My 1440p monitor died on me so I'm looking to upgrade to a 4K monitor, to be used with my home+work laptops, some older game consoles and an aging Linux PC.

The aging PC is the problem: it's an i5-6600 on an Asus B150M-A. It lacks DP and its HDMI port can't do 4k60.

I vaguely recall there being super cheap graphics cards meant for exactly this sort of thing, just a low end GPU with a bunch of ports, but I can't seem to find much, especially not AMD (Linux + Nvidia remains meh)

Suggestions? Perhaps a minimally invasive upgrade to the PC? Or just stick it out at 1440p (non-integer scaling, ugh) until I can upgrade properly?

Was geuninly just out browsing for a new CPU cooler and then this shit appeared out of nowhere xD

Link as proof i have not edited this: https://www.newegg.com/p/0VE-01P6-00006

Hello,

I've been looking into new laptops, trying to get back into Tech work after about ten years out due to a couple spinal injuries, and hoping for some advice.

TLDR: Laptop for coworking space, flexible AMD hardware preference, NPU for LLM work, Linux SysAdmin practice, metal case/chassis for heat dissipation, as budget friendly as possible.

I'd need a laptop due to limited space and to stay mobile depending on any particular job; mostly remote and may need to go to a local coworking space.

I'm hesitant about LLM usage, but know it's here at least now and I should be familiar with the technology.

I'm considering experimenting with mostly smaller scale LLMs, and maybe whatever else I can get working, 'feasibly', locally;

• Building as much of my own models if I am able to
• Creating/curating training data sets
• Training models on those as best as capable
• Experimenting with suitably sized models from my training or pre-trained
• Testing 'agents’/methods/whatever else these types of quality improvements are being called

So, I'm looking at machines with NPUs for that, though I hadn't heard of these until I started looking into machines just recently. Any advice, guidance, rants, lectures, preaches related to that are all welcome and appreciated. Truly.

I trend towards AMD hardware. Just a preference of which corporation to send my money/support to. It may be that higher performing, lower priced, or more "ethical/moral/customer considerate" hardware exists. I'm unfamiliar, though, and these preferences were admittedly made from younger years and minimal information. Please correct as you see fit.

Additionally, I've had better results with Linux and AMD, when I've needed to use it; for continuing to use older machines, Linux SysAdmin practice, or Windows avoidance. Though, LLM work might be in early stages in Linux at the moment.

I am on the fence/generally consider against HP with how they've been with their products. Similarly, any statements or experiences with HP's computers; advising avoidance, stating they're not as problematic as their printers, or anything you feel relevant or helpful; will be highly regarded.

Yet, the lowest priced laptop I've found, which also has some local LLM options, seems to be this HP Omnibook 3 14' (AMD Ryzen AI 7 350, 16G).

HP Omnibook, HP Website

I also found this Lenovo Ideapad 5 with about the same hardware. Yet, higher price even before tax.

Lenovo Ideapad, Costco Website

I've mostly found these CPUs with 16G of RAM. Preferably, I'd like 32G, for some additional memory with LLM training/usage practice. Outside of that alone, I'd likely do fine with 16.

I'd considered metal bodies/chassis for heat dissipation if I'm working the processors with the LLM practice; likely adding a laptop stand and/or cooling pad (if not included directly in the stand).

Sorry for the novel, but hopefully that helps with describing what I'm hoping towards.

I very much appreciate you taking the time to read my post. Thank you very much for any guidance or statements you may feel able to make.

Have a great weekend.

What's the 5 pin plug on the right for?

The fans connected to this controller have stopped lighting up all at once. They still blow and can adjust their speed. Just no light.

Can I control their light/colour from JRGB on my motherboard?

I don't have a cable for the 5 pin socket on the right.

My kid is reaching an age where we want to start introducing a real computer and it needs to be a laptop since we don't want it to stand around all the time.

I am looking for something cheaper, second hand or refurbished laptop, want something to install Linux on it.

Since I live in Europe I looked for shops that sell refurbished laptops of all kinds and stumbled upon this one: https://www.ecopc.com/en/

Anyone have any experience ordering there? It looks pretty good and offers 2 years warranty still. Sounds too good really.

Alternatively if anyone has suggestions for other shops like this, preferably within Europe for easier shipping, I'd appreciate it.

Hey guys,

I'm sad. I absolutely love this mouse (best replacement for the Rival 310 I could find) but a firmware update seems to have rendered it nearly unusable. I was using it without the Basecamp software, but I wanted to change a couple things so I installed it. It said the mouse needed a firmware update, I said yes, it updated fine, then it won't detect the mouse anymore, the scroll wheel quit, and sensor is acting weird, and the LED turned off. I am hoping it's not ruined.

Does anyone know a hardware factory reset I can do on it?

Hi, in my current PC i have an RX 580 8gb, Ryzen 5 2600 and 32gb of RAM 3000mhz CL 16 (its 3200mhz but i had stability issues and had to put them at 3000).

I recently bought a 165hz monitor but i struggle to reach that fps in CS2, which is the main game i play. I read that its a CPU game, so i guess its time to update the 2600. My goal is basically reaching around the 165-200 fps line in CS2 to benefit from the monitor with the least money possible, but if i get a CPU that will future-proof my build for some years i won't complain. (mind that i basically never play very demanding games, and when i do i don't have problems favouring fps over graphics, after all the monitor is a TN haha)

Reading around i stumbled across the 5 5600x (read also a lot about the 5700x3d but its 150 euro more so no thanks) or the 5700x. (if you have other things in mind suggest freely im open to anything)

So my question is which one should i buy and at which price? After a very quick search the 5600x is around 105€ and the 5700x 115€. Also, will the GPU bottleneck be a big problem? Btw i'll run memtest86 to check if the RAM is faulty cause i was on 3000mhz for years but i feel like if i upgrade the CPU i should at least max the ram frequency.

Hi,

I am currently looking for a new chair I can game and work in. My old chair (70 €, 7 years ago) is now loosing its fake lether and little flakes are everywhere. I am willing to pay a premium.

I found the following chair I liked but I have never heard the brand Spawn before. Since I would like to buy this once and if possible a good product I would like to now if anybody has any experience. There is not even on Amazon a rating. And when I clicked through their vendors I couldn’t find any either. I think it is east European company. Maybe there is a language barrier I am facing, since on YouTube I couldn’t find any good reviews either.

Please internet, tell me if I’ll regret my choice if i would buy it.

For anyone who has advice here are my requirements:

• Nice bum cushion
• I am small so the height should be adjustable
• Armrests
• No fake leather please
• Back should be high enough to lean my head against
• Needs to look nice. Please no all black chairs. (Well actually I would like a chair which looks cool/cute/pleasant)
• Rolls, if possible exchangeable
• It doesn’t need to be a gaming chair
• I want to sit on it legs crossed
• Up to 500 but only if I fall in love immediately

Hello guys I currently have a 55-inch TV as my monitor I think it's worth around $500 1080p 60hz nothing crazy, I need a good monitor with 120hz at least and preferably 1440p and OLED, would like it to be bigger than 30 inches but may have to compromise on the size if I want a good one

I am going to be upgrading my graphics card soon. and the ones in my price range are the above mentioned. Which do you think I should get.

As a side note the runners up were a 7900 XTX or 4080 both used. The reason I'm thinking of going with the above two are my Mobo ihas gen 5 PCIE.

Sorry if this is a dumb question. My current gaming setup is a Intel I7-4790k, 32Gb ram and a RTX 2080 Super. I came across a AMD Threadripper 1920x, mobo, 64Gb ram for free basically.

Is that worth the time/effort to swap over? It seems to me it would be, but when I search around for info I get conflicting opinions. So any input/insight is appreciated.

Edit: Thank y'all very much! I think I was overthinking single threaded performance.

I finally started the move over to Linux, and installed a dual boot system. So far liking it, except for 1 or 2 things. The big one is the process of dual booting.

I vaguely remember a friend a bunch of years ago always having the option to pick the OS on startup. Not having to hit F11 to pick the OS. Is there a way to do this? Everything I've found so far is about windows dual booting, which isn't exactly helping.

Here's my setup, so there's an idea of what I'm working with.

Motherboard: MSI MPG Z390 Gaming Edge AC SSD 1 (Windows): Predator GM7000 2TB SSD 2(Linux Mint): Crucial P5 Plus 2TB

I just want to always have the choice of OS when starting up, without always having to hit F11 to get to the boot option. Any help is appreciated.

Edit: In case it matters, I installed windows on SSD 1 without SSD 2 installed, then did the same with Linux, removed SSD 1, and installed Linux to SSD 2 (using their respective slots) then put both in. So I didn't install Linux with the dual boot option on the install screen.

Edit2: Got it working! As suggested, I had to change the boot order so Linux was primary instead of windows. Then had to change the timeout for grub from 0 to 30 (tried 5 but it was still too fast) and once I was able to see grub, I had the option to let it go into mint, run windows, or just pick Mint without waiting.

Way easier than going about it thinking windows first, since it refused to acknowledge i had another OS installed. Now I get to play around with drivers and software, and figure out why I can't align my multiple monitors properly.

Thanks everyone!

I'm looking to get a new keyboard since my current board (Cooler Master K653) is in rough shape, spilled some coffee on it a while back and it's started to not register inputs randomly and sometimes doubletyping instead.

I want 96% or 100%, wired, hotswap, with a budget ~200€. Will mostly be used for casual gaming and some schoolwork.

I've considered Keychron Q6 Pro with K Pro Banana switches, but I've read a few scathing reviews about Keychron from 2024 and 2025, have their quality decreased during the latest years?

EDIT: Thank you all for your replies! I ended up buying a Keychron V6 Max since it was on sale, and Keychron was one of the few manufacturers which came with nordic keycaps as stock.

I dual boot Fedora and Windows with Windows being the gaming OS

I have 2 4tb WD Black SN850X for Windows and a 2tb Crucial T500 for Fedora

From what I can tell of my own research so far the WD Black's use their own proprietary controller but the Crucial uses a phison controller but I don't use it on Windows because its completely dedicated to Linux

From the information I have they should be fine since but I just wanted a second opinion

Would you pick a subtle gaming laptop or a spaceship?

Installed a vent into the desk with a high powered fan underneath.

Figured we joked about it enough, but this thing keeps my office snug & warm throughout winter without having to expend a single extra cent in heating.

My #1 priority is actually idle power usage. Efficiency on load is irrelevant. 99% of the time, it will be idle or web browsing. With low idle power, good Linux support (especially for decoding) and efficiency cores for light usage, I heavily lean on Intel. I don't mind if it is inefficient on-load.

A CPU with integrated graphics is a must. The graphics performance is irrelevant as long as it can achieve at least 4K 144Hz for desktop and video decoding (so that it won't ramp up CPU usage while watching 4K YouTube, for example).

I have a 4K 144Hz monitor. I am a Linux user dual-booting Windows for necessary games only.

Gaming is not a priority. I will mostly be doing web development, browsing the web with numerous tabs, watching videos, taking screen captures, and using remote desktop/gaming.

Things I mainly play: Train Sim World, Cities:Skylines, Forza Horizon; mostly simulation games. I rarely play Fortnite and similar games. I might also play some AAA titles, like Hogwarts Legacy and Cyberpunk, but I don't mind using medium-high settings and lower resolution with upscaling.

I previously had a PC with a 5900X (I was running VMs back then), an RTX 4070 12GB, and 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4 3,600MHz C16. I was fairly happy with the performance, except for the FPS, which was around 40-60 on the simulation games I listed. I would like to have a higher FPS on simulation games, but it's not critical.

For the motherboard, can it not have a PCH fan, please? :) If there has to be one, can it not run on idle? Additionally, a BIOS with good fan curve control that also allows for 0 RPM on case fans. 2.5G LAN and temperature probe are nice to have.

Regarding the GPU, I want to stay away from Nvidia if possible (they are being annoying nowadays, and have bad Linux support). But I still want low idle power and good streaming performance (remote gaming, low latency at 4K, using Sunshine). I've heard negative things about these aspects from the Radeon side, but I'm not sure if they've been resolved. If not, and if onboard graphics could handle video encoding/decoding just fine, would it make sense to use onboard graphics, maybe switching inputs when a game requires max performance? I am looking for something similar to or better than the RTX 4070. I would love to try Arc, but apparently, they don't have anything close to my performance expectations.

My budget is €1000-1500 and does NOT include case, fans, cooler, PSU, or storage. I am willing to overpay for CPU and motherboard for higher quality and future GPU upgrade, and I can buy a graphics card later, especially if Intel come up with something new. Gaming is not urgent. I am also fine with buying used stuff, so feel free to recommend something old gen, as long as it won't hurt future upgrades too much.

TLDR: I lean on 9070 XT but I am not sure about its idle power and low-latency 4K 144Hz video encoding-decoding. But maybe it is not a problem if I have a CPU with onboard graphics that can take care of that. Light-usage efficiency is the most important part. So I am looking for advice on choosing the right (mainly Intel) CPU, RAM, mobo combo that goes well with simulation games. I am also open to other GPU ideas.

Hi guys, a friend of fine asked if i could make him a build for his new pc, something small so he can move it around easily and not expensive, so he could have a work pc on which he could play some games (he usually play not demanding games like cs2, but he may play some heavier games from time to time) Im super out of the loop for pc's since i build mine 6 years ago some im asking some advice. I'd tend to to go with AMD both for CPU and GPU, but im open to any advice. Thank you very much!

Gamer's Nexus made a 3.5 hour investigative report video on GPU Export Controls and the GPU Black Market. Here is a related article on their web site that links to the video, now showing it being copyright claimed by Bloomberg L.P..

Here is an alternative link to the video on Rumble and somebody put it on the Internet Archive as well.

I built a PC for my friend and I am at my wit's end in trying to figure out why the wifi isn't working well on his PC. MB: Z87-G45 GAMING OS: windows 11 RAM: don't recall brand, but I think it has 16gb Old Wifi Adaptor: FV-AC2030T (I don't have the part information for the new wifi adaptor that we bought within the last month) GPU: ASRock AMD Radeon RX 6600 Challenger

Issues: High ping, average was about 80-100 ( not bad ) but it would have spikes of high ping(200+), and there would be anywhere from 5 to 10% packet loss. Info was from using the ping command to reach out to google. Packet loss was also seen when pinging the router directly.

Things I have tried:

• Checking whether it was just the strength of the wifi being an issue. I brought over my own PC and confirmed that my PC's wifi was better than his.
• Updating the motherboard BIOS and drivers (link to their website) The BIOS was an older version originally (don't recall which one) but I've updated it to 1.9. I updated the drivers to 10.1.1.45 for Windows 10 64. Potentially this is a problem since windows 11 is what is installed.
• ensuring the drivers for the old wifi adaptor were up to date. Did the same for the new one.
• Switching out the wifi adaptor in case the old one was faulty. The one listed above is the old on, I don't have info on hand for the new one.
• Checked a couple of different RAM module in case 1 was faulty. I think i test all 4 ram modules, alone connected the the primary RAM slot and the wifi was not affected.

As of now, the options I'm seeing are to get a new board, ram and cpu, or installing windows 10 (since the board doens't come with TPM and may be the cause)

Linux sadly isn't an option due to the games my cousin plays not all functioning on Linux.

Any suggestions at all would be appreciated.

I noticed my D: drive was marked as dirty and some folders were coming up as corrupted, so I recovered as much data as possible, and then scheduled a chkdsk /r /f on next restart, and I've been here since Thursday (it progressed a bit throughout Wednesday):

I now need to urgently access files on my C: drive, but don't know if I should interrupt this process with a forced power off.

I wonder what went on in the AMD employee's mind when they packed this.

I can understand putting a 9800X3D in a tray and that in an envelope with bubble wrap.

But after that they put it, not inside one cardboard box, but two and both boxes are hugely oversized for their contents.

The final box size is almost hilarious to house a single 9800X3D.

The original video is here.

The USB onboard controller on my ASUS Crosshair VI seems to have busted on me. That being said, it would seem I’m now in the market for a new MB.

I haven’t been keeping up with the industry and my MB crash is a bit unexpected, so I’m coming into this a bit blind. Looking for advice or feedback from your own experiences.

I have the following components:

• 2 x 16 gb 288 pin 3600 DDR4 SDRAM G.Skill Trident Z Neo
• EVGA FTW3 RTX 3080Ti
• AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-core/16thread
• Seasonic - PRIME TX-1000 80+ Titanium PSU

Looking for suggestions. Not sure if it’d be better to get a new CPU and MB or continue with the current setup with a new MB. I’m also vibing with MBs that have very little to no RGB, I’m a bit RBG’d out.

Appreciate any help or advice

(Edit: added PSU)