Clamibot

I personally like high refresh rate VA panels since they have very good colors and are immune to burn in. Yes the colors aren't as good as OLED, but they're good enough for me. There is also the black smearing issue that is inherent to VA panels, but this is really dependent of the screen you get. On the newer Samsung VA panels, the black smearing is pretty much nonexistent. Same with my Dell S3422DWG as long as you keep the contrast high and set it to the maximum overdrive setting. Of course if you're like me and you absolutely detest matte screens, you can also mod the screen to make it glossy, which further improves the colors and gets rid of the stupid matte blurring and washing out effects.

I normally don't like handhelds, and I absolutely detest BGA hardware, but I decided to get a Steam Deck since they were on sale during the Steam Spring sale. I wanted to see what all the rage was about. I've beein messing aorund with my Deck for a few weeks now, and surprisingly I like this thing quite a bit. Being able to play my PC games on the go has been a dream of mine ever since I was in elementary school, and now we have a PC gaming handheld that actually has semi-decent performance. There's still quite a ways to go, but it's a start. Being a hardware enthusiast and all, I didn't hesitate to start teaking things. I never run anything stock. It has to be custom tuned by me. That's one of the most fun parts of getting a new computer. There's a new adventure to find the performance ceiling of your new device! The first thing I did was proceed to overclock the screen. The screen runs at 60 Hz at stock, but I can get it up to 70 Hz before artifacting occurs. 72 Hz is the highest it'lll go before giving out completely. I then overclocked the CPU to 4 GHz and overclocked the GPU to 2.1 GHz. This required increasing the power limit to 35 watts to get the clock increases sustained. The Deck runs much hotter as a result, but this was expected and I'm not thermal throttling yet. The total APU power consumtion never actually reached 35 watts, max was around 25. The processing power this device has in such a small power envelope is really making me reevaluate my priorities and wants in regards to computer hardware. Laptops never turned out to be what I wanted them to be, and real soon I won't want to have anything to do with them if LGA options don't return. I've made my return to desktops and decided to make my builds portable if I ever need lots of computing power to take with me from one place to another. For computing on the go, modern PC gaming handhelds may just be a viable alternative to laptops for me. The DTRs of old were awesome and all, but let's face it, gaming while walking around isn't an option with a laptop. Battery life sucks too. I've never had a laptop that got more than 3 hours off a charge. For my purposes, a portable desktop would be less convenient than a DTR, but would serve the same function for me. The hit I take in convenience wouldn't be much of a big deal. With my Steam Deck, I can pull it out of my backpack and game some whereever I am, put it to sleep, put it back in my backpack, and then take it out again sometime later to resume my gaming session. I can even game while walking around! Gaming on the Steam Deck is convenient everywhere! I'm really excited with the announcement of the Asus ROG Ally. That's gonna be a Steam Deck on steroids, and I'm gonna like it a lot more given its 120 Hz screen and it's ability to actually reach 120 FPS in games. You guys who've known me for a while know I'm a high framerate snob, so you bet I'm going to buy the ROG Ally and enjoy the hell out of it. But yeah, extra long post from me this time since I haven't posted anything in a while. I just had a lot to say. To sum it all up, I'm thinking of going with a portable desktop + powerful PC gaming handheld combo for my future setups. That'll give me my portable moster rig on the go, and give me an ultraportable handheld for gaming anywhere, which is what I wanted out of laptops in the first place. This should give me exactly what I want while costing less than my previous setups. Or you know, the cost savings on my portable devices just go into making my desktop even more of a monster rig. 🤣

Wait so we can now finally pair a high end CPU with a mid range GPU in a BGA laptop? Could I configure this thing with a 13980HX + RTX 4060? This laptop is impressive, especially considering the price and despite it being a BGA machine. The 13980HX + RTX 4080 model is on Best Buy's website for $2500 and is significantly more powerful than my X170. It also costs less than what I've spent on my X170 in total. Must... resist... urge... to... buy...

The return to normal GPU prices may have started: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/best-buy-heavily-discounts-nvidia-rtx-30-graphics-card-stocks The cards have already all sold out (no surprise here) due to hungry gamers finally getting good prices for a GPU. $420 for a new Founders Edition RTX 3080 is a pretty good price. That's basically where it should've been at this point in time given it's now a last gen card. Just wait. People have spoken with their wallets and are refusing to buy GPUs at current ridiculous prices. Prices will come down. I like seeing things unfold the way they should. Poor sales will improve once prices are no longer sky high. I guess it takes a while for that fact to be realized.

Wait for integrated graphics to improve to the point where you no longer need a dedicated GPU. That may work if you never move to higher resolutions than 1080p. Aww who am I kidding? We're enthusiasts! Integrated graphics will never be enough since our performance requirements keep growing with the increases in hardware processing power.🤣

I really don't like authors who write articles that serve as shilling for higher prices. Why would anyone want to justify higher prices? Most people want lower prices, but apparently some people think everyone is made of money. The thing is that even if the author is correct (which he's not), it doesn't matter. Consumers don't care about a company's BOM or other costs associated with products a company makes. Nobody cares how much it costs to make a product, consumers only care about how much it costs to buy said products from a company. If the prices are too high, people will complain and simply not buy the products. The 4090 is undoubtedly the best value GPU of the Lovelace series, which is weird as the highest end GPU of any generation usually has the worst price to performance ratio. I don't foresee many sales of the xx50 to xx70 class cards from Nvidia this generation.

I'd personally rather go with cheap high capacity SATA SSDs now that prices have been falling and are rumored to continue falling till or through next month. I personally don't notice a difference in performance between NVME SSDs and SATA SSDs, probably because consumer workloads benefit more from random read/write speeds than sequential read/write speeds. You can get a 4TB SATA TLC SSD from Crucial for about $230 now. It's amazing how SSD prices continue to drop.

I love how this idea keeps evolving. I'm loving it! Now I wonder how we could scale it up to something with a 24 or 27 inch screen to allow more space for ATX motherboards and large radiators. You'd definitely need a suitcase to transport it at that point, but it'd be cool nonetheless, and a true fusion between a desktop and laptop with the benefits of both and none of the downsides of either, with the exception of weight.

I'd been using Avast for the past 19 years and finally ditched it a few months ago because I was fed up with how it was becoming adware. It seems like an additional process gets added by it every year as well so it keeps becoming more bloated. To add onto those two things, it now causes problems with some of my games and screws with my game dev workflow from time to time flagging stuff I compile as viruses (like what?). I just use Windows Defender nowadays. For anyone other than individuals who genuinely require lots of security, Windows defender is enough. I also run scans with SuperAntiSpyware from time to time to remove tracking cookies that I may have picked up inadvertently and remove malware if I feel I did something stupid. But yeah, basically refrain from doing something stupid and you'll generally be fine and not get a virus. It can still happen even if you're careful, but the chances are very low, and Windows Defender can take care of the kind of stuff most users (including us) would get.

Well holy crap this thread has been incredibly active today! I'm liking this a lot as it's feeling like a real conversation! To add some more to today's conversation, I went and bidded on a Samsung B-Die DDR4 RAM kit and actually won! This is the very first time I've ever won a bid, so I'm feeling proud of myself. Freaking bid snipers made me lose all other bids I've ever been a part of. It's super annoying when someone swoops in and takes the bid from you at the last second. I decided to not deal with that crap this time around and instead set up automated bidding for this listing. I'm excited for this kit to come in and continue my RAM overclocking escapades. It was very daunting to start out with, but now I'm hooked. TUNE EVERYTHING AND OVERCLOCK EVERYTHING FOR MAXIMUM PERFORMANCE MWAHAHAHAHA!

I have a delidded CPU with a peltier AIO mounted on top. It seems to work pretty well. Granted, I don't let the temperatures on the CPU go subzero, I just introduce a large temeprature differential to increase heat transfer and keep the CPU much cooler than it normally would be under conventional cooling methods. I've always found it strange that normal thermal paste does better than liquid metal at subzero temperatures, but I suppose that makes sense given that metal expands and contracts more than paste does. Extreme cooling is awesome. The colder you go, the more performance you get!

The quest for ever more performance is addictive in itself. I'm a performance enthusiast, but for games. So fortunately for brother @Mr. Fox, I'm not your typical gamerboy you have to complain about.🤣 My performance requirements are very high, 144 FPS in ALL games. As such, I usually end up needing high end hardware to get the job done. That's how I got into benching, but I bench only video games. I always find the conversations we all have very interesting reads. I enjoy tweaking my hardware to push it to its max so I can get the best performance possible. And it doesn't end there as I can employ software tweaks on certain games to increase performance further. Perhaps I should make a guide for increasing performance in games as much as possible by employing both hardware and software tweaks as I'm doing software experimentation on my games as well.

Typically what I'll do is some experimentation by starting at the maximum speed I know the CPU is stable at, and then I'll run cinebench and keep increasing the frequency by 100 MHz steps until the system crashes. At whatever frequency the system crashes at, I set the CPU multiplier to match and also increase the voltage by 25mv. I'll then run cinebench again. If the system still crashes, I raise the voltage by additional 25mv steps until the system is stable. I then repeat this process until I run out of thermal headroom. Typically the frequencies you can reach in games will be higher than what you can achieve in cinebench by another few hundred MHz since the load will not be as high.

Aww man, that's a bummer. I didn't see that.

Maybe this will interest you then: https://www.ebay.com/itm/275480705689?epid=13056675991&hash=item4023edfa99:g:saQAAOSwgaxjNjcz&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAA4IlCNM0VPjO6z7nVNIZO1KlhpeINPo4yDXkxNWYhEzbUjx0SB4Mz%2BqlK7Z%2BcGSQKPlYyZM3Qv%2BwJndDNqFNhBJeKxuPF5%2FPfmSlOeg49FtDHd6MdRFSvcq%2FaKRKnd%2FD0bDGP4VXaSebnd0lZgv%2BkTk%2ByIHNPX8zb1m1%2FgT34%2F9OUH8D4AbEGmXLWT4%2FzC3HucHGJTETKNeK5poPngZ%2F0wGD8safu%2BqAIZkJ1nagPgBoUHhsPD2sz9yuYWnHoGarLOeFiWmX9uX2Qeay29H%2B2xdV6ZfmZQVRUQkVIsBIXZ4mG|tkp%3ABFBMoO7tvMFh I soooo wish I had gotten this laptop for $1200 in it's high end configuration. It has cosmetic damage to it, which is why it still hasn't sold despite this listing being up for months. If you're ok with the cosmetic damage and don't care or are willing to put in some money to repair it, this is an amazing deal. Best part, the seller says this unit has Premamod on it! I was seriously considering buying this as a secondary machine, but you can have dibs since you're looking for a laptop as your main machine right now.

The one thing that sets Samsung SSDs apart from competitors is power efficiency, so they're really good for laptops. Your battery life can improve significantly vs having a competitor SSD since the Samsung drive firmware is better (generally speaking, obviously not in the case where their new 980 pros are having issues). Of course if you're using a desktop, or if you're imposing heavy workloads on your laptop on battery power, the difference is minimal.

And then the same companies will complain that the sales were bad and nobody wants these types of laptops anymore. It's like EA saying nobody plays singleplayer games anymore so they focus on multiplayer. No, it's not that nobody cares anymore. People still care, it's just that people don't want to buy bad products. Make a good product, make sure people know about it, and it will sell. You're creating a self fufilling prophecy by creating a bad product and pointing out that sales sucked, so nobody wants products in that product class anymore.

Given you're running your i7 4940MX in an Alienware 18 and with liquid metal, I'd say you should be able to achieve 4.3 GHz with max fans assuming the CPU isn't a crap sample. I'm running an i7 4930MX in my Alienware 17 and can get it to 4.2 GHz stable as my max daily driver frequency. It can go up to as high as 4.5 GHz, but only with a hefty 125mv overvolt and only on a cold winter day. I'm using liquid metal as well. Given you're using the Alienware 18, you should be able to do better than me as the cooling on the CPU side is significantly better in the Alienware 18. The i7 4940MX is also supposedly a better bin than the i7 4930MX, but sometimes the 4930MX overclocks better. My i7 4930MX is a qualification sample I bought from Japan for a cheap price, so I don't know how well it stacks up against other i7 4930MX and i7 4940MX CPUs. As for RAM, I'm running this in my Alienware 17: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00UVOVV12/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&th=1 I don't know if the kit is even sold anywhere anymore, but those sticks are the fastest DDR3 laptop RAM you can get. They should be compatible with the Alienware 18 as I've found that generally any part that is compatible with the 17 is compatible with the 18 as well, and vice versa.

What you described is pretty much how I treat laptops as well. The kind of laptop I like is a laptop with desktop performance, but is easily transportable. I'm not looking to constantly be carrying a laptop in one hand, which is what reviewer videos annoyingly do for a wide range of laptops. Who does that? I don't know anyone who walks around with a laptop in one hand while trying to use it! I don't mind if other people want thin and light laptops. That's their preference and I respect that. What I don't appreciate is that all the options I like are going away while people that like thin and light keep getting more options. I thought the whole reason for consumer choice was so that everyone could have a type of computer suited for them. There is no one size fits all solution since everyone's needs and wants are different. To be fair, I no longer NEED a laptop since I graduated college a little more than a year ago, but I still really like the portability of a laptop, so I still want one. A desktop is fine for my needs, but I really like being able to take my computer everywhere with me. Even the X170 is more portable than the most portable small form factor desktop. The X170 being a laptop is also an all in one computer: it has a built in battery, screen, keyboard, and trackpad (although I pretty much exclusively use mice). With a SFF desktop, you have to carry around those pieces as extra items. Even the chonkiest of laptops are still more convenient to carry around. There are times when having a laptop is really useful despite me not needing one anymore, because there are still times I have to travel. Such occasions are rare, but I'm really glad I have a beefy laptop when such occasions arise. I'm sad to see my options dwindiling away.

The X370 is an impostor. It's a heavily watered down version of Clevo's previous DTRs. I wouldn't even call this thing a real DTR as there is no socketed CPU or GPU. The number of ports has been reduced vs the X170 as well. It's very sad when people think a 7 pound laptop is heavy, because it's not. The 12 pound DTRs of the past weren't particularly heavy either, they just had heft to them. Plus, they could double as workout weights. I'm not sure why Clevo decided to go full BGA. I'm still interested to see how thing thing performs, but I know it would be less satisfying to have than an X170 despite the increased processing power over the X170.

I think the fans can be detached from the original heatsink, but I'm not sure if they're screwed on or glued on as I've never tried removing them. If they're glued on, that would suck.

The CPU side of the custom air/water unified heatsink looks a lot beefier than the stock one. I'd imagine this heatsink yields better thermals on the CPU than even the modded zTecpc heatsink.

GPUs are still way overpriced, but I've been seeing SSD prices dropping like a rock over the past year. It's great to see how far SSDs have come in capacity per dollar. A 2TB TLC SSD can be had for $90 nowadays. Good thing too because I'm gonna start needing much more storage in the near future for my job, so these price drops are coming at the perfect time. You win some, you lose some I guess. I'm just glad that prices are dropping on components I really need. I still need a GPU to complete my desktop, but I don't NEED it right now as I'm doing fine with just my X170SM-G. More than fine actually since I like laptops a lot more than desktops (but might not for much longer hehe).

Slap on a TEC AIO or custom loop and you should be able to boost the frequency on that 13900KS by another 500-700 MHz. I saw Skatterbencher's video with the new EKWB TEC and it looks awesome! I'm waiting for Cooler Master to announce their new TEC AIO as I'd rather go that route since you'd get most of the cooling power (around 88% assuming Cooler Master maintains their same 185 watt power limit on the MasterLiquid ML360 Sub Zero Evo / V2 vs the 210 watt power limit on the EKWB Delta² TEC) for probably less than half what the EKWB route would cost.

Yep, traditional rasterization has gotten so advanced and looks good enough at this point where I couldn't care less about raytracing in most games. Raytracing makes for a laggy unoptimized game as all it does is make your hardware do a lot of extra work for barely any gain in visual fidelity in most cases. There are cases where raytraced effects make sense, such as in dynamic scenes. If you have a day/night cycle in your game, GPU accelerated raytraced reflections could make sense, especially if you have a butt ton of objects in the scene as a realtime reflection probe would absolutely hammer the CPU in that case. The problem is essentially that in most games that currently have raytracing, it either isn't used properly or isn't needed, so it ends up causing a massive performance loss for barely any visual gain. Bright Memory is an example of Raytracing being used effectively as the reflections look absolutely amazing. Same with Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the raytraced lighting increases immersion by a lot. What we definitely don't need is raytracing being proprietary tech that requires proprietary hardware.