haha I laughed good at this.

[youtube]SpZmH0_1gWQ[/youtube]

All I have to say is the 20 series should be avoided unless you are rich and don't care about price. 

However it is a very important step towards the future of rendering as ray tracing and path tracing is inevitable.  This reminds me of when PhysX was added and the performance was way worse with it on, but given a few generations of development now it just works with little to no perf hit, and I suspect as the technology develops in a generation or two we will see the same thing.

I 100% agree the step needed to happen to progress tech.

I personally think they rushed to way too much. It's not even close to be a basic feature you can use.

My opinion is they should of kept it in house until performance was at least usable and offered a notable visual improvement, which is all looking to be a big flop.  Doing this sort of PR stunts really hurts the company's reputation.

They probably should have waited until the 2070 could have 64 RT cores like the 2080 Ti and the 2080 Ti should have had twice that.  It is pretty clear that they're on the right track to getting real time selective ray tracing, but the tech just isn't quite there yet.

At least on the plus side this just means we should see it happen in less than 10 years, about time really I've been waiting for real time ray tracing in games for 15 years.

a Cyberpower UPS because the power really sucks around here (lots of brown outs in the summer during peak heat usage and during TStorms, so consistent voltage is essential)

Smart move.  When I was in Florida we would get dips all the time and brown outs, I was burning through hard drives from the constant crashing and got a Cyberpower UPS as well.

Yes glad we have that in common I think my old unit lasted so long because of the Cyberpower UPS it had, so I just got a new one for this computer- the only difference is this one has real sine wave output not a simulated sine wave like the last one did.  Did you get the 1500PFCLCD model, Doc?  I have the 1000PFCLCD one, it replaces my old 1000AVRLCD model.  Good thing is we can replace the batteries on these when they die.

All I have to say is the 20 series should be avoided unless you are rich and don't care about price. 

However it is a very important step towards the future of rendering as ray tracing and path tracing is inevitable.  This reminds me of when PhysX was added and the performance was way worse with it on, but given a few generations of development now it just works with little to no perf hit, and I suspect as the technology develops in a generation or two we will see the same thing.

Yes sometimes you have to endure some pain to have progress, but in the end it's worth it.
I have more issues with NVidia data collection policies and these NDA's that seem overly harsh and anticompetitive (Intel does the same stuff) but I still buy their products.
I decided on the 1060 6 GB video card and 16 GB of memory because I was looking at a bunch of benchmarks for 1080P screens that showed that's all you need at that resolution and I wanted to save some money to get a really good NVME SSD hard drive, a higher end motherboard and a good gaming keyboard and good cooling unit.  The one I have now has 4 copper heat pipes on the cpu cooler and 2 copper heat pipes on the gpu and twin fans and the copper pipes keep it so cool that the gpu fan doesn't even run most of the time.  This GPU is so much cooler than my old 8800 GTS 640, I just need to make sure to keep everything dust free because where I live it can get pretty dusty.  I also bought a set of 4 120mm LED case fans that are 83 CFM each so hopefully they wont attract dust lol.  CPU and GPU temps stay been 40C to 60C at peak and the fans dont speed up unless temps get above 60C which has rarely happened so far even though my room stays rather warm around 30C.

I also have a Cyberpower UPS

I personally never bothered with a UPS as my PCs all have survived brown outs and momentary black outs.  It's mainly because I run larger end of PSU wattage which have larger caps and because in Aus we have 240v mains the threshold on brown outs is much higher as PSUs can run as low as about 90v and also the 240v means the caps have a higher stored energy so the last longer during power flickering in and out.   Worst I get is about 1sec of power out and the PC just hard locks up and recovers after several secs after power resumes, never crashes it though, just a stalling of some kind. Weird really.


Of course this doesn't help if the power goes out completely but it's always happen at odd times when the PC is not used and not that often.  But brownouts and flickering on/off is quite often.   Only had the power lost while the PC was on maybe 4 times in 10 years.

Hey guys with a Cyberpower UPS should I turn it off when my computer is off?  I leave my computer running 16 hours a day and it shuts off automatically for 8 hours (while I'm sleeping), should I also power off the UPS or leave it on when the computer is off?

HarbingerDawn, what is the current status of your old computer, and what would you recommend for every pc gamer?
I also saw you built two other computers, what were their specs, and what were they meant for? Also, why are you still using windows 7?

I just picked up one of these used on ebay from China.

https://www.asus.com/au/Sound-Cards/ROG_Xonar_Phoebus/

There was a few of these and Xonar essence cards available locally and a bit cheaper on the ebay owned spin off called gumtree but I never have any luck with the sellers on there, they all act difficult and won't sell you stuff. I tried about 4 different sellers with no luck so I was pretty happy for one of these to finally come up on ebay and it wasn't too much given their resell value being very high.

This is going into my daily PC so will be interesting to see how the old games fair which is mainly why I got it.

It's supposed to be pretty good!  It's hard to find people nowadays who use sound cards or have optical drives for that matter but I have both lol.

I dont like adding a lot of external devices even though my build has 10 USB ports (9 are USB3.1, 3 of those are USB3.1Gen2) and support for up to 15 USB ports, right now I only have a keyboard and mouse plugged in.  Then there are the three connections for my 7.1 Creative speaker system and one for the mic and two for my two DVI monitors and one for my internet of course.

yeah an optical drive is a must for me and it annoys me that all the good PC cases now have no bays for optical drives.

I had been out of sound cards since 2004 or so when briefly I switched to XP from win 2k and lost all EAX support with any creative cards going forward.  I had another go at this year but still couldn't get EAX to work on any creative cards until I found out about xonar cards which worked out of the box.

So how I got the Phoebus card on it's way I am pretty excited as it's considered one of the top cards for win 7 era and also the last to support EAX and also was the only one with a new chip set and new EAX implementations so as I read many people like this card. So its the first of a kind and last at the same time regarding EAX at a hardware level.

I prefer 2.1 system the most and is what I have and mine have been awesome, way better than headphones I have used

I had the Audigy 2 ZS with XP before I did this new build and I was wondering what happened to EAX since it did work in the beginning and then went kaput!

This card I have now is there anyway to get EAX with it- it is the RX 7.1. Otherwise I might get that card you have from Amazon.