PC Master Race

Hey y'all, I bought a x4x4x4x4 4 slots M.2 PCIe card foolishly thinking that if it fits in the slot, it would surely work. In the end, I got 2 of the 4 SSDs working on my old AM4 X470 chipset. I'm coming to you for advice what the cheapest way to get to use this would be. I've noticed that a lot of CPUs have a PCIe lane limitation of 28, just short of what I need (I'd like to run the SSDs but also a x16 GPU). I'm not too keen to buy a threadripper setup for this occasion...

Cheers!

This poor laptop drive was serving me well as a jank storage pool on my Nas for almost 8 years now and today it died.

Edit: Coasters and fridge magnets acquired

I'm thinking of upgrading my old 75hz qhd monitor for the Alienware oled 4k 240hz AW3225QF. However, I'm using an RTX3070 right now & don't want to upgrade until the release of the 5070. Does anyone have the Alienware already who can speak to how it looks with games running at qhd resolutions on the 4k screen?

For something that I had to import from Germany because the RGB version wasn't being sold in the states at the time and was supposedly supposed to die within <2 years because the RGB made it run too hot, it lasted 5 years and 72 TBs written before a random power outage took it down. Even then, it was still able to allow me to dd it to another drive without issue

RIP :(

I considered building PCs a bit of a hobby from about 2001 up until 2012. Life happened, priorities changed, all of that fun stuff. So, after a really long hiatus and a good 3 years with a PS5 to keep me content gaming wise, I decided it was time to jump back in with the big boys and get something a little more powerful.

I spent the better part of two weeks researching and reading, going through build iterations on PC Part Picker. Finally, I settled on a build in the $2,500 range. I was going to need everything though, short of a monitor --although that will eventually come after I finish redoing my gaming room. For now, I'm using my 55" Samsung S95B QD-OLED TV and it's doing nicely but I do worry about burn-in. Right now I'm eyeing the Alienware AW3225QF monitor to grab here in a couple of months, maybe catch it on sale. I can wait this one out honestly.

The STEALTH build

• Antec 1 FT Performance Full Tower Case
• Seasonic Vertex PX-1000 80+ Platinum 1000W PSU
• Asus TUF Gaming X670E-Plus WiFi Motherboard
• AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D 8-Core CPU
• PNY Verto GeForce RTX 4080 Super 16GB
• 32GB G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 RAM
• Western Digital Black SN850X 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD
• Arctic Liquid Freezer III 280 AIO Cooler
• Logitech G515 TKL Wireless Keyboard & Logitech G502X Wireless Mouse

I tried to avoid RGB lighting as much as I possibly could, but it seems that it's an almost impossible task these days. Fortunately, it's not too gawdy and the only lights are on the memory, a small spot on the mobo and then the KB & Mouse. The latter two are beneficial though so they don't bother me at all.

The only thing I'm really having trouble with is figuring out all of the new performance and overclocking features of modern hardware. Man has A LOT changed. It used to be so much simpler just tweaking voltage, front side bus speed and multipliers. It feels like you practically have to have a degree to be able to maximize performance on these new PCs! If anyone has any suggestions or guides for my specific setup that would be awesome. I've been looking around now that everything is assembled, and Windows 11 is installed.

https://ibb.co/3c5cnZh https://ibb.co/2SgndgG

I am going to upgrade my 8gb desktop pc. I have 2 free slots and 2 slots with 2x4gb 2400Mhz. I will buy 2x8gb with 3600 MHz. Should I put them together and have 24gb at 2400Mhz or should I remove the 2x4 in favor of the 3600Mhz.

I'm asking because I read that when you have 2 different ram speeds it will default to the lower one.

Edit: it's for gaming and I have a Ryzen 3 1200 with a b350m as a motherboard

So over the weekend me and the lads decided to play Mindustry (i think im addicted). Ive never been a fan of RTS games but Honestly been loads of fun. I usually play on the Ybox which is what i called by LAN rig. but sadly the motherboard kicked the bucket (it was a xeon 2697v3 14 core and a X99 machinist motherboard which ran gentoo). so i dug around in the closet to hopefully salvage game night and found 'yeee old reliable', so the cool part is mindustry has really low system requirements

Linux Minimum: Memory: 1 GB RAM Graphics: Anything with OpenGL 2.0 Support Storage: 200 MB available space

So me and the Bois played just like normal, except i was running 10+ year old hardware and you really couldnt tell the difference the system specs for the "shitboxPro" as named

Intel core 2 duo E7500 AMD RX 570 2Gb of ddr2 RAM Running Debian 12 with the Mate Desktop (i was originally going to install Gentoo on it but didn't want to spend 3 weeks compiling LMAO)

it kinda blows my mind that this new of a game, granted its writ-in JavaScript and uses so little ram and runs on grandmas pacemaker. it kinda leaves me wondering what happened to the gaming industry? It went from excellent games that sipped ram to storage queued for a 200G update (im looking at you COD war zone). I also want to express my gratitude Towards Debian and Linux as a whole, this computer cannot run windows 10. I live booted just to see the slideshow that was windows 10 on 2GB of ram, and Debian ran really smooth. also shout out to the Dev for a great game that's insanely optimized!

I would love to hear about other experiences you have had with legacy hardware and use cases!

Thanks for reading and have a good one!

--added note, my apologize for the bad punctuation and such i never was good at english in primary LMAO

Recently I had a hiccup with my main SSD drive. I have a dual boot Win/Kubuntu setup. Linux was crashing hard and Windows was giving me blue screens. After I resolved the issue (cooling/loose connection, idk) my Linux was doing fine, but Windows was giving me blue screens. I think it was doing an update when it crashed.

After a couple of hours messing with my recovery USB and booting in safe mode, I was able to fix the bad update and reboot normally.

I tried to open Firefox and it couldn't find the executable. Looking into the Program Files Mozilla folder, I found the .exe files had been renamed to .exe.sig??????

Then looking for the Edge browser, I suddenly found out that Microsoft Copilot AI had been installed!?!?!?!?!?!?

What the actual fuck???

I never wanted that trash on my PC! That's one of the reasons out of the many that I didn't want to use Windows 11.

And it's a weird fucking coincidence that Firefox was fucked. I couldn't even rename the files to .exe because they wouldn't execute. Looks like they were encrypted or some shit? What the fuck is Microsoft pulling?

It's a happy coincidence because you know what? I've been thinking about going full Linux install since all my games and Windows applications work with Steam, Proton and Bottles now.

I really don't see any fucking reason to keep using Windows. Fuck this shit and fuck Microsoft.

Edit: Oh and that's on top of all the other bullshit like forcing users to create a MS account to install Windows 10 now and having to jump through hoops to have an offline installation. And also defaulting to having all your user folder documents into their fucking One Drive cloud.

I'm done.

My current trackball has lost its smoothness and feels "sticky" no matter how well, or often I clean it.

So, I'm looking for a trackball (thumb controlled) with the following features:

• Bluetooth wireless with support for at least two connections (for laptop and PC media station).
• Uses AA or AAA batteries.
• Uses bearings.
• Set at a tilt/ergo angle.
• Repairability is also important, but not a total dealbreaker if the mouse is high-enough quality.

So far, most that I've found will lack one of those features, but I'd really like to have all of them, if possible.

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who offered tips on getting my current trackball working better. Today, trying to roll the ball left became very difficult, like it didn't want to move. I took it out, looked at the little white ball (bearing?) supports that the ball should be rolling on, and noticed that the left-most one was almost pushed in, and flush with the cup that the ball sits in. The other two are higher up, so the ball can "float" on those, but not this other one. The manufacturer is already sending a replacement mouse, so it should work better, but I'd still like to find my unicorn 😄

Hello everyone, I have a 6600XT and I am just recently approaching these technologies. Everything I read on the web and on yt seems to contradict itself.

This is what I understand:

• FSR (and Super res): it's upscaling and you can use it to make a game smoother (so technically I could go from 30 to 60 fps)?
• AFMF is a frame generator so technically it's a win-more-condition, if I have 60 fps I can do better, but it doesn't improve something that isn't already fluid.

That said beyond the fact that FSR 2 (on Baldur's Gate 3 for example) makes everything a bit grainy and blurry compared to native resolution, I did this test:

BG3 on an ultrawide screen at 2100x900 high details, native runs me at 43 fps.

FSR2 (quality) + AFMF: I get 190fps

But 190fps goes beyond the 75Hz of my Freesync monitor. And the frame cap in game seems to turn off. Radeon Chill cannot be enabled, so is there a workaround? Other than using custom drivers like R.ID, which seem to be stuck at the March release?

But it really makes sense for soft pacing single player to have all that FPS without a frame cap? Do I understand well the case-scenario where I should use one or the other tech?

Thanks

Last year I built an AM5 PC with x670e board and installed 2x gen4 ssds and 1 gen3 from different OEMs.

Today I installed another gen4 and ran benchmark on all drives. To my surprise all the old ssds read speed is down by 30-60% from last result, write speed is similar to specs. I am unable to figure out what is wrong with them all drives are showing 98-99% of spare.

So there are these two monitors - Samsung Odyssey G3 LS24AG32 and LS24AG30. Both of them are practically the same but the LS24AG32 is 165Hz and the LS24AG30 is 144Hz. Since they are both VA panels, I was worried about severe ghosting. All the reviews I find are for LS24AG30 which has what I find is an acceptable level of ghosting but I the only model available on my region is LS24AG32 so I am wondering if it uses the same panel which would mean a similar level of ghosting. The issue is that the old model of the Odyssey G3 had terrible ghosting so I am worried about the LS24AG32. The LS24AG32 model comes with a AU optronics M238HVN02.0 CELL but I couldn't find any information for the LS24AG30. Can somebody help me. Thanks in advance

I have a budget of around $750 and I expect to be able to code in it. I honestly have not much idea what the ideal requirement of a laptop for a college student should be, which is why I am asking here to get an estimate of the specs I should be considering while choosing one. I would advice against naming any specific laptop as I have no guarantee of its availability in my region.

Edit: Seeing some of the comments, I have decided to add some context and additional constraints:

• Fit for Computer Science: I wish for the laptop to handle all the tasks expected from the course with reasonable efficiency first and foremost. Gaming support (at least Minecraft) may be desirable but completely optional.
• Windows only: I am completely inexperienced with Linux and college life, and I want to prioritize my studies over setting up and learning a completely new OS until I am sure I can find enough time to consider switching, so for the time being I am going with Windows. Moreover, the cheapest models among the Macbooks available here cost way above my budget and aren't feasible either.
• Newly purchasable models only: My college is offering a grant for newly bought laptops and it is in my best interest to avail the offer to get the most capable model possible, so I will not be purchasing any used laptop.
• Price matching allotted budget: For the same reason above, I will not be deviating from my budget by more than $100 from either side.

I understand that these constraints narrow down my options by a large margin. If no one can offer something that fulfills the above criteria, that's OK. I will ask someone else or simply buy one by my own intuition. I will only request you to comment if you actually have a suggestion that respects the above constraints and not just to complain about them.

I'm thinking about buying a new GPU. I'm looking at the 7700 xt as it's about £355 and I want Linux support and I like newer features. Before I pull the trigger can anyone tell me why I'm making a huge mistake?

Considering buying the Dell Alienware AW2725DF Monitor, but am a little unsure how well it perform on a Linux(Bazzite) system. Are there any issues with this at all these days?

I recently booted the game up and forgot about the problem. Here's the thing. The game was able to do so on my old 2TB super cheap NVME drive. But I upgraded to a WD Black 4TB drive and that when the problems started.

I'm sure a major portion of the problem is I have a Intel Arc A770 card. runs the game smoothly at 60fps locked on extreme settings (as long as ray tracing it turned completely off.) But Intels monitor combining software is HORRIBLE!

I have tried the hack of using SRWE to get around it, but even doing that the screen still defaults to 1920X1080.

was just wondering if anyone had any other suggestions for getting my triple monitor setup working again?

Microsoft asks many Game Pass subscribers to pay more for less

"Launch day access to first-party titles now restricted to $19.99/month 'Ultimate' tier."

Just got a high refresh rate monitor (PG248QP) and it makes a high pitched noise when I set it to 500hz. Anyone else have this problem with this or other high refresh rate monitors?

Just like in the title my PC has an issue when it won't turn on. Power button does nothing, fans do not spin, PC is completely dead. First time it happened was when I put it to sleep, sometimes it wouldn't wake up so I just avoided putting it to sleep as a temporary solution that become quite permanent... Simple power off worked well enough but recently it won't start even when I turn it off. If that happens I need to flip the power button on the PSU for a 30 or so seconds then it turn it back on and I can start PC no problems.

From what I read on the Internet people suggest faulty PSU. Is there a way to confirm that? I don't want to buy a new PSU if the old one is still good. It has little over 5 years so it's not exactly new but certainly not too old.

I also had one crash that looked like PSU fault since PC just shut down suddenly but I blamed it on some power drop in the grid at the time.

Dell XPS 15 9530, Windows 11 Pro 10.0.22631, x64, 13th Intel Core i9... I could go on. Hopefully that's enough info.

This is a sub for asking tech questions right? Apologize if not.

Just thought Nerd Fonts should get some more love & attention

Nerd Fonts patches developer targeted fonts with a high number of glyphs (icons). Specifically to add a high number of extra glyphs from popular ‘iconic fonts’ such as Font Awesome, Devicons, Octicons, and others.