Tech Gaming Hardware discussion (& Hardware Sales) thread

[Madmick]

@Madmick

What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree?

I think that external amplifier "Breakout Box" with all the inputs is a more attractive product than the discrete sound card.

Hardware Canucks has been putting out a lot of shill videos the past few years, and this is one. I don't care for their channel. It's become sponsored content masquerading as tech review.

Frankly, the EMI "power line noise corruption" sounds like Creative's attempt to reintroduce an old sales pitch that turned out to be hot air (as a practical concern) in the recent past, and justify it on the rationale the new RTX cards are the culprit. He says he could hear the mouse cursor while using onboard audio, but he doesn't provide a sound recording of this? Wow. I'm calling bullshit. I don't even find this credible with the dirt cheapest motherboards and PSUs on the market today, and obviously those aren't part of his setup (with the Taichi).

The high-end motherboards build in shielding to prevent power emissions from corrupting the signals of nearby lanes, and more stable power also contributes to less noise distortion. Notice the chart he supplies is a dBV chart comparing a GTX 1060 (1.0930V) to an RTX 2080 (1.0500V)? Even if the perceivable sound pressure distortion is greater relative to a 1V baseline the RTX 2080 is operating at a lower voltage level, and of course these GPUs also operate on entirely different levels of power draw. It's such a dishonest comparison, and I don't think that's a mistake. Also, why didn't he boost the dBa level while the RTX 2070 was in and edit the video to compare that to when it was boosted with the RTX 2080 Ti in? Doesn't stop there. Later, when he demonstrates the noise with the dBa bump using the dynamic vs. condenser microphones, do you notice he doesn't juxtapose onboard audio vs. the Creative sound card with the condenser mic? Thanks, Hardwarecanucks! You just did a splendid job of showing me why I should pay more for a condenser mic if I'm a streamer. You didn't show me a damn thing about onboard vs. discrete audio.

What garbage.

Besides, if one owns an RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti, and notices a level of white noise that is bothering him, the best solution is the road already traveled when the sound card makers pushed this fear years ago: to take the sound card outside the case. That's why external DAC+Amp combos blew up in the audiophile community.

 

[KaNesDeath]

Anyone know of a way to unzip a *.gz file without downloading and installing Winzip?

 

[Gregolian]

Anyone know of a way to unzip a *.gz file without downloading and installing Winzip?

Winrar?

 

[Madmick]

Anyone know of a way to unzip a *.gz file without downloading and installing Winzip?

https://extract.me/

 

[KaNesDeath]

https://extract.me/

Hmm, it extracts but Windows Defender blocks me from downloading the extracted file : (

 

[Madmick]

Hmm, it extracts but Windows Defender blocks me from downloading the extracted file : (

You can turn off Windows Defender, or grant an exception, download the file, then upload to check it here before opening it:
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/

Why in the hell don't have you have 7-Zip, btw? Best freeware extractor out there. Should be on every comp:
https://www.7-zip.org/download.html

 

[KaNesDeath]

Why in the hell don't have you have 7-Zip, btw?

Last time i had to use file compression software was 2009. To save bandwidth costs FaceIT uses it on their game demos.

On my Pc i avoid installing software that doesnt get used frequently.

 

[Madmick]

Last time i had to use file compression software was 2009. To save bandwidth costs FaceIT uses it on their game demos.

On my Pc i avoid installing software that doesnt get used frequently.

Well, I immediately know three things about you.

1. You're not a hacker.
2. You're not an academic researcher or an avid eBook/Comic reader.
3. You're not into jpeg porn.

 

[KaNesDeath]

Well, I immediately know three things about you.

From the lethargic practices of office life it was kind of interesting. Bosses feared the highest ranking employee was becoming disgruntled. They tasked me in private to backup all of our servers in duplicate. Two external HDD's wasnt sufficient, they wanted DVD-R's with the external HDD. Took seven hours to make all those DVD-R's

 

[jefferz]

AMD Settles FX Bulldozer False Advertising Lawsuit for Roughly $35 a Chip
Today, AMD has settled a class-action lawsuit for false advertising of its Bulldozer chips for a total of $12.5 million, of which lawyers could take up to 30%, or $3.63 million. That could leave an $8.87 million pot for Bulldozer owners to split among themselves (provided they file a claim).

AMD's Bulldozer lineup of chips, which debuted back in 2011, were largely considered a flop due to their high power consumption, inability to hit rated boost speeds, and generally lackluster performance in comparison to Intel's competing Sandy Bridge chips. Thus, Bulldozer is largely credited as the chip that touched off AMD's decline in the desktop PC processor market, which eventually found the company teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. That situation wasn't rectified until the arrival of the Ryzen series of chips in 2017.

To make matters worse for the then-embattled AMD, the company advertised the chips as eight-core models, when in fact they featured four modules that each had two execution cores with shared resources, like a shared front end, cache, and floating point unit, meaning the cores were incapable of operating independently. AMD maintained that the dual-core modules still met the definition of two traditional cores, but some customers disagreed.

That led to a long-running class-action false advertisement lawsuit that was filed in 2015, but AMD settled the lawsuit today for a paltry $12.1 million. The settlement works out to roughly $35 a chip, provided that the number of claimants meets the projections of the court. Unfortunately, the court only predicts that 1/5th of the customers that purchased a Bulldozer chip will come forward to claim their settlement.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/a...ion-lawsuit-eight-cores-settlement,40256.html

 

[jefferz]

Thermaltake C32 midtower case for $67. Tempered glass and 2 200mm ARGB fans.
Amazon product ASIN B07NLZY34Y

 

[Madmick]

AMD Threadripper 3000 32-Core Benchmark Leak Reveals 30% Performance Boost

The latest benchmark of AMD's Zen 2-based 3rd Generation 32-core Threadripper has appeared and this time in the UserBenchmark database, revealing its performance compared to its predecessor, the Threadripper 2990WX, and it's very good news.

AMD's 3rd Gen Threadripper CPUs will use the same 7nm manufacturing process and chiplet design as Ryzen and Epyc CPUs

AMD
The benchmark entry, spotted by Wccftech, states base and boost frequencies of 3.6GHz and 4.2GHz, the former being 600MHz higher than the 2990WX. The scores are the most interesting part, though as both single-core and multi-core benchmarks show massive performance uplift. The multi-threaded score hits 5,649 points compared to just 4,328 points for the 2990WX - that's a 31% increase in multi-threaded performance.

Benchmark results for an engineering sample of AMD's 3rd Gen Threadripper have appeared online

ANTONY LEATHER

The single-core test score was 135 compared to 118 for the older CPU. That's a slightly less impressive but still significant 14% boost, which should help to offer better performance in lightly-threaded tasks - an area the 2990WX wasn't too strong in, although that was in part due to poor Windows optimization and in games there was an Nvidia driver bug too, meaning the poor CPU really wasn't painted in the best light at launch. There's plenty to be excited about, but as usual, the results should be taken with a pinch of salt due to the fact that the CPUs were clearly tested on different systems as well as the new CPU being an engineering sample.

At the speed of a comet. My goodness AMD is bodyslamming Intel in 2019.

 

[ssBaldy]

I think that external amplifier "Breakout Box" with all the inputs is a more attractive product than the discrete sound card.

Hardware Canucks has been putting out a lot of shill videos the past few years, and this is one. I don't care for their channel. It's become sponsored content masquerading as tech review.

Frankly, the EMI "power line noise corruption" sounds like Creative's attempt to reintroduce an old sales pitch that turned out to be hot air (as a practical concern) in the recent past, and justify it on the rationale the new RTX cards are the culprit. He says he could hear the mouse cursor while using onboard audio, but he doesn't provide a sound recording of this? Wow. I'm calling bullshit. I don't even find this credible with the dirt cheapest motherboards and PSUs on the market today, and obviously those aren't part of his setup (with the Taichi).

The high-end motherboards build in shielding to prevent power emissions from corrupting the signals of nearby lanes, and more stable power also contributes to less noise distortion. Notice the chart he supplies is a dBV chart comparing a GTX 1060 (1.0930V) to an RTX 2080 (1.0500V)? Even if the perceivable sound pressure distortion is greater relative to a 1V baseline the RTX 2080 is operating at a lower voltage level, and of course these GPUs also operate on entirely different levels of power draw. It's such a dishonest comparison, and I don't think that's a mistake. Also, why didn't he boost the dBa level while the RTX 2070 was in and edit the video to compare that to when it was boosted with the RTX 2080 Ti in? Doesn't stop there. Later, when he demonstrates the noise with the dBa bump using the dynamic vs. condenser microphones, do you notice he doesn't juxtapose onboard audio vs. the Creative sound card with the condenser mic? Thanks, Hardwarecanucks! You just did a splendid job of showing me why I should pay more for a condenser mic if I'm a streamer. You didn't show me a damn thing about onboard vs. discrete audio.

What garbage.

Besides, if one owns an RTX 2080 or 2080 Ti, and notices a level of white noise that is bothering him, the best solution is the road already traveled when the sound card makers pushed this fear years ago: to take the sound card outside the case. That's why external DAC+Amp combos blew up in the audiophile community.

Yeah, would much prefer external DAC instead of a sound card, especially since top end sound cards are pretty damn expensive. And better to feed your DAC the signal through optics or USB.

 

[Madmick]

 

[Joe_Armstrong]

I want to install the may update 1903.
Windows says my PC isn't ready yet.
I have a Acer Predator.

 

[Unknown Pleasures]

I want to install the may update 1903.
Windows says my PC isn't ready yet.
I have a Acer Predator.

It's probably some other component preventing it. Chances are it'll get resolved in a few days.

 

[jefferz]

 

[ToxicShocker]

I've been trying to find a keyboard for my mom to replace the Microsoft Arc that broke and it's pissing me off how much competition there is.

Searching for compact, USB wireless, not Bluetooth. Nothing at best buy, haven't tried Fry's yet, but Amazon, man fuck Amazon....

Look at the amount of bullshit rinkydink keyboard companies they have. I musta counted 200 different fucking brands.

 

[Madmick]

Big news today:
USB-IF Announces Publication of USB4™ Specification (PDF)

USB4 devices are clear to roll out next year

The USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF) announced today that the organization has finalized the technical specifications for USB4. These specs will be making their way to designers, engineers and manufacturers shortly, meaning we can expect the first USB4 products to hit shelves some time in 2020. The highlight of the new standard is its dual-lane 40Gbps speed, matching Thunderbolt 3's transfer rate and doubling that of USB 3.2's.

USB4 will use the same form factor as USB type-C and will be backward compatible with USB 3.2, USB 2.0, and Thunderbolt 3. In other words, you'll be able to use just about any existing USB type-C device with a machine featuring a USB4 bus. The new connection will be similar to USB3 in that it will support both data and display protocols, so expect to see more monitors feature USB connections in addition to HDMI ports.

The 40Gbps transfer rate of Thunderbolt 3 has been a boon for creative professionals and power users, allowing for streamlined video editing, animation and modeling workflows. It has also enabled the introduction of new product categories such as external GPUs. Having the speed of Thunderbolt 3 as a universal connection will bring these capabilities to everyday consumers, making data backups and transfers a faster and easier experience.

USB4 will support Thunderbolt and double the speed of USB 3.2

It was just last week when we heard that the 20Gbps USB 3.2 connectivity may show up on new devices later this year, but today, Intel is already talking about an even speedier USB4. At a Taipei event earlier today, the company revealed that this next-gen spec will once again utilize dual channels to achieve 40Gbps speeds, even on existing 40Gbps-certified USB-C cables.

Better yet, thanks to Intel finally offering Thunderbolt 3 to manufacturers with open licensing, USB4 will be integrating this tech and thus effectively becoming the "new" Thunderbolt 3. In other words, USB4 will pretty much be the mother of all wired connectivity options, and will be ready for more powerful PCIe plus DisplayPort devices.

This is great news for consumers, as this means 40Gbps is the new baseline for all future USB ports, and this in turn will likely be deployed across products much quicker than Thunderbolt 3 did. To date, there are only 463 devices certified with Thunderbolt 3.

It's still early days for USB4 though, as the USB Promoter Group won't be sharing detailed specs until around mid-2019. Furthermore, there's no word on USB4's compatibility with future versions of Thunderbolt; but Intel did clarify that it will continue promoting the Thunderbolt brand alongside USB4.

 

[Madmick]

I've been trying to find a keyboard for my mom to replace the Microsoft Arc that broke and it's pissing me off how much competition there is.

Searching for compact, USB wireless, not Bluetooth. Nothing at best buy, haven't tried Fry's yet, but Amazon, man fuck Amazon....

Look at the amount of bullshit rinkydink keyboard companies they have. I musta counted 200 different fucking brands.

PCPP tends to function as a bit of a brand-anchored quality control filter for keyboards. I've already selected the "Wireless" filter for you, not Bluetooth, and organized by price:
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/keyboard/#t=2&sort=price&page=1

Notice the filters on the left. You can also filter by Brand, Design Style, if Mechanical (not common with wireless) and according to their Switch type, if Backlit, if "Tenkeyless" (those without the numeric pad on the right hand side-- example pictured below), by Color, and for those packaged with a Mouse combo. Handy to select "No" for the last if you don't need a mouse, and don't want to bear that unnecessary expense.

You're almost certainly going to end up with a Microsoft or Logitech. The Arc is wireless & tenkeyless with an ergonomic style. It's the only one available with those filters.

Amazon does have a lot of crap-- even in their bestseller chart:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/12879431/ref=pd_zg_hrsr_pc