xaaronx

Yeah actually the only thing I wanted was a SPDIF port for my external dac... I had a quick look at pcie cards but for the price I might as well get a better motherboard.

Hey guys, I was wondering if I could get some advice. I'm fairly happy with my decision here but I wanted to run it by people who do this stuff all the time. I currently have a ASUS Z170i mITX motherboard, obviously with the Z170 chipset. I'm running that with a 6700K @ 4.6Ghz and an R9 380/4GB and 16GB of memory. I want to move to a full mATX or ATX system (nearly) as cheap as possible just for future flexibility when I upgrade the GPU, add storage and maybe a TB3 card. Would the ASUS Prime Z270-P Motherboard be a good, solid choice? I can pick it up new for $180AUD and by the looks of it sell my Z170i for a fair bit more. I'll of course loose on-board WiFi but I don't use that. Might grab a cheap WiFi card for the future. Thanks.

I can get CL9 1333Mhz SODIMMs. Would that be better than CL11 1600Mhz? 4x8GB?

I won't be using this laptop too much for games but when I do I'll be using the Quadro K2000M which has 2GB of dedicated VRAM. So CL11 is okay? Won't really make any difference? I was looking at getting two sets of this: http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/QUMOX-SODIMM-16GB-2x-8GB-DDR3-1600MHz-PC3-12800-204-PIN-SO-DIMM-MEMORY-/281696972862?hash=item419672b03e:g:HyMAAOSwNSxVWz1r

I've been reading a bunch of posts about memory and a lot of people mention 1600Mhz memory with a CAS latency of 11 clock cycles as being bad memory, or not of high quality. I'm trying to find either 4x4GB or 4x8GB sticks of 1600Mhz (12800S) DDR3 memory for my laptop. (Thinkpad W530). CAS11 ram is everywhere, CAS9 is much harder to find and much more expensive. I could alternatively go 1333Mhz. Would that be better? Would I notice a difference between C9/C11? Can anyone give me advice? I basically want to upgrade to either 16GB or 32GB of memory, cheaper the better but I want good performance. Kind of a balance. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks. Edit: I'm in Australia.

So I've tried all the things. It's still removing AMD Settings. It did it again today. I've tried using Microsoft's troubleshooter that'll let you disable/hide updates (wushowhide.diagcab). I've also tried Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Hardware >Device Installation Settings and select [No] for "Do you want to automatically download manufacturers' apps and custom icons available for your devices?". Any other ideas guys? This is so annoying. I'm considering just re-installing Windows 8.1.

Does it do it with only the power lead plugged in? You can get nasty shocks from old TV HDMI ports. The shield can be kept at a couple hundred volts, I'm not sure why they do it. But it's high impedance and not enough current will pass to hurt you. Maybe your monitor does something similar. My old DLP TV would give me huge shocks from the HDMI shield. Our new LCD doesn't, however my sisters Panasonic Plasma does. It hurts, not enough to injure you though. No earth faults either.

I wouldn't worry too much. Sleep and Shutdown aren't going to really have any impact on the SSD. Sleep keeps the RAM powered so the memory stays intact. Hibernate dumps the memory to disk (or SSD in your case) which means it will write and erase more frequently which is wear. So sleep is better. You can probably configure hibernate so it saves to another disk (HDD) though and then you can use both.

Just make sure you don't ground out the signal (center) wire.

I'm going to vote C++. People will say it's too complicated for beginners but it's not like you're going to throw yourself straight into the deep end. Once you have a good understanding of it, transitioning to other languages is easy. But that's just my opinion! There's tons of libraries out there too which will let you get into creating games or multimedia programs quickly. My personal favorite is SFML (Which supports multiple platforms and languages anyway).

Hi guys, Been having a weird issue lately. 3 times now I've noticed Windows 10 has gone ahead and uninstalled the latest AMD driver (non-beta) that I've installed, and removes the AMD Control Center with it. It's driving me crazy, I really don't like using an OS that goes and pulls this stuff off behind my back. It's only just done it again. I usually notice because when I run games or anything that's GPU intensive, I'll notice just a tiny bit of choppiness which I've previously attributed to AMD Power Saving mode. So I go to start up the Control Center to find it's gone! The card is an R9 380 by the way. Has anyone else has such problems? I've read up on it a bit and found that you can go to Control Panel > System > Advanced System Settings > Hardware > Device Installation Settings and select [No] for "Do you want to automatically download manufacturers' apps and custom icons available for your devices?". But the summary text, whatever you want to call it, the text next to the Device Installation Settings button for that window says "Choose whether Windows downloads driver software for your devices and detailed information about them.". It's like they're trying to hide something...? Any ideas why this could be happening, and if the above fix will work? Has anyone experienced anything similar? Thanks!

You keep saying things that aren't relevant at all. Once again, if you bothered to read my posts you would have discovered that the ST3000DM001 series of hard drives have an extremely high failure rate. Now, I'll say it again for you: these disks aren't failing due to a firmware bug, they're failing due to mechanical stress. It's that simple. Now, these drives are controlled by firmware. Engineers might have discovered that reducing the platter speed by 5% increases the hours before failure by a huge amount. So what do they do? They release a firmware update. This then prolongs the life of the drive. Now, I've just made all that up. But hopefully now you understand why a firmware update may be pushed to a drive, and why the drives firmware can directly impact the mechanical-side of a drive. That's just one of many reasons. And obviously a company isn't going to come out and say that if you don't install the update, your drive will die. They'll just silently push the update. So, no, I'm not trying to fix something that isn't broken. I'm trying to take a preventative measure. Updating the firmware is much more likely to solve long-term issues rather than cause short-term issues. Isn't it obvious? If I purchased a Western Digital drive that has no known widespread issues, I wouldn't bother to even check if never firmware was available. And I didn't know it was funny to try and prevent problems. Now can you please stop referencing the failure of 7200.11 drives? It has nothing to do with anything here, apart from disproving your idea that no drive will ever fail due to a firmware bug. Once again, the 7200.11 series of disks did not fail due to mechanical stress, yes, you're right, but you're completely missing the point. Take some time to read please. It's still relevant. A drive manufacturer could release a drive tomorrow that fails for millions of people in the near future. Hard Drives existed for a long time prior to 2009. Yeah, well you're kind of wrong. Read above. Anyway, this entire thread has turned to waste. But hopefully you'll learn that trying to update the firmware of a hard drive isn't entirely pointless. If it was, why would a company release the newer revisions in the first place? Also, although it could be irrelevant, it's interesting to know that a Seagate ST3000VN000 doesn't seem to have any firmware updates available online (And I'll admit I didn't give it a thorough search so I may be incorrect) yet the ST3000DM001 has a history of 6 firmware revisions. I wonder why.

You stated drives will never fail due to firmware bugs, and that they're all mechanical failures. Firmware bugs can cause failures, and firmware changes can impact mechanical stress since certain properties of the drive are directly controlled by the firmware, such as spin speeds, arm acceleration, whatever. Because of this, and the high failure rates of the ST3000DM001, I wish to have the latest firmware. What does a date have to do with my argument? Clearly drives can fail as a result of firmware problems. Please quit replying in this thread. You have no idea what you're going on about. The fact that you've never heard of someone updating the firmware on an HDD is reason enough for you to not bother replying.

RIght, first off. You obviously didn't read my post. My drive works fine, the firmware mismatch prevented my drive being flashed. I'm trying to find out where I can find firmware for my drive. Second, here's an example of failed drives caused by firmware bugs. Since you don't know how to Google around. This is the Seagate 7200.11. Now I'm not saying my drive is going to suddenly die from a firmware bug. The ST3000DM001 has no critical bugs afaik. However if the drives are failing due to mechanical stress, a firmware fix could lessen the chances of it failing by, I don't know, slightly lowering the speeds of the disks, or the acceleration of the arm. I don't know, I'm not a Hard Drive engineer.

Why are you acting like it's a shocking thing to do? People have had to upgrade/flash firmware on disk drives many times in the past. For example if you were one of the early adopters of a 7200.11 drive from Seagate and the thing was still recognizable by Windows, you were highly encouraged to flash it to prevent it bricking itself. There's nothing wrong with flashing firmware on hardware? I mean, if there's NO reason to, sure, don't. However ST3000DM001 has high failure rates and I want to have the latest firmware running on the drive.