TechGrappler

I bought a 5.1 Ch surround home theater system to use with my laptop and I had to use a Toslink cable to hook it up. The receiver for the audio system only accepts HDMI (and it doesn't have video pass-through) and Toslink for surround, while my laptop only has 1 HDMI port and my TV doesn't accept more than 2 channels of sound and does not have pass-through either. Instead, I got a Creative Soundblaster X-Fi 5.1 Surround Pro to encode the audio through USB to Dolby Digital and then used that through the Toslink port on the external sound card to play through the system. I am aware that you can't use the master volume control for Windows to adjust volume through digital steams, but it seems that he volume sliders for individual applications still work through Window's native mixer (such as Windows Media Player and Chrome). While I can adjust the volume with the remote for the audio system, it's much more convenient to use the hotkey on the keyboard instead, so I was wondering if there's a way to get Windows to adjust the volumes of specific applications when using it's native slider rather than opening up the mixer and doing it by hand?

I'm getting [error code 1] when downloading the 350MB patch through Rockstar's client. It would supposedly download everything and then give the error message at the last moment. Anyone else facing this problem?

Thanks guys!

Can someone tell me what Post-FX, Soft Shadows and Tesselation do in PC games? I looked around online and couldn't find a definitive answer for them and messing around with them didn't yield any noticeable results. Also, how does turning up these options affect performance?

So aside from the smaller UI elements and the AA, raising the resolution would not make a difference on the perceived viewing angles or other image quality aspects? Also, would it be more effective to render at a higher resolution without AA or render at 720p and turn the AA up a bit?

Running off a GTX 850M on my laptop, I'm pretty sure it doesn't support DSR.

Hi everyone, I was wondering if setting the resolution of games at 1080p will make any difference if I play it on a 720p TV. I tried fiddling with the settings, and I could swear that the there's just slightly more detail at 1080p despite being viewed at the TV's native 720p. Some of the menu items seem to also increase in size at lower resolutions. While actually playing the games, I don't really notice much, but if I take a screenshot at different resolutions and then look closely at a still image, I do notice some minor differences. Is this just some sort of placebo effect, or does rendering a game at above native screen resolution actually affect the image quality? Does lowering the rendered resolution lower the viewing angles or amount of objects displayed even when using a 720p display source? Thanks!

Hi everyone, I want to try to overclock my laptop's Nvidia GTX 850m (4GD DDR3) a little bit. I understand that laptops struggle to deal with increased thermal output, so I've taken a few precautionary steps beforehand. I have removed the old CPU and GPU thermal compound (stock) and re-applied with AC MX-4 and then ran a few stress tests and benchmarks to make sure that the temperatures were either equal to or lower than the stock temperature. I also have my laptop on a cooling stand and it is in a well ventilated room with a very cold ambient temperature. My main goal for overclocking is to get a modestly better framerate during gaming and then prehaps even reverting back to stock clocks in between if necessary. I plan to increase core and memory clocks, without changing the voltage. I'll be using Nvidia Inspector. My main question is how much should I increase the clocks by? I'm not looking for massive improvements, just modest upgrades (I'll be satisfied with even a 5-10% improvement). Some guides that I have read online suggest increasing the core and memory clocks anywhere from 50-200MHz. What do you guys think is a safe amount? At stock clocks, my GPU runs at an average of 58C when under regular load and peaks out at just under 68C. I'll be closely monitoring both the CPU and GPU temperatures the entire time. Thanks!

My laptop which I use for gaming and school work has been pretty reliable so far, except that the CPU temperature occasionally gets up to the low 90 ©. I have cleaned the dust out a couple times now, though I was always hoping to replace the stock thermal compound. The manufacturer's warranty recently expired (void if I took off the heatsink), so I have nothing holding me back now. My main questions are: 1) What brand of compound should I use? (I read around and was thinking AC MX-4) 2) Can I replace the GPU compound with it as well while I'm at it? I know that replacing the compound probably won't affect performance much, but I am determined to do it. Any tips or advice would also be greatly appreciated.

I can probably find most of them. My main concern is if I just throw them in some random folder in my data drive after I format it, will the games be able to find and load them? Or do I have to put them in some specific location?

Hello, I've decided to replace my laptops disk drive with an SSD as a boot drive. My current hard drive is partitioned and I want to departition it and use the single drive as mass storage. It's currently only loaded with photos, music, the OS and my PC games, which I have made backups of and can easily retrieve/redownload if lost. My only concern is where the game save files are and if I should place them in some specific location so the applications can find them after I move them out of whatever folder they are in now and into the single drive. Some of my games are from Steam (some have cloud support, some don't), while others aren't; the saves might be all over the place. Would they still work if I format my old HDD and dump all my old files back onto it from a backup drive? Do I have to find the specific files before formatting/departitioning and place them in specific locations afterwards? My steam application is currently on my partitioned OS drive, while I have all the game in the second data partition. Thanks for the help!