|OT| The PC Hardware Thread -- Buy/Upgrade/Ask/Answer

Parsnip said:
At least it's cheap to test and replace. Hopefully the controller isn't faulty. :blobweary:
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I think the controller is fine as it works plugged in and that issue has never happened. Although these Playstation controllers seem to have a really shit usb port. Im really careful with my controllers and used it wired for a long time before switching to Bluetooth. Now if i play wired and am not sitting perfectly still the controller will disconnect and its definitely the usb port and the wire just becomes un-seated slightly. Really annoying.
 
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How am I supposed to set up my games when having a GSync montor? Vsync off and limit the framerate to 144? I'm playing Ender Lillies and I swear I'm watching tear.
 
NarohDethan said:
How am I supposed to set up my games when having a GSync montor? Vsync off and limit the framerate to 144? I'm playing Ender Lillies and I swear I'm watching tear.
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V-sync off in-game. Always ON through NVCP. (I personally do this on a per game basis.)
Cap 3 fps below your actual refresh rate. This is to ensure G-Sync is always on with the least amount of input lag.
Low Latency Mode: ON

Under Set up G-SYNC, Enable it for windowed and fullscreen. This'll cause some windows apps to misbehave (not respecting your refresh rate), but you can manually blacklist those apps. The choice is up to you, though. You can also manually enable the windowed & fullscreen g-sync option on a per-app/game basis through NV Inspector.

Since your new to G-Sync, I also recommend turning on the G-sync indicator via NVCP. This'll help you make sure G-sync is working.

It's a good idea to read through the Blurbuster's G-sync guide when you get some time.
 
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Valdien said:
V-sync off in-game. Always ON through NVCP. (I personally do this on a per game basis.)
Cap 3 fps below your actual refresh rate. This is to ensure G-Sync is always on with the least amount of input lag.
Low Latency Mode: ON

Under Set up G-SYNC, Enable it for windowed and fullscreen. This'll cause some windows apps to misbehave (not respecting your refresh rate), but you can manually blacklist those apps. The choice is up to you, though. You can also manually enable the windowed & fullscreen g-sync option on a per-app/game basis through NV Inspector.

Since your new to G-Sync, I also recommend turning on the G-sync indicator via NVCP. This'll help you make sure G-sync is working.

It's a good idea to read through the Blurbuster's G-sync guide when you get some time.
Click to expand...
Thank you very much! Your settings did help a lot and I'm noticing anymore what I was seeing.
 
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Yoshi said:
My 144hz monitor arrived, and it has NO dead pixels! :blobcheer:

24" UltraGear FHD IPS HDR Monitor - 24GN600-B | LG USA

Discover the 24" UltraGear FHD IPS HDR Monitor that features IPS 1ms (GtG) Response Time and FreeSync. Find reviews, specs, and more for 24GN600-B.
www.lg.com www.lg.com
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That's an awesome monitor. Congrats.

Still on my Samsung C27HG70 (144hz, no Gsync, VA). I'll be upgrading to an HDR monitor in the future, I don't want 4K though. 1440p is the sweet spot for GPU performance with ray tracing.
 
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I have a G502 but since I bought it I've found it a bit too big for my hands. I'm deciding between a Steelseries Rival 600, Sensei 310 or a Logitech Pro X Superlight.
 
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I really want a good midrange card for my office desktop PC - it’s rocking Intel graphics right now. Alas, the offerings in the 1080p “midrange” right now are just plain bad.
 
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Built a Deskmini X300 + Athlon 3000G + 16gb 3200Mhz setup for my older brother. He wants a mini pc that can be carried around between home and office, for $350.

I think this fits the bill, considering the budget. And upgradable if he needs something more powerful down the line.

Strictly for work, no gaming, so it's fine. Although I did test Genshin Impact on it, and it's playabe at 720p low default setting at 30 fps. Not bad.

rVLr51A.png
 
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didamangi said:
Built a Deskmini X300 + Athlon 3000G + 16gb 3200Mhz setup for my older brother. He wants a mini pc that can be carried around between home and office, for $350.
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APUs are quiet impressive today. Build a 3400g system for a friend and that is able to even run complex games like Total Warhammer 2 at 900p, low, 40fps.
One of the reasons why I'm looking forward to the Deck, as it should be even more powerful!
 
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Hey, we finally got a decent mic on a wireless headset. Might pick one up when my Arctis 7 stops working in the future.

www.techpowerup.com

Corsair HS80 RGB Wireless Review

The Corsair HS80 RGB Wireless is the newest addition to this famous gaming headset family. This $150 wireless headset offers excellent build quality, good battery life, an above-average omnidirectional microphone, and a Dolby Atmos license, enabling you to enjoy the best virtual surround sound...
www.techpowerup.com www.techpowerup.com
 
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My PC has been making a lot of vibration noise lately. I opened it up today to swap some hdd's and checked that they are all well fastened but now it's doing it again. :blobweary:
Ideally I would only have SSD's inside the case, but ideally I would also have more money to buy said SSD's but that's just not a reality right now.
 
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I found a new & unused 2TB SSD today lying in a cabinet drawer which I had totally forgotten about... I wanted to add that to my Gaming PC one year ago when I was supposed to switch my 2700 to a new 3800. That never happened, one year later and still no affordable 3800 in sight.
 
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sprinkles said:
I found a new & unused 2TB SSD today lying in a cabinet drawer which I had totally forgotten about... I wanted to add that to my Gaming PC one year ago when I was supposed to switch my 2700 to a new 3800. That never happened, one year later and still no affordable 3800 in sight.
Click to expand...
Not interested in switching to a 5600 or is it not viable?
 
I did some data shuffling and made an old boot drive, an older 500gb ssd, my "mostly in active use drive that's not the boot drive" and set hdd's to sleep in 10 minutes. Should work well for my vibration problems for now, until I can go fully solid state for all internal drives. I mean I don't even need super fast drives in there, but when you got €0 budget even cheap ssd's aren't cheap enough.

Now I just need to look into why something keeps randomly waking the hdd's up even when I'm not doing anything on them.

And then also hope that it's actually hdd's that are causing the issue and not a case fan or gpu or whatever. :valle:
 
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I’ve got this CM Hyper 212 EVO cooler mounted on my socket 1151 CPU. I’m planning on upgrading my CPU in the near future, and I’m seeing the same cooler recommended for AM4 socket CPUs. Does that mean the mounting bracket will just fit on that as well, or are the recommendations referring to a revision of the 212 with appropriate mounts that will fit AM4?
 
boop beep said:
I’ve got this CM Hyper 212 EVO cooler mounted on my socket 1151 CPU. I’m planning on upgrading my CPU in the near future, and I’m seeing the same cooler recommended for AM4 socket CPUs. Does that mean the mounting bracket will just fit on that as well, or are the recommendations referring to a revision of the 212 with appropriate mounts that will fit AM4?
Click to expand...

You need to buy a new AM4 mounting kit for 212 evo from CM.

store.coolermaster.com

Hyper 212 Evo Accessories Kit (AM4 Kit Included)

This item is on order and will be available for purchase early May. Apologies for the inconvenience. Hyper 212 Evo Accessories Kit. Includes ●Intel Mounting Hardware ●AMD Mounting Hardware (AM4) ●1x Fan Bracket ●Thermal Paste ●Fan Dampening Pads
store.coolermaster.com store.coolermaster.com
www.cmstore.eu

HYPER 212 EVO ACCESSORIES PACK (New version,with AM4 but No socket 775)

Welcome to the official Cooler Master store - Browse for accessories, spare parts and peripherals. Customize, Upgrade and Adjust to Make It Yours!
www.cmstore.eu www.cmstore.eu

Not as good as noctua providing free mounting kit upgrade but yeah, at least it's available.

edit: it's out of stock in the us :(
 
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didamangi said:
You need to buy a new AM4 mounting kit for 212 evo from CM.

store.coolermaster.com

Hyper 212 Evo Accessories Kit (AM4 Kit Included)

This item is on order and will be available for purchase early May. Apologies for the inconvenience. Hyper 212 Evo Accessories Kit. Includes ●Intel Mounting Hardware ●AMD Mounting Hardware (AM4) ●1x Fan Bracket ●Thermal Paste ●Fan Dampening Pads
store.coolermaster.com store.coolermaster.com
www.cmstore.eu

HYPER 212 EVO ACCESSORIES PACK (New version,with AM4 but No socket 775)

Welcome to the official Cooler Master store - Browse for accessories, spare parts and peripherals. Customize, Upgrade and Adjust to Make It Yours!
www.cmstore.eu www.cmstore.eu

Not as good as noctua providing free mounting kit upgrade but yeah, at least it's available.

edit: it's out of stock in the us :(
Click to expand...

Available in the European store it seems. I was gonna say it costs about the same as just getting a new one (€17 incl shipping), but then I found that these coolers go for €30+ nowadays. Bizarre. I got mine for less than €20 back then!

Thanks for the info though. I'll probably go this route.
 
Following my hdd explorations and data reshuffle, I decided to look at the mfg dates on my older 4tb drives, I have 2 of them. One is over 6 years and the other is 5. They are getting up there for sure, and 4tb is so small too that it almost feels like a waste of physical space to keep them around. Especially since I don't need them, so keeping them "just in case" doesn't seem worth it.

Also it's kind of wild to think that 4tb is small. I still remember when I got my first 1tb drive and thought it was huge. 👴
Now I can fit 4 of these 4tb drives into my current largest drive and have some extra to spare.
 
Do we have a separate hardware troubleshooting thread? I'm having some issues, but I'm not sure if this is the right place for it.
 
Parsnip said:
I think this thread is as good as any.
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Great! Well, I've been having issues with my PC booting the past few days. Debug display seemed to indicate it was an issue initializing RAM or something along those lines. Case fans wouldn't spin while PSU, GPU and CPU cooling would be on just fine. Sometimes, it'd boot but show a thing about suggesting reverting to optimized defaults (even though that'd been what I was running). After some retries and troubleshooting, I got it running again. Good.

However, today, after a restart it wouldn't boot anymore (worked absolutely fine prior to restart). This time, all fans including case fans are spinning nicely, but I'm not getting any display out either through iGPU or GPU. Another peculiar detail is that the debug LED on the mobo is off, which I've never seen happen before. Yet, the On button on the mobo is lit. If the mobo would be dead, my initial expectation would be that both lights go out. No debug LED makes it damn hard to troubleshoot! I tried different configurations of my RAM, but that didn't make any difference, so I'm at a loss here for what to do...

Could the CMOS battery need replacing? Strange that some lights work on the mobo but others don't though. I'm not sure. I could try that, but the default BIOS doesn't support my CPU and I don't have a compatible one to flash it. Is there a risk of it reverting to stock if I replace the battery?

I should probably first find an internal speaker for the mobo to figure out what's going on.
 
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Replacing the battery might revert the bios to default settings (there's probably some kind of time element here), but it shouldn't roll the bios back to a previous version or anything like that.
I haven't heard of these kind of issues when it comes to cmos battery being out of juice, but it's an easy and cheap to rule out as a problem so there's no harm for sure.

How old is the board?
 
Parsnip said:
Replacing the battery might revert the bios to default settings (there's probably some kind of time element here), but it shouldn't roll the bios back to a previous version or anything like that.
I haven't heard of these kind of issues when it comes to cmos battery being out of juice, but it's an easy and cheap to rule out as a problem so there's no harm for sure.

How old is the board?
Click to expand...

It's from 2014 apparently. Now that I that I type that out, a battery replacement might indeed be due.

Edit: Ayyyy, it lives! Battery replacement did the trick. Well, I'm still getting the same issues I had initially where it won't always boot due to some problem with the memory, but at least it occasionally boots up now, allowing me to at least get the data off my SSD without buying additional cables/adapters.

Thanks for allaying my fears about the CMOS battery swap Parsnip. Glad I gave it a shot :)

I do wonder what the issue with the memory could be. When the PC is able to boot, everything runs well and it doesn’t BSOD. Memtest86 didn’t show any errors either after 4 passes.
 
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Few things come to mind.
Now that the battery has been replaced, it might be worth a shot to load those optimized defaults and save them, as a first step.
Then I would probably check that the memory is running at its rated speed and voltage. I remember one time I had 1.2V sticks, but when I set the correct rated speed in bios, the automatic voltage setting kept increasing the voltage and I had to also manually set that. No idea if that's common issue in bioses or if that could cause issues like yours.
You said you tried different ram configs, did you try them all? If you have two sticks, try with just one, and try every available ram slot. Is the ram seated properly? :D

Though it might also just be a slightly busted board and there's nothing that can be done in the end. :surrenderblob:
 
boop beep said:
I do wonder what the issue with the memory could be. When the PC is able to boot, everything runs well and it doesn’t BSOD. Memtest86 didn’t show any errors either after 4 passes.
Click to expand...
I have a friend who, over a decade ago, had to use a hair dryer on his PC memory in order to make it boot on cold days. Then it was stable. Likely something about metal expanding at slightly higher operating temperatures, making a trace work that didn't do so at colder room temps.

Not necessarily the same thing but it reminded me of that.
 
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boop beep said:
It's from 2014 apparently. Now that I that I type that out, a battery replacement might indeed be due.

Edit: Ayyyy, it lives! Battery replacement did the trick. Well, I'm still getting the same issues I had initially where it won't always boot due to some problem with the memory, but at least it occasionally boots up now, allowing me to at least get the data off my SSD without buying additional cables/adapters.

Thanks for allaying my fears about the CMOS battery swap Parsnip. Glad I gave it a shot :)

I do wonder what the issue with the memory could be. When the PC is able to boot, everything runs well and it doesn’t BSOD. Memtest86 didn’t show any errors either after 4 passes.
Click to expand...

If your motherboard has 4 slots of ram you can try moving them to another slots for the dual channel to work and check to see if that clears the problem.

If you want to spend more time with it and be more thorough, you can test the ram one at a time, and then the ram slots one at a time. If there's a slot or a memory that causes the boot problem then you know the source of the problem this way for sure.
 
So I was building an new pc for my father since his old pc basically died. And I have a question.
So I know what that the power button just shorts 2 pins for a brief moment.

So before building it I building on a table and shorted to test that everything worked (Green rectangle) and it did.

W5olGUC.png


However every pc i remember ever building had the red rectangle connection

So my question is does the ground connection matter or can it be any of the 2 ?

I mean it boots fine, so i don't think it matters, and given that the manual doesn't seem to specify which is which I assume it's fine.

I'm just asking, cause this is the first time looking at a manual that I've had doubts.
 
didamangi said:
If your motherboard has 4 slots of ram you can try moving them to another slots for the dual channel to work and check to see if that clears the problem.

If you want to spend more time with it and be more thorough, you can test the ram one at a time, and then the ram slots one at a time. If there's a slot or a memory that causes the boot problem then you know the source of the problem this way for sure.
Click to expand...

I have shuffled them around and the problem persisted but I only tested the memory in one configuration — the one that had problems and with both sticks. Might try that then.
 
My GPU kept crashing when it went over 75C, not a system crash, just whatever game would either freeze or black screen with the audio still playing then CTD.

Changed the thermal paste on the GPU, played a bit of DOOM Eternal and it didnt go above 68C.
And when it's not under load the temp drops off much quicker so I'm hoping it'll keep going until 30 series come back in stock at a reasonable price.

I've previously had this card in bits to do the EVGA Thermal Pad Mod as there were reports of them overheating near launch.

YKlSSMW.jpg


qhETb16.jpg


cyTskLe.jpg
 
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I have been thinking about possibly swapping my 1070's thermal gunk as well. It is over 5 years old now so I wonder if it could make a difference in its thermals.
 
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I've noticed a big difference and it was a pretty easy job maybe took me an hour.
The only fiddly bit was unclipping the led and fan connectors.
And it's good to get all the dust out of it as well.
 
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Eugh, I really should also do some dusting to my pc now that you mention it.

I should look into one of those electric air blowers instead of pressurised air cans. Maybe something with a battery too so it would be more flexible.
 
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Parsnip said:
Eugh, I really should also do some dusting to my pc now that you mention it.

I should look into one of those electric air blowers instead of pressurised air cans. Maybe something with a battery too so it would be more flexible.
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I have one of those electric air blowers, I have to plug it in but it has a very long lead on it. Works very well for me, much better than the cans used to.

A friend of mine asked me to install a new SSD for him in his computer, got the machine and the inside was covered in dust, put it down outside and used the electric air blower on it, did a great job and it was some sight to see all the dust blowing around everywhere.
 
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ScreamingTrees said:
I have one of those electric air blowers, I have to plug it in but it has a very long lead on it. Works very well for me, much better than the cans used to.

A friend of mine asked me to install a new SSD for him in his computer, got the machine and the inside was covered in dust, put it down outside and used the electric air blower on it, did a great job and it was some sight to see all the dust blowing around everywhere.
Click to expand...
Unfortunately I don't have a good place to dust it off that would also have wall socket nearby. At least I don't think I do. I wish I had like a balcony or something. I need to look around the apartment basement, there's probably one there somewhere.
 
I still have a 1600*900 monitor. So I need an upgrade. Is 1440 worth it with a 2060 or should I go for 1080p?
 
Gaston said:
I still have a 1600*900 monitor. So I need an upgrade. Is 1440 worth it with a 2060 or should I go for 1080p?
Click to expand...

Might as well go for a good 1440p high refresh rate IMO. Monitor usually last longer than your GPU in terms of longevity. Newer games usually have a dynamic/scaling resolution option now, so you don't have to change your native display resolution and get a blurrier image.
 
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I don't think there is no reason not to go 1440p. They're almost same price as 1080p. And improvement on desktop is significant, even if you have to play @ 1080p.
 
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Yeah I went 1440p 165hz G Sync, my GTX 1080 handles most games pretty well and it doesn't have DLSS, you can always lower settings to get a decent frame rate
 
I am in an upgrade mood ! For starter because I really wouldn't mind more disk space, and for fuck's sake, I won't let it be said that I don't blindly follow Windows in a new version like a moronic moth into a flame ! Oh, wait...

So my PC, or parts of it -
AMD RYZEN5 2600X Socket AM4 4.25Ghz+19MB
MSI B450 Tomahawk AMD Socket AM4
Corsair Vengeance LPX 16Go (2x8Go) DDR4 3000MHz C15 XMP 2.0
MSI Geforce 2060 Super

The nifty Windows 11 tool Ge0force linked to says...

wgFvA9U.jpeg


I was thinking about buying a Samsung 980 NVME drive, Pro version looks nice but pricier (is it needed ? 3500Mo/s to 7000mo/s sure looks cool). I suppose it would solve the DirectStorage compatibility thing, and be a good opportunity to do clean install with an UEFI format. I'm not clear about my MB being secure boot ready though.
I seem to vaguely recall recall horror stories several years ago when NVME were new, overheating mostly. And my PC is not the chillest, it can go in the 70c when gaming.

So what says you, Meta ? Is this doable ? Will I bask in the glory of a new super fast drive and enjoy a Windows version that doesn't subtly whisper to me
REBUILD ICON CACHE, MOTHERFUCKER !
every other day ?
Well, let's not get carried away :confounded-face:

Every input welcome ! And if it is not too much to ask, I would love your opinion on this ISee
 
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