Building a computer? Need advice/suggestions? Come here!

[Warsaw]

e: warsaw posting too fast.

I have no life...actually I do, but I'm ignoring it at the moment.

On a side note, maybe I am just not experiencing these controversies. My Computer has 1200p, my Laptop has 1080p, TV has 1080p and my smartphone has 720p. Pretty much all standard.

The size ratio and resolution issues have impacted laptops more than anything else, since the displays are integrated. Sure, you could always get 1920x1200 or 1920x1080, but these are generally regarded as premium options and were so even on laptops 17" and up until fairly recently. Even then, you still paid for it. It's the mainstream end of the spectrum that really got the shaft. My laptop from 2005 has a 14", 1440x900 16:10 screen, standard. Even today, a 14" or 15" laptop comes with a 1366x788 16:9 screen as standard. This is unacceptable, and it's not like consumers had a choice or a chance to influence company decisions (I love broken economics) because the entire industry went that way except Apple, but Apple's 13" screen was 1280x800, so it wasn't not really any better.

[Patrickssj6]

Technology pushes technology.

This is of course true but one should not make things appear that simple since there are lot of factors that go into the equation.

This is also a reason I don't like considering Moore's "law" as a law, it is just an observation in a short time span. What should be a law is, that technology will stop when it meets with human limits. In case of resolution when we reach the point, where our eyes cannot differentiate between resolutions anymore. When harddrive space gets so big we cannot put enough data on it because our lives are to short to view of all of it. When CPUs are that fast that human reaction is the bottleneck. When the DPI of your mouse is so high, the movement of a muscle always is too rough for precision.

And I think with resolution we soon will have hit the limit, on an average computer screen (24'? , also a human limitation obviously) there is more potential for pixel density right now but I doubt the difference between 4k and 8k will have any significance. To be able to use more screen space you would have to make everything smaller until you cannot read text anymore (another human limitation). On a TV this is obviously another story because of the screen size / pixel density.

This is a topic where we have a lot knowledge of / daily practice that is why it is hard to debate but if you take a look at other technology branches where there are similar discussions (which are far worse tbh, this here is pretty factual) you will find these human limitation much faster. Can you see the difference between a 16MP or 36MP picture printed out? Can you see if the picture was taken with a 16-28 Nikon 2.8 ($2800) or a 18-105mm 3.5 ($150) lens? Can you hear if an electric guitar was recorded on a solid state amp or a valve amp? For you this seems a small difference but people make a HUGE deal of it (and pay a lot of $$$). Would you pay 10 times the money for a guitar amplifier, something you can barely hear the difference? I did just because of the "bigger is better" mentality :P

I just brought these examples up because I think these topics can be very well compared to computer technology.

The size ratio and resolution issues have impacted laptops more than anything else, since the displays are integrated. Sure, you could always get 1920x1200 or 1920x1080, but these are generally regarded as premium options and were so even on laptops 17" and up until fairly recently. Even then, you still paid for it. It's the mainstream end of the spectrum that really got the shaft. My laptop from 2005 has a 14", 1440x900 16:10 screen, standard. Even today, a 14" or 15" laptop comes with a 1366x788 16:9 screen as standard. This is unacceptable, and it's not like consumers had a choice or a chance to influence company decisions (I love broken economics) because the entire industry went that way except Apple, but Apple's 13" screen was 1280x800, so it wasn't not really any better.

Hmm well it is difficult to say where the diversity comes from, maybe it is just a time where companies compete with form factors until it it balances out and a standard is established? Or it is the gfx card which is not very powerful in netbooks or it is like I said, you don't see any difference or screen space would be too big / items too small. Do people even care? Would you care if you don't know the individual screen resolutions? Progress comes with the need of improvement. Laptops are either too heavy, too slow, too large or battery life too short but I never heard people saying, "the screen resolution could be a lot higher".

There are also people like my dad who do not the best eyesight and turn down resolution to be able to see text on screen.

[Warsaw]

I would notice not being able to have as many windows up or having to scroll more. My sister noticed these things when she went from her 14" with the 144x900 resolution to a Lenovo U410 with the garbage resolution, and she's not a tech savvy individual like we are. Most people don't really know about pixels, but they do think a larger screen means you should have more work-space. Unfortunately for them, it doesn't work that way.

It's a shame DPI-scaling isn't very well implemented, because your dad having to turn down the resolution to read the text is a sad state of affairs for computing.

[Patrickssj6]

Being able to change DPI while keeping the UI size at a given resolution (and being able to change that as well of corse) would be brilliant idea!

[Dwood]

Being able to change DPI while keeping the UI size at a given resolution (and being able to change that as well of corse) would be brilliant idea!

It certainly is. Those are the kinds of features we need in computer displays, so our ui can actually scale with increasing pixel density. It sounds like the concepts of vectors. Though, the os or graphics drivers would need to know either the dimensions of the display or the pixel density as well. That way, size could theoretically stay the same but the overall details could be more crisp, too.

Let's look around and see if there are any solutions to that question/problem.

[Warsaw]

Pfff, that's nothing a few questions at set-up can't fix. And a vecor-based UI would be perfect.

[Amit]

Watch this and feel inadequate!

[Cortexian]

As someone with a $5,000 system.

Challenge accepted.

I haven't had TIME to sit down and figure out what customer water-cooling stuff I'm going to put in my system yet... I know it's probably going to total about $800 - $1,000 based on other builds I've seen. The reason I got this case was for the water-cooling upgrade potential it has, would be a shame to never put that to use!

I'm probably going to pickup another used Titan in the future as well, because I already have the triple-SLI bridge and the board can do PCI-E 3.0 x8 on 4 lanes just fine, so I have the bandwidth... But not until I need it, because I'm running BF4 on Ultra at 5760x1200 without any issues, and every other game on max settings at the highest resolutions they can do, and getting solid 60 FPS with adaptive VSYNC.

[Patrickssj6]

You need more screens, just in case you decide to turn your head

[Tnnaas]

If I were going to build a computer within the next 12 months (it could be next month, next December, or somewhere in between ), and it was going to last me at least 5 years after it was built (with various upgrades on the side of course), should I wait until DDR4 memory and the motherboards to support it are manufactured or just go ahead and build with the hardware that's available now?