Coaxialgamer

I'm moving house in just a bit which means I'll be on mobile data for a little while until I get settled in again. Just gave in my fiber box today, figured I could survive a week or so with mobile wifi hotspots. The area i'm in isn't exactly fantastic when it comes to cell reception, but when connecting to my phone's wireless hotspot with my android tablet I get about 3mb/s each way. Not exactly the fiber speeds i've known previously but also not unusable for web browsing and light video streaming...truthfully i've had worse. Using straight 4G on my phone is similarly usable. The thing is though that when connecting my desktop PC to said hotspot the connection quality tanks. When network speed tests load I'll maybe get like a fifth to a third the total bandwidth I get on my tablet. Haven't been able to get a read on latency, but the overall experience (coupled with the fact it won't load most of the time) makes me think it's significantly higher on the windows machine. Any way to explain away these issues? Is it maybe just background internet usage that hogs my bandwidth? IS there like a setting on windows that might restrict network traffic in this respect? Or any other fix? My rig is basically unusable.

I've been trying really hard to maintain better posture...this might be the motivation I need lol

Phone is a Redmi Note 10. I've been having an increasing number of issues relating to Bluetooth audio playback. Music tends to cut out at the slightest bit of interference. Putting my phone in my pocket, or even holding it too far...hell even just lying down wrong in bed now makes the audio cut out. I'm reduced to holding the damned thing in my hand while walking if I want a stable connection. It's not an issue with the earbuds, as different earbuds have the same issues and the issue doesn't occur with other devices. I've reduced the bitrate in the dev settings, restarted my device, even reset it... nothing works. I would be incredibly pissed to have to dispose of an otherwise perfectly functional device because of this, but given the amount of music I listen to I'm seriously considering it. Can't even run with music anymore.

Okay this is going to be a small /rant because i am frankly very annoyed at this (maybe more than i should) and every time the subject comes up i go on for 10min about it and now you're going to be privy to it. Maybe it's my inner old person. Back when I was a kid shoes would often have a label/tag in the store that indicated that some part of them was made with real honest-to-god leather. Maybe this is specific to my corner of the world I don't know. Obviously there's still some variance but there's at least some expectation that those pairs would last longer than ones without any leather in them. And I'm not just talking business stuff either: you had normal walking shoes or even sneakers that had leather in them. And nowadays at least where i live those tags are completely gone. I go into a shoe store and everything is made of plastic. Prices are also insane as well. I mean I could be spending 50$, 100$ or even 200$ on pairs from different brands and from a purely structural standpoint none of them will look particularly more durable than the other. Most of the time they all feel the same, apart from the super cheap ones. What, am I just supposed to trust the manufacturer that by spending extra $$$ i won't have a detached sole in 6 months? Because from where i'm standing they all seem to be made with the same exact cheap materials and i'm struggling to see the premium as being anything more than brand recognition. Am I like supposed to look for goddamn shoe reviews before I go shopping, is that it? Because from where i'm standing it seems like most of the markers of build quality are now gone, and I hate that. /rant over

As long as socket/chipset compatibility is maintained then sure. There's also the addition caveat of the board needing a BIOS that supports you chip, but given that 12th gen was the first LGA1700 generation that shouldn't be an issue. The only possible risk is that your previous board took the CPU along with it when it died. I'm not saying that's necessarily true (or even likely for that matter, it depends on how your board failed) but it is something to keep in mind.

No, as the base stations use IR for tracking IIRC. That being said it is possible to use only one base station with limited tracking functionality

I mean it could be software tomfoolery. does this have any effect on performance?

I mean if it can't accept the full voltage range that means that the construction of the unit differs from the units that can. At the very least some intermediate stage in the voltage conversion process is completely different and that can have an impact on the stuff after it. At the very least, given how most DC power supplies in use today can accept a fairly wide voltage range (hell, even tiny USB chargers) i'd be fairly sketched out by a PSU that can only take 230V, at least on principle.

There's no way to take a CPU/GPU/RAM combo and say definitively whether or not the system "will bottleneck". For starters any PC will have a bottleneck somewhere because performance is finite and components are never all used at 100% capacity all the time. It's just that in the context of PC gaming most gamers will want their GPU to be the limiting factor (because games are GPU-intensive and graphics cards are expensive yo), but there's nothing intrinsically wrong with being CPU limited either. But to answer you question: there's no way to tell. Different games will use your components differently, and even within individual games the actual settings (and resolution) will have a fairly significant impact on relative CPU/GPU utilization. So it kinda depends on what you play and how you play it. Now personally, if i had a 2700X and was playing at 1080p or 1440p and was looking for a GPU upgrade i'd first seriously consider looking into flipping your CPU and getting a 5th gen ryzen CPU. I used to have a 1700 for a while but more recently sold that CPU and bought a used 5600x (yeah fewer cors but i didn't need 8 cores realistically), which performs a hell of a lot better. The upgrade didn't end up costing me a whole lot in the end. Thank god for forward compatibility. If that wasn't an option (either because of cost or if my board wasn't compatible with 5th gen) I'd probably not go much beyond mid-range for GPUs (7600XT/6700XT territory at most), but it isn't much more than an educated guess.

Thanks, I'll definitely be sure to freak out on this thread the day I finally get my hands on the meds, and I'm sure more will come as I start seeing the effects lol

Hey y'all, I know that this thread has been kind of semi-active and up in the air for a while. I've dealt with a range of feelings about myself for most of my life, and moving out really enabled me to look inwards and examine what I truly wanted. While it's been a grueling road at times, I'm pleased to say that I'm starting HRT in a couple weeks and I couldn't be happier. This thread has always been wholesome and I love it for that.

I'm currently running an RX 6800. Before that I had a 2080, and before that dual 290Xs. Honestly the whole issue is overblown by far. The only problems I have encountered are mostly confined to a select few VR titles (mainly texture rendering bugs and sub-par performance in Elite)...but the experience for me has overall been pretty much exactly the same as it has been on my older RTX2080. I don't play the latest released though, so plausibly Nvidia cards *might* get fixes and driver releases faster, but YMMV. I similarly had no problems with my 290Xs when I was running those in my system. Honestly the whole thing is incredibly plug and play. From what I've gathered a lot of the FUD about AMD driver releases comes from the old ATI days, or in some cases for the latest hardware releases...but 99% of the time, on hardware that's not a few weeks old...you're not going to notice a difference.

I'm looking for a power supply to replace my near decade-old Corsair CX750M which has started become quite noisy (and its age is starting to concern me). I have about 150 euro of fun money to play with (although paying less is always good i guess), and I'm looking for a unit with at least 750W of capacity. Ideally gold rated, and AT LEAST semi-modular. Silence is a primary concern. I'm in France, FYI. The two units I've found so far that I like are Seasonic's Focus GX 750W unit (132EUR) or the slightly more expensive Corsair RMe 1000W (150EUR). I know Seasonic has a very good reputation as an OEM and their unit has a slightly longer warranty (10 vs 7 years), but my thinking here is that the RMe 1000's overkill capacity would both help with overall lifespan and noise. Current rig has an overclocked R5 5600X and RX 6800, to give you an idea of the draw here. I kinda like the idea of having extra power capacity if needed (given how GPUs power budgets seem to be soaring); but realistically I'm aware that I'll probably never really use a full 1000W either. Oh and if i've missed any other obvious picks i'm all ears of course.

Sad to see this thread being left to rot! bump!

This may be an obvious question, but is Maximum PC freely available? Are these archives...legal?

Yes... if you can find those parts at all. My past experiences involving processors being sold new despite being a couple generations old typically involve the store not bothering to update their pricing and selling parts for what they sold for when current... That or stores upping their prices to make up for scarcity (I guess?) Just a minute ago I tried to find a 10700K, and i STILL see shops selling them as new for 330+ EUR.

I mean the 12700K is a perfectly capable gaming processor, and is still damn close to the top of the performance charts here. Can you engineer situations in specific titles where the 12700K might hamper your GPU's performance? Yes. Try running games at 720p and see how things go. Realistically though you're not equipping it with the fastest GPU available, and you're probably gaming at reasonable resolutions.Unless you're really into high refresh rate gaming you'll be fine.

Neither Intel nor AMD typically produce older CPUs for much longer after a new generation comes out. If the new products do well you get a large dropoff in demand for the older chips anyway, so previous-gen parts often come from existing stock and aren't actively produced months or years after being replaced. Intel doesn't make new LGA2066 parts anymore. You can either try to find new old stock for whatever parts you want, but older chips like this will probably cost you MSRP, which is a ripoff at this point. A better option is to go used, and you'll find many parts from that gen for sale for a fraction of the price.

The QX9300 is a significantly faster, hotter, and more power hungry chip. It is quite possible that Toshiba didn't add it to the CPU support list because of this, or they may not have bothered adding support for a processor that they didn't offer. Alternatively your CPU might be dead. Without documentation specific to this laptop it's hard to be sure.

Are you sure that your board and chipset support the QX9300? Especially with core 2 generation parts, you typically had a wide array of chipsets running off a single socket, each supporting different processors. Aside from that, it's possible your BIOS doesn't support the QX9300, in which case you're SOL. What CPU did that PC come with?

Your card has nothing to do with it: your own personal preferences do. Up until mid 2022 I was rocking an R9 290, a card which came out in late 2013 (and which I bought more or less when the 970 came out, a year later). That's over 8 years on a single GPU. It's not like it was broken either: it's just that some newer AAA games I wanted to play wouldn't run in full HD at ~60fps beyond low settings. It could certainly have run for longer if I had wanted it to. Your GPU is about 4 years old at this point, and trades punches with the RTX 3070, which is still a very capable (and current) GPU. I suspect it'll stay competitive with mainstream cards for another generation or two, so you might easily get another 4 years out of the card if it doesn't fail. You might just need to revise your expectations if you expect 1440p/144Hz gameplay.

I mean sure, but that's also an embedded processor, not one designed for client use. If you're able to find embedded processors then go ahead, but these questions usually imply client SKUs, not embedded ones.

This was also confusing to me when I got started with PC gaming. At the simplest level, Nvidia produces bare chips (GPUs) which are then sold to companies such as Asus, MSI, Gigabyte etc (called AIBs), which put the chip on a PCB, slap a cooler on it, and sell it to you. Both Nvidia and AMD put out "reference" designs for their cards (sometimes called "founders edition" for Nvidia) which these AIB companies can opt to use. Alternatively, AIBs can opt to design and build specialized or more performant coolers/PCBs for any given GPU. This is what you're paying for when buying more expensive, "premium" versions of certain cards. Some cards might also have a slight overclock right out of the factory, although in practice the performance jump is fairly minor. Finally, you're paying for game bundles, customer support, and packaging. Buying a card from a brand known for good support in your region could save you a lot of hassle down the line.