PC Hardware Talk Megathread

[Coys1882]

Everything I'm reading is that making the jump from DDR4 to DDR5 is worth it. Does the CP braintrust agree?

[combustiblefuel]

Originally Posted by Coys1882

Everything I'm reading is that making the jump from DDR4 to DDR5 is worth it. Does the CP braintrust agree?

What are you using it for? Are you trying to keep cost down and trying to re use old parts?

Gaming? Not really . Office work? Not really . 3d rendering? slightly better . Ai modeling ? Yes absolutely. Build8ng a new system from the dround up and not wanting to use your current ram ? Yes.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

I have to think that for future CPUs it's basically going to be impossible to find mobos to support DDR4 so if you're building or upgrading now and go the DDR4 route, I wouldn't buy a new mobo to do it because whatever you put on it is likely going to be the last thing it sees. In other words, if you run DDR4 now, any future upgrade is going to require a new mobo AND new ram.

In some cases that's fine of course, if you know your next build is probably going to be ground-up or near enough and you want to squeeze the life out of what you have now.

[btimbit]

Not so much a hardware question, but can anyone explain what the appeal is in things like frame generation, DLSS and FSR? Because as far as I can tell they just make games look worse, increase latency, and doesn't make them run any better

[photon]

If you can get an acceptable frame rate at your monitor's resolution and the quality settings you want then there really isn't any point IMO.

If you can't, then I've found DLSS an acceptable compromise in most cases. It looks better IMO than just playing at 1080p and letting my monitor upscale that to 1440p or dropping a bunch of the settings to get a playable frame rate (assuming it's at least somewhat close and can use a better quality DLSS). I'd rather see a bit of artifacting in certain patterns that are barely noticeable when actually playing than have to play with severe degradations in graphical settings.

That said I'm usually pretty ok with anything over 60fps, I don't play online multiplayer or anything where the additional frames are going to matter much.

Frame generation I find less compelling since those frames are just visual, it doesn't seem like they'd worthwhile in taking a game from 40fps to 60fps for example. It seems more like a "win more" feature, going from 100fps to 150fps is interesting and all but is it worth the degradation? For me probably not, though I really haven't played with it so I really haven't experienced it. I'm just going by the reviews and analysis videos I've seen, and the way it can mess with the GUI stuff seems like it wouldn't be worth it (mind you I think there's been an update to it since I last looked into it).

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by btimbit

Not so much a hardware question, but can anyone explain what the appeal is in things like frame generation, DLSS and FSR? Because as far as I can tell they just make games look worse, increase latency, and doesn't make them run any better

I think photon covered the topic well, but I wanted to say that there's a pretty huge difference between DLSS and FSR right now. If you think DLSS actually makes a game look worse then you maybe haven't used it in a while? It's shockingly good at what it does. It's not going to let you upscale from 720p to 4k without some artifacts, but for the average person looking to go from 1080p to 1440p (or 1440p to 4k) while keeping all the ultra settings on, it's amazing. It's a new lease on life for a ton of video cards.

[btimbit]

Originally Posted by Mazrim

I think photon covered the topic well, but I wanted to say that there's a pretty huge difference between DLSS and FSR right now. If you think DLSS actually makes a game look worse then you maybe haven't used it in a while? It's shockingly good at what it does. It's not going to let you upscale from 720p to 4k without some artifacts, but for the average person looking to go from 1080p to 1440p (or 1440p to 4k) while keeping all the ultra settings on, it's amazing. It's a new lease on life for a ton of video cards.

I played around with it yesterday, but it's definitely possible that I'm just using it wrong since I still don't get what it's supposed to do

[Mazrim]

Originally Posted by btimbit

I played around with it yesterday, but it's definitely possible that I'm just using it wrong since I still don't get what it's supposed to do

Let's say you're trying to play Alan Wake 2 at 1440p Ultra settings with raytracing and your older RTX card is floating somewhere between 30 and 45 fps. You can set the internal resolution to 1080p and let DLSS upscale to 1440p for you. Theoretically you won't see any quality reduction but the game will run a lot closer to 60 fps since the lower internal resolution is easier on your PC and the upscaler core on DLSS compatible video cards takes care of the upscaling.

There's a few things that could be coming into play for you:
- You just happen to have better eyes than most and can pixel peep the differences.
- You're using the wrong mix of DLSS mode and video quality settings in the game for your computer (DLSS Performance, Balanced and Quality all do different things so you might need to play with those)
- You're not matching your monitor's native resolution and a multiple of the refresh rate which probably means it looks bad regardless of what you're doing in the settings.

All I know about frame generation is from watching videos online, but they all seemed fairly conclusive that it's a powerful tool. It can introduce significant lag on underpowered hardware depending on your settings, and I believe I saw a digital foundry video where they showed raytracing getting a shimmering effect in Cyberpunk RT Overdrive mode. Sounds like Nvidia is dealing with that via ray reconstruction in a future update.

[btimbit]

Here's an example (embeds are compressed by most browsers so full size link are included too)

1440p DLSS Quality on

Spoiler!

full screen link
https://ibb.co/3T7qh2L

1440p No DLSS, all other settings the same

Spoiler!

full screen link
https://ibb.co/1mC3FRb

Looks like I did gain 20fps with DLSS, but everything is just a bit blurry. I can gain more with just leaving DLSS off and reducing minor graphics settings, and still look better



I'm guessing it's just like photon said and I'm simply not benefiting from it because my PC is powerful enough anyway? Later tonight or tomorrow I'll fiddle with it in VR since that's more taxing on the system

The main reason I ask is whenever I mention doing a new build next year and going from my 3080 to maybe a 7900xtx people point out that I'll miss out on DLSS, but I'm trying to figure out if that's really something that bugs me or not

[DoubleK]

Any Cyber Monday sales or recommendations for RGB case fans?

Wife has approved some bling for the case.

[btimbit]

Originally Posted by DoubleK

Any Cyber Monday sales or recommendations for RGB case fans?

Wife has approved some bling for the case.

Saw the Lian Li Unifan's were $20 a piece on newegg earlier, that's almost 50% off

[calumniate]

My secondary SSD seems to be acting strange. Like sometimes it's fine and other times even going into windows explorer takes forever with it and the read / write rates are almost frozen. Not sure what to make of it :/

[DownInFlames]

You could check the SSD’s health using CrystalDiskInfo or the manufacturer’s app like Samsung Magician. SSDs have a limited lifespan and it could be failing.

[calumniate]

Originally Posted by DownInFlames

You could check the SSD’s health using CrystalDiskInfo or the manufacturer’s app like Samsung Magician. SSDs have a limited lifespan and it could be failing.

Yeah it's only a few months old and tools like that either say it's great or they crash wondering 'where is this thing'.

I also did a trim on it and the first time, it hung up. Today I'm doing trims on it and you can see the status bar fly. Think I have it fixed... just unplugged it and replugged it.

Thanks for the tip though! Crystaldisk is saying >500mb/s so I think it's fine. My computer has some advanced parts but a very old motherboard

[photon]

Wouldn't hurt to load Samsung Magician and check the lifespan rating. Samsung did have some issues with that and I had an SSD that I had for less than a year that showed my SSD life was 100% used up, which was impossible, so either the drive was bugged or I was sent a used drive rather than a new one.

[photon]

Finally made the plunge to Windows 11, my Windows 10 install was starting to do weird things.. I'd swapped the motherboard/CPU combo out from underneath it at least twice if not more, so it was time.

So far I hate I can't move the task bar to be vertical on the left hand side of the screen.

[DownInFlames]

Rotate your monitor 90 degrees. Problem solved.

I’m sure there’s an app out there that will give you a proper fix.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Well this is stupid. I have 2 1440p monitors and a KVM switch I use to swap between my home PC and work laptop/dock, and it's worked great for years. But suddenly out of the blue today while I'm using my PC both monitors shut off, come back on after a few seconds, but then I notice the resolution on my left monitor is off. The right monitor is still at 2560x1440, but the left is stuck at 2048x1080. If I bypass the KVM everything is fine, but for whatever reason the KVM can no longer output 1440p to both monitors. I tried disconnecting everything to make sure it power cycled, but no luck. Is it normal for a KVM to half-#### the bed like that?

[Galakanokis]

Originally Posted by photon

Finally made the plunge to Windows 11, my Windows 10 install was starting to do weird things.. I'd swapped the motherboard/CPU combo out from underneath it at least twice if not more, so it was time.

So far I hate I can't move the task bar to be vertical on the left hand side of the screen.

Some software might do it but far from ideal. Start11 or StartAllBack. They might have options to move the taskbar vertical. Updates potentially break the setup though.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by Galakanokis

Some software might do it but far from ideal. Start11 or StartAllBack. They might have options to move the taskbar vertical. Updates potentially break the setup though.

I run Start11 on Win11, for me it's great as I can make the start menu and task bar behave exactly like I had it setup in Windows 10. After looking at the options though there is no vertical taskbar support, you can only have it on the bottom or top of the screen