DezGalbie

There's a lot of things being said about points which I am not making in the slightest. I'm not saying that this driver issue is only LMG's problem. I'm not saying that AMD and LMG do not have some kind of partnership (although if I was to describe it I probably wouldn't do it that way). I'm also not dismissing Linus's complaint. He's right to complain. I would too. I am only disagreeing with one very specific point. The point where it was said that AMD are forcing LMG staff to work this weekend. That is clearly untrue. That's a decision for LMG management to make. They were put in a tough spot where they had to decide between coming in over the weekend to redo videos and gaining the income/exposure/all the other stuff that comes with being at the forefront of a big tech launch and giving the staff the weekend off, waiting until Monday to redo their videos, and a gaining a little bump in staff morale. That's a choice. It's a choice made by LMG, not AMD.

Oh, no. I get that completely. AMD's driver fuck-up has required that videos be redone and it means more work. It's just that that point is entirely irrelevant to the question of who is forcing them to come in and redo their videos over the weekend instead of leaving it to Monday? Let's grant that AMD have fucked up their drivers. We could even assume that AMD have fucked up another dozen random things with regard to this launch which have made things difficult for tech-tubers and requires videos to be remade. But how does that mean they are forcing the staff at LMG to come in over the weekend? AMD do not decide who works when at LMG. The decision makers at LMG decide who at LMG works when in order to run the business to their best of their ability. If LMG management wanted to, they could have given their staff the weekend off and redone the videos on Monday and/or Tuesday, couldn't they? Now, I understand that they don't want to do that because it will put their content behind dozens of other tech-tubers, but that's not the same as AMD forcing them, is it? That is LMG recognising that it would be of great benefit to the business to bring staff in over the weekend instead of waiting and letting your competitors steal a march on you. To then paint that decision as "AMD are forcing us" rather than "Sorry, guys, but we need you to work this weekend. It's just too important to wait." is childish at best. It's not a popular decision to have to make on behalf of your staff, but it makes sense, and I'm sure that most of the staff there understand it. Just own it. The professional folk put in that situation will respect that honesty and personal responsibility more anyway.

I remember a JayzTwoCents video where he did a similar thing. He wasn't sure if it was the motherboard or CPU which was dead in a specific system which was behaving similarly to yours. He had pushed the overclock a bit on it and killed it. He swapped out the CPU for his deceased dad's CPU (he had kept a hold of his dad's system for sentimental value, I guess). He ended up killing his dad's CPU as well. It seems like his overclocking broke something in the power delivery on the board, which then took out the original CPU. And, of course, because the power delivery on the board is now broken it also took out the next CPU he put in to test. It's a scary thought when buying a motherboard used that this kind of thing can be lurking out there just waiting to screw you over. You have my sympathies!

Well who is it that's actually forcing them to come in on the weekend to get it done? Does AMD have authority over LMG when it comes to LMG shift patterns/rotas? Pretty sure the decision makers at LMG (whoever it would be to make the ultimate call on who has to come in to work and when) can make the call to leave this work until Monday. The argument against this would presumably be something like - "Oh, but we can't because all the other tech-tubers will have the updated reviews out before us and we'll get less views, exposure etc". True, if you leave it until Monday then you are giving up that strategic advantage to your fellow tech-tubers. But that's a business call. To be made by LMG. Nobody is forcing them, they can decide whether to give staff the weekend off or to stay on the cutting edge of tech news and product launches. Make the call however you see fit for your business in terms of balancing business need and staff morale, but, for the love of God, take some responsibility for the decision. Nobody is forcing you to do anything. Being convinced of your preference to do a thing by recognising an undesirable consequence of not doing the thing does not necessarily equate to being forced to do the thing. I'm sure your reasonable members of staff will accept the business need in this situation and man-up and get it done anyway. Working a weekend every now and again isn't the end of the world.

I'm sure it is cheap and from China. But obviously I don't think it's crap or I wouldn't bother with the effort of trying to find more. The problem is, with different branding/design, how do I know that any similar pen is the same inside? There will be other pens with different branding which are the same internally most likely, yeah, but there will also be just as many pens which are similar externally and different internally. That's why I ask about this * exact * pen. Not just similar. Without a lead on the exact pen my only option is to buy a shitload of similar pens and test them all, which is pretty expensive, time-consuming, wasteful, and not even guaranteed to be successful. I was hoping I could find a stock of cheap pens which are actually surprisingly pretty nice to write with but I guess I'll have to give up on that dream and just pay through the nose for good branded pens. By the time I buy a load of random cheap similar pens and test them it will have been easier and cheaper to just buy the more expensive pens in the first place.

My motherboard is the B350 Mortar Arctic from MSI which has an "Optical S/PDIF OUT connector". Is that the one we would be looking for? The PC is connected to the TV via HDMI. Are these audio optical connectors all a standard size? Like, if I was to go and buy a soundbar which is advertised as coming with an optical cable, would it be guaranteed to fit? Or do I need to be make sure of which particular cable and connector it is on the unit?

Thanks for your input. So for this, would I be connecting the soundbar to the PC that's running Plex through the TV? Or would I be connecting it to the TV itself? And is there any more setup after that? Or does the PC just recognise that there is now a soundbar and adjusts accordingly? Sorry, I really have zero experience with this stuff.

As long as the benchmarks coming out aren't complete fantasy, then 3rd gen Ryzen does seem to blow away the 9900K. I mean, when you look at both performance and price:performance together. In terms of performance alone, 9900K won't be completely blown away, but it will be at least a little slower, and at a significantly higher cost.

@_Syn_ Great. That all sounds promising then. I'll need to sit down and check these things out. Probably won't have a chance until next week though. I'm working 12hr shifts for the next 4 days and I never have time for tinkering or watching stuff when the work schedule is like that. Thanks

Hmm. I find it hard to answer that. Because it sometimes sounds a little muffled. But I would say that mostly the issue is that the dialogue is just way too quiet compared to the rest of the audio. But this is only on some video files. Others are fine. Well I almost always use Plex for my movies. I don't specifically see an option in there to disable 5.1. Would that option be in my TV menu? Or would it be turned off using the Realtek software on the PC which is running Plex and is connected to the TV? I just had another thought. If I was to buy just a single extra speaker, would I be able to connect this to the PC or TV, use this for just dialogue, and adjust the volume of that one independently of the TV speakers to get the balance right? Or is that stupid?

Is the centre speaker the one which handles the dialogue then? Or does it vary?

I know pretty much nothing about audio setups, so please be gentle with me and be prepared to get the crayons out to draw me the bigger picture if there's something I'm missing! I've always just used the (presumably) pretty crappy included internal speakers on my TV since I bought it around 9ish years ago. I've mostly just been happy enough with that. But I find myself getting more and more annoyed when I try to watch a movie and get that kind of experience where you can't make out the dialogue, so you turn the volume way up, but then all the other sounds are way too loud and you still can't quite make out most of the dialogue. I remembered reading somewhere online that this is caused by playing video files with 5.1 sound through a non-5.1 audio setup (such as the internal speakers on my TV). Is this true? If it is true, then does that mean I should get a 5.1 speaker setup and it will fix the problem? If so, will any 5.1 speaker setup do? It really doesn't need to be top of the line or anything. As long as I can hear the dialogue at a reasonable volume, I don't really care too much about audio quality.

Was it like a chain pound shop which might have a branch local to me?

Unless you really, absolutely, need the portability of the laptop then I would say it's an easy choice - the 1080 and the 3600.

Yeah, there will be lots of similar ones out there available from lots of places but, ironically, not through the link you provided. Lol. Apparently those are out of stock. And they're described as glitter ink. I don't think my fragile masculinity could handle glitter ink. Probably not suitable for professional use either. But does anyone know where I can find more of the same kind I have in my pictures though (not just similar)?

Is anyone out there, like me, quite particular about the make and model of pens which they use? I need some help identifying a particular pen so that I can buy more. I found this pen so I don't know where it was bought or who made it. There is no obvious branding on the pen, just the words "roller tip pen" and "liquid ink". Can anyone help?

If the broken fans can be removed from the heatsink then I would suggest taking along a couple of small working fans of your own (like even case fans powered from the motherboard headers) and some zip ties. Attach the working fans and try stressing the card with some kind of benchmark. If temps and performance are as expected then it likely is just the fans that are the problem. Obviously let the guy know beforehand that this is what you will be turning up to do, and that you need to do it to verify that everything else on it works. Seems like this would do the trick unless I'm missing something?

You can have that, yes, but not necessarily. So it really depends on the experience he is having and how much of the power of that 1080 he is missing out on. An overclock should help, yeah. But a good overclock can only do so much. I'd say it's certainly worth trying anyway and seeing what that does to the utilisation percentages of both CPU and GPU.

You are getting to 100% on your CPU because you have a good GPU which can fully utilise it. Essentially, the CPU is the bottleneck in your system when gaming. It's not necessarily a bad thing to use 100% of your CPU, but it means your GPU is probably not being fully taken advantage of.

I love wood as a furnishing and building material. I'm always interested in seeing it incorporated into case designs. There should be more wooden (or at least partially wooden) PC cases out there!

Time for the latest installment of strawman theatre. Where did I say that "journos" (or any single other person for that matter) are to avoid weighing in on the artistic qualities of games? You've got it all wrong. My original comment was not about how people should not discuss the artistic qualities of games, it was about how people should not try to censor art, and how people should pay no attention to people who encourage us to go down that route. My comment was about how an individual person has no authority to decide what should and should not be in someone else's art. The point of art (or should I say - one of the points) is to bring together a group of elements which become of greater value than the sum of their parts. These elements could be words on a page, brush strokes on a canvas, or any other number of other things. By combining these elements in your own special way you communicate a point or a feeling. For someone to break a work of art down to those individual elements once again and apply intention to each of them individually is disingenuous at best, and dangerous at worst. Is every single piece of art which contains the "N" word racist? No, because you have to look at the bigger picture, the entire context, the work of art as a whole. Branding a game racist just because it has a gang who refer to themselves as "The Animals" is exactly the same thing. This game does not conform to the approved ideology. It does not go all-out in an effort to promote feminism, transgender culture, and other typically left-leaning pet causes. It is because it does not conform to this ideology that this disingenuous method of critique is being used. "Journos" such as this one don't use this same method of critique to assess works of art which do conform to the approved ideology. If you don't believe me then I'll give you an example. The Macklemore song "Same Love" was praised for it's message defending homosexual love and relationships. There was no mainstream backlash for his use of the (gay slur) "F" word. CBS even chose not to censor it despite generally censoring every other slur used by other artists. So what is the difference? If your message is approved then you can use whatever elements you like in your artwork and it's all cool. If your message deviates from the approved then your art will be unfairly broken down into it's component parts, and you will be labelled racist/sexist/transphobic/whatever to criticise you and pressure you to conform. If your perceived overall message is seen as favourable then it's good enough to look at your intent and judge you that way. If your perceived overall message is seen as lacking, then your intent does not come into it. Your art is broken down into single atomic elements and judged in the least favourable way possible in order to vilify, demonise, and castigate you. Everyone on the planet should be free to write whatever article they want. That includes writing articles on games you do not like. I'm all for that freedom. That freedom of expression should also extend, however, to games developers. Games developers should be able to make any kind of artistic expression they want in their games without people trying to exert influence to coerce some kind of modification to their art form. If you don't like a game, that's fine. Tell everyone who will listen that you don't like it, or that you think it would be better if it pushed a different message. But to unfairly brand it (and by association it's creator too) racist/sexist/transphobic based upon a disingenuous breakdown of all the individual elements of which it consists, is to attempt to unduly censor and silence the artist. That really does not explain your point any better. We must explore the social connotations of art for it to be art, because it helps people understand it and appreciate it more? Well so what if nobody understands or appreciates it? Does that mean it isn't art? Did The Mona Lisa only become art when Da Vinci showed it to other people who understood it and appreciated it? Or was it still a work of art before he showed anyone? What if the people he showed did not understand it at all and refused to engage with any critique of its social connotations? If Da Vinci had burned the painting immediately after finishing with no one else seeing it then it did not achieve the status of "art"? Well that may be a solid point if my stereotyping had anything to do with my argumentation in this case. But it didn't. I didn't argue something like "you shouldn't listen to games journos because they have rainbow hair" or "games journos are full of shit because they use Macbooks", did I? The stereotype had nothing to do with my argument. My argument was based on the nature of qualities of the argument put forward by the person. Yes, the very definition of a stereotype means that it will be false in some cases. My argument is not that all SJW games "journalists" who do this crap have rainbow hair and use Macbooks, but this is a common scenario, hence the stereotype. Why can you not prove a stereotype? That seems like a completely bizarre statement to make. It really doesn't seem to be that complicated to prove or disprove a stereotype. Let's pick a completely fictional example so as not to offend anyone. As far as I know this stereotype doesn't already exist, but let's say our stereotype is that "Scottish people love Tic Tacs more than anyone else". You take the identified group of people (Scottish people) and try to prove/disprove that they conform to the standard expressed (loving Tic Tacs) to a higher degree than a control group (consisting of people of varied other random nationalities). You survey both groups asking them if they love Tic Tacs and you analyse your results. Or maybe even just look at per capita sales of Tic Tacs in Scotland compared to the figures for different countries. Both of these methods would provide some hard evidence towards proving or disproving the stereotype. Pretty simple, no? Well, as explained above, your beef is not with me then. I'm not interested in silencing games journalism. I'm interested in encouraging people to refrain from taking any notice of them when they disingenuously cherry-pick elements from games which are then used to brand a games developer's work as racist/sexist/whatever. I'm interested in encouraging people not to lend any credence or air of authority to the opinions of these people just because their name appears on a website. But above all else, I'm just really super interested in where the sense of entitlement comes from to demand (as a lot of people do) that other people refrain from making art which they do not like. If you do not like someone else's artwork then fine, just don't engage with it. Art is a relative and personal thing. You don't have to like other people's art. But it's a two-way street. You also don't get to decide what another person's art means. You can't decide their intentions based on minute details of the big picture, unfairly magnified in ignorance of the larger context. And even if you do look at the bigger picture, properly contextualise your analysis, and come to the conclusion that you don't like the piece for whatever reason, guess what? The artist still should be allowed to make his art.

What on earth did I say that justifies your claim that I think of games as "dumb toys without meaning"? I referred to them as "art". If you somehow think that "art" is synonymous with "dumb toys without meaning" then that's up to you, but I strongly disagree, and I suspect a lot of other people here would as well. But hey, it's a tech forum. Play to your audience, right? Paint the bad man who disagrees with you as a video game hater. That will help circle the wagons? Well, that's certainly a sentence. How would you justify that though? Why must we explore the social connotations of art for it to be art? Citation needed, as the saying goes. But let's say you're right for the sake of argument. Let's say that we must explore the social connotations of art. OK, now what? How does that bolster or invalidate my argument? Well, I'm the one saying that games developers should be free to explore any and all such issues in their games in any way they wish. The rainbow-haired Macbook tappers (and, yes, I will feel free to continue to stereotype because I do not recognise the authority of people who tell me I can't) are the ones who are arguing against supporting games developers who make games which explore topics which they do not like, or which explore topics in ways which they do not like. If you are in favour of fully exploring the social connotations of art, then the Macbook tappers do not speak for you. Isn't it funny how thinking and questioning is a good thing so long as you come up with the pre-approved answers to those questions? A "journalist" thinks and questions and receives praise from you because at least they are doing that. I think and question the authority of someone to tell people what art they are allowed to create and that is somehow a bad thing in your eyes. Isn't it also funny how refusing to limit yourself is a good thing until it clashes with the pre-approved ideology? A "journalist" refuses to limit his/her self to the superficial characteristics of a game and it's worthy of praise because they are on your side. A game developer refuses to limit his self to the pre-approved guidelines regarding the identity politics apparent in his game and that very same "journalist" (who you defend) tries to take him down. It's almost like there's something to that whole tribalism of ideologies thing I mentioned, right? People are willing to praise people on their side for doing the same kinds of things they criticise the other side for doing. As long as they have the pre-approved ideology then nothing else matters. People in agreement with that ideology will always find a way to rationalise their actions and criticise those same actions on the other side.

I feel like it's pretty niche to absolutely need more than 2 monitors but, sure, if you do need 3 or more monitors for each system then that is something to consider. If that is the case and you don't have a motherboard option with enough display ports then you may need a graphics card of some sort anyway.