Something I have no business getting into. Special thoughts.

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Liquid or Air cooling a PC, what makes You happy?

How did we get here?

Noise. Honestly, that’s it. It came down to how much noise my rig was making while I was trying to stream. End of Blog, right? Maybe not, I may actually need to explain a bit.

The original configuration in a Montech King 95 case was two 140mm fins blowing in from the side and a Corsair H100i, with the radiator top mounted. There was nothing wrong with this configuration, and as the temperature testing showed, it worked quite well. The problem was that keeping that nice cool temp meant the fans ramped up and even during moderate loads, would get loud. It wasn’t unbearable, the placement next to my mic meant extra noise in my streams. Again, my mic didn’t pick a lot up, but every bit helps when you are streaming.

What was my solution?

I chose to go with a tower air cooler and rearrange the fans. Specifically, I installed a Thermalright Assassin air cooler and changed the airflow patter with the fans. Instead of the top fans all blowing up and out, the top front fan blows in and the rear top fan blows out. My hope was to assist in bringing air in to have fresh air across the CPU.

There have been many videos made and blogs written about airflow and what is proper, but all seem to point to a diminishing return after so many fans, so I kept it simple. The top would have one in and one out, and the back fans was exhaust. I considered adding a fan at the bottom pushing in to feed clean air to the GPU, but during tests the GPU temp went down, so I scrapped the idea until later. It’s still an option, but for now it’s fine.

Speaking of tests, I ran several ten minute passes of Cinebench 2026. I won’t give my opinion of the new app, or the difficulty finding the old ones, yet. Cinebench R23 is one of my favorite CPU tests and Maxon chooses to hide it now. The 2026 version does allow you to test CPU single core, Multi core and GPU, so for this test it worked well. The important thing was to get a lengthened load test for the temps.

And?

The All in One kept the CPU cooler. It was also louder, as discussed previously. There were two surprises, though. The first and biggest, was that even without a fan blowing air on the GPU, the temperature went down slightly. It was only from 65C to 63C, but it was a measurable and repeatable change.

The other surprise was just how quiet the Thermalright fans were. TL-C12C fans come in a set of five, and I’m sold on them. Not convinced that a ten minute test was enough, I also sat down for an hour long gaming session and was very pleased. In the associated video, I do a comparison, and the difference is noticeable.

The temp was higher on the CPU with the fans, but well within a comfortable range at around 63C. The noise level more than makes up for it and the inconvenience of a noisy stream is averted. This won’t meet everyone’s standards, but that’s the reason for the title in the first place. It’s very subjective.

What’s next?

For me, I will consider placing a fan on the bottom to introduce more clean air to the GPU. I may also decide I don’t need it, after all, GPU temps went down. I’m definitely staying with the tower cooler and will eventually use the H100 for another build. I may just stick with the Air Cooler, though. its much cheaper. AIO’s are less expensive, now, but a good tower cooler still beats it.

There is also the lack of maintenance, I have had my fun cleaning All in One coolers, and I am just fine only cleaning fans. Actually, a lot of my channel has to do with fixing things and learning lessons, including this last one with a Z97 motherboard. I’m also sure this won’t be the last visit on this subject.

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It’s not failure if you learn something. The important Z97 lesson.

How Did We Get Here?

That part’s easy. Computer component prices are ridiculous and people are looking anywhere they can to save money. This includes PCs and systems with older parts. In some cases, much older, as in ten years old.

One such case is trying to revive PCs that use DDR3 memory instead of the current standard DDR5. The problem there is that the dominant Operating system for these PCs no longer supports finely aged hardware. I won’t dwell on the details of the many different work arounds or the options, I’ll just say that those products are still in demand, and in some cases fetch as much as newer budget motherboards and components.

My plan was simple. I have a B85 motherboard that supports 4th gen Intel CPUs. It was suggested that I try thew Z97, which is the full feature version of that generation. I found one for a reasonable price, ordered it, received it, and set up to test. At this point I was happy, I found the board for a reasonable price and it came in beautiful shape. My happiness didn’t last.

It’s not failure, it’s learning.

The set up went well enough. I have a known good test bench and known good components, so I went to work. After setting everything up I hit the power switch and noticed my first issue. The signal initially come from the video card, then stopped. Luckily the i5 4670 has on board graphics, and I was able to get into the bios.

I though the RX480 I was using finally gave up the ghost, so I switched cards. Not only did I get a signal, but I was able to set up in the BIOS and on the reboot went straight into windows. Success! Except for about an hour later, the PC wouldn’t ‘wake’. The following reboot, didn’t boot.

I set about testing all of the component’s, the power switch, power supply, reset the BIOS, everything. Nothing. I even went back and tested the RX480 that I though might have dies and it works fine. There was only two possible culprits. After swapping the 4670 into the B*% motherboard, we were down to one.

What Did I learn?

The first thing I learned was that my troubleshooting process was sound. I also learned that even with a bad deal, something good can come of it. I made YT content and this blog. And, I learned, or relearned, that used parts fail. They don’t always fail spectacularly, like the RTX 2060 in the blog here , but eventually they do fail. Knowing that keeps me from being upset, but I am disappointed.

What do I plan to do next? I’m already looking for another Z97 board, but as I mentioned I’m trying to find a good deal, especially now that the investment has another seventy five bucks tacked onto it. When I find one, I’ll do more testing. Until then I will just do more learning, like not matching modern components with much older hardware.

If you are curious how this experiment went, feel free to check out the video here.

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Trying to play new games on an old PC

How Did We Get Here?

With companies pushing to develop Artificial Intelligence, many supporting components are outrageously priced. One of those components is memory. Although the memory data centers use is different than that used by the common consumer, when factories concentrate on producing data center memory, they don’t produce consumer products. Shortages mean higher prices.

Most systems now use DDR5, with AMD still producing some processors that use DDR4. That leaves DDR3. It has risen in price, but not as much as newer memory. It’s also over ten years old. That’s fine for some games, but those released in the last couple of years are sometimes poorly optimized. Some also have features that didn’t exist a decade ago. There is also the fact that systems with DDR3 don’t have Windows 11 support.

What About Gaming?

It’s still possible to use some versions of Windows 10 and, of course, Linux, but for this trial we used Win10 Pro without the latest updates. We tested games as old as ‘Shadow of the Tomb Raider’ from a decade ago, up to new releases like ‘Clar Obscur: Expedition 33’. The games had a wide array of features including Ray Tracing and Cheat Detection. The last is important because it requires a Trusted Point Module, specifically version 2.0.

Games with Anti-Cheat require both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. Most Anti-Cheat also doesn’t work well on Linux, further pushing gamers to Windows 11. These are still compatible with Windows 10 Long Term Service and IOT editions, but TPM requires extra hardware. More recent CPUs have this built in. Most games will run fine on Linux, but demand for Linux gaming will have to increase quite a bit for developers start implementing it. The good news is, that may not be too far off with companies like VALVE striving to make their OS mainstream.

So, what are our options?

That depends on your favorite games. If you’re into competitive shooters, most require anti cheat and Windows 10 Long Term or IOT and a separate TPM module may help. Those into pretty much anything else, will find many Linux distros waiting to be explored, and they get better every day.

If that is your cup of tea, Pop OS, CachyOS, Nobara, Bazzite, and of course, Steam OS seem to be great options and I’ve actually played around with each to varying results. In testing Bazzite and Nobara Linux played the most games without issue. Nobara also has DaVinci Resolve as a working package. Many of these also use OBS well, if you stream what you play. All are options that I will continue to explore.

Those looking for videos can check out a few of videos on my Linux Gaming playlist here.

To read other blog entries, check out this link.

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New Hardware in an Old PC

How did we get here

Upgrading PCs is a delicate balance of finding the right parts that work together. Sometimes, this works well, and many parts work with each other n some capacity. Some parts compliment each other very well, but some struggle mightily. One such case is an older HP Pavilion and a newer generation graphics card.

The PC in question has a Ryzen 5 4600g, 16GB of 3200MTS DDR4 memory and a 400 watt power supply that itself, was an upgrade. The Ryzen processor was one of several in AMD’s line up that handles graphics. Not in the way Intel displays basic graphics, but an actual graphics processor built in. These units were far above any Intel offering and allowed a solution without the extra cost of a dedicated card. They weren’t very powerful, but they were effective.

These Processors also worked on a PCIe 3.0 bus to operate. The Peripheral Component Interface is how the processor interacts with all of the individual parts. All of these are designed to work at certain bus speeds and the newer GPU is no different. What is different, is what bus speed the newer graphics card is designed for. PCIe 5.0.

So?

With each major iteration of the PCIe standard, the bandwidth doubles. This effectively doubling the speed that all of the components communicate. This means that the CPU that communicates at 8GT/s with PCIe 3.0 is trying to push a graphics card that is expecting 32GT/s. One fourth of the GPUs designed capability.

This simply means that the card may perform up to 50% worse in some games and applications. The video for this is here. It shows anywhere from a 20% loss in performance to around 50% compared to a system running an i5 12400 running at PCIe 5.0. The card still functions and is a huge step up from the integrated graphics from the CPU itself, but it’s not the right tool for the job.

When IS it a good idea?

It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but it’s not very effective. In most cases applications will run well, and games will perform , but a more recent platform will give significant improvement. In the case of a graphics card, newer innovations like Ray Tracing and Frame Generation will also be able to take advantage of a broader bandwidth and could add much more than the 50% loss in some cases.

With the price of DDR5 and SSD’s still out of reach to some, a good deal on a graphics card might still be of use until someone can save enough to invest in newer parts. Storage like NVMe SSDs are also affected, but the difference is not as critical as the GPU. Newer NVMe drives can reach data speeds in excess of 10,000 MB/s, significantly higher than standard SSDs.

One of the next things to test on this same platform will be the RTX 3050. That graphics card is more in line with the Pavilion’s budget and it is PCIe 4.0. When I write about it, you will find it here.

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My exciting attempt to mess something up.

How did we get here?

One word. eBay.

In many other words, I attempted a trick I saw on YouTube to repair a graphics card with a similar problem. While my attempt is here, I will go over some of the finer points. This was almost successful, and I thought I had done something.

Several months ago, I was buying fixable parts on eBay for YouTube content. One of those was an OEM version of an RTX2060 that I believe came from a Dell system. The listing claimed that it worked under normal circumstances, but failed under any kind of load.

I immediately thought this was a thermal throttling issue and ordered it. This should be an easy repair and I would have another video card. It wasn’t until I opened the card and found it full of thermal paste that I realized someone else had the same idea. Still, I gave it a good cleaning, and tested it.

So, what happened?

To be quite honest, other things came in that I could repair and they made it to a video. This one literally was shelved. In fact, this card sat on a shelf until about a month ago when someone mentioned under-volting. This card was a perfect candidate.

Components rely on a few things to work, the right voltage and a limit to how much power it should use. In this case, if the power delivery system was faulty, I would decrease the voltage needed to reach the same frequencies it used. It may never reach that output, but it wouldn’t try to use too much voltage.

I found a stable voltage and using MSI Afterburner, set a voltage limit to reach the max frequency for the card. It took a few tries, but it worked. Well, okay, it passed a few tests, but it wasn’t under a true load. I have to say that I did have a bit of confidence that I pulled this off.

That confidence didn’t last long. As soon as I started the first game benchmark, there was a loud pop, and a burning smell. It didn’t just shut off, it was a catastrophic failure. I knew this card pulled more power than the PSU was rated, but thankfully, it was the card, not the PSU. The PC has a Ryzen 4600g and still works great, in spite of my calamity.

The smell came from the card, and it was very hot to the touch. There was no doubt, it suffered a tragic end. Still, the effort did result in a YouTube video, mentioned above.

What do I do now?

For the past year, the card sat on a shelf as decoration. It will take the same role now, but I know more certainly that I won’t attempt to fix it again. I’ve had success in the past buying untested or nonworking parts, so I will again, and I have another video card that still needs attention.

The other card doesn’t work, but the fans spin. It also doesn’t show up in any hardware profile or in BIOS. My though is, though, that cleaning the contacts on the x16 connector and the ports has a chance and doesn’t cost any money. The worst that can happen is that it still doesn’t work. No Loss.

Of course, if it does work, it will be a new video, and a blog, so I have that going for me, and that’s nice. For more of these blogs click here.

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When is saving an old PC a great idea?

How Did We Get Here?

To be quite frank, greed. Corporate greed and all around nosiness. Large tech companies want to maximize profit and any company that deals in information or software wants more information. If a company can make you existing item obsolete, many times they will. For example, Livermore, CA has a firehouse with a hundred year old light bulb. Except to move it or a power outage, its been operating since 1901. One hundred twenty five years. How many other bulbs have been changed in that same building? If all products were designed to last forever, we would only change them when they went out of style, or a natural disaster.

Planned Obsolescence, I’m sure is a term you have heard and its a very real thing. My opinion is that the recent solid operating system with a ten in it’s name and the shortages of hardware coinciding with an Artificial Intelligence boom were not by accident. Perfectly serviceable hardware that would be of great use during a product shortage is now obsolete. The information company’s new product excludes that same older hardware. They can’t collect the same amount of information on you to train, you guessed it, AI.

But Why?

Currently the Western world is in a state where the fear of missing out is a real thing. We want the newest mobile phone or the biggest TV. We need to keep up with everyone else, and we post it all, for everyone to see. It’s almost mandatory to prove our worth to others. It’s what large corporations count on, so they find ways to make that happen.

They emphasize that if you don’t have the new product, their new product, you’re missing out. You will fall behind. No one wants to fall behind, so you enter the vicious cycle and buy the next new thing. Consequently, they make the next new thing allowing the large companies to make something that still works, obsolete.

Enter where we are today. Some large companies, in an effort to get more of your information, find themselves impeded by the very thing they tried to promote. In the case of a company that sells a very popular Operating System, I don’t need to name names, they have rendered a massive amount of older hardware incompatible at the same time component shortages make it difficult to upgrade or buy new PCs.

I don’t think this was an accident. Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist, but when you make older products non functioning and new hardware is expensive due to shortages for AI, corporations have a huge opportunity to profit off us while telling us it’s in our own best interest. Greed. Greed for profit on new parts and greed for your information so they can train AI to ‘give you what you want’.

What choice do we have?

Part of it is simple. If your tech does what you need it to do, wait out the rush and them pushing the narrative that you will miss out. They need everyone’s help, let them sweeten the deal. If you do end up missing something, maybe you didn’t really need it.

Another option is find a way to make do with a little less. Systems I build now may only have 16GB of RAM instead of 32, or maybe you can size down on storage until prices adjust. They need us to buy, and although they will get the eager, or maybe the desperate, a calm demeanor and a little patience may work to our advantage. It will eventually bring prices back down, and it may signal to some that we don’t really want them having all of our information; we can make our own decisions without AI’s help.

Don’t forget to take a read through other blogs, here, or visit my YouTube Page

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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