Tech Corner

[Pol]

If you don't see your preffered Firefox browser as an option, just do a reset. Hit "Microsoft" type cmd, right click, pick "Run as admin" and execute this:

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"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\uninstall\helper.exe" /SetAsDefaultAppGlobal

Afterward return to "Default apps settings" and voila, you can choose it here now!

[Pol]

@mr.hackcrag
Myself I like more AMD/ATI approach for being more honest in propagating their products. Anyway, it's hard to judge these two competitors when no one is having cards on the market. So, let's choose the "best card" in better times.

For my needs I'm looking for new AMD APU, seems like next year could arrive at consumer market. This gives sense for me merely random playing some RPG or strategic game.

==

As avid Firefox user I must admit, that when javascript comes in play, it's slow. After considering Chrome and Opera, Opera wins it for me. Need to say that all of them runs on the same (chrome) engine.

If you still like to play some games in flash, be careful as Microsoft is planning to hard remove flash player from your computer with update KB4577586 or with Annual Update 21H1 (most likely, will come in June). You may either grab some 3rd party flash player or disable windows update with StopUpdates10. The second is more of a solution but you will freeze your whole system.

[mr.hackcrag]

With the shortages in GPU right now, they all cost double what they normally would in my area. It is not a good time to buy anything.

[PilipHannah]

Right now GPU prices getting lower
Hope in 6m i could buy a 3080 or 3070

[Pol]

Yeah, most thanks go to China and Elon, for blocking miners. What's not good for them, is good for us and anyone paying bill for elektricity. Including Mother Nature

[Pol]

One more hardware pondering, about APUs - which is processor with graphic card integrated inside.

Presently you can get AMD Ryzen 5 5600G which is having incorporated Vega 7 graphics.
https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-5-5600g

CPU Cores: 6
CPU Threads: 12
CPU Base Clock: 3.9GHz
CPU Max Clock: 4.4GHz
L3 cache: 16MB
Slot: AM4

GPU Cores: 7
Graphic Freq.: 1900MHz


As the KB2 is built upon UE4 the game will run but most likely with pretty mediocre performance. Even if you pair it with a very fast memory in dual channel. At this mmt it's hard to determine, if that would be enough or not. But it's below minimum requirements.

But on the horizont there's hidding stronger sibling AMD Ryzen™ 7 5700G
https://www.amd.com/en/products/apu/amd-ryzen-7-5700g


CPU Cores: 8
CPU Threads: 16
CPU Base Clock: 3.8GHZ
CPU Max Clock: 4.6GHz
L3 cache:
Slot: AM4

GPU Cores: 8 (Vega 8)
Graphic Freq.: 2000MHz

Which ofc is also below minimal requirements. However in reality it could been enough. I have relatively sweet memories with my old APU A10-7850K, where if the game was optimized it was playable. So I could play King's Bounty (AP, DS, Legend..) all along.


As I see some benchmarks, the GPU performance is in a mid between Nvidia GT1030 and AMD RX 560.
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/amd-r ... 00g-review

Are these pose a usable solution for gaming? They can be but can't really match even medium discrete graphic cards. Even new generation with new RDNA2 archictecture which is coming soon tm. Though it will be nice leap.

[Pol]

AMD RX 6600XT
https://www.microcenter.com/search/sear ... RX+6600+XT

Very interesting, still overpriced like a hell but available. These are new, with better performance than 3060 from nVidia. At the same moment it's a little pressing down nVidia prices. If they are in the stores, at all.

[Pol]

AMD - Ryzen 9 5900X 4th is in action at BestBuy only for $499.99

And when we are at it, Intel is planning to launch their own graphic cards, so they already reserved factories for it. Meaning AMD and nVidia will be out of luck for 3nm process. Currrent range Alchemists should be available in next year. And the newest one, with 3nm process they call Arc, enlisted names are Battlemage, Celestial and Druid, shall come 2023-24.

That's all true, if miners will be exoded to some other planet.

[mr.hackcrag]

All of those video cards you linked are sold out in my area.

Which CPU processor are you looking forward to most Pol?

[Pol]

I'm looking for next gen AMD APUs (top models only) and if the game won't be running on it, it will be out of luck. So, Song of Conquests or Master of Magic, we will see about Fanstratics

[mr.hackcrag]

https://www.microcenter.com/product/623 ... t-included

Is this worth getting now on sale considering new technology "Alder Lake" is around the corner in November-December?

Compare with this: https://www.microcenter.com/product/630 ... lth-cooler

[Pol]

I would say yes, it's strictly depending on the price and this one is good. If you are not needing anything specific from "new technologies", which seems unlikely for home use, you are ready to go.

[Pol]

So, in this year, there may arrive some middle or better GPU on the market, and you could really bought them, for just a bit upped price. nVidia is having done it's new line, AMD too and lately event Intel comes to the rescue with Iris XE graphic - which is the best news ever - if you are looking for notebook, slim an capable of handling not so demanding games.

Out of curiosity, I did a test with my backup graphic, and in fact with only relatively recent card which I have, AMD RX570, using Unigine Superposition Benchmark. As a result some not so demanding games, can be played at middle settings. Max settings were, as expected, a total failure. You can compare all results here.





BTW This is a very small card, with only one fan. Relatively silent but you hear it ofc.

[Kalah]

So I think my HDD may be broken. It happened during a Steam patch download that the PC suddenly rebooted, and the HDD that has Steam installed on it does no longer appear. It's weird, though: it's a WD Black 2TB SATA that I'm using for storage and gaming. It should last a lot longer than this. Could it be the motherboard instead? That did have a problem earlier, not being able to find more than two HDDs (so I only use an SSD for the system and the 2ST for storage and gaming).

It system did give me a warning before it happened, something about “at-risk SMART event” that could be disabled. When I clicked to disable, though, the HDD no longer appears.

Is it time to try changing the motherboard or go for a completely new PC? I could try to keep the old HDDs and connect it to a new one... Or perhaps jsut getting a new mobo and PSU would be enough?

Here's the rig stats, btw., described in the PC building thread.
Power supply: EVGA Supernova 750W G3
Main Board: ASRock Z87 EXTREME3 - Haswell
CPU: Intel Core i5-4670 Haswell - Box 3.80 GHz
RAM: Kingston 16GB HyperX Beast DC DDR3-2133 (2x8GB)
Graphics card: MSI GeForce GTX970 GAMING. PCIe 3.0 x16, 4GB GDDR5, 1140 MHz klokkefrekvens, 1279 MHz turbo, 1x HDMI, 2x DVI, 1x DP.
HHDs:
- Samsung 840 Basic EVO SSD 120GB (system)
- WD Desktop Black 2TB 3.5" SATA 6GB/s (SATA 3.0), 64MB Cache, 7200RPM, Dual processor

[Pol]

Your sure bet would be to get the HDD out and trying to connect it to another computer. And to leave it here for some longer time, like ten minutes and start and restart the machine with it. And check smart status from here. (Use Western Digital Dashboard)

WD Black were having extended warranty, up to five years, so it's worth to check it.

It still can be SATA cable, connector or controller. The last two are on board though.

If you would like to upgrade, I would mark MB, CPU and RAM as upgradable. Prices for RAM are relatively low, on the contrary prices for CPU are not.

Also be careful with transferring Windows license, technically, you are entitled to do it once. Albeit, if anything break, they will still help you.

As of Intel, there's one of possible proposals:

Intel Core i7-11700KF (FCLGA1200, Rocket Lake 11th Generation, Z5XX chipsets)
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... 0-ghz.html

Z590 Phantom Gaming 4/ac+
https://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Z590%20 ... /index.asp

DDR4 (up to 4800, XMP 2.0)
Like "Corsair 32GB KIT DDR4 4600MHz CL18 Vengeance RGB RT"
https://www.corsair.com/eu/en/Categorie ... M2Z4600C18

Edit - Sidenote:
At this moment AMD CPU are overall better but in fact the price is a decisive factor. Usually it's paired like:
Intel i3 = Ryzen 3
Intel i5 = Ryzen 5
Intel i7 = Ryzen 7
Intel i9 = Ryzen 9 (Top performance but also the price!)

The difference is not big, especially for gaming, where Intel still can secure its lead in many games. From my view, the important role here plays also socket, where LGA1200 is from Q12020 and AMD 4 is from 2019 and it will be superseeded by AMD 5. So in case of AMD 4 sockets, you will need to go with some mid ranged board as there is slim chance to any future upgrades. But you can save.

As an AMD alternative:
AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (AMD AM4)
https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-7-5800x

GIGABYTE X570 GAMING X (supports AMD Ryzen 7 5800X from version 30, can proceed cpu-less bios update! )
https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/X5 ... -rev-11#kf

Memory can be the same.

In both alternatives, you are likely to get also new CPU cooler. Not always though, sometime they sold socket adapters. Which one do you have for now?

[Kalah]

I figure that the only two alternatives (apart from doing nothing) are: 1) buying a whole new gaming computer (and connect the extra HDDs to it) or 2) buy a new motherboard with a CPU. That's what I did last time and I think the rest of the parts are pretty good; the GPU, RAM and drives all seem fine. What I'm thinking,though, is that the PC is getting a bit old, after all, so maybe it's better to just get a pre-built one this time? Then I can get one with SSDs instead of the old SATA drives, and only use the old drives for storage.

[Pol]

Pre-built is a bit specific. Because you need to take care about good graphic card inside. The pre-built are also usually a bit more pricey. However, especially now, good graphic card can compensate. GPU for OEM are on the market.

But hey, they most likely will have a tad worse PSU, MB, RAM and HDD. Renowned vendors are having configurators, so you can pick what will be inside. But not the delivery time.

To sum it up, pre-built is less hassle for you but you overpay and you definitively should get one with gaming graphic card inside.

Les Example:

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Base	OMEN 25L Desktop GT12-1335qd CTO
Operating system	Windows 11 Home
Processor	Intel® Core™ i7 11700 W/RGB Air Cooling (2.5 GHz up to 4.9 GHz, 16 MB L3 cache, 8 cores)
Memory	HyperX® 32 GB DDR4-3200 RGB SDRAM (2 x 16 GB)
Storage	WD Black 512 GB PCIe® NVMe™ M.2 SSD
Secondary storage	No HDD
Graphics card	NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 3060 (12 GB GDDR6 dedicated)
Additional Specs
Chassis and Power supply	Front Bezel Shadow Black Glass, Dark Chrome Logo+ Side Cover Glass with Cooler Master 800 W Gold efficiency power supply
Networking	Intel® Wi-Fi 6 AX 201 (2x2) and Bluetooth® 5 combo (Supporting Gigabit file transfer speeds)
Productivity software	No Additional Office Software
McAfee LiveSafe™ security software	McAfee Livesafe (30 day)
Keyboard and mouse	MISC No Included Keyboard
Base Unit	BU RCTO OMN Oasis Z590H 25L US
Country kit	CKIT HP CTO OMEN 21C1 US
Cycle AV	21C1 Cycle AV
OpSysSW Localization	OSLOC US
Technical AV 1	MISC HEVC MEDIA EXTENSION HP
Technical AV 1	FLAG EPEAT
Technical AV 1	FLAG ENERGY STAR Qualified
Warranty	WARR 1/1/0 US

Ships on: 03/24/2022 for $1804.99
Link

If you will decide not for pre-built, then:

Memory - when you will be changing MB you will need to change RAM too. Yours is DDR3 and now is everyone having DDR4.

As of (additonal?) SSD, you might be happier to go with M.2 SSD. It looks like RAM but you put it inside a special M.2 connector on the motherboard. And it's flat. Example there:
https://www.adata.com/en/xpg/596?tab=specification

[Kalah]

Memory - when you will be changing MB you will need to change RAM too. Yours is DDR3 and now is everyone having DDR4.

That's a good note - I thought I could just keep the RAM since I already have 16GB of it.

[Pol]

As of the future, it's good to keep in memory that DDR5 RAM are already on the market (and are indeed faster about 1.2x and more) and can be used in some boards and also that AMD yesterday officially announced socket AMD 5. But both of these, won't be important in this year.

[mr.hackcrag]

What criteria do you look for when selecting liquid cooling?