General computer talk/advice

Sounds nice! The SSD boosts performance really well. 6 gb RAM is also great. 4 gb is the bare minimum for me.
I used my HP Envy (15") for casual gaming, ArchiCAD and programming, but it was just too thick and heavy...
So I swapped that for a Panasonic Toughpad FZ-G1 and got the smaller Dell. I don't use CAD anymore and I have a desktop for gaming.

 

Tbh, I've ran HDD only on my desktop for many many years. Then I've ran the raid cache setup this had from factory (essentially using a raid controller to combine a discrete SSD and HDD together into a hybrid drive) and now its running pure SSD boot drive.

I'm still not sold as SSD being necessary. It is nice having power on take no time at all (actually limited by how long my CPU can crunch its way through the BIOS steps), civ 5 open in a reasonable time and not having to wait long for visual studio. But I've never had an issue with simply turning a PC on and arranging my work environment while it boots or similar.

It is certainly nice to actually be able to have both the small SSD boot drive + larger HDD in one laptop though, dont get that often.

 

Hey guys i have noticed that most of you have your PC specs underneath every post. How do you do it?

 

Go to settings -> edit signature

 

There's no way to swap a GPU if the PC is on. Don't do this, ever. Power off and unplug the PC before removing any components, other than maybe a hard drive (although make sure to unmount those from the OS first, and it's still a bad idea).
To hot swap a GPU, you'd need the system to disable the GPU, switch over to integrated graphics if available, then detect to and switch to the new GPU, all at runtime. Never heard of things like GPUs or RAM being detected at any time after POST. And honestly I have no idea why you'd ever want to do such a thing anyway.

Don't buy a 500 series, it's too old. Old parts are never worth buying. Go for a 260X.
You might also want to spend a bit more on GPU, you could go for an i3-4160 or an FX-6300 and a 950 or R7 370.

 

Microsoft have confirmed the GPU is in the keyboard.

And little known feature, PCIe does support runtime disable and swap.

heres something. Apples thunderbolt. Plain and simple. Its PCIe, and hot swaps. Devices on the other end of a thunderbolt bus are standard PCIe cards with no knowledge that they are actually running on thunderbolt.

 

Huh, TIL. Still not a standard thing you can do in any PC, though.

 

Part of the reason why some PCIe cards have contacts that dont reach the edge of the connector, except for the grounds which do. Ground being first to make contact and last to break contact can aid in prevention of damage to a device during removal. Its also why USB connectors have longer contacts on 5v and ground than they do data.

Any power surge during disconnect of data can still be grounded.


Not that I advise ripping GPUs out. You are correct that most machines dont *expect* that to be happening. I'd imagine microsoft have employed some driver trickery to allow windows to do it, although I think server editions have done it before.

 

Well windows 10 just destroyed my computer... Giving a boot error on startup and if I try to reinstall windows 7 from DVD my os drive does not show up and I am not formating my media drive... Any ideas?

 

Does your boot drive show up in BIOS? What is the boot error? Do you have a code?

It seems unlikely that an OS upgrade would kill a hard drive.

 

That's the error screen I see... And that's still there after formating and installing Ubuntu...

 

Looks like a bad boot sector. A Windows reinstall should work, you could also try a repair from install drive.

 

Can't, Windows install disc won't see the drive I want to install to and when it saw the Ubuntu partitions on that drive I couldn't delete them

 

Does the drive show up in BIOS?

 

Yep...

 

Do you have a linux installation drive? If you do, try that and see if the drive shows up, it should. Format it as NTFS, or just delete all partitions, and you should be able to install Windows.

 

I want to put windows on disk 2 but as you can see the options are all greyed out. I don't know why and Idk what else I can do. I used an Ubuntu disc to create the smaller partitions but it won't even load that. It just gives me the windows boot error. Also Ubuntu last night gave me the option to use ntfs but today it doesn't.

Also windows install is telling me it's plugged in via USB or IEEE 1394 despite being sata


Nevermind... I just realized that's my USB backup drive

Well I'm screwed... Ubuntu can't see my drives so it won't install... Windows won't see them either. Just wonderful

 

You need the partitions and file systems to be set up properly. Windows can be installed on NTFS (or FAT32, but not recommended). If I remember correctly, Linus will install on NTFS as well. I use MiniTool Partition Wizard to work with partitions. You will need to make a bootable CD.

 

Sorted out my GPU overheating issue a bit, although it looked fairly clean there was a lot of dust caked around where the heat sink actually touches the card. Cleaning that out made a huge difference in temperature both at idle and under load. However in certain games it'd still get to heat levels that I didn't like.
My work around was simple enough. I removed the window from the side of my case, cut out a piece of fiberglass window screen, and put it where the window would normally go (it's held in place under the window bezel).
I thought doing this would have a negative effect on my airflow, which it probably does, but it works pretty great. it's currently 74F (23C) in my room, and it's been idling at 84F (29C), which is cooler than it's ever idled. In Beam on the east coast map I put all of the settings to max with dynamic reflections and it only hit 77c, in the past it'd easily reach over 90C and I'd have to shut it off.
Anyone see any reason why I shouldn't keep it like this?

 

Dust.

Also, what GPU is it? 77C is perfectly normal for something like a 290X or older Nvidia cards.