The PC thread

[Progmetty]

Hey fellas! The misses birthday's coming up and I'm looking to get her a new laptop 
I was looking at this one and noticed it said "128GB PCIe NVMe SSD + 1TB HDD" in the description, which I haven't seen before. Does that mean what it sounds like? There are two different type hard drives inside?
Also any feedback or recommendations are appreciated. All she does is type articles, papers and constantly leave 7,300 tabs browser tabs open. So light stuff.

[ReaperKK]

Yup you read that right. The OS will be installed on the SSD so navigating through Windows will be quick and then you have the HDD for additional storage. This is most likely due to the manufacturer trying to hit a certain price point with the laptop. 1TB NCMe SSD's can still be a bit pricy.

Honestly from the use case I would say that's fine. She'll probably have something like 90gb's left on that SSD which if you're not gaming or downloading a ton of media it'll be more than fine.

[MrBoom_shack-a-lack]

I just realised that my i7 cpu that I bought in 2013 is almost 10 years old. Kinda proud that it's still running fairly smooth despite all the heavy games I run. I really don't want my PC to explode in this trying times though. 

[faizoff]

I think around that year esp with the release of Sandy Bridge CPUs in 2011 is when they all became these tanks that you could abuse for years on end. Even though I upgraded my system after (ab)using it for a decade I handed my i5 2500k to my daughter and it runs perfectly fine.

[cramx3]

Yeah, my old I7 is in my spare PC of my old parts.  Still works well.

[MrBoom_shack-a-lack]

Interesting, yea I remember a time where I changed components fairly often. Basically the only thing I upgraded since 2013 is my GPU, display and added some SSDs.

Although I guess nowdays changing a gpu is about 60% of the cost of a new PC or something.

[El Barto]

Interesting, yea I remember a time where I changed components fairly often. Basically the only thing I upgraded since 2013 is my GPU, display and added some SSDs.

Although I guess nowdays changing a gpu is about 60% of the cost of a new PC or something.

You'd think that, but not really. I was kind of unprepared for just how many other things I'd need to replace when I did mine. While my GPU was the most expensive component by far, the cost of buying everything new again adds up quickly. Things like aftermarket coolers, which are necessary now. I went from (I think) DDR2 to DDR 4, and DDR5 is a thing now, so there's another $80. I had a very good quality PSU, but it damn sure wasn't made for modern CPU/GPU. In the end it was probably more like 40/60 the other way, and I spent big money on the GPU. 

And along that PSU line, mine is the computer that keeps on costing. My UPS has been squawking at me of late. Now I'm gonna have to drop another bill on that. it never ends. 

Interestingly, I plugged it into my Kill-a-watt for curiosity's sake, and doing absolutely nothing but showing the desktop the thing idles at ~95w. I was kind of surprised by that. Looks like I'm going to have to embrace some kind of sleep mode going forward, which I've always resisted.  Just to experiment I ran Cinebench and Heaven alongside one another and cracked >600W almost immediately, causing the UPS to cut off instantly. That's not a realistic load, by any means, but it's certainly evidence of what it's capable of.

[El Barto]

And now for something completely different. Does anybody here use a HTPC? Or perhaps use a computer to stream music through a nice stereo? Part of me wants to repurpose my old computer, which is almost entirely intact, as an HTPC. At the same time I was never happy trying to get high quality audio out of it. Simply too many things wanting to get involved in the signal path. VLC or Winamp both process your audio file. Windows processes that, and then passes it off to the sound card (or in most cases now the video card's HDMI out) to move it along to the pre-amp. I'm curious what other people with an ear towards sound quality are doing to get good tunes out of their PC.

[faizoff]

And now for something completely different. Does anybody here use a HTPC? Or perhaps use a computer to stream music through a nice stereo? Part of me wants to repurpose my old computer, which is almost entirely intact, as an HTPC. At the same time I was never happy trying to get high quality audio out of it. Simply too many things wanting to get involved in the signal path. VLC or Winamp both process your audio file. Windows processes that, and then passes it off to the sound card (or in most cases now the video card's HDMI out) to move it along to the pre-amp. I'm curious what other people with an ear towards sound quality are doing to get good tunes out of their PC.

Even though I don't use it that often, I have setup Plex with some of my music on FLAC. It sounded pretty good to me. I didn't need to do anything to the files, just rip them from the CD, point Plex server that music exists here and then whatever device I use (phone, TV, Tablet, etc..) they all sounded pretty good. I think the Plex server audio setup is quite good, though I haven't messed with it in great detail.

[Podaar]

I just have all my music ripped to a 6T NAS on my home network. I've stored it at the resolution that sounds good to me (320 kbps at 16 bit), but I certainly could have ripped it all in FLAC if I wanted to. Then, whatever device (primarily the Denon in our HT, and the Yamaha whole home stereo) is attached to the network can access the NAS for music playback. It's worked out well and sounds great.

[El Barto]

I just have all my music ripped to a 6T NAS on my home network. I've stored it at the resolution that sounds good to me (320 kbps at 16 bit), but I certainly could have ripped it all in FLAC if I wanted to. Then, whatever device (primarily the Denon in our HT, and the Yamaha whole home stereo) is attached to the network can access the NAS for music playback. It's worked out well and sounds great.

That's actually how I'm considering doing it. My pre-amp is a little old, so it's kind of limited in that regard, though. No WiFi and limited OSD. But it has the main advantage of being as direct a line as I can get between the file and the speakers, with only the receiver's DAC monkeying with the 0s and 1s, which is really what I'm after.

I've been using an Android STB, and it actually works alright. It's just wonky trying to access TBs of media. It has the advantage of consolidating audio and video, though, which is something else I'd like--hence the HTPC.

[Stadler]

I'm going to be doing something similar to Faizoff. I'm already up to "W" in my rip effort (next up, The Who!).

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

And now for something completely different. Does anybody here use a HTPC? Or perhaps use a computer to stream music through a nice stereo? Part of me wants to repurpose my old computer, which is almost entirely intact, as an HTPC. At the same time I was never happy trying to get high quality audio out of it. Simply too many things wanting to get involved in the signal path. VLC or Winamp both process your audio file. Windows processes that, and then passes it off to the sound card (or in most cases now the video card's HDMI out) to move it along to the pre-amp. I'm curious what other people with an ear towards sound quality are doing to get good tunes out of their PC.

Even though I don't use it that often, I have setup Plex with some of my music on FLAC. It sounded pretty good to me. I didn't need to do anything to the files, just rip them from the CD, point Plex server that music exists here and then whatever device I use (phone, TV, Tablet, etc..) they all sounded pretty good. I think the Plex server audio setup is quite good, though I haven't messed with it in great detail.

This is the way to go. Plex is great for playing music, both locally and remotely. I built a server PC specifically for Plex with 8tb of storage space to host all my music. The majority of my music (from CDs) is in lossless 44/16-bit FLAC format. My vinyl that I ripped is in 192/24-bit FLAC. It all sounds great, whether through my Denon amp on my home system, or through my headphone amp and Denon headphones, or even streaming through my Android phone in my car. As long as you have the internet speed to remotely stream the FLAC files. Or you can always have your Plex server transcode it to something smaller for remote streaming, like OPUS 256k.

 If all you are doing is streaming music from it a CPU with at least 4 threads is all you need and at least 16 gigs of ram. If you want to stream movies and tv shows with Plex, I recommend throwing in a mid to lower end Nvidia GPU so it can take advantage of NVENC encoder.

[faizoff]

And along that PSU line, mine is the computer that keeps on costing. My UPS has been squawking at me of late. Now I'm gonna have to drop another bill on that. it never ends. 

Interestingly, I plugged it into my Kill-a-watt for curiosity's sake, and doing absolutely nothing but showing the desktop the thing idles at ~95w. I was kind of surprised by that. Looks like I'm going to have to embrace some kind of sleep mode going forward, which I've always resisted.  Just to experiment I ran Cinebench and Heaven alongside one another and cracked >600W almost immediately, causing the UPS to cut off instantly. That's not a realistic load, by any means, but it's certainly evidence of what it's capable of.

That is similar to what happened with me, my UPS wasn't able to take the full load on my new system and I had to upgrade. If I remember, the old UPS had a total capacity of just 450W and I had plugged my monitors too. It could support the system on idle but when I played games or did anything CPU intensive the UPS would scream. I then bought a CyberPower 1500VA Sine Wave UPS that supports up to 900W and now everything is just grand. I had bought mine for $150 and now it looks like even that they've hiked the price to oblivion.


This UPS has a display and you can check the wattage being drawn, I don't think I've ever seen it go over 550W with everything plugged in. I should run Cinebench and Heaven like you and see what the max draw is. Then again your CPU probably has a much higher draw and that by itself will skew the numbers higher.

Interesting, yea I remember a time where I changed components fairly often. Basically the only thing I upgraded since 2013 is my GPU, display and added some SSDs.

Same for me, SSDs and HDDs were the only things I was adding or replacing. Everything else that was purchased in 2011 (CPU, GPU, RAM, Mobo, etc..) remained the same

[El Barto]

And along that PSU line, mine is the computer that keeps on costing. My UPS has been squawking at me of late. Now I'm gonna have to drop another bill on that. it never ends. 

Interestingly, I plugged it into my Kill-a-watt for curiosity's sake, and doing absolutely nothing but showing the desktop the thing idles at ~95w. I was kind of surprised by that. Looks like I'm going to have to embrace some kind of sleep mode going forward, which I've always resisted.  Just to experiment I ran Cinebench and Heaven alongside one another and cracked >600W almost immediately, causing the UPS to cut off instantly. That's not a realistic load, by any means, but it's certainly evidence of what it's capable of.

That is similar to what happened with me, my UPS wasn't able to take the full load on my new system and I had to upgrade. If I remember, the old UPS had a total capacity of just 450W and I had plugged my monitors too. It could support the system on idle but when I played games or did anything CPU intensive the UPS would scream. I then bought a CyberPower 1500VA Sine Wave UPS that supports up to 900W and now everything is just grand. I had bought mine for $150 and now it looks like even that they've hiked the price to oblivion.


This UPS has a display and you can check the wattage being drawn, I don't think I've ever seen it go over 550W with everything plugged in. I should run Cinebench and Heaven like you and see what the max draw is. Then again your CPU probably has a much higher draw and that by itself will skew the numbers higher.

As I recall you've got a pretty high end Ryzen. From what I gathered the actual power draw isn't terribly dissimilar. Intel's 11th gen was notorious for being an energy hog, but of course all things are relative.

I did a bit more testing last night, and what I found is that the CPU pulls about 220 and the GPU 250 under load, and there's another 80 in overhead idling (two water pumps, 5 fans, 5 drives, one monitor, system). Six hundred's what it can top out at, and that's under circumstances that should never really happen IRL. Games tend to rely heavily on one or the other, so while they'll both be active neither of them should be maxed out. And even then, maxed out in real life applications is very different than maxed out using synthetic benchmarks.  My numbers jibed with online PSU calculators that suggest 520 watts to be about right.

My old UPS is only 350, which was fine with that Sandy Lake. 

The thing that's always pissed me off is that UPSs seem to be design limited. APC is particularly bad about designed failure. I'm not an engineer, but it sure seems that the total capacity of the battery shouldn't matter when it's getting line power. A beep to let me know that it can't support the system in its current state would be sufficient. Moreover, if a battery fails you should still be able to use them as surge protectors, and often times the whole unit will brick itself once the battery is toast. I've always found them to be exemplary of the shittier aspects of capitalism.

[faizoff]

I just checked and my old UPS was just 360 W so yeah it's going to fail miserably under high loads. I just ran a few quick tests on Cinebench R23 multi core and the CPU-Z bench stress test along with Heaven and it looks like the UPS shows a draw of ~625W.

Using HWiNFO64 my CPU max draw shows 128W while the GPU tops out at a crazy 370W, I'm assuming the rest of the several USB devices and dual monitors are pulling in the rest. Though idle load is mostly around ~200W.

You are right about the actual power draw being a wash really, at least for the system I configured. So my Ryzen 9 5950x plus RTX 3080 ends up pulling the same as yours with the i7 11700K and RTX 2080 super give or take with the rest.

[El Barto]

I just checked and my old UPS was just 360 W so yeah it's going to fail miserably under high loads. I just ran a few quick tests on Cinebench R23 multi core and the CPU-Z bench stress test along with Heaven and it looks like the UPS shows a draw of ~625W.

Using HWiNFO64 my CPU max draw shows 128W while the GPU tops out at a crazy 370W, I'm assuming the rest of the several USB devices and dual monitors are pulling in the rest. Though idle load is mostly around ~200W.

You are right about the actual power draw being a wash really, at least for the system I configured. So my Ryzen 9 5950x plus RTX 3080 ends up pulling the same as yours with the i7 11700K and RTX 2080 super give or take with the rest.

That's quite interesting. The power draws are coming from different places, but even out. Your CPU is pulling 100w less (which surprises me, because the TDW is nearly the same), and your GPU pulls 100w more (which also surprises me). What I'd be curious to learn is what your real world consumption is. What gaming or application work hits it the hardest, and how hard is that? As we know, it's rare for something to really hammer both processors, and synthetic benchmarks are worst case scenarios. I was going to download MS-FS2020 last night, as that's a pretty balanced CPU/GPU load, from what I gather, but it won't run without being connected to Redmond, and I'm not interested enough to fork over $60.

Also, your 200w idle is insane. That leads me to believe that it's all from showing the desktop since it's about 100w different from mine. I hate sleep mode in almost all of its forms, but it sounds like shutting the monitors down might cut that idle consumption dramatically. I'll be checking into that this evening.

[Phoenix87x]

So I just got a new laptop and it had me thinking about how to cycle the battery in the most efficient way.

Anybody know how low the battery percent should be before recharging? I've been just waiting for it to say battery low, but I read stuff like this:

https://dillonstechguide.com/at-what-percentage-should-i-charge-my-macbook-pro-the-facts/

where they recommend to charge it at 25% and unplug it at 85% 

Anybody know what the deal is?

[ReaperKK]

Correct me if I'm wrong but I didn't think full power cycles are necessary with new batteries anymore. On my laptop I have a setting that will only allow the laptop to charge to 85% to conserve its life longer.

[Phoenix87x]

That's interesting. I'm gonna have to check that out.

[faizoff]

So I just got a new laptop and it had me thinking about how to cycle the battery in the most efficient way.

Anybody know how low the battery percent should be before recharging? I've been just waiting for it to say battery low, but I read stuff like this:

https://dillonstechguide.com/at-what-percentage-should-i-charge-my-macbook-pro-the-facts/

where they recommend to charge it at 25% and unplug it at 85% 

Anybody know what the deal is?

I think I had read this strategy around 2017-2018 and those batteries showed the best results with those guidelines. LIke Reaper said I don't know if it's true for new batteries anymore. I gave up doing that after not seeing any meaningful results. I don't think it hurts to try.

[cramx3]

Welp, my C drive is completely full somehow and totally making windows broken and there's apparently no files for me to delete?  I don't even install anything on my C drive.  Oh well.  Time for a complete windows re-install.  My audio got corrupted on Windows as well (this happened once before).  Going to be a long day of rebuilding the OS and re-installing/personalizing the computer all day.  I guess no better day than a day working from home to do it. I just get a bit on the edge of my seat doing this because I have so much data and I don't want to get myself locked out of gaming on a friday night.

[El Barto]

Welp, my C drive is completely full somehow and totally making windows broken and there's apparently no files for me to delete?  I don't even install anything on my C drive.  Oh well.  Time for a complete windows re-install.  My audio got corrupted on Windows as well (this happened once before).  Going to be a long day of rebuilding the OS and re-installing/personalizing the computer all day.  I guess no better day than a day working from home to do it. I just get a bit on the edge of my seat doing this because I have so much data and I don't want to get myself locked out of gaming on a friday night.

Why not just spend $50 on an external drive and move a bunch of stuff off of it? If nothing else that'll give you breathing room to install a second drive without having to reinstall Windows.

edit: Oh, and check to see if you don't have 800gb of game saves in your documents folder.   

[cramx3]

Welp, my C drive is completely full somehow and totally making windows broken and there's apparently no files for me to delete?  I don't even install anything on my C drive.  Oh well.  Time for a complete windows re-install.  My audio got corrupted on Windows as well (this happened once before).  Going to be a long day of rebuilding the OS and re-installing/personalizing the computer all day.  I guess no better day than a day working from home to do it. I just get a bit on the edge of my seat doing this because I have so much data and I don't want to get myself locked out of gaming on a friday night.

Why not just spend $50 on an external drive and move a bunch of stuff off of it? If nothing else that'll give you breathing room to install a second drive without having to reinstall Windows.

edit: Oh, and check to see if you don't have 800gb of game saves in your documents folder.   

Oh I have 2x 4TB drives almost completely full of data (not porn! but all my concert video files take up a lot of space) so the external drive is an expensive option.  I will eventually need a NAS set up for all this data, but that's not today's problem.  I just disconnected all the drives from my motherboard to avoid the installation somehow messing with them (it shouldn't, but a precaution).

As for the games, they were all installed on a seperate NVME drive so they weren't the cause.  I'm pretty sure it was Adobe Photoshop using my C drive as scrap space for projects and I was not sure how to find/delete those files. (I changed the scrap space folder to the NVMe after noticing this)  It wouldn't fix my audio issue though so it was a double problem for me. 

Windows is already re-installed now and the audio issue is now fixed it seems (I can use my headphones again AND switch to my speakers).  Somehow when I connected my new speakers to my PC, it corrupted my windows audio settings making my Razer headphones not work as well as playing MP3 files.  Yet youtube or gaming audio worked.  Whatever, stupid windows!

[faizoff]

I use a program called WizTree to see where all my big files are on the drive. It's how I saw that I have 500 GB of games installed that I  haven't played. 

[El Barto]

For me it's never the games, but the saves (stored on the C drive). Depending on the game, saves can bloat up to decent sized files, and it's easy to rack up 500 of them for a game you stopped playing ages ago.

Oh I have 2x 4TB drives almost completely full of data (not porn! but all my concert video files take up a lot of space) so the external drive is an expensive option.  I will eventually need a NAS set up for all this data, but that's not today's problem.  I just disconnected all the drives from my motherboard to avoid the installation somehow messing with them (it shouldn't, but a precaution).

When you upgrade your storage be sure and look for CMR drives, rather than the ubiquitous SMRs. I don't care what WD says, SMR sucks ass. It's worth the extra 20 or 30 bucks to go old school. WD Red Pro is about the only way to go now, and I think I paid $120 for a 6TB drive last time around.

[cramx3]

Cool, I'll have to remember. I don't plan on going NAS anytime soon. I have let's say "options" from things that can go missing from work. But I have some 2TB SSDs I'm using now.

In any news. Windows has reinstalled and I added back all my drives without data loss or issues. And my audio issue is now fixed.

A much needed refresh but I get so anxious doing complete reinstalls. So weird though how my audio got screwed like that

[XJDenton]

For me it's never the games, but the saves (stored on the C drive). Depending on the game, saves can bloat up to decent sized files, and it's easy to rack up 500 of them for a game you stopped playing ages ago.

Oh I have 2x 4TB drives almost completely full of data (not porn! but all my concert video files take up a lot of space) so the external drive is an expensive option.  I will eventually need a NAS set up for all this data, but that's not today's problem.  I just disconnected all the drives from my motherboard to avoid the installation somehow messing with them (it shouldn't, but a precaution).

When you upgrade your storage be sure and look for CMR drives, rather than the ubiquitous SMRs. I don't care what WD says, SMR sucks ass. It's worth the extra 20 or 30 bucks to go old school. WD Red Pro is about the only way to go now, and I think I paid $120 for a 6TB drive last time around.

SMR is fine in some circumstances, so long as the system knows its an SMR drive. I've been using Seagate barracuda NAS drives in the small servers I admin for work and they have performed pretty admirally.

[El Barto]

For me it's never the games, but the saves (stored on the C drive). Depending on the game, saves can bloat up to decent sized files, and it's easy to rack up 500 of them for a game you stopped playing ages ago.

Oh I have 2x 4TB drives almost completely full of data (not porn! but all my concert video files take up a lot of space) so the external drive is an expensive option.  I will eventually need a NAS set up for all this data, but that's not today's problem.  I just disconnected all the drives from my motherboard to avoid the installation somehow messing with them (it shouldn't, but a precaution).

When you upgrade your storage be sure and look for CMR drives, rather than the ubiquitous SMRs. I don't care what WD says, SMR sucks ass. It's worth the extra 20 or 30 bucks to go old school. WD Red Pro is about the only way to go now, and I think I paid $120 for a 6TB drive last time around.

SMR is fine in some circumstances, so long as the system knows its an SMR drive. I've been using Seagate barracuda NAS drives in the small servers I admin for work and they have performed pretty admirally.

In some circumstances they'll work alright, but I still have issues with their longterm reliability. The problem is that since they're designed with capacity in mind you want to use them for archival purposes, and the long writes necessary for that are their Achilles heal. The first thing out of the box you immediately set out to copy 600gb to one and they choke something awful. It only gets worse from there. And at least in the case of WD portable passport drives, it seems like they stop caching after a year or two, and an SMR without the CMR cache is a paperweight. Oddly, it seems the people most pissed off about them are the people using NAS, and they should work fine for that. Lots of short writes across many different drives.

[XJDenton]

The problem with using them with NAS was that some drives that used what's called Device Managed SMR, which meant that to the OS and Storage controllers it appeared as an CMR device and would accept standard write commands which the drive would then internally convert into an SMR compatible operation. And this ended up absolutely killing write performance when used alongside standard CMR NAS drives in RAID or ZFS configurations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aztTf2gI55k

Host managed SMR on the other hand is more predictable in its behaviour, and if you are only using a single drive or a couple in a RAID 1 they should be fine so long as you are happy sacrificing some performance for single drive capacity. When it comes to long term reliability I don't hold much stock in individual experience as it could quite easily just be you got a drive from a bad batch.

[ReaPsTA]

[cramx3]

That's pretty cool

[faizoff]

In a surprise move, EVGA today announced they will no longer be making any Nvidia GPUs, looks like they're pulling out from the GPU market completely. That's a real shame, their FTW3 lineup has been fantastic and the 3080 FTW3 card I bought has been great so far.

[ReaperKK]

I saw that this morning and I was shocked. I love my evga cards and it's a bummer they are pulling out of the gpu market.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

Well that's just great.....now what brand GPU am I supposed to buy? Gigabyte and MSI are trash GPUs, Asus is overpriced, Zotac is laughably bad and overpriced. Then there's Gainward, Galax, Colorful, PNY, etc etc, but most of those you can't even get in the United States, and some of the others are just cheaply built and overpriced...