2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

For general rambling.
Peijen
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Peijen »

Continue from another thread:

If I want to drive a triple monitor setup with one screen for game play at max setting, what's the recommended motherboard/gpu setup? Single card? dual card (8x/8x, 16x/4x, 16x/16x)?

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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Jonathan »

If you're going to CrossFire/SLI, then balanced is the most desirable PCIe lane configuration. 8x is plenty.

Depends on what you want to play. CrossFire/SLI speedup is heavily driver dependent. In the best case you'll see near 2x vs. single card, but in the worst case it's no speedup. 3x1080p is within the single card range for the last generation of GPUs, depending on the settings.

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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by quantus »

Jonathan wrote:3x1080p is within the single card range for the last generation of GPUs, depending on the settings.
Agreed, Radeon 6950's are certainly capable of this on paper. I haven't gotten around to testing it though. This thread answers your question from an nVidia card perspective: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2245070. Note that GTX5xx cards didn't support 3 monitors unless they were in SLI, so it's likely not cost effective to go with an older generation of nVidia cards.
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Peijen
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Peijen »

I haven't looked for a while, but my issue has been finding a card with 3 (dvi/hdmi) outputs.

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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Dave »

Most of my cards have 2 DVi and HDMIx1 but you can't output to all 3 at once. I went from 2pcs 3 LCDs 1 netbook to 1 PC w/ LCD & HDTV (thru receiver with hdmi)

This setup for work or home? What do you plan on paying with 3x LCDs?
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Peijen »

no, games will only be on one screen, but when I do some programming at home I really could use the 3 monitor setup

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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by quantus »

My Radeon 6950 from Sapphire has two mini-display port and two dual-dvi outputs. Theoretically, each of those dual-dvi ports should be able to drive 2 monitors at 1080p. Each displayport port should be able to drive up to 3 monitors. AMD/ATI drivers have been flaky though. Some updates have messed up HDMI output and I've had to get beta drivers to get a fix.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Jonathan »

Yeah, for physical reasons display port is the way to go here.

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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by quantus »

Jonathan wrote:Yeah, for physical reasons display port is the way to go here.
And for price reasons, maybe not.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Dave »

I totally was mistaken.

I just hooked up a LCD (not dvi) & HDTV (hdmi) to my laptop and all three were able to display. So including the laptopscreen, I can have 3 screens active at once.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by quantus »

That's actually pretty common at my current and former workplaces for people to have their laptop hooked up to two external monitors and still have the attached screen also working... I'd do it at home, but I don't have a place to leave two monitors just sitting around, nor would my wife appreciate me spending money on more screens in the house. Maybe when my son is older and starts playing computer games too, I can somehow justify it. I'm happy to game on a single lcd tv. Maybe one day it'll be a 4k tv when prices become reasonable during some holiday sale.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Jonathan »

4k displays will get not silly-priced when HEVC gets cheap enough to implement that 4k isn't a huge processing burden.

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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by quantus »

Well, the standard is published, so people will certainly be coming out with hardware to accelerate decompression. Hopefully it won't take super long for costs to come down. Maybe 2-4 years of scaling if hardware costs are high now? That much scaling should make it reasonable by then I'd guess. Of course, oversupply could also cause a price drop, but demand will probably stay ahead of that possible issue for a while.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by George »

Where's the 4K content going to come from, though? This technology seems likely to follow 3D TV's path. Expensive equipment with expensive, generally mediocre content is not a great business strategy.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Dave »

I already can't stand 1080p movies, looks too much like I'm actually on the movie set, and no illlusionary feeling of low-def fuzziness. Even porn, HD = no thanks, I don't need to see those pimples.

Only sports I would like seeing in 4K and from multiple cameras.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Jonathan »

So, what this essentially means is that one can use a PCIe 3 x8 slot for any current GPU without worrying about bandwidth constraints, since offers the same bandwidth as a PCIe 2 x16 slot.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/7089/gefo ... -vs-pcie-3
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by quantus »

Dave wrote:I already can't stand 1080p movies, looks too much like I'm actually on the movie set, and no illlusionary feeling of low-def fuzziness.
You could just sit further from the screen and that can create your low-def fuzziness... Personally, if a movie is shot at a nice location, I'd like to be able to see the landscape and not some splotchy bunch of color. I'd like the trees to have leaves/needles and not just a general shape of a tree.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Jonathan »

George wrote:Where's the 4K content going to come from, though? This technology seems likely to follow 3D TV's path. Expensive equipment with expensive, generally mediocre content is not a great business strategy.
People's cell phone cameras, soon enough. Sensors and screens can already handle 4k and greater resolutions. It is the bandwidth (and compute associated with reducing that bandwidth) that is the real block.

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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by quantus »

Jonathan wrote:
George wrote:Where's the 4K content going to come from, though? This technology seems likely to follow 3D TV's path. Expensive equipment with expensive, generally mediocre content is not a great business strategy.
People's cell phone cameras, soon enough. Sensors and screens can already handle 4k and greater resolutions. It is the bandwidth (and compute associated with reducing that bandwidth) that is the real block.
And once it starts coming from cameras, then it'll be available on youtube. If not, then it'll drive personal storage again because people will want to be able to keep their memories and without exorbitant monthly costs. Also, it'll need to fit on some sort of disc which will be a blu-ray derivative (either DBXL which most players don't support or move to HEVC on the disk too) since that seems to be how many people still consume their movies at home. Yeah, it'll be one more big upgrade cycle :-\ And we're still in the tail end of the last upgrade cycle to HD.

Oh, major movies are being captured in 4k resolutions now and then sampled down to HD, so they'll be ready to go. Just like many movies are filmed in 3-D just to have it available if it eventually does catch on. Now, a jump to 8k screens would kinda mess this up and probably not be possible as quickly.
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Re: 2012 Computer Notes (advice welcome!)

Post by Dave »

I just bought a scratch and dented Lenovo H430 ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6883265611 ) for $170, as both my gaming pc and old dell (wife's pc) died around the same time. I'll see what condition it is in when it gets here!
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