saturnotaku

Took a chance on an open-box non-Super RTX 4080 from Amazon. With gift cards and reward points, it was just over $700 out the door.

I was hoping for much better from Zen 5. Guess I'll be holding on to my 5600X3D for a while longer. I also have to wonder if there will be microcode updates for Intel laptops. To Gigabyte's credit, their Aorus laptops have an advanced BIOS like MSI that lets you not only undervolt but also set a cap on the maximum voltage the system will ask for. Gigabyte Control Center still sucks as a software suite, but considering I didn't have to pay for the laptop, I can live with it.

Time to give the thread some more love. I didn't think Lenovo was going to bring the AMD-powered Pro 7 to the US, but they did. As of this writing, the version with RTX 4090 is priced at $2699 for their Black Friday in July sale, but you can lower that to under $2500 by stacking the codes "LENOVOBUYMORE" ($100 off) and "BENKAISER6" (6% off, so a bit more than the usual extra 5%). Plus there's 10% Rakuten cash back. The Ryzen 9 7945HX is an absolute monster of a CPU that Lenovo has allowed to run at 5.2 GHz and 90W even with a 150W GPU load. That means it's going to run hotter than its Intel counterpart, but that's how Dragon Range is designed. Plus, it's not any louder versus its Intel counterpart. Only problem is that you can't use UXTU to tune it.

LTT doing LTT things

I'm intrigued by the Surface Pro 11, but it would have to be a few hundred bucks cheaper for me to consider it.

$400-450 would be a reasonable starting point, though you may have to be prepared to accept less for a quick sale.

PowerSpec is MicroCenter's in-house brand, and it consists of fully built desktop PCs (like Cyberpower, iBuyPower, etc) and individual components including power supplies. My desktop was originally a PowerSpec machine that was built in a crappy LianLi case that had virtually no front air flow save for some small perforations between the solid front face and the main case structure. The power supply was also from that brand, but according to most tier lists, it was in the "C" category, so average at best. My desktop is basically the Ship of Theseus at this point because all the components except the RAM have been changed since the original date of purchase.

For uBlock and AdGuard, you can add the following to the user filter list, and it will remove Google AI results, no need for any additional extensions: google.com##.GcKpu It even works if you search from a blank tab.

The first company that engineers the following laptop can shut up and take my money: An SoC that provides 1080p/60 fps gameplay for ~4 hours on battery while being the size/weight of a MacBook Air. Silent like a MacBook Air would be amazing but not absolutely mandatory.

Just did an overhaul of my desktop. Swapped the horrible Lian-Li case and MicroCenter-branded PSU for a Corsair 4000D Airflow and EVGA Supernova 850G XC power supply that comes with NVIDIA's stupid 12V connector so no adapters needed. The case change alone dropped my under-load GPU and CPU temps by 4-5 and 7-10 degrees, respectively, and that's with one fewer intake fan. Speaking of GPUs, MC had some refurbished RTX 3080 10 GB Founder's Edition cards for $400 so I grabbed one of those. It's a surprisingly capable GPU even today with just enough VRAM headroom for it not to be an issue for most games at 1440p while generally outperforming the costlier RTX 4070. I'm also a sucker for the Founder's Edition aesthetic. The one game I play that basically requires DLSS 3 (Portal RTX) I can just fire up on my laptop. I'm also planning to downgrade my primary gaming monitor from 4K back to 1440p. My office monitor will still be 4K because I like the resolution and sharpness for productivity.

That's right. I forgot the 6300HQ and 7300HQ were a thing, and they were indeed four cores with HT disabled.

6th-gen desktop i5s were quad core, with mobile chips going that way I believe starting with 8th gen.

Found this while trolling a social media feed, and it seemed interesting. It's almost like they want to go for a SteamOS-type of experience but for the desktop. I'm not necessarily sure I want to try it myself, but if someone here has/is adventurous, I'd sure like to hear some feedback. Bazzite – The next generation of Linux gaming

You can use the web and Android versions of the MS Office suite on ChromeOS.

Are you talking about using an external battery bank like this? Those things are only designed to be used to top off a laptop's internal battery or when performing non-intensive tasks. The X14 is the smallest Alienware laptop, and there are only a couple model in general that have AMD CPUs and GPUs, including one version of the Alienware M18, the Framework 16, and the Asus TUF A16 Advantage Edition.

Alpha Protocol is back – DRM-free, for modern PCs! Watch the documentary video on the process of its revival - GOG.com While this game was a commercial failure, it looked like it developed a pretty strong cult following. GOG worked with the original developers and publisher (Obsidian and Sega, respectively) to get it working on modern PCs. Glad to see them do the right thing and bring it to GOG where it can now be bought for just $20 (it's 10% off until April 3) and played DRM-free.

I'm swapping out my M3 Pro MBP 14 with a refurbished M1 Max 14 that MicroCenter has up for $2100. While I'll be taking a hit CPU wise, the extra GPU cores provide a noticeable bump in performance. Plus everything I've read indicates it won't be super loud like the M3 Max in the same form factor. The biggest upgrades, though, will be to unified memory and internal storage as the config I'm picking up is 64 GB and 2 TB, respectively. Apple Silicon Macs are emulation beasts, especially with the latest updates to Sonoma and RPCS3. So I'm going to be digging out my PS3 games and purchasing a DualSense to go with it.

Good video showcasing gaming performance of the Framework 16 with the 7700S (the only way the reviewer could test on account of his sample having some pretty serious issues) in both Windows and Linux.

SSDs are so commoditized that pretty much anything from a recognizable brand is going to be decent.

The Radeon has worse power efficiency, ray tracing, and its upscaling+frame generation tech still significantly lags those of a GeForce. If you don't care about any of that and simply want flagship caliber performance without the flagship price and/or you have a system with an AMD CPU (less driver overhead compared to NVIDIA), the XTX isn't a bad option at all.

The price difference is closer to $90 when you factor in time and fuel. Percentage wise, it's a not insignificant premium that doesn't net a corresponding increase in gaming performance, which is what I'm going for since I shifted production duty to the Mac. Plus with the 5600X3D, I came out slightly ahead after selling the 5950X, which wouldn't have been the case for the 5800X3D even factoring in its additional discount.

You don't even need to do that much. At the MS account creation/login screen, type the email address no at thankyou dot com, any password, and it will let you use a local account from there. I was perusing MicroCenter this morning and saw they put the 5800X3D on sale for $270, which would have been enough to tempt me to go that route over the 5600X3D at $200. I don't feel like taking my machine apart again and making the lengthy drive to do the exchange. Still irritating, though.

Haven't had a chance to install the new NVIDIA app, but from my experience using NVCleanstall to remove all the junk from the stock drivers resulted in worse performance versus installing from the standard download or GeForce Experience. I missed having my rays traced so I took back that bargain 7800 XT in favor of a 4070 Super. I also swapped my desktop CPU to a 5600X3D from the 5950X as my MacBook Pro is now doing all my work-related heavy lifting. Despite the "downgrade" I saw a nice bump in performance in most games. Cyberpunk can give a 4K/60 experience with ultra ray tracing (and DLSS obviously), which wasn't possible with the 5950X. I'm also exploring the idea of swapping out my DDR4-3600 CL19 RAM for something with tighter timings now.

Smartphone camera pictures aren't a good measure for this. As long as it doesn't bother you, that's all that matters.

The changes to the NVIDIA driver control panel and GeForce Experience are long overdue. Also good on them for removing the login requirement.