adm0n

I think when you start using the microphone of the XM4s windows automatically switches you over to Bluetooth hands free audio, which has a vastly lower audio quality from what you are normally getting. And I'm not quite sure if there is a way to use the mic without it. But besides that, the headphones doesn't support Bluetooth low latency mode, so you are likely getting 200ms+ audio delay on windows (android somehow manages fine without it though). So I'd recommend getting either a clip on mic and using them wired or getting a new dedicated headset.

For getting more power out of a USB cable, your PC and the monitor would need to negotiate a higher voltage. But your PC doesn't have a steady supply of an "arbitrary" voltage between 5 and 48 V. So it is probably only capable of outputting 5V. So that severely limits how much power a potential monitor could draw. You could get away with an portable monitor though. Something like an Innocn 15a1f. But for anything else you'd need a USB controller that can inject a DP signal from your GPU Convert 12V from your PSU to whatever USB-PD needs And I don't think such a thing exists. But it'd also be fun for you to prove me wrong.

I'm pretty sure if you use Rufus, it automatically prompts you when creating a bootable USB device to remove those requirements. As for the en and decoding. Usually your plex server will encode your files at a lower bitrate than you have provided them (for example if you high bitrate blu rays) and then your target device would need to decode them again (well it will need to do that regardless). If your network is fast enough, you can always just access the files directly. But if you leave your house, you usually want them at a lower bitrate. That's what you need somewhat "powerful" hardware for.

So as you ask for the best way to go about it. These are the most important questions you need to ask yourself: Which OS do you want to use? (Something like trueNAS or unraid for example. Windows is usually not the best for a NAS server.) How much storage do you want in what configuration? What redundancy do you want. What power envelop are you fine with? (Your current hardware will likely draw 30-60w at idle) Going with a raspberry pi is also an option. I don't have any experience with it, but I guess you'll have limited encoding support for plex. Just as a last question, what is wrong with your current setup for win11? You can easily bypass the TMP check, if you don't have a TMP module. You won't be able to use software that relies on it, but the only one I know so far is Vanguard for playing LoL or Valorant. I had a 4th gen intel system running with win 11 already.

If you have more performance than you need or are willing to invest some time, you can usually tune your hardware for efficiency a bit. Look up how to undervolt your hardware. That way you can usually remove the power draw of your GPU/CPU a bit without influencing their performance. If you are willing to give up a bit of performance, the results are usually even greater.

From what I can tell, the cooling performance of these laptops is pretty similar. The "water cooling" of the legion 9i does nothing and seems to be more of a marketing gag. From https://www.ultrabookreview.com/66327-lenovo-legion-9i-review/#a7 So the question is, if you want a MiniLED monitor (which is awesome for HDR but has pretty average/bad response times) and is it worth the performance loss and price increase to you? At that price class, if you are tethered to a monitor for most of the time anyway, a desktop with a RTX 4070 could also be a real consideration. You can probably build one for around 1k and with the rest of the money you could still get a nice laptop with a RTX 4060 or similar. When you want to play games on your laptop, you can just stream them from your PC and anything simple can be handled by the laptop directly. So unless you are often out without access to a solid network, but still want to play AAA games maxed, this is a way better solution in my opinion! With the added benefit, that if the GPU is to weak in a couple of years, you can just chug in a new one.

Just looking for "portable blu ray player" brings up a plethora of devices that all basically do what you want. But unless that isn't feasible for your use case, I'd really much rather go with a usb-c blu ray drive. That way you can watch the videos on any laptop, that is almost sure to have a better screen and better battery life. And for modern laptops you can also get a USB-C power bank to increase the battery life even further. Most portable blu ray players will need AC power.

The amount of RAM used by games usually depends on how much is available on the latest console generation. So if you have nothing else open on your PC, 16 GB is still enough for almost all games currently, as the current console generation has only 16 GB of RAM as well (and that is combined CPU and GPU RAM!). So my guess would be, that you'd be fine for at least the next console generation, if you get 32 GB of ram. All of that changes, if you have like 16 GB worth of other programs running in the background though! You CPU/GPU will likely get less relevant before you will need more than 32 GB of RAM for gaming though. So don't worry about that too much.

So the tearing happens on both monitors when run at their native resolution? It could just be that there is some weird interaction going on between your GPU and your monitor. It sounds like they are just not synchronized, i.e. (doesn't work this way but take it as an analogy) your monitor expects 60 pictures a second, and expects them to arrive starting from t=0. Your GPU is outputting 60 pictures a second, but starts a slightly offset time, like t = 5ms. That way one frame would take up ~70% of the screen, while the rest 30% would be drawn when the monitor updates to the next frame. And at that time your GPU delivers the next frame, which takes up the remaining 70% of the screen. Like this you'd be left with a horizontal seam in the top part of your monitor. There was also a problem with Nvidia GPUs and Samsung TVs, where they would just not be able to consistently output a signal at all. So this kind of thing isn't unheard of. The first thing I'd try (if you haven't so far) is uninstall your GPU driver using DDU. If that doesn't help, you would have to either try with a different monitor (a different model altogether) or it could actually be the circuit on your GPU that is the problem, in which case I'd RMA it. There are also less conventional solutions, that might work. It is possible to use your iGPU to output to your monitor, but your dGPU to render games and have that displayed through your iGPU. And maybe you could also hack up different timings for your monitor. But I don't know about either well enough, that I could just tell you whether they'd work for you or not. If you feel like trying either of them out, you'll have to put the work in and figure out how they actually work! Either way, good luck with your problem! Hope you'll get it fixed.

Just to give you a bit of context, why it would be safe to do that. USB power delivery never just applies a lot of "power" to the connector. Instead a small and safe amount, that any device that supports the USB spec can handle, is applied and then the device supplying the power and the one receiving the power have a short talk about how much "power" they actually support. As long as you don't buy a super shady power supply or hack one together yourself, you don't have to worry about it!

That would also be my first guess. Otherwise you shouldn't see it in videos.

It would be good, if you could elaborate on what you mean by tearing. Usually tearing refers to the GPU outputting images at a different speed than your screen refreshes at. That way you will have multiple frames on screen (lets say the top half was the older frame and the bottom half the newer frame). You will see a seam at the border of these frames. Unless your GPU is perfectly out of sync with your screen, the place of the seam will vary basically with every frame. I'm guessing this isn't what you are talking about though, right? Maybe you just have some tearing while scrolling in your browser for example? Or in other programs? If you window the program, does it also appear outside of it?

There are multiple reasons I'd assume. Some I can think of are Having a dGPU like that, would take up actual PCIe lanes. So you are either stuck with -8 lanes permanently or you need a PCIe switch Board space for fitting all the components of an actual GPU Cooling and extra VRM Extra Cost It would likely only be viable for lower end GPUs, so it would only make sense if the whole contraption was somehow cheaper than just buying a motherboard and a GPU. But you'll hardly save anything, especially if you don't want to compromise on the motherboard functionality

If just copying files so far was enough, I assume you don't need your entire windows install to be backed up, but you specifically select what you want backed up. If that is all you want, two options that won't require additional software are: Writing a simple robocopy script and automate it to run daily. "file history", which is directly integrated into windows. Looking at reviews online, it doesn't seem to be that bad.

That's a good choice then! Enjoy your laptop. If you get one without an OLED and every want to see what the fuzz is all about, there are very cheap portable monitors. I got this one -> https://innocn.com/products/innocn-15-6-portable-monitor-refurbished-15a1f It does accept an HDR signal (only via HDMI), but it not that impressive in that regard. But it's awesome for SDR content and you can power and provide a display signal all via one usb-c cable from your laptop.