Hans Power

True - GPU overclocking errors usually result in a 141 error shown in the reliability report after a game crash.

I hope this is the right place for this sort of discussion but this is about system stability as a whole, so I thought it might be. To start with I notice A LOT of forum discussions around the stability of certain titles. Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader for example has tons of people complaining that their game crashes. Granted, the game has been patched but I played it since launch and I have yet a single crash to encounter. Same with Dragon's Dogma 2 - horrible performance given the visual quality? Yes! But crashes? Not on my end. Yet even Steve from Gamers Nexus had multiple crashes across several systems with this game. And I do not have the fastest system either. You see the system specs below in my sig plus 2x 2GB NVME Gen3 drives with DRAM cache I added recently. And the system is constantly topping out - depending on the game mostly with my GPU but sometimes also with my CPU. No crashes, no bluescreens, though. And seems that my system is almost a unicorn since there are so many people complain about system stability these days. It's overclocked as well, btw - GPU and CPU. Thing is - I can relate. Prior to this system I had an I5 4690k, a Gigabyte Motherboard and 16Gigs of RAM. And it took years to stabilize the system. Turned out to be memory settings in the BIOS - had to set timings and voltages manually to what was written on the sticks instead of using XMP and that basically did it. So, with my "new" system I went for stability over everything else. I got 2 sticks 3200 RAM (instead of the 4 sticks in my old system) and made up the mediocre speed by making sure that I bought Dual Rank memory instead of Single Rank memory because Dual Rank typically plays nice and fast with 5000 series Ryzen CPUs However my current system turned out to not always be 100% stable either - only about 99%. All went well (with that I mean all ~100+ games I currently have installed) until I checked out the Vulcan version of Baldur's Gate 3 which always crashed after a couple of minutes. Just for that I had to reduce my GPU overclock by 50 MHZ (!) from +195 to +145. And with that everything seems 100% stable again. Then I went for the CPU overclock via PBO. Initially I had the system undervolted with the curve optimizer which went swimmingly however when I added 200Mhz on top the system ran okay for several hours until crashing - mostly while idling oddly enough - rarely if ever during full load. Reducing the undervolt helped with that. Add to all that that motherboard manufacturers like to pump a little extra juice into the CPUs to make them look better in benchmarks and you got a whole heap of potential problems and who knows if your factory overclocked GPU actually is stable 100% of the time or crashes in those one or two games which ACTUALLY tax the GPU to the max. And we haven't even started talking about PSU's, temperature. and all the other shabang that goes into modern systems. Anyway I think it's worth discussing. So have you encountered stability issues with your system and found ways to solve it? And if so - what did you do? Maybe we could turn this into a bit of a knowledge base of what can go wrong with your system that causes ever so slight or massive stability issues. And maybe it's worth for Linus Media Group to investigate this as well in a video at some point?

Reviving this cause I found a workaround. Tried lowering DPI for a while but it didn't make any difference for me. But I just tried putting the weights into my G9x (as well as my G502) and that actually makes a difference. The weights slow down my momentum just enough so that the click registers. Before I tried making my mice as light as possible which probably helps with shooters but not with slower games or in the operating system.

That sounds about right and I think what got the colors to show correctly was switching over to YCbCr422. My point wasn't that I'm getting an amazing OLED 3000€ HDR experience out of my cheap ass 1080p screen but that it might be worth experimenting with what you got and you *might* get rewarded with an improvement, however small it may be.

That was definitely the case before I switching to the YCbCr422 color format. With that most games either look barely any different compared to SDR (Baldur's Gate 3, for example) or slightly better or sometimes notably better (like Resident Evil 3). Might not be real HDR but it does a good enough job to fool me.

I mean, it's not the bees knees by any means but it's kinda nice to tweak something usable and enjoyable out of my low end gear. I'm fully aware that I won't have the 3000€ high-end experience with a dinky 230€ Display but, you know, it's nice to see an actual improvement with something that was probably meant be little more than a marketing gimmick.

I mean, looking better is all you can hope for for what is basically a bonus feature. I payed for a rather cheap Freesync 144Hz 1080p monitor and this giving even just a slight improvement is the cherry on top - and in RE3 it actually looks significantly better. Btw, It does not look washed out YCbCr422 color mode whatsoever - the opposite, actually - it gives an extra pop to the colors as well as blacks and peak brightness. With YCbCr444 or RGB format it does look slightly washed out, though, compared to SDR. Also, interesting to note - in YCbCr422 the desktop looks pretty much the same both with HDR on and off. In YCbCr444/RGB format, the desktop lost a bit of contrast and saturation when turning HDR on. Not sure, why that is but I'm glad I figured it out.

If you bother to read the text I'm making a point that it still looking better in a lot of HDR content.

Yup

So, I've been experimenting with my MSI MAG274RDE to get the best possible experience out of it, cause I'm bored I guess. Anyway, after finally successfully installing the manufacturers color profile without it darkening the whole screen and making everything look horrible (had to set colors to reference mode in the Nvidia driver), I managed to get a seemingly improved image in SDR. However I can't quite 100% confirm that it changed much if anything since going back and forth between color profile and no color profile just takes too long since you manually have to delete the file and reboot the system. After that I went to HDR and even before finetuning it, and I know what everyone's thinking - it has to be complete and utter crap since it doesn't even have a HDR400 certification - just "HDR Ready". However according to some reviews it just so manages to get to 400nits. Some games showed a difference, others didn't but generally I thought colors look a bit more natural compared to SDR with slightly less saturation and more natural colors overall. But then I tried the different color formats and when I set it to YCbCr422 and did a calibration with the Windows 11 HDR calibration tool and I got some real pop out of this. I tried it with the Resident Evil 3 Remake because you can activate and deactivate HDR without having to go back into Windows and toggling it there, so you can spot any differences instantly. And that actually showed a really nice improvement, I wouldn't want to miss anymore. Lights suddenly have an overall glow to them looking like actual lights instead of bright, almost plasticy objects. Skin reflections look much nicer as well. Also, no loss in detail due to bloom and even black levels seem darker. I tried the same in YCbCr444 and RGB and it still shows a similar improvement but the image is a bit more washed out - less peak brightness and less deeper black - still in this slightly better than SDR. I could spot the same in Immortals: Fenyx Rising - Sun, clouds, and ground reflections are much more intense with HDR on. Btw, I calibrated both games properly to the test image/nits setting. Also, looking at some HDR footage on Youtube shows a significant difference in peak brightness, when I reload the video in SDR and HDR for comparison. In the end I got a lot more out of this than I expected. However, what I don't quite understand is why YCbCr422 looks so much better than YCbCr444 or RGB with brighter whites and deeper blacks without noticeable loss in detail. Thoughts?

Still, always the same thing. I try to apply a color profile for my MSI Mag274R from the official website to Windows 11 (Windows 10 was the same, though) and the only thing it does is to darken the whole screen and when I try to delete it, it just won't I have to delete the ICM file out of the Windows directory to uninstall the file. Removing the file from the color profiles page doesn't do anything. That can't be how it's supposed to work, though, can it? First, why does the official color profile darken the screen (and it really does look absolutely aweful and unusable) and second, why can't I remove it through "normal" means.

I'm on 1600 DPI right now and Windows Cursor speed is set to medium, no acceleration, of course

Mostly my trusty old Logitech G9x but I've had several gaming mice from other brands over the years and it was all the same with those. It's not the mouses fault. In BG3 or Windows for that matter I even get the click animation, so it does register properly. It just won't do the appropriate action, likely because I'm moving the mouse away too quickly and there's already slight mouse movement while clicking. A delay before it would initiate a drag of half a second would probably fix that.

You know that issue? Especially in games (for example Baldur's Gate 3) I wanna switch characters by clicking on the portrait real quick but the click doesn't register. Why? Cause I didn't stop quite early enough and the click didn't register as a click but a click and drag. Took me a while to figure that one out. To me that makes everything feel kinda slow and sluggish and is a bit of a bugbear of mine basically since I used Computers - never quite got used to that. So, is there some sort of registry hack which could be used to remedy this? I mean there must be some small middle ground between full stop of the mouse cursor and slight movement and I wonder if that might be adjustable somehow. Or if there's maybe a third party tool which you can used to adjust this.

Welp, unfortunately, after initial success, after another Chkdsk scan it showed more faulty sectors in SMART. And now it increased from the initial 8 faulty sectors to 16. Luckily I could back up the drive completely and now I ordered a Toshiba N300 HDD.

Reported Un-correctable is at 10, though, so it apparently did block and/or replace a few sectors.

No that is still at 0. I will do a full read test after the backup is finished and report back in a day or whenever it's all done.

Seatools should reallocate the faulty sectors same as chkdsk - the "fix all" option is basically a full sector scan + repair. Also took about 9hrs give or take. Btw, even with the faulty sector count before I did the "fix all" scan, the seatools smart values showed an "ok" evaluation other than crystaldiskinfo which showed a yellow warning. Still, I gonna keep an eye on the smart values and also the logs of Macrium Reflect - it will discover and log any CRC errors since it does a sector copy. I might still write zeros to the drive after backing it up, though, just to make sure.

Well, actually that just happened. While chkdsk didn't finish and hung up during the process I did a full "fix all" run with Seagates Seatools and after that the faulty sector count went from 8 back to 0 in Seatools' smart readouts as well as in Crystaldiskinfo. Now I gonna run a full backup with Macrium Reflect and if that runs without any CRC errors then I'm probably lucky this time.

So, my Seagate 4TB ST4000DM005 seems to be dying according to Crystal Disk Info. Shows a Current pending sector count and an Uncorrectable Sector count yellow warning. Also, my latest backup via Macrium Reflect just failed with a CRC error and I'm currently running chkdsk /f /r on that drive. I assume that I'll have to replace that HDD asap. I heard good things about the longevity of Toshiba HDDs but I wonder which one I should go for. This is my data drive, so it's not meant as a gaming drive but it does get backuped frequently so good reads would still be appreciated. Also both seem to be 7200RPM drives but the X300 performance has more cache so I wonder what the actual difference is apart from that and what makes the N300 a 24/7 rated HDD. Some advice and/or background knowledge would be appreciated.

Yeah, I remember having an external drive sitting on or next to the PC and then merrily throwing it off the table every other time I tinkered with the PC. Held up despite all the abuse, tough, funnily enough. I don't intend to try my luck that way again, though.

I know myself and would most likely not do it otherwise.

Any kind of cloud storage subscription would absolutely blow my budget (so would a 12TB HDD if it hadn't been given to me for free), so I'll be relying on offline backups for now. Although, I guess cloud storage wouldn't be a terrible deal if you had to decide between spending money on a big HDD and on cloud storage.

I won't be backing up any of my game drives either, that's for sure for the reasons you mentioned. When I say data HDD I do mean archives. There's some crucial data on there and I'd like to automate the process which is why I like to use Macrium Reflect and just gonna let it clone the drive over night once a month. Just as important to me is a Windows 10 system backup, just in case my system NVME drive dies. I've seen it happen often enough to warrant a bit of caution. And it would take days on end to get my Windows installation back to how it is now. Granted, I wouldn't do any of that if it wasn't for the 12TB HDD I was gifted.

So, recently I fixed three 12TB Seagate Barracuda Pro HDDs for a family member (just corrupted MBRs) and was given one as payment. So, I decided to use it as a backup drive with an SSK external USB HDD/SSD dock. As software I'm using the free version of Macrium Reflect 7 and configured it to clone my 4TB data HDD to an equally sized partition on the 12TB drive once a month. I know that Macrium can do incremental backups but that's only for the payed version and this should be good enough. As for the rest of the free space - I made another partition and use that to create a compressed image file of my 2TB m.2 NVME system drive on it - cause having the system drive cloned directly and having the files "open" might or might not interfere with the Windows installation. I know that this at least was in issue with earlier Windows versions. This is scheduled to happen once a week since it's a relatively fast process. I wonder what you ladies and gentlemen are using as a cheap or free backup solution. Maybe there's a more efficient (free) method than what I'm doing.