Dr. FunFrock

I believe the police has pictures of my PC's cable management and I don't know the penalty but it's definitely criminal. No just curious

Small spoilers for Breaking Bad if you still haven't seen it. So we all know that scene where Walter and Jessie drive a van next to the evidence room with a big magnet in the back and they wipe the compromising laptop with that. Of course, that would work on an old laptop with an HDD. HDDs are magnetic and people have demonstrated that you don't even need a very strong magnet to kill one. But what about SSDs, and the rest of the components in a modern laptop? I know that if you can generate an arbitrarily strong, magnetar-like magnetic field you're going to kill it, but how strong of a field and what kind of equipment would you need to do that?

I'm kind of surprised that no one told me to go Intel for the CPU. Thoughts?

As stated above any case that fits my components with decent enough airflow that they don't cook is good enough, I don't care about the looks in the slightest. Is the 7900X3D really better for gaming? It's about 140 euros more which is like 25% extra The 4080 is about 20% to 25% more expansive than the 4070Ti, but from what I can gather it's about 20% to 25% faster as well. Since I have the budget I think it's worth the upgrade, especially since it has more VRAM and I do like to run some games in 4k (RTS, sim games...) I'm definitely not taking that SSD after consideration (also I already have 2*1TB SATA SSDs that I'm keeping and a 4TB HDD) I think Gigabyte is reliable enough not to blow up in my face, it's cheap, certified gold and modular, so do I really need to be picky and take a Corsair one?

Thank you for that bracket recommendation I'm taking notes here. So overall would you recommend going x670e or b650?

Yeah, I have a first gen NVMe SSD with about 1000MB/s write and read speeds and I don't really notice a difference with my SATA SSDs so I guess PCIe 5.0 is overkill for the drive. Now I wonder If even PCIe 4.0 drives are worth it or if I should go for a cheaper 3.0 one? For the case, yeah basically, it's not going to be my showoff sportscar that I'm going to use to seduce girls, I don't really care about the appearance. My current PC is in a Fractal Design case, I've had no problem with it so I thought I'd just stick to that brand. It's going to sit under my desk, not even I am going to look at it very often, so if it fits my components it's good enough. Now for the 4080, I'm not 100% sure yet. The 7900XTX is indeed cheaper here in Europe and basically trades blows with the 4080. The main reason why I'm sticking with NVIDIA is basically because I want DLSS, and maybe also RTX. I know most people don't use RTX because it'll tank your framerates like nothing else but I I do play many games where framerate isn't that important and I'd happily trade some frames for some extra eye candy. As for DLSS it looks very good, and I'm basically thinking that if my venerable 1080 did support it I would basically barely need an upgrade right now. I know AMD has a comparable technology but it seems to be supported by less games and also a bit less good looking overall. That might change in the future but NVIDIA seems to me like a safer bet. But I'm a total noob so feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Budget (including currency): 2500-3000€ Country: Europe Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: All kinds of games including very demanding ones like BattleBit Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): Hey guys! So my PC just turned 8 years old (although technically I upgraded some parts after that) and is starting to show its age. That being said, it served me extremely well during that time. I bought a relatively high end PC although not technically top of the line because I wanted to be able to use it for about 5 years, and then the whole GPU market crisis came in and forcibly extended its lifespan even more. It has a i7-5820k paired with a GTX 1080 that I bought a bit later. It's still been able to play recent demanding games like Cyberpunk although only at 1080p on low to medium settings. Overall I've been very happy with my purchase, so I kind of want to do the same. So the goals are : To build a PC that'll last me at least 5 years, it should probably be a bit overkill for right now to be a least a bit futureproof. Going from 1080p med/low to 1440p high/ultra in most games getting more frames in demanding shooters like EFT, Play Starfield and Phantom Liberty with good framerates in 1440p high I don't really intend to stream, I do intend to do a bit of 3D modelling and coding but nothing very demanding, no 10 hours compiling or stuff like that, I mostly want power for gaming. Here's what I've spec'd for now: Ryzen 7800X3D 519€ Asus Prime x670-P 299€ (PCIe 5.0 seems important for futureproofing) DDR5 Crucial Pro 5600MHz 2*16GB 129€ RTX 4080, haven't decided which one yet, about 1300€ Noctua NH-D15 129€ Corsair MP-700 1TO NVMe PCIe 5.0 SSD 192€ 850W Gigabyte PSU 120€ Case 120€ Total 2800€ I'd like your opinion, what's good and what's not, where would you save money and where would you put more? Thanks!

Okay things are weird. SFC /verifyonly returned some corrupted files so I ran sfc /scannow with the computer plugged in via Ethernet and rebooted after it said it had successfully repaired the corrupt files. Now things are working but what do you know, BitDefender just popped up and just coincidentally detected a "threat" about 30 seconds after I rebooted. So idk, might have been an actual threat and running a SFC might have allowed the antivirus to work properly and detect it, or it might have been BitDefender who corrupted some files in the first place and freaked out when I repaired them, in any case it's a bit weird. I'll still do a full system scan and a couple other things to make sure it's not actually malware but I think it's most likely at this point that BitDefender messed up. In any case, thanks a lot for the help @will0hlep

Method 1 doesn't work, unsurprisingly because two full reboots should also have restarted the explorer. As for method 2, I ran SFC in verifyonly and am waiting for the results

So a guy there says it's BitDefender messing up windows and I should turn it off to change the setting And BitDefender says "it's not me you have a virus" https://www.bitdefender.com/consumer/support/answer/1940/ I think I trust the Microsoft guy but it's a bit weird from BitDefender's part. I may wait till the scan is complete before trying anything. To be clear I know the windows network menu frequently bugs out but what I found a bit sus was that it said my wi-fi was off and I couldn't turn it back on when I clicked the little WiFi icon but when I checked my network adapters the WiFi adapter looked like it was on. Also usually when the bottom bar menu bugs out usually a reboot fixes it and it didn't this time. Still I'm fully prepared to believe this is just a windows bug

I don't know if this is meant to be a 100% hardware troubleshooting subforum if it is the case I apologize but I seem to have a malware problem on my PC and I wasn't sure where to ask for advice... I was trying to access my AppData folder earlier and I noticed it wasn't showing. I checked in the View panel of windows explorer and Hidden items was unticked. I did not do that. When I try to enable it the explorer refreshes itself and it auto unticks the radio button immediately. After rebooting my computer another shady behavior popped up, my wifi says it isn't connected but I'm not 100% sur that it isn't. It won't display the networks or let me do anything to the WiFi adapter. So I turned off the router's wifi momentarily just in case. This to me looks like a virus and a quick Google search seems to indicate that I might be right, but I'm not 100% sure it's not just windows bugging out. What should I do? I have launched a Bitdefender scan but I guess it'll take ages on my old clogged up system and I don't know if it can be trusted... Is there something I can do to speed it up, like some folders that I should do a manual scan on? Additionally Bitdefender seems to find some password protected files but isn't asking me for any password, is that normal? Is it just skipping anything password protected? What do I do if it doesn't find anything? I'm willing to format everything and reinstall windows but how can I make sure that the virus is actually neutralized, will a normal windows formatting be enough or do I need to use some program to write zeroes on every drive? What about my home network do I need to scan or replace everything with a drive? And how can I save my work that is on my computer, I have one folder with work projects that I absolutely cannot loose but I'm afraid that if I plug in my external SSD the malware might copy itself to it... This is an unprecedented situation for me in 25 years of using computers I've never had to deal with something similar so I apologize for that flurry of questions and thank you for your patience and for any advice you might give.

Oh wait. It is. I just switched it a few days ago. So I guess my games are running slow just because Tarkov has terrible FPS and Sea of Thieves keeps getting patched into the ground by the most incompetent devs of all time

Thanks for the info, GPU-Z reads around 50W power draw (24% of TDP) but 0%GPU load... That does not seem off to me but I'm no expert.

Hi guys, Lately I've noticed that some of my games seemed to be running slower than usual. I've dismissed it as probably being caused by game patches, my hardware aging or something along those lines. However I'm starting to wonder if I don't have some kind of malware using some of my GPU power. I've got an 1080 MSI gaming X which is supposed to use semi-passive cooling. At idle the gpu clock went way down and the fans used to turn off. But it seems like it's never at idle anymore. According to the MSI afterburner software it's running at 1683MHz (100% of base clock) and 58 to 62C just displaying my desktop background with absolutely nothing opened. According to windows task manager GPU usage is below 5%, which is possible, but I'm having some kind of doubts. The room I'm in is pretty cold, the GPU isn't covered in dust I just checked it and it's pretty clean, so the GPU should be 100% passively cooled when I'm not gaming and the fan used to be sitting at 0 RPM basically all the time. To be clear, I'm not saying 60 degrees is particularly hot for that GPU, it goes way higher when I'm gaming, I just think it's slightly higher than what I remember it being at idle (and I'm pretty sure the GPU clock used to go down too when I'm not gaming). Is there a way to check GPU usage that is more accurate than windows task manager? If you think it's possible that it is some kind of malware how do I check for that? I do have an antivirus installed, but it's avast, I know it's not great but I got it way back when I didn't know better and it's a massive pain to uninstall properly and replace with something better so I basically just let it sit there and do its thing. I know I'm probably just being paranoid, I'd just like to know if there is a definitive way to confirm that my GPU isn't mining dogecoin for some random north korean guy while I'm playing tarkov

100W at idle is enormous. We don't have that much power to spare for days at a time... The intel n4100's TDP is 6W by comparison (I know that doesn't mean the PC will idle at 6W but I can't imagine it will be anywhere close to 100W) And the system I was talking about is only 150Euros, taxes included. Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I can tell there are not many used PCs at that price point that would be as compact and power efficient and much faster. I was just asking about the eMMC memory, basically I just wanted to know how bad it is compared to an HDD. The rest of the specs is fine for our use case.

Intel celeron n4100, 8GB of LPDDR4 and 64GB of eMMC. It's not meant to be a gaming PC though. The PC has interesting characteristics in this case, because it's meant to be used in a sailboat to run navigation software and read charts and such. @Electronics Wizardyis probably right, a used PC would probably be faster, but fast isn't what we need. This PC actually has some pretty good advantages for this kind of use case. First it's cheap. Which is good, because sea water and electronics don't go well together and even though they're not supposed to come in direct contact with each other, so far the environment has meant that the PCs we've used have only lasted for so long. I don't know if it's humidity in the atmosphere or something else but even a Panasonic Toughbook only lasted a few years. Then, it's really small which is also good, and this CPU has a very low TDP which means the whole thing is fanless, and relies on passive cooling through the chassis. This could actually make it last longer since it would avoid humid air or sea water being pumped through the system. And the low TDP in itself is very important since we don't want to be draining the boat's batteries too much when we're at sea for several days (it's a sailboat so the engine's alternator isn't running very often). In the end I'd say if the performance bottleneck caused by the eMMC memory isn't too great it's probably an acceptable trade off

Hi guys, My dad is looking for a cheap barebone-type computer and let's just say he doesn't intend to run crysis on it. My brother found a zotac thingy with a very low end processor that would probably do the job, however, what I'm worried about is that the storage consists of 64GB of eMMC memory. I've always thought that you should absolutely avoid this kind of stuff, that it's basically an SD card soldered onto the motherboard and that the performance is way crappier than even a basic HDD. However it's been a long time since I got that info, maybe things have evolved since, and this is why I'm asking you guys about it. First am I correct on the soldered thing? I guess if my dad goes for that he won't have any option to upgrade the storage, is that right? Then about the 64GB, it doesn't sound very reasonable to me for a computer on which my dad wants to install windows. How much of that space can I expect windows to take up? And finally, about the performance, how bad is eMMC in general, does it sit somewhere between that of an SSD and an HDD like my brother says or is it like I thought, worse than an HDD? Thanks in advance

Hi guys My PC is using what seems like a ton of RAM when idle. Windows' stupid task manager isn't providing much information on what's using so much memory. Here are a couple of screenshots taken just after booting, with nothing opened. There are a bunch of apps below that but as you can see nothing seems to be using a ton of RAM and it certainly doesn't add up to 4.6GB. I'm guessing it's a memory leak of some kind but how can I pinpoint and solve it? Thanks!

Hello guys, I just recently switched to a OnePlus 7T Pro (and I have to say, what an amazing phone), but unfortunately the included screen protector didn't last long at all (I guess it really wasn't meant to last, or else it's garbage). So, couple questions here : - Should I use a screen protector ? I'd feel more comfortable but gorilla glass isn't too fragile and I don't want to buy a new protection every other week... - What are the pros and cons of tempered glass screen protectors ? It served me well on my GoPro but I don't really intend to smash my phone into concrete walls at Mach 40 like I frequently do with my Gopro, so maybe a softer material would be better ?

Yes ! Thank you very much that is the kind of answer I was hoping to get

So, I know this is a bit of an odd one, but I was just wondering... Hope someone here can answer You know that kind of buzzing sound we used to hear on radios and TVs, when a mobile phone close to the speakers was about to receive a message or a call... Well I think I haven't heard it in years, and just recently I heard it again on an old video from 2009 on Youtube. That made me wonder, what exactly was that sound in the first place and how come we never hear it anymore ?

And when I say that I expected my rig to be kind of outdated, I mean that as a hardware enthusiast I think I should start to feel an itch to upgrade by now, and I don't. I'll admit that my expectations are kind of based on a bygone era, when I grew up in the nineties your 5 year old PC would suddenly look like an antique when trying to run a new game on it...

Well I kinda did. Calling the 5820k mid-tier is kind of an understatement, but calling it extreme high end is definitely too much. You could already spend more than twice the money at that time for the very top of the line core i7. The 5820k, 5930k and 5960x were a bit special in that they shared the lga 2011-v3 socket with the current gen Xeons, which intel doesn't do anymore. So yeah the motherboards were kind of expansive, but they also packed quite a lot more features than the boards that were available for 4xxx series CPUs. When I initially my reasonning was that GTX 900 series were going to get replaced so I'd better go for a cheap one and replace it later, which I did. That allowed me to save a bit of money for the CPU and MoBo, which in the end I definitely don't regret. I think the initial cost was about 1100Eur for the complete system, CPU + Mobo + HDD (I bought the ssd later) + AiO 120*240mm watercooling + PSU + Case + 16GB RAM (threw in an extra stick later) and a GTX 960 2GB. The specs you gave me would cost about the same where I live, without any of all that extra stuff, and except for the GPU which would be about infinitely better even if downgraded to a 2060 it doesn't look like much of an upgrade to me...

Hi guys, So, I really need your opinion about this. It is my understanding that Linus often says that it is better to buy decent hardware rather than cheap crap because it will stay relevant for longer. And, we also all know that hardware isn't getting better as fast as it used to. But somehow, Intel, NVIDIA and more recently AMD have managed to maintain at least an illusion of progress, keeping us hardware enthusiats somewhat excited for their new stuff. So I'm having mixed feelings about the current "era" of hardware... On the one hand, it feels like the new Zen 3 CPUs are really bringing competition back to the market and that it's overall a really good time to build a new rig ; but on the other hand, looking at what I already have, I don't feel like upgrading like at all... It feels like I'd be throwing crazy amounts of money at it for just a tiny performance upgrade in most real-life tasks. I bought my rig about 5 years ago, and made a couple upgrades since then, but the thing is, I kind of expected it to be somewhat outdated by now, and it doesn't feel like it is at all. I'm wondering how I can even get excited about Ryzen 3 and stuff when it feels like for the most part, Intel have been sitting on their asses for 5 years and AMD is just barely catching up right now... So this brings me to three questions : -I'll put the specs of my rig below, and I'd like to know how you guys think it would fare against a more modern, similarly priced rig. -If you want, you can share your opinion on the current state of the market, and innovation in the PC hardware domain. I know there is new stuff, but does any of it really matter ? -Most importantly, and what I'd really like to see a LTT video about : In the end is it definitely, scientifically, benchmarkably, completely worth it to spend the extra few bucks to get a high end gaming rig since it will last for years without going really outdated ? I'd happily send my rig for Linus to benchmark it against a more recent one, but they are about a third of a world away... My current specs : -Core i7 5820k (The main reason of this whole rant. Don't get me wrong, I love it, but I bought it for 450€ at the time, I run it at a smooth 4.2GHz sustained without even increasing the voltage. It trashed the similarly priced 6700k and 7700k on most tasks, 8700k was barely better and the 9700k still isn't worth the upgrade, with the 9900k being considerably more expansive than what I paid at the time. WTF Intel ?!?) -Asus X99-A motherboard. Not exactly top of the line, but very decent. I don't have thunderbolt, or USB type C, only USB 3.1 gen 1 or whatever it's called. But what I did get with a super-easy-to-do BIOS upgrade, is my PCIE NVMe M.2 SSD running with absolutely no issue. So I don't think thunderbolt alone is worth buying a new system. -GTX 1080. Obviously an upgrade, since it wasn't released 5 years ago. But. An RTX 2080 non-SUPER is currently priced at about 750€ and for half that price, I could get a second hand GTX 1080 and run SLI, trashing even the RTX 2080Ti at the cost of a lot of power... I don't really feel the need to though, I get satisfying framerates in all of my games. -24GBs of DDR4 RAM. That was new at the time, it's only becoming standard now (and I bought it before the memory crisis where prices skyrocketed so in the end it was about as expansive as it would be today). By the way I can run quad-channel, I have 8 memory slots, and I also have 28 PCIe lanes which is slightly better than 16. 450€, 5yo CPU guys. BTW you can roughly convert 1€ to $1 (USD) when talking about computer hardware because euros are actually worth a bit more but since we get fckd by taxes you guys pay roughly the same amount but in dollars instead of euros. That's just a general rule of thumb and only applicable to computer hardware.

Hi guys, My mum's looking for a decent 15 inch laptop in the 500 to 600$ range, good specs are obviously welcome but since it's mostly for working on Excel and stuff I think the most important thing is usuability and comfort. She likes the 15 inch formats, needs a numpad, a nice display would be a plus. To sum it up, if you guys know some cheap but well built laptops, with good keyboards and decent batteries, your help would be very appreciated. Thanks !