EChondo

Personally, I'm siding with Apple here. I don't like their products nor platform and how restrictive they are, but it is their platform, so to me you play by their rules. It's the same thing here on these forums, there are rules and policies in place for a variety of different reasons and if you don't follow them, then you're not going to be around for much longer. Apple is going full nuke mode here and I don't blame them. They want to protect their ecosystem and this whole thing from Epic is a direct attack. Everyone here can agree/disagree all day, but it doesn't seem that Apple and Epic will be settling this out of court, so we'll have to see what the courts decide and go from there.

Disagree. Forge and Custom Games are core multiplayer features. Locking those two things behind the $60 price tag would be insane. I can see them offering a years worth of battle passes or something with the $60 purchase, so theoretically the campaign and battle passes would be $30 each or so. As for the "10 year" thing, we saw how Destiny turned out with that...didn't end well. I don't see it working out for Halo either.

Oh man, I just bought a RTX 2060 for a SFFPC and got in with the Death Stranding promo. So happy. I really think these promos for "live service" games are terrible. I hope NVidia's 3000 series have way better promos than this generation has had... Godfall is a new game that isn't released yet. It was shown for the first time in the PS5 reveal a couple weeks ago. Personally I don't like the look of the game, just gives me a Anthem vibe and I'm surprised AMD is having that promotion when the game isn't even released?

I don't want to say this confirms that Gold is being removed(or pay to play online is), but this is definitely the direction they seem to be moving in... Though, with the multiplayer being free, I hope the campaign is worth the $60 USD.

I wanted to share my experiences with this specific laptop. So I had/have two issues with this thing. First, obviously, the Core Clock Bug. For Windows I had to install the Armoury Crate service driver thing, I installed it from ASUS's website though, not from the Microsoft/Windows Store. My ASUS button on the keyboard doesn't bring up the Armoury service, so I'm assuming it only installed the driver and not the full software suite. I was not aware of the Ryzen Controller program from storm1er, I'll have to try this after my next Windows reinstall. For Linux, I can confirm that it has a stable clock speed on Kernel 5.7.6. Supposedly a patch for this laptop was provided in Kernel 5.6.X, but I only tested 5.7.6 since it's the latest and I just installed Linux Mint 20 on it to try some dual booting goodness. Second issue, this is bizarre, but I cannot boot from the primary M.2 slot, it just does an infinite black screen boot loop. I'm not sure if the M.2 drive is going bad(stock 660p), if it's the slot, or just the BIOS being stupid. But I fixed this by installing a second M.2 drive in the secondary M.2 slot, installing Windows/Linux onto it, and then going into the BIOS and DISABLING the primary M.2 slot to be bootable. This fixed my booting issues 100%. I haven't tried swapping the drives/slots around since the laptop has been working fine. But this will break if you reinstall/upgrade/reset the BIOS and you have to re-disable the primary slot again. Honestly, I wish I never bought this laptop. I feel like it's just been issue after issue and when I reached out to ASUS Support they wanted me to RMA the laptop and I didn't want to deal with the hassle of paying for shipping and then just getting a broken product back, which seems to be the case for 99% of people RMA'ing this laptop...

I'm not a huge console gamer so I think the price is a bit much. I think if Sony wants to push for digital-only going forward, they need to incentivize properly. Like, the disc version costing $500, but disc-less is $400 is nice, but I think they should up the storage capacity on the disc-less to 2TB for $400 or $450. They'll make their money back anyway if they have to take a loss on the storage for the disc-less since everyone would be buying digital anyway through their store. Personally I just don't see the point buying disc-less unless you have unlimited high speed internet. For the disc version you can resell your games and don't have to worry about your internet speed as much. Because even though most of us on here are PC gamers and/or know a lot about PC's, Joe Shmoe down the street doesn't know and frankly does not care about PC's. But he/she loves God of War and the only way to play it is on PlayStation. It's also why most of us here on this forum probably work in IT as well. If everyone knew about computers, IT wouldn't be a critical job sector.

Tempted to try this out with Nox and use macros haha. They'll probably try and stop this soon though, at least I would hope so

Oof, just saw this after watching the Intel 10th gen video. Welp, I thought Intel was a pretty good choice for price:performance, but not anymore. Can't say I'm surprised though of a price cut, just wasn't expecting THAT much of a price cut.

This year and next year seem like the weirdest times to buy any PC parts. Intel is still on 14nm(though it's cool they were able to dissipate the heat better, though the wattage is insane). But we won't know for sure what 2021 will bring with 11th gen, will it still be 14nm? DDR5 may come in 2021, are they skipping that and waiting for 2022? Either way this will require another motherboard purchase...and if 11th gen is just another 14nm refresh, then it's a dead platform in a 1-1.5 years from now. Same thing on AMD's side, they messed up severely with the B550 release. If you buy B550/X570 right now, you may only get Ryzen 4000 as an upgrade this year. And then the question is about B650/X670, will that even release with Ryzen 4000? Will it be late to the game and release with Ryzen 5000? Will it support DDR5? Personally, with DDR4 coming to an end, I see zero reason to buy into a new platform right now. I would get a budget B450/X470 and plop in a Ryzen 2600 or Ryzen 3600 and wait for Ryzen 4000 since AMD will be supporting it, then just ride that until 2022/2023 when DDR5 will be cheaper and more adopted. Either that or buying something brand new knowing you probably won't have a reasonable upgrade for the next 2-3 years from either side due to DDR5. Anyway, thank AMD for CPU competition. Now if you could up your efforts in the GPU department...that'd be great.

Even though this would be the best option at the current moment, it'll unfortunately never happen. Most vendors can't even update a single BIOS in under 3-4 months. There's no way they'll have 2-3 concurrent releases of a BIOS for a single motherboard.

I agree here. This was an absolute mess for B550 release. I'm pretty disappointed AMD/mobo vendors dropped the ball hard here. I know AMD wants to stop the perception of being the "budget" option, but when literally everything released for a new CPU lineup is nowhere near budget offerings, you've messed up big time. Again, it is a shitty thing that has happened no doubt about it. I'm sure behind the scenes they had everything in a solid project roadmap and expected to be able to offer full AM4 support for the full lineup, Ryzen1000/ABX300 to Ryzen4000/BX600, but technologies change and sometimes change fast. I think the better approach here for AMD would to have been to come out around Ryzen 3000's release and inform everyone that they probably won't be able to meet prior expectations for AM4 support through Zen1-Zen3 and explained in a good tone why this is happening. Now we have everyone pulling up 3 year old articles and scrolling through Twitter trying to catch AMD in some double-speak and it's bewildering since many of us saw this coming since Ryzen 2000 that this was a possibility. It sucks, but we'll have to wait and see what Ryzen 4000 offerings are and if it justifies a full CPU+Mobo upgrade or if most of us can wait for Ryzen 5000.

1. AMD was very clear that the year 2020 was a cutoff, even since Ryzen 1000/300 series motherboards were first released. 2. AMD itself is not supporting Zen3 on older motherboards. They also didn't support Zen2 on older mobos, but you can still throw a 3950X on a A320 motherboard. 3. I don't see the problem here. This doesn't make all current Ryzen CPU's and mobos obsolete. Unless you're already on a 3950X, then you have an upgrade path with current hardware released. I just bought a 3700X and a X570 Taichi late last year. I don't plan on upgrading until Ryzen 5000. I see Ryzen 4000 being a very weird middleman between current offerings and DDR5/PCIE5. So I'd rather not invest in Ryzen 4000 so soon with a much newer platform 1-2 years out from right now.

Agreed. AMD needs to push the OEM's HARD. It's absolutely embarrassing seeing these sub-par Ryzen laptops still occurring 3-4 years later.

OH, you meant OneDrive, Microsoft's service. Yes, FreeNAS supports Cloud Credentials, direct documentation on this here: https://www.ixsystems.com/documentation/freenas/11.3-U2/system.html?highlight=cloud#cloud-credentials FreeNAS supports; Amazon S3 Backblaze B2 Box Dropbox FTP Google Cloud Storage Google Drive HTTP hubiC Mega Microsoft Azure Blob Storage Microsoft OneDrive pCloud SFTP WebDAV Yandex As for saving from the PC to FreeNAS, you can have Windows do a full system backup to FreeNAS natively(though I think this is a Windows 10 Pro feature?), article: https://www.maketecheasier.com/create-windows-10-backup-to-network-drive/ As for other options like individual files/folder/directories, some people I've seen like to use Veeam, but it seems very complicated to setup for FreeNAS use. I would recommend using Syncthing as FreeNAS has a Syncthing plugin and it seems to work really well apparently. Syncthing website: https://syncthing.net/

100% disagree. I would read this thread in its entirety before touching that specific laptop with a 1,000 foot pole: Believe me. I own that one. You do NOT want to buy it.

True, but for ~$830, it's not bad. I wouldn't play the latest Battlefield on it, but Valorant or CSGO? It's a pretty good option. Personally I would get the ASUS G14 with the 4900H+2060, but that's out of OP's budget and I favor CPU over GPU. But for OP's usage you're right with the A15. It's a solid laptop and fits OP's budget perfectly. Edit; found the laptop for cheaper on B&H, though it's pre-order for later June: https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1558022-REG/asus_tuf506iv_as76_tuf_a15_gaming_laptop.html Also Xoticpc has the same laptop for the same $1200 price: https://xoticpc.com/products/asus-tuf-tuf506iv-as76

Agreed. The screenshot just screams ChromeOS to me, which may be fine if they run 10X separately from regular Windows 10. I think it'd be a great side product, but for actual productivity and office work, 10X will fall flat on its face. So hopefully they won't do that, again.

For the keyboard, I think you may want to use "chiclet" as a search term to find what you need. Unfortunately there isn't really a big market for chiclet gaming keyboards. So if you find one you like, I would buy a spare of it just in case for future use.

On the cheaper side; Ryzen 5 3550H, GTX 2060, 120Hz, 16GB RAM, ~$830 on sale: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/asus-15-6-laptop-amd-ryzen-5-16gb-memory-nvidia-geforce-rtx-2060-512gb-ssd-stealth-black/6403866.p?skuId=6403866 Not bad IMO.

Nagios Core; https://www.nagios.com/products/nagios-core/

Probably Halo 1. I doubt you can run the Halo MCC from Steam version, but the original Halo 1 CE for PC from 2001 can run off of a flash drive and it's a very old game, so low system spec requirements. Online play may still be available too, but at least you can LAN the game pretty easily too and the singleplayer isn't half bad either.

Is your monitor plugged into your motherboard(so you're using your CPU's iGPU), or is it actually plugged into the GTX 1060?

Sorry it had to come to that. Off of the top of my head, double check everything on your OS drive before wiping it in case you need to keep anything. C:\Users\EChondo\Desktop C:\Users\EChondo\Downloads C:\Users\EChondo\Documents C:\Users\EChondo\AppData(usually Minecraft saves here in Local I believe) Hopefully it's a quick and easy reinstall and it works out for the best.

https://apps.irs.gov/app/vita/content/globalmedia/4491_dependency_exemptions.pdf Here; Because college students, even though they are supported by their parents, some aren't well off and neither are their families. So the parents get a tax cut because their dependent, who can be 24, is in college full-time. But now the parents don't get $500 for their adult dependent, and the full-time student doesn't qualify for $1200 because their parents already claimed them. It's a huge mess. Which is why the second stimulus bill in current talks are stating anyone above the age of 16 will get a $2000 check each. Doubt this will pass, but we'll see what happens.

Unfortunately most adults over 18 until 22-24 years old have been claimed by their parents as dependents. So, most of these 18-24 year olds can't claim the stimulus check and their parents won't even get the $500 extra for them because that $500 bonus is for dependents under the age of 18. I mean, they could file, but then that opens their parents up for a possible audit as well. So, in theory, this stimulus check benefits families and independent filers the most and hurts college students the most.