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WildW_UK

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Posts posted by WildW_UK

  1.  I'm looking for some advice on what to buy to improve our slow and weak WIFI. I'm in the UK where the most common setup is a cheap combined modem/router provided free by the internet service provider, and ours provides a spotty and barely usable experience throughout the house. We have a couple of desktop PCs upstairs that are connected through TP-Link homeplug adapters, which mostly work but drop out for minutes at a time every now and then. We rent so we can't run any ethernet cables upstairs or through walls. I'm hoping that some more modern WIFI kit will make things better.

     

    Whatever I get - WIFI router or access point I guess - will need to handle two gaming PCs and mutliple TVs streaming stuff. I see lots of choices at lots of different price points, and I don't know how much it is worth spending. Because we have desktops with no existing WIFI I'll also need adapters for those. . . is it worthwhile to go for PCIe cards with more significant antennas, or are USB WIFI dongles up to the task?

  2. I recently got back into playing first-person shooters (or rather I've been playing a lot of Deep Rock Galactic) and I'm wondering what the current position is on good 3D positional sound. There are some enemies in the game that move around quickly and listening to them should be the best way to know where they are - but it feels like it's not working as well as it should.

     

    Many years ago I used to play Battlefield 2 and I remember being super-impressed when I upgraded to a Creative X-FI sound card, which had some CMSS-3D special sauce that did really good 3D audio with basic 2-channel headphones. Suddenly I could hear exactly where enemies were around me, it felt like such an advantage.

     

    These days I assume that proprietary sound stuff like this is long gone, and maybe decent 3D audio is just built into Windows? A quick Google search revealed that indeed, Windows 10 contains "Windows Sonic" spatial audio, which I eagerly turned on and wondered why everything suddenly sounded like it was in a bathroom far far away. I've tried playing with it turned on, and I think I noticed some interesting positional stuff going on, but it still sounds weird and quiet. The X-FI card just sounded crystal clear and amazing when I first used it back in 2006 or so.

     

     Nobody seems to talk much about sound in games these days, I wonder if it's a solved problem or just nobody is interested. Is there anything else out there that actually delivers a better experience than motherboard audio or USB headsets?

     

  3. 27 minutes ago, Sauron said:

    Sounds like a nintendo switch would be more up your alley than an xbox

    I know this, and I know you're right, but. . . . I'm that guy that's waiting for the console-only version they'll never do, because as a driving adult I have no need for a portable system or to pay for the screen. And my god the games are expensive.

     

    I think I actually want a fictional XBox or Playstation that has wireless controllers, HDMI output, and a store that has digital versions of every XBox/360 or PS1/PS2 game. I would've bought a PS4 years ago if it just played PS1 games, but apparently emulators are hard.

  4. I haven't touched modern consoles in a long time now. I was thinking it would be nice to play games more with my partner in the living room and I'm not sure what to choose, or if modern consoles are anything like I imagine. We've played older stuff (360/PS3 era) but it would be nice to move to newer things - I'm thinking couch co-op games really, more indie games than AAA titles. What are consoles like now?

     

    We have a media PC and have played some things via Steam with controllers (e.g. Portal Knights recently) but it doesn't have that nice storefront with free demos of everything XBox Live feel to it. With the new XBox coming soon it has crossed my mind to go for that - I like the idea of lots of backwards compatibility, picking up some remastered classics, being able to download random multiplayer XBox games like the XBox Live Arcade days... I heard XBox Live Arcade is gone now. . .are there still fun "small" games on the XBox or is it all big single player things now? I looked at all the XBox one console bundles and they all ship with AAA single player games - if I was interested in those I'd play them on PC.

     

     Does what I want exist on any console? If I buy one to play couch co-op randomness will I be disappointed?

  5. Hi folks,

     

    I've had an LG G6 for almost 3 years now. . . honestly it's fine, but I keep noticing that I would like a better camera for stills and video. I'm not sure if what I want is realistic though.

     

    So I'm working from home and I'm trying to shoot a video in my office to demonstrate some new software feature I'm working on - I'm not trying to directly screen grab a PC, this is an embedded control system a touchscreen and external hardware inputs, so I want to shoot video of my whole setup including a screen. If I point the camera at my screen, the whole background goes dark - automatic exposure control doing its thing. If the camera catches the window then the same thing happens, the room goes dark except for the window and you can't see anything useful.

     

    My eyes don't do this, they can see a reasonable balance of everything. I would like to shoot video that looks like what my eyes are seeing. How hard is that, and what is stopping it from happening? Could this be improved with a different camera app? (The built-in one doesn't have any manual controls for exposure). Is the camera itself capable? Is ANY (phone) camera capable? Am I trying to do something simple or impossible?

  6. 13 hours ago, Kidplayer_666 said:

    How

    That's a complex subject that you would be better asking Google and finding a proper guide, but the basics are that you'd need an older SD card (pre SDHC, less than 4GB) to transfer over an exploit file that you can open on the Wii. When opened that file will let you install a modified set of Wii operating software that will run homebrew software, including loaders that will run both Gamecube and Wii games from USB drives (memory sticks or hard disks I believe) and emulators for older consoles.

  7. On 3/4/2020 at 8:27 PM, Andreas Lilja said:

    Reverse non-techie.

     

    Having issues with my FireTV, Amazon guy at the other end of the line assumes I have a sub-75 tech IQ. 

     

    There needs to be a secret pass-phrase you can use on tech-support calls to identify yourself as tech-savvy so you can skip all the stupid steps you've already tried. Or someone needs to tell me what it is if it already exists.

  8. I use identical generic black HP keyboards on my computers at home and at work. After some years they get kind of gross with dust and crumbs, and I mean to clean them, but they are so cheap I just buy another. I have several gunky ones in boxes that I might clean if I feel poor next time.

     

    After holding onto a Sandy Bridge i7 for far too long, last year I finally upgraded. I was so sick of overclocking and stability testing that I bought an i5 9400f and told myself it would be fine at stock. And it is fine.

  9. If you want a PC to run old DOS games and you really want to avoid DosBox then you probably want to start with ancient hardware. Sound in particular was done very differently in the DOS days and you would almost certainly not be able to get any sound from any modern motherboard's on-board sound hardware. There were a very small number of PCI sound cards that had DOS drivers (e.g. by Ensoniq who were later bought by Creative and re-released some of those cards as Soundblaster), but other than that you are looking at much older systems with ISA slots - nothing later than about 1999 / Pentium III / very early Athlon era.

  10. 16 hours ago, stormcoller said:

    i7 2600k was amazing but sadly I broke my motherboard?????

    Wished if I could get a proper lga1155 motherboard again..

    Only just replaced my 2600k - too many volts for too many years degraded it and I couldn't keep it cool any more. Z77 motherboard is still ok though.

     

    I honestly would've been more interested if they'd started 20 years back

  11. Back in my student days, some 20 years ago, I used to sit with my roommate and watch him play JRPGs like Grandia and FF7 on the Playstation. They weren't the kind of games I've ever got into playing, but I was able to experience the story while enjoying good company. Maybe it's like that if you're watching the same people regularly. All my friends these days are retro-gaming youtubers, although most of them don't know they're my friends.

  12. I recently built an i5 system and saw something similar. Assuming you have good cooling then the CPU should be able to maintain its maximum turbo of 3.8GHz on all cores indefinitely. However there can be bios settings that limit the time the CPU can run at turbo speed.

     

    Look for settings in the bios called something like long term power limit. On my motherboard this value was a power level in watts and there's a time limit setting next to it. The quoted TDP of your CPU is 65W, but this is for the base clock speed of 2.8GHz. When turbo kicks in it will be higher and the system will let it run for some time at a higher level but then slow it back down again. It looks like this could be what's happening for you.

     

    The fix is to increase the long term power limit. Some folks seem to just say to put in 9999 as the value. When I was first testing my CPU cooling with Prime95 and CoreTemp I noticed that it would run at the all-core turbo for about a minute, and then dropped down to the base clock speed. CoreTemp shows the current TDP of the CPU, and under all core turbo it jumped from 65W to around 100W. I set my long term power limit in the bios to 125W, and now it will run at the all-core turbo speed indefinitely.

     

     

  13. If you install both on the same drive you need some kind of boot menu to select which one to start - Windows or Linux will do this for you though. If you boot from separate drives you need to select which drive to boot from, such as spamming F11/etc when you turn your computer on to get the bios boot menu.

     

    For me the real benefit of separate drives is when you change your mind later or want to reinstall one of the OS - it's much easier if they're on separate drives that don't know about each other.at boot time. If they're two partitions on the same drive, good luck reinstalling one without breaking the other.

  14. I have a big old-fashioned stereo amplifier (receiver) on my desk that drives my headphones and some bookshelf speakers. It's big and bulky and sometimes I think about getting rid of it, but I don't know what else I would do.

     

    I'm assuming that with modern 3D audio everyone games with headphones now. . . but does everyone still have weak little PC speakers with a headphone socket? Do you just use headphones plugged into the sound card? Where's your volume control? And how do you pipe your TV, other PCs and consoles into your headphones?

     

    What's the modern normal for audio?

  15. I recently replaced the hard disks in our home file server (nothing fancy, just a PC running Windows 10), and I'm using the old drives as an offline backup, only powering them on occasionally to update the backups. I've used Microsoft's Synctoy to sync folders and everything works great.

     

    However, the new drives are larger than the old ones, and one of the backed up folders is soon going to get larger than the largest backup drive. At that point Synctoy is going to stop being a solution.

     

    I like that with this sort of method the backup is a directly usable copy of the data, and I want to avoid using any sort of raid.

     

    The first option that springs to mind is the split the folder in two and sync it to two separate drives, but that's not ideal. I'm aware that there are a few alternatives to Synctoy but I haven't used any of them. Do any allow some kind of automatic splitting of the copied data between two target folders, or maybe something different that would better? Any ideas?

  16. After some recent overclocking and stress testing I touched my VRM heatsink out of curiosity and basically burned myself, which got me thinking about cooling for motherboards. I've been reading motherboard reviews recently and noticing that they talk about how well cooled the VRMs are in terms of heatsinks.

     

    One of the only redeeming qualities of the Intel stock cooler is that it also gives you some airflow over the motherboard. If you're overclocking with an AIO water cooler you get none, and you're probably drawing a lot more power than usual. But, how important is it? I'm thinking about both stability and board longevity - do you add any cooling, perhaps a fan pointed towards your motherboard?

  17. Looking for some thoughts on what might be happening here. System is an old i7 2600k, Z77 motherboard, and Corsair H75 AIO cooler (single 120mm radiator). I've been running this at about 1.35V and 4.5 GHz for over a year, and I'm sure that when I first installed it I was only hitting around 80C under a full synthetic load. I looked at it again recently and was alarmed to see it quickly jump to about 95C as soon as the load was applied and continue climbing in less than a minute. Yikes.

     

    I removed the cooler, cleaned and reapplied fresh thermal gunk, and saw a few C drop, but not significant improvement. I dialed down volts and frequency quite a lot, and ended up down at mid 80's C with 4.2GHz and 1.24V to the core. This ran Prime95 without errors for an hour (I know, not the most thorough test any more, I'm out of touch), and the temperature was stable so I guess the pump is still working. It just seems really hot for what's now a pretty mild overclock. CoreTemp is guessing an actual TDP of less than 125W at these settings, and the H75 ought to cope with that easily.

     

    Is this what CPU degredation looks like? I've heard that a degrading CPU might need more voltage over time to hold a stable overclock, but that doesn't seem to be an issue. Or perhaps the H75 is not working as it should? I was planning to reuse it on another machine, guess I will find out when I try.

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