BF2S Forums Tech: Open thread

I used to rock a full tower with a custom water loop (there's even pictures buried somewhere deep in this forum). The tower was steel and weighed more than me. It didn't bother me but it did eventually get in the way.

Since then I've been rocking much more modest mid-towers. The problem I find nowadays is everything is already built into the MB so there's no reason to have more than 1 expansion slot for your video card. Take all that extra space, rearrange some of the other components (like power supply) and you can fit the same amount of stuff into a much smaller space. Enter ITX cases.

I also keep my box on my desk so space is at a premium.

PSU fan on my modular small form factor (SFX) silverstone is on the way out. it has lasted < 12 months. really not happy to draw the short straw here. RMA process takes ~ 28 days. so that's a month without a PC i haven't even had for a year.

the irony is not lost on me that i forked out exorbitant amounts for fancy fans (which are indeed silent), and now the bearing in my fucking PSU fan starts to make my PC sound like a hamster on a wheel 24/7. the only fan i can't really take apart and replace myself, not fancying lethal amounts of electricity passing through my body for the sake of a £2.50 bearing.

uziq wrote:

re: IEMS.

these are back in stock on drop and with $50 off. they are very, very good.
https://drop.com/buy/drop-jvc-ha-fdx1-d … -iem/story

buy some and thank me later. then please ship me a pair so i can skip the customs charges from drop.

link wrote:

To negotiate the best possible price for our customers, we agree to hide prices prior to logging in.

Good luck with that deal. Imma head out

I bought an ultralight backpacking tent from Drop. Designed by a well-known thru-hiker and product designer. The website is exactly as you describe. The website is solid and offers deep discounts on well-regarded products

i would really get a pair for myself if drop didn't have +£75 customs charges. us britishers and europeeens are left waiting for drop stuff to wash-up on ebay, normally.

Please let me know if you can find a RTX 3080 at MSRP. It is supposed to be more that twice as powerful as what I have right meow.

Retailers I have never heard of have it in stock for over a thousand dollars.

Amazon has listing in the $1500 range. No way in hell I am going to pay that even if I need this in my life.

I yadda yadda'd in the other thread about my GPU woos. The setup I have actually puts the GPU to work. I am hoping maybe the whole thing was just an issue with old drivers that I updated just now though.

Bitcoin is currently worth $32,000. In the time of global pandemic and unlimited corporate bailouts what is the safest investment option around? Internet money.

My PSU isn't modest.

I am wondering if I just had a driver issue earlier though. My GPU seems to be doing better than before in task manager.

I built the computer before I built the setup I have now. Look at the purchase date: April. If I knew this is how this all would continue, I would have went with a much higher watt PSU. I guess I could just yank the 650w PSU with a bigger one but I am just nervous as to whether it would physically fit in the midtower I have.

Still this is all just speculating. The GPU isn't going to become available/reasonable anytime soon.

This all very true. I guess I just got annoyed by the blue screen during work. Hopefully the driver update fixed the issue. I will still continue to be angry at bitcoin and GPU price gouging though.

Thank you again for the talking down father Uzique, Filipino priest

I'll add that generally you're safe with a PSU that meets the recommendations of one of the many wattage calculators (who don't like to underrecommend) out there. I usually toss on a few extra for possible overclocks and additional storage. The thing to spend most of your time looking for are definitely quality builds and components.

For recommends, I like to start by looking for Seasonics and failing that, PSUs manufactured by Seasonic and rebranded Corsair, etc. Look for things like coil whine complaints (been an off and on thing for seasonic sadly), faulty return complaints, and generally keep in mind that within one seller, some models are good, some are bad. More common knowledge stuff for builders than revealing info, though.

I guess bequiet has a 1500W psu now for the big time tower builds? CWT as the mfg seems like a bit of an "average" choice, but I haven't seen any of the tests.

2070 super definitely ready to play some ray tracing, but details will still be down due to cpu/ram bottleneck. Keeping my pattern, won't upgrade to the 30x0 series probably. Maybe not even 40x0 if there's nothing I want to play.

Two of my PSUs have been making high frequency pulsed noises for a while, when the PC is off. Meeeep Meeeep Meeeep just within the audible range and very quiet.
Are they about to die?

I checked out that Drop site discussed above. Some really nice things there. Hilarious that there's a hobby market venn diagram overlap between mechanical keyboards and headphones. I think there's a lot to unpack there. I mean, I'm in that section of the diagram myself...but man, it's never been presented to me so starkly.