Rhianwen

Alright, I tried a different monitor and a different SD card, sadly no results. My best guess is that something is going wrong with the flash process but I have no idea what it could be, everything that the Pi needs to boot seems to be there.

Just now, Sauron said:

Maybe your sd card died?

It's possible, but is there any way that I can know for sure? I can still plug it into a card reader and it would behave just fine in Windows.

4 minutes ago, Sauron said:

The green light blinking is perfectly normal, just because it doesn't have an sd card inserted doesn't mean it's not doing anything. As for the display issue, do both video outputs not work at all? Have you tried using a different cable or a different screen? Has it ever worked before with this setup?

Yeah, both HDMI ports show no output to the monitor. I don't have another cable for it to further test if that's the issue and I do have a second monitor for it I will try later (that monitor being the one I am using now) but I will say it has worked fine with this setup before. I haven't touched it in a long time and I simply re-flashed it with Lakka, then RecalBox and it didn't wanna work since.

My poor Raspberry Pi 4 B appears to be ill, it seems no matter what I do, I can't get a signal to the monitor... be it messing with the config file or flashing a new OS to the SD card. Only thing I haven't tried with the config file was boosting the HDMI signal to the TV. However, I encountered something bizarre that I can't easily find online.

The red power light stays lit, okay that's good... but then there is the green one that just consistently blinks at a quick pace, no particular amount of flashes or anything although it does have an "arrhythmia" to it. Everything I seen online states that an application is running or its writing/reading code, but the Pi also does that when I power it on with no SD card inserted. I am hoping that it's another one of those instances of me missing something so absurdly obvious because I love my Pi quite possibly more than my gaming rig.

(Also I have to leave to college classes soon, so if I disappear for more than a few hours, that'll be why)

Ah, I think that's good input, I was hoping for some more perspective on the Pi-top, but I learned later that it was largely assembled specifically for kids that don't have computer accessibility, so it makes sense it wouldn't be for serious work.

Thanks!

I need a laptop for upcoming college classes next month and while I have pretty good knowledge in PC hardware and how laptops function, my firsthand experience in using the latter is uh, very limited. I don't know how one would behave differently from a desktop. I am gonna be doing programming for circuitry and robotics classes and MS Office will be involved too.

There are some refurbished Lenovo ThinkPads and Dell Latitudes I found with 6th gen i5s within budget, some with 8GB of memory and 128GB SSDs for around $230. However, their processors benchmark considerably less than desktop CPUs from the Sandy Bridge era and I have an Optiplex with an i5-2400 that does not like Windows 10 as it is. Then I found something interesting, that just appeals to me a lot, a Pi-Top! With Pi-TopOS it can run the MS Office suite, it's cute, supposedly great for programming, and easily within my price range. Plus if it breaks, I imagine it won't rob me of too much repair money.

But, is a Pi-Top too good to be true? What would be a better choice in this instance? Also, webcams aren't necessary but are a good nice-to-have.

I noticed this earlier today, there's not much of a gap in performance between Sandy Bridge and Coffee Lake CPUs. According to UserBenchmark, my i7 8700k only outmatches the i5-2400 by a 35% margin, the i7-2600k by a mere 23%, both latter CPUs fully capable of playing triple-A games ahead of their time just fine with a decent GPU.

It's fascinating, really... improvements in software design aside, I am not sure if Intel is stagnating or the x86 architecture is hitting its limit. Could be both, could be neither, I have no clue.

Doesn't mean CPUs will be irrelevant, but it does remove incentive to buy anything considered flagship and new when building a gaming PC.

The oldest game I play to this very day has to go to Command and Conquer Red Alert 2 from 2000.

Growing up in the mountains in the middle of nowhere, I played a LOT of games from the late 90s and early 2000s... but then I got cable and a Steam account lol

On 6/17/2021 at 11:28 PM, HelpfulTechWizard said:

Stop using windows 7. 

It's liability, it's out of support, it's less stable than 10. You have 3 os to choose from, win8/.1, win10, and win11. 

 

Everything to do with windows 7 officially no longer exists, the only way to get things is from "pirates" that are hosting it now.

Well that explains why the Update Center broke and I couldn't manually find any Windows 7 updates from Microsoft's website anymore. I guess it's time to explore Linux distros for my older computers.

40 minutes ago, AbydosOne said:

Is the pump running?

I followed Skiiwee's advice just now, I removed the fan and listened closely, it gurgled for a split second then nothing happened, no vibrations nor sounds. I can safely say the pump is indeed dead.

I almost completely neglected something so simple as the liquid cooling being a factor, thank you so much everyone!

Hmm, I felt the hoses last night and they were still pretty darn cold, so that may be it... This is legit my very first time dealing with liquid cooling, so bear with me here lol

If the hoses and radiator were still very cool, while the block is blazing hot, that would be viable confirmation right?

My sister purchased someone's retired gaming rig that came with this Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard, it features insanely easy access to overclocking. She didn't touch anything on it, she hates the idea of overclocking and it worked fine for the entire eight months she owned it, I also made sure everything in the UEFI menu was on stock settings too.

However for some reason, right after a Windows 10 update, it starts randomly shutting off from overheat. I mean, the CPU temps will reach 82C really quick before hovering there for ten seconds and shutting off at 84C, I disconnected the hard drive and discovered that the issue is independent from the OS. So I assume something was touched that shouldn't have been, so I removed the CMOS battery and left it sitting for an hour to try and reset the mobo's settings, didn't work... Last thing I done, was attempting to underclock it and reduce the voltage in the UEFI before it began heat throttling on me and shutting off in a span of one minute at best. Sadly, I didn't succeed and everything I caught a glimpse of appeared to be on stock settings.

Sorry if I am too rambly, I am just trying to cover all extenuating circumstances to help give everybody a better understanding of this issue. I'm at my wits end and I also heavily prefer to not flash it if possible, it's way too risky and I don't wanna brick the motherboard. Here are the specs to the PC:

Intel i7-3770k for the CPU

Corsair TX750M power supply

Thermaltake Water 3.0 liquid cooling (the reason why I can get a minute at most out of it)

Gigabyte GA-X79-UD3 motherboard

16GB of DDR3 Corsair Vengeance

A lonely 3TB system drive

GeForce GTX 970 Afterburner GPU

1 hour ago, Dat--Boi said:

srry meant aim trainer along these lines 

https://store.steampowered.com/app/824270/KovaaKs_FPS_Aim_Trainer/

Any first person shooter will provide you with practice, really. It's just that so many of them are built upon different game engines and have a different feel to them as a result.

If you have some money to spare later down the road, you can grab some FPS games at dirt cheap prices when Steam has one of its massive sales. When you feel like craving more than TF2, I recommend Unreal Tournament 2004 at a discount.

Smh clearly it's a GTX 1660 Ti with more VRAM

On 5/21/2019 at 2:39 AM, Gale said:

The classic Fallout games.

OMG yes, Fallout 1 and 2 are easy on the eyes and full of things to do, and since they are isometric games older than the hills, they should run on just about anything.

My switch to PC from console was a gradual change, nothing directly encouraged me to transition, I just eventually got too spoiled to using Steam lol

Maybe it's because I do a poor job of keeping up with my CDs so I enjoyed an all digital library instead, I dunno.

I never cared about pretty lights, my computer is like a Soviet car, ugly as crap and missing some nice-to-haves, but perfectly handles almost everything I throw at it.

I mean, how demanding is Crysis 3, exactly? It's a game made in 2013 with recommended specs suggesting a DX11 card with 1GB of dedicated VRAM. Are people excluding extenuating circumstances like ultra graphic settings?

Different websites say a Radeon HD 5870 is recommended but according to UserBenchmark, a GTX 1060 (6GB) beats it in raw speed by a 235% margin.

I know not all cards are equal, but otherwise, I can't see the 1060 to be blamed lol