Random Question Thread: Tech

[Mortilox]

Hey Tech forum. I'm looking for advice on a new gaming mouse, somewhere between £30-100($45-150). My recent mouse, the R.A.T 5, has broken after one month of use. I'm going to try to return it today. I've bought cheaper mouses that gave me less grief and lasted longer than this piece of crap.

What I'm looking for: a mouse with programmable extra buttons, preferably with a precision aim mode button(lowers DPI on the fly, awesome for FPS games. This is the only redeeming quality of the R.A.T5 to me) and above all, something I won't have to fix/return after a month.

Thanks for any suggestions!

[GoggleHead]

Logitech G600 is pretty rad if you're looking for extra buttons and I recall there being a feature that lets you alter dpi on the fly. I'm not one for FPS games, but for what its worth the dpi range is pretty huge and allows you to set it by increments of 50dpi.

[AoE]

Ok I need a resource about SQL fundamentals that is not too technical because I have a professor that is just absolutely shitty at teaching no matter how brilliant she apparently is at her day job. If anyone can supply me with something that helped them out, I'd greatly appreciate it. Plain SQL, not MySql.

[Ratatapa]

Question about Amazon Prime, I don't order enough stuff to value the 79$ per year but, if i register for their free month and i order shit, that is not out yet but they qualify for Prime, when i will cancel at the end of the month will my items still count as prime or will they charge me shipping?

[Pocketrockets]

I have a very odd problem with my phone today. Galaxy s3 running CyanogenMod 10.1 on AT&It's 4g network. I was having problems with various ESPN related things this morning, so I figured the site was down, but then I tried a coworkers Verizon phone and everything worked fine. Then I connected my phone to Wi-Fi and everything worked fine. I did a little more digging, and it turns out I can't connect to any site in the Disney/ABC/ESPN family while I'm connected to the ATT mobile network. Every other site that I've tried loads perfectly fine. Thoughts?

[Ratatapa]

Hey i'm not really good with Hertz and stuff like that

I'm moving to a house soon and i want to be able to watch movies or sports at any place in my house

My plan is to buy 2 Apple TV and stream to them from my Ipad Mini


My question is simple

For watching movies and sports, would it be better to buy a Monitor with HDMI or a mini TV with HDMI?

I'm looking mostly for 'Durability before screen breaks
Image Quality
Price
Electriicty consuption

Thanks

[Niya]

Since the age of flat screens/LCD panels there's not really a difference between monitors and TVs concerning the panels.
It's just that a monitor is "dumb" and relies on an external source for image processing etc, and a TV has a little OS built in and additional tuners so it can work stand-alone.
Though the border between both is more and more becoming non-existant. You can use any TV as a monitor, and there's more and more "monitors" that have tuners and some kind of OS built in so you can use them without a PC.

Durability and image quality completely depend on the panel, no difference between monitor and TV.
Power consumption will probably be a bit higher for TVs because of the tuners, but there's way more difference with the panels and the backlight. Edge LED uses way less power than CCFL or full-grid LED, but full-grid has other advantages. (forget about CCFL...)

So a pure monitor would probably be cheaper, but remember that it will always rely on an external source for video. And depending on what size you're looking for, i'm pretty sure that anything larger than 32" isn't really available as a monitor but only as a TV.

[Ratatapa]

I see Thanks

[TSFFXI]

I've been shopping around for a new cheap computer mostly for ffxi and came across this set up, which was assembled by someone else two months ago:


AMD A10-5800K APU: http://goo.gl/XaFFP

MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 Motherboard: http://goo.gl/DXM3W

8GB Samsung DDR3 1600Mhz RAM: http://goo.gl/gVqCL - Another great option: http://goo.gl/Jbtye

500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue Hard Drive: http://goo.gl/bM1Ww

NZXT Source 210 Case: http://goo.gl/2wlae

430W Corsair CX430 Power Supply: http://goo.gl/QzWZo

They stated the price was approximately $350, which I thought was agreeable, but when I checked the prices today it came out to be a little more than $500. Have prices for various computer parts risen in the last two months? Is it a bad time to buy new stuff?

[Jojimbo]

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/QJw7 $362

Where did you get $500 from?

[Ghost_Wheel22]

So my Amazon Prime Student deal finally expired and I'm a fan of saving that extra $40/yr. Is there a solution to get back in since it appears I can't just reuse my existing .edu email?

[TSFFXI]

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/QJw7 $362

Where did you get $500 from?

What the ?
Huh, I triple-checked earlier this week, and a few others online also noted the price jump. I suspect amazon may have shown a much higher price for the case earlier this week before they ran out of stock, but no idea.

Thanks, though, I'm much happier with this turnout.

[Gulkeeva]

I've been shopping around for a new cheap computer mostly for ffxi and came across this set up, which was assembled by someone else two months ago:


AMD A10-5800K APU: http://goo.gl/XaFFP

MSI FM2-A75MA-E35 Motherboard: http://goo.gl/DXM3W

8GB Samsung DDR3 1600Mhz RAM: http://goo.gl/gVqCL - Another great option: http://goo.gl/Jbtye

500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue Hard Drive: http://goo.gl/bM1Ww

NZXT Source 210 Case: http://goo.gl/2wlae

430W Corsair CX430 Power Supply: http://goo.gl/QzWZo

They stated the price was approximately $350, which I thought was agreeable, but when I checked the prices today it came out to be a little more than $500. Have prices for various computer parts risen in the last two months? Is it a bad time to buy new stuff?

PC prices change on a daily basis, it will probably go down a bit a little soon with the announcement of intels new CPU's.... possibly. If intel adjust CPU prices anyway causing amd to price match also. Other then that don't expect rices to go down much, if not up a little more with increasing ram prices causing dram/video card prices to go up constantly.

[Fake]

Just bought a new laptop with an i7-3720QM @ 2.60, 16gb of ram, gtx 675M.

I know laptops are nowhere near desktop performance but I find it hard to believe I shouldn't be able to keep capped frame rate on a single character in towns in ffxi. It drops down to 10 in legion just standing around waiting for next wave to pop if I have all the other characters in view. I've changed drivers, nvidia settings etc and I can't get any better performance. I've use MSI afterburner to see GPU load (which never goes above 25% with 1 char, around 40-50% with 3 chars).

Is there anything I'm missing that could improve this. I've had better performance on an older laptop with far worse specs.

[hey]

I'm pretty sure ffxi just always drops its fps if there's a lot of people around, regardless of whether your pc could handle running it a million fps or not.

[Ghaleon]

Just bought a new laptop with an i7-3720QM @ 2.60, 16gb of ram, gtx 675M.

I know laptops are nowhere near desktop performance but I find it hard to believe I shouldn't be able to keep capped frame rate on a single character in towns in ffxi. It drops down to 10 in legion just standing around waiting for next wave to pop if I have all the other characters in view. I've changed drivers, nvidia settings etc and I can't get any better performance. I've use MSI afterburner to see GPU load (which never goes above 25% with 1 char, around 40-50% with 3 chars).

Is there anything I'm missing that could improve this. I've had better performance on an older laptop with far worse specs.

It sounds like your nvidia "Optimus" isn't working correctly. Optimus is a mobile graphics solution for mobile devices that switches automatically between dedicated graphics and integrated graphics while not in games.
Try and trouble shoot some forums and see how to manually keep it off.

either the drivers are bad for ff11(which i've heard many horror stories for nvidia drivers w/ latest nvidia gpus for ff11)

or ff11 is so olde, your graphics card doesn't want to kick in because your ivy bridge feels it can handle it LOL (which is probably true for the most part, since from what i've noticed, FF11 takes more CPU resources than it does GPU)


fuck this new line of haswell is going to get rid of the LOLINTEGRATEDGRAPHICS phase for me. impressed as fuck so far.

[KCem]

Complete techie noob here, but how would a G1610 (2.6ghz iirc) Celeron using integrated graphics and 4GB RAM fare trying to run FFXI on Windows 7? I'd ideally like to run the game at 1080p, but 720 wouldn't be a deal breaker, but I suspect I'd need to invest in a low/mid end GPU and maybe some more RAM, though I'd like not to have to if I can get away with it as I'm a student on a budget. Thanks in advance!

[Ratatapa]

Tbh you should have 0 problem FFXI is 10 year old game

[KCem]

Cheers, I kind of hoped/suspected that would be the answer, I just recall having some frame rate issues with my last PC (which wasn't nearly as budget as this one) and being told that FFXI was a bit "unique" in the way it ran. I was just wondering if the cheapest CPU I could find would be up to the task of playable HD FFXI, as it jerks about a little playing Team Fortress 2 on low settings. Thanks again!

[Ratatapa]

Honestly Celeron are indeed cheap but we talking bout XI here