Computer upgrades - good deal or nah

[Hellser]

Haha, sweet, good to know that ONE thing I bought five years ago would be considered overkill even by todays' standards... :')

A good powersupply is both overkill and long lasting.

[Kostov]

What's with people getting power supplies that have 200% of the wattage they will ever use? Put your money into an SSD or something, man.

[edward850]

Leg room. And no component stress, ensuring longevity.

[Kostov]

So then what do you do about the reduced effiency from more than enough wattage (said Linus), if you're never going to use that? Leg room is understandable though.

[edward850]

What reduced efficiency? Electricity doesn't leak, and modern ATX power supplies are designed to only supply what's needed (as with most modern power supplies).

[Kostov]

Ah. I see. I heard about it from this video.

[edward850]

That doesn't make a lot of sense, considering when you switch your PC off, the power supply is still running, providing power to one key component: Your CMOS.
And no way is it going to be spending 500 watts keeping the CMOS.
It'll also run USB, LAN (Wake on), and some sound cards for line-in pass through.

[Kostov]

While we're on this subject, I wonder if there's anything wrong I'm doing with my PC before I sleep. I turn it off, then I wait for the fans to stop spinning, then I turn off the power supply and wait for the graphics card light to turn off. Then I turn off the power strip.

[edward850]

Indeterminate. Cold booting your PC every day can ware out the components and crack solder joints faster, but that largely depends on the climate, and sometimes that just happens on its own. In servicing, going from spring to summer will always guarantee a slew of suddenly dead motherboards and other hardware components, due to the sudden shift in temperature.

Incidentally, it happens far less to the people who just leave their PCs fully on all the time.
This obviously has its own list of problems, though, such as heat management and maintenance.

[Hellser]

Problems start when you start up your computer. However, some operating systems needs to restart once in a while (like Windows. Sure, I can run my computer for 30 days straight, I've done it before. But that's when I notice my system getting sloggy).

[Nash]

Oh wow I never paid much thought into this; I've been cold-booting every computer I've ever owned for close to 30 years...

[Hellser]

Generally you shouldn't worry too much. It's not like we're running servers.

[DaMan]

80+ PSUs renderers the efficiency argument moot. The difference is 3% (click what is to get the chart).

[Nash]

Holy crap I am so upset right now. I didn't choose to get these set of upgrades because I detected that something in my system was dying. As far as I was concerned, everything was perfectly functional and normal.

Today my GTX 460 showed pixel artifacts in the BIOS utility but not in Windows. Speaking of which, I can't start Windows anymore unless I DriverSweep my nvidia stuff out of the system. I'm currently posting without a GPU driver installed. Strange that artifacts don't appear here though...

So anyway the part that upsets me is OF COURSE my GPU starts to show signs of failure just as I've ordered a new graphics card. Now what if I was in a bad financial position and was unable to afford the GTX 960, and then this fucking GPU failure happens? It was going to happen either way, I just got lucky that I felt like buying a new graphics card and I could afford it!?

Oh and OF COURSE this had to happen just as my previous post was about not realizing that cold-boots contribute to hardware failure???? Fuck are graphics cards meant to die all the time? Do they have some kind of evil "use by" date that I don't know about? This GTX 460 costed me a bomb back then (almost 4 digits)... I'm not a hardcore gamer, I don't overclock or force grafic's mods in my games... I treat it with care... yet it STILL decides to malfunction? ARGH!

Sorry for the rant haha

[GooberMan]

I killed a GPU thanks to gravity. Fuckers are so overloaded with fans and heatsinks these days that the PCIe slots can't support them properly.