Jump to content

Shmael1053

Member
  • Posts

    29
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Awards

This user doesn't have any awards

Recent Profile Visitors

The recent visitors block is disabled and is not being shown to other users.

Shmael1053's Achievements

  1. If your motherboard supports 5000-series CPUs, that would be a smart upgrade. The AMD platform has matured quite a bit since first-gen Ryzen, so you'd get a pretty big performance bump. Whether you'll get another 4-5 years out of your system really boils down to your other components IMO - an 8-10 year old PC has a not insignificant chance of component failure, so there's a chance your motherboard or something else might fail before you reach that milestone. In terms of performance, though, you're probably good. I have a 5800X in my system right now and I don't see myself replacing it any time soon. When I first read the second question, I was going to say you should go with the faster memory instead of adding more. Ryzen famously benefits from faster memory, so you'd get the most out of your new CPU that way. However, I was going to say "also almost nobody actually needs 32 GB RAM unless they're doing creative work or engineering simulations", and then you said you make videos and use Photoshop. You would legitimately benefit from more memory. If there's a way for you to get faster memory and upgrade to 32 GB, that would be ideal, but if it's one or the other I'm inclined to say go up to 32 GB. Do you have an extra M.2 slot on your motherboard? I would honestly recommend keeping the 256 GB SSD as your boot drive and only adding another NVMe drive if you have another open slot. Some of that is personal preference - I like to keep as little on my boot drive as possible - but also migrating from one NVMe drive to another can be a pain if you don't have another slot. The performance bump from loading games off of NVMe as opposed to a SATA HDD is pretty huge, especially if you're playing a lot of big open-world games, but it's not life-changing like switching your boot drive from a hard disk to an SSD. You could split the difference and get a SATA SSD to store your games on? In terms of different upgrade ideas, I highly recommend you upgrade your GPU sooner than 2025. I was running an overclocked 1050 Ti just like you until a year ago, and the performance leap from that to a 30-series card is astronomical. I went from roughly 60 FPS at 1080p medium settings in most games to 144 FPS at 1440p, anywhere from high to ultra settings depending on the game. Keep in mind that GPU prices have fallen a long way from where they were a year ago; I've seen used 30-series cards listed on Craigslist for just under $300. If you have a limited budget for upgrades, I would legitimately recommend skipping everything else listed above and just getting a new graphics card - your current CPU is definitely not going to be bottlenecking a 1050 Ti, and a modern graphics card would almost definitely speed up your video production work as well. If you're worried your CPU would be a bottleneck, run the SteamVR Performance Test - you're definitely not going to pass with a 1050 Ti, but it'll tell you whether or not your CPU is a bottleneck in your system. My money's on no. And if you're skeptical about how much of a performance bump it would really be, just look at the difference in PassMark scores between a 1050 Ti and even low- to mid-tier 30-series cards. A 3050 would double your GPU performance; a 3060 Ti would more than triple it. That's the smartest upgrade IMO.
  2. Strictly speaking, not the right channel for this, but it's the only channel under "Consumer Electronics" that has anything to do with audio, so I figured it was worth a shot. Mods feel free to delete if not allowed I'm planning to upgrade the head unit in my car once I get my tax return. My car is from 2010, so it has an aux input and all that, but I drove a rental car with good quality Android Auto integration on a recent business trip and realized what I've been missing all these years. Getting Android Auto connectivity in my car is my number one priority, with major bonus points for a wireless solution. From what I've seen, there seems to be two main options for decent quality aftermarket head units with AA: name brand units (Kenwood, Pioneer, Sony, etc) or Chinese-made head units that run Android themselves - the two main brands I've seen are Seicane and Idoing. Does anyone have experience with these Chinese-made Android head units? They look a lot neater than a name-brand thanks to the integrated fascia, and they have more features if your phone isn't connected, but in all honesty the country of origin and the poor quality English on their websites has me nervous. I also saw someone in a YouTube comments section say they monitored their WiFi traffic and noticed their Seicane unit "constantly pinging some sketchy server deep in China", though IMO that could easily be an update server or something similar? The price works out to about the same for either route, so for me it really boils down to reliability and data safety. Any info from someone who has dealt with a Seicane or Idoing head unit would be much appreciated.
  3. I realize my post was a bit long-winded, so the detail kind of got lost in the shuffle, but I want to be clear: I already did that. About a week ago, I used Macrium Reflect to back up my C: drive to an external drive. I then disconnected the external drive, and all other drives, from my motherboard, and used Windows install media to put a completely clean Windows install on my C: drive. I'm still having the same issues as I did before the clean install. That's why I'm posting here; I've exhausted all of the obvious solutions.
  4. Just took a look at your UserBenchmark results. Single-channel memory can be a bottleneck, but according to your test results the memory is performing just fine. Your processor, however, is underperforming even more dramatically than your graphics card. If your processor is struggling, it can bottleneck your GPU. That may be what's happening here. Your SSD is also underperforming; it's actually in the lowest percentile of all your components that were tested. Since an NVMe drive is often linked directly to the CPU, this could *also* be because your CPU is having issues. Based on the manufacturer's photos for your PC, it may be a cooling issue? It looks like a stock cooler or something comparable, which is not likely to do a great job keeping your CPU cool under load. if you have something like HWinfo installed, take a look at what your CPU temps are, both at idle and under load. For reference, I have a Ryzen 7 5800X and it's sitting at 45 C as I write this, and that's with a tiny low-profile heatsink from Noctua. If your temps at idle are much higher than that, or if HWinfo says "Thermal throttling | Yes" when you're running a game, you probably want to look at a new cooler. As a side note, are you installing all your games to your boot drive? Your UserBenchmark results say your system drive only has about 12% free, while your second drive has over 80% free. It's generally a good idea to avoid filling up your boot drive; I think Linus himself has said he doesn't like any SSD getting over 50% full. I highly encourage you to move games and large files over to your secondary drive. It'll spread the load out across the drives and stop your system from having to fight for bandwidth when you're playing a game - SSDs are good at handling requests from multiple sources, but it's still best practice to spread out the load as much as possible. It might help your system run faster, and it will *definitely* keep your boot drive alive for longer.
  5. Hi there, I've got a bit of a mystery issue and at this point I'm out of ideas. First, some background: Back in August, my boot drive (a WD_Black SN750 SE 500 GB) failed and had to be RMA'd. I hadn't been making regular backups, so my only option to avoid losing my files was to clone the drive using a Linux boot USB and DDrescue, which I did successfully. Thing is, I was feeling lazy, so instead of installing Windows on a new drive and copying my files over, I used Windows' built-in recovery tools to fix the system image on the healthy drive and make it bootable again. When my replacement SSD arrived, I just copied over the same "fixed" system image to it. The only issue I had, other than a few programs needing to be reinstalled, was that my installation of Bitdefender was bricked. It still showed up as installed, but wouldn't open, and not even an uninstall utility provided by Bitdefender customer service was able to remove it. About a month or so ago, I started to have some odd Windows issues that became more frequent until they impacted my ability to use my PC. Occasional BSOD on wake from standby, and more rarely, on boot. These BSODs were always flagged as "WHEA_ UNCORRECTABLE_ ERROR". I have not been able to find any crash dump files despite double-checking my settings to ensure they're enabled. Long POST or POST getting stuck. I have an ASUS ROG motherboard that just has four POST LEDs instead of a display; recently I started having problems on startup where my PC would either get stuck on the boot disk section of the POST sequence for a long time before booting, or just staying on that section indefinitely until I either shut off my PSU or hit the reset button. Hitting the power switch would usually cause the BIOS to bring up a power failure warning the next time it was powered on, which would let me enter the BIOs customization screen; my boot drive would always show up as a boot device, and when I selected it, it would boot right away with no issues. About a week ago it hit a point where it often took several attempts to get my PC to boot, and I was worried about letting it enter sleep mode because it might BSOD on wake and need to go through the same process again. I tried to use Windows 10's reset feature to refresh my OS while keeping my files, but instead of fixing the issue, it rendered my NVMe drive unbootable and "repaired" a system image I'd forgotten about on a SATA hard disk. At this point I finally caved; I copied all my files from the NVMe drive to an external drive and did a clean install of Windows, thinking that would fix the issue. It did not. While a full wipe and reinstall did fix the weird Bitdefender issue (it's now properly installed and running), I've still had several instances of the POST issue and one BSOD with the WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR message - after which my BIOS didn't detect my boot drive until I shut off my power supply and turned it back on. At this point I'm kind of at a loss for what to do next. It's a four month old NVMe drive and a fresh install of Windows, and I'm still having the same issues that I assumed were due to an improperly repaired OS install. I've been plagued with bad luck with this build (the boot drive was one of three components I had to RMA) so I'm terrified of the possibility that I'm going to need to RMA another component, be that my motherboard or a second faulty boot drive. If anyone has any insight into what could be causing this issue and/or what my next step should be, I would very much appreciate it. I'm starting to feel like that XKCD joke about the guy who's cursed to endure mysterious errors forever. My specs: Motherboard: ASUS ROG Strix X570-I Gaming Processor: Ryzen 7 5800X RAM: 16 GB G.SKILL TridentZ RGB Series (DDR4 3200) Boot drive: WD_Black SN750 SE 500 GB (replacement installed in September after my previous boot drive of the same model failed) Other drives: MSI M470 1 TB, used for storing most of my games library; 1 TB 7200 RPM hard disk, can't remember the make and model off the top of my head, used for occasional backups of the C: drive and for games that don't benefit from NVMe speeds PSU: Fractal Ion+ 2 Platinum 760W OS: Windows 10 Home 64-bit; reinstalled within the last week, but still experiencing issues Graphics card: GIGABYTE OC PRO RTX 3060 Ti All hardware except the boot drive, graphics card, and hard disk were purchased on Black Friday 2021 and assembled in December 2021 System is connected to a surge protector, albeit an older one. Area suffers from occasional brownouts, some of which have occurred around the appearance or intensification of some of these issues! As previously stated, I've been unable to find any crash dumps from the BSOD issue, despite checking my settings to ensure that crash dumps are enabled.
  6. It's common for the screen to flicker or black out several times during a graphics driver update. Is it full-on crashing during the driver update or are you shutting it down manually? If you're shutting it down manually, that may be the problem; power loss during a driver update can mess up your PC. if it's hard-crashing, what POST code/error light is it showing? Also, out of curiosity, how are you installing the driver? Are you downloading it from the Asus support site or are you using GeForce Experience?
  7. I'm having an issue with OneDrive where it's telling me I'm out of storage space and need to pay for more storage, but won't let me delete or stop syncing the files that are eating said storage space. Apparently, most Battlefield games store save data and some game data in the user's Documents folder in Windows. Battlefield 2042, for some reason, saves shader files there too. The "Battlefield 2042" folder in Documents is almost a gig of DX12 shader data. Buried in OneDrive settings, there's a GUI to uncheck specific folders from syncing. However, if you try to uncheck a folder that has pending uploads, you get an error telling you to try again after the uploads have completed. This is, of course, impossible if the drive is full and is not accepting new uploads. I went into OneDrive and deleted the Battlefield 2042 folder from my drive, which put me well under the storage limit... at which point OneDrive immediately began backing up the folder again because there was free space and the pending uploads resumed. If you pause the upload, it prevents you from unchecking the folder again, or from uploading any other files you actually want to back up! This has created an infinite loop that I can't find a way out of. My drive is full because of unwanted files, but I can't tell it to stop syncing the unwanted files because the drive is full. So I delete the files, but they come back, because OneDrive wasn't told to stop syncing them, but I can't stop syncing them because the drive is full, and on and on forever. Has anyone encountered a similar issue with OneDrive? Have you found a solution other than paying for additional storage or deleting files you actually want?
  8. So this is a fun one. A couple weeks ago I started to get this weird issue where occasionally my screen would go black for a half second or more before coming back. After about a week this progressed to minor graphical glitches, so I assumed it was a problem with my GPU and swapped in another card. The other card displayed (most) of the same problems, and when I checked HWinfo to see how the second card was performing, I noticed that my boot drive (A WD_BLACK SN750 SE) had a red “Drive Failure - Reliability” warning. I’d noticed zero weird storage behavior, so I thought it might be a bug with HWinfo, but then the next time I rebooted I got a “Fixing C:” progress bar. The system worked perfectly fine after this, and the whole PC is only about eight months old, so I thought it was a one-time error and any chance of a full-blown failure was small. I went out of town for a week and when I came back my system was still working fine. Last night I stepped away from my PC for a few minutes and came back to a black screen with a mouse cursor in the middle. I did a hard shutdown and when I rebooted, my motherboard was giving a POST error that means no boot drive detected. I managed to get into the BIOS after some fiddling, and my motherboard is detecting all of my storage devices, but isn’t picking up the WD SSD as a boot device. Not really sure what to do now. Is there any way to fix a NVMe drive that’s being detected by the system but can’t be read? Or do I need to just RMA the thing and reinstall Windows?
  9. Yeah, that card is overclocked so I'll give that a shot tomorrow. I have a backup GPU I swapped in an hour ago and that's working flawlessly so it doesn't seem to be a Windows or Nvidia issue. Will put the Gigabyte card back in tomorrow and try to mess with the OC settings/drivers to troubleshoot.
  10. I semi-recently acquired this 3060 Ti from Gigabyte, and recently I've started to notice some worrying behavior. For the past week or so, if I'm in a game or watching a YouTube video, or anything else that utilizes the GPU, every so often the screen will black out for a second before coming back. Not world-ending, but deeply frustrating when you're playing a game. Right before going to make this post, though, I started getting visual artifacts when doing run-of-the-mill stuff. I opened Firefox to do something else and the screen had those messed up areas seen in the attached photos. Some of the characters in this very post were a little wonky in the text box until I moused over the area and they seemingly refreshed - I've actually had that happen in Microsoft Word for a while now, but it was such a minor issue that I didn't think much of it. This all started within the past few days, right around the time Windows 10 installed a new update and Nvidia installed a new "Game Ready Driver". I don't want to RMA my GPU if this is a software issue, so I figured I would post here first for a second opinion. Is this a software problem or is my graphics card dying after ~3 months of use?
  11. I own both, obvi, but I prefer to use my desktop. Even leaving aside the fact that you get way more performance per dollar out of a desktop than a laptop, it's just way more comfortable to work or game on a large monitor, at eye level, with a full keyboard, and a mouse. Even the most ergonomic laptop is going to have a (relatively) small display, a smaller and usually non-mechanical keyboard, and you're going to spend the whole time looking down at it.
  12. Halo Infinite and Battlefield 2042 are here, and after several years of faithful service, the i7-4770 and 1050Ti in my office-PC-turned-gaming-PC is starting to show its age pretty badly. I'm finally going to build myself a new up-to-date gaming PC, but I'm having some trouble choosing a motherboard. I live in a hot climate, so even ignoring the minor performance differences, I've decided I'm definitely going AMD over Intel for thermal reasons alone. Thing is, I also have a pretty small living space and desk space (my desk is only 19" deep) so I'm trying to keep my build small, avoiding full-size ATX motherboards and only looking at micro-ATX, mini-DTX, and mini-ITX boards. The practical differences between X570 and B550 are a whole other rabbit hole (if anyone has thoughts on whether X570 is worth it or not, I'd love to hear it!) but the main difference between the form factors other than physical size is that micro-ATX seems to be the only one of the three sizes to offer any boards with more than a single PCIe slot, x16 or otherwise. Something about that is extremely off-putting to me. I use two PCIe slots on my current PC, but then again, that's only because it's an old office PC that doesn't have built-in WiFi like every decent gaming motherboard now does. I can't think of anything I would need a second slot for on a modern full-featured board, but I would much rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. So this is equal parts opinion poll and survey: How many PCIe slots do you use on your gaming rig? Is only having one slot a severe restriction, even on a high-end motherboard with built-in networking and NVMe slots? And, as a bonus question if you feel like answering, because it's another thing I've been struggling with, is X570 worth choosing over B550 for a smaller build?
  13. I’ve been helping my stepdad set up a laptop dock in his home office for WFH. His laptop is slightly older - a Lenovo Flex 5-1470 - but it does have one USB-C 3.0 port. He bought two 1080p monitors that use HDMI, and a cheap USB-C dock from Best Buy. The dock would only allow one monitor to display at once, and when he called the support number for the dock, they told him that the dock he had (which supported up to USB 3.1 gen 1) supported simultaneous HDMI and DisplayPort output but not simultaneous HDMI, and that he just needed to buy one of their more expensive docks. I’m understandably suspicious of that claim. I’ve been looking online to see if USB 3.0 has support for multiple displays over a single connection, and haven’t been able to find any information other than “you can convert USB-C to HDMI” Is it possible to connect multiple displays to a single USB 3.0 connector? Keep in mind this is 3.0, not either generation of 3.1, and both displays are 1080p.
  14. Not sure whether this should go under laptops or tablets but I've heard enough iPad testimonials so maybe I can get some Windows hot takes here. I've been looking to get into digital art, specifically drawing, for a while now but haven't had the money or desk space for a conventional USB drawing tablet. Recently, out of the blue, a family member got me an 11" iPad Pro to use as a note-taking device in classes, unaware that I already bring my regular old laptop to classes and prefer handwritten notes. I'm low on space and said laptop is getting really dated (HP Elitebook G1; I've had it for 5 years but it's a 7 year old model) so before they did that my original plan was to eventually upgrade to something like a Dell XPS 2-in-1 or an HP Spectre; I asked them and they said it was totally cool if I returned the iPad and used the money to get one of those instead. The thing is, I've heard mixed things about the drawing experience on Windows laptops as well as the iPad. Some people said go iPad because Windows pen support is spotty and not typically pressure sensitive. Some people said the iPad isn't pressure sensitive either and that the screen is much too small to draw on. People who have only ever used one of the two platforms tend to give it rave reviews despite what the other side says. I have zero desire to own another device (let alone an Apple product) I need to keep track of, and my old laptop is pretty much fine for my purposes, so what I end up doing comes entirely down to the drawing experience between the two platforms. Does anyone have experience drawing on Windows laptops, the iPad Pro, or preferably both? Windows 2-in-1 crowd, do some Windows laptops have better pen support than others?
  15. Ran a battery report yesterday, data was incomplete because I hadn't used it in a few days but it seems pretty clear the battery is toast. Will run another one tonight and upload in case I'm just reading it wrong but the results are pretty cut and dried
×