Mr.Meerkat
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UK mobile networks summed up: super cheap, inconsistently fast, inconsistently terrible and slow, coverage
Gave up on trying to force my way with only O2 and Three without broadband. Third line added with EE, which is also mixed results
O2 - Main line, 300GB/mo, £15.2/mo
5G: coverage is not great and not very fast (about 70Mbps in testing).
4G: coverage is very good but the speeds range from "decent" to "0.05Mbps on 4G? O_o".
3G: coverage is great but speeds are not great
Mind you, that 4G mast is still broken next to my home...7 months later...
Three - iPad (but is a phone line), 40GB/mo (with rollover), £4/mo
5G: coverage is pretty great with amazing speeds (200Mbps+)
4G: uninspiring due to oversubscription (aka a bit crap).
3G (HSPDA+): Still by far Three's biggest strength, 25/4Mbps+ is honestly very solid even in 2024 with lower ping than 4G and better coverage.
EE - Second phone line (did need for work), 30GB/mo, £3.50/mo
5G: acceptable coverage but speeds are not great (around 90Mbps in testing).
4G: 125Mbps spikes before settling to 80Mbps, pretty solid for 4G. Solid coverage as well.
3G: What's that? You mean edge?
Honestly, I'm surprised I can have 370GB of data, across three lines and it only costing £22.70/mo. I do actually need all three lines, albeit the two secondaries could both be <5GB of data (but it wouldn't have been cheaper so 30 and 40GB it is).
I guess now that I've become a commuter who lives out of a hotel 50% of the time, always having 330GB+ of data is actually really nice.
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Laptop display flickering and artifacts (Asus X13 Flow)
Mr.Meerkat replied to Mr.Meerkat's topic in Troubleshooting
Haha, no worries. Was just about to point that out again The problem is since it's the 2021 model, it doesn't have the MUX switch so everything (internal display, DP/USB-C, HDMI ect.) all goes through the Radeon iGPU (dGPU passes-through the iGPU). Have tried stress testing with both the iGPU and dGPU, and the flicking is still there but it doesn't get any worse. I've not switched the display cable as it's almost impossible to buy one. I've only simply reseated it for now (in case it was loose). Anyway, I guess it's time for me to go display cable and new display hunting. Dunno what's worse, second major issue with this laptop (since the original WD SSD failed very, very, very, very pre-maturely) or the fact that parts are so hard to come by. Maybe it's my excuse to go obtain myself a MBP 14" with a M2 pro... Yeah, as I suspected ultimately. Egh, can't even just simply spend £20-ish and try replacing the display cable first... Right, time to go fight with the retailer, throwing the UK's consumer rights act 2015 at them...again -
Laptop display flickering and artifacts (Asus X13 Flow)
Mr.Meerkat posted a topic in Troubleshooting
Hey all, so I have a 2.5-ish year old Asus X13 Flow GV301QE. Unfortunately, the display has started to sometimes flicker and has lines running across the display. Symptoms: 1. If the right 2-3cm of the display isn't black, the display flickers and artifacts. 2. Whilst posting, there is a purple line running across the splash-screen. Since it is a laptop can go 360 with the display, the flickering happens regardless of screen angle. Screen flickers regardless of brightness Things I've tried: 1. Changing display refresh rate, the flickering is worse with 60Hz compared to 120Hz. Display doesn't like any other refresh rate. 2. Reinstalling both AMD and Nvidia drivers, doesn't help 3. Reseating the display cable, didn't help (which removes the only simple fix...egh) 4. Tried external display via HDMI, no artifacting or oddness Since there is a purple line artifact during the ROG splash screen on start, it would suggest it's a hardware issue rather than software. Don't suppose anyone here have any suggestions or ideas? Edit: Should also clarify that the laptop has not been dropped at any point.
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D'oh, how could I have been so stupid?
So I no longer have broadband at home meaning I had to hotspot with my iPhone. However, the 4G is unusable so I have to leave my phone in a specific place so it gets 5G.
iPad mini or old phone, works perfectly, connects via Wifi 6 and there's minimal speed/ping penalties. However, my desktop would get stuck at 2.4GHz and I would struggle to get more than 10Mbps with horrible ping (connection is between 40-80Mbps depending on time of day). However, I did figure out that if my old android phone is connected to the iPhone hotspot, I can just hotspot my Android (one great thing about Android, hotspotting a wifi or ethernet connection) to my desktop and it works fine enough (caps out at 30Mbps and adds about 20ms of ping however).
After going at it with the janky setup for 1.5 months, I realised something...why don't I just USB tether my old android phone...phone happily stays Wifi 6 and desktop is now happy...The solution has been there all along
Mind you, I still haven't worked out why the intel 9260 is okay with my iPad's hotspot (150Mbps on iPad's 5G no problem) but hates my iPhone's 15 hotspot (it won't connect to anything other than 802.11n).
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Huh...neat. Complaining to the communications ombudsman really was worth spending the 5 minutes to upload your complaint (ctrl+c/ctrl+v my email complaint to network) and the two 5-minute phone calls, assuming you can establish sufficient proof
Decision:
1. Obtain the promised 20% discount onto my sim contract
2. This gets backdated to start of contract (about £35~)
3. A £75 credit on-top after all of that as well.
£110~ for 15 minutes of forms and calls is pretty sweet. Of course, I'm deffo dipping from O2 once my contract expires but who do I go with...I need that (more than EU) inclusive roaming (for work) alongside O2's international calling add-on (get it for free, again for work, does actually make a difference).
If only I could get a pre-2021 Three UK unlimited sim-only contract...best inclusive roaming (for me) and their EU-to-EU calling is technically cheaper than calling domestically within the UK...
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Late 2022, I upgraded my Fury (with a few CU's unlocked, 3840SPs) to a Sapphire 6900XT Toxic EE. It's AIO was replaced by Alphacool's block, which apart from it being incredibly restrictive (compared to my Fury's EK block...), performs very nicely. With a gaming load or stress test (Heaven, Timespy extreme and Furmark), the GPU works just fine. No crashing, no artifacts, absolutely no oddness. Not even a driver crash. Sadly I can't say the same about hardware acceleration/compute loads however. Back in 2022, I did notice that occasionally, I would get half a dozen white pixels scattered across the screen whenever I was doing something that involved browser hardware acceleration (namely YouTube). Originally thought it was just Chromium being funky so kind of disregarded it. I also did notice Capture One starting to crash once every 25th time opened, but for that, I blamed it on the Corsair 3200MHz DDR4 kit that couldn't even run at 2400MHz. Fast forward to 2023, I get Topaz AI, intending to denoise and upscale a bunch of photos from the noughties and 2010s. Unfortunately the hardware acceleration rears it's ugly head again, but this time making it unusable. Whenever I try to denoise or upscale an image, the output image would have all kind of artifacts, from purple pixels to lines to weird circles shapes, making the image unusable. Tried various drivers and whatnot to no avail but with my laptop having a 3050ti, I kind of ignored it...until two weeks ago. Friend hosted an university event and for fun, I photographed it. It was a dark venue and couldn't use flash so all the images were shot between ISO6400-12800. 900+ photos reduced to 150~ final images and with Capture One's denoising tool being useless old fashioned, I tried Topaz with the 6900XT again. Still artifacts on the output images but as it takes the 3050ti 30-40s/image with Topaz, the time saving with the 6900XT would have been substantial as it only takes 2-3s to process each image (i.e. 1.5hrs vs <10 mins). Now with new drivers (including trying AMD pro), different PSU for testing (old XFX XTS 1kW), new Micron DDR4, reinstalling the GPU block, fresh windows install, undervolting/underclocking (core only as for some reason VRAM is locked to 2000MHz min), basically all thee troubleshooting steps that exists, I could not get the artifacting to go away. As there's nothing left to do, I randomly selected 1500MHz on the core and 2200MHz on the memory...the artifacting was gone. 1500 core/stock 2000MHz mem, artifacting is there. Stock 2375 core/2200 mem, artifacting is there. After playing around, I managed to get it to 1915 core/2100 mem without it artifacting in hardware acceleration loads. As I do like 5hrs of gaming every 3 months nowadays (and it's 2560x1080p anyway), the underclock is completely fine but huh? Is this a software issue? GPU die issue? Memory issue? The underclock I can understand but why do I have to overclock the memory as well to make it not artifact during compute loads? Don't suppose anyone here has any ideas? TL;DR Sapphire 6900XT Toxic EE, completely fine in gaming and stress tests (including timespy extreme, heaven and furmark) but artifacts during H/W acceleration and compute loads. After troubleshooting with every single method under the sun, found a remedy which involves underclocking GPU core from 2375MHz to 1915MHz (not as bad as it sounds as stock 6900XT is 2015MHz) whilst also overclocking VRAM from 2000MHz to 2100MHz. If core is any higher or memory is any lower, it causes artifacts in compute loads. Anyone have any ideas? It straight up doesn't make sense to me... Hey, on the brightside, with the underclock (and undervolt), it's now a 160W GPU instead of 320W under full load (and sub-50C temps!). Also, just in case someone is thinking, why 6900XT, especially the most expensive version (Toxic Extreme Edition), it was cheaper than a 6900XT nitro, cheaper than 6800XTs and was roughly the same price as 6800s back in 2022 so had no doubt in my mind to buy which card.
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Huh...recieved the crucial kit today and the default is 3200MHz@CL22. Not 2133 or 2400MHz but 3200 (with not so good timings). XMP profile is 3200@CL20 so again pretty poor timings but it's much better than 2133MHz, regardless of timings.
Seems to be Rev.B so should be interesting to see how it compares to my old Rev.E kit. Maybe try pushing it to 4000MHz?
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When you get given a £100 voucher to "test" a photobook so you collate your 50~ favourite photos and arrange them into 30 pages
Only problem was I left it until the very last moment to use the voucher (30 day expiry, got given it 27th January so had less than 15 minutes to use it...
) so might have missed a few photos and the layout probably isn't perfect but ya know what? I'm still very excited for it.
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Omg, omg, omg, omg, I actually found a new Rev.B/E 3200MHz 2x16GB Kit again! Can't wait for Crucial to be back in my life
Imagine, 3200MHz XMP/AMP actually being stable...something Samsung's A-Dies do not know what is...2133MHz being the only stable clockspeed, even manually tuning 2400MHz could not get it remotely stable
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Huh...TIL Spotify's Windows App will utilise 4 cores at 25-50% each when it needs to buffer the current/next song
(is a 3700X for reference, not an intel "atom")
Now it all makes sense. Back when I actually played video games, that's what caused the random FPS dips whenever I would listen to songs whilst playing something demanding.
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this goddamn app COOKS my Core 2 laptops, regardless of streaming quality...
Even when a song isn't playing, boom, 100% CPU usage for like 20 seconds loading the app.
What is it doing that needs that much horsepower...
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11 hours ago, da na said:this goddamn app COOKS my Core 2 laptops, regardless of streaming quality...
Even when a song isn't playing, boom, 100% CPU usage for like 20 seconds loading the app.
What is it doing that needs that much horsepower...
they gotta load the fucking ads
despite me having premium, podcasts have ads in them. Not sponsorships, not ads read by the podcasters, but actual ad spots from spotify and stuff. Pisses me off, but at least I can skip over them
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Uh huh...6900xt trips the OCP of a SF750
Wait huh? Insert confusion
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8 minutes ago, Skiiwee29 said:
I mean, my 3090 tripped OCP on my HX850, so even high end PSUs aren't immune. Had to put in an HX1200 to resolve it.
Yeah, that's true. Suspect a specific program is making the GPU spike well above 500W, tripping the OCP. Am a bit perplexed how no matter what stress test, gaming load or really anything else won't trip the OCP but the second I try to use DXO PureRaw, PSU goes bye-bye, I'm out of here.
I'll heed the trial's advice of not getting DXO PureRaw I guess
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Uh huh…otterbox actually makes the case I’ve always wanted and it actually looks thin! Unfortunately, there’s only an iPhone 14 Pro version
It’s the folio MagSafe attachment and although there’s no 15 pro version, it is just a MagSafe attachment so in theory, I should be able to pair it to an otterbox 15pro case. Amazon warehouse has the 15pro symmetry case and folio (damaged boxes) for £19 and 12 so maybe it's worth a try regardless.
I have tried two detachable flip cases off Amazon for my 15pro but oh mai, dey be thicccccccc (current flip case is thinner than the silicone cases alone, never mind the folio part
).
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9 hours ago, Senzelian said:
I will never understand people who put their cards on the back of their phones.
Funnily enough, bank cards are the one type of card that I don't usually put in my phone case. The only time I have a bank card in it is when I'm travelling and I know contactless won't be an option. Instead, I usually chuck my commuter pass in there (bye bye pass holder) and I usually only keep a single card in a flip case (as otherwise it starts getting thicccccc). Also, it's a nice business card holder when you aren't expecting one (I use a card holder as my wallet so not really ideal for receiving business cards).
Other reasons for flip case, most acts as a nice stand in a pinch (especially nice for filming or long exposures), acts as a screen protector (anecdotal but zero cracked screens so worth something to me) and honestly, I find it fun flipping the cover. Who needs a foldable phone when you can just slap the case cover
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Completely forgot I even created an adobe stock seller's profile and added 7 images 2.5 years ago. Login today and I find 7 downloads
worth a grand total of...$10
Two coffees, nice
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Erm, been wanting an Astron for many many years and when Seiko released the new SSJs last summer, I wanted one even more. Got a random recommendation from Google and it was a seiko authorised retailer offering this, a SSJ019 with a 40% discount (making it cheaper than grey market even before import tax)...my impulsiveness clicked in before I could stop myself No regrets. Guess my prospex (that's gone to hell and back x10) finally has a partner!
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