Recent content by athenian200

That could be the issue, I do remember the disc looking "dirty" after being in the drive for some reason, like there was some weird residue on it. I just checked the warranty on the site... and it has a warranty of exactly one year. So it failed pretty much EXACTLY when the warranty was up, and...

Yeah, I did try that, and also tried downgrading the firmware because apparently it got silently upgraded earlier this year, and I wasn't even asked if I wanted to do that. I suspect that the firmware update might have played a role in bricking it, and that the update I was fed wasn't intended...

I have this Blu-Ray burner that can no longer read DVDs, and I confirmed it was a hardware problem. It can still playback Blu-Ray discs, but I have a huge library of both software and movie DVDs and that is unfortunately a deal breaker. I wound up having to replace the Blu-Ray player with a...

I don't think they're still made, but I have an older OEM case that is either a Lian Li or a knock-off that looks very close. It's made of aluminum but is painted black.

I heard nVidia just decided not to launch the 3070 Ti Founder's Edition in the US. I've seen it on eBay when I include international listings, especially in Europe. The fact that AIB 3070 Ti is available also makes me doubt it's a chip shortage issue, seems more likely that nVidia was pressured...

There is one thing I would like to note because I'm a user of Oracle Solaris and OpenIndiana. nVidia's Unix drivers are not as bad as you're being led to believe by the out of the box experience in many Linux distributions. They use something called "nouveau" out of the box because of their...

That's what I'm thinking too, that eventually the demand will be met even though it's taking a long time. A lot of the people willing to pay the current prices already have a card. So if the supply eventually reaches a point where there's more cards than people willing to pay the current prices...

If you don't want to buy an SSD, there's always ReadyBoost: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost Basically, if the laptop happens to have an SD card slot or a working USB port, you can use any flash storage device you have lying around as cache to avoid having to access the slow hard...

That's still a perfectly serviceable laptop. I would say it's still good enough to use for light web surfing and productivity tasks. If it has a dedicated GPU, you could probably run a few games on it. I would say that's a good laptop to take with you on trips where you're worried it might get...

The GTX 3090 can pull 350W even without overclocking, and considering I typically have to buy a PSU that can do 100W over what the manufacturer recommends for stability at stock speeds, I'd say overclocking a 3090 on an 850W PSU might be pushing it. I looked at how much power some of the factory...

That's a really good point as to why this kind of ruins the fun of buying a new GPU. I have the money to buy one, but I find I don't want to because it's just not a good deal, and part of what made the RTX 30 series exciting was the idea of getting RTX 20 series performance for less money. I...

They have discontinued the 16 series to focus on the RTX 30 cards, it seems. They only kept making them as long as they did to relieve supply issues (usually they would have stopped shortly before or after the launch of the new cards), but now they're just going to pump out as many RTX 30 cards...

The reason two sticks are generally better is because most motherboards only support a dual channel configuration, and generally the ideal configuration is one stick per channel. So if you have a dual channel configuration, usually having one stick on each channel should allow you to reach the...

The 2080 Ti goes for like $1200 these days, so if you can get even $1000 for it, you're only out $500. Having an existing high-end GPU to sell off after you buy the new one leaves you in a much better position right now, actually. So people who have high end cards and want an even better one can...

A GT 1030 is significantly better than nothing. It has built in HEVC decoding, and in terms of gaming it's pretty much equivalent to a 560 Ti or a 650 Ti. The big advantage of a GT 1030 over an older card like a 560 Ti is lower power consumption, better video decoder, more modern drivers, and...