SitD

That's precisely the SSD PCIe solution that I bought. ^^ Yeah, might have to redistribute... Thanks for letting me know about the compatibility listing, I wasn't aware of it. I'll check if I can get one of those second hand.

Edit: I'm slightly worried about ASUS as a mainboard supplier though because of their recent rootkit escapades...

It's a MSI X470 GAMING PRO. Tried both upper x16 slots. The second one seems to be x8, but the first one doesn't work either despite being x16. I have other m.2 slots but they're already used up - however those are smaller SSDs so worst case I could move my OS to a SATA drive and populate those m.2 slots with the larger and newer SSDs that i bought! 😂

as x4/x4, but PLX would divvy it all up essentially 4x M.2 at x2/x2/x2/x2, that kinda thing. If this adapter doesn’t have it and you can’t get this to work, and you’re willing to blow another hundred bucks, that other kind of adapter would def work.

Without knowing your motherboard I’d def download the manual and ctrl+f some promising keywords such as ‘bifurcation’ or ‘PCI’ and basically hunt for anything in the manual that describes settings to enable this. Sometimes on a 3 slot board the bottom ‘chipset’ slot can be toggled to run something different than PCH, like some other controller.

I’d also try running the adapter in every possible configuration, on the most current supported PCI-E standards and a previous generation if motherboard allows, ie: adapter top slot, GPU middle slot, GPU top slot, adapter 3rd slot (if mobo has one), disable PCI-E 4.0 or enable 3.0 each time just to see if some configuration works (kinda tedious but costs 0 dollars so

Thanks for the hints. I'll try to put it in gen 3.0 mode and see if I get more settings there, good idea!

ur “main” NVME SSD. Your chipset typically has like 4 or 8 more (the very bottom slot). And you have to figure out some sort of combo where that works, and they’re not combineable. What’s worse is a lot of motherboards hard wire those extra x4 pcie lanes to the M.2 SSD slots so you get no choice.

I've put the bifurcation card next to the CPU now and it only offers two x4 lanes. I thought zen2 should be able to handle bifurcation, so if it was directly hooked up with the CPU, I should get all four. Seems chipsets still have some influence over the first PCIe slot.

This sounds like a path I could take - just buying a mainboard like that and making it a NAS. Which board do you have there? If it's AM4, I could get a similar one and just reuse my old CPU.

don't know about op's claims but one time a crack actually affected my computer - in a really goofy way. it just installed a background wallpaper that was advertising for canned tuna, all in Russian 😂 the brand didn't even exist where i lived. also i could easily reset the background, so it wasn't malicious at all.

That's precisely why I didn't blame windows in my post, but the windows-consumer mentality of "yeah install with privileges, shove genshin impact into ring 0 why not"

Linux can have the same issue. We have to keep the culture on our side here vigilant and pure near the kernel.

I love how everyone understands the issue wrong. It's not about being on Windows or Linux. It's about the ecosystem that is common place and people are used to on Windows or Linux. On windows it's accepted that every stupid anticheat can drop its filthy paws into ring 0 and normies don't mind. Linux has a fostered a less clueless community, but ultimately it's a reminder to keep vigilant and strive for pure and well documented open source with the correct permissions.

BSODs won't come from userspace software

Ah cool, I didn't know that there are layers of capabilities for different requested brightnesses. Thanks for your in depth reply! I'm also a 1000 nits enjoyer but I don't switch on any lights - I like when my eyeballs get blasted with colors. 😂

Hey there, thanks for the comprehensive reply, I learned a lot. Also, your blog is fantastic, I'm always happy when there's a new post =)

Question about the last point: I feel like in SDR mode, the OLED is pushing brighter images. I almost feel like it's underselling the capabilities at 270, but does so to give pixels a rest every now and then, in the hope that the bright spots don't stay stationary on the screen. It's a wild guess, I have no idea.

I'm using all of them sometimes. ^^ Washed out colors are not an issue on AMD anymore as you said it, but on nvidia I can't seem to fix it. I wonder if this is happening to absolutely everyone, as the arch wiki makes it sound like nvidia 545+ has been reported working...

About the contrast: I wish I could, but I found that the factory default was 70% and it did seem to often cause noticeable dimming because the image was too bright for the max avg luminance. It felt weird and I think it's because Alienware, like many manufacturers, just can't resist blasting the consumer with overtuned contrasts to get a purchase out of it.

I think it was win 8. I've dual booted excessively until dxvk basically made such a dent in the gaming exclusivity that I just stayed and enthusiastically followed it grow into perfection