Frizzil

Build for mom is complete! THIS CASE IS GORGEOUS WTF

I figured out a way to strap the fan on that doesn't look too bad, while enabling room for the proper A2/B2 configuration. Thank you.

Question in title. Is this likely to matter? Manual just "recommends" to use A2 and B2 for dual-channel, but doesn't comment otherwise. Why I'm asking: my CPU cooler (Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE) is huge and the plastic sides of the literally-strapped-on fan is occluded by both sticks of RAM, but if I shift them over it will all fit nicely, lol.

No, it really is a bad USB driver. She's afraid to even touch the computer cause she thinks she'll break something, when she really hasn't done anything like that in forever. She doesn't even browse the internet on it, just occasional email use and attempts at mass printing or scanning photos. She just needs to learn to try things and not immediately reach for help, honestly. Multiple external USB devices have issues (printers, specialized photo scanner, USB hub) but not with other computers. Updating drivers changes things, sometimes temporarily fixes them, sometimes not. Sometimes reinstalling entire software suites changes things. Point is, she's not doing anything other than a very specific sequence of steps to try and print things, whereas she uses her iPhone/iPad as daily drivers. The only changes between her attempts are Windows Updates (go figure.)

I found reviews praising the equivalent MSI board over the ASUS one I selected, so I think I might roll with it instead (same price right now!): https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813144524?Item=N82E16813144524 Thank you guys for the input.

Question in the title. Context My family keeps buying my mom cheap computers and they keep failing at basic tasks, costing me and my brother inordinate amounts of time troubleshooting, so I've decided to just build her a PC that will actually work, and double as budget gaming PC for the nephews. Historically, the problems have come down to either 1) interaction of OS with non-best hardware, or 2) plain bad USB drivers. Hence the question - which mobo brand is most likely to have bug-free, up-to-date drivers, especially USB drivers? My ASUS Sabertooth X79 lasted me an entire decade without issue, but I'd like to hear other opinions before pulling the trigger. Thank you! EDIT: Not the main point of the question, but here's the build if y'all have any feedback, perhaps good ways to cut cost (since I'm trying to convince family to pitch in): CPU: i3 12100 Cooler: Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 GPU: Hand-me-down GTX 970 or GTX 1080 RAM: G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 3200 Mobo: ASUS Prime B660M-A WiFi D4 <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< item in question SSD: Samsung 970 EVO+ 500GB PSU: Thermaltake Toughpower GX2 80+ Gold 700W Case: Fractal Design Pop Mini Air Note: this thing is absolutely going inside a wooden desk container thing with minimal airflow, but it can at least be opened while gaming.

I added a CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive and pulled the trigger. Thank you!

@Crunchy Dragon Awesome! Glad to know I'm not completely off base. (It's been a while, lol.) I'll look into AIO cooler - steel case is a tough call, as I really like the glass look, so I'll have to think about it more. Ultimately the best solution for recording will probably be using a separate room, not sure I could get it quiet enough anyhow. I think I'm fine going without iGPU then, will just be more hassle once it's time for debugging. "iGPU Multi-monitor" not needed. Unfortunately I don't live near a Micro Center, nearest one is in Atlanta. (It's like a tech desert here in Alabama.) I think I agree on Win10, I got burned back in the day upgrading OS right after buying audio preamp, driver was immediately busted and never fixed On the case - I actually realized that I already own the black version, lol, probably went through the exact same decision process. You're right, it is an amazing case!

Budget: Around $1500 ideally Country: USA Workloads: IntelliJ (Kotlin/Java builds), Visual Studio (C++ builds), Ableton Live, Blender (3D modeling and texturing), Photoshop, voxel games (I'm currently developing one), latest AAA titles (mostly for reference, but I enjoy Nier Automata, Dark Souls and Monster Hunter), indie games, retro emulation and modding, video capture for YouTube, countless Chrome tabs. I'm a graphics programmer and will probably bring my GPU to its knees (perhaps unwittingly.) Main Concerns: Did I allocate cash appropriately to respective components? E.g. CPU isn't "wasted" given mobo? Is everything compatible? Enough wattage headroom? Will CPU "F" be a PITA if graphics card or driver fails? Anything I can/should save on? Currently over ideal budget, so I may wait on GPU to diffuse cost. Do I go Win10 or Win11? Any other issues? Other details: I'm migrating from a PC I've built and upgraded since 2012, lol. I'm fine just disconnecting it and reusing existing peripherals. I may occasionally test my game on the old PC for various reasons. I already own mouse, keyboard, and audio preamp. I have several displays, one 4K and two 1080p. One 1080p is HDMI, the 4k is DisplayPort, and the other 1080p can be either. I may upgrade to high refresh rate in future. I plan to do a basic overclocking, just the CPU base clock/freq and power draw, assuming that's how it all still works. (If there's "Power Limit Throttling" on this desktop CPU so help me...) I'm considering waiting on the GPU and reusing a GTX 1080 until the next series becomes affordable. I have a laptop 3060 I can rely on in the meantime to test new features (such as mesh shaders.) This PC will probably be travelling with me to a few gaming conventions. Parts I've picked out: CPU: $404, Intel i7-13700KF (gotta reduce those compile times, keep IDEs snappy. Want to develop for new Intel architecture. Good cache for badly optimized games doesn't hurt either.) Cooler: $36, Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE (quiet here is better for music making, if possible. This one includes thermal paste.) GPU: $510, RTX 3070 8GB PCIe4 (latest gen, basically, at pre-COVID price point) Mobo: $240, ASUS Prime Z790-P WiFi D4 (WiFi and Bluetooth saves me USB ports. My last ASUS lasted literally a decade, but I think was a nicer model.) RAM: $85, G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 2x16GB (Ableton + IntelliJ + 30 Chrome tabs + my voxel game running + Windows) PSU: $110, CORSAIR RM850 Gold SSD: $140, WD Black SN850X 1TB (OS drive) HDD: $50, WD Blue 2TB Desktop HDD, 7200 RPM, SATA 6Gb/s, 256 MB Cache (mostly a temporary drive until data can be transferred to external) Case: $190, Fractal Design ATX Mid-tower (need plenty of front-facing USB ports, especially USB-3 and at least one USB-C. Would love to have even more!) Total: $1765 Thank you!

Yeah, I was afraid it was just Windows being shitty, but I just wasn’t pessimistic enough, assumed it was my own meddling I may investigate that further. I definitely agree that New World shouldn’t be played without safety limits or normal clocks, however, as a graphics programmer I gotta disagree on it being Amazon’s fault necessarily (at least in the case of failing NVIDIA cards.) My entire job is to basically squeeze as much performance as possible out of a GPU, and to my knowledge there is no material out there that says “If you do too much of that the card might explode!” It’s not the game dev’s job to prevent that, but the driver dev and hardware engineer’s. (I’m sure you weren’t trying to make a point here, but I gotta take a stand on these things!)

Because it's already water-cooled... by my FEET

So I bought a CyberpowerPC laptop (Tracer V Gaming I17G 350), been using it since August, and I must say... it has been an INTERESTING ride. Thought I'd share my experience since I couldn't find a lot on them before buying. $1800 seems like a great price for the specs I chose: i7 11800H (8/16 cores), RTX 3060, 1440p@165hz display, 500GB NVMe M.2 PCIe 4, 2x16GB RAM... but power-limit throttling (PLT) is impossible to adjust without using another manufacturer's bloatware for the same chassis! (This is the advice given in various places to customize the "profiles" the laptop can toggle between via a button.) Also, the battery life is a non-existent 2 hours (which I knew going in), and the speakers are frankly terrible. The USBs being mostly on the right near the mouse is also frustrating. I've still had a great time with it, however, despite these issues. The main problem is, the thing overheats from inactive fans whenever it's in sleep mode, to the point of shutting itself down on wake to prevent damage... could be due to installing the other manufacturer's bloatware, maybe not, hard to say. But I suppose we'll never find out, since I can't find an installer for the crappy one that shipped with my laptop! Anyway, I've been using hibernate exclusively, which isn't much of a loss imo. (I hate it when laptops wake themselves up from sleep!) Even if the use of alternate bloatware is to blame, it's worth using just to disable PLT and control fan curves directly. Perhaps someone out there has another explanation for the overheating issue? I want to say the cooling is good... I mean the fans are clearly very powerful, and the "Tongfang chassis" is known to be good. However, while I haven't yet observed high GPU temps, if one CPU core has 90% utilization and the others hit 50% from a sporadically 100% workload, it'll hit 85 degrees with PLT, and 90+ without! Additionally, without PLT and playing New World, the external power brick gets RIDICULOUSLY hot - not enough to burn skin, but almost! I no longer play New World without PLT active, though at a higher threshold than default (75w instead of 60w), and the brick has been acceptably warm since. I may try to profile this if anyone is interested. (The brick has never overheated even from 100% CPU utilization, so it must be a combination of GPU and CPU without PLT!) Don't get me wrong - I LOVE my experience so far, coming from a Lenovo Y50 and GTX 860. Going from 1080p@60hz to 1440p@165hz has made everyday life so much better! As a programmer I love the keyboard, and with XMG's bloatware replacing CyberPower's, the performance/noise/temp tradeoff is highly configurable. But I seriously doubt most people would be willing to navigate these issues like I have. The overheating-mid-sleep issue is no joke, nor is the obscenely hot power brick without PLT. The speakers and battery are plain awful, but I'm always plugged in and using external speakers when it counts, anyway. Thoughts? Any of y'all looking at a CyberPowerPC laptop? (Perhaps not any more? Lol.) Let me know!

Lock Linus in a dark room with multiple PCs and devices connected via network - his objective? To save as many computers as possible from a spreading virus! I'm not sure if there's some virus out in the wild you could use, but it might be more manageable/safe if you hired someone to make one that implements common strategies, then use that as an opportunity to talk about them. I recommend going for maximum war room vibes: rig a buzzer and a red light to go off every time a new device is infected

Hi, so I'm a game developer/graphics programmer, and I've been getting into SIMD programming as of late. For my specific application (a voxel game), I get some huge performance increases through vectorization, but I'm curious as to what extent modern games actually make use of this tech. It's a little hard to develop for, and its use cases are limited but important. E.g., on-CPU physics and particles, encoding/decoding, etc. Anyone have ideas? This seems important, as its an area where we might see actual major increases in CPU performance, justifying consumers upgrading their processors, but it requires developers to actually program for it. (Spoiler: if the developer has a choice, they typically pick the laziest option. Multithreading? Nah. SLI support? Nah. Speed increases? Oh good, we can spend less effort optimizing our code. etc.)

[Redacted/Retconned] TMI