Storage capacity needs vary wildly from one person to another. I would argue that 240 GB is more than enough for most computer users, but most computer users aren't heavy gamers.
Whether it's enough for gamers largely depends on how many games you want to have installed at a time. I tend to play one game at a time, and if I quit a game and know that I'm not going back to it, I uninstall it. Sometimes I'll uninstall it even if I think I might go back in a few years.
If you have 50 big games installed and pick which one you're going to play in a given day uniformly at random and independent of what you played yesterday, then you'll need a lot more space than I do. Though I'd argue that if you've got the money to buy 50 big games that you play a lot (excluding games that you buy, play for a while, and then quit!), spending $100 on an SSD will probably be pretty modest compared to what the games cost.
Yah, as i said, i dont know anyone who would be happy with 240GB ;P
The choice pretty much comes down to:
240GB SSD 120GB SSD+1TB HDD
for the same price.
I have a 120gb and a 180gb and have about 40% free space on both. I also have a 1tbb hdd, but i have no games installed on it.
I honestly believe people are just lazy and keep a ton of games on their systems that they simply don't play and wont play, but keep deluding themselves that they will pick it up again. I talked to a guy on a different forum who went through and checked his steam after we got into in argument over the SSD vs HDD debate, and he had about 15 games that he hadn't touched in over a year. Just sittin there wasting space. Was something like 80gigs of crap he hadnt touched in a year. He tried to pull the "i have a shitty connection and redownloading it would take a long time so i keep it because i *might* play it" argument. Which again, i think unless you live in a country that has ridiculous per month data caps, even with a 3 or 4meg internet connection, you could let the game download overnight while you're sleeping and play it within a day if you really get that large of an itch.
I think if people really sat down and were realistic about the games they play or might play, they could uninstall 60-70% of the games they have installed.
Just for points of reference, i have over 20 games installed, several of them large, like BF4 and TW3, FFXIV. And im using around 87gb on the 120 (including windows and other programs), and about 135 on the 180gb SSD (which is all steam games). Some of those games i haven't touched in 2-3 months (usually im waiting on patches to make changes im looking forward to, like with Diablo 3).
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
Well im still waiting on amazon or newegg to get an i7 6700k in stock thats not hugely over inflated on price.
Kind of sad, its been what 3 weeks now and they're still not supplying them in any real capacity? Or do you think there is just simply that much demand?
They're all reserved for pre-built pcs for big and small companies, the yield is so bad, intel just doesn't have enough leftovers for custom built purposes.
Storage capacity needs vary wildly from one person to another. I would argue that 240 GB is more than enough for most computer users, but most computer users aren't heavy gamers.
Whether it's enough for gamers largely depends on how many games you want to have installed at a time. I tend to play one game at a time, and if I quit a game and know that I'm not going back to it, I uninstall it. Sometimes I'll uninstall it even if I think I might go back in a few years.
If you have 50 big games installed and pick which one you're going to play in a given day uniformly at random and independent of what you played yesterday, then you'll need a lot more space than I do. Though I'd argue that if you've got the money to buy 50 big games that you play a lot (excluding games that you buy, play for a while, and then quit!), spending $100 on an SSD will probably be pretty modest compared to what the games cost.
Yah, as i said, i dont know anyone who would be happy with 240GB ;P
The choice pretty much comes down to:
240GB SSD 120GB SSD+1TB HDD
for the same price.
I have a 120gb and a 180gb and have about 40% free space on both. I also have a 1tbb hdd, but i have no games installed on it.
I honestly believe people are just lazy and keep a ton of games on their systems that they simply don't play and wont play, but keep deluding themselves that they will pick it up again. I talked to a guy on a different forum who went through and checked his steam after we got into in argument over the SSD vs HDD debate, and he had about 15 games that he hadn't touched in over a year. Just sittin there wasting space. Was something like 80gigs of crap he hadnt touched in a year. He tried to pull the "i have a shitty connection and redownloading it would take a long time so i keep it because i *might* play it" argument. Which again, i think unless you live in a country that has ridiculous per month data caps, even with a 3 or 4meg internet connection, you could let the game download overnight while you're sleeping and play it within a day if you really get that large of an itch.
I think if people really sat down and were realistic about the games they play or might play, they could uninstall 60-70% of the games they have installed.
Just for points of reference, i have over 20 games installed, several of them large, like BF4 and TW3, FFXIV. And im using around 87gb on the 120 (including windows and other programs), and about 135 on the 180gb SSD (which is all steam games). Some of those games i haven't touched in 2-3 months (usually im waiting on patches to make changes im looking forward to, like with Diablo 3).
Sotorage has other usese than just storing games. In RL OS+games are pretty much only thing that profits from SSD (for average/normal user).
I have a 120gb and a 180gb and have about 40% free space on both. I also have a 1tbb hdd, but i have no games installed on it.
I honestly believe people are just lazy and keep a ton of games on their systems that they simply don't play and wont play, but keep deluding themselves that they will pick it up again. I talked to a guy on a different forum who went through and checked his steam after we got into in argument over the SSD vs HDD debate, and he had about 15 games that he hadn't touched in over a year. Just sittin there wasting space. Was something like 80gigs of crap he hadnt touched in a year. He tried to pull the "i have a shitty connection and redownloading it would take a long time so i keep it because i *might* play it" argument. Which again, i think unless you live in a country that has ridiculous per month data caps, even with a 3 or 4meg internet connection, you could let the game download overnight while you're sleeping and play it within a day if you really get that large of an itch.
I think if people really sat down and were realistic about the games they play or might play, they could uninstall 60-70% of the games they have installed.
Just for points of reference, i have over 20 games installed, several of them large, like BF4 and TW3, FFXIV. And im using around 87gb on the 120 (including windows and other programs), and about 135 on the 180gb SSD (which is all steam games). Some of those games i haven't touched in 2-3 months (usually im waiting on patches to make changes im looking forward to, like with Diablo 3).
Sotorage has other usese than just storing games. In RL OS+games are pretty much only thing that profits from SSD (for average/normal user).
HDD beats DVDs/USB sticks for storage purposes.
Nobody is arguing any of that. The whole SSD vs HDD debate has fuck and all to do with storing porn or pictures, or movies, or whatever. It has to do with people having enough space for their games and programs. If all you need to do is store stuff thats not programs or games, then there's really no argument. HDD wins hands down.
The only situation i can think of outside of programs/games, is professional or amateur photo/video editors, who need a lot of space, but they also need the speed. In that case, SSD is really the only option unless they wanna sit around thumbing their asses while they wait for stuff to read/write from an HDD.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
For bulk storage of media files, the real question is how much data you have that you want to store. If you have 2 TB that you want to store, then get a hard drive, obviously. If you have 10 GB, that doesn't justify the cost of buying a hard drive, and it's better to just stick it on your SSD.
I've got the new computer and am posting from it now. Some difficulties that I ran into were:
1) The Corsair Carbide 400D case really doesn't have a good way to mount the Fury X fan. The problem is that the case has very large holes for the screws to mount a fan, while the fan comes with very small screws that go right through the holes to mount them. I don't just mean the part that is supposed to screw in, but the entire head of the screw is much smaller than the hole for it. Fortunately, I found some appropriate sized screws that came with my previous computer case.
2) The front fans on the case don't work, or at least, I can't figure out how to make them work. There's no molex connector to plug them into anything, but only a wire connecting them to the top front panel. I'm not sure what that wire is supposed to do, but it doesn't make the fans spin.
3) Windows 10 didn't come with a driver for the ethernet port. If some drivers are initially missing, you go online and get them--except that you can't get online without an ethernet driver. Oops. I had to fire up my laptop, go download the appropriate driver from there, copy it over, and then it worked.
4) To say that the Catalyst Control Center's monitor arrangement portion is buggy is quite the understatement. I'd ask it to change something, and it would--but pretty much uncorrelated with what I asked it to do. It do stuff like put one monitor in portrait and the other two in landscape, while saying they were all in portrait. Or it would rearrange them so as not to be connected, so that the mouse can't move from one monitor to another. I basically had to just change things until it finally gave me what I wanted, which took about an hour or so.
Also, Eyefinity caps the refresh rate at 60 Hz. Maybe it just doesn't like the ultra high resolution or something. So I decided to turn it off, which probably means running games in windowed mode and no FreeSync. I haven't tried playing any games yet.
That the monitor arrangement was so buggy surprises me, as on my previous computer, it worked exactly how you'd hope. Here, it kept giving me DisplayPort link errors and then making random changes to settings. Maybe it doesn't like using quite that much monitor bandwidth.
Quizz thanks for the feedback on how things are coming together. I wonder if the catalyst troubles are with the Fury specifically if it worked well with your previous card.
Could also be the Windows 10 driver - my nVidia has driver issues in Windows 10 that it didn't in Windows 8.1
I've got the new computer and am posting from it now. Some difficulties that I ran into were:
2) The front fans on the case don't work, or at least, I can't figure out how to make them work. There's no molex connector to plug them into anything, but only a wire connecting them to the top front panel. I'm not sure what that wire is supposed to do, but it doesn't make the fans spin.
Not certain for this case, but often fans will come with a single 3 or 4-pin connector that's designed to go on a motherboard fan header rather than a molex.
I've got the new computer and am posting from it now. Some difficulties that I ran into were:
2) The front fans on the case don't work, or at least, I can't figure out how to make them work. There's no molex connector to plug them into anything, but only a wire connecting them to the top front panel. I'm not sure what that wire is supposed to do, but it doesn't make the fans spin.
My take for now is that the Windows 10 driver situation is a disaster. And by a diaster, I mean Vista. Now, the Vista driver situation did get fixed. But it took a while and we're not there yet with Windows 10.
It's not just the "Windows can't find an ethernet driver" that I mentioned above. It seems that there isn't a Windows 10 driver for my gamepad at all. My speakers, meanwhile, are very quiet on max volume--about as loud as the case fans--which are hardly silent, but not unduly loud, either. That's fine for low volume, but not max. The monitor speakers work fine, but they're poor quality, as monitor speakers typically are.
I thought the onboard sound driver might have been the problem, so I went to MSI's web site and downloaded the driver. To install it, the software says it has to uninstall the old drivers, reboot, and then install the new drivers. The problem is that it uninstalls the old drivers, then Windows sees that there is something that doesn't have drivers installed, reinstalls the old drivers before a reboot, and then after the reboot, the driver installation software sees old drivers and says it has to uninstall the old drivers again, reboot again, and then it can install the new drivers. Rinse and repeat until you're ready to strangle Windows for being stupid.
On the bright side, Catalyst Control Center seems to be working fine today. In particular, Eyefinity works completely fine at 144 Hz today. I'm not sure why it didn't work last night. Even rebooting didn't fix it last night, but now it's fine.
It's likely that I merely messed up on installing my front case fans. But all I could find for wires from them was a wire from each fan that joined together and then went and attached to the top front panel. I didn't see a free end to connect to anything, whether molex or anything else. I think there's more or less adequate cooling without the front case fans, as the video card heat does get sent straight out the top of the case. But it would still be nice to get them working.
My take for now is that the Windows 10 driver situation is a disaster. And by a diaster, I mean Vista. Now, the Vista driver situation did get fixed. But it took a while and we're not there yet with Windows 10.
It's not just the "Windows can't find an ethernet driver" that I mentioned above. It seems that there isn't a Windows 10 driver for my gamepad at all. My speakers, meanwhile, are very quiet on max volume--about as loud as the case fans--which are hardly silent, but not unduly loud, either. That's fine for low volume, but not max. The monitor speakers work fine, but they're poor quality, as monitor speakers typically are.
I thought the onboard sound driver might have been the problem, so I went to MSI's web site and downloaded the driver. To install it, the software says it has to uninstall the old drivers, reboot, and then install the new drivers. The problem is that it uninstalls the old drivers, then Windows sees that there is something that doesn't have drivers installed, reinstalls the old drivers before a reboot, and then after the reboot, the driver installation software sees old drivers and says it has to uninstall the old drivers again, reboot again, and then it can install the new drivers. Rinse and repeat until you're ready to strangle Windows for being stupid.
On the bright side, Catalyst Control Center seems to be working fine today. In particular, Eyefinity works completely fine at 144 Hz today. I'm not sure why it didn't work last night. Even rebooting didn't fix it last night, but now it's fine.
It's likely that I merely messed up on installing my front case fans. But all I could find for wires from them was a wire from each fan that joined together and then went and attached to the top front panel. I didn't see a free end to connect to anything, whether molex or anything else. I think there's more or less adequate cooling without the front case fans, as the video card heat does get sent straight out the top of the case. But it would still be nice to get them working.
It honestly sounds closer to Windows Millenium than Vista.
But come on, you must have known that it takes MS at least 6 months to get an OS acceptable. It have happened every time they release an Os (even thogh 7 actually must have been the most stable ever at launch, even 2K was worse.
Ok, this was actually somewhat worse then I even thought it would and I expected bad after hearing enough for my ears to almost fall of from a few buddies that moved to 10 already.
I found an old pair of speakers and plugged them in, and they work fine. They're not that good of speakers--which is why I replaced them 6 years ago even though they still worked--but they do at least work with my new computer and they're a whole lot better than the speakers in my monitor. I don't blame Asus for putting poor quality speakers into the monitor; monitor speakers are a last resort alternative to no sound at all. Perhaps my newer speakers (Logitech S220) just aren't playing nicely with the onboard sound for some reason.
I'm now thinking that I'm going to have to get used to running programs in windowed mode rather than maximizing. For reading a web page, a 27" monitor in portrait mode is just too tall. If 2560 pixels of height is too much, somewhere around 1800 seems right--and is a whole lot more than the 1024 in my old monitor. Still, "you have to decide what you want the computer to do and then it will do it" is a good "problem" to have.
Champions Online doesn't run that well at the settings I was used to, once I scale up the resolution. Still, 4320x2560 is more than 8 times as many pixels as 1280x1024, so that's a whole lot of extra load on the system. I'll have to figure out what settings I like on the new computer.
Sometimes drivers have a different output for headphone versus line level. Headphone output is amplified a bit (and will sound louder).
Running apps Windowed - takes a bit of getting used to, but I agree, a good problem to have. Windows Snap feature drove me insane, I had to turn it off - it tries to make this easier by automatically tiling your apps and pinning them to corners or sides of the screen, but like my web browser: I don't want it taking up exactly 1/3 or 1/2 of the screen, nor do I want another program that I happen to accidentally pin come in and mess up the aspect ratio I had manually set the web browser window to, or for the "pin" studder to hit whenever I drag windows from one monitor to the next. Fortunately, it's a feature that can be easily turned off - some people may like it, and I suppose if you get used to it it may be helpful, but I don't know.
And yeah, the fullscreen windowed thing is pretty much the only reason I haven't jumped on adaptive sync yet.
If you trace the wires around, that molex connnector isn't directly attached to the front fans. It's attached to the top front panel, by where the power button is. But I found it, plugged it on, and now the front fans work. Thanks for helping me track that down.
Perhaps my bigger complaint is that there's basically no documentation for the case. This is pretty much the extent of their documentation:
What I tell people with programming is, it's okay to do something weird, but if you do, you have to document it extensively explaining exactly what you did and why. Needing to plug in a connector that isn't even attached to the fans in order to make the fans work is weird and unintuitive. It's perhaps legitimate for cable management reasons if you explain that it's what you have to do, but Corsair doesn't.
-----
The motherboard BIOS is weird. You can set the memory to 1333 MHz, or you can set it to 2133 MHz or higher, but nothing in between. Also, the BIOS will tell you the memory voltage, but won't let you change it.
Instead, you have to go to MSI's web site to download their MSI Command Center software, which lets you adjust the memory voltage and a bunch of other things from within Windows. As best as I can tell, it doesn't let you adjust the memory clock speed, though. It's quite possible that I just haven't figured out how to adjust the memory clock speed from within Windows, as it would be very, very strange for a motherboard to allow 1333 MHz memory and 2133 MHz or higher, but nothing in between.
To be fair, MSI does ship extensive documentation with their motherboard, including a bunch of stuff about MSI Command Center. And being able to see and adjust stuff within Windows is slick. It will show the clock speed of individual CPU cores, for example. It's not what I was expecting, but it works fine. Maybe it doesn't allow lower clock speeds because it detects that the memory is rated at 2400 MHz.
-----
I've had trouble with some things crashing if you maximize it. I saw Lockett's punt return TD on all three monitors loop through twice, then completely lock up the computer the third time.
Elsword has a weird glitch where one particular font size of text in cutscenes causes the text to float around weirdly and drop my frame rate to about 5 frames per second for a minute or so after the cut scene ends. It can handle all of the 3D rendering at 4320x2560 and a high enough frame rate that I have no idea what it is, but it chokes on simple text of some particular font size at that resolution. So I say it's a bug, not merely insufficient hardware. I'll probably have to mess with resolution options to see what I can use that makes it work.
-----
The BIOS and POST only allow two monitors to turn on, and aren't aware that they're in portrait mode. The monitors show the same thing, rather than one image spread across two monitors. I don't blame MSI, as doing multi-monitor support really isn't the job of a BIOS. But it's annoying to have to move monitors around.
-----
When Windows decides to turn monitors off, it resizes all open windows to be much smaller and sticks them in the top left corner. This is annoying, so I don't let it turn monitors off automatically.
A lot of time RAM speed will be some function of your CPU speed, and you only get to select one of maybe 4 or 5 multipliers, so if you go to OC your CPU, you'll see your RAM speed gets adjusted with that.
Other times, your limited to whatever JEDEC/XMP profiles the DIMMs have in their ROM, and nothing else.
And usually, there is some way to do it, but it's buried in all the arcane random settings that are in the BIOS that it isn't very clear.
If I were you I'd return to windows 7 and see how the setup fares there. That will at the least help you troubleshoot, and I suspect, solve all your problems.
I installed Win 10 as soon as I could, but after a short time, I returned to Win 7, and will now upgrade only when I have too. When DX12 comes into play, or the free offer is running out.
My problems were sound and video. I have an ASUS soundcard, and have always had driver problems with it, but have made it work. In Win 10, I did find a third party driver that worked, but Win 10 insisted on downloading realtek drivers, who kept on messing the system up. I just couldn't get rid of those drivers.
I stream to my plasma via a HDMI, and subscribe to Skygo via VPN. But the Edge browser didn't work for that, and I had to find the Explorer to use. (I use Chrome for streaming Tidal, and Firefox for browsing. Explorer opens up on the Plasma screen and runs video streaming.)
Then after an update, no videos worked. Flash, HTML5 and Silverlight all just froze as soon as they were started.
I rolled back to WIn 7 and am now just waiting for Win 10 to get itself into working order.
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
I've been having some stability issues, and I tracked it to the memory. I think I've now fixed it, but the memory wasn't stable at its rated specifications. I've now got it running at 2133 MHz, 1.5 V, and 12-14-14-35 latency timings, and it passes a stability test, so it should be fine.
Actually, I didn't even try it at the rated speed of 2400 MHz, but I did try it at 2133 MHz, 1.65 V, and looser latency timings than rated (once you adjust for the clock speed difference) and that wasn't stable. At what I've got it running at, it's still nice memory, assuming it's stable. But overrating what the memory can do is a bad thing.
Upon further review, it looks like I haven't gotten it to set the memory to 1.5 V. If I change it to 1.5 V, it says it saved it, but if I reboot, it change it back to 1.65 V. If I set the memory clock speed to 1333 MHz, it is fine with the voltage at 1.5 V, but not at 2133 MHz. It won't save a value of 1.64 V, either, so it's not like it's discovering that I set an unstable voltage and changing it.
A BIOS update did add the option to set memory clock speeds of 1600 MHz and 1866 MHz, among other things. Not sure why a motherboard would ship with a BIOS that didn't offer that, especially for a platform that has been around for so long.
Quizzical. I'm not saying this to be malicious at all. I am glad to see that even people with far more knowledge than me have the same sorts of trouble that I had when working the kinks out of my new system. Hope you get stuff sorted to your liking! I also have been watching this thread and thanks for the progress updates. Just interesting to read even though I got nothing I could honestly add to benefit the thread.
Sometimes memory parameters will get locked to XMP profile settings unless you find the right BIOS switch to unlock them
Finding the option to disable XMP was easy. What was hard was enabling it. That required a BIOS update, as the BIOS that shipped with the motherboard had XMP grayed out. After a BIOS update, I enabled the XMP settings and it's stable, so I'm going to leave it at that. I'm guessing that the instability was caused by some other memory timings having something stupid set by default, but that's just a guess.
I think the real problem with the memory settings is a bug in MSI Control Center. Several of the menus work, but trying to even open two of them causes the program to hang. I don't know if it just doesn't play nicely with Windows 10 or what. MSI probably didn't feel the need to put it in the BIOS because they figured that you'd adjust it through MSI Control Center from inside of Windows.
Quizzical. I'm not saying this to be malicious at all. I am glad to see that even people with far more knowledge than me have the same sorts of trouble that I had when working the kinks out of my new system. Hope you get stuff sorted to your liking! I also have been watching this thread and thanks for the progress updates. Just interesting to read even though I got nothing I could honestly add to benefit the thread.
This is the exact thing that ran through my head when I read the thread. I was actually a bit shocked and surprised because I figured it was always just me, no how matter how much research I put in, that runs into these hurdles. It was very cool that Quizz posted the bumps along with the good. I got to the point where I got sick of building things a few years ago and figured that manufacturer builds would be more solid. My last Acer purchase has shot that idea all to hell. I honestly don't know what I'm going to do for my next build, but this thread really helped put things in perspective.
Even hardware reviews from professionals who review hardware professionally say that this or that didn't work right. They get stuck on trying to make stuff work right, and they have massively more experience with it than I do. Some things, especially the motherboard problems I had, can be dismissed as a simple case of bugs happen.
The trouble with the front case fans was really a problem of a lack of documentation. It's the sort of thing that's fine to do if you document it well, but Corsair didn't. I don't expect that I'll buy another Corsair case if they don't document it any better than that. I understand how failing to document things happens, but that doesn't excuse it.
But the enormous screw holes in the case for the fan mounts are just plain baffling. Large screw holes aren't intrinsically bad, but if you're going to ship a case for which the screws that come with case fans typically won't fit, you'd better ship your own screws with the case. Corsair didn't, and there's no good excuse for that.
Comments
I have a 120gb and a 180gb and have about 40% free space on both. I also have a 1tbb hdd, but i have no games installed on it.
I honestly believe people are just lazy and keep a ton of games on their systems that they simply don't play and wont play, but keep deluding themselves that they will pick it up again. I talked to a guy on a different forum who went through and checked his steam after we got into in argument over the SSD vs HDD debate, and he had about 15 games that he hadn't touched in over a year. Just sittin there wasting space. Was something like 80gigs of crap he hadnt touched in a year. He tried to pull the "i have a shitty connection and redownloading it would take a long time so i keep it because i *might* play it" argument. Which again, i think unless you live in a country that has ridiculous per month data caps, even with a 3 or 4meg internet connection, you could let the game download overnight while you're sleeping and play it within a day if you really get that large of an itch.
I think if people really sat down and were realistic about the games they play or might play, they could uninstall 60-70% of the games they have installed.
Just for points of reference, i have over 20 games installed, several of them large, like BF4 and TW3, FFXIV. And im using around 87gb on the 120 (including windows and other programs), and about 135 on the 180gb SSD (which is all steam games). Some of those games i haven't touched in 2-3 months (usually im waiting on patches to make changes im looking forward to, like with Diablo 3).
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
HDD beats DVDs/USB sticks for storage purposes.
The only situation i can think of outside of programs/games, is professional or amateur photo/video editors, who need a lot of space, but they also need the speed. In that case, SSD is really the only option unless they wanna sit around thumbing their asses while they wait for stuff to read/write from an HDD.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
1) The Corsair Carbide 400D case really doesn't have a good way to mount the Fury X fan. The problem is that the case has very large holes for the screws to mount a fan, while the fan comes with very small screws that go right through the holes to mount them. I don't just mean the part that is supposed to screw in, but the entire head of the screw is much smaller than the hole for it. Fortunately, I found some appropriate sized screws that came with my previous computer case.
2) The front fans on the case don't work, or at least, I can't figure out how to make them work. There's no molex connector to plug them into anything, but only a wire connecting them to the top front panel. I'm not sure what that wire is supposed to do, but it doesn't make the fans spin.
3) Windows 10 didn't come with a driver for the ethernet port. If some drivers are initially missing, you go online and get them--except that you can't get online without an ethernet driver. Oops. I had to fire up my laptop, go download the appropriate driver from there, copy it over, and then it worked.
4) To say that the Catalyst Control Center's monitor arrangement portion is buggy is quite the understatement. I'd ask it to change something, and it would--but pretty much uncorrelated with what I asked it to do. It do stuff like put one monitor in portrait and the other two in landscape, while saying they were all in portrait. Or it would rearrange them so as not to be connected, so that the mouse can't move from one monitor to another. I basically had to just change things until it finally gave me what I wanted, which took about an hour or so.
Also, Eyefinity caps the refresh rate at 60 Hz. Maybe it just doesn't like the ultra high resolution or something. So I decided to turn it off, which probably means running games in windowed mode and no FreeSync. I haven't tried playing any games yet.
That the monitor arrangement was so buggy surprises me, as on my previous computer, it worked exactly how you'd hope. Here, it kept giving me DisplayPort link errors and then making random changes to settings. Maybe it doesn't like using quite that much monitor bandwidth.
Not certain for this case, but often fans will come with a single 3 or 4-pin connector that's designed to go on a motherboard fan header rather than a molex.
I think that wire is used to switch the fan leds on and off.
It's not just the "Windows can't find an ethernet driver" that I mentioned above. It seems that there isn't a Windows 10 driver for my gamepad at all. My speakers, meanwhile, are very quiet on max volume--about as loud as the case fans--which are hardly silent, but not unduly loud, either. That's fine for low volume, but not max. The monitor speakers work fine, but they're poor quality, as monitor speakers typically are.
I thought the onboard sound driver might have been the problem, so I went to MSI's web site and downloaded the driver. To install it, the software says it has to uninstall the old drivers, reboot, and then install the new drivers. The problem is that it uninstalls the old drivers, then Windows sees that there is something that doesn't have drivers installed, reinstalls the old drivers before a reboot, and then after the reboot, the driver installation software sees old drivers and says it has to uninstall the old drivers again, reboot again, and then it can install the new drivers. Rinse and repeat until you're ready to strangle Windows for being stupid.
On the bright side, Catalyst Control Center seems to be working fine today. In particular, Eyefinity works completely fine at 144 Hz today. I'm not sure why it didn't work last night. Even rebooting didn't fix it last night, but now it's fine.
It's likely that I merely messed up on installing my front case fans. But all I could find for wires from them was a wire from each fan that joined together and then went and attached to the top front panel. I didn't see a free end to connect to anything, whether molex or anything else. I think there's more or less adequate cooling without the front case fans, as the video card heat does get sent straight out the top of the case. But it would still be nice to get them working.
But come on, you must have known that it takes MS at least 6 months to get an OS acceptable. It have happened every time they release an Os (even thogh 7 actually must have been the most stable ever at launch, even 2K was worse.
Ok, this was actually somewhat worse then I even thought it would and I expected bad after hearing enough for my ears to almost fall of from a few buddies that moved to 10 already.
And no, I don't think it is the case....
I'm now thinking that I'm going to have to get used to running programs in windowed mode rather than maximizing. For reading a web page, a 27" monitor in portrait mode is just too tall. If 2560 pixels of height is too much, somewhere around 1800 seems right--and is a whole lot more than the 1024 in my old monitor. Still, "you have to decide what you want the computer to do and then it will do it" is a good "problem" to have.
Champions Online doesn't run that well at the settings I was used to, once I scale up the resolution. Still, 4320x2560 is more than 8 times as many pixels as 1280x1024, so that's a whole lot of extra load on the system. I'll have to figure out what settings I like on the new computer.
Running apps Windowed - takes a bit of getting used to, but I agree, a good problem to have. Windows Snap feature drove me insane, I had to turn it off - it tries to make this easier by automatically tiling your apps and pinning them to corners or sides of the screen, but like my web browser: I don't want it taking up exactly 1/3 or 1/2 of the screen, nor do I want another program that I happen to accidentally pin come in and mess up the aspect ratio I had manually set the web browser window to, or for the "pin" studder to hit whenever I drag windows from one monitor to the next. Fortunately, it's a feature that can be easily turned off - some people may like it, and I suppose if you get used to it it may be helpful, but I don't know.
And yeah, the fullscreen windowed thing is pretty much the only reason I haven't jumped on adaptive sync yet.
http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=99194
You aren't the only one with issues with the front fans. This contains some possible solutions.
Perhaps my bigger complaint is that there's basically no documentation for the case. This is pretty much the extent of their documentation:
http://www.corsair.com/~/media/Corsair/download-files/manuals/49-000048_revAA_400R_QSG.pdf
What I tell people with programming is, it's okay to do something weird, but if you do, you have to document it extensively explaining exactly what you did and why. Needing to plug in a connector that isn't even attached to the fans in order to make the fans work is weird and unintuitive. It's perhaps legitimate for cable management reasons if you explain that it's what you have to do, but Corsair doesn't.
-----
The motherboard BIOS is weird. You can set the memory to 1333 MHz, or you can set it to 2133 MHz or higher, but nothing in between. Also, the BIOS will tell you the memory voltage, but won't let you change it.
Instead, you have to go to MSI's web site to download their MSI Command Center software, which lets you adjust the memory voltage and a bunch of other things from within Windows. As best as I can tell, it doesn't let you adjust the memory clock speed, though. It's quite possible that I just haven't figured out how to adjust the memory clock speed from within Windows, as it would be very, very strange for a motherboard to allow 1333 MHz memory and 2133 MHz or higher, but nothing in between.
To be fair, MSI does ship extensive documentation with their motherboard, including a bunch of stuff about MSI Command Center. And being able to see and adjust stuff within Windows is slick. It will show the clock speed of individual CPU cores, for example. It's not what I was expecting, but it works fine. Maybe it doesn't allow lower clock speeds because it detects that the memory is rated at 2400 MHz.
-----
I've had trouble with some things crashing if you maximize it. I saw Lockett's punt return TD on all three monitors loop through twice, then completely lock up the computer the third time.
Elsword has a weird glitch where one particular font size of text in cutscenes causes the text to float around weirdly and drop my frame rate to about 5 frames per second for a minute or so after the cut scene ends. It can handle all of the 3D rendering at 4320x2560 and a high enough frame rate that I have no idea what it is, but it chokes on simple text of some particular font size at that resolution. So I say it's a bug, not merely insufficient hardware. I'll probably have to mess with resolution options to see what I can use that makes it work.
-----
The BIOS and POST only allow two monitors to turn on, and aren't aware that they're in portrait mode. The monitors show the same thing, rather than one image spread across two monitors. I don't blame MSI, as doing multi-monitor support really isn't the job of a BIOS. But it's annoying to have to move monitors around.
-----
When Windows decides to turn monitors off, it resizes all open windows to be much smaller and sticks them in the top left corner. This is annoying, so I don't let it turn monitors off automatically.
Other times, your limited to whatever JEDEC/XMP profiles the DIMMs have in their ROM, and nothing else.
And usually, there is some way to do it, but it's buried in all the arcane random settings that are in the BIOS that it isn't very clear.
I installed Win 10 as soon as I could, but after a short time, I returned to Win 7, and will now upgrade only when I have too. When DX12 comes into play, or the free offer is running out.
My problems were sound and video. I have an ASUS soundcard, and have always had driver problems with it, but have made it work. In Win 10, I did find a third party driver that worked, but Win 10 insisted on downloading realtek drivers, who kept on messing the system up. I just couldn't get rid of those drivers.
I stream to my plasma via a HDMI, and subscribe to Skygo via VPN. But the Edge browser didn't work for that, and I had to find the Explorer to use. (I use Chrome for streaming Tidal, and Firefox for browsing. Explorer opens up on the Plasma screen and runs video streaming.)
Then after an update, no videos worked. Flash, HTML5 and Silverlight all just froze as soon as they were started.
I rolled back to WIn 7 and am now just waiting for Win 10 to get itself into working order.
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
Actually, I didn't even try it at the rated speed of 2400 MHz, but I did try it at 2133 MHz, 1.65 V, and looser latency timings than rated (once you adjust for the clock speed difference) and that wasn't stable. At what I've got it running at, it's still nice memory, assuming it's stable. But overrating what the memory can do is a bad thing.
A BIOS update did add the option to set memory clock speeds of 1600 MHz and 1866 MHz, among other things. Not sure why a motherboard would ship with a BIOS that didn't offer that, especially for a platform that has been around for so long.
I think the real problem with the memory settings is a bug in MSI Control Center. Several of the menus work, but trying to even open two of them causes the program to hang. I don't know if it just doesn't play nicely with Windows 10 or what. MSI probably didn't feel the need to put it in the BIOS because they figured that you'd adjust it through MSI Control Center from inside of Windows.
Even hardware reviews from professionals who review hardware professionally say that this or that didn't work right. They get stuck on trying to make stuff work right, and they have massively more experience with it than I do. Some things, especially the motherboard problems I had, can be dismissed as a simple case of bugs happen.
The trouble with the front case fans was really a problem of a lack of documentation. It's the sort of thing that's fine to do if you document it well, but Corsair didn't. I don't expect that I'll buy another Corsair case if they don't document it any better than that. I understand how failing to document things happens, but that doesn't excuse it.
But the enormous screw holes in the case for the fan mounts are just plain baffling. Large screw holes aren't intrinsically bad, but if you're going to ship a case for which the screws that come with case fans typically won't fit, you'd better ship your own screws with the case. Corsair didn't, and there's no good excuse for that.