Hyatice

For a handful of months now I've been working on a script that dynamically adjusts the performance of 6800U handhelds, aiming to reduce power draw. As you can see from the videos below, the impact is massive, and at least for most games the performance is rock solid. It even dynamically adjusts the target ratio based on the average load of the game, so emulators like Yuzu that barely load up the GPU (40% or so) will still turn clock speed up to 1600-1800mhz to reach and maintain the FPS target. The biggest offender, to me, is Hades. Hades will use 18W to run at 120 FPS, 60 FPS, 40 FPS, 30 FPS or even 1 FPS. With this script that drops down to 3.8-5W. This is all well and good, but the reason I think this is worth a video is that I see literally no valid reason for this script to have to exist. This should be the default behavior of the drivers, and if not the default it should be part of a power-saver mode. AMD (and Nvidia and Intel) all have much better (more accurate), faster (measured in microseconds, vs this script running 1 time per second) and lower overhead (direct-on-chip adjustments) access to all of the data that I'm using for this. With the new 6800U handhelds coming out and likely on your docket already, I think this is an extremely meaningful addition to talk about. Videos (Note the power draw and frametime/framerate consistency in the top left. This is while recording on the same device, not with a capture card!) https://youtu.be/rIhGj0qzFFQ https://youtu.be/aLkOfG3ax6s

Hey all. I am sure a video will be coming out regarding the Win Max 2 eventually, so I wanted to get ahead of it and ask that you guys try your best to cover the eGPU side of things as well as possible, and not just as a "you know we're gonna be pluggin that in! *points at RTX 3090*" joke. Hopefully you get your hands on the 1260P and 6800U version and can do a good comparison of performance between the two. For those of us who used eGPUs before Ice Lake, the difference between 8th/9th gen and 10th gen (ice lake, not comet lake) was absolutely night and day because intel integrated the TB3 controller into the CPU. Since the 6800U has a separate controller for it, we're worried the latency will go up and performance will go down. I have yet to see any objective investigations into this other than "yep, we plugged it in and timespy went burr". There's a lot of little tweaks that can be done (disabling PCIe power savings, setting EPP to 0% (on intel), disabling the internal display and using only an external display (this is effectively the same thing as a muxless vs mux laptop!), etc etc. Feel free to reach out if you need knobs to turn. GTX 1080 w/ 1260P (Thunderbolt): https://www.3dmark.com/spy/29432421 (7510 / 7196 GPU / 9986 CPU) https://www.3dmark.com/spy/29434666 (7514 / 7194 GPU / 10055 CPU) https://www.3dmark.com/spy/29520870 (7558 / 7195 GPU / 10594 CPU) GTX 1080 w/ 1260P (M.2): https://www.3dmark.com/spy/29433389 (8018 / 7744 GPU / 10036 CPU) My 1080 outperforms the average desktop 1080 score via thunderbolt, and slaps the average around with an M.2 eGPU setup. If you have your hands on both, it would be super helpful to see the performance difference between USB-4 and M.2 on the 6800U. (I see 7.8% on intel; 2.62 GB/s vs 2.82GBs in a bandwidth test in 3DMark or CUDA-Z) It's worth noting that if you have a PCIe4 M.2 "enclosure" you can actually take advantage of it on newer 4th gen cards, getting 5.65GB/s or so, so be sure to test USB-4 vs M.2 with an older/PCIe3 card.

Ah man, that makes me sad. I love my Azeron. I've used: Belkin n52te Razer Nostromo (rebranded n52te) Razer Orbweaver (two of them) Razer Tartarus Razer Tartarus v2 Logitech G...13? And literally all of them except the belkin n52te (the oldest, which is hilariously still going strong, although I gave it to a friend forever and a half ago) have broken within 1.5 years from purchase. That being said, maybe you haven't used a keypad, or just didn't give the azeron enough of a chance. Even with all of my 'keypad' experience, it took me a good week to get used to it, and at least another week to actually get proficient with it/bake in muscle memory.

I'm set to get the GPD Win Max 2 on Friday and am super excited to start playing with it. Presumably ya'll are also getting one - if you haven't already done so... I see at least two other people have I've done a lot of tinkering with the Win 3 and specifically with windows power plan settings. I've found what I believe to be a great balance between performance and battery life, with minimal tinkering. I'd love to share these settings/tools with you to try out on your own Win Max 2/other handheld (intel) PCs, if you are interested in trying them.

I've got a Lenovo, though my work laptop is a Dell and I may run into a similar issue whenever I finally decide that I'm tired of looking at a 12" screen while working and plug it in to my existing setup... I'll definitely give that a shot if I run into issues with it.

Hey there @cr8tor My problem is actually the OPPOSITE of that. My external is my main monitor, has all the windows on it and everything is A-OK. If I close the laptop and then open it, all of the windows suddenly move to the laptop, despite the external being the primary still. My best guess as to why is that switching from 144hz to 120hz took longer than it took for the laptop to make itself presentable, so Windows decided to move everything to the laptop instead. Once I set it so that "Mirror These Displays/Extend These Displays" had 144hz as well as "Second Screen Only" (which is my preferred setup, I only open the laptop when gaming to dissipate some extra heat), it stopped 'flashing' and so it just didn't move the windows.

So, this isn't truly a troubleshooting thread: I've already figured it out. HOWEVER, I did not find a single thread anywhere on google that described the problem I was having accurately, so I figured I'd throw the information out there. The problem: Whenever I close and subsequently open my laptop lid, the secondary/external monitor would flash and all windows would move to the laptop monitor. The solution: My refresh rate on my secondary monitor was set differently for the "Extend these displays" mode and "Second screen only" (or "mirror these displays" would also apply here) mode. One was set at 120hz, and one was at 144hz, for some reason. Once I updated both to 144hz, I stopped getting the flash AND my windows stopped moving. The laptop screen would still turn on, which isn't ideal, but is a lot less disruptive to Win+P it away when necessary than to have to deal with windows being resized/moved.

Thanks so much!

This would primarily be used as a game drive. She's been complaining about games taking a very long time to load, some heavily compressed games take several hours to download compared to 20 minutes on my computer, etc. When you say free buffer - she isn't the best at managing her data, and only notices when something tells her she doesn't have room for an install. Should I just partition away 5-10% to help with this or leave it as is?

Hey guys, I remember reading/hearing a while back that SSDs shouldn't be filled to more than 50-60% of their maximum load if you care about speed and reliability. The logic behind this was something along the lines of: TLC will use some percentage of leftover space as DLC for writes, which allows it to perform much faster. If a drive is full or near full, it has a much smaller amount of cache to work with, so it can't perform as well. This also would have an effect on endurance because it would only have some small percentage available to write to, leading to multiple writes in the same spot. This seems like it would go double for QLC. So, my question is: Is this still true? And if so, will the drive use unpartitioned space to fulfill these needs? Can I buy a 2TB QLC drive and only partition 75% of it so that my fiancee can use the drive and I don't have to worry about her accidentally turning it into a brick? Thanks! Hyatice