use the 60gb SSD for the OS, Google Chrome, LFS etc.

The cooler will fit in the case okay (I've chosen a different one from the one on the list - more space and better cooling).

The boxed edition is only £6 less expensive, so should be okay.

Thanks for the advice guys

[[TC]»Elmo«]

Good quality thermal compound (ie Arctic Silver 5) will improve the cooling performance over a pad and will usually last longer. How much will depend on how cheap the original paste/pad is. You really want to replace the compound after 2-3 years anyway but especially for pads as they often dry out.
You probably won't need anything better than the stock cooler unless you're going to overclock or run it in hot ambient conditions - the intel *K processors can overclock if you want them to.

Make sure you disable the onboard sound in the BIOS - you don't want to get a VIA driver near your system if you can avoid it.

60GB SSD may well be too small. You're not going to be able to install many programs on it, and certainly no big games - Windows tends to use quite a lot of space after a while. Last calculation I did came up with 80GB to be comfortable for 64bit Windows 7. With only 60, you're probably going to have to be careful with disk usage.


Aside from that, looks good.

[[TC] Brad]

Yeah, I was worried about the 60GB too - at the last minute I saw that swapping to a 120GB was the better option, and didn't add as much as I expected to the overall cost.

All ordered now, should hopefully arrive within the next 2 weeks

Thanks for the help

[Moving Coil]

You don't need an external soundcard. The onboard ones are very good in sound quality, you can't hear the difference unless you can hear the difference between a FLAC and a 320kbps mp3. (Which %99.99 people can't) Especially with a high end motherboard. So don't waste your good earned money.

If you have any questions about music technologies / sound engineering feel free to ask.

Edit: If you are planning to connect a Hi-Fi system with just 1 cable (s/pdif) go ahead and buy it.

[[TC]»Pete«]

I have a dual monitor setup however I only use one of those for my games, the other monitor houses applications like iTunes, TC Lights, TS and Chrome. I tried splitting LFS across two screens but I wasn't happy with how it looked.

[[TC]»Elmo«]

(2012-08-06 05:00)Moving Coil Wrote:  You don't need an external soundcard. The onboard ones are very good in sound quality, you can't hear the difference unless you can hear the difference between a FLAC and a 320kbps mp3. (Which %99.99 people can't) Especially with a high end motherboard. So don't waste your good earned money.

It (presumably) very much depends on the specific onboard sound. I personally haven't had any experience with the modern Realtek ones which are supposedly quite good, however this motherboard has VIA. VIA onboard sound is utter crap. The driver is crap, the sound quality is crap. Anyone that isn't tone deaf would be able to tell the difference between a VIA and a Xonar - I was actually amazed how much better my Xonar DX sounded vs the VIA onboard. Even my ancient Audigy 4 sounded better than the VIA, although the Xonar was noticeably better still.

If you have speakers/amplifier(s) with a digital input, it doesn't really make much difference (except for the audio driver and microphone). However, the amplifier is generally the most important link in the audio chain and if you have an analog amp and crappy preamps in the soundcard it'll sound bad no matter how good your main amp is.


Yes, very few people can tell the difference between 320kbps mp3 and FLAC, but most people can tell the difference between 128k mp3 and FLAC/CD, even if their ears have been conditioned to prefer the sound of mp3. That's the kind of quality difference (if not greater) between VIA onboard and a Xonar.

[Moving Coil]

I don't think the VIA ones are that bad man. That kind of high end motherboard should have a very decent audio chip on it. Whats wrong with the driver? I don't have any experiance with a Xonar but maybe its sound is transparently colored so it sounds better. (high treble and bass frequencies). Believe me they do it to mislead you. You can do it with a simple eq nearly in every sound cards driver or in your music playing software. But i'm just guessing, I don't have any experience with that card or with a VIA card. I have just compared the sound quality between my onboard Realtek soundcards sound vs my t.c. electronic konnekt 24D "clickable link". Its nearly impossible to compare. I don't believe you should give that much money for that little change. I make music and study it at university but if I wasn't recording anything I still wasn't going to buy a new sound card for listening music. But the money and the decision is yours.

If you really want good professional A/D D/A converters and preamps you can buy a professional card like this (this is just an examplary card) "clickable link" plus its cheaper. If you don't want an external card there are pci ones too.

[[TC] Stephen]

(2012-08-06 18:27)Moving Coil Wrote:  I don't think the VIA ones are that bad man. That kind of high end motherboard should have a very decent audio chip on it. Whats wrong with the driver? I don't have any experiance with a Xonar but maybe its sound is transparently colored so it sounds better. (high treble and bass frequencies). Believe me they do it to mislead you.

I believe that the board makers sacrifice in sound as they will expect the end user to buy a discrete sound card anyway. So this way the company saves money on things that will probably never be used.

[[TC]»Elmo«]

(2012-08-06 18:27)Moving Coil Wrote:  I don't think the VIA ones are that bad man. That kind of high end motherboard should have a very decent audio chip on it. Whats wrong with the driver?
...
But i'm just guessing, I don't have any experience with that card or with a VIA card. I have just compared the sound quality between my onboard Realtek soundcards sound vs my t.c. electronic konnekt 24D

Then don't talk about what you don't know

For the record, this isn't a high end motherboard. It may have a fairly expensive Intel chipset in it, but it's not even a high end one. You can't even do proper Crossfire/SLI on it - don't be fooled by the 2 PCI-E 16x sized slots, one of them only runs at 4x and can't be used at the same time as the 1x slots because the bus is shared.
The higher quality ones tend to have Realtek Sound and Network - this has VIA and Atheros respectively.
I'm not saying it's a bad motherboard, it's decent, just not high end by any means.

As you say, (and what I've generally heard agrees with it) the modern Realtek onboard audio is pretty damn good. VIA's, however, aren't. I've had a fair bit of experience with VIA stuff, not just audio, and it's all cheap and either low quality or cuts corners.
As for the driver, mine had a wide variety of things either wrong, broken or retarded going on.
A prime example is what it did to my microphone most times I tried to use it: http://soundcloud.com/lamp-1-1/tc-ts-elmo-exterminate


As for my perception of audio quality in general, I'm not an audiophile. I'm not going to go buying gold plated toslink cables or £500/metre speaker cable - that crap isn't fooling me.
However, I do know good equipment/mastering when I hear it. I did a fair amount of audio engineering while at Uni, plus helping out with some major touring bands' engineers and techs. I've heard a wide variety of good (and bad) quality equipment.

I haven't got any fancy signal analysing hardware, so I can't personally compare the frequency response of the various sound cards I have any way other than subjectively, however I've seen tests online:

Spoiler (Click to View)

Doesn't look like they're messing with the sound to me.

Ed: Boosting the bass and treble is probably sometimes done in an attempt to mask the shortcomings of some cheap amplifiers, which tend to drop off at the extremes of their frequency range - that and some people actually like having very little mid for some reason (boy racer car stereos, I'm looking at you).