THE COMPUTER THREAD

[Variety of Cells]

I was very nervous about that when I bought closed loop liquid cooler.  But the Corsair I had first never leaked, and my current cool master has been going strong for a couple years now.  Would love to liquid cool my gpu, but that's a whole other thing.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

My first AIO water cooler was a Corsair, lasted 5 years before enough coolant evaporated through the tubing that it started making air bubble noises and not cooling as it did when new.

Only reason I got the Fractal Design one to replace it was that it used standard fittings on the radiator, so it could be expanded to include GPU cooling and easy to refill.  So now if I want to someday build a custom loop I have a rad with fans all set to go.

Took the cold block apart and didn't see anything really wrong, so don't know why it wasn't moving enough liquid.  Those micro-fins on the copper plate are amazing, looked at them with one of those hand held microscope tube things, the channels are only 0.001 inch wide.  They didn't look clogged at all, so without seeing any mechanical reason for it to fail I'm guessing something electronic in the controller was failing.

[RVR II]

Strange issue happened with my old main computer (I'm still running Windows 7 Ultimate on it )..
I bought a 6TB hard drive during a 'Black Friday' sale on New Egg and received it yesterday. I installed it (as well as cleaned out the inside from years of dust & bugs that were in there), formatted it and things were going along just fine till I went to change the drive letters to put them in order by age (4TB2k15, 4TB2k18, 6TB2k20) and for some weird reason my most important HD (4TB2k15) suddenly disappeared. Shut down and rebooted and it still wasn't there. Shut it back down, opened it back up and checked the SATA data cables and found one had some frayed wires like it had been up against something hot that it melted part of the insulation. It also had a crack where the right-angle connector locks into the hard drive. Replaced it along with another right-angle connector as it also cracked when disconnecting it and replaced then with straight connector SATA cables and it sees all the hard drives now.
Not sure why it saw them to start with then lost connection while changing the drive letters but I was panicking as this hard drive has so much history on it that it's irreplaceable and this is why I bought this new 6TB hard drive, to back up everything onto it just in case it failed. I'm so relieved it was just a bad SATA cable.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

It probably had nearly broken wires that broke when you jostled things putting the new drive in, but the broken parts were still touching enough when cold to work when first turned on.  I'm sure it was just a coincidence that they disconnected when you were messing with drive letters, it was probably just things warming up and expanding.

[Variety of Cells]

So happy I might cry a little.  Since upgrading my GPU I've been confronted with weirdly high frame times in games.  With some games it's not an problem, but in others, even with the graphics settings turned waayyyy down, I would be getting erratic frame times that would jump all over.  Visually it was hitchy and unpleasant.  Made it look so rough, when I knew I had the horsepower for it to be buttery smooth.

Thought maybe it was just bugs in the new games I was playing (Horizon Zero Dawn and Cyberpunk), but something didn't feel right.  No one else was complaining about jumpy frame times.  And I was getting it in two separate games.  Tried a whole slew of things, but nothing was helping.

Started to seem like something was up with my CPU, and it turned out I was right.  The shitty overclock I did was causing the hitching.  That, plus a windows update had disabled my motherboards ability to OC and I hadn't realized it.  So I flashed my BIOS, re did my overclock, this time with a fixed multiplier and disabled all power saving features like C states and turbo boost.  Now most games run buttery smooth like I had anticipated.  Cyberpunk is still a little rough, but nowhere near as bad as it was, and it's now in line with what other people are experiencing. 

Before, one of my 12 virtual cores would be at 100% usage in game, and the others would be much lower.  Now the work seems to be distributed much more evenly.  Yeah, my idle temps are higher now (48C) and I'm constantly feeding the CPU 1.26 volts, but this is a gaming PC.  I'd rather have a CPU that works great for a shorter period of time than a CPU that makes games stutter for longer.

[goflyblind]

finally got the dvi cable so that my dad could use the video card that was installed in the machine when he got it (rather than the onboard video he's been using), but can't seem to get it to work. tried things the internet suggested without success. why is windows so stupid difficult?

[Variety of Cells]

In my experience, it's DVI that is stupid.  Had a DVI only monitor that I was trying to adapt to get it to work with my new GPU that doesn't have a DVI port.  Nothing I tried worked.  Just couldn't adapt it.  It was my second monitor, so eventually I just ended up getting a new one with display port. 

[MartyS (Gromit)]

Yeah, DVI has so many variants that it is hard to know if it will work with what you are trying to feed it.  There are DVI ports that are only analog, basically they just put the VGA signals into that version of DVI, really idiotic to have a "digital video" standard and have variants that are only analog. 

For the onboard graphics vs. card, normally the BIOS will shut off the onboard graphics if it sees a graphics card plugged in, the bios may have been set to only do onboard graphics since no monitor was plugged into the card.  If you want to do dual monitor using the card and onboard it usually requires setting the bios to turn on both.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

My old computer speakers and sub-woofer were both starting to rattle, so bought new ones.  Since I can turn these up a bit more that crinkly CPU background noise started to get noticeable again.  I started looking at USB sound cards but then I remembered a while back I had to reset my BIOS, so went in an disabled C-state control, now the speakers are silent again when nothing is playing. 

No way to take the old speakers apart to fix the rattling grill, but the sub-woofer can come apart and I've re-glued and put foam in, can not figure out what it causing the rattling sound at certain frequencies.  Now that I have the replacement I can be more aggressive taking it apart and see if I can find the darn rattle.  I'd like to use it somewhere if I can get that annoying sound to go away.

[MartyS (Gromit)]

I was still getting slight CPU crackle in my speakers.  It was getting too annoying so I broke down and got a sound card, now my speakers are completely silent.  I had a cheap USB to headphone dongle that I used for the last day just to make sure it wasn't the speakers.

Got an ASUS Xonar SE card, $40 at Amazon.  I have 30+ year old Sound Blaster cards lying around that cost way more than that and they were low end ones, this card at $40 was a high end one...