Clamibot

Yep, exactly why I was looking at the 6950 XT. The 7900 XT and 7900 XTX are too high priced for me to ever consider, and currently the 6950 XT offers a better price to performance ratio than those two cards. I'm getting really tired of waiting to complete my desktop and want to use it for everything now. I'd been using it as a machine to make game builds while I do active development on my X170SM-G, but I'd like to be able to use my desktop for active development and gaming as well. The overwhelming majority of the newer games I have in my library (released 2015 and after) have a significant performance advantage on AMD hardware. The 6950 XT should keep me happy for quite a while as it will have a significant amount of performance headroom left to spare, allowing me to keep that 144 fps in all my games for a few GPU generations. Also, I wanted to turn my new desktop into a hackintosh, so AMD GPUs are my only option anyway if I want GPU acceleration in MacOS. The 6950 XT is perfect as it will meet all my needs. There's no reason for me to go for Nvidia GPUs anymore since AMD's offerings are more useful for my needs. I'm hyped for Starfield. I enjoy Bethesda titles quite a bit.

Yeah a lot of heat is absorbed during state changes since additional energy is required to complete the state change. This is called the Enthalpy of Fusion (also known at the Heat of Fusion). You can have water be at 32°F (0°C) and exist as a liquid, or you can have ice at that same temperature. Melting the ice into water requires additional thermal energy to complete the state change. The thermal pad once melted also flows into microscopic pits, displacing air pockets and therefore improving heat flow.

This is an awesome announcement! I'm glad I'm a part of this community, and the fact I get news from here that I otherwise wouldn't have heard about is one of the things that make this community a great place. I've been waiting over a year to complete my desktop. I haven't been able to find a GPU I want for a reasonable price, but the 6950 XT has been steadily dropping in price over that period of time. I'm glad to see AMD is now doing a new game bundle with a game I actually care about. That may be one of the things that pushes me to finally buy a 6950 XT, since now one can be had for $570 on Newegg. Just gotta wait a few days and hope they don't go out of stock before the bundle starts. Oh, and Newegg's Fantastech sale starts on July 10th as well, so maybe prices on the 6950 XT will go a bit lower then. The stars really are aligning for me right now. I just hope my frugal side doesn't take over and compels me to wait until all deals are over and stock is depleted. 🤣 Great way to never buy anything! 1080p 144 fps is my target. I'd rather have a high framerate than a high resolution as motion smoothness makes games more immersive for me. That being said, 1080p is my baseline resolution that I won't go lower on unless the screen is very small, like on my Steam Deck. 1080p is still the norm, and likely will stay the norm for quite a while until prices on 1440p and 4K panels match that of current 1080p panels. The fact of the matter is 1080p seems to either still look good enough for most people (evidenced by Steam's hardware survey), myself included, or people just don't want to spend money on ridiculously overpriced monitors. Not to mention the hardware you need to get good performance with those ultra high resolution monitors. The upgrade in visuals just isn't worth the monetary costs involved to acquire the hardware to achieve them. I did get a 1440p ultrawide monitor a few months ago, specifically the Dell S3422DWG, and I absolutely love it. I got it mainly for work so I could see more information on a screen at once since I'm not a fan of multi-monitor setups. I never got the point of those, but my personal preference is to have one big screen so I don't have to see annoying borders. It absolutely rocks for gaming, but the increase in immersiveness over my Asus VG248QE is due to the increase in field of vision rather than resolution. I'm still happy with my Asus VG248QE and still use it for games I can't achieve 144 fps on with the Dell S3422DWG due to the much higher resolution. 1080p still looks great to me! In my opinion, ultra high resolution monitors give much more of a benefit in productivity than in gaming. Having used a 4K monitor myself at an office, I like the higher resolution for productivity as I can see a butt ton of information on the screen at once with my hawk vision and 100% scaling. For gaming, yeah it does look better, but the difference isn't huge like jumping from 480p to 1080p. The biggest difference is the crispness of faraway objects, but I'm happy to sacrifice that to quadruple my framerate. Once 4K at 144 fps is achievable on all games without needing a graphics card that costs more than $1000, then I'll be interested in 4K for gaming.

From a financial standpoint, not really. The RTX 3080 MXM is about 15% more poweful than the RTX 2080 Super MXM on average from what I've heard.

As a Unity developer myself (as in I develop games using Unity, not the engine), I stick to the LTS releases of the editor because of weird things that can happen with alpha and non LTS verisons. Perhaps you can try downloading the latest 2022 LTS version of the editor and try importing the Enemies demo package into a new HDRP project created using that editor version. Edit: Oh I see, the package was developed with a 2023 version. Yeah that explains why your editor has unexplained crashes. There is no 2023 LTS version of the editor yet. The 2022 LTS was just released earlier this month.

An SFF desktop or that luggable case I posted earlier would definitely be the go to options for portable muscle. If you want to go the SFF route, you can wait for Sliger to release their Tego case, which is a console style case that can fit an ATX Motherboard, an ATX power supply, and a 360mm AIO. I've been waiting over a year for the case to be released and it's been delayed again. 🙃 I'm gonna keep waiting though since that's really the best option. The case is more MFF than SFF, but it's portable enough for my needs and probably yours as well. No need to compromise on super small cases that can't give us the performance we can get from a tower case. The Trego basically just compacts everything together, eliminating all the unused space. It'd be nice if it would stop getting delayed, but I understand Sliger has been having trouble keeping up with demand from their corporate clients since their most recent move a few months back.

So for my birthday last week, my parents got me an MSI MEG Unify Z590 motherboard, and I'm absolutely loving it! I'm both disappointed and impressed at the same time. Disappointed because I still can't run the super 10900K I bought from brother @Mr. Fox over 5.6 GHz stable (can do 5.7 GHz on both boards, but that speed causes a crash shortly after it's achieved), but I'm impressed because that same 5.6 GHz requires 100mv-120mv less voltage on the Unify board than it does on my Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Master. On the Aorus board, I need 1.5v to do 5.6 GHz on the super 10900K. On the Unify board, this same speed requires only 1.38v-1.4v to run. It's insane how big of a difference a motherboard swap made. No amount of undervolting on the Aorus board that didn't cause a crash could bring the voltages down this far. Now I understand why Gigabyte boards are cheaper than other brands for seemingly the same specs. Their boards are really good for anyone who just runs their CPU stock since you get a good cost to performance ratio from them, but MSI's enthusiast boards are much better for overclockers. Since the required voltage is now significantly lower for all given speeds, temps and power draw have dropped significantly. 5.4 GHz all core on the Aorus board required around 307 watts of power to sustain, and my desktop just crashed after a few seconds of that. On the Unify board, this same speed requires only 267 watts and can be sustained indefinitely courtesy of my awesome cooler and my all liquid metal build. Liquid metal works extremely well with the TEC AIO I have. Best temps I've ever seen in a computer short of sub-zero cooling, and can be used indefinitely since it's practical. I can see 5.6 GHz all core being stable indefinitely for any gaming workloads, although I STILL need to find a GPU to put in my desktop to test that. Overall, looks like I'm hooked on MSI enthusiast motherboards now, just like I got hooked on liquid metal for my CPU cooling needs. Oh also to anyone who is new to liquid metal builds or anyone who wants to know an easy way of dealing with liquid metal stain residue, I've found that sandpaper isn't necessary to clean off copper surfaces of any crap that forms on top of the copper surfaces. I'm not talking about the silver stains themselves, rather, I'm talking about the hardened dark spots/flakes that slightly protrude out of the copper surfaces, giving the surface a bumpy feeling. Instead of using sandpaper, you can take a big wooden pick like I did and scrape all that crap off the copper surfaces. It'll take a bit of time and force to do, but the spots will come off if you keep working at them. I was able to reapply liquid metal easily and not have any raised or dry spots on either of the surfaces. The liquid metal all applied evenly on both the CPU IHS and cooler coldplate (more like a nozzle in my case). I can confirm the contact is very good as the core to core temperature deltas are minimal, and the temps are really good even with the TEC module inactive.

Hey everyone! What do you guys think of using this case as a base for a proper laptop? https://www.caseclub.com/product/pc-portable-gaming-station-with-built-in-monitor/ It's extremely expensive for a case, but you'd have a forever upgradeable laptop. 🤪

I think the root of the problem is just people being evil. Regardless of economic system or governmental ideology, the people of a particular country (or even the world for this matter) will thrive if they are righteous, or at least trying to be. They flourish because they create a stable environment for themselves to progress. Doing douchey things creates an unstable environment, and with enough evil people hatching their nefarious schemes, things fall apart for everyone once the instability becomes too great. What we need is abundance economics like the Vulkans have in Star Trek. That'd be nice. In any case, we have to work with what we have, so applying regulations where needed is a good policy to reduce instability and keep companies in check. With that tangent out of the way, the Asus ROG Ally is apparently releasing on my brithday. I'm looking forward to seeing it's performance in games!

Is this panel a glossy panel? Looks like one from the images posted. I ask because I absolutely love glossy screens. Won't use anything else.

That's good news. At least now we know the motherboard is at least mostly usable. Given the information you provided, my next guess is the power delivery on the GTX 980m MXM board is toast. It's more likely that the power delivery on the MXM board itself has crapped out than the power delivery on the MXM slot itself. I've sparked the MXM slot on my Alienware 17 before while performing my GTX 1060 upgrade about 5 years ago (silly me, I forgot to disconnect the battery), and the slot (and GPU, whew) was still fine afterward. Did you ever shunt mod your 980m?

The out of box experience on the X170KM-G seems to be a hit or miss. Sometimes it's good, and sometimes it's not. If you're looking for a stable out of the box experience, the X170SM-G is generally much better in that regard, plus Premamod is available for that model. However, if you win the lottery on a good X170KM-G motherboard, the experience will also be good, you just won't have Premamod. The heatsink fitment depends on the laptop you get as there is a heatsink lottery with these models. I got my X170SM-G from zTecpc back when they were selling that model with Premamod, so I got a guaranteed good heatsink.

This thing looks awesome and very well built. We're looking forward to seeing your results! I took a look at the installation part of the video you posted again to see if I missed anything. Here is the list of dos and don'ts: Do: - Apply masking or electrical tape on the CPU to secure it in the socket - Gently massage the waterblock into place after putting it on top of the CPU (if needed). You probably won't need to do this, but you can if the screw holes are off when you initially install the waterblock. Don'ts: - Do not overtighten the screws. Hand tight or slightly tighter is enough. - Do not use a power tool like an electric screwdriver to install the screws (lol). Use a hand tool only. - Do not use too much force while screwing in the screws. Be gentle.

Not to mention you can swap out the optical drive for another drive bay, giving you a total of 4 drive slots if you count the msata slot. In fact, it is possible to fit 4 2.5 inch drives in this laptop if you use an msata to sata adapter cable for the 4th drive. It's simply amazing how much room this laptop has in it for hardware despite supposedly being the same size class as today's 17 inch craptops. That's lots of storage for all my games, media, and development work hehe. 😁 You can confirm if the combined load is the issue if you enable hybrid graphics and pull the dedicated card, that way you run completely off the iGPU. Do you have a 120 Hz screen like me? In that case the laptop won't let you use the MUX switch key combination to avoid bricking itself. If you have a 60 Hz screen that connects to the LVDS port on the motherboard, then you're in luck and you should be able to easily switch to mshybrid/optimus mode. If you only have the 120 Hz eDP screen, then you'll need a 60 Hz LVDS screen temporarily connected to the laptop to perform the switch and do your diagnosing.

I still have my Ranger and it still works like it's brand new. I've had it for almost 8 years now. It was a year old when I got it (overstock nobody had bought) back in 2015. I've never replaced any parts in it due to failures. The motherboard is still the original one that came with the laptop, and I have the CPU upgraded to a i7 4930 MX, the GPU upgraded to a GTX 1060, and the RAM upgraded to a 32 GB kit of Kingston HyperX 2133 MHz SODIMMs, which aren't even sold anymore. You can't find that RAM anywhere anymore. I upgraded the screen to a 120 Hz screen as well when I did that GPU upgrade. In addition to those hardware upgrades, I also have the upgraded CPU and GPU heatsinks by Chichen, and have liquid metal on the CPU, plus Phobya Nanogrease Extreme on the GPU. I put some Nanogrease on top of the CPU VRMs so they'd have good heat transfer to the CPU heatsink. Chichen's upgraded heatsinks for the Alienware 17 are very good. I've run the CPU at around 4.1-4.2 GHz most of the time during heavy use, and this thing has been very heavily used. My unit still shows no sign of wear even after the close to 8 years of use it's been through. It still runs like it's brand new as I said before. This laptop is built extremely well and is made to last, unlike the stupid crap on the market today. I wish there was a version of this laptop with modern desktop class hardware as I really like the physical design of this laptop. @Ashtrix From the symptoms of the issue you described and the list of things you've tried, I'd guess your issue is probably a power delivery issue on the motherboard itself. What's interesting though is that when you tried a CPU stress test, you didn't experience a shutdown. It appears your problem only occurs on combined CPU + GPU workloads, so the issue is probably with the power delivery circuitry on the motherboard itself that the DC jack connects to.

Well I guess I'd be your guy if you wanted a translation in realtime then. 😁 What's funny is that you post these Thai overclocking videos from time to time, and I enjoy them every time you post one since I can understand what they're saying. I don't usually look for videos in languages other than english, but this guy's videos have some really good content. At that point where the video starts when I clicked on it, the dude was going over the instructions on mounting the direct die waterblock. He was saying that he was putting tape on the CPU package to secure it in place before mounting the direct die waterblock. He also said to not overtighten the screws.

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.