Ugh, yet another reminder to BACK UP YOUR DATA. Not my gaming computer, but my wife's Mac. A 3 TB hard drive that had half of our photos just stopped working. No prior warning either. The computer just doesn't recognize it as a drive any more. I put it into an external drive caddy and plugged it into other computers and they don't recognize it either. It's actually the newest drive in the computer. The computer is 7 years old, but I got this drive "only" 3 years ago.

I don't even know how long the drive has been out. I normally don't use her computer, but wanted to retrieve a couple of photos, when I noticed that Lightroom couldn't find the photos.

Not a gigantic deal, because the most important documents (the photos) are in at least three other drives. At most, I lost a couple weeks worth of photos. But it's the biggest hard drive I've had fail on me yet. The last one was a laptop and failed because I dropped the laptop. I'm definitely going to run another backup of my computer today.

Just to add, newer and larger magnetic drives are actually more prone to failure than older smaller drives. It's just physical limitations of the technology (failure rates per bit has gone done, but not by enough to compensate for the increased size of drives).

Nowadays... Google Photos at $2 a month is how I store my photos and videos, and that's only because my wife likes to keep the images and videos full quality. You already have free unlimited storage if you let Google compress the images to 16 megapixels and videos to 1080p.

I've tried 5 different external hard drives with my PC. None of them work. Either I have the worst luck in the world, or something is wrong with my USB port.

EDIT: Ugh, the external card reader works from the same USB cable. Meaning the port and cable both work. Just not with external hard drives. ****!

Are all these drives USB powered? Could be your PC's USB port is just not supplying enough juice for the HDDs.

gus,

What kind of connection is between the hdd and the enclosure? SATA? IDE?

When you connect the USB cable, does the drive spin up at all? Can you hear or feel it spinning if you hold it?

Just try the HD in another person's computer. All 5 failing means it's your PC, or that you're storing them improperly (like in an aquarium).

SATA drives using this kind of enclosure (same brand, but older model):

https://www.newertech.com/products/voyagerq.php

Got it because it's both USB 3 for my PC and Firewire for my wife's Mac. The Mac doesn't have USB 3.

Drive was spinning up, just not showing up in Windows Explorer.

Looks like it was just a momentary glitch. I powered off the PC last night. Tried again this morning and my main external drive worked fine. Haven't tried the enclosure yet, have to finish my backup first.

You guys gonna think I'm nuts but I am increasingly convinced a MacBook Pro 15 in bootcamp + EGPU is the best value in gaming setup now.

This is mostly because MacBook Pros retain resale value so well and eGPU technology has matured. Used MacBook Pro 15s from 2016 (the first touch bar) are still selling for 1700-1800 on EBay. The 2015 version is still selling for 1200-1500 too. That comes out to about $300 per year on the MacBook itself. Add 3 years of use out of an 1080 eGPU at ~$1200 (~400 per year) or 1070 eGPU at 750-900 (~250~300 per year), and we're at $600 per year for top notich gaming performance at $600 to 750 per year for 3 years and you get an eGPU enclosure at the other end. That's assuming you don't bargain hunt (B&H for example runs promotions and don't charge sales tax in most states).

You can get pretty much same performance with cheap 8550U/8650U laptops as long as they got TB3 but those laptops have virtually no resale value and really don't work that well as portable machines. Not to mention they just aren't built as well.

I came to this conclusion when my wife asked how much my new X1 Carbon is gonna cost (I had to ask for permission, yes I am whipped) and followed up with how much I could sell my old one for (less than half of what I bought it for, coming out to about $600/year of use).

This was a bit of a minor epiphany for me. The upgrade path is a lot easier and cheaper with eGPUs relative to even desktop setups.

Man, if they didn’t burst into flames while running graphical things on the screen I probably would have kept mine and tried this out.

They don’t. The graphics are offloaded to the egpu

A while back, I bought a 32" 4k BenQ monitor because it wasn't that much more expensive than 27" models (like 900 vs. 800). For inexplicable reasons, 27" models have dropped significantly more in price while becoming better in both color gamut and response times.

Now I am stuck because I want a second 4k monitor but I don't want to pay almost twice as much for a 32" and I don't want two monitors with different DPI.

I guess I could sell my 32" and get a little more than enough to buy a 27".

I've been agonizing over this stupidly 1st world problem all day. <sighs>

Looking to upgrade my system currently have this

Intel - Core i5-4460 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor
ASRock - H97M PRO4 Micro ATX LGA1150 Motherboard
Corsair - Vengeance LP 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR3-2133 Memory
Crucial - MX100 256GB 2.5" Solid State Drive
EVGA - GeForce GTX 750 Ti 2GB Superclocked Video Card
XFX - 550W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply


I'm looking to upgrade to one of these, I'm probably just going to get a PC with a 1050 and then take it out and sell and get a 1060 6gb. I will also get a SSD put into it too.

https://www.ebuyer.com/826461-punch-...-gdt-705-1022#

ntel Core i7-7700 3.6GHz
8GB DDR4 + 2TB HDD
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti 4GB
WIFI + Windows 10 Home
1 Year Manufacturer Warranty


https://www.ebuyer.com/787930-zoosto...-pc-7290-5330#

Intel Core i7-7700 3.6GHz
8GB RAM + 1TB HDD
DVD Writer + WIFI
NVIDIA GF GTX 1050Ti 4GB
Windows 10 Home 64bit

http://www.ukgamingcomputers.co.uk/n...ter-p-171.html

Cooler Master MasterBox Lite 5 Case
Corsair CX 550W PSU
Intel Core i7 7700 3.6Ghz Processor
Asus PRIME B250M-PLUS Motherboard
8GB Corsair Vengeance LPX 2400MHz DDR4 RAM
Nvidia GeForce® GTX 1050 Ti 4GB Graphics Card
Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200rpm Hard Drive
7.1 Surround Sound Audio
2 Rear USB 2.0 an


My guess it's probably better to go with option 1 or 3, Would appreciate if someone can take a look and give there 2 cents. Main games would be CSGO/PUBG/Fornite.

Thanks in advance.

Don't use ebuyer, they are scum.

Any particular reason why? Who else would you recommend otherwise?

If you plan on using the PC to do anything else at the same time as gaming, such as playing music or streaming on twitch, you should definitely upgrade to 16GB RAM.

The power supplies on the 1st 2 links also seem really underpowered for a gaming PC. I know my 1050ti came with a recommended 500w PSU minimum suggestion so I really can't see either of them supporting a 1060.

At this point you also should accept that 6 cores are the standard going forward for gaming and developers are almost certainly going to code for that to get some performance going forward.

It's one of those rare times in the past 10 years or so that it makes sense to get the newest stuff. The gap between 4 core 7xxx chips and 6 core 8xxx chips is very substantial. If you getting a new machine anyway, just pay the 200-400 extra.

Something like this:

https://www.cyberpowersystem.co.uk/system/IEM-Rival

6 core i5 with 1060. 1132 inc VAT.

Similar story with memory. Spring for the 16gb. When budget sub $500 laptops are being sold with 8gb, you know developers will find a way to use at least 8 gb and probably more in the very near future.

Overclockers, Scan.

Ebuyer will find bull**** reasons to **** you over if you ever have to return anything.

That seems weird to me because I thought part of the big draw for the 10X0 line was that they were surprisingly less power hungry than the previous gen

Unless you are overclocking or doing SLI it is fine.

Thanks for this, Just to be sure... I'd be better going for a I5 8th gen with 6 cores over a I7 7th gen with 4 cores.

Yes, although you will see even bigger boost going to i7-8700k if you multitask at all while gaming, it will cost you another ~100 pounds.

You will see laptops in the sub 1500 range too with i7-8750h six core chip and GTX 1060 with 100+hz screens probably sometime next month too if that appeals to you.

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/user/SJE...d/#view=8pBKZL

So I come up with that, I have a SSD that I can chuck into this. I haven't looked at pre builds yet so I'm not sure how good this is money wise.

What type of multitasking are we talking about? Streaming on twitch is one thing, and that probably warrants looking in to an i7.

But if we're talking music and web browsing, I don't think that's enough of a tax on a 6 core i5 to warrant jumping to an i7. If you have the money to burn then an i7 is a great investment. But if you're being budget conscious, consider what your "full load" use is going to be. Are you going to be gaming while running a VM in the background? Are you doing any kind of media rendering? Or is it just Discord and Chrome in the background with 6 tabs open?

I mean I realistically I probably don't need it... but my thinking is that it's £81 more than the I5 8600k - 3.6GHz 6 core. Is that really a huge jump in price in terms of processors? (I actually don't know..)

Intel - Core i7-8700K 3.7GHz 6-Core Processor - £281
I5 8600k - 3.6GHz 6 core - £200

Here's my take on the i5 vs. i7 thing. Not everyone is like me, but if you can see yourself thinking this way then it might help you choose.

If you're building this system to last you a few years, at some point in 2021 you can look back on the UnitedAs1 of April 2018 and either be glad that you saved 81 pounds, or be glad that you spent a little more and went with the i7. With the information you've given us, it's unlikely that you're going to be in a situation where you really think to yourself "man, this i7 is performing so much better in my current situation than an i5 would have."

Are you going to spend the next couple years thinking that you have the "budget-minded" processor? Or are you going to spend the next couple years with warm fuzzies about having the top of the line? Are those years worth of warm fuzzies worth the money?

Or will you build the system for whatever the cost is and not give it much more thought than that?

I think those are more important questions when debating i5 vs i7. For me, I build a system in 2008 using a Core 2 Duo. It lasted me until 2016, but I would say for a solid 5 years I was thinking "I wish I would have gone for the Core 2 Quad". In my current machine I have an i7 6700K. I don't use it to the point where it's really necessary over whatever the equivalent i5 would have been, but for the last 2 years whenever I think about my computer I get those warm fuzzies. That's worth the difference in price to me.