@DragonLord Just looked this up, where do the motherboard ports go?

Up? o.O

@MichaelFrank @DragonLord I've had a BD drive on my desktop for four years (since early 2011). I have not used it once with a BD disc.

It's just one of those things that sounded nice, but ended up being totally useless.

@Bob Yea, I was thinking about putting one in my HTPC... Then I realised I have a perfectly good PS3.

Worse, it reads/writes DVDs slower than non-BD drives.

@MichaelFrank I actually haven't used BD at all, anywhere in the house.

Have one BD movie I've never watched, and a small pile of BD-R discs I've never used.

@Bob Planned use is to store photos and other bulk data (such as Steam backups) on high-density BD media

A single-layer BD disc stores 25 GB.

@DragonLord Personally, I'd rather just store them on an external HDD :P

any word about the arrival of the Surface Pro 4? @Bob

A single external HDD stores 2-6 TB

@allquixotic No clue :\

It's for an additional layer of redundancy. Optical discs are better than hard drives for archival storage IMO.

@DragonLord Unless you're really concerned about 10+ years, that's largely a non-issue.

I want a SP4 to have the Core M 5th gen processor, with Iris Pro, a 1 TB SSD, and a minimum of 8 GB of RAM. I would tap that.

Or you want a lot of copies, I guess. But for smaller amounts of data I'd prefer USB flash media.

@allquixotic Ya, biggest thing holding me back from the SP3 (apart from the price) was the lack of Iris Pro.

I have an external hard drive (really an internal hard drive in a dock) acting as nearline storage.

cmon, flagship hardware product... least they could've done :(

@DragonLord BD media creates potential reading compat problems too

USB media, you can literally stick into just about any computer when you need it

@Bob how? I thought any BD-R disc will work in any BD drive.

@DragonLord BD drives are relatively rare

BD drives are cheaper than ever.

And ODD drives are pretty much nonexistent in lightweight laptops now

@DragonLord Because no-one wants them.

Oh, sure, get one if you want. It probably won't do any harm.

I've just found them to be rather limited in usefulness.

@allquixotic Given the choice of PowerShell, Perl, Batch/cmd and VBScript, which would you pick? :P

@Bob VBScript.

Wait, sorry, that was my boss typing on my keyboard.

I meant PowerShell.

Hopefully, I'll be able to start building the computer by this summer.

@allquixotic I've been learning PowerShell recently. It's really awesome stuff.

@JourneymanGeek superuser.com/questions/883132/texting-in-multiple-languages

@allquixotic OTOH, I'm limited to PowerShell 2.0 :(

Probably still the best option, but I want the easy file download capabilities of 3.0 :(

@Bob I make videos and i have not used the BD recorder yet :-( and it was slower, which it shouldnt be. I read about too many people whos dye-change BDs did not last much time to use it for archive. The seperate hard disks removed most of the time have been much better for backup data. now including a compare routine to keep seeing if anything is evaporating First :-)

@Psycogeek Ya, organic dyes are mostly useless for archiving.

Also, Get-FileHash of PS 4.0 would be so useful

I still had to have it in there, in the case that there is a dire need for a BD video, but really good HD still make a really great dvd (sd 16x9)

cause pixels is pixels, and starting with a lot more interpolates into less a lot better than starting with barely enough.

@MichaelFrank migrated

Good stuff!

Also, I didn't install an optical drive on my case cause I couldn't find one that matched my case ;p

Any conceivable application for a PC Gamer LPC-level system?

It seems as if $3000 isn't enough for a desktop even though it'll run most games at or near max settings up to 1440p QHD.

...and at or near high settings up to 2160p UHD.

define isn't enough

I'd probably contrast it with two other 'builds' ;p

Isn't enough as in something's telling me I want more

meh

The secret of a good system build is to balance what you want with what you need

There's this part of me that wants to build up to LPC performance with an unlimited budget, potentially exceeding $10,000

The LPC is estimated to cost about $10,000

Do you have an unlimited budget? ;p

Will save up arbitrary amounts of money :P

Have you considered 90/10?

Well, given that a GTX 980 (even at stock clocks) will do at or near max settings on most games up to 1440p, I don't see any practical reason to go any further or bother with SLI, but there's this part of me that's asking for more

Oh SLI's probably fine

a LPC class system has other crazy shit

dual processors?

The ASUS Strix GeForce GTX 980 is a good deal faster than a stock GTX 980

@JourneymanGeek i7-5960X.

0_0

No, not Xeon.

I priced out one the other day

(I'd probably do a dell 7910 build on their site and compare ;p)

@DragonLord Consider that it'd be out-of-date in half a year :P

@JourneymanGeek what is 90/10 ? a $2500 computer that is fast enough for 90% of what you do , and the other 10% will never be fast enough :-)

You're probably better off building a system for half (or less) that price and updating every year or two.

Pretty much

Update parts as needed and sell the old parts.

Resale value of a GTX 980 is pretty good

@Bob: half? Maybe even quarter

Hm. I wonder what Nvidia's new naming convention is going to be...

@JourneymanGeek Yea, was going to edit, but just added "or less" :P

Unless you absolutely need every last bit of perfomance right now, you'd get better value for money just by upgrading often

I think my system's in the 2500 dollar range

Rather than buildig a single machine to last half a decade

Heck, for $10k I'd expect it to last at least a full decade, if not two

Even counting the slightly fancy peripherals.

And that just won't happen

The Alastor build I brought up a while back would come to about $3500 once displays (probably two 1440p monitors) and peripherals are added.

@Bob: the 2500 dollar box will likely do that half decade

Planned service life is about 5 years with incremental upgrades.

and as I'd like to point out. My current gaming rig started off as a dell I pulled from the dumpster ;p

@JourneymanGeek Mine cost something like $1.5k, and I'm going on four years now. It's still running well enough (hardware, anyway... OS is the one with stuffed drivers) that I can't really justify an upgrade now

@Bob Add-Type -ReferencedAssemblies $Assem -TypeDefinition $Source -Language CSharp ...

My recent purchases have all been mobile devices. Because the desktop is sufficient for all my uses.

@allquixotic XD

@Bob and the desktp is more expensive to upgrade

@Bob Planning on updates.

Though, I just found PSCX, which has all I need

By the time I'm selecting parts for Alastor II, a lot will have changed.

But most of those are 'nice to have' rather than 'my computer is too slow'

Calculate how much of the time your cpu is not pinned at 100% and it is the User :-) who isnt fast enough.

(New naming convention for future computers is based on theological demons.)

I'll never run out of greek/roman goddesses ;p

@JourneymanGeek I started with Greek Titans :P

The stream is Theia

Though that's just server naming.

(just so @Bob knows ;p)

@JourneymanGeek dem goddesses

Home computers are... much less interesting

@Bob started with a laptop ;p

@JourneymanGeek I'll have to keep a full list of your names :P

Might make one when I get home.

Lucifer is reserved for an Intel HEDT build (possibly up to the LPC class)

In any case, something like this isn't going to happen anytime soon.

(which amusingly enough was initially named after Alice of Alice in wonderland and also an ex-friend of mine I was really close to)

(Which probably would have changed to a discworld theme I suspect, if I had gone full literary)

my computers are named after a random 6-digit string that (I think) OpenSUSE generated for me as a hostname in ~2006 or so? I just keep incrementing the first digit in the string

o.O

like, if the first one was rm3aly, I'm up to like rm14aly now

I suppose that works for uniqueness...

(Next: computers named with GUIDs. Full MS-style! :P)

note I said IF :P

@allquixotic linux-abcd

Makes me wonder if MS uses GUIDs for their Azure servers

where abcd is some random string of four alphanumeric characters

That's what openSUSE uses these days

See ya in a bit, gotta go home.