PC Master Race

gamers nexus just dropped a 3 hour video where they talk to various companies involved in the consumer PC space, some of whom really open up about their costs and economics and how operating in america just isnt feasible under the current tariffs

So I've been planning this upgrade for a while but wanted to wait for the right price.

Before my upgrade I had a i3 12100F and a RTX 3050 8GB. It was a decent rig, and good enough all but the latest games at 1080p. However I do video editing and wanted to get more RAM on my GPU and more core would help with some games and workloads.

So I waited for the right parts at the right price. My first good luck came in the form of a $170 discount on a i7 12700KF. I paid $270.08 CAD with tax and shipping. For single threaded workload (read FreeCAD) it didn't do much but for games it was a smoother experience and so far nothing has ever maxed out the CPU outside of Shader Caching.

But the upgrade I was keeping an eye out for was the GPU. 8GB of VRAM is just enough for what am doing. However I really wanted 16GB. I was aiming for the RX7600 XT, however $450-$500CAD for it was too much for me to stomach. With no real used options I tried looking for a RTX 3060 12GB. For the same price and no performance difference it's not a good choice new... but used it's frequently $350CAD. However I got it in my head I wanted it for $300CAD. I kept seeing it creep down to $330-$320CAD, and was tempted. But I held since it wasn't an urgent upgrade. Then I found it, a Zotac 3060 12GB for $288.27CAD with tax and shipping. Scooped it up immediately and it finally arrived today.

My upgrade total was $558.35, and the result was actually pretty nice. From a quick comparison from running some games and video renders before and after the upgrade. For games I saw +20FPS improvements in modern games and for games getting 200FPS I saw my GPU utilization drop from 100% to 70%.

For video editing it's very interesting. My render times dropped by 20-30 seconds depending on the video and number of effects. However after reviewing my hardware utilization, it seems like the software may be bottle necking me more than the GPU. Or maybe it's a RAM issue.

Regardless I am very please with this upgrade, epically the price for this upgrade. Outside of more RAM, I don't think I'll be doing anything else with it for a long while now.

I just saw this and felt I should share it. I'm sure most people here wouldn't fall for it but it can't hurt to make sure 👍

Edit: I just wanted to add, I have no idea what this tried to copy. I'm using Firefox on Linux which is perhaps why it didn't make it to my clipboard 🤷

up to 80€ for Digital Games up to 90€ for Physical Games Meanwhile Nintendo is richer than ever...

TL;DR - reflashing the BIOS saved my old Desktop

This is a short tale from a corrupted BIOS in a MSI Tomahawk B350 Motherboard from 2017

On March 24th I used the computer to play some games and browse the internet as usual then gracefully shut it down. On the next day I tried to turn it on again, but the computer did not make it to POST verifications. No chance to get in the BIOS, no beeps or display at all. Nothing. The components were energized, all lit up on their leds, but nothing else.

Checked the MB debugging leds and I saw that they got stuck on “VGA” and did not get any further progress. So I tried to switch my current VGA with an old VGA card that I have. Same behaviour in the MB leds. Since I didn’t know if the old VGA was ok, I gave the MB diagnosis a credit.

As it is an 8 year old Desktop, maybe removing all attached cards/memory and cleaning up everything could help. Reattaching everything together can solve some problems, sometimes. However, I got the same MB leds behaviour.

Even trying to boot the PC up without any attached cards (only memory) lit only the same VGA led on the MB. Sigh… the MB debug led is wrong…

After a brief internet search I found similar problems with the same MB in the MSI forum where the problem was a corrupted BIOS chip. The problem in the forum was solved by reflashing the BIOS.

It all looks easy, however my MB does not have the external button to flash the BIOS (btw I discovered this was a thing looking for my problem in the forums).

So I had two ideas: Buy a new MB that supported my 8 year old setup OR try to reflash the BIOS with basic components for 1/6 of the new MB price.

After watching several bad and precarious videos in youtube about corrupted BIOS recovery (most of them in PT-BR my primary language (hue)) I bought a CH341a usb stick with an 1.8V adapter.

They come with a “double clip” that eliminates the need of removing the chip from the MB to read/write. And since I don’t have a hot air station to unsolder the chip, using the clip looked like a good plan.

The plan was to mount every component and, using the double clip, read from the chip, save it locally as some sort of backup (even though it was corrupted) and then write the most recent BIOS update of my MB to the chip. The most recent BIOS could be downloaded from the Support section of my MB page in MSI website.

When CH341a usb thing was finally delivered to my address I gave it a shot.

I mounted the CH341a and the 1.8V adapter in the correct pin orientation (regards to the bad youtube videos) and using the Linux app IMSProg I was able to find my chip specs and see a green “Connected” in the status bar of the app!

From here it all went as planned - I was able to read the old BIOS binary and save it locally to a file. Using xxd to compare the headers of the new BIOS with the extracted one I saw that they were nearly identical. This gave me hope!

I had to rename the new BIOS to a .bin extension so that the IMSProg could find it and open the file. After opening the file in the app I hit the automatic options: erase, program and verify. The process took a while but was finalized with a successful message.

After putting all Desktop pieces together the boot sequence completed and I was able to see the Windows login screen again :’-). Unfortunately my grub had gone away, but this is a tiny detail.

I Hope this text gives you courage and ideas to solve these awful problems that appear out of nowhere.

Please feel free to lmk if this isn’t the right place to be asking.

I can’t seem to find any other laptops that use a similar rubberized coating to what the thinkpads have. Do any exist out there?

I think the thinkpads are great but I don’t care for the trackpoint.

Thanks!

I'm concerned since my 2080ti is idling at 58c. I have that intake right next to an exhaust and I'm not sure.

I'm looking at buying a used reference RX 6800.

I notice there are quite a few brands for the reference model (ASUS, MSI, Sapphire, etc) and wondered if any of them use better components for example. I would quite like lower odds of having coil whine if it's related.

Just to explain my choice of card:

• Max 40mm thick
• Supported by Ollama
• No proprietary software when using linux

I've tested it in several games and had good results, especially in those that are CPU bound and vary in frame rate a lot. below are my qualitative results from different games. My monitor is 180hz 1440p, frame gen is on it's default settings, and when using fixed mode I cap my fps at 90.

Teardown: Keeps the game looking smooth even when doing higher amounts of destruction, looks better than a fixed multiplier because of the high variability of the game's performance depending on the situation.

Helldivers 2: Slightly worse artifacting, also slightly smoother when in extreme situations with lots of enemies on screen. I prefer a fixed multiplier because of the lower artifacting, but its honestly about the same.

GTA V Enhanced: For some reason adaptive frame gen gives me unplayable levels of input lag in GTA 5, and unstable frame rates, whereas a fixed multiplier works fine.

Noita: the exact same.

anyone else have thoughts on this update, or lsfg in general?

And I mean a true beast that can do anything from gaming, video editing, rendering and so on

Hey team,

Years ago, SO gifted me an Alienware Aurora R7.

It has an Intel I7-8700 and Nvidia GTX 1080 (8GB VRAM), 16 GB of DDR 4 RAM. (what else is relevant to this question?)

My question to you is basically this -

Given that I'm not gaming with it anymore, I want to use it for only two things -

1. Plex Server
2. Running random local LLM stuff like Kotaemon (https://github.com/Cinnamon/kotaemon)

Let's say I have $1000 to throw at a GPU and I'd like to get 16 GB VRAM (or 24 if it's possible). I want to install it myself rather than take it into a shop.

What's a GPU I can buy that will fit,

1. within my budget?
2. within the chassis?
3. with the CPU and motherboard without issues?
4. with the needs I've detailed (namely Plex transcoding, and running ML models)?

I am an absolute noob when it comes to figuring out what hardware to buy (hey, we got us an Alienware sucker here).

So lemmings, help me out! I'd rather not ask ChatGPT.

Hello pcmr!

I have found a "broken" 4080 second hand for 200 euros in my neighbourhood. After doing some searching, I think it was a misconfigured bios and and incompatability with corsair's software, based on the description. They mentioned games crashing, corsair aio rgb not working until iCue is opened, screen flickering and random repeated reboots. They said the issue persisted on their friends computer as well after trying. Is this worth the risk? Would love some advice!

Thanks in advance

sorry about spamming your feeds with 17 cross-posts. that was not right and I won't do it again, I promise!

I would just like your feedback and opinion, good or bad, on the PC components I have on a project I've made called "bestof". I've worked on it for quite some time, and after some recent changes to improve the PC builds section I think it is ready to be shown off.

a few notes:

• only recommending CPUs that aren't on dead platforms for upgradeability reasons. however, if you are on a budget, I have mentioned the 5600, 12100F, 12400F, and the 5700X3D as solid options
• PC cases are almost 100% subject to personal preference, I just suggested a few popular options as well as some good cheap ones
• I did not recommend the RTX 4090 as most people don't need it unless they have money to burn. Both AMD and Nvidia GPUs have been mentioned

If you have any questions or think any of my picks are wrong (which many of them probably are) then please lmk!

https://swarbler.github.io/bestof/tech/pc-builds/pc-builds

My son has my family's oldest gaming PC, it's an i7 4790 with a 1660 TI and 16GB DDR3. It wasn't booting the last couple of days. I had time to look at it so we disconnected everything and threw it on the table with some good light and connected it to power so I could see what it was doing.

It was clear his three case fans were all dying, one was completely dead. One was in poor condition and one was starting to make noise. I already had extra case fans brand new in box sitting in my house, but I assumed old fans weren't what was keeping it from booting.

We removed all three bad fans, and with the case wide open, both sides front and top removed, I blew it out a little bit with canned air. It wasn't that dirty, just a little bit of dust came out. I checked with my fingers to see that the ram seemed seated and that all the connections seemed okay, but I didn't disconnect and reconnect anything, I just touched it.

I turned on the PC with no case fans (only an old CPU cooler connected) and it booted up. So we installed the three new case fans, and tested it again. It booted up again. We put it all back together and connected all the peripherals and it's working absolutely flawlessly.

So I am asking a question, but I want you for context to know that I have repaired hundreds of PCs, maybe close to a thousand. I have never fixed a boot issue by replacing case fans. I have read that some 20+ year-old PCs maybe would have that issue, but from what I understand a 12-year-old PC should not have boot impacted by case fans. So here's my question: was this just a ghost in the system, or is this actually possibly a real thing?

TL:DR We fixed his computer with three new case fans and the tiniest bit of canned air. Help me make it make sense.

Hi there, hope this is the right place for something like this.

So today I used my computer like normal, everything was fine this morning.
Then after a brief walk I came home and it won't turn on since.
When I click the power button there is the normal click sound of the psu and nothing happens.
My keyboard lights up, the ethernet port lights up, but other than that - nothing. Already tried to remove the ram, the graphics card (just removing the power cable of it turns on its red light), removing just the cpu power cable does turn on the motherboars red status light, but non of the fans or other status leds light up.

My build is not new and other than the keyboard I did not change anything lately.
The build consists of:
Asus ROG Strix B550 A
Ryzen 5600x
32 GB Ram (Crucial ballistix)
Asus RTX 3060ti
Corsair RM650 PSU

I also unplugged the psu for a while. It makes a slight buzzy noise after powering the computer, but I do not know if this is normal.

Can anybody help me please?

Edit: Thank you all for helping, I installed a new psu and everything is working again! Thank you.

For those using Linux and want to play VR with a quest, it seems WiVRN is working well. I've just had a run in H3VR and it's fairly "flawless" on my Quest 1.

Only thing it getting the app on the Quest, via adb, debug or whatever

So today I enabled the hdr setting in windows 11 and everything seemed fine.

Tried playing genshin and it crashed right away.

After disabling hdr I started getting weird artifacting so I restarted and everything worked fine.

I reloaded my gpu undervolting settings in radeon software (rx 6750xt ) and they worked fine.

Went ahead and upgraded the driver and rebooted. Now the undervolt settings crash on stress test and any game I'm trying to play.

Is the windows 11 hdr setting actually killing my gpu????

EDIT: Ended up changing the undervolt from -120 to -100mV and that seems ti have stopped the crashing. Can a driver really affect undervolting that much?

EDIT2: Actually it stopped crashing at -75 undervolt.