GRcade

Lagamorph wrote:Xbox controllers don't have rechargeable batteries built-in. As strawberry floating ridiculous as it seems in 2018, you'll need to either buy AA batteries for it, or get a Play and Charge kit for another £20.

That seems insane, given the nearly £50 RRP. Thanks for letting me know.

I'm happy with my wired Xbone pad for the PC, lights up too to match the tower and mouse lights etc.

BAKA wrote:

Lagamorph wrote:Xbox controllers don't have rechargeable batteries built-in. As strawberry floating ridiculous as it seems in 2018, you'll need to either buy AA batteries for it, or get a Play and Charge kit for another £20.

That seems insane, given the nearly £50 RRP. Thanks for letting me know.

This was a genuine shock to me when I got my X last year. It never even occured to me that it wouldn't have a rechargable battery. It's crazy that for what is championed as their premium system you still need to shell out for the play and charge kit.

When the original 360 came out you had to buy the play & charge kit for your controller. Buy the Wireless adaptor to make WiFi work. Buy the HDD to have a reasonable amount of storage. It was the first over £500 console if you actually wanted it to work properly.

Rechargeable Eneloop AA batteries > built in battery

You will also need to buy a bluetooth adaptor to connect the thing to your pc if you don't already have one. Those are dirt cheap though.


BTW, has anyone else got Sunset Overdrive? It's a pretty basic port but runs fine if your PC can power through the hurdles. I know it's a four year old game launched at the start of the current gen consoles but the art style is very forgiving.

Meep wrote:You will also need to buy a bluetooth adaptor to connect the thing to your pc if you don't already have one. Those are dirt cheap though.


BTW, has anyone else got Sunset Overdrive? It's a pretty basic port but runs fine if your PC can power through the hurdles. I know it's a four year old game launched at the start of the current gen consoles but the art style is very forgiving.

Downloaded a dodgy copy of SO to see how it compares to the Xbone version (900p/sluggish 30fps) and plays and looks great (Maxed out/1080P/60fps lock) on PC. Really hope at some point it gets X enhanced as I own the season pass too and never really gave the game much time.

I'd appreciate it if someone could look over my new parts list:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/JmJwFt

I plan on reusing my graphics card, but I think it's time to move on from my ageing 3570k.

You could get 3000 MHz RAM for £4 more from Aria and if you opted to go down the AMD route, a 2600X setup would save about £100 but obviously you lose out on that out of the box gaming performance which you'd need to buy an aftermarket cooler to try and make up through overclocking.

edit: But this coming from someone who is about to go out and return a M.2 drive to Amazon because he couldn't read the compatibility instructions for his motherboard correctly...

andretmzt wrote:You could get 3000 MHz RAM for £4 more from Aria and if you opted to go down the AMD route, a 2600X setup would save about £100 but obviously you lose out on that out of the box gaming performance which you'd need to buy an aftermarket cooler to try and make up through overclocking.

edit: But this coming from someone who is about to go out and return a M.2 drive to Amazon because he couldn't read the compatibility instructions for his motherboard correctly...

Yeah I'd rather stick with team blue for this. What's the M2 issue? I don't know a great deal about M2 drives, is the one I've got above going to work with the mobo I've selected?

Cheeky Devlin wrote:

BAKA wrote:

Lagamorph wrote:Xbox controllers don't have rechargeable batteries built-in. As strawberry floating ridiculous as it seems in 2018, you'll need to either buy AA batteries for it, or get a Play and Charge kit for another £20.

That seems insane, given the nearly £50 RRP. Thanks for letting me know.

This was a genuine shock to me when I got my X last year. It never even occured to me that it wouldn't have a rechargable battery. It's crazy that for what is championed as their premium system you still need to shell out for the play and charge kit.

I was a bit surprised to find the Steam controller didn't have a built in battery, but there is an argument that having fewer built in parts keeps costs down (I know lol), means less can go wrong, and is less likely to need a total replacement. If a built in battery bites the dust you need to replace the whole controller. I agree that it's a bit cynical to not include one in the premium pack.

+1 for Eneloops.

Winckle wrote:

andretmzt wrote:You could get 3000 MHz RAM for £4 more from Aria and if you opted to go down the AMD route, a 2600X setup would save about £100 but obviously you lose out on that out of the box gaming performance which you'd need to buy an aftermarket cooler to try and make up through overclocking.

edit: But this coming from someone who is about to go out and return a M.2 drive to Amazon because he couldn't read the compatibility instructions for his motherboard correctly...

Yeah I'd rather stick with team blue for this. What's the M2 issue? I don't know a great deal about M2 drives, is the one I've got above going to work with the mobo I've selected?

Should do. There's a diagram of the board layout on this page if you scroll down: https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/Z390-A-PRO -- it's explicitly compatible with M.2/NVMe.

Nice build by the way.

Winckle wrote:

andretmzt wrote:You could get 3000 MHz RAM for £4 more from Aria and if you opted to go down the AMD route, a 2600X setup would save about £100 but obviously you lose out on that out of the box gaming performance which you'd need to buy an aftermarket cooler to try and make up through overclocking.

edit: But this coming from someone who is about to go out and return a M.2 drive to Amazon because he couldn't read the compatibility instructions for his motherboard correctly...

Yeah I'd rather stick with team blue for this. What's the M2 issue? I don't know a great deal about M2 drives, is the one I've got above going to work with the mobo I've selected?

Oh no issue for you at all, yours will work fine as Karl said sorry. I've gone for the same drive on my build too.

My motherboard has two M.2 slots though so I wanted to make use of the second slot to keep the cables down in my case. I thought this second slot could use SATA but it is only a PCIe slot and if I used it I'd reduce my PCIe lanes on the GPU down to 8.

andretmzt wrote:My motherboard has two M.2 slots though so I wanted to make use of the second slot to keep the cables down in my case. I thought this second slot could use SATA but it is only a PCIe slot and if I used it I'd reduce my PCIe lanes on the GPU down to 8.

Did you test this? On PCIe 3.0, there should still be enough bandwidth on 8 lanes to run the GPU.

I like that case manufacturers have finally realised no one gives a gooseberry fool about optical drives and have started to reduce the height of cases accordingly.

Karl wrote:

andretmzt wrote:My motherboard has two M.2 slots though so I wanted to make use of the second slot to keep the cables down in my case. I thought this second slot could use SATA but it is only a PCIe slot and if I used it I'd reduce my PCIe lanes on the GPU down to 8.

Did you test this? On PCIe 3.0, there should still be enough bandwidth on 8 lanes to run the GPU.

You know what, I didn't even consider whether going from 16 to 8 even made a difference, I just assumed it did. I haven't tested it as I haven't built the system yet but a quick browse around would suggest any difference would be minimal.

Not sure what to do now. Could keep the drives I have but I'm worried about the thermals of the Samsung 970 while sat on the back of a motherboard that will see little if any airflow. Or I could return the SATA drive and just get a 2.5" drive to replace it and have a couple extra cables to deal with.

edit: What I realise now is that when going for your first ever PC build, opting for the 12 litre case is probably not going to make things easy.

Winckle wrote:I like that case manufacturers have finally realised no one gives a gooseberry fool about optical drives and have started to reduce the height of cases accordingly.

I have a Fractal Node case which has no optical drive bays but I still have an external DVD drive which I use almost exclusively for ripping CDs.

I reckon it'd be possible to modify the case to fit a laptop optical drive in it but that'd be a fairly pointless exercise.

M.2 is the connection type. NVMe or SATA are the interfaces. So you could have M.2 SATA or M.2 NVMe and they would perform very differently. This is something to watch out for when buying SSDs that connect through the M.2 socket. The SATA versions will be cheaper as well.

The latest version of SATA is limited to 600Mbs where NVMe is somewhere around 3500Mbs. The bottleneck for SSD's has been the interface for a long time. They could read and write faster than the bus would allow data throughput.

Switching from SATA to NVMe will probably allow for close to the full 3500Mbs(ish) read from your SSD and somewhere between 2000Mbs - 2500Mbs writing, depending on the SSD you go for.

There will be a price difference and you have to decide if it's worth it for your requirements. If your hobbies include something that will require you to read and write faster than 600Mbs then it's worth it. If you just want to play some Games and watch Youtube videos it might not be worth it.

I wish more case manufacturers would support slip line optical drives. They are a cheap enough that wasting space on the larger ones is hardly worth it and they could be fitted into most cases with little difficulty. Then again, an external optical drive is probably good enough for all the times you are likely to use it.

Winckle wrote:I'd appreciate it if someone could look over my new parts list:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/JmJwFt

I plan on reusing my graphics card, but I think it's time to move on from my ageing 3570k.

I am running a 3570K at the moment too. It served me way longer than I thought it would, great CPU but a bit long in the tooth now so I am retiring it after Christmas.

Personally I went with Ryzen 2600X as I didn't think the 9600K was worth paying nearly £70 more but I suppose that's down to the peference. You'll get superior single thread performance out of that CPU than the 2600X.

My advice is:
* Buy faster memory (3200mhz or abouts). If you are buying a fast CPU you might as well.
* Maybe reconsider NVME storage for now. I was contemplating it myself but decided that, considering the price difference between it and SATA3, it's not really worth it at this point when you are paying nearly twice as much and the latter still offers pretty solid performance. I will probably uprgade to it in a few years though.

Meep wrote:I wish more case manufacturers would support slip line optical drives. They are a cheap enough that wasting space on the larger ones is hardly worth it and they could be fitted into most cases with little difficulty. Then again, an external optical drive is probably good enough for all the times you are likely to use it.

Winckle wrote:I'd appreciate it if someone could look over my new parts list:

https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/JmJwFt

I plan on reusing my graphics card, but I think it's time to move on from my ageing 3570k.

I am running a 3570K at the moment too. It served me way longer than I thought it would, great CPU but a bit long in the tooth now so I am retiring it after Christmas.

Personally I went with Ryzen 2600X as I didn't think the 9600K was worth paying nearly £70 more but I suppose that's down to the peference. You'll get superior single thread performance out of that CPU than the 2600X.

My advice is:
* Buy faster memory (3200mhz or abouts). If you are buying a fast CPU you might as well.
* Maybe reconsider NVME storage for now. I was contemplating it myself but decided that, considering the price difference between it and SATA3, it's not really worth it at this point when you are paying nearly twice as much and the latter still offers pretty solid performance. I will probably uprgade to it in a few years though.

Good shout Meep, I've never known that much about RAM speed, so I thought I was playing it safe. As for the M2 drive, I want it to prevent having to run SATA cabling as much I do for the speed benefits.