fordy_rounds

If it's not throttling, I wouldn't worry about it. Repasting could actually make it hotter to the touch, as you get better thermal transfer to the heatsink (that is, if your CPU temps drop, that heat's going into the heatsink instead). But it probably wouldn't hurt anything either. If you need to be inside the guts for some other reason too, go ahead and do it. (For example, I just repasted a laptop because I had to take the heatsink off to upgrade RAM, so I figured while I was in there I'd do it. If I hadn't upgraded the RAM, though, I wouldn't have bothered.)

My MIL is a teacher at a small school without an IT department, so I help her out sometimes. She was recently given a donated laptop (Dell Inspiron 11 3185) to use. It's... well.... potato seems generous. It has a grand total of 32GB of (soldered-on eMMC) storage. With WIndows 10. When I opened it up, I found that while there's a big empty space for a 2.5" drive, they didn't add the SATA headers to the board (there's solder pads but no connectors). It also has only 4GB of RAM, though that's pretty easily upgradeable, as it's a single SO-DIMM. There's a microSD card slot for storage expansion, but it's capped at USB 2.0 speeds. Full specs: Processor: AMD A6-9220e with Radeon R4 graphics RAM: Samsung 4GB 2400MHz CL18 (currently running at 1866 CL 13, according to CPU-Z, which means I need to see what I can tweak in BIOS) Storage: 32GB eMMC (non-removable), plus a microSD slot (connected by USB 2.0) and 3 USB 2.0 ports, and NO SATA connectors Screen: 11" 1366x768 touch screen + HDMI port WiFi: M.2 A-key Qualcomm chip (I'll edit in the specific chip in a moment) Use case: Zoom meetings, playing videos on a projector, web access So the upgrades I'm thinking of giving her are a large microSD card (probably 128GB), since right now there's not even enough storage available to update WIndows; 8GB of RAM; and an upgrade to the WiFI card (it currently has an N150 module, I can upgrade it to support WiFi 5). I really wish I could just replace the thing for her, but I have only small money, not big money. My question is, do you think these upgrades are worth it?

This is going to come down to aesthetics as much as anything else. I've been pretty happy with my Silverstone PS15 (although I use the 3.5 bay as a cable management shroud rather than a drive bay).

It should, though it depends more on the GPU than the MB. I use an EVGA GTX 1650 Super with a Gigabyte B450M DS3H MB (a lower tier MB than yours) and I can adjust everything but core voltage with afterburner. But @minibois is definitely correct, it'd be better to adjust the fan curves (also doable with afterburner) than the thermal limits, though 85 should still be safe.

Using MSI Afterburner (or other OC software) you should be able to adjust thermal limits.

You'll need to get a fan splitter for the fan cables to plug into your single sys_fan header. (Watch the current draw; if the total of all the fans is over 1A, you'll want to get a powered splitter so you don't risk MB damage. E.g., if each fan is rated for .2A, you're fine; if they're each .4A, .4*3=1.2A, I'd get a powered splitter to be safe.) Examples: unpowered or powered. (examples only, I can't vouch for either one since I haven't used them.) As for the RGB, you'll need either a new MB or a USB RGB controller. The pictured cable is a standard 4-pin 12V RGB cable (4 pins are 12V, G, R, and B). Your MB doesn't have any RGB connectors. I'm not necessarily recommending this one specifically (since I've never used it) but this is an example of what to search for: https://www.newegg.com/cooler-master-mfy-rcsn-nnudk-r1-black/p/N82E16811999379?Description=rgb led controller&cm_re=rgb_led controller-_-11-999-379-_-Product&quicklink=true That's a lot cheaper than a MB upgrade.

There's no problem with having it on the floor, unless you have carpet and your PC has any bottom intake (including PSU). In that case, it doesn't take much; it's a little ghetto, but I just put some cardboard under mine for a few weeks until I could get something better. I ultimately got an end table from IKEA to put it on, though.

Well said. My grandmother was a breast cancer survivor, and as my own mother gets older, I just hope that she doesn't get it. I also had two grandfathers die from different cancers. I'm happy to raise my electric bill to help end it. Thanks for everyone's efforts!

In general, don't try to draw more than 1A through a single fan header. If you need more than that, you can get a powered splitter. They power via a connection (usually molex, but can also be sata) to the PSU, but connect to the MB for PWM and RPM control signals.

Motherboards that come with wifi usually have it installed via an A/E slot (including newer laptops; older laptops used mPCIe). So this is, I think, meant more as an upgrade than as a new component. You can get x1->A/E adapters, but they usually come as WiFi adapters (i.e., with the the WiFi card already slotted in), so again, this would be an upgrade. Honestly, it would probably be cheaper just to get an AX200 PCIe card than to get this + an adapter.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/512485/intel-core-i5-9600k-coffee-lake-37ghz-six-core-lga-1151-boxed-processor It's $170 for CPU only, then an additional $20 off w/motherboard.

If you live near a Micro Center, they have this CPU for $170 right now.

A solid portion of this is you, @Den-Fi. Nearly a billion points is a lot of progress toward killing Covid. Thanks!

Walang anuman. We all started somewhere. Good luck with your learning!

Yes, it is. It looks like most/all of these are equality of int or char types, so they would be better implemented as switch statements. (The inequalities (that's <, <=, >, or >= ) need to be if/else's still.) And a few other notes, OP: short variable names don't make your code more efficient. Help us, and yourself, with some real names (i.e. use employment_status or employmentStatus rather than es). I don't have any idea what gi, ba, ot, etc, mean, and if you set this down and come back to it in two weeks, you probably won't, either. Statements like if(es=='r||R') don't work the way you want it to; in fact, it won't even compile. Use if(toUpper(es)=='R') instead (though, as above, switch(toUpper(es)) is even better). Also, for user-friendliness, sentence-case your outputs so we don't feel like your program is screaming at us. That's about all the help I can give without more specific questions.

Even if it didn't come with a driver CD, check the manufacturer's website to see if they need to be downloaded.

Keep in mind that at some point you'll be limited by the microSD card's speeds rather than the USB speeds. Right now, as you say, you have a USB 3.0 reader and port; that limits you to (theoretically) 500MB/s (it's ~1/10, not 1/8, of the spec'd 5Gb/s, because there's overhead, parity bits, etc.) That's already faster than all but a UHS-III card (UHS-II caps out at 312 MB/s). If you have a UHS-III card, you could see a minor improvement if you upgrade to a 3.1 reader and port, which is 1.2GB/s, but not much, since UHS-III caps out at 624MB/s. Not sure that the speed increase is worth the cost, though. From 312 to 500, sure, but from 500 to 624, maybe not. Also keep in mind that you're transferring to an HDD. That's going to limit your speed more than anything else.... Most HDDs cap out at around 100MB/s, which is equivalent to a UHS-I SD card. When it comes to file transfer speeds, remember: the slowest speed is always your determining factor. If your microSD card can do 624MB/s, the reader can do 500, the port can do 500, the port/cable going to the HDD can do 500, and the HDD can do 100... you'll be doing 100MB/s at most.

Exactly. I looked up both the chipset and CPU, and both of them only support 2.0. Thus, OP, your card is showing up as PCIe 2.0 because it's connected via 2.0, even though the card itself is still 3.0-capable. Much like USB, or SATA, or other backwards-compatible standards, the lowest specification wins.

New update!!!! I've done some pretty good upgrades this month. First, I bought some of these fans. I installed them, and..... they didn't make much difference. Things were still running pretty hot. Nice white-framed case fans. Too bad they didn't affect the temperature much. The eagle-eyed among you may also notice that the WD SSD got swapped out for a PNY. I bought the PNY for a laptop upgrade, but ultimately decided I liked it better aesthetically in this case (aesthetics don't matter in the laptop), so I swapped them out, and the WD went into the laptop. I thought about it, and I realized that, after paying $40 for these fans and another $40 or more for a good air cooler, I'd be $80+ into cooling; additionally, my choices of air cooler were limited by the case's 154mm specification for max cooler height. Most of the really good tower coolers are taller than that. But hey, I realized, for $80+ I can get into a cheap-ish AIO. So I did. I returned the white fans and caught a good sale on Cooler Master's ML240L ($65, plus there's a rebate, so the eventual cost is only $55; less than I'd have paid for a good air cooler and fans). I also got a matching exhaust fan for the rear for $12. Thus: Sorry it's a little washed out—that RGB is super bright, and hard to properly photograph. (See note below.) It's sexier in person. Yes, I know, I know, I still need to double the RAM to get dual-channel. But I've gotten into Folding@Home, and just didn't have the thermal headroom to properly fold on the CPU. I was at 80+ folding on only 5 threads; now I fold on 10 (leaving a couple for GPU coordination and other things) and I've been pretty steady at 70C. I learned, with both sets of RGB, that my MB doesn't support dimming, apparently, each color is either on full blast or off. This limits me to only 8 colors (blue, red, green, purple, yellow, cyan, white, black). It also only supports static lighting, no automatic color-changing. I'm ok with this, though. I've set it to red in the BIOS and blue through Fusion, so it boots and red and turns blue when Windows loads Fusion, then I just leave it blue while running (although I typically turn the RGB off at night). And one last upgrade: I got tired of the finickiness of my USB Wi-Fi adapter, and added in a PCI-E Wi-Fi adapter. (I had an Amazon gift card, and my RAM is only available from Newegg, so I got Wi-Fi instead of RAM.) It's pretty snug there in between the GPU and PSU, but that's the only slot available. I now have no room for expansion. But that's ok, as I also have no plans for further expansions. What else do folks use PCI-E slots for, anyway? There's still room for improvement on cable management, but with Folding Month going on, I didn't want to leave it powered off for too long while I did the AIO and Wi-Fi upgrades. I'll improve it and add RAM after Folding Month.

So far, pretty well. I've got it on an R5 3600, where it's probably a little overkill. With the stock cooler (Wraith Prism), I could F@H with 5-6 threads and hover around 80C (and gradually higher than that). Now I do 10 (leaves a couple open for the OS and for GPU folding orchestration) and I've been steady at 70. (I've been running it for nearly 24 hours now; I installed the AIO last night). My GPU went from low 60s to about 70 as well (my case only has front mounts for a 240, so it gets the warmed air from the rad), but that's still in a comfortable range. I love it. And I grabbed an extra CM Sickle Flow 120 fan for my exhaust so it matches.

Also, if you can, run a stress test, then shut down as quickly as you can and de-mount it right away. In theory this helps warm up the TIM and keep it from sticking. I just upgraded to the very same AIO, and my old cooler (wraith stealth) came off easily—I'd been running F@H just prior.

Sounds like maybe it stripped. (This can sometimes happen if a crossthreaded (i.e. put in at the wrong angle) gets driven in, it just strips out the threads so then it'll keep turning because it's just a screw in a hole, not a screw in a threaded hole.) If the cooler feels secure and your temps are ok, it might be ok. Otherwise, I'd recommend replacing both the cooler and the backplate it screws into. (Wraith stealths are cheap online, because a lot of people replace them with after-market coolers; the backplate might be harder to find, though.)

210 today. Still moving up. Might go down a little today though, as I'm shutting down to do some minor hardware upgrades. I've got my old laptop folding now too, but it's only ~1000 PPD....

It looks like it's an Asus EN7300TC512 (which is a variant of an Nvidia GeForce 7300LE gpu). No idea when the Asus card was built, but the 7300LE is from 2006. Plug it in, it should work, but it won't game.

I hold no hope of ever being near the top with my humble 3600 and 1650S, but so far I keep moving up.