pangaea

Are they able to enforce these limits on people who just have a non-carrier phone they bought on Amazon? Or do they allow those phones on these types of plans?

I'm just curious as to how they enforce this, especially if someone has a phone that wasn't provided by the carrier. Are phone manufacturers under any obligation to report to cell service companies what type of data you use? Do they have some sort of a monitoring system in place? I've only ever had plans that provide a specific amount of high speed data and don't distinguish between hotspot and mobile so I'm curious how this would work.

So it looks like I just fried a power supply. The PC shut off and wouldn't turn back on again. I did the green-to-black trick with the PSU out of the PC and it won't fire up longer than a split second. PSU definitely toast. Whether this is the cause or the result of the GPU issue, I'm not sure.

Hey, I just made a really interesting observation. So I played around with the fan setting in MSI afterburner and when I set the fan speed to a certain level (it's somewhere ~75-80%), my fan I thought was "burnt out" fan kicks on. The bad part of this is that it tells me that something may be preventing power from being properly delivered to the fan (meaning replacing it is probably useless) but the good part is that I can work around it via pure software. I wonder if this also has something to do with a power save feature, making it a software issue rather than a hardware issue. EDIT: the magic number is 76% to make the fan kick on, but I can see it "twitching" a bit at 75%.

I found a similar listing for US buyers, I'll examine my card and figure out how hard it might be to install or if I can be sure this is the root cause of the problem: https://www.ebay.com/itm/85mm-Sapphire-XFX-AMD-HD-7970-7950-R9-280X-280-270X-Dual-Fan-Replacement-R161b/171294979533?hash=item27e1f9f5cd:g:NgAAAOSw71xZnaTv

It's a sapphire if that makes a difference.

Do you know of a cost-effective way to fix it?

I'll need some sort of an aftermarket cooling solution if I decide to fix this something reasonable that isn't going to cost more than it's worth to fix this GPU. Or I could just buy this RX 580 for $180. https://www.amazon.com/XFX-Radeon-1386MHz-Graphics-RX-580P8DFD6/dp/B06Y66K3XD/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=amd+gpu&qid=1562471301&s=gateway&sr=8-3

I can afford a new GPU. I don't think I absolutely have to upgrade my AMD 7950 if I can fix it, though the only after market coolers I'm seeing are ~$140. If it's going to cost THAT much to fix, I'd rather not bother. I'd be better off putting the money towards a new GPU. But if I can fix it for a budget of say $30, then why not?

So one of the two fans on my AMD 7950's cooler recently burnt out. I caught this after the GPU was running a game that I didn't think was overly GPU intensive and showed symptoms of overheating. I opened up the side panel and noticed one of the two fans wasn't spinning up. I know the 7950 is a pretty old card so I may just want to consider upgrading it, but what do you think my options are? Should I buy an after market cooler? Try to find a replacement for just the fan?

Make sure you have it set to "AHCI" and not "RAID" in the BIOS. Ran into that issue at work.

So the router is in my roomate's bedroom on the third floor of a townhouse. I live in the basement. I get good enough speeds but the signal strength can occasionally be a bit unreliable. I also have a VPN (issue still occurs without the VPN) so I'm considering three setups: -Keep what I have now. It may not be a worthwhile trade-off to have improved reliability for a slight performance hit. -Get a cheap wifi extender, will improve signal strength but possibly cause a slight performance hit. I used them at a place I used to work at to improve signal strength at the edges of the office as well as create some poor man's VLANs and segment off the network reduce the possibility that someone would say accidentally print to a printer in the other room and have to run upstairs (that was a huge nuisance at one point, as I was the IT guy dealing with non-techie co-workers yelling "I can't print!" on a nearly daily basis). We had pretty good experiences with them so it could be a good solution for my personal use as well. -Get a router and use it in wireless repeater mode. Not sure if the performance could be better as any performance benefit would likely come out of giving a wired connection to my desktop but it would also open up the possibility of running my VPN on the router instead of on each device. A decent router costs a little more than a repeater though.

Or you could cancel your cell service use Google Voice anywhere you have wifi for a poor-poor man's cell service.

Any of the plans in my area that even come close to Mint Mobile's prices in my area are only introductory offers it turns out. Other than some plans for very, very, very light users.

AMD is usually a great "bang for your buck" option when buying new hardware. But I still think you could do slightly better in the used market.