P4r4gr4ph

Oh, of course I forgot to specify what features I'm looking for lol. Just updated the main thread.

All I really want to specify here is an alternative that has a replay feature. Also, I'd STRONGLY prefer that the cache is saved to disk, not RAM (I figured out OBS does that the hard way, PC crashed from running out of RAM).

Yeah, I know, mechanical keyboards are superior and all, but I'm not the type of guy that can afford $150 for a keyboard alone. Hell, I'm still holding off on upgrading my PC where my new PSU is literally more expensive than my shitty CPU. My best taste of mechanical keyboards at home is the Reddragon K552 which I got for $30. Of course, it's basically just Cherry MX Blues made in China. I know that $30 is not gonna get me the best experience, but I'm not really willing to pay so much for a keyboard. I have been using it for a while, and it's actually had given me quite some trouble that I guess I decided to tolerate like I always do for whatever reason, such as it pretty much destroying discord voice chat rooms when I'm not using push to talk. Even then, in some cases, the keyboard can be louder than my voice, which is especially quite impressive in some weird way since I'm a total squeaker. I also know that mechanical keyboards aren't supposed to really be that quiet, but is there really no solution for MX keyboards to be silent without putting O-rings in them which makes it feels weird in some indescribable way, and now with the new MX Silents, it feels like there are giant O-rings built within the keys themselves? All of this isn't to say mechanical keyboards are shit. Believe me, I have window shopped and sampled many good mechanical keyboards and I would totally get MX Browns if I could afford it, but apparently not even off-brand browns are cheap enough for the $40 I'm willing to pay at the very most, at least from what I could find. However, I have had pretty good experiences with membrane keyboards, strangely enough. Hell, I even have a shitty Microsoft keyboard that is more silent and feels a lot more tactile than my mechanical keyboard. What I want is a keyboard that's tactile so I can tell when the key activates and what key it is, preferably quiet, preferably without a 10key, and preferably one where the switches won't fuck up if I spill the tiniest amount of my drink into the thing. I have yet to find any sort of MX browns for the $40 price range I want, and I feel like I've had better experiences with membrane keyboards. I guess at this point I should do a shitty transition back to the main question, which is if mechanical or membrane keyboards are right for my poor ass. I guess since I also described the type of keyboard I want, I guess I'm also open to suggestions on what keyboard to buy, and of course I'm willing to buy membrane. TL;DR the only mechanical keyboard I've found in my price range is shit and the only other thing I can afford are membranes but I don't want to give up on mechanical keyboards but at the same time I don't know what else to do. Other than the main question being if mechanical keyboards are right for my cheap ass, I guess I'm also looking for suggestions on what keyboard to get, accepting membrane keyboards as well. Tactile so I can tell what key is being activated, preferably without a 10key, preferably one where the switches won't fuck up if I spill the tiniest amount of my drink in it, and preferably one that ain't so loud that it destroys whatever voice chat I'm in.

As I said, when my PC kept crashing, I turned down the power limit and left the rest of the settings the same. It stopped crashing, and although it had trouble hitting the OC settings, it's hitting my VRAM overclock. I don't see how it could be my GPU.

I understand how you think my OC is the issue, but I've never had a GPU straight up cause a crash without even showing a BSOD before. Every other card I've ever overclocked too aggressively before, Windows would recover the driver and revert to stock settings. Besides, I'm not sure if its me or if 1050MHz Core and 1500MHz Mem is pretty reasonable for an R9 270, and I'm not overclocking my 2nd card. If anything, I'm probably going to underclock it.

Hey, So I recently got a new graphics card for my crappy rig and put my old graphics card on the bottom slot for video encoding and my 2nd monitor. However, when I overclocked my new card, my system would often suddenly crash with my monitor becoming a mosaic of sorts. I decided to turn down the power since I applied an extra 20% to the power limit, and my card didn't crash anymore, although it seems to be having trouble hitting my overclocked speeds. I decided to take a look at my PCIE cables, and both of them don't have a pin at the top middle hole, and there isn't a cable for that hole at the back. Either I'm dumb and PCIE cables never had a pin at the top middle or the manufacturer decided not to put one there for some reason. After all, the entire base of my PC is a crappy prebuild. I'm guessing that missing pin is what provides the extra 20% power and isn't required. After all, I'm able to use the card, so it's obviously working. Plus, I think my PSU is struggling to run everything in my rig. I'm not sure if I'm able to measure how much watts is being used from my PSU, but I'd like to know if I can measure that. I definitely need to get a new PSU, but until then, I want to figure out how to fix the issue if at all possible. Thanks, Paragraph

Oh, I thought they were called ziplock ties, not just zip ties. Yeah, I'm talking about zip ties.

Hey, I know there isn't much to discuss about zip ties, but I want to be sure that whatever zip ties I'm buying won't fuck up my PC. The only features I'm looking for is that they're sturdy, re-usable, won't fry or melt in my computer, adjustable, and they're actual zip ties, not those shitty little paper ones. I'm not sure if it's common among zip ties, but when I asked a friend to bring over some zip ties, he brought some paper ones that only had some small metal wire through the middle. Needless to say, I am absolutely not going to get those types of ties. Thanks, P4r4gr4ph

Hey, So I recently got a good upgrade for my system, at least good in my perspective. I was able to get a case from a friend for free because it's crappy and he no longer needed it. However, that case is still better than the one my crappy pre-build came in, and I was able to transfer my PC to the case. The case actually opened up a lot of opportunities for me that I didn't have before such as being able to fit a second graphics card. So I dug up my previous card, a GTX 750 Ti, and now I'm able to use it along with my current R9 270. Surprisingly, my temperatures were barely impacted, and the airflow is great. I was also able to pick up a crappy Dell square monitor for $10 and use it on my 750 Ti. Although the monitor is crappy, it allowed me to do things like watch YouTube while gaming without impacting performance since the load would be on my 750 while I use my 270 for gaming. It also allowed me to do things like record videos without impacting performance, which even allowed me to return to using Linux over Windows since without ReLive or Shadowplay, which aren't available on Linux, my performance would suck while recording. However, now that I have a separate card to do the encoding, my performance has been better than ever as well as the quality of my recordings. In short, I can do pretty much anything now without impacting my performance while gaming since I can just put the strain on my 750, separate from whatever game I'm playing on my 270. It may sound primitive, but for a poor low-spec kid like me, it feels like I'm in technology paradise. However, there's still one last problem that's impacting my performance, and that's my CPU. Since my entire system's base is a pre-build, it's no surprise that there's a bottleneck. I gotta say though, all things considered, it's not that bad. However, it's still a problem I really need to get rid of. My CPU is an AMD A10-6700, which is pretty much an FX-4300 with crappy integrated graphics that I never use. My RAM's 16GB DDR3-1333 without heat spreaders, and although I'm not educated enough on RAM to know for sure, I think it might be thermal throttling, and if not, it's still giving me long loading times, stutters when it suddenly has to read/write small and random bits of info, etc. My heatsink is the stock one that comes with the CPU, if not some weird OEM one, and it's pretty astounding that it can even manage 70 degrees celsius under load. At some point, I actually had to clean the previous thermal paste and apply some new one since I discovered my previous thermal paste actually dried up. Needless to say, I need an upgrade. However, I'm not sure what to get. Since everything in my system is an aftermarket except for my 1TB HDD which isn't even my boot drive, I can simply reuse everything in a new build as well as put my pre-build in it's original case and sell it, and I'm sure it'll sell for at least $200 ontop of the $150 I already have. I already have a hard drive, GPU, case, fans, and even an optical drive, so all I need is a new motherboard, CPU, RAM, and PSU. I already have RAM and a PSU picked out, so all I need is a CPU and motherboard. With the PSU and RAM I've picked out, it gives me around ~$250 to work with, although I'd like to spend as little as I can since after this I plan on saving for an 144hz monitor and I want at least ~$125 to start with. I hope I'm proven wrong, but as I have multiple GPUs that perform different tasks, mainly multi-threaded ones, I'd say I'd at least need 6 cores, whether or not the CPU is hyper-threaded. This is because usually my programs take up around 3-4 cores which should leave my 2 GPUs with 2-3 cores to work with. Really, I don't know if my setup could get away with 4 cores, even if it's hyper threaded and even with the more up-to-date architectures and whatnot. At this point, I'm pretty much looking at a poor man's threadripper. Also, call me an ideologist, but I'd prefer my CPU to be AMD. I seriously don't want to use Intel unless I have to, not only because of the major hardware-level security breach in Intel's older processors, but also for more personal reasons I don't think anyone would understand. There isn't much to say about the motherboard other than that I strongly prefer it to be overclockable, and although I wouldn't care too much, it would be nice to have some sort of feature to assign how much PCI-E lanes each PCI-E device gets so I can give my 270 more PCI-E lanes than my 750. So given all of the previous I've said, what CPU do you all think I should get? Personally, I think my best bet would be the Ryzen 5 1600 with any motherboard with a B350 chipset or better. However, maybe there's something I don't know about, which is why I'm posting this thread. I really don't want to screw this up, and although I'm confident in what I've chosen, I wonder if there's any better option. Thanks, p4r4gr4ph

Hey there, I want to make my mic uni-directional from the top of it. I don't think I'll ever be able to have it completely uni-directional from just adding things onto the mic, but I want to make it as uni-directional as possible in hopes that it will help with background noise and echoing. My microphone is a Neewer NW-800. Here's a picture of it facing upwards for reference: Thanks, P4r4gr4ph

I'm too broke to afford acoustic foam at the moment, so is there any sort of substitute I can use in the meantime? The only substitute I can think of is spare bed sheets, and I don't know how I'd put them on the wall.

Seems nice. I know beggars can't be choosers, but please tell me those are real Cherry MX Blue switches.

Hey, So I'm a poor-ass PC gamer. To give you an idea of how poor I am, my mouse, keyboard, headphones, and mic probably cost about 1/6th or 1/7th of what my PC costed. I'm looking for a better experience with my current keyboard without having to spend more than $5. I am saving up for a mechanical keyboard, but I don't really think it's worth spending more than my $30 mouse, but the cheapest Cherry MX keyboards I see are $50 and I don't think I can get any for cheaper, even if I get one on sale or from buying from a friend or something. I have gone window shopping on mechanical keyboards a few time, and although flashy lights and clicky noises are nice, what I especially loved was how easy to press the keys are. I do plan on deeply cleaning my keyboard of dust, even going inside the keyholes, but I wonder what else I could possibly do to make the keys any easier to press. Is there any ideas on what I can do? Here's a link to a short imgur album of my keyboard: https://imgur.com/a/YSkllzs Thanks, P4r4rgr4ph Edit: Yeah, I know the only real way to get a better experience is to get a new one, but I'd still like to hear if there's any sort of way to improve my experience with just the current one I have. For example, I've been thinking of taking a thin paintbrush dipped in oil or whatever liquid that could make surfaces more slippery and whatnot and brushing the insides of the keyholes and maybe the insides of the keys themselves.

Hey, So I'm looking for a headset with a microphone that's really close range, for lack of better term. I expect it to pick up my voice clear as day and at a good quality, but barely anything else. I can't seem to find much resources on the topic of headset mics that are really close range. My friend does have a Razer Kraken Pro V2 and he even sent me an audio sample that had barely any background noise. So I have my eyes on the Razer Kraken, but that's kinda the only headset that doesn't suck that I've even heard what it sounds like, and I haven't really found much else. Any suggestions? Thanks, Paragraph

Sell my current PC and save up some more money and build a new one.