Tuesday 15 November 2016

omracer's Steambox: The GTX 1050 addtion

This is the final upgrade to this PC, a GTX card. With its performance an ideal mention for my gaming needs and the price of £134.99. This was it, here you can see how it will really perform and boy it did really Good. The video was below:




The Unboxing


Technically, this has already been unboxed which you can see here. But the presentation is nice along with the features and so on and so forth. But the side by side of this combo is a way to go :).

The Steambox and the GTX
The top of the box

The back of the box

The gigabyte card on the top of the box

The Fitting. 


This was actually quite a smooth move and not a struggle compared to the normal desktop. But it was longer than i thought, which doesn't matter since its not too long and the cables are fitting in nicely. It works with the LEDS on the board and on the case as well, a green strip might make it perfect but thats for another day. 

A close up from behind 

its fitted

The lights really work with the card here, except maybe a green strip. 
Then it posted, the drivers installed and temperature was hovering at 29C. Which was pretty good, Geforce 375.70 was installed and them time to test. 

The testing of games.

So, we have a few games to test, with the results making me realise the games i can play in 1080p on HIGH at almost 60FPS means this is the card I wanted. So Lets start, since Afterburner is installed and showing the results. The list is:


  • Rocket League
  • Goat Simulator
  • Rollercoaster Tycoon World
  • Arkham Origins
  • Sonic Lost World
  • Ridge Racer Unbounded

Rocket League:

This was a improvement by far, which the smoothness was very nice and it was really nice to finally play a game in 1080p with over 60fps. High Quality shaders was off to give a little boost. But now i can stream online if I need to. 

The settings used for this. 

Those framerates are pretty good :)

Rollercoaster Tycoon World

This was a suprise, due to the power of the gpu. There was a good framerate of 50fps with full high settings minus AA.  The way the placing of the rides was fast and easy. The terrain looked beautiful and well, its finally amazing to see how it looks. 

The settings used

That Sunrise or sunset though

The rides look good here 

Ridge Racer Unbounded.


This was finally the game could play. RR was smooth, beautiful and no lag unlike the PS3 version which was 30FPS. Don't worry too much about the Antistropy, it doesn't make much difference i feel. 
The rays from that sun

The niceness of the Road, also its been a while since I played RR

Sonic Lost World

This was not much of an improvement in beauty but in framerate, was a nice boost. That full 60fps at 1080p let alone 720p. But it really makes this a good game in its looks, with the Sonic physics. 

The settings used 

How the game looks, ok this was not the ideal part of the level. 

Arkham Origins. 

This was one of those titles I thought would struggle but was smooth at most parts on high settings at 1080p. But if i lowered some settings, there would be some good intense frame boosts. 

The settings used

That view was a decent one 

Goat Simulator. 

This was actually a good sign too, with its smooth 60fps at 1080p. Loading screens did lower the rates but it was still smooth and pretty. I'm not expecting amazing graphics in a game based off a april fools prank. 

The settings 

More of the settings


Well the goat looks good 

PAC-MAN CE 2.

This game was the main reason for the buying of the card. and it performs smooth af. With 60.3FPS constant at 1080p, it might finally make my score nice. I hope to be getting S Ranks on this card soon. 


Conclusion


All in all the 1050 is a solid card and for the budget of £130 it can really stack up to be a contender, sure its not a card for the ULTRA 4K MSSAA Master Race but it still makes the competition fierce and the casual PC gamer happy as a larry. This will make some good streams and videos as well later on in its life. More PC gaming videos will follow i reckon. 

More reviews to be coming soon, especially  with the Christmas period now starting as well.

omracer




Tuesday 8 November 2016

A Celeron N3050 and a GTX 1050 - A Budget Gaming Combo ??

This is to help with a little project i've made on a budget PC and adding a GTX1050 to it. Now before we start this, the GTX 1050 is actually for the Steambox. But since i saw a deal for this N3050m-D3P for £27.54 + Delivery, I ordered that along with a Case which was £55 in total from Aria.
The GPU was £134.99 from Scan Including delivery. The video with tests except a benchmark is below:




The Build. 


This was a nice project, with using spare parts along with the purchases, which means which ones were used, well it was: 

  • N3050M-D3P N3050 Micro-ATX Motherboard
  • CiT F3 Micro ATX Case
  • 500GB 2.5" HGST Drive 
  • 500W PSU Non 80 Plus 
  • 4GB Crucial Ballastix (borrowed from work) Normally its 2GB Kingston
It was not too bad but I didn't clean the build, but this is not a main pc do i'm not going to make the effort, But I did have a problem with the original 2 sticks of ram I had, one was dead so it was 2GB, but the Ballistix worked fine. It did take a while to boot up and install due to the hard drive, If i was going to have a use for this PC or sell someone a N3050 spec, it would have an SSD. End of.

Running this home with me

The case and motherboard

a look at the n3050m-d3p

A look inside the case

The build before the 1050


The 1050 Arrives. 


In all its glory it arrived. The Red eye with the OC and features shown and Nvidia's Mark all over. The design of the box is pretty aggressive as a GTX should feel. Features and details aplenty too. 

The Front

The bottom

The back

The card inside
The DVD which has XP drivers on it too


Then we look at the card, smaller than i was worried it was going to be, with beautiful blades, a nice grill and some nice designs to go with it, it deserved a photoshoot of its own.

Looking good

The connections

The back of the card

Looking at that typcial GPU view

The Fitting and setup in the build. 

Well this was a bit more complex but that was due to cables in the way, the PSU ones anyway, but it was the length of the mATX board and no PCI-E 6pin needed which is a nice touch. Then it was getting it to post, which it did first time, the fans weren't spinning on the GPU but that was a design of its own, not a fault. 

Inside the case

How the ports look

That fan though

The cables stretching over

Add caption


Then it was the Windows drivers to install, which took ages but worked fine. Also it was still using the iGPU which i had to turn off in the BIOS to get that GTX to fully be used. Then it was afterburner to setup. That CPU Usage was a heck of a lot too, same with the HDD. 

Installing afterburner to show the usage


The Testing:

(05/03/2017) For a Change, I decided to do a Benchmark of the PC with a Different HDD and this was the results.

PassMark Rating





Then, I tested 3 games in the video, since 2 were too awful to even bother with, but the list is: 
  • PAC-MAN Championship Edition 2 - Playable if scaled down
  • Rocket League - Playable
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon World - Laggy on high settings
  • Goat Simulator  - Didn't load
  • Ridge Racer Unbounded - a Disaster

Below is the settings and quality shown in each game. 

The menu has more FPS than the HD 530 can give out on its own in my steambox

You do see lag in tutorials

The settings for RCTW

It does look beautiful though 

A favourite lightweight game, Rocket League

It can do 60fps if tweaked properly



Conclusion


This combo is not an ideal one but if your on a really tight budget then it can work for £220 if you use decent RAM, PSU and a SSD. The CPU is a huge bottleneck so streaming or recording this is a no go, as the delay in audio and video showed. Also 4GB of DDR3 might not of been enough/ 
Also this can handle streaming if you have a 2mbps upload and use the x264 preset of ultrafast as with this PS4 capture test








Soon i'll have the 1050 really put to the test, inside that steambox.

omracer