GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

The corsair is the most tempting one right now, hopefully they have one with AA batteries. Are left and right click super sensitive? That's a plus for me and part of why I go for gamer mice, I kind of swipe them with my thumb near where that middle mouse button is located.
I mean it took a pretty gentle swipe to move the cursor across the screen in the manner you described and if my dainty lady hands can manage it you should be fine.
 
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Back then, it wasn't just broken switches (though those did happen). There were other problems like the scroll wheel flicking back up after a downward scroll. Back then, replacement switches were hard to find and often so expensive that is was just as much to get a new mouse, especially if it was cheap. I think some might have been moulded plastic so repairing them usually meant cracking the shell open which never went back together right.
Mouse switches are super cheap and easy to find nowadays. Just search for mouse switches on Ali or ebay, a pack of ten costs like 5$ delivered.
You can also get scroll wheel encoders cheap that way too. They're usually standard as well, you just have to get right height.
I also had luck with just putting a janky encoder in an ultra sonic cleaner, worked like new afterwards.

Cheap mice are usually just two plastic parts snap-fitted together ,you can open those without doing any damage. Carefully pry it open along the crack with a guitar pick or a plastic spudger while watching for any hidden screws.
 
I mean it took a pretty gentle swipe to move the cursor across the screen in the manner you described and if my dainty lady hands can manage it you should be fine.
No not dragging the cursor around, I mean the main left and right click buttons. I often click the left with my thumb and the right with my ring finger, sometimes both of them with the joint of my thumb(not at the same time obviously). I should clarify, I keep the mouse parallel to the spacebar in front of the spacebar and when typing it sits between my hands. Moving it left on the desk moves the cursor up for me, that's no problem every mouse can do that, I just prefer hair trigger main buttons because of this setup.
 
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No not dragging the cursor around, I mean the main left and right click buttons. I often click the left with my thumb and the right with my ring finger, sometimes both of them with the joint of my thumb(not at the same time obviously). I should clarify, I keep the mouse parallel to the spacebar in front of the spacebar and when typing it sits between my hands. Moving it left on the desk moves the cursor up for me, that's no problem every mouse can do that, I just prefer hair trigger main buttons because of this setup.
I mean I still feel like I have to purposefully click the mouse buttons to get them to do stuff, but if you have man-strength maybe your mileage may vary, idk.
 
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I buy the cheapest rodent possible. I just need one to point at things. Two buttons and a wheel. If you're not afraid of taking them apart to clean them occasionally they last forever. The quality of these ten buck "I just need a mouse" mice went way up in the last few years. They're tanks. I remember the 90s and 00s cheap mice, they'd fall apart from unpacking and sooner or later, one of the buttons would just randomly stop working. Hadn't have that happen in ages, and as has been said it's easy to fix if it happens. They probably put all that planned obsolecence in the 100$ gamer stuff.
 
Be nice if the mice were easier to take apart - no more of this shit where the case has plastic tabs that you have to nearly break to take it apart. If you could unscrew the entire mouse with 6-10 screws, mine would last alot longer.

Even the gamer mice have improved lately though, I had an original G502 that eventually fell apart and had slight nail marks (from 1mm long 'nails' on my right thumb) on the padded portion, but I replaced it with a G502 Hero that has some kind of scratch resistant padding so it has held up better. Still would be nice if you could take the whole thing apart easier via screws.

Another area I have to say isn't quite as good as the 'old' version are mechnical keyboards. What happens with everyone I have had is that eventually the keys are very easily bumped off, ie by my hand brushing against it. Right now my arrow keys are like this, but to properly clean it you have to take off a portion of the keys.

I am probably going to pay for a 1980s beast keyboard soon instead, they had their own set of problems - short cords, an obvious lack of hotkeys or volume controls since no one conceived of them that early - but I am tired of having to replace modern mechanicals.
 
Another area I have to say isn't quite as good as the 'old' version are mechnical keyboards. What happens with everyone I have had is that eventually the keys are very easily bumped off, ie by my hand brushing against it. Right now my arrow keys are like this, but to properly clean it you have to take off a portion of the keys.
That's ABS plastic, it literally just rubs off and gets shiny. I have the personal and very unscientific theory that it seems to rub of quicker with some people than with others. (with me ABS literally starts melting when it comes close to my fingertips) You're looking for PBT keycaps, many of these old keyboards have them. They're a bit more robust. They will eventually get kinda shiny too, but barely to the degree of ABS and certainly not at the same speed.

Cherry makes affordable mechanical keyboards with no frills and decent enough PBT keycaps by default. They even still support PS/2. I don't really know and it could be complete BS but my pet theory is that these Cherry keyboards still exist in their mostly unchanged beige"retro" form because of corporate/government contracts in Germany. (such contracts exist for parts sometimes) Every single doctors office, laboratory or government place you walk into and has a computer here has Cherry keyboards at their workstations, if it's a fancy place or a big arm of government even with custom branding of the place. I'm not sure they're cheap anywhere else but in germany, they are. They're also made in Europe, much unlike anything else.

I personally had tons of mechanical keyboards (even exotic ones, like the 122-key IBM terminal one) over the years but finally settled on a Cherry keyboard with custom SA shaped keycaps. It's just in the right corner of price, robustness, ease of replacement and ease of cleaning/repair. Also no frills and beige. I like that latter part a lot.
 
Question for knowers: what's a good low-profile cooler for an Intel i7-9800X? (LGA2066 socket)
Being an Intel, the chip can consume lolcowish amounts of power (165W TDP max) but I don't expect to be driving it at 100% most of the time and I'd be fine if I couldn't get the absolute max performance out of it.

I saw a few on PCPartPicker which claim to be compatible:

69mm: https://www.scytheus.com/bigshuriken3
74mm: http://www.cryorig.com/c1_us.php
75mm: https://www.bequiet.com/en/cpucooler/570
27mm fanless (?!): https://www.dynatron.co/product-page/r15

I'm not familiar with most of these brands though.
 
Question for knowers: what's a good low-profile cooler for an Intel i7-9800X? (LGA2066 socket)
Being an Intel, the chip can consume lolcowish amounts of power (165W TDP max) but I don't expect to be driving it at 100% most of the time and I'd be fine if I couldn't get the absolute max performance out of it.

I saw a few on PCPartPicker which claim to be compatible:

69mm: https://www.scytheus.com/bigshuriken3
74mm: http://www.cryorig.com/c1_us.php
75mm: https://www.bequiet.com/en/cpucooler/570
27mm fanless (?!): https://www.dynatron.co/product-page/r15

I'm not familiar with most of these brands though.
I have the be quiet shadow rock LP and I quite like it. Even though it’s really thin it’s quite wide though, so you’d have to bear that in mind when choosing your ram in case it overhangs the ram slots. My ram sticks have no heat spreaders on them so they aren’t too tall. If you really wanted a heat spreader on them you could get away with something really low profile like the Corsair Vengeance LPX stuff. I have a mini ITX motherboard and the cooler overhangs the ram slots completely so having my ram sticks be ugly green PCBs honestly doesn’t bother me since you literally can’t see them at all. Plus they’re probably getting some secondhand cooling from the cooler anyway.
 
Heatsinks on RAM chips is a pure marketing gimmick. They don't need it.

I'm fantasizing now and then about putting my AMD APU in one of these tiny cases, the Fractal Design Node 202 for example looks nice. The last time I tried something like that though, it was a disaster. (constant heat problems, you just can't cool these tiny spaces)
 
I have the be quiet shadow rock LP and I quite like it. Even though it’s really thin it’s quite wide though, so you’d have to bear that in mind when choosing your ram in case it overhangs the ram slots. My ram sticks have no heat spreaders on them so they aren’t too tall. If you really wanted a heat spreader on them you could get away with something really low profile like the Corsair Vengeance LPX stuff. I have a mini ITX motherboard and the cooler overhangs the ram slots completely so having my ram sticks be ugly green PCBs honestly doesn’t bother me since you literally can’t see them at all. Plus they’re probably getting some secondhand cooling from the cooler anyway.
What's the noise level like on that thing under normal and max load?
 
What's the noise level like on that thing under normal and max load?
It’s pretty quiet across the board. A lot of bequiet stuff is really quiet, it’s all designed to be really quiet which is why they named the company that. Most of the noise in my rig comes from the massive 16tb hard drive that I install my vidya hoard onto. Before I had that it was way quieter, because the cooler doesn’t make much noise.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/be-quiet-shadow-rock-lp-cpu-cooler-review,9.html
This guy says it’s 34-37 decibels which is one of quietest coolers in the comparison that he did.
 
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It’s pretty quiet across the board. A lot of bequiet stuff is really quiet, it’s all designed to be really quiet which is why they named the company that. Most of the noise in my rig comes from the massive 16tb hard drive that I install my vidya hoard onto. Before I had that it was way quieter, because the cooler doesn’t make much noise.

https://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/be-quiet-shadow-rock-lp-cpu-cooler-review,9.html
This guy says it’s 34-37 decibels which is one of quietest coolers in the comparison that he did.
That is much better than I thought.
 
I'm fantasizing now and then about putting my AMD APU in one of these tiny cases, the Fractal Design Node 202 for example looks nice.
I was actually thinking of trying to squash everything down into a rackmount case. But upon further reflection, in addition to buying the case and some sort of low-profile fan I'd also need a new power supply to fit, and so on. At that point why not just buy something completely new that is actually suited to that purpose?

Right now I've got everything stuffed into a Fractal Design Core 500 (which is mostly full of fans, heatsinks, and cables)
 
I was actually thinking of trying to squash everything down into a rackmount case. But upon further reflection, in addition to buying the case and some sort of low-profile fan I'd also need a new power supply to fit, and so on. At that point why not just buy something completely new that is actually suited to that purpose?

Right now I've got everything stuffed into a Fractal Design Core 500 (which is mostly full of fans, heatsinks, and cables)
I have the Fractal Design Define Nano S because I wanted something that could fit a big boy graphics card and a thicc hard drive in it, while simultaneously being a few centimetres shorter in height than the average PC tower because it needed to fit on the bottom shelf of my desk next to my feet. The shelf above it isn’t adjustable and the desk isn’t as wide as the average desk for space reasons so I can’t have the PC next to the monitor. It’s also the reason my PC doesn’t have any RGB in it even though I’m one of those people that actually likes RGB unironically - when I’m using my PC I’m looking forwards at the monitor and not downwards at my feet, so what’s the point? I still got the version with the side window though so if my living situation eventually changes and I have the space for a full size desk I can cram as many lights in there as I want.
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I currently have the Thermaltake Core V1, had it for quite a few years already. Design-wise it's an ok case mostly because you can put a big 200mm fan in front. That does more for cooling than anything else and the fan can transport so much air while move so slow that you don't hear it.

Case looks kinda gaudy and cheap though, Especially not wild about the ugly thermaltake logo or window either. Also it's made from very thin and cheap metal and it vibrates like crazy if you have a mechanical drive. (there's this stuff you can knead that turns into rubber after a while, it's great to fix stuff like this)

It was the case of an older computer that I had. I tried to fit my AMD APU into a smaller case first with a noctua NH-L9i and it was pretty much a disaster, depending on weather you'd run into thermal throttling on compilation jobs. The problem mostly was that the hot air from the CPU had no way to go and the dumb and embarrassing thing was that I actually knew that case probably wouldn't work out but just really like what it looked like. Some day I'll put some low TDP computer into it *sigh*

I recently fell in love with small, portable high DPI screens you can sit really close to. I first bought one for an experiment and now am using it almost exclusively for anything non-multimedia, having it directly in front of the keyboard. I think a really cool looking build would be a desktop-like horizontal case with such a screen on top, I really loved that look in the 80s and was sad when it disappeared in favor of (quite fugly) towers. It's just that these cases are just not really compatible with modern computing energy requirements.
 
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I bought the monitor mentioned here.
Monitor related question. I saw a good deal on AOC 24g2u and 27g2u (24 and 27 inch) 1080p IPS monitors. I'm considering getting one.
I opted for the 24 inch. I'm coming from a 60hz TN panel from 2016 that was well reviewed at the time. 144hz is interesting but I don't think it's a night and day difference like the jump from 30 to 60 fps is. The colours are nice too. No more banding on gradients.

The problem I'm having is saturation, or I'm just used to bad colours. sRGB mode fixes the brightness at 90, so bringing up a bright screen is blinding. I've made a custom setting that to my eye feels pretty close, but no matter what I do colours (especially reds) seem over saturated, even in sRGB mode. This could be because I'm used to my old monitor.

Anything remotely dark is also hard to see. Again, this could just be me being used to bad monitors. eg. I always ignored the "turn down the brightness until the logo on the right disappears" messages on horror games, so maybe now it's biting me in the arse.

I'm going to give it a few days to see if I can get used to it. Hopefully OLEDs get better and cheaper.
 
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The problem I'm having is saturation, or I'm just used to bad colours. sRGB mode fixes the brightness at 90, so bringing up a bright screen is blinding.
a quick googling has revealed that the monitor goes a bit past the normal sRGB color gamut, which is kinda mute on the red so that might be what you're seeing/noticing. (which is highly subjective to begin with) That's not necessarily bad but might be disruptive. A higher gamut is not always automatically good, either too, especially without the means of doing a hardware calibration or somehow limiting the gamut in monitor settings or with a color profile via GPU in a reasonable way. Without calibration hardware you can pretty much only adjust by feeling. You might try checking if the manufacturer offers ICC color profile files for windows.

It's funny that you note that you feel the screen is too bright because with 250 cd/m² (there's e.g. screens with 400 cd/m²) it's actually on the low spectrum of brightness, so yeah, maybe just really "new screen" effect. High brightness is basically always better though because it means it'll be more contrast/and color accurate on lower brightness settings.

With new monitors, I always visit this website. It's really old and a few categories are pretty outdated by now but contrast/gamma calibration/black level/white level sections are always good and simple indicators at how accurate the monitor is.
 
The problem I'm having is saturation
a quick googling has revealed that the monitor goes a bit past the normal sRGB color gamut, which is kinda mute on the red so that might be what you're seeing/noticing. (which is highly subjective to begin with) That's not necessarily bad but might be disruptive. A higher gamut is not always automatically good, either too, especially without the means of doing a hardware calibration or somehow limiting the gamut in monitor settings or with a color profile via GPU in a reasonable way. Without calibration hardware you can pretty much only adjust by feeling. You might try checking if the manufacturer offers ICC color profile files for windows.
Combining these two posts because I just remembered a relevant site, https://tftcentral.co.uk/articles/icc_profiles , they have created color profiles for so many monitors so maybe give that a shot.

One tip if you are calibrating by feel or using a guide like Lagom, tweak for a little while and WALK AWAY. Go do something else for an hour then come back and look at it with fresh eyes. Otherwise you might end up with a color profile that is the equivalent of whore makeup.
 
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So a power outage delivered a knockout blow to my 5 year old AIO cooler and it took me about 4 days to notice when my machine wouldn't boot from restart. I noticed that there is no hot air coming out of the top of the case even though the fans are still spinning. The CPU would throttle under medium load at 100c and never break above that to prevent burnout. I'm worried that I've damaged it but it's gotten 6ish years of use so it might be time for an upgrade anyways. How fucked am I? Intel 6850k.
 
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