Game testers wanted 2015

PC Update Final piece of the puzzle

Over-clocking the Ageing CPU was the final stage required to bring my ageing gaming rig up to 2015 specification.

Original post here: http://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/11/extending-life-of-my-gaming-pc.htmlhttp://mindbendingpuzzles.blogspot.ie/2014/11/extending-life-of-my-gaming-pc.html

Earlier trials had proven my i5-760 had plenty of over-clocking headroom while maintaining stability but that the stock Intel heat-sink was unable to dissipate the additional heat generated. A Zalman CPS10X  heatsink addressed that problem for a modest �26 additional investment.

Zero points for neat cabling but at least the airways are clear.

I had taken  measurements well and fitting the large heatsink posed no real problems although it took a while because I had to remove the motherboard to fit a rear retaining plate. The i5-760 has a factory locked multiplier so over-clocking is a trade-off that requires adjustments to cpu, ram and IMC voltages and timings. I used the utilities that came with my ASUS motherboard to get a ballpark position before manually tweaking. In the end I settled for a rock solid 25% over-clock that keeps the peak CPU temperature below 79�C under severe torture testing and to the mid 60s during actual heavy gaming. My i5 now runs at a nominal 3.6GHz but this isnt directly comparable to a modern 3.6GHz processor because of the older architecture. Nevertheless it should serve me well enough for the next years gaming. 3D Mark Fire-strike score for the final rig is 8,717 which is less than 5% below their modern "High End Gaming PC" benchmark. The rig runs Assassins Creed Unity smoothly as butter in high quality mode with Vsync at 60 frames per second. I got the game free with my GTX 970 graphics card and it looks absolutely gorgeous. It is probably the most beautiful game I have ever seen.

An interesting side story: Modern CPUs vary their internal clock rate and disable cores depending on temperature and load. In order to test over-clocking it is normal  to disable these energy saving features while doing stability and thermal testing. Once I determined that my CPU ran stably  within acceptable temperature limits at 3.6GHz.  I went back into the bios to re-enable these  features in order to avail of the energy saving benefits. On rebooting I was quite surprised to see that the processor was now running at 4.1 GHz rather than 3.6GHz??? It seems that my efforts had also enabled turbo mode which over-clocks the processor when less than half of the four cores are in use. I was worried that this would invalidate my careful stability tests but further torture testing didnt show up any glitches and I decided to leave it as is.

Here for reference is a full list of the before and after in my project to bring a five year old gaming PC up to 2015 standard with a budget of only �400.

Component	Before	After	Cost of Upgrade
Processor	I5-760  2.9GHz /3.3GHz	I5-760 3.6GHz/4.1GHz	�26 for new Heatsink
Ram	4Gb  x 1333MHz	8Gb x 1666MHz	�25 for extra 4Gb
SSD	-	64Gb SSD Cache drive	�39 for SSD �24 for Software
Graphics Card	Radeon HD 5850	Inno3  Nvidia GTX 970	�310
Total Cost of parts			�424

Note 2: For an estimate of US equivalent prices just take the euro figures as US $. Our high sales tax pretty much cancels out the euro dollar exchange rate.

A little over my �400 budget but I should recoup the difference by selling my HD 5850 and the bulk of the investment will still be useful in a new build next year. The GTX 970 should be good for two years at least. I intend to keep using the SSD cache as long as I still use large spinning HDDs. Even the heatsink may be useful on a new motherboard. Only the ram is almost certain to be obsolete.

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Search by Size in Gmail

Now you no longer need to remember search operators to filter Gmail results by size. Gmails advanced search added a new option that lets you restrict results to messages larger or smaller than the specified size. Just click the arrow from the search box, pick "greater than" or "less than", enter the size, choose from "MB", "KB" or "Bytes" and click the search button. You can also add other filters.

"Ever wanted to find that wedding video your uncle shared as an attachment, or see which messages take up the most space in your mailbox? You can now search your emails by size in advanced search without having to memorize search operators like size: and larger:," informs Google.



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Sharp Practice Video on Beasts of War

http://www.beastsofwar.com/sharp-practice/sharp-practice/

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Penumbra Overture Rip Version

Title: Penumbra: Overture Rip Version
Genre: Adventure, Horror
Developer: Frictional Games
Publisher: Got Game Entertainment
Release Date: 8 May 2007
Size: 299 MB Highly Compresse / Single Link
Language: English
Mirrors: PutLocker



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Pes 2013 Full version

Minimum System Requirements
Windows XP SP3, Vista SP2, 7.
Intel Pentium IV 2.4GHz or equivalent processor.
1GB RAM.
8GB free hard disk space.
4x DVD-ROM Drive.
DirectX 9.0c compatible video card.
128MB Pixel Shader 3.0 (NVIDIA GeForce 6200 / ATI Radeon X1300 / Intel HD Graphics 2000/3000). DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card.
DirectX 9.0c or higher (included on Disc). Multiplayer: TCP/IP 192 kbps or higher.
Windows compatible keyboard.
800 x 600 monitor resolution.

Recommended System Requirements
Windows XP SP3, Vista SP2, 7.
Intel Core2 Duo 2.0GHz or equivalent processor.
2GB RAM. 8GB free hard disk space. 8x DVD-ROM Drive.
DirectX 9.0c compatible video card. 512MB Pixel Shader 3.0 (NVIDIA GeForce 7900 or AMD/ATI Radeon HD2400 or better).
DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card.
DirectX 9.0c or higher (included on Disc).
Multiplayer: TCP/IP Broadband Internet connection.
Windows compatible USB Gamepad. 1280 x 720 monitor resolution.




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