The PC thread

[Jester]

TBH, the number one reason I did it is for desktop work (just having a larger desktop without a bunch of monitors on the physical desk)

The 4k gaming will be interesting, but that was more of a bonus to me.  As far as video, the choices are pretty limited.  There is upscaling, but that's not the same as a pure 4K source.

When I first set up the monitor, I didn't have any 4K material, so I just went to YouTube and watched some 4k 2160p streams.  It is pretty amazing to watch.

You also have to make sure your video cable can handle the resolution and Hz rate.  Obviously, that applies to the GPU card as well, but I think there have been some people that haven't realized they need the newer version HDMI/DP cables and don't get the full effect.

[cramx3]

Yea, I was reading about 4k TVs today and what I found interesting was that the upscaling can actually make the quality worse.  You need HDR10 in the 4k TV to properly upscale (which is not in any of those cheap 4k TVs).   There's a lot of thought that goes into the purchase that I never thought about.  Also things liek g-sync support (for Nvidia GPUs) can make a difference for a 4k monitor. 

My problem, is I am going to be looking at that sick monitor my brother bought every day and think "man does my set up suck" sort of like how I think he looked at my GPU and new case and thought the same thing 

[Jester]

You must become one person so you can enjoy the great monitor with the great GPU.

This is kind of why I take the middle of the road approach.  I have a pretty decent 4k monitor with an incoming pretty decent GPU.  Stopped going for "the best" in my 20s.  Audio / Video / Computers (the stereotypical man cave stuff) just changes too rapidly.

[cramx3]

You must become one person so you can enjoy the great monitor with the great GPU.

This is kind of why I take the middle of the road approach.  I have a pretty decent 4k monitor with an incoming pretty decent GPU.  Stopped going for "the best" in my 20s.  Audio / Video / Computers (the stereotypical man cave stuff) just changes too rapidly.

Oh I didn't mean it as I am only getting the best (this is the first time having a top of the line GPU) but only meant it in making the best purchase.  My plan was to buy a new monitor next year anyway to pair with the GPU.  Dropping so much at once was more than I wanted to do so an increase in performance followed by an increase in pixels was my plan and I am still sticking with it, but just brought up a new light on 4k gaming.

[Jester]

You don't even want to know what I have for graphics until my new GPU arrives (and it still is no GTX1080).

Are you a big gamer or are you kind of getting back into it (hence the GTX1080 splurge)?  I haven't played a serious action graphics game on my PC in years.  What are you (and that means anybody) doing for controllers?

[cramx3]

Im a PC gamer.  I upgraded from a GTX 770.

For controlller I just use an xbox1 controller, but I only use it for certain games.  Otherwise I use my Razr Black Widow Chroma keyboard and Black Widow Death Addr mouse.

[Jester]

What are the main features you look for in a gaming keyboard?  The gaming mouse is somewhat obvious (precision).  What is the one or two features of your gaming keyboard that you think would drive you crazy if you lost those?

[cramx3]

What are the main features you look for in a gaming keyboard?  The gaming mouse is somewhat obvious (precision).  What is the one or two features of your gaming keyboard that you think would drive you crazy if you lost those?

Mechanical keyboard is the big one.  Feels so much better and has better response time.  My keyboard is customizable too.  I have 5 extra buttons to customize as I want or write a script for.  For example, one key types out my email address.  But I can customize all my keys if I wanted.  I'm not a huge customizer in that regards so some games make better use like MMO games, but I don't play those but I do play FPS games where response time is more important so thats why I went mechanical.  I also like the LED backlights on the keys, also customizable, but that's just for looks (which I really do like, but was hardly a reason to buy the keyboard, just added bonus really).

[Jester]

Although the lighted keys wouldn't be make or break, it might be cool for turning off the room lights but still being able to see the keys you don't push as often.

Now I'm remembering why I took a break from PC gaming.  The costs can add up quickly.

[jasc15]

Someone gave me a video card recently, and my motherboard doesn't recognize it.  When i first installed it and booted, the BIOS utility came up showing the new hardware.  It also showed up in the device manager under display adapters.  I then downloaded and installed the driver, and through device manager, clicked "Update Driver Software" just to be sure.  The computer froze, and since then I have not been able to install it.  The motherboard is an ASRock Z77 Extreme 4 and the video card is a Powercolor HD7750.  Also, I tried it in another PCI slot with no luck.

[Jester]

I'd hardly consider myself an expert, but do you have onboard graphics that need to be disabled in the BIOS first?

[MrBoom_shack-a-lack]

No expert at all but sometime old drivers can cause issues, so make sure you delete those before you install new drivers, atleast that's what i've heard you should do when you manually install new drivers.

[IDontNotDoThings]

I just realised that you can double-click the top-left-hand corner of a window & that closes the window. How did I never notice this before? 

[jasc15]

I had a scare last night.  I store all my files in a second internal HDD, with an SSD for boot and software install only.  I tried to open a folder in my storage HDD, and it froze.  The computer then wouldn't reboot, nor would it boot after a hard shut down.  It would only boot with the HDD disconnected.  I tried booting a few more times with it connected with no luck.  Finally I booted with the HDD powered, but without the SATA plug in.  I then connected the SATA "hot", refreshed the device manager, and all the files were visible.  I immediately backed up to another external HDD (I do this periodically, but it had been a few months) and today finally started an online cloud backup service.

I've been putting this off for a long time, and last night was enough to make me pull the trigger.  I went with CrashPlan after a bit of reading, and started an estimated 5 days for the initial backup.  I've been hesitant because I didn't like the idea of ALL my sensitive information in the cloud, but the risk of losing it all was especially real after last night's scare.

[Zydar]

I've had problems with my PC at home for quite a while now. Sometimes when I start it up it sends no video signal to my monitor. So I had to turn it off, wait a while, and then boot it up again - repeat the process until it works. Last night it just wouldn't get the monitor to work at all, so I decided to troubleshoot it (plus googling about it). I tried another graphics card (my old one), but it didn't help. I took out the RAM modules and placed them back in. No dice. Then I removed the soundcard - that seemed to do the trick. Works fine now. So I ordered a new soundcard right away, a Creative Soundblaster Z this time. I'll be using the onboard soundcard until the new one arrives.

[ReaperKK]

Interesting that it was the sound card.

Also it's been forever since I've used something other than onboard sound.

[BlobVanDam]

Onboard sound has been plenty sufficient for the majority of people for a long time. Unless you do audio work or need a high end setup, there's not much need for a dedicated sound card these days. I've never had a sound card cause issues like that, so that's strange.

[Podaar]

I used to be a big proponent of sound boards, but the last two computers I've had I don't even use on-board sound. My sound system and headphones are both USB and they are completely trouble free.

[cramx3]

Yea, built in sound on mobos has gone a long way.   Mine can support 7 channels for example.  The quality can always be better, but for someone like myself who's ears are not the best, it's not worth the cost for small boosts of sound quality that I may not be able to appreciate. 

Speaking of PC sound, I do need some new gaming headphones soon.  My logitech G930s are falling apart.

[Podaar]

I've had my G930's for four or five years and they are still pristine. My 21 year old son has gone through 3 sets in the same time and in every case it was the micro USB connection that failed. I finally figured out that he was primarily using them while plugged in (rather than wireless) and he'd forget, stand up, and yank the plug out.

[cramx3]

This is my second pair of them, the first my x broke by throwing them against the wall  but she at least bought me these because she knew she was a dick.  Anyway, my mic had broken off so it's held together by tape.  It works, but looks and feels terrible now.  Plus the ear cups have mostly faded.  The guts still work well, but I am starting to have connections issues that drop the wireless for a second every like hour or so of use which gets annoying.  It appears logitech has some newer headphones that I may buy at some point.  However, upgrading my mobo/cpu is higher on my list for PC upgrades.

[faizoff]

Anyone update their PC to Windows 10 Creators Update? I updated mine yesterday. They have a ton of features added, too many to list. I tried 3D Paint and it's really fun. Win 10 always has some issue with my wifi adapter so I had to assign a static IP address and also decided to try out using google's DNS servers. So far it's been pretty good. Don't have the constant drop and connect issue like I had before.

[cramx3]

My PC is fried.

Well not really.  So yesterday was a very frustrating day for me and my PC.  I noticed that my sound in my headphones somehow got lower.  Like at max settings for one game I play a lot, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, just got very low audio.  And I know Logitech has protections so you can't raise the volume to ear damaging levels, but I did some research and found that you can install an older driver that would probably allow you to game at higher levels.  I wanted to test this.  I uninstalled my sound driver and that's where my hell began.  Whole computer crashed and my OS became unstable.  I could not repair it, I could not load a restore point, and I could not reinstall windows 10 even (wtf?) .  Safe mode would boot, but would give me an audio error (and not work, but in safe mode it at least didn't crash the PC) and installing the driver through safe mode would fail. 

I decided if I need to completely wipe my OS drive and restart that I would just do a new build.  I literally told myself this week I wanted to start researching for the new build since it had been on my mind for awhile.  Well, now I have my reason to do it.  I had all day yesterday so figured let's go get some parts and do a new build.  There's a micro center in NJ that my brother used for building his PC.  So the two of us went there (about a 45 minute drive one way) and I got myself some cool goodies:

Intel Core I7-7700k
Asus Z250-AR Motherboard
Crucial 16GB DD4 RAM
Samsung 250GB NVMe SSD
New blu-ray drive (my old one broke many years ago, but figured let me finally replace it)

So I get home and put it all together.... and nothing.  Won't POST.  Tried reseating the DIMMs, moving them to different slots, using only one.... double checking all my power connections, making sure I got the connectors correct for the case buttons... my brother helped me... we could not figure it out.  One thing I noticed, my motherboard was already opened and it was actually the second one the guy at the store gave me because the first box he grabbed was deformed.  I am thinking my motherboard is bad.

I was very frustrated, I ended up popping in my old mobo back in and rebuilt windows 7 onto my wiped SSD.  That worked but now it turns out my 5TB hard drive is giving me errors and looks like some of the data may have become corrupt (this was never an OS drive, just my storage drive which sucks because if this is crapping out I may have lost pictures from this year).  Anyway, looks like my PC problems will remain for the week.  Since I got a somewhat stable build atm, I think I won't get around to trying to fix things until the weekend besides doing some data back up tonight in case that 5TB drive fails.

[ReaperKK]

That sucks to hear and it does seem like a motherboard issue. I was wondering if you were having issues because we're steam friends and I saw you kept logging into battlegrounds.

[PowerSlave]

Anyone update their PC to Windows 10 Creators Update? I updated mine yesterday. They have a ton of features added, too many to list. I tried 3D Paint and it's really fun. Win 10 always has some issue with my wifi adapter so I had to assign a static IP address and also decided to try out using google's DNS servers. So far it's been pretty good. Don't have the constant drop and connect issue like I had before.

I've been experiencing some odd behaviour from my pc since that update. My wifi signal instantly took a shit after the update. And I've had to reinstall my game controller a few times. I have a steelseries stratus xl controller and it uses bluetooth. The controller is already a bit frustrating because they have intermittent issues with the L2/R2 triggers, and since the update it will occasionally not connect to my pc at all unless I (at the minimum) remove it from the discoverable list and then sync them up again. I'm not sure if I've done something silly on my end, but nothing comes to mind.

[cramx3]

That sucks to hear and it does seem like a motherboard issue. I was wondering if you were having issues because we're steam friends and I saw you kept logging into battlegrounds.

Yea, once I finally got things to run, I ended up having to test things and mess with my settings to get them to what I use which meant starting and restarting the game to test.

Funny enough, on my new/old build the volume is back to what it should be and the game runs much better.   

[faizoff]

Anyone update their PC to Windows 10 Creators Update? I updated mine yesterday. They have a ton of features added, too many to list. I tried 3D Paint and it's really fun. Win 10 always has some issue with my wifi adapter so I had to assign a static IP address and also decided to try out using google's DNS servers. So far it's been pretty good. Don't have the constant drop and connect issue like I had before.

I've been experiencing some odd behaviour from my pc since that update. My wifi signal instantly took a shit after the update. And I've had to reinstall my game controller a few times. I have a steelseries stratus xl controller and it uses bluetooth. The controller is already a bit frustrating because they have intermittent issues with the L2/R2 triggers, and since the update it will occasionally not connect to my pc at all unless I (at the minimum) remove it from the discoverable list and then sync them up again. I'm not sure if I've done something silly on my end, but nothing comes to mind.

From what I read the update does a clean slate of the driver installation and this was my problem too with the wifi adapter. However I think it's a combination of things that were an issue. I plugged that wifi adapter into another computer using windows server 2016 and had zero issues with it. I think the problem was stemming from the fact that I assigned static ip address on my regular desktop that had win 10 pro. Ever since I removed the static addresses and just used the option to automatically assign I've had zero issues either with my wifi or LAN connectivity between two computers. Only slight deviation was that I have to now use hostname to connect to another computer rather than an ip address since pinging the computer's ip address doesn't work.

But I'll worry about that later, for now everything works great.

[faizoff]

@cramx I've had a 5TB drive fail as well, I read something about the packing density of the hard drive plates make the 3 or 4 GB the best option and less likely to fail. I think the 4GB are the sweet spots for now.

[cramx3]

@cramx I've had a 5TB drive fail as well, I read something about the packing density of the hard drive plates make the 3 or 4 GB the best option and less likely to fail. I think the 4GB are the sweet spots for now.

Thanks for the advice because I may be buying a new drive, was thinking of getting a couple drive to RAID after this failure.  I used to have that set up on 2TB drives but I outgrew that and hence my single 5TB drive.  I *should* still have my data from the 2TB set up, but I may have given those hard drives away (I had about 5 of these drives total and used some to build a PC for my friend). 

Has anyone ever tried a data recovery company for a failed hard drive?  A quick google search came up with some results but wondering if anyone has any experience (seems like they are likely able to do it).  If I don't have my info on one of my 2TB drives, I will be considering this option because I would be really bummed if I lost all my data, otherwise I would have just lost data from the last 6 months which sucks, but I can live with it.

Looking to return my DOA motherboard tomorrow and spend the evening doing a rebuild and hopefully have a nice new PC and no more headaches.

[faizoff]

I haven't used one myself but from what I've been told by people who've used it is that it's, to be expected, expensive.

I have a RAID setup as well on my other computer where I used 4 x 3GB drives in a RAID 5 setup

[cramx3]

Nice and yea, the starting price wasnt cheap for the one site I checked out.  Hence why I'm OK losing my last 6 months of data for that price, but if I lost all of it, those memories are kind of hard to find a $ value on so it may be worth it. 

[cramx3]

So last weekend I finally got myself set up again, but there was definitely some headaches.

First, my second motherboard I got was also bad.  Well I'm pretty sure of it too.  I tested it out with my brother's components and we got it down to the only thing consistent with both failures was the motherboard.  It was the same model from the same store.  I kind of felt defeated after spending so much time with this.  I had rebuilt the OS on my old motherboard/CPU and got that stable, was upset I lost my 5TB hard drive and data.  I just told myself, fuck it, I'll upgrade at a later date because I'm extremely frustrated and I just want to get on with my life and not spend hours troubleshooting the $500 of garbage I was buying.  So the one thing I wanted to keep was my new heatsink and decided to put it on my old motherboard since I had heating issues with that CPU, apparently my old heatsink fan was not performing well.  Well after doing this, my CPU completely failed.  I think my old heatsink was just right for keeping it working and removing it exposed something. I don't know, I know there was like no thermal paste on it when I took off the heatsink and what was left was a white coat of goo along the edges which I think was actually doing just enough to keep it from failing.  I don't know, just a guess.  But I could not get that CPU to power on again.  It would heat up insanely hot the moment I put power to it.  I was defeated again.

I went back to the store to return everything.  I don't think all was bad, just the motherboard, but I wanted none of it.  I then purchased a completely different product.  The last gen cpu, Core I7-6700k, a previous gen motherboard (but a much better one) Asus Maximus Hero 8, and then some ram (EVGA was the ones on sale, 16GB at I forget the speed, but overclocked speed) and a Samsung M.2 250GB SSD.

This worked.  Well mostly.  But the motherboard worked.  I am back in business.  I do have one issue, Windows is unable to detect my M.2 SSD.  So I wasn't able to install Windows 7 on it.  I looked into it briefly and some say Windows 7 has issues with them.  I need to look further into it, because I want to be able to use it, but I might have to upgrade to Windows 10.  Either way, I am back to gaming and should be making videos soon again.  Also, I brought back to life my old 2TB hard drive which has all my backed up info from 2016 and before, so at this point I've only lost my data from this year.  That sucks, but not as bad as losing it all.  I am going to be looking into getting 2x 3TB and creating a raid1 array for my data on that.  Put this 2TB back into storage, and maybe find another hard drive for my "active data" I guess you can call it (aka video files for editting).  My raid0 array of 2x 400GB SSDs isn't big enough for my games plus my active data and I'd rather not have that data run on my slow storage drives.

[Skeever]

Is this a decent deal?

https://www.bestbuy.com/site/dell-inspiron-2-in-1-13-3-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i5-8gb-memory-256gb-solid-state-drive-gray/5606400.p?skuId=5606400&extStoreId=&ref=212&loc=1&ksid=52d06b0c-4c9f-445e-aa31-b99d08237852&ksprof_id=8&ksaffcode=pg200288&ksdevice=c&lsft=ref:212,loc:2

Been wanting to jump on a laptop for some light MS Office / programming / design / maybe some very light gaming.

This is also enticing due to the fact that it's lighter and seems to have slightly better specs, but I've always had issues with Lenovo, whereas Dells have always last years for me: https://www.bestbuy.com/site/lenovo-yoga-720-2-in-1-13-3-touch-screen-laptop-intel-core-i5-8gb-memory-256gb-solid-state-drive-platinum-silver/5722715.p?skuId=5722715

[cramx3]

Can't vouch for it being a good deal or not since I don't know laptop prices these days, but it looks like solid specs (both).  One thing I noticed is the Lenovo says "PCIe SSD" and the Dell only says "SSD".  There's a difference in that the PCIe SSD is faster. 

Personally, I hate dell.  I replace Dell server hardware all day and their support sucks.  Granted, thats not consumer based products, but I would never recommend Dell to anyone, that's just me.  If you had good experiences, don't let my opinion stop you from continuing.

[Orbert]

HELP!

Old PC finally died.  2007 WinXP 32-bit system.  Pretty good for its time, but that time has gone.  That's okay, we have a backup drive thing that runs every week, and does a full system backup every month.

New PC is Windows 10 64-bit.  Way cool.  I hook up the backup thing to it, and it restores a "bunch" of files, then freezes when it goes to grab the next batch.  Never moves.  Some Google searching reveals that this is a known issue with no known solution.  The software on the backup drive thing self-installs on the new PC, should be automatic and painless, but it won't run right on a 64-bit system.  SOL, buddy.  Toshiba Convo, if it matters.

So I get one of those external docks that you plug into a USB port and can mount up to two hard drives.  I pull the drives out of the old PC and stick them in.  Fire up the docking station, the system is supposed to recognize it and install everything automatically.  Should be painless, but it won't run under Windows 10.  Go to the manufacturers website, no Win10 driver.  Some Google searching reveals that this is a known issue with no known solution.  Thermaltake BlacX Duet, if it matters.

Fuck my life.  All my mp3s, pictures, documents, and of course pron, sitting there on drives and backed up externally, and I can't get to any of it.


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