Recent content by zandor

So I finally got around to buying a 4k player and a handful of movies. Movies were just a few things I picked out from what Amazon had for next day delivery. Dune 1 & 2, Oppenheimer, and a Lord of the Rings set. Then what do I do? Screw up and watch Dune 1 on regular Blu-Ray. Sat there the...

Lack of game support. All the NV app can do for game settings most of the time is just edit config files. I don't think this should be enabled by default. AI assisted performance tuning would be a nice feature for the clueless, but to really be useful the AI agent would have to be built into...

High end CWT unit. A bit cheaper than a Seasonic Prime TX-1600. $490 vs. $560 on Newegg. Should be good. Most of Corsair's good stuff is made by CWT.

My biggest beef with "no disc" doesn't have anything to do with games. Usually I play them once or twice, then forget about them. The thing that makes me mad about discs going away is the low quality replacement for Blu-Ray. Streaming bitrates stink. I think MS should include a disc drive on...

That's one thing I really wish AMD and Intel would do for gamers - stop tying the fastest clocks to the biggest chips. Why do we have to get "9" chip core counts to get max clocks? Just make a "gamer edition" or whatever "7" and/or "5" chip with max clocks and charge appropriately. And of...

+10 to that. I'm in a similar position. Back in late 2024 I was working on a new build while waiting for next gen cards to come out. New build would leave me short a vid card. Somehow Microcenter decided that to let people order ARC B580s for pickup on launch day. So I bought one. It was...

+1 and... Top mount or bust!

One up side with that is the extra cache should reduce the need to get higher clocked ram, at least for gaming. It'll make the big cache Intel chips act more like AMD X3D. So our 6400 CL32 won't be too bad. Sure faster would be nice, but how much do you want to pay for a few %?

TechSpot ran some performance tests on the remaster and got some interesting results. They ran their tests in Novigrad and noted that performance was a better outside the city. Looks like there's some sort of bottleneck with ray tracing and path tracing. PT tops out at about 60fps and RT just...

I voted no because I think the Steam name is more likely to stick around. I think it's unlikely either one of them will just disappear. Even if Valve or CD Projekt went bankrupt someone would probably buy their assets. Stores get merged and you still have your games. I think the Steam name...

Yeah, you need an i7 or a 1600 Xeon (single socket only) to do a multiplier OC on X79. Xeon 1680v2 is kinda the ultimate OC chip for that platform. 8 cores & you can use the multiplier. X79 boards can run 2600 series dual capable Xeons, but those are multiplier locked. Alas, 1600 only goes...

There's a series of "Post your Workstations" over in Cases & Case Modding > Case Mod Gallery 2026 version is here.

A couple years from now prices will either be worse or we'll have a massive AI crash, lots of spare HBM all over the place, the return of Vega (sort of - higher end gaming GPUs using HBM), and slow sales for gaming cards because there's a recession and people are broke? Personally I'm expecting...

That's pretty close to spot on. It's an enthusiast build. Custom build by a 48yo (at the time) software engineer. It's not new, and now I'm almost 50. The hole in the side fan cage is there to avoid putting too much strain on the 12V-2x6 cable. The cut sucks because I suck at using a...

No, it's not a big deal at all. I was asking That_Sound_Guy who builds a rig like this because he said he could pick out the type of person who builds a rig based on a picture. So I figured it'd be fun to post my rig and see what he comes up with.