Life is a Mind Bending Puzzle

 Following on from the CPU upgrade mentioned in my last post I am going to record my current build for posterity.  CPU: AMD Ryzen 9800x3D Motherboard: Asus TUF x670E plus Wifi Ram: 2x16GB 6400MHz DDR5 (running at 6000MHz CAS 32 for stability)  GPU: Nvidia RTX 56070ti SSD: 2Tb DDR 4 NVME HDD: 4Tb HDD with 512Mb ssd cache PSU: 850W EVGA Case: Still using my old Fractal Design Define R5. No window and no RGB.  Screen: MSI MAG274QRF-QD 27" 165Hz 1440p monitor + Dell P2719HC 27" 75Hz 1080p second monitor  Sound:  Swan OS 10 speakers + Sennheiser HD598SE headphones Peripherals: Logitech G915 keyboard / Logitech G502 X mouse / Microsoft Xbox One controllers (x2), Lenovo 500 FHD webcam.  Operating System: Windows 11 Pro 25H2 The Lenovo webcam is a recent acquisition because it was the cheapest webcam I could get that has the infrared camera necessary to support face log in with Windows Hello. It works but after it arrive I realised that it doesn't have a built...

 I have just upgraded my CPU from a Ryzen 9700x to a 9800x3D. The 9700x was plenty fast enough for my 5070ti  but I wanted to try one of AMDs much vaunted x3D cpus for myself. It is the most expensive CPU I have ever bought but then again my 5070ti is the most expensive GPU I have ever bought.  At least the €400 9800x3D is currently the best gaming CPU on the planet. My €800 5070ti on the other hand offers less than 60% the performance of an RTX 5090ti. Given that the RTX5090 currently costs around €2.7k I don't think I will be upgrading my GPU again any time soon.   I haven't noticed much of a difference in Windows or in Games yet. Total War Warhammer seems a bit quicker over the end turn but that could be wishful thinking. I ran a few synthetic benchmarks and the 9800x3D is a bit slower than the 9700x in single threaded tests but faster in multi threaded. That makes sense because the 9700x has faster clocks but a smaller cache. The single threaded test probabl...

I have just spent €802 on a PNY Triple Fan OC Nvidia  Geforce 5070ti . This is actually a good deal for a card with US sticker price of $750 taking into account Ireland's 23% VAT and the extra costs associated with living on a small island. It is also the most expensive PC component I have ever bought. I am definitely not OK with the fact that enthusiast level GPUs  cost double what equivalent tier cards cost ten years ago.  I chose this version because it is one of the cheaper variants available but it is well built and one of the faster overclocked models with a large 3 slot heatsink that keeps it cool and quiet under pressure. It has no RGB or other frills but I don't care about that.  Initial impressions after playing around with it for about an hour: In 3D Mark, Total Warhammer 3 and Cyberpunk the card does seem quite a bit faster than the 7800Xt particularly at very high graphics settings. On the other hand the Nvidia Control panel still looks archaic. AMD's Ad...

 Copied from this Reddit comment: https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/zf8x35/what_was_pc_building_like_25_years_ago/izdndkg/ I am late to the party but your question brings back some nostalgic memories I would like to share: I first built a PC in 2002 so only twenty years ago and not twenty five. In 2002 building your own PC was not as common as today but enough people were doing it that guides were readily available and specialised retailers sold components. The actual steps of the build itself were not too different but they probably took a bit longer especially installing windows and drivers. The main components were still CPU, GPU and RAM and you still had multiple choices: Intel or AMD for CPU, Nvidia, ATI and a few few others for GPU. There were a lot more ancillary parts however. You needed a sound card, you needed a hard disk, a floppy disk and a CD/DVD drive. You also needed a dial up modem to get 56kbit ! internet. You needed a wired keyboard and a wired mouse...

The RTX3060ti I "borrowed" from my wife's Dell XPS machine is a great card for 1440p gaming but the twin fan cooler gets quite noisy when it is pushed hard. This post will explain how I managed to reduce the audible noise while maintaining performance using MSI afterburner.  The Parameters First a bit of background information. The three most important parameters are: 1. Fan Speed:  The louder the fan spins the noisier it gets. In my experience anything below 1000rpm is very quiet while anything above 2000rpm is intolerably noisy. I like my fans to idle below 1000rpm when the PC is not being stressed and I like them to stay as far below 2000rpm as possible when being pushed hard. Long ago PC fans ran at fixed speeds but nowadays they are nearly always controlled using a fan curve dependent on GPU temperature (or CPU temperature for CPU fans). The hotter the component gets the faster the fan spins.  2. GPU (core) clock speed. Simply enough the higher the clock speed the...

Quick recap about my cunning plan to overcome the GPU apocalypse last year: We bought a prebuilt Dell with an RTX 3060ti for my wife who is not a gamer. I Took the 3060ti for my gaming machine and put a GTX 1050ti into the Dell. The 1050ti is plenty powerful enough to drive the three monitors my wife uses for work and content creation.  This plan hit a roadblock when it turned out that 1050ti caused intermittent crashes in my wife's machine often during important conference calls.  Trying to diagnose a problem that randomly occurs once in about 24 hours is incredibly frustrating. I wasn't even sure that the 1050ti was the problem because it worked fine in my PC. The 3060ti itself was not completely immune to crashes but they were much less frequent,  less than one per week. Google threw up a few posts from other users who had similar frustrating crashes with that model of Dell when a graphics card is fitted. The only reliable solution suggested was to remove the GPU ...

 Back in 2014 I wrote this post cataloging the gaming GPUs I have used over the years. Its been eight years so I think it is time I did an update.  2014 GTX970 .  At €310 this represented a step up in what I previously paid for graphics cards. Partly this came from me being a bit older and willing to spend a bit more money on my hobby but also it reflects the fact that gaming in general and PC gaming in particular was getting more expensive. For many years 30 frame per second  was considered playable while 60 frames per second at 1080p was held up as the holy grail of performance. By 2014 however the envelope of desirable performance was being pushed hard on multiple fronts: 4k gaming, ultra high frame rates and even virtual reality demanded significantly higher levels of CPU and GPU performance.  The €310 GTX 970 was only the entry level of the "enthusiast end" but it still managed to deliver high quality gaming at good framerates for the next few years  ...

In 2017 I switched from Intel to the new (at the time)  AMD AM4 Ryzen platform and started completely from scratch with all new components in a new case. I still think of it as my 2017 rig even though almost every  component has been upgraded since. Nevertheless like the Ship of Theseus it retains its essential identity as  my "2017 Computer" and is likely to do so until the next time I build a new PC from scratch. Yesterday I replaced the Ryzen 5 3600 CPU with a rather unnecessary Ryzen 7 5800x for no better reason than spotting one at a decent price on a local trading site. This change is somewhat significant because it probably marks the end of the upgrade path for this rig. The AM4 socket has reached end of the line with the 5000 series and any further upgrade would be prohibitively expensive for very little gain. The rig in its current state has plenty of horsepower to see me through the next couple of years until I am ready to start again from scratch with a new pla...

 I am writing this in early January 2022 and it is almost two years since we first heard about SARS Covid 19,  the virus which caused a pandemic that has wracked the globe in multiple waves since then. Notwithstanding the fact that there are far more serious implications of a life threatening pandemic than its impact on a hobby I still think it would be appropriate to write a few words about how the last couple of years have affected PC gaming.  To misquote Dickens it has been the best of times and the worst of times to be a PC gamer. Virus halting lockdowns forced many to look to digital entertainment and gaming of all types thrived. Of course we all headed outdoors as soon as restrictions lifted but I think the bounce in new players and the increased respectability of gaming as a leisure activity brought about will have lasting consequences. Despite a number of Covid related delays we have also been lucky enough to enjoy many fantastic game releases over the last two ye...

I am not an IT professional but I am technical enough to be called upon for computer support among my friends and family group. When it works I love being able to help people out but the experience is fraught with risks.  The diversity of things that can go wrong can be overwhelming and everything to do with computers seems to take much longer to fix than people expect. I have had the opportunity to watch professional support technicians in my workplace and once a problem goes beyond a certain complexity they very quickly go to the nuclear options of re-imaging disks or replacing hardware. Unfortunately these are not popular options when working with a family laptop that has has never been backed up. The biggest pitfall in providing amateur tech support however is the unwritten rule that once you attempt to repair a device anything that subsequently goes wrong with that device is now your fault, no matter how broken it was originally and no matter how much you acted in good faith t...

I built a new gaming PC about six months ago (Ryzen 5 1600) but I had a nasty shock when I went looking for a new graphics card. Crypto-currency miners were buying up graphics cards by the dozen to perform the hard sums needed to unlock virtual currency pushing prices for graming graphics cards through the roof. The €300 price bracket that I consider to be my comfort zone seems to be particularly affected with the result that there were no cards available in my price range that would give a reasonable upgrade over my three year old GTX 970. Aside: Bitcoin was the fore runner and still the most widely known crypto-currency but this year a new player called Etherium seems to be demanding all attention. A key feature of Etherium is that it is resistant to mass extraction using customised chips called "Asics" and therefore requires actual GPUs for mining. It is my understanding that AMD Radeon architecture is the favourite for this process leading to complete lack of availabili...

I am posting this here rather than on something like Reddit because I don't want to get involved in the usual internet fanboy wars but the plain fact is I find myself somewhat disappointed by the release of AMD's Ryzen 7 CPUs. Brief background: My current gaming rig is long overdue an upgrade (currently running a 2009 era Xeon 3470). In 2014 I was due to replace this system completely but put it off in favour of an overhaul initially to wait for Windows 10 and then later to wait for AMD Ryzen. Well here we are in 2017. Windows 10 is old news and Ryzen 7 has finally been released. I have run out of excuses. I am old enough not to have completely gotten lost in the hype about AMD Ryzen but I was very much looking forward to a new competitive CPU market that might bring bring high end CPU power down into my mid market price range. I guess my hopes were that Ryzen would bring i7 level performance at i5 level prices. Realistically I was expecting half way between i5 and i7 pe...

A combination of Winter sales, Christmas spirit and a few days holidays always puts me in the mood for some video games. Here are the titles which have gotten some of my time since the start of December:  1. Neverwinter Nights 2: A buggy launch cast a shadow over this sequel but fully patched it remains an engrossing gaming experience. Even though I have a boxed copy I rebought it from gog.com to save the hassle of patching it myself and I got all the expansions as a bonus. This is actually the third time I started the main campaign of NWN 2 and each time I get about half way through and then move on to something else. That is still many hours of gaming goodness each time however.  2. Witcher 3: Hearts of Stone. Witcher 3's expansions have been on my wishlist for quite some time so when isthereanydeal.com  informed me that they had finally fallen into my price range I jumped and bought them both. I have only played the shorter"Hearts of Stone" and it was excellen...

I have had my Asus Xonar DGX for  few days now and I have had a chance to try it out in a few games. First impressions are a little bit mixed. On the one hand the card sounds good and the Xonar control panel has a few nice features that work well with headphones (which I use a lot). On the other hand my attempts to use the Xonar to get EAX support in older games has met with mixed success. and has even led to a few crashes. I tried enabling EAX in the following games: Far Cry (seems to work but occasionally crashed), Painkiller (seems to work), Rome Total War (EAX 2 works EAX 3 doesn't), Prey (seems to work), Battle for Middle Earth 2 (says no supported EAX hardware found). I also tested the card in a few more modern games (Alien Rage and Fallout 4) and it works without any problems but neither of those games use EAX. Asus claims that the GX2.5 feature on their xonar cards supports EAX 5.0 so I am a bit surprised it seems to have problems with EAX 3.0. There are very few games t...

It is at least ten years since onboard sound became good enough to obsolete discrete sound cards yet I have just bought an ASUS Xonar DGX for my PC. I have no illusions that this €30 card will give any noticeable improvement in sound quality for modern games. I bought it because it comes with an emulator for Creative Labs EAX technology.  EAX was the dominant environmental sound method used in PC games until the advent of Windows Vista. EAX was proprietary to Creative labs but every sound card manufacturer had some form of EAX compatibility back in the day and a huge number of games used it . Vista and all later versions of Windows changed the way sound is handled and EAX no longer works. Modern games achieve rich audo environments through other means but older titles that relied on EAX are left high and dry. I enjoy playing older PC games and it always irritated that I could no longer get the full experience due to the lack of EAX. Many of these games relied on EAX for positio...

Perhaps that is not surprising but you might be surprised to know why it scares me. I have dreamed about virtual reality and virtual worlds since I was a kid back in the 1970s. The distopian fiction of William Gibson didn't put me off virtual worlds  instead it opened my eyes to the incredible possibilities. Virtual reality would offer humans a chance to escape from physical limitaions and the fictional representations of virutal reality in books, TV and movies whetted my appetite for it. During my formative years in the 1970's and 80's the hardware available could barely host crudely pixelated 2D environments and yet they fed the spark of my enthusiasm. When three dimiensional game worlds became possible with 1990's hardware I got further sucked in and PC gaming became my main hobby. The advent of online multiplayer worlds in the noughties was further proof that this was really going to happen. At the time I thought  / hoped that the mmorpgs might develop over time t...

It takes so long to boot my Windows laptop that it just isn't worth it any more. I am not talking about the minute or two delay caused by booting from a normal HDD. I am talking about the 10 to 15 minute delay due to Windows updates that seems to be required every time I want to use the laptop. I guess this wouldn't be as much of an issue if used the laptop every day but I don't. I use it perhaps one every two to three weeks in order to give a talk or presentation when I am out of the office. I can assure you from first hand experience that three works worth of accumulated updates makes booting into Windows a slow nightmare. I do have a nice Samsung tablet that I use for normal mobile computing (meetings / email / web browsing) and I even have a HDMI adapter for that tablet but if I am going to an unfamiliar location with untested facilities it is still far safer to bring a windows laptop with old fashioned VGA connector to ensure everything works out. Solutions: 1. B...

I bought a 500Gb SSD  as a Christmas present for my gaming rig. As usually happens with PC upgrades things didn't quite go as smoothly as planned. Most of the difficulties arose from peculiarities of my own rig but for posterity I am recording the main issues here: 0. Peculiarities of my rig: Prior to fitting the 500Gb SSD I had two 1Tb  HDDs,  one 120Gb HDD (archives from older computer) and one 64Gb SSD being used as a cache drive. The plan was to install Windows and common programmes on the new SSD freeing up one of the 1Tb drives for additional storage. 1.Preparations: Shrinking my 1Tb C: drive so that it would fit onto the new 500Gb SSD took quite a while. Mindgems folder size  was handy for identifying the main space hogs. I used symbolic links to shift programmes I wanted to keep installed to another drive. 2. Even after deleting a bunch of stuff I still couldn't shrink the C: partition below to 500Gb because of Windows immoveable files. This guide po...

I am delighted to report that Windows 10 is now running smoothly and stably on my computer. The initial disk chugging which marred my earlier experience has entirely stopped after I left the machine running overnight.  I am pretty sure the initial sluggishness was down to Windows trawling through all of my disks and files in order to index them. Now that this is complete the search feature works properly too which is essential. Windows 7 spoiled me from making shortcuts for most programmes I just hit start type the first few letters of a programme and away we go.  Things I like: In use the operating system does everything that Windows 7 did for me but feels a bit more polished and up to date. The interface is cleaner and looks prettier.  I love the new Task view button. This instantly displays all open applications in a tiled format which is much more useful than the carousel format that win-tab gave in Windows 7. As a bonus the Task view also allow you to setup ...

Three hours after I had first set the automatic installer up and running control was finally returned to me and I logged into Windows 10 with excited anticipation. Everything ran terribly.  There was constant hard disk chugging and my computer refused to recognise more than one of my two monitors and insisted on running that at 800x600. The search tool couldn't find any of programmes so I had  forced to dig through the programs directory to get anything to run.  I suppose I should have expected this. My rig has been running Windows 7 since 2009 and the system has grown incrementally over the years with new bits of hardware added and thousands of programmes installed. It has three big conventional hard drives and one SSD all packed to the gills with game, utilities and various odds and ends. Despite all this the system was running very sweetly. Over the years I had built up a complex system with symbolic links and caching to ensure that everything ran snappily....