duncan said:

Interesting notion which I didn't realise (the binning)...

Guess I should stop putting as much faith as I do in my two drives (one, an old WD Mybook has about 25k hours on the clock, so is probably nudging close to its MTBF anyway, albeit it still passes SMART with flying colours)

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If you didn't know this is done with almost everything, from CPUs to general flash memory. The lower the price the lower the binning of the parts used in a product (generally). It isn't a perfect way of telling quality though, as a CPU that is lower binned is generally just set to a lower clock speed and you won't ever really discover the "flaw" that the manufacture found in the chip.
 
HDDs and SSDs are the only place the consumer should really worry about since a lower quality drive or part could cause data to be lost.
 
As for drives that have been tooting along for a very long time this might be a good starting point: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

Awwwwwwwwwww yeah. Compoopter upgrades.
 

Not sure if im asking this in the right forum (since it's Headfi), but I'll ask anyways. I'm looking at 3 laptops now, but can't really decide which one is the best of 3. Will be using it mostly for school projects and such, and maybe some gaming from time to time. All 3 laptops are around the same price.


FHD laptop with Intel i5 6200U processor, and Intel HD520 graphics, 8gb ram

HD laptop with i5 6200U processor with GT920M gpu, 4gb ram

HD Laptop with i7-6500U processor, AMD R5 M335 gpu, 4gb ram

feedingnation said:

Not sure if im asking this in the right forum (since it's Headfi), but I'll ask anyways. I'm looking at 3 laptops now, but can't really decide which one is the best of 3. Will be using it mostly for school projects and such, and maybe some gaming from time to time. All 3 laptops are around the same price.


FHD laptop with Intel i5 6200U processor, and Intel HD520 graphics, 8gb ram

HD laptop with i5 6200U processor with GT920M gpu, 4gb ram

HD Laptop with i7-6500U processor, AMD R5 M335 gpu, 4gb ram

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Well, first one would be better if you do not play games, because integrated is not enough for fullhd, but it you want to play some games the last one should be better. 

feedingnation said:

Not sure if im asking this in the right forum (since it's Headfi), but I'll ask anyways. I'm looking at 3 laptops now, but can't really decide which one is the best of 3. Will be using it mostly for school projects and such, and maybe some gaming from time to time. All 3 laptops are around the same price.


FHD laptop with Intel i5 6200U processor, and Intel HD520 graphics, 8gb ram

HD laptop with i5 6200U processor with GT920M gpu, 4gb ram

HD Laptop with i7-6500U processor, AMD R5 M335 gpu, 4gb ram

Click to expand...

What kind of gaming? The laptop with the GT920M will have the best GPU performance and a decent CPU, but like no RAM. However, the laptop on integrated will probably do just fine. 
 
I would probably take the laptop with the HD520 and call it a day. Do very casual gaming on it and school work and you will be fine. Just don't ask to much of it and have a desktop for your gaming needs. If you really want to take on gaming on it, go for the laptop with the laptop that you can upgrade the RAM on and the dedicated GPU, the graphics boost is not really there, but because of the lower res screen and slight performance increases, you will do a little better. After you get the laptop, pick up a 8GB kit of RAM and you will be good to go.
 
For GPU horsepower reference:
http://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Radeon-R5-M335.144861.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/NVIDIA-GeForce-920M.138763.0.html
http://www.notebookcheck.net/Intel-HD-Graphics-520.149940.0.html
 
CPU horsepower is irrelevant, in fact the i7 is almost identical to the i5 in performance. No point really in an i7.

Alright, thanks guys

I'll probably go with the third one then, and see if I can get more ram

vxace said:

  The drives that you will get with the external drives are typically a lower binned set. So generally they are not has high quality and not as reliable as the desktop drives. If you plan on storing your life on them, I would not recommend using a pre-built external drive, purchase a normal desktop or laptop drive and a enclosure for it and you will probably end up with a better drive than the ones in the externals. If you are just planning on putting data that you don't care much for, go for the cheaper ones, after all it is data that won't kill you if it is lost.

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I actually didn't think about the desktop drive and enclosures as I do have a few wd blacks I'm slowly transferring to an external. It slipped my mind that portable drives are not as good in quality however I do need something small in size since this is an ultrabook.
 
I decided to buy a samsung t1. I believe it's a msata (or at least some kind of ssd) in an enclosure but it's enough space and portable. I'll keep a backup just in case. Price per GB isn't great but have to pay for ultimate portability.

vxace said:

  Awwwwwwwwwww yeah. Compoopter upgrades.
 

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Nice nice. 
 
I went Skylake instead of Haswell as the ship is kinda sailing on Haswell now. Prices are near normalized now and DDR4 is commonly cheaper than DDR3 somehow (or at least matched). Plus new stuff of course.

bowei006 said:

  Nice nice. 
 
I went Skylake instead of Haswell as the ship is kinda sailing on Haswell now. Prices are near normalized now and DDR4 is commonly cheaper than DDR3 somehow (or at least matched). Plus new stuff of course.

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Yeah, I am surprised at how quickly DDR4 is coming down in price. But Haswell will start moving in the used market (well the older gens including RAM) as they slowly get replaced. I am going to stay on the Haswell ship for a while, as this machine was built before Skylake was released (the original builld of this machine was in June, this is its second or third major revision). My guess is that I won't go to DDR4 for a while... an i5-4690K should hold me out for a while, unless I build a server for heavy ass workloads, then that would be bumped up to a newer architecture.
 
 

rawrster said:

   
I actually didn't think about the desktop drive and enclosures as I do have a few wd blacks I'm slowly transferring to an external. It slipped my mind that portable drives are not as good in quality however I do need something small in size since this is an ultrabook.
 
I decided to buy a samsung t1. I believe it's a msata (or at least some kind of ssd) in an enclosure but it's enough space and portable. I'll keep a backup just in case. Price per GB isn't great but have to pay for ultimate portability.

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That is a really good idea, an SSD as an external for music will allow you to listen on the move without fears of buggering up a hard drive.

Dafuq? was that

Not sure if I'll regret going Haswell-E but the money that was burning that whole in my pocket a few months back wouldn't allow me to wait for Skylake-E...

Sure I've future proofed myself for a couple of years though... (That being said I would never have said that I would migrate from a [vanilla] 4790 to a 5930K within 13 months of initial purchase, so who knows with my whimsical spending! X99 slow boot speed irks me, so that is already a way to justify!)

Boot times on X99 are only marginally slower though... I don't see why that is a concern to anyone, it is only boot time, just don't turn off your computer and you will be fine. You aren't going to win an award or anything for having the fastest boot time, but you will feel the difference in power.

The POST on my new laptop is super...fricking....slow lol.
 
It has one of the fastest laptop PCIE SSDs but the POST and BIOS option time is around 30s before it starts loading OS.

My laptop doesn't restart unless it's installing updates. Sleep mode whoo. That said, that's a pretty slow post time, seems sketchy.

bowei006 said:

 
The POST on my new laptop is super...fricking....slow lol.

It has one of the fastest laptop PCIE SSDs but the POST and BIOS option time is around 30s before it starts loading OS.

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Are there any boot priority settings to change? I've found that sometimes if you set your boot drive as the first drive to boot from (so it doesn't need to check for a USB or optical drive), it speeds things up.