Gaming Hardware discussion (& Hardware Sales) thread

Usb disk drives, anyone have any luck with the cheap ones?

I have some stuff stored on disk I’d like to get , old pics some games documents etc.

Are the cheap ones decent enough for this?

Or should I jerry rig one of my old disk drives up for this?
 
Gonna get an Xbox One X for Kingdom Hearts 3. Current price is "$100 off" at $399.

Is this as good as it gets and never drops below that so might as well grab it now? Or should I hold out a bit longer?
 
Looks like I'm waiting for my new GPU, thanks Madmick.

I hope the new GPU's allow for 4K uhd blu-ray playback, I don't want a new motherboard and cpu to do that (only certain Intel cpus with embedded gpus allow for uhd blu-ray playback on PC).
 
Yeah, I already have a Logitech keyboard I like. I'll do a little browsing before selecting, but it looks like they have some nice fingertip-grip options that fit my aesthetic preferences. I'm really tempted by the g703 tbh, but I'd probably lose a wireless mouse.

G700s, find one on eBay, can be used wired or wireless.
 
Gonna get an Xbox One X for Kingdom Hearts 3. Current price is "$100 off" at $399.

Is this as good as it gets and never drops below that so might as well grab it now? Or should I hold out a bit longer?
I doubt you will see better than that in the next 6 months. I don't think that's the floor. Both the original XB1/PS4, including the iterations that were mild improvements on their reference hardware, the PS4 Slim & Xbox One S, have settled in at a floor of $250-$300. That seems to be as low as they're willing/able to go on a perpetual basis.

Black Friday blowouts see the $200 price tag, but I doubt you can expect to see them stabilize at that price point until they are antiquated by the next gen of consoles. The same was true of the PS3 and Xbox 360's that preceded them towards the end of their own life cycles. They were around $250 from 2011-2012, saw some $200 blowouts, and then stabilized around $200 (though not so much for the 500GB versions) after the launch of the new consoles.

So I doubt you will see >$300 prices on the advanced units like the XBX until the sales season in late 2019, and beyond.
Usb disk drives, anyone have any luck with the cheap ones?

I have some stuff stored on disk I’d like to get , old pics some games documents etc.

Are the cheap ones decent enough for this?

Or should I jerry rig one of my old disk drives up for this?
Only you know how much flash storage you need for convenience on the go, but I just saw the sale on that 10TB external hard drive pop up again that happens to come with a free 32GB flash drive. Saw quite a few sales like that. Seems like they may have some flash drive inventory buildup they are trying to clear. So you might consider looking for a deal like that where they are effectively thrown in for free on a more substantial purchase.
 
Mouse is dying. It's elderly as fuck. Very simple wired two-button thing with 800 non-adjustable dpi.


Looking for a replacement. Open to suggestions with more luxury
Yeah, I already have a Logitech keyboard I like. I'll do a little browsing before selecting, but it looks like they have some nice fingertip-grip options that fit my aesthetic preferences. I'm really tempted by the g703 tbh, but I'd probably lose a wireless mouse.
Mice preferences are subjective according to game, hand size, etc, but I'm with @GearSolidMetal. If there is one component where I will throw Logitech some love it's mice. They have ruled forever, and it shows up in customer feedback ratings. It seems like every time I've looked up mice for the past few decades on Amazon, gamer or office class, the Logitech have incredibly high customer satisfaction scores in comparison to their competitors. I know you play shooters including BR formats like PUBG. Not sure if you like a lot of buttons for extra macros because IIRC you also play some RTS, but maybe I'm thinking of Civ and TBS where that isn't important. The G502 is the current market king, but any of their G series are what you're after.

If not Logitech, I would advise steering into these brands to save you some time sussing them out yourself-- eyeball to gauge your fancy:
  • Logitech (G series)
  • Razer (Deathadder Elite)
  • Zowie (EC2/EC1, FK2/FK1/FK1+, ZA13/ZA12/ZA11)
  • Steelseries (Rival 710, Rival 600, Rival 310, Sensei 310)
  • HyperX (Pulsefire Surge, Pulsefire FPS Pro, Pulsefire FPS)
  • QPAD (8K Laser, 5K Laser, 8K Optical, DX-20)

That QPAD website is a mess, but the chart is more useful than their more competently designed store. I appreciate how Zowie selects a core design, and then offers it in varying sizes. Unfortunately, left-handed gamers don't get the same love from just about anyone when it comes to ergonomics.
I may just very well wait for the 3060 to drop and snatch that up bc that sounds amazing
Didn't you just put together a new build with a real PSU? That card isn't targeted at you. That's for the guys who maybe get kicked down a recycled office comp, or buy one of these cheaply off eBay/Amazon. For example, this is the #1 bestselling Amazon desktop right now because yesterday it was trending at a sale price of $419, so it won the 24-hour period. Gamers could add the RX 3060 and have a legit gaming budget gaming build for $550 with plenty of storage (sans the luxury of an SSD):
https://www.amazon.com/Acer-TC-885-...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=S8K8QSDN0K6EBSYW3EG9

Another example is this small form factor HP Ivy Bridge i5 refurb that has been reigning atop these charts for a while because guys like to throw in low-profile GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1050, or GT 1030. For the past few years this has been the strategy that brings a gaming PC the closest to console prices:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Quad-Core...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=S8K8QSDN0K6EBSYW3EG9

But if you have a legit PSU, you have the power and external 6+ pin connectors to drive a real GPU. The RX 3080 is the one you want. This is the spiritual successor to the RX 480 and RX 580 which oppose NVIDIA's GTX 1060. This is the mainstream gaming sweet spot. If you look at the Steam survey this is the class of GPU that dominates the market, and thus, the developers are keen to accommodate it.
 
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Damn, the leaks are really pouring out a month ahead of CES, here. More bad news for Intel. Qualcomm (who along with Apple themselves are the leading processor manufacturers for smartphones and tablets) is now encroaching on the ultrabook space. Intel is getting squeezed like a mofo from both sides:

Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx PC Chips Challenge Intel Core i5
Qualcomm claimed that although its Kryo 495 can “only” equal the peak performance of Intel’s 15W Core i5 CPU (assuming one of the latest generations), the chip’s real advantage is seen in sustained peak performance, which is double that of Intel’s Core i5 at 7W TDP. Qualcomm is not wrong to focus on sustained peak performance here. Over the past few years, Intel seems to have continued to increase peak performance for its Turbo Boost clock speeds but usually at the cost of sustained peak performance.

In other words, Intel’s chips may get to claim high peak performance in benchmarks, but in the real world you may find that the chips throttle to avoid overheating. Intel has been putting the blame on OEMs lately for not being capable of proper heat management for its chips. However, when most OEMs seem incapable of abiding by Intel’s performance specifications in their laptop designs, perhaps the fault lies with Intel chips' demands.
The most advanced 15W Intel i5 processor currently in production is Coffee Lake's "Whiskey Lake" variant, the i5-8265U, although it's much easier to find the previous generation's Kaby Lake i5-8250U (& i5-8350U) in actual products for sale. Intel's most advanced 15W processor is their i7-8565U flagship, so they have some distance to their lead in reserve, but it's all coming from the CPU. The i7 and i5 processors share the same Intel UHD 620 Graphics chip onboard. They can't be feeling good this week looking at all these "leaks".

As far as gamers are concerned, PUBG by Tencent just won the 2018 Google Play Store "Game of the Year" Award: both from the Editors and in the "Fan Favorite" category. Fortnite has obviously exploded more than any other game in 2018, and is distinct in the sense that it has brought a truly cross-platform version of their game to mobile platforms, not a modified edition inspired by the original game. Streamer Ninja is right that we are really on the cusp of a new era, especially for mobile, where all the throwaway reskinned casual games are going to find themselves competing with genuine AAA monsters.

NVIDIA and Apple are lurking. I believe the former is coiled while the hardware continues to evolve, patiently waiting for the ripe moment to spring the NVIDIA Shield's successor, while Apple is complacently content for the market to come to it with their Apple TVs since it has a first-serve monopoly on mobile software development.

But the times, they are a-changin, and it doesn't seem like it will be more than several years before Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo find themselves embattled by a new breed of legit AAA gaming consoles running on Android and iOS.
***Disclaimer*** I said the same thing in 2016 a year after the first NVIDIA Shield dropped, so read this prediction with a healthy pinch of skepticism.
 
Ebay is having a 10% off everything sale with coupon code PHLDAYTEN
 
Mice preferences are subjective according to game, hand size, etc, but I'm with @GearSolidMetal. If there is one component where I will throw Logitech some love it's mice. They have ruled forever, and it shows up in customer feedback ratings. It seems like every time I've looked up mice for the past few decades on Amazon, gamer or office class, the Logitech have incredibly high customer satisfaction scores in comparison to their competitors. I know you play shooters including BR formats like PUBG. Not sure if you like a lot of buttons for extra macros because IIRC you also play some RTS, but maybe I'm thinking of Civ and TBS where that isn't important. The G502 is the current market king, but any of their G series are what you're after.

More or less right. My recent games have been RoE, Pubg, CSGO on the shooter front.

I do play rtss (sc2, AoE2, occasionally C&C or some niche game) with friends but not really competitively anymore. I use hotkeys mostly through my keyboard in any case.

I also use hotkeys a fair amount in 4x games but that just speeds them up.

Anyways. I'm picking up a g203 as a quick, cheap replacement and am gonna keep an eye out for a deal on the fancier ones. I have long hands but mostly use a fingertip grip anyways.
 
I doubt you will see better than that in the next 6 months. I don't think that's the floor. Both the original XB1/PS4, including the iterations that were mild improvements on their reference hardware, the PS4 Slim & Xbox One S, have settled in at a floor of $250-$300. That seems to be as low as they're willing/able to go on a perpetual basis.

Black Friday blowouts see the $200 price tag, but I doubt you can expect to see them stabilize at that price point until they are antiquated by the next gen of consoles. The same was true of the PS3 and Xbox 360's that preceded them towards the end of their own life cycles. They were around $250 from 2011-2012, saw some $200 blowouts, and then stabilized around $200 (though not so much for the 500GB versions) after the launch of the new consoles.

So I doubt you will see >$300 prices on the advanced units like the XBX until the sales season in late 2019, and beyond.

Only you know how much flash storage you need for convenience on the go, but I just saw the sale on that 10TB external hard drive pop up again that happens to come with a free 32GB flash drive. Saw quite a few sales like that. Seems like they may have some flash drive inventory buildup they are trying to clear. So you might consider looking for a deal like that where they are effectively thrown in for free on a more substantial purchase.
DISK DRIVE like as in a cd/dvd read/write.

I want to pull old data off and store on an hdd.

I have an hdd dock and slap on hdd’s for mass storage, I don’t have any storage issues.

Just a f ton of old data stored on cd’s and floppy’s and don’t have a working pc with a dick drive anymore.

I’m not so much worried about the crap that’s on the floppy’s, I don’t think there is anything I need or want on those, but a lot of old photos mainly etc on cdrw’s I’d like to get off.

So my options are pick up a cheap cd/dvd drive usb style, for convenience or dig an old drive out of the pc graveyard in my attic and jerry rig one up temporarily on my pc, and hope one of them still works.

If the <20.00 ones I see for sale are reliable enough this would be much easier and more convenient
 
for what it's worth, i was in a similar boat and picked up some little asus external dvd drive for $~30. works fine. i was going to rig up some component graveyard thingy as well, but fuck bothering to rig up adapters for IDE ribbons and shit.
 
Mice preferences are subjective according to game, hand size, etc, but I'm with @GearSolidMetal. If there is one component where I will throw Logitech some love it's mice. They have ruled forever, and it shows up in customer feedback ratings. It seems like every time I've looked up mice for the past few decades on Amazon, gamer or office class, the Logitech have incredibly high customer satisfaction scores in comparison to their competitors. I know you play shooters including BR formats like PUBG. Not sure if you like a lot of buttons for extra macros because IIRC you also play some RTS, but maybe I'm thinking of Civ and TBS where that isn't important. The G502 is the current market king, but any of their G series are what you're after.

If not Logitech, I would advise steering into these brands to save you some time sussing them out yourself-- eyeball to gauge your fancy:
  • Logitech (G series)
  • Razer (Deathadder Elite)
  • Zowie (EC2/EC1, FK2/FK1/FK1+, ZA13/ZA12/ZA11)
  • Steelseries (Rival 710, Rival 600, Rival 310, Sensei 310)
  • HyperX (Pulsefire Surge, Pulsefire FPS Pro, Pulsefire FPS)
  • QPAD (5K Laser, DX-20)

That QPAD website is a mess, but the chart is more useful than their more competently designed store. I appreciate how Zowie selects a core design, and then offers it in varying sizes. Unfortunately, left-handed gamers don't get the same love from just about anyone when it comes to ergonomics.

Didn't you just put together a new build with a real PSU? That card isn't targeted at you. That's for the guys who maybe get kicked down a recycled office comp, or buy one of these cheaply off eBay/Amazon. For example, this is the #1 bestselling Amazon desktop right now because yesterday it was trending at a sale price of $419, so it won the 24-hour period. Gamers could add the RX 3060 and have a legit gaming budget gaming build for $550 with plenty of storage (sans the luxury of an SSD):
https://www.amazon.com/Acer-TC-885-...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=S8K8QSDN0K6EBSYW3EG9

Another example is this small form factor HP Ivy Bridge i5 refurb that has been reigning atop these charts for a while because guys like to throw in low-profile GTX 1050 Ti, GTX 1050, or GT 1030. For the past few years this has been the strategy that brings a gaming PC the closest to console prices:
https://www.amazon.com/HP-Quad-Core...coding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=S8K8QSDN0K6EBSYW3EG9

But if you have a legit PSU, you have the power and external 6+ pin connectors to drive a real GPU. The RX 3080 is the one you want. This is the spiritual successor to the RX 480 and RX 580 which oppose NVIDIA's GTX 1060. This is the mainstream gaming sweet spot. If you look at the Steam survey this is the class of GPU that dominates the market, and thus, the developers are keen to accommodate it.
Are there still a shitload of problems with hp’s Taking gpu’s??

I found in my research when I was thinking about picking up a cheap used office i7 rig from an older generation that hp’s had the most problems with gpu’s not working and no driver supposed compared to dell and ASUS etc.

It was basically a Russian roulette if the particularly build could use one or not, and I’m not talking about big gpu’s I mean people were having issues with 1050 and even 1030’s not working on them.


I had abandoned that road when I found some really good deals on parts and threw together my r3 rig dirt cheap, but I’ve been thinking about revisiting that again to make some cheap “Christmas” sale pc’s

When the mining crashed here there was a mass fire sale on used gpu’s. People were selling big lots of good newer gpu’s cheap and people were selling older gpu’s even cheaper.

There were so many out for sale you could low ball all day, the supply has dried up some and prices risen some now.

I missed out on a deal, for TWO 980 ti’s a guy had been running sli, I had talked him down to 200.00 for both. But drug my feat.

That would have been the time to buy ten or so random gpu’s all under 100.00 and ten i7 desktops for 100.00 each.
 
Random question, I have another case fan I need to rig up, as I have no exhaust fan now and my junk gets hot under heavy load with the side panel on.

My mobo only has one case fan port. So my options are order a splitter or get the soldering iron out and making one, this brings two questions.

How likely is the power draw from two fans to overload the one port, and how likely is the wire sizing to be too small for the fan load on two fans on a homemade splitter?


I’m seansing some googling and getting the calculator out for wire load draw will be in order but thought I’d ask here before going down that road.
 
for what it's worth, i was in a similar boat and picked up some little asus external dvd drive for $~30. works fine. i was going to rig up some component graveyard thingy as well, but fuck bothering to rig up adapters for IDE ribbons and shit.
I've seen people use double sided tape and mount a dvd drive under their desk.
 
OdyVXFU.gif
 
DISK DRIVE like as in a cd/dvd read/write.
You were asking about cheap USB drives, and I was just mentioning that I've seen a lot of them thrown in on what are already great sale prices for external storage as standalone units. Both operate on USB, so it's just a Big/Little strategy. The flash drives are convenient if you don't need more storage than you can carry around on a keychain, but the external/portable hard drives are nice if you need to move the contents of several old, full hard drives.

I suggest "ODD" or "Optical Drives" to describe Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drives in order to minimize confusion.

Due to floppies back in the day the use of "disk" has never subsided even after the advent of USB drives. Throw the two together for "Disk Drive" and I trip over myself because I'm inclined to misinterpret it as just another name for a "USB drive" aka "flash drive" aka "flash storage" aka "thumb drive" aka "USB stick" aka "stick drive" aka "memory stick" (the last which I might also confuse for RAM, and now also Optane drives!).
Are there still a shitload of problems with hp’s Taking gpu’s??

I found in my research when I was thinking about picking up a cheap used office i7 rig from an older generation that hp’s had the most problems with gpu’s not working and no driver supposed compared to dell and ASUS etc.

It was basically a Russian roulette if the particularly build could use one or not, and I’m not talking about big gpu’s I mean people were having issues with 1050 and even 1030’s not working on them.


I had abandoned that road when I found some really good deals on parts and threw together my r3 rig dirt cheap, but I’ve been thinking about revisiting that again to make some cheap “Christmas” sale pc’s

When the mining crashed here there was a mass fire sale on used gpu’s. People were selling big lots of good newer gpu’s cheap and people were selling older gpu’s even cheaper.

There were so many out for sale you could low ball all day, the supply has dried up some and prices risen some now.

I missed out on a deal, for TWO 980 ti’s a guy had been running sli, I had talked him down to 200.00 for both. But drug my feat.

That would have been the time to buy ten or so random gpu’s all under 100.00 and ten i7 desktops for 100.00 each.
This is why for any specific unit it makes sense to run a search in both the Amazon Q&A and Customer Review sections. Reddit also helps, but ultimately, if you don't want to play roulette, the safest method is to obtain the precise model # from the seller, and even more specifically the precise part # for the motherboard. These refurbs are sometimes frankensteins thrown together out of working parts from different units, but they are on custom form factors, so even if the motherboard wasn't from the exact model number in which it is now contained, it will be from the same family of computers that HP sold at the time on that form factor.

As far as the PSU, if you want to be certain, the way is to find the part #, or ask for a photo printout of the manufacturer specifications stickered on the side, and from there you can deduce amperage along the 12V rail, and whether or not it is peak or continuous power. Work from there with a list of the other components. Use a PSU calculator for help if you need it for power draw estimates.
 
You were asking about cheap USB drives, and I was just mentioning that I've seen a lot of them thrown in on what are already great sale prices for external storage as standalone units. Both operate on USB, so it's just a Big/Little strategy. The flash drives are convenient if you don't need more storage than you can carry around on a keychain, but the external/portable hard drives are nice if you need to move the contents of several old, full hard drives.

I suggest "ODD" or "Optical Drives" to describe Blu-Ray/DVD/CD drives in order to minimize confusion.

Due to floppies back in the day the use of "disk" has never subsided even after the advent of USB drives. Throw the two together for "Disk Drive" and I trip over myself because I'm inclined to misinterpret it as just another name for a "USB drive" aka "flash drive" aka "flash storage" aka "thumb drive" aka "USB stick" aka "stick drive" aka "memory stick" (the last which I might also confuse for RAM, and now also Optane drives!).

This is why for any specific unit it makes sense to run a search in both the Amazon Q&A & Customer Review sections. Reddit also helps, but ultimately, if you don't want to play roulette, the safest method is to obtain the precise model # from the seller, and even more specifically the precise part # for the motherboard. These refurbs are sometimes frankensteins thrown together out of working parts from different units, but they are on custom form factors, so even if the motherboard wasn't from the exact model number in which it is now contained, it will be from the same family of computers that HP sold at the time on that form factor.

As far as the PSU, if you want to be certain, the way is to find the part #, or ask for a photo printout of the manufacturer specifications stickered on the side, and from there you can deduce amperage along the 12V rail, and whether or not it is peak or continuous power. Work from there with a list of the other components. Use a PSU calculator for help if you need it for power draw estimates.
Yeah I used usb in the wording to reference the cheap usb(instead of case counted hard wired ) drives. From the subject matter I thought what I was talking about was obvious, but my expired nomenclature and my departure from working on pc’s for a large period of time often puts me at a nomenclature disadvantage, and I can confuse people easily.

As far as the hp mobo and type etc, I’ve gone down that road and it seems to just be to much of a pain in the ass to check and read on each and everyone when trying to grab cheap sales deals as often times the people don’t have the info needed, and would need to meet them to see the pc and get it. So it’s a wasted drive and time, when it seems that with a Dell (and especially an Asus, but they are rare in my area) it’s much more likely to work.


The power supply figuring is the easy part.

Especially if you look for deals, just change it.

Like this Newegg deal on a Corsair 500w for 14.99 after debate.

https://m.newegg.com/products/N82E16817139196
 
That’s about to be me with this damn fan issue.

A smarter man would just order a fan splitter, maybe I’ll video my ghetto rigging for some lolz and post for y’all.
 
Well, there's a Sapphire ITX Vega 64 for $369 via Newegg with the eBay code today, but I think this is the best sale I've seen:


If you've thought about streaming that is the mic to get. It's normally $120-$130 on Amazon depending on the color, and that's the case right now for this blue unit ($124.99), so that's nearly 45% off the the price on the microphone alone without consideration of the inclusion of the AC: Odyssey game ($40 value), and additionally, most will dodge the state sales tax from Newegg that is unavoidable with Amazon.

Screaming deal until the end of the night when the eBay sitewide 10% off discount expires.
CA, CT, IN, NJ, PA, TN, WA
 
Well, you were wondering, @90 50. The stars are on your side. Ask and ye shall receive:
AMD Ryzen 3000 Specs & Prices Leaked, Upto 16 Cores & 5.1GHz on AM4

45461686164_7c03d1e83f_b.jpg


More and more with each announcement it looks like the frequency wars are subsiding, and giving way to the core wars. As small as they go, they can't go that much smaller on the die, and so there just isn't as much to be gained by pursuing higher clocks. So instead of building up, they're building out. One wonders how long this can last; when the next generation won't be doubling the previous generation's cores.

Hardware Unboxed called bullshit on this
 

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