Praxis

Hi, Thanks for the reply, unfortunately I don't have the option for uefi firmware settings. After advanced options my only choice is start up settings. I'll have a search to see why it's not available. Perhaps this will lead me to a solution. Thanks

Yeah I've tried hitting F2 as well. When the drives are in I can spam F8 and it brings up the boot drive selection screen which looks/is some small part of the bios. From that screen I can select a drive to boot from or it gives me the option to enter setup ( which I assume is the full bios) when I try this I go straight to a black screen like when spamming F2 and/or delete. I think at this point I just have to live with it as it is and forget overclocking. Hopefully I don't need to go into the bios often otherwise I'll have take the side off and unplug all the drives. Perhaps it's my PC telling me I need an upgrade Thanks for the advice!!

Thanks, yeah I'm thankful for having the integrated GPU, tbh I think it'll influence my future purchases to make sure all my CPUs have one. I just tried extending the post time to 10secs, unfortunately I hit the same issue of when a drive is installed and I hit del on the post screen the display just goes blank.

Hey, thanks for the reply, I'll give that a go and see if it works. However I have a feeling it may be something more than that, I see the Asus logo pop up and the text about hitting F1 and del to access the Bios. But as soon as I hit del the screen goes blank, it's like it's entering the bios but there's some kind of display error.

Hi All, I wanted to get back into some overclocking on my old rig but have found I cannot access the bios with any drive plugged in. But I can still boot to windows. I've taken all the drives out and have also removed my graphics card and can now boot to the bios. I've tried resetting the bios to defaults and clearing the CMOS but still can't get the bios to load when a drive is plugged in. The motherboard post code / q code I'm getting is AE, which is a legacy boot event error. My system is the following: 4790k Asus z97 pro (wifi/AC) with a range of drives: 2 Samsung nvme SSD's one in the motherboards m.2 port the other in an Asus hyper mini pcie to m.2 adaptor, 1 Samsung SATA SSD and 1 HDD. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks for your help, From your advice, some research and a long think about things I've decided to just save my money, there's nothing wrong with my setup at the moment and because my 970 is pushing frames well above 60fps it'll mean I'll be able to game at fairly maxed out settings at 1080p for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for the help, I've been doing some research over the past few days and have found two potential options. 144Hz 1080p monitor: Acer GN276HL: $479 + $25 shipping https://www.pccasegear.com/products/38991/acer-gn276hl-27in-144hz-gaming-led-monitor 144Hz 1440p monitor: Dell S2716DG: $799 w/free shipping http://accessories.ap.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=au&cs=audhs1&l=en&sku=210-AGRD The interesting thing is I own pretty much the exact same acer monitor except it is only 60Hz so I know what I'm going to get, then again that also means I'm paying $500 minus what I can sell my current monitor for second hand just to upgrade from 60Hz to 144Hz I'd buy the Dell in a heartbeat if I had a slightly better graphics card or there was some way to play at 1080p on the 1440p panel. I know you can do it but I haven't been able to find anything googling it, where you play in windowed mode at 1080p and the window takes up most not all of the screen. But I feel that would be such a janky way to play. I'm pretty sure dell has a 30 15 day money back guarantee thing so if they do I might try that and see if I'm happy with it. edit: 15 day

Thanks that's good to know that 1080p on 1440p looks terrible, using my current monitor for playing games at 1080p does defeat the purpose as I wanted to drop back to 1080p on the 1440p monitor so I could play FPS games at a high framerate, but my current monitor is only 60Hz. I'm getting the sense that the best options for me are to either pick up a cheap 144Hz 1080p monitor or wait and buy a 1440p+ high refresh rate monitor a few years down the road when I can also justify upgrading my graphics card. We'll see how long it takes for 4K 144Hz to be "reasonably priced" Any extra advice is once again greatly appreciated

Hi Everyone, TLDR: Any suggestions on a monitor upgrade from a 27" 1080p 60Hz TN More Info: Currently I have an Acer 27" 1080p 60Hz TN Panel and I also am in the position to spend some money on my PC. I have an i7 4790k and a GTX970 along with an NVME drive, so I feel the current sensible upgrade for my setup is a better monitor. I'm willing to spend close to $900 AUD as I want a monitor that is "future proof" (but I would like to save some money if recommended by you), I kind of feel that spending money on another monitor that is 1080p, even if 144Hz, wouldn't be the smartest move unless its very cheap. So at the moment I'm leaning towards something like the: ViewSonic XG2703-GS: https://au.pcpartpicker.com/product/c8zZxr/viewsonic-xg2703-gs-270-2560x1440-165hz-monitor-xg2703-gs or AOC AG271QG: https://au.pcpartpicker.com/product/scM323/aoc-ag271qg-270-165hz-monitor-ag271qg (I am aware or the issues with potential back light bleed with these panels) I know that my 970 is going to struggle to play a lot of games at 1440p 60Hz let alone 144Hz but I would like some headroom for the potential to upgrade my graphics card in the next 4 years or so. Basically I'm looking to see what your opinions are on what I should do? Even if that is wait and just upgrade my monitor at the same time as my graphics card. For some extra info, I mostly play RPG single player games like the Witcher 3, Assassins Creeds, Fallout's and TES, however I'm starting to play some FPS games with my friends particularly Rainbow 6 Siege. This is one of the reasons I'm thinking of the upgrade as I'm pushing frames well over 100fps in R6 so I feel I'm not getting the most out of my computer with a 1080p 60Hz monitor. I'm just unsure on things like 1440p 144Hz or 4k 60Hz, IPS vs TN, G-Sync or not, or the potential of playing games (R6) at 1080p on a 1440p monitor to keep high fps with my 970. So yeah any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!! Cheers in advance and sorry for the rambling.

Depending on the warranty you could always try returning it, so long as you've got somewhere to store the files until you get a new external drive. Western Digital's Red drives are specialised for RAID setups. If you're not going to use RAID for backup and are just going to set up a manual backup or use it similarly to a external drive you can save yourself some money by going with a WD Blue or Green. Those drives are normally cheaper.

I'm not very experienced with budget hardware so I can't make any specific suggestions. But perhaps having a look at getting a Haswell CPU and compatible motherboard. It might be cheaper than the newer platform if you can get your hands on them. There hasn't been much of a performance increase since then and when you're looking at the budget end the newer technologies that come with newer hardware (eg. USB 3.1) aren't there anyway or aren't relevant.

I agree with @gtx1060=value and @manikyath. Norton is really good, I've had experience with McAfee and Trend Micro and Norton is by far the superior of the three. I run Norton on my desktop as I don't want to risk anything happening to it. But on my laptop I just use Windows defender.

Thanks, must have been the modem as I restarted the router other day when I first noticed the issue. I'll have to remember to do both in future.

Hi Everyone Recently I've noticed my families home internet has become considerably slow, especially for videos such as in the Float Plane Club, Facebook and news websites. They're basically unwatchable, having to buffer every second, even loading the forum here was very slow. However despite this I can play YouTube videos at 720p with no buffering at all, they just play straight through from start to end with no issues (in fact I just checked and I played a 6 min 1080p video with only less than 5 sec buffering at the beginning). The same issues is noticeable on both an ethernet connected PC and on mobile devices over WiFi. I'm wondering if this is an issue with our modem and router settings or if it's just some weird issue with our ISP. Any suggestions and thoughts would be greatly appreciated.

Binning is the organising of a manufactured product into classes of quality. Some products will be better than others, despite all of them functioning correctly or to specification. Companies take advantage of this manufacturing trait by selling products as high quality at a higher price. In relation to PC parts, the marketing term of 'binning' means that these products are supposedly better than the others, even though they will all meet a quality standard. The binned ones are just the cream of the crop.