OS Neutral Your Computer For Gaming

[Huntn]

Feel free to discuss any aspect of your gaming computer in this thread.

Huntn PC Upgrade 2024 Part 1
Repair tales of Valor… 🕺🏼
My PC gaming computer (see signature) , one recent night I turn it off after playing for several hours and the next day it won’t start. It starts to start, it lights up and then it goes dark. Power supply is 10 years old, I don’t have a power supply tester and I decide this is the likely culprit. So I buy a new power supply and install it. Nope. Check the CMOS battery, it’s good. Get an inexpensive power supply tester, the old power supply tests ok, the new power supply reads high out of specs 13.9v vs 12v. So I give the old power supply another chance. Nope. I initiate a return of my new power supply And order a new one.
I talk to a repair person, likely culprit is the motherboard. Talk to a friend who repairs computers for a living and he tells me to disconnect everything from the power supply and motherboard except for the motherboard power (24 pin) and the cpu power (4x2). If the power board does not light up, it’s the motherboard. After performing this… the MB does not light up.
I have a Gigabyte Z39UD MB from 2019. Ideally if I can find one online, I don’t have to buy a new CPU and new memory. New ones are over $200 price gouge because they’re discontinued. I find one that’s labeled as boot checked used for $150 on Amazon and ordered that.
Oh, and I pulled out my standby tower out of a box. Last time I used this was at my son’s house, 6 months ago. There it was packed into its original box and put in the back of the car and driven home, where it went into my closet. When I started this up, it went into hard drive check mode and stayed in that mode for over a hour. I briefly got signed in last night and started updating it. It’s slow as molasses as Windows does its thing in the background. Started it this morning, and it’s back to checking the hard drive. Wondering if the hard drive has taken a crap?
Sunday morning standby computer - Boy is it acting strange, I’m concerned my hard drive is n the process of taking a dump. After it announces it can‘t auto repair Windows, or was it my hard drive(?), I perform a clean install of Windows and start updating it. It now seems stable as I start to download a 65GB game, World of Warships, via WiFi.
The new used MB for my primary PC arrives on Monday…
Stay tuned!

 

[bousozoku]

Good luck!

I'm glad I don't have to deal with all of that. My previous tower was a PowerMac G4 dual CPU. I used to specify Windows and OS/2 machines for work but never for games at home. I'm glad to have laptop computers for gaming, even if they're not completely powerful.

 

[Huntn]

Good luck!

I'm glad I don't have to deal with all of that. My previous tower was a PowerMac G4 dual CPU. I used to specify Windows and OS/2 machines for work but never for games at home. I'm glad to have laptop computers for gaming, even if they're not completely powerful.

Well, I could take it too a shop and pay MORE 😉, but since I built this one, I prefer to do it myself. The thing is, if I reach a point where I don’t feel like I’m making progress because the issue is too mysterious, it will go to the shop. When labor fees are added the cost ballon.

My standby computer which I purchased on Amazon for less than $500 has a 3 yr warranty and it’s being prepared to be shipped back at their cost. Even though it has a recent i7 processor and 16gb RAM, and a sub-par graphic card, I would not recommend this for purchase.

link

BTW, my 2016 MBP continues to chug along without issue.

 

[Huntn]

Huntn PC Upgrade 2024 Part 2
The used replacement motherboard arrived, dead on arrival, package that up and returned it to Amazon. The Corsair power supply that I was getting fault readings on, I called Corsair today and text chatted with someone on their website to discover that this one particular setting on my tester is optional and that it doesn’t count so I gave them my readings and they said I had a good power supply.
it’s difficult to find an identical replacement motherboard without being gouged in the price, such as $200 for six-year-old motherboard when I can buy a new motherboard for the same price or less. I started thinking about it and decided I could pay $200 to maintain the status quo or I can spend $600 and upgrade from a ninth generation Intel processor to a 13th generation. My understanding that’s a pretty big jump in performance. So the $600 equates to new motherboard, CPU, memory, power supply, and CPU cooler. The last serious upgrade I did was in 2019 so that’s five years and probably due to upgrade anyway. I’ll keep my current graphic card which is a RTX 2070.
I started on New Egg, but when I got to the checkout, only two of the items I ordered were covered by free shipping so I popped over to Amazon and ordered the items today, and they should be here by tomorrow.

 

[Carrotstick]

The used replacement motherboard arrived, dead on arrival, package that up and returned it to Amazon. The Corsair power supply that I was getting fault readings on, I called Corsair today and text chatted with someone on their website to discover that this one particular setting on my tester is optional and that it doesn’t count so I gave them my readings and they said I had a good power supply.
it’s difficult to find an identical replacement motherboard without being gouged in the price, such as $200 for six-year-old motherboard when I can buy a new motherboard for the same price or less. I started thinking about it and decided I could pay $200 to maintain the status quo or I can spend $600 and upgrade from a ninth generation Intel processor to a 13th generation. My understanding that’s a pretty big jump in performance. So the $600 equates to new motherboard, CPU, memory, power supply, and CPU cooler. The last serious upgrade I did was in 2019 so that’s five years and probably due to upgrade anyway. I’ll keep my current graphic card which is a RTX 2070.
I started on New Egg, but when I got to the checkout, only two of the items I ordered were covered by free shipping so I popped over to Amazon and ordered the items today, and they should be here by tomorrow.

I would recommend an AMD AM5 motherboard and CPU. These have platform longevity till 2027. Meaning Zen 5 and Zen 6 will be supported. Zen 5 is releasing next month and Zen 6 in 2026.

 

[Carrotstick]

My gaming computer is a 12th i5 12400, 32GB DDR4 3200MHz and I recently upgraded from a RX 6750 XT to a RTX 4070 Super.

 

[Huntn]

My gaming computer is a 12th i5 12400, 32GB DDR4 3200MHz and I recently upgraded from a RX 6750 XT to a RTX 4070 Super.

This time I’m going with a 13th i5 13600 DDR5, having upgraded from a 9th gen i7.

 

[Queen6]

BTW, my 2016 MBP continues to chug along without issue.

Just a whipper snapper my 2011 15" is now 12-1/2 years young. Is up 24/7 running as a media server, starting to think it might outlive me...LOL.

Q-6

 

[bousozoku]

ASUS sent me an e-mail about their new 14 inch TUF gaming laptop computer with AMD Ryzen 7 8845HS and GeForce RTX 4060. I went to the website and they started talking about AI and how you could go all the way to some processor name AI. I probably rolled my eyes at that point.

I clicked on Buy to see the configurations and there was only one configuration with the RTX 4060, 1 TB of storage, and 8 GB of RAM with an extra slot open for US$1399.99. I thought that was good for a 14 inch machine, especially considering how much Razer charges. I never found the other models or an ability to update the specifications.

Truthfully, I would like to upgrade the storage since 1 TB keeps things tight. 16 GB of RAM is sufficient and the RTX 3050 Ti is quite good still, given everything I run.

The newer AMD processors seem quite a bit more powerful than my Ryzen 7 5800H.

 

[Lex404]

My PC is old and needs an upgrade, but the fact that I have to change everything (Except SSDs) scares me haha. I also don't play as much as I should to justify the upgrade, and for everything else I'm on MacBook. + I got an xbox and a switch.

ASUS PRIME Z390-P
Intel Core i5-9600KF
MSI Radeon RX 5700 XT EVOKE OC 8G
32 GB DDR4

And yes, the above config is 100% compatible with Hackintosh haha. I remember the mobo needed almost no tweaks, the GPU is compatible OOB.

 

[rm5]

I ordered this Lenovo Legion laptop (specs in signature), but that hasn't arrived yet. Currently, I'm using an HP Z420 that I bought barebone, and threw my spare PC parts in. It runs very well, in fact! Can't wait to see what the Legion is all about though!

 

[Queen6]

Mine is getting on but does all I need it to do and I lucked out on the Silicon Lottery; i7 8750H that can hold full boost all day long (3.9GHz) on all cores, GTX1070 that too is very strong for it's kind, 32GB RAM, dual drives plus externals.

I think about getting a new PC, but seems a waste as this one is fast enough and as long as the FPS is good across the majority of my games I have no need to really worry about it.

Q-6

 

[bousozoku]

I ordered this Lenovo Legion laptop (specs in signature), but that hasn't arrived yet. Currently, I'm using an HP Z420 that I bought barebone, and threw my spare PC parts in. It runs very well, in fact! Can't wait to see what the Legion is all about though!

The Ryzen 7 7840HS is both popular and powerful. My Ryzen 7 5800H is quite good, but the changes in the 7xxx series are amazing. They're talking about the 9xxx series now and I'm just going to wait for a while.

That one in the e-mail ASUS sent me looks amazing, but I'm not quite finished with this one. I wish I was in need.

One weird thing I noticed was that the referred to the display as 2.5 K meaning that it was 2560 x 1600. We used to refer to such a display as 1600p. 4K used to be 2160p because it's 3840 or 4096 for Cinema 4K. Obviously, I'm behind the times, but then, I never processed any of the 4K video I recorded because it was too taxing on my almost new mid-2012 MacBook Pro.

 

[bousozoku]

Mine is getting on but does all I need it to do and I lucked out on the Silicon Lottery; i7 8750H that can hold full boost all day long (3.9GHz) on all cores, GTX1080 that too is very strong for it's kind, 32GB RAM, dual drives plus externals.

I think about getting a new PC, but seems a waste as this one is fast enough and as long as the FPS is good across the majority of my games I have no need to really worry about it.

Q-6

How warm does the room become? Can you melt icebergs?

 

[Huntn]

Huntn PC Upgrade 2024 Part 3
I’ve got quite the tail to tell about this computer upgrade, but if you don’t do your own upgrades, it might be kind of boring. Composing it now I don’t know how smart or dumb you‘ll think I am. Maybe just smart enough to be dangerous. I’ve learned some things.

Right now, I wanna know why it’s taking so freaking long to clone a hard drive with 400 GB of data on it, and my God, whatever you do don’t ever install the windows media creation tool/file on your computer, and then tell it to upgrade (scream…). Anyway, I’ll fill in the blank soon if anyone’s paying attention. 😝🤗

 

[bousozoku]

I’ve got quite the tail to tell about this computer upgrade, but if you don’t do your own upgrades, it might be kind of boring. Composing it now I don’t know how smart or dumb you‘ll think I am. Maybe just smart enough to be dangerous. I’ve learned some things.

Right now, I wanna know why it’s taking so freaking long to clone a hard drive with 400 GB of data on it, and my God, whatever you do don’t ever install the windows media creation tool/file on your computer, and then tell it to upgrade (scream…). Anyway, I’ll fill in the blank soon if anyone’s paying attention. 😝🤗

Cloning software can be a pain, unless you're in the business and can buy the best. They're never as quick as you want them to be, especially if you're dealing with SATA drives.

 

[Queen6]

How warm does the room become? Can you melt icebergs?

LOL it has user selectable power level's and for gaming never full CPU power. I rarely run it fully unlocked these days as have no need. Is most working around Intel's rule as CPU can take a very significant under-volt and PL-2 can suspended indefinitely as long as the BIOS allows.

Useful if I need it to do heavy lifting, but far from a powerful machine these days. It's fast enough for my use and wont be replaced unless it has a critical failure or I start seeing too much slowdown in gaming which will come sooner or later.

Q-6

 

[Queen6]

I’ve got quite the tail to tell about this computer upgrade, but if you don’t do your own upgrades, it might be kind of boring. Composing it now I don’t know how smart or dumb you‘ll think I am. Maybe just smart enough to be dangerous. I’ve learned some things.

Right now, I wanna know why it’s taking so freaking long to clone a hard drive with 400 GB of data on it, and my God, whatever you do don’t ever install the windows media creation tool/file on your computer, and then tell it to upgrade (scream…). Anyway, I’ll fill in the blank soon if anyone’s paying attention. 😝🤗

I never clone as too much chance of inheriting problems. I have all my important data sync'd with my cloud server, just set up the app and leave it to get on with it. Only thing that takes time to install is the games as I have about 150 installed. The mod games are more complex, but they have dedicated folders and can be directly copied to a new drive.

The windows media creation tool works ok, but the instructions are hopeless. Better to ignore Microsoft and just search for a tutorial designed for human beings not AI. If only for gaming better to use the W10/11 ISO and a script to rip out all the bloat.

GitHub - memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall: Personalized Unattended Answer Files that helps automatically debloat and customize Windows 10 & 11 during the installation process.

Personalized Unattended Answer Files that helps automatically debloat and customize Windows 10 & 11 during the installation process. - memstechtips/UnattendedWinstall

github.com

Q-6

 

[Linkbill]

Feel free to discuss any aspect of your gaming computer in this thread.

Repair tales of Valor… 🕺🏼
My PC gaming computer (see signature) , one recent night I turn it off after playing playhop for several hours and the next day it won’t start. It starts to start, it lights up and then it goes dark. Power supply is 10 years old, I don’t have a power supply tester and I decide this is the likely culprit. So I buy a new power supply and install it. Nope. Check the CMOS battery, it’s good. Get an inexpensive power supply tester, the old power supply tests ok, the new power supply reads high out of specs 13.9v vs 12v. So I give the old power supply another chance. Nope. I initiate a return of my new power supply And order a new one.
I talk to a repair person, likely culprit is the motherboard. Talk to a friend who repairs computers for a living and he tells me to disconnect everything from the power supply and motherboard except for the motherboard power (24 pin) and the cpu power (4x2). If the power board does not light up, it’s the motherboard. After performing this… the MB does not light up.
I have a Gigabyte Z39UD MB from 2019. Ideally if I can find one online, I don’t have to buy a new CPU and new memory. New ones are over $200 price gouge because they’re discontinued. I find one that’s labeled as boot checked used for $150 on Amazon and ordered that.
Oh, and I pulled out my standby tower out of a box. Last time I used this was at my son’s house, 6 months ago. There it was packed into its original box and put in the back of the car and driven home, where it went into my closet. When I started this up, it went into hard drive check mode and stayed in that mode for over a hour. I briefly got signed in last night and started updating it. It’s slow as molasses as Windows does its thing in the background. Started it this morning, and it’s back to checking the hard drive. Wondering if the hard drive has taken a crap?
Sunday morning standby computer - Boy is it acting strange, I’m concerned my hard drive is n the process of taking a dump. After it announces it can‘t auto repair Windows, or was it my hard drive(?), I perform a clean install of Windows and start updating it. It now seems stable as I start to download a 65GB game, World of Warships, via WiFi.
The new used MB for my primary PC arrives on Monday…
Stay tuned!

Oh i guess its time to upgrade for me as well so this won't happen. When I played BG3 I had several crashes with a black screen. The power supply is not the newest. Although my 1660 and i-5 9400 seem to be doing well.

 

[Huntn]

Cloning software can be a pain, unless you're in the business and can buy the best. They're never as quick as you want them to be, especially if you're dealing with SATA drives.

Huntn PC Upgrade 2024 Part 4
Upgraded from Windows 10 Home to Pro I paid $5 for Win10Pro* because after swapping out the motherboard, I was having trouble with getting users from Wind10Home days to appear. On the Windows Activation page, I entered the License key and was advised it was already used. I filled out a ticket at the place I purchased it and they told me “it’s a common Problem” (uh huh) gave me instructions to trigger an upgrade which has you call a Microsoft phone number. There a chat bot directs that it will download a page to your phone. There you enter a bunch of numbers that appeared on the Activation Page, and you will be magically activated. I talked to no human being at MS. Then later you’ll find you have a digital license, not the numbered license you entered, I presume because someone else had the number.

*That's legit right? 🤔

Refresh Windows (Warning Will Robinson!)
Before I cloned, I decided to refresh my Windows install, and I, by my doing, lost several hundred GBs of data, fortunately it was all game stuff that could be ressureted. I swear it's not my fault! It has to do with Windows Media Creation Tool which I had used several times before on a USB Thumb Drive. This can be used to refresh Windows, in other words reinstall Windows, but keep your apps and computer structure so everything remains connected.

The short version is do not install this on your computer and do anything but tell it to create the tool on a USB Stick. Don't get the bright idea to run it from the hard drive because... it wipes your TB drive, WITHOUT A WARNING and turns it into the equivalent of 32GB USB thumb drive. And I swear, there was no warning about "formatting your hard drive"!!...at least I don't remember a warning. I'm usually keen on "this step will reformat your drive". 🤯 And then I had to reformat that drive to get it back to normal...

So I actually got my Windows install refreshed and moved onto cloning it. I was cloning a 2 TB drive with 450GB data (C Drive) to a 1TB M.2 SSD. the first. time I started it at 9AM and at 7PM, 12 hrs later a power interruption turned off my computer ending the process. The second time I started at 8PM and it finished up about 15 hrs... My guess is either I was dealing with a free version of a cloning program, they wanted to punish me or because it was dealing with large drives, even though there was only 450GB of data, maybe the program (Macrium Reflect free) has to wade. though all of the sectors even if there is no data to copy? 🤔

But it got done and the clone seems to be stable. Next I moved onto resurrecting my desk top, which more or less it's there, but I've made a lot of changes regarding hard drives, added hard drives, and changed names of hard drives. And I'm also figuring out my users on this computer as having Microsoft accounts or just being local accounts. Actually I started doing that before I cloned the drive...but I have 2 that seem to share the same email address. but have different computer log on passwords? Is that possible? 🤔

 

[bousozoku]

I'm glad you got to a point of accomplishment.

When I was doing software development in agriculture, I also had a second responsibility to help maintain 30+ Windows machines, mostly with Windows NT and Windows 95. We didn't have anti-virus software. For all that I did, I think you have it worse right now.

 

[Queen6]

@Huntn I've almost fallen foul of the same with the Windows Media Creation tool. MS really need to make the instruction clear, running the tool off the main drive with same target will result in it being formatted!!! Refresh will most likely mess up things baring very simple setups (MS apps only) and the option you likely needed is Repair which is buried deep into the process as that will actually fix any corruptions and or errors in the system.

My understanding from memory is;

1. DL & run the tool from C:
2. Tool will ask for a target drive, which should be a thumb drive. MS need to emphasise this more, if not block the tool installing on multi TB drives as it will format with little to no warning
3. Boot PC from the thumb drive
4. Follow instructions, target drive etc.
5. Finally the options to Install, Upgrade, Refresh or Repair

The problem with the tool is it's primarily designed to create & deploy a new installation of Windows, Refresh does not have adequate explanation & warnings and Repair is buried far too deep as that is likely those incurring issue need. It would make more sense to have a Media Creation tool and a separate Repair tool. Refresh should be renamed as IMO it's not capable of helping you out once you have a built system with apps from multiple venders and will likely only create havoc.

TBH is far easier and better to run the the DISM & SFC comands as they will also correct any system errors. I can expand if any are interested with strings that will detect and or repair issues with Windows 10/11 as both DISM & SFC have many parameters. Nothing fancy, just detect & repair...

Q-6

 

[dmccloud]

Here is my current build:

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
32GB DDR4-3600 G.Skill RAM
MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk Max WiFi motherboard
Corsair RM850x 850W PSU
XFX AMD Radeon 6800XT videocard
2x 2TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 SSDs
2x 8TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs
NZXT H9 Flow case
NZXT Kraken 280 AIO (liquid cooler)
7x Lian-Li SL-Infinity 120mm fans
2x Lian-Li SL-Infinity 140mm fans

 

[Macalicious2011]

Here is my current build:

AMD Ryzen 9 5900X
32GB DDR4-3600 G.Skill RAM
MSI MAG B550 Tomahawk Max WiFi motherboard
Corsair RM850x 850W PSU
XFX AMD Radeon 6800XT videocard
2x 2TB Samsung 980 Pro M.2 SSDs
2x 8TB Seagate Barracuda HDDs
NZXT H9 Flow case
NZXT Kraken 280 AIO (liquid cooler)
7x Lian-Li SL-Infinity 120mm fans
2x Lian-Li SL-Infinity 140mm fans

View attachment 2394540 View attachment 2394541

American or British colours? Why do you have so much ram?

 

[Pezimak]

My lovely new Apple Refurb M3 Max 14“ MacBook Pro with 14 core CPU 30 core GPU, 36GB RAM. I have used Crossover to install Diablo 4 currently, wondering if using Fusion and Windows 11 would be the same or worst performance?

I used to work in IT back in the day and went through the gaming PC era, upgrading the graphics card every year or two. Ended up with a dual Xeon PC with MSI motherboard using on board SCSI RAID and two 15,000 SCSI hard drives. Silverstone case and temperature controlled fans. And a flagship Asus GPU can’t remember the model, then I got a Quadro GPU. Then I moved to Mac and my PC ended up at the dump as no one wanted it. It even had dual DVD burners lol. Spent so much money on computers and accessories over the years, lots of different keyboards and mice.

I see these days motherboards can cost several hundred alone, then a couple of grand for the GPU, cases again a few hundred. Top end PC kit these days certainly isn’t cheap. Plus if I built one these days I’d water cool everything I could.