DebatED Nothing

Barnacules is insufferable in my opinion. He knows his stuff but I just find him so grating that I can't make it through a video of his.

Yeah those are torx security screws. Hexagonal with a spike in the middle so that regular torx bits don't work.

Also, unrelated note, but I take issue with people saying that referring to a USB storage device as any of "USB" "Pen Drive" "Thumb Drive" "USB Stick" is "non techie" or otherwise ignorant. Those are very widely accepted terms. Same goes for referring to a mobile data allowance as "an amount of 4G/3G/"internet"" that's a common expression, just because you use it doesn't mean you don't know anything about tech.

I spent about 15 minutes trying to explain the "favourites" system in windows file explorer to my mum the other day. She couldn't wrap her head around the fact that [File X] could be both in the favourites section -and- in My Documents/[Subfolder Y] so in the end I just removed the stuff she had accidentally put in it and "fixed it".

I couldn't think of one at the time, retrospectively I should have just not posted.

The job with the good boss please, because even a menial task can be made enjoyable when you're talking to friends doing it (cough, DOTA, cough :P) Would you rather a PC in a node 202 with a GTX 1070 or a Full tower with a 1080, assume all other components comparable.

Monitor, get a rotatable monitor arm. Also my touch typing would get completely shafted by a change in keyboard layout.

If you're loading into a multiplayer game it could be a combination of read speed, CPU speed and internet speed.

I've just looked again and realised that what I thought was the vrm cooling was actually the north bridge heat sink, I don't think there is a VRM heatsink on this motherboard that I can find. I -think- this has fixed it, but as I said I can only be sure after a few hours of testing which I've not done yet.

Interesting. I get it in a lot of games, the worst culprits are DOTA 2 and Mirror's Edge Catalyst, which is completely unplayable with the lag.

Okay, I can't do it today because I'm not at home anymore, but I'll try these recommendations tomorrow. Come to think of it there was one time when I removed the MOBO to so something and accidentially lifted it by the VRM heatsink which might (I honestly don't know the chronological order of these events) be a cause. I might try reseating that heat sink.

I will give this a go, however I've not had the issues the whole time I've had the computer, they just started seemingly randomly at some point (no hardware changes before it startes) My motherboard is Rev 1.1 of the GA 990FXA-D3 not UD3 but thanks for suggestion. Just touched the VRM heatsink and it's fucking scorching hot...

It says in the post I used DDU, display driver uninstaller which completely removes the drivers and all related files and folders. I'll try with no drivers.

I'll add these to the post as well, but I'm using a Corsair HX 750 and Windows 7 SP1.

Try reading my post, I did that already.

Description of problem: Whilst gaming (in a variety of games, so it's not one game or one engine's fault) I will get quite frequent framerate drops from 60 or so down to anywhere south of 10, sometimes even as low as 2 or 3 FPS for a few seconds. After the FPS drop, the performance will return to normal for a while, sometimes only about 15 seconds, other times several minutes can pass before another FPS drop. The problem sometimes takes a while from game launch to begin, but once it starts happening it does not stop. As you can imagine, this renders most of the games it affects completely unplayable so I -really- could use some help on this now. As you may see by looking at my profile, I have come here with this problem before, but to no avail, the problem seemingly died down for a while but has now returned. It's really bad, so bad it's making me seriously consider moving my plans for a new PC forward about 8 months because I can barely use this one at the moment. Signs and symptoms of problem: The FPS tank will, when monitored in MSI afterburner, correspond to a few things: a massive drop in GPU utilisation, a massive spike in CPU utilisation across all 8 cores, no change in RAM or GRAM usage, weird fluctuations in temperature of the CPU. Below are some screenshots graphs of these things when the issue occurs: (Spikes in this next image line up in time with the drops in the previous image) Graph showing CPU Temp behaviour: Hardware list: CPU: FX 8350 stock speed (Cooled with Noctua NH-D9L) RAM: 8 GB Corsair Vengeance which MOBO refuses to run at more than 1333 MHZ MOBO: Gigabyte GA-990FXA-D3 GPU: EVGA GTX 770 PSU: Corsair HX 750 OS: Windows 7 SP1 Games are all stored on Samsung 850 pro 250 GB SSD. Steps attempted so far: Completely reinstalling Graphics drivers (newest version, uninstalled using DDU in safe mode) Cleaning GPU heat sink, and CPU Heat sink (neither were dusty), re applying both's thermal paste. Storing games on different SSD and on HDD. I could seriously use some help guys. Thanks for any tips you can give.

I've become the poor unfortunate soul in my group of friends that is considered "in the know" about laptops and tech and stuff, so a friend has asked me for a laptop recommendation. His budget puts him below the kind of area I've looked in before so I'm kind of stumped at the moment and could do with some pointers as to what to recommend. His budget is at most up to £700 but would like to spend less if possible. He would like the laptop to be no larger than a 15" screen, doesn't really care about how thin it is or how light it is, but wants it to be able to "run basic games like DOTA 2 for about 4 years while I'm at University". I imagine you can achieve that fairly easily at this budget comfortably, but what's the best deal I could get him for about £600-650? Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

What about this, I changed it to a 250GB SSD. I really recommend an SSD for flight sims as it really helps with loading times. http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/82zvVY

I added some RAM, a hard drive and an SSD to your build, take a look. Thoughts @AluminiumTech http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/qVLyf8

Also what operating system are you using? Because Flight sims use a lot of ram but you can't use more than 16 GB on certain versions of windows.

You'll need to get hard drives and probably an ssd (load times in flight simulators really benefit from a decent SSD like a samsung 850 pro or something), and you'd probably want a non-stock cooler at some point though stock would probably be fine for a while.

So if I was going for an X99 in a Mini-Itx build (Node 202 as mentioned previously) what would you recommend CPU and MOBO wise? I'm very ignorant when it comes to Intel CPUs so wouldn't really know where to start looking.

A) Stop derailing my thread B) What makes you think that?

That's what I'm getting a lot as well, random drops in FPS despite my GPU being capable.