Author: aztpg8

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Do you really need that shiny new PC?

How did we get here?

That question is actually very easy to explain this time around.

With the focus on AI, and companies diverting their resources to the corporate customer instead of the consumer, pricing has soared. Specifically, anything with a memory component has seen a drastic increase almost overnight. In some cases, increases were more than 100%.

Data centers use a different type of memory than consumers, so you might not see a problem, but the big three are committing to more data center products and less consumer. Good for data centers, bad for us. A shortage of newer memory means people panic buy any memory they can get, driving the price of DDR4 up. We’ll discuss the issue for one company involved in a bit.

There are three major memory manufacturers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, with the latter recently saying they will drop their consumer effort completely. Crucial is a very popular and dependable brand, producing memory and storage, and now they are gone. That leaves two companies to produce the entire supply and they have already announced they are scaling back.

PC memory saw the most immediate effect, but pricing for everything that uses memory will increase. All solid state devices use some form of memory and now that will be in shorter supply with no end in sight. That means everything from TVs to mobile phones, and cameras to tablets get more expensive. Even if another company wanted to take advantage, factories don’t come online overnight.

The Biggest Loser? (Besides us)

There will be several, but one company that will suffer is AMD. This will be especially tough on them with the AM5 platform taking only DDR5. Any modern processor they make will be dependent on DDR5 and they are sure to see a downturn. Intel, and maybe even Qualcomm gain an advantage with some of their modern products using older memory.

Intel’s LGA 1170 socket has DDR4 version support available and Qualcomm has shown itself to be very adaptable. Their mobile sector may suffer, but their PC processors could have an advantage. AMD could save itself a bit though if they stretch the AM4 processors. It’s something they have done recently, and many of us thought it was a bit silly. It may be a genius move.

AMD has produced several new AM4 CPUs well after introducing AM5 and they have continued BIOS updates. It could be a great stop gap. It does not help their graphics division, though. Nor does it give high hopes for Intel continuing with the Celestial line of GPU, but that’s a different conversation.

So, what do we do?

The simplest answer for that is nothing. If you don’t need a new PC, don’t go shopping for a bit until thew market calms. If you do need a new PC, look at slightly older platforms like the AM4 or LGA 1170. Older generations are also a possibility, but you have to be mindful of the Windows 10 retirement. That’s a whole other story as well.

I have YouTube videos on using much older platforms, one of them here. I’ll also be writing and publishing videos on more current generations that will accept Windows 11. Don’t forget, Linux is also an option for your operating system instead of large corporations offer. Thank you Steam for pushing this to a higher level. If you would like to read my last effort discussing some older platforms, try this one.

I’ll keep my eyes and ears open, and of course, I’ll discuss it in the blogs.

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When a game is more aggravating than amazing.

How did we get here

It started simple enough. I needed more current titles for benchmarks. Comparisons of hardware need a reference and performance in popular games gives that. New components aren’t always better and sometimes you are better off with what you have. The new part doesn’t improve the experience.

This is usually straight forward. See what is popular, look at reviews, watch for sales. This sometimes leads you astray, however, which is the case with at least one game I’ve recently purchased. I won’t mention the title, but there is a video linked here. This used to be a very popular franchise but a number of moves have ruined that.

The First Issue

The first obstacle you face is the size of files to update or download. Steam told me I needed a whopping 463GB to install this thing. That is larger than many of the SSDs I put in budget builds and the entire drive on mid priced builds. AT that point, I should have known this was a bad idea.

I didn’t have the almost half a terabyte required for this on my portable SSD, so I removed older games I don’t test anymore. I know this will bite me in the butt later as I have older systems I need to test. Still, I carry on because the people need their benchmark. I find room, I load it and proceed to testing.

I’m then met with a series of warning messages. This is not uncommon, A lot of games will give a message about video memory, or a video card driver. This game gave several. The first being that I was using a hard drive instead of an SSD. I literally chose the SSD because it’s portable. Chalking this up to the settings thinking the external SSD may be an internal HDD, I moved on .

I get the customary video driver warning for a driver that was released last week instead of last month, so I ignore it, knowing the driver is current enough, but the warnings didn’t stop. I also got one for a bios update, and the big one after that, Secure Boot.

Secure Boot Issues

Now, I understand that publishers want to keep players from cheating and exploiting the game, but Windows 11 already has some of these requirements and it shouldn’t take a tech expert to play a video game. A game should not make you go into the BIOS of your PC and make changes. It is too easy for someone to make the wrong change, and render the PC useless.

Sucking it up for the team, I make the changes on a couple of my PCs, because it is not a default setting, and carry on. That is until I get to a more budget system with an older AMD video card. What was a mid tier adjustment because a six hour adventure with no end to the ride.

The older AMD card would not allow the PC to post after the change, although, any card with current driver support would. I tried this with an RX480 and RX580 both, with no success. In the case of the RX580, it boot looped and required a BIOS reset. That is not something your average twelve or thirteen year old is going to try to do to play a game.

In the end, this set up won’t be testing that game. I may go back later and play with drivers, but it won’t be today, nor will it be this week. I move on without it and test everything else, which work great, by the way. The system is great, the game sucks.

Additional Feedback

The ironic thing is, that it seems more and more that people don’t even like this game anymore. They play because their friends still do, and many admit the fell out of love with this series a few years ago. I wonder why. Insert sarcasm here, I know perfectly well, why. The game, and indeed the series is more trouble than it’s worth and when you stray so far from a great experience, you end up like Kmart, or Blockbuster, or any number of fond memories from our past.

If you like like blog, maybe visit another on my blog page.

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Windows 10 has left the building, now what?

How did we get here?

With Microsoft kindly retiring millions of older devices due to new security constraints, I have been forced to explore options to either install a new Operating System or upgrade one of my PCs in an unconventional way. Having a YouTube channel centered mainly on budget PCs and PC related equipment, I find myself with several PCs that worked well on Windows 10, but for one reason or another, will not play well with version 11.

Some of these are justified. There are instruction sets on older CPUs that do not meet the new requirements, similar to how some video games won’t run on older hardware. This is normal and I wouldn’t expect to try running the new OS on a Q6600. Some of these ‘rules’ seem arbitrary, like the 7000 series Intel CPUs not being supported even though they have secure boot and the now required TPM 2.0. There is seemingly no difference in the architecture of the 7tb vs 8th gen. In fact, both of these are even on the 14nm node that Intel was so proud of for several generations.

For that matter, the 6th gen Intels were also on 14 nm and fit in the same sockets. The only thing I would be able to point to would be if DDR3 were an issue, but if so, make that the requirement, not the CPU. It is true though, that even though six through nine fit in the same socket, the motherboard chipset is different, but again ,make that the reason, not that it ‘can’t handle secure boot and TPM2.0″ .

I can complain endlessly.

What can we do about it?

The first thing and the least likely is just to leave the PC on Win10. It won’t get updates, but it doesn’t just stop working. Second, we can look at alternate ways to install version 11. I am actually exploring this with my laptop where I write this blog a majority of the time. It has an i5 7300 HQ, that is otherwise a solid machine. I am putting together a video to explore that and give it some totally unnecessary upgrades, and I may touch on that process a bit further in this blog.

The more interesting option is to try to install one of the many flavors of Linux Distros that are available. There are about a half dozen major distributions with more specialized versions forking from those. CachyOS off of Arch Linix, Bazzite from Fedora, and so on. There are advantages and disadvantages to all of them, but the requirements for my new OS are relatively simple. I have to be able to Play some games, use OBS to record video, and I have to be able to edit using DaVinci Resolve.

That doesn’t sound like a huge deal, but there are many that can do one or two, but the struggle is finding one that is intuitive for a newer user and can do all three. I believe i may have found that in Nobara Linux. I was able to easily install Steam and OBS, and they worked out of the gate. Steam gave me issues later, but I believe I just have to find the right combination of Proton and graphics card drivers.

Not all Rosey

This distro did come with a few challenges that were harder to overcome. Davinci Resolve would install, but would crash every time I went to the edit screen. I was running out of time before I had to post a video, so I gave a review of what was a positive experience for the most part and published the video here. Almost immediately I got some helpful feedback on the installation and part of it worked. Resolve is working and although I haven’t editing a video yet, I was able to set up all of preferences and I haven’t had any failures.

While I was having my struggles with Nobara, I also gave CachyOS a try. The installation was easy enough though there were more choices to make and it wasn’t quite as intuitive. I did like the lightweight nature of the distro and it was very quick. The issues though were in trying to install the games and programs I needed . It seems CachyOS doesn’t support Resolve yet, and that takes it out of the running, at least for now.

I have recently tried a third distro and will go back again to see if OBS and Resolve will install, but Bazzite very easily ran most of my games, It’s not a far stretch for me to have a Gaming PC and a Creation PC. I have inadvertently set that up as my current default. My main PC is an AMD build with an RTX 5070, and my Editing Rig is an Intel 12700KF with a B570 in it. It’s not unheard of for me to split the workload even on the same OS.

What about Eleven

I won’t give a step by step, or tutorial, but it is possible with a USB tool for ISO’s to select some of the parameters beforehand. My ISO tool of choice is Rufus, and I actually use it for all of my Linux and windows ISOs. It’s easy to find and download and very intuitive, and although copying the ISO onto a USB can take ten or fifteen minutes, it’s a small investment to make for a free tool.

I don’t know what the eventual split will be between any of the Linux versions and finagling of new Windows, but I am relatively sure anything I sell will have windows installed. not because I prefer it, but because anyone buying it will be more familiar with it and I will have fewer call backs. There may be a time when Linux is a widely accepted as Windows, but that time isn’t now.

For an easy read on one of the PCs that won’t have any issues with upgrades click here or feel free to go back to the blog page here.

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A small repair that makes a great difference

How did we get here?

What do you do when your graphics card starts running warm and sounds like a jet engine? Set aside some time, trust yourself, grab your tools and it may help to watch a teardown video or two.

My adventure began when I started benchmarking the RX 9060 XT against some other cards that I have. The testing went well, but I noticed how loud and warmer temperatures for my 3060Ti. This card has been a workhorse for me , and I only recently took it out of my main PC. I didn’t notice anything as I was using it to game and stream, but it was very noticeable during the comparisons.

I also noticed that the NVidia card ran much warmer than the other two by several degrees. Benchmarks measure performance by stressing components, but this card had some abnormal behavior. It wasn’t hard to see I had a small issue.

The card I have, an EVGA RTX 3060Ti, is a two fan card with a slightly larger heatsink, but it was obvious the cooling on this card was working much harder than the others. In addition, the time to heat up was very quick and cooling off was more gradual. The card was in regular use since purchase, but very seldom was it stressed for long periods.

The next steps

At this point I was sure of a couple of things. The card wasn’t overheating, but was warmer than normal. It was time to make sure that the temps didn’t adversely affect the results I was getting in the comparisons. The only way to make sure was to tear it apart and reapply the thermal paste. I was just hoping the change wouldn’t skew the numbers I had already collected for the video I just released, here.

The teardown itself is straight forward. Several screws hold the backplate, but the ones near the GPU take special care. These four spring loaded screws are handled in an alternating pattern similar to changing a car tire. This ensures equal pressure on each side of the chip and less chance of damage. Standard thermal paste like MX4 works fine assuming you make sure coverage is full.

Testing

With the paste applied and the card reassembled it was time to re test all of the benchmarks. The strange thing is that in almost every benchmark the results were slightly lower than the first set of runs with a lower temp. So, what happened, it should have been better.

Actually, it was better, just not the final numbers.

Observing the tests, it was important to see not just the temperatures, which were slightly lower, but the noise levels and the ramp up and cool down. In the first set of tests, the card would heat up quickly and recovery was slow. In this set, temps rose gradually and cooled off very quickly. My first indication that the re-paste worked.

Other indicators were the sound of the fans during stress, and the sheer amount of heat put off. The first set put off a considerable amount of heat when opening the case, while the second test was closer to expected. The fans were much quieter as well. There was fan noise, but it not to catastrophic levels. This was a success.

Now What?

The most important thing is that my comparison to the other two video cards is still valid. The results from testing were still within margin of error, so the results of the first test were solid. The card is cleaner and with fresh thermal paste, it will have long life.

The next thing is that it really was something simple and well within my experience level to fix. There are several small thermal pads on the video memory chips, and of course the paste itself, but the hardest part of this was keeping up with the screws. Not only did the back plate have several, but the end bracket had three tiny ones and two for the back plate had very small nuts. (go ahead, insert joke here).

The only other worry was making sure I used a cross pattern to tighten the screws holding the PCB to the Heatsink. Those were spring loaded, so the chances of overtightening was slim, but there was still a chance. It pays to take your time and exercise patience here.

Overall, this was a great success. I wasn’t sure of that when I started seeing the benchmark numbers come back slightly lower, but the cards behavior was vastly different and I’m happy. This wasn’t a repair as much as maintenance, but it’s good to know it was successful.

The YouTube video for this blog can be found here.

Feel free to check out more blogs with other things I probably shouldn’t have done. here

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When 8GB is enough memory for modern video games.

The Rx 9060 XT 8GB

Yes, the step sibling of the better model from AMD, and the model that made much of the tech community collectively groan. It has half the memory of the 16GB, and arguably other architecture making it worse. AMD denies this and says they are identical but the memory, but board partners have a say as well.

Part of the reason for the collective dissatisfaction is performance, but a larger part is naming. AMD has chosen to follow examples set by its dominant competitor and confuse us. Yes, sometimes following an example can be great, but when the example is one consumers hate, we are left scratching our heads.

For years NVidia has pulled a bait and switch tactic on us and gets away with it. Multiple cards have identical naming and different specs. Some have slower memory swapped in. Some have artificial limits set on them so a lower model doesn’t outperform a higher one. Super versions and Ti versions knock on the performance door of the next tier up, but money is always in play.

And that’s the example AMD choose. Both cards have the same name and in prebuilt PC’s can have either. You expect high level performance, but get a lower tier card. Money.

But what about the card?

The card itself is a pleasant surprise. Drop the XT and this meets or beats expectations. AMD has done that before with cards like the RX 7600 or RX 9070. Yes, the current gen has plain and XT flavors. This card was destined for price drops. That’s why I bought it. A recent price drop well below retail on some models almost makes this a decent card.

A full set of testing on a mid range system showed great results. Matched with a Ryzen 7 3700X, Cyberpunk in 1080P Ultra had 103 FPS and Monster Hunter Wilds had 71 with no Frame Gen . Great numbers for a mid range 1080P build. Matching it with a 12700KF with 32GB of DDR5 saw 83FPS and 76 in 1440P, respectively. Those were the lowest marks with highest ranging up to 319 in CS2. All without borrowing from system memory.

I thought this card would have no choice but to borrow in the newer, more demanding titles, but it didn’t. The only time I saw it have to borrow was in MH Wilds while trying to make it do so with the settings for another video. Steam’s new Performance Monitor. This card works great in 1080P and 1440P.

I fully expected to hate this card because I was told to by most reviewers. The fact is, I didn’t. I don’t game in 4K and I don’t push Ray Tracing to the limit in any games I play. Yes, I can see where that would show it’s deficiency, but if you are playing with full RT or in 4K, you probably aren’t looking for a budget card.

This card is fine

Yes, it should have a different name. But so should the RTX 3050 6GB, or the RTX 3060 8GB. Yes, that one does exist, so does a 2060 12GB. If this card were a RX 9060, I think half the complaints go away. As it stands, if the price drops to around 250USD, it is the price of the now available B580, and clearly beats it.

When the B580 came out, people called it a great card, but something that beats it head to head will be marred by a confusing name and a higher retail price. It’s a shame, because if this card had hit the market right, people would have loved it. The fact is, it’s a solid video card and maybe a lesson in marketing.

Click here for the video run down.

I discuss whether you may need a High End Gaming PC in the first place, here.