PC Build Advice/Review Thread

[Kalmado]

There is no denying that, even as I run on this Seagate 3tb (you know, that one) in my system. I only have music, movies, and some games on it, but all saves and what not are either in the cloud or elsewhere. A buddy still thinks Seagate is great because while he was in the military they sent back some Seagate drives that were ancient and were replaced (in his head) for free. He thinks Seagate has a lifetime warranty for some drive. Maybe they do. I really don't care because it doesn't apply to anything us consumers would buy.

[Senji]

All the manufactures have bad batches or sizes. 1 TBs have always been pretty consistent through the manufactures as they are simpler afaik. Along with PSU's; I consider five/six years to be the lifespan, anything longer is asking for it. Really I'd say yank them after 5, and keep them as emergency spares if you have none.

For general users I spec SSD,WB 1tb blue, or both. Power users who care should have some redundancy, and it's really HGST or bust. HGST the proper name for Hitachi drives.

[Arkanna]

Something important to remember when buying a motherboard with the intent to overclock a Pentium G3258 is, the B85/H81/H87 chipsets were not designed to overclock, so many of those motherboards will not allow it. Some time back, a way to open overclocking was discovered and some manufacturers released BIOS updates for some of their boards, so before picking one of the above boards, you'll want to verify that your choice is one such board.

[Gredival]

Every manufacturer gets duds, I think it's simply a matter of whether you want to bet on being one. I've had less trouble personally with Seagate than I have had with WD, but I know for sure that's not the norm among people.

He thinks Seagate has a lifetime warranty for some drive. Maybe they do. I really don't care because it doesn't apply to anything us consumers would buy.

Maxtor's used to have lifetime warranties, and I believe they were absorbed by Seagate. Perhaps they still honor those, or perhaps they still have them on Maxtor branded drives even.

[Niya]

About the IGP of current (Intel) CPUs: they're about as good as entry-grade dedicated GPUs, so if he really does zero gaming (or maybe just stuff like browser games or non-complex games) he'd be totally fine without a dedi card.
I mean, the IGP is good enough to get 4k running at 60Hz (if the mainboard outputs DP 1.2 or HDMI 2.0), that should be more than enough.
Since the hardware is so non-demanding, you can get the lowest-wattage PSU you can get. Usually 300W is the lowest you get for a reasonable price, and that would still be enough to fire your build with a dedi-GPU and some add-on cards...

And for the love of Menphina (or rage of Halone...), get plain, "naked" RAM. Those heatspreader thingies are a plague that must be purged... <.< Kingston, G.skill, Mushkin and other companies offer great "plain" RAM that 100% stays within the JEDEC specifications.

[Darus Grey]

Every manufacturer gets duds, I think it's simply a matter of whether you want to bet on being one.

That's really not what I was talking about. It's not "everyone gets duds"...it's "Segate's designs are fundamentally flawed and from tens of thousands of samples from data center usage over a decade have been proven to be unreliable".

Seagate drives are statistically unreliable, it's not a matter of opinion or "just some bad duds".

The best drive they make(their 4TBs and 1TBs) in terms of failure rate are still worse than the WORST drive Hitachi has ever made.

Like, there's no logical justification for buying Seagate if you care about your data(and if you don't, well that's a different problem).

[Senji]

I'm feel sorry for anyone who believes Back Blaze's "data analysis conclusions" are anything beyond click bait.

[Kalmado]

I'm feel sorry for anyone who believes Back Blaze's "data analysis conclusions" are anything beyond click bait.

You're not the first that I've seen make a comment as such. Why do you feel the data isn't trustworthy?

[Kryssan]

I noticed some people were splitting HGST/Viviti from WD? HGST/Viviti is a subsidy of WD, has been for a few years now. Purportedly the marketing / sales / operations teams are supposed to be functioning separately as competing entities but they're coming out of the same R&D pool now so unless the drive in question is >3 years old I don't know how much differentiation you're really getting.

Straight from the horses mouth ( ie product acquisition paperwork ):

The primary focus of our subsidiaries will continue to be profitable revenue growth through outstanding customer satisfaction. By offering separate WD and HGST brands, WD has an outstanding opportunity to broaden its overall appeal to customers and earn an even greater share of the market.

I'm a bit confused myself over Toshiba's relation in all this, because AFAIK TSDT ( not TSST, that's not hard drives and it's Samsung / Toshiba ) in some part was also bought by WD... but WD divested some stuff to Toshiba somehow as well. Something something assets affected by the Thailand flooding that hadn't resumed operation.

The floods made the whole market into an umbrella of some kind... I haven't really tried to keep track of it all 'cause outside of the 5TB drives from Toshiba I bought for a reduced rate to build my main rig last year the last time I bought drives were the WD Reds (WD30EFRX Nov2012). Haven't had one of the reds die on me yet, and they were 24/7 until the Toshibas ( now only turned on once a week ). Before them was the Samsung / Seagate drives and most of 'em are still running ( not that often though ). I hammer my active drives at least once a month with ZFS scrubs so if there is a bad drive it doesn't take too long to find it.

[Mojo]

Looking to build a new system for playin' games and stuff (FFXI, Starcraft II, LoL, maybe FFXIV). I've only really decided on the case (either a Fenix Prodigy or a Fenix Prodigy M for a possible SLI build.) Any recommendations? How much should I even care about Motherboard/CPU? I feel like it might be a waste of money to even go the Intel route although I haven't seriously considered anything yet. As far as budge goes, I don't really have one, although tend to like things that are cost efficient.

[Senji]

WD purchased HGST, and it's more complicated with their arrangement for tax and anti trust purposes, but they do not have a Chevy/GM relationship. They are essentially operating as two different companies with different drive tech.

You're not the first that I've seen make a comment as such. Why do you feel the data isn't trustworthy?

Their data is in no way, shape, or form a "test" or "shootout" to any sort of standards, much less rigid. They used to claim we are merely presenting our raw data to share with the world, then they started to contort its presentation as HHD "winners" and giving advice on what consumers should be buying. When really it's all about convincing skeptics to just pony up for their cloud backup storage. Which many should do, but did you hear about their company before "HDD tests"? No? Click bait agenda successful.

While I applaud their ingenuity and entrepreneurship, they really are very mom and pop leaning as we go sort of deal. They buy up whatever is randomly on sale/they can get a deal on of consumer level drives for cheap, pack them in like sardines, and run the shit out of them in homemade enclosures. Enclosures that have been a learning process for them as far as heat and vibration dampening. How did they figure out that they need to back to drawing board/make modifications? Remember when there were all that massive flooding in Taiwan and 1 TB drives were going for $330? Remember who popped back in Newegg stock the quickest? They literally bought the salvaged drives from Seagate. The actual drives and parts of what they claimed was totally still G2G, 5 second rule. Sent to China for them to cut their teeth on with manufacturing because the Taiwanese factories were literally fucked. Now combine that with timelines of which homemade enclosure iteration they got stuck in.

You could say it's great they want to share their info, but it's all marketing. There is no apples to apples testing, though they never were going for it. Completely random samples, no standard sizing, cooling, enclosures, timelines, notations, nothing. HDDs typically fail basically out of the gate, or chug on for years. The closest thing to worthwhile data they have was of the newest drives, which basically was; did you fall in less than 6 months y/n? It was actually I believe HGST/Seagate, with WD/Toshiba trailing behind. That's also assuming they are all in their latest gen enclosures.

If we want to cut flood anomalies, pre SATA modern drives (which would be Maxxor), and the shitastic WD greens; regular drives are all pretty much the same, with HGST playing to a different tune. WD blacks actually have the highest failure rate, but they aren't apples to apples either. You can't fault WD, they basically say the boost is turned up, motor won't last as long. No one with a clue buys them anymore regardless. They hail from the era when you picked velociraptor or black for speed, and a pathetically small SSD was either a pipe dream on the horizon, or still cost more than your entire sli gaming rig. Seagate had the next fastest competitively priced drive, and they chugged 2-3x as long. The limit really is the chemical degradation of the platters over time which you can't do much about besides not kick your case when you're pissed or power button slam shutdowns. Long enough.

tl;dr HGST makes higher quality drives for higher quality dollars, Back Blaze isn't a testing company, and you don't buy flood damaged machinery unless it's cheap and you know what you're getting yourself into.

[Darus Grey]

That's not even what I was referring to, I was referring to my own datacenter experience, seagates across the board fail more often for basically the last decade.

In a datacenter this is fine, because the reason we still buy them is because they're dirt fucking cheap, and all our data is stored to be redundant by design. So Seagate still exists as a company basically because their cost/benefit is still in the positive, they sell tons of cheap crap that on aggregate over thousands of units, is slightly better cost over-all factoring in labor and failures.

For a CONSUMER though this a totally different proposition, most consumers are buying a single drive, where a single failure will disproportionately affect them if there's a failure. In that situation I couldn't in good conscience recommend seagate ever.

"it's all the same" is only true if you're running RAID1/5/6/ZFS/unraid/whatever. Which most consumers even in this thread are not.

[Xerlic]

Edit: Oops, wrong thread.

[Senji]

Your "data" you pulled out was conspicuously congruent. So either your center is a jalopy mess like theirs, or you're back pedaling "your findings." I don't personally care either way. They aren't fire sale cheap. If they had a legit 20+% failure rate in consumer drives in consumer applications they would be out of business. The statement of "the last decade" holds value only to those stubborn or already close minded. Same as all the idiots who say they had some bad ignition switch in their Focus years ago, so they won't buy a new Mustang now. Or they are parroting like ignorant plebs. All modern, standard recent drives of equivalency have had the bugs ironed out and last to similar deviations. You drop anything manufactured this summer in grandma's pc, if it didn't die by now, it will last the same as all the others; to its life expectancy.

[Darus Grey]

I mentioned a decade in my original(looking they haven't even been doing this for long), I've mentioned before I've work(ed) data center and computer cluster environments, "conspicuously congruent" my ass.

You came in here asserting I'm talking about something I clearly was not, and when I point that out, you claim I'm backpeddaling, you sound like a conspiracy nut talking like that.

But whatever, I forgive you, let's not shit up the thread.

[Senji]

Looking to build a new system for playin' games and stuff (FFXI, Starcraft II, LoL, maybe FFXIV). I've only really decided on the case (either a Fenix Prodigy or a Fenix Prodigy M for a possible SLI build.) Any recommendations? How much should I even care about Motherboard/CPU? I feel like it might be a waste of money to even go the Intel route although I haven't seriously considered anything yet. As far as budge goes, I don't really have one, although tend to like things that are cost efficient.

FFXIV requires the most by far. So if you have/want to budget; need to pick resolution, if you want max graphics, or beyond for other games.

[Corrderio]

So I'm thinking of building a new machine due to my current computer getting sluggish and my video card crapping out last night. Before I start doing reseach on account of me not being home, what is the "best" video card? I remember BG praising a GTX and was wondering if that still holds true.

[Gredival]

So I'm thinking of building a new machine due to my current computer getting sluggish and my video card crapping out last night. Before I start doing reseach on account of me not being home, what is the "best" video card? I remember BG praising a GTX and was wondering if that still holds true.

Define best: the best performing card on the market or the best value for your price (relative to a certain price range)?

[Corrderio]

It's not too big of an issue. I know they're normally one of the most expensive parts of a machine. I just remember back when people praised Nivdia GTX 840 or something along those lines.

[DrClout]

GTX 980ti is considerably top end. But "best" doesn't always equal best so narrow down what your rig can handle and what your future rig will look like.