The PC Thread - Tips, Benchmarks, Specs, Laptops, Custom Desktops, Pre-Builds and more.

[Ciggavelli]

Windows 8.1 is fine. The notifications are great and everything in Windows 10 is just so refined, but probably not worth giving up the VPN IMO.

Yeah, not unless dx12 does some crazy shyt I want (like new effects or something). I really don't want to lose my Vpn, that's for sure

 

[Liquid]

I've been coasting on 8GB for years, now suddenly everything's running slow

I click away from a chrome tab, come back and it has a white loading screen

Applications lagging and freezing when memory isn't even above 80%

Cleared some space on the HDD, no change

I'm fukking up somewhere

There is your likely problem. If you are not running on an SSD you are really feeling that performance hit with everything caching all the damn time. I had a laptop that had a 500GB HDD and that shyt went from to the minute Windows 10 was installed. I had to buy an SSD immediately.

SSD is damn near mandatory IMO.

 

[itsyoung!!]

It is ok to start out, just get a single stick of 8GB RAM to not waste slots. A single 16GB stick will be ideal if you are on the DDR4 wave.

I think we might start seeing games recommend the inevitable 16GB soon. I thought Fallout 4 would be the one to do it, glad we are not at that point yet.

Games wont be recommending 16gb for at least another 3-5 years minimum. We arent close to that at all.

@daze23 im 99% sure it was my SSD causing all these errors so i bought a new one today. Samsung 850 evo 250 gb on sale for $89.99

The 500 gb version was $220 or so. Great price since its a high rated ssd. But i couldnt justify spending $130 more on 250 gb i been using a 128 gb for over half a decade

 

[itsyoung!!]

I've been coasting on 8GB for years, now suddenly everything's running slow

I click away from a chrome tab, come back and it has a white loading screen

Applications lagging and freezing when memory isn't even above 80%

Cleared some space on the HDD, no change

I'm fukking up somewhere

There is your likely problem. If you are not running on an SSD you are really feeling that performance hit with everything caching all the damn time. I had a laptop that had a 500GB HDD and that shyt went from to the minute Windows 10 was installed. I had to buy an SSD immediately.

SSD is damn near mandatory IMO.

mitht be a spy ware issue killing his processor/memory

Run a spyware/malware scanning program first before you go out and spend money on something you might not need


But thats what happened to me. My chrome would crash, then my computer would freeze up. After so many reinstalls/restarts my computer at times didnt even recognize my ssd had windows installed on it so your hardrive might be failing you

 

[itsyoung!!]

new SSD running 10 degrees cooler on start up than old SSD

this new SSD so cool and fast

but my monitors still go blank after 30 minutes or so after playing a game. Hard to find correct google answers on this because a million people title threads "monitors go blank" so had to shift through the bs threads from 2007 and shyt

come to find out the 970 GTX has display issues especially EVGA version (which I have) so I will have to have them send me a new card, ill worry about that in a few days.


edit:

Some further experience. I finally found an experience that could quickly and consistently create a crash for me, so I could do some testing. The Star Wars Battlefield beta (running on all high settings) was causing my comp to crash a few minutes in every time. I set up GPU-Z to track the sensors on my card every second to a log and see what was happening. It wasn't obvious what was happening exactly before the crash, but one pattern emerged. As others have said, the card was getting around 80c and the TDP % was hovering around 100, or even jumping up to 103% at times. After doing some research, I realized this is "Thermal Design Power" and generally refers to the manufacturer saying how much power can safely go through your card. The fact that it was going to 103% percent was interesting to me. I was also shocked to see that even at 80c, the fans were only running at 50%.

So, I did a few things. First of all, I realized I had SLI disabled, so I enabled it. I also did one other I think key thing that others here have mentioned. I downloaded EVGA Precision, and enabled the built in fan curve, which is much more aggressive, going to 50% fan at around 50c and upwards from there. I also set the max power at 100% for both cards. I then went back into the game and set everything to Ultra.

I played three full 10 minute matches of Battlefield with no crashes. GPU-Z showed the temperature never got above 69c, and the TDP never hit 100%.

So here's my hypothesis. For these OC cards, they set the power and heat allowances up higher, and slap a better heatsink on it. They do their own testing, but they can't test against our specific computer setups (how much heat we have in our systems, running in SLI etc). So even if it can last at full load in their setups, it might get to an unstable level of heat/power draw in ours. I'm a bit shocked by how conservative the default fan curve is to be running at 50% at 80c, which seems a bit hot to me.

For me, so far, this combination of upping the fan curve and putting a hard cap on the power draw through Precision if not fixing the issue, seems to greatly help. When I complained most recently to EVGA and asked for a non-OC card, they said they couldn't do that, but they could RMA me another and make sure to note to the testers to be very thorough in their testing. I'm thinking this isn't so much a "manufacturing" flaw with these OC cards so much as, they are OC'ed and are inherently more unstable, and thus it's up to the testing team to ensure that the level of OC and cooling etc is stable, and for the ones we've been getting, combined with our comp setups (airflow etc), may push the OC cards over the edge.

I personally bought a factory OC card because I didn't want to deal with the trouble of making sure my manual OC was stable, but I guess that's what I'm doing. Since I'm not going for bleeding edge performance, but just a little boost, increasing the fans and putting a cap on the power draw is well worth the trade off of stability.

I'll keep you all updated with if this seems to fix it across other games, but since Battlefield was crashing so aggressively, and now is stable, I'm hoping it will be a trend.

saw this fix on the EVGA forums.. hope it works..

 

[Anonymous Being #17]

new SSD running 10 degrees cooler on start up than old SSD

this new SSD so cool and fast

but my monitors still go blank after 30 minutes or so after playing a game. Hard to find correct google answers on this because a million people title threads "monitors go blank" so had to shift through the bs threads from 2007 and shyt

come to find out the 970 GTX has display issues especially EVGA version (which I have) so I will have to have them send me a new card, ill worry about that in a few days.

I just had to put a RMA on my MSI GTX 970. Shyt was causing my system to freeze/lock up

 

[itsyoung!!]

I just had to put a RMA on my MSI GTX 970. Shyt was causing my system to freeze/lock up

i just put a "fix" in the post you quoted.. ill see if works. It only started happening during battlefront beta and now it happens in every game but can be after a hour or 5 hours..

 

[itsyoung!!]

notice anything different in the temps ? just a slight difference

new Speccy

Speccy from few days ago;

 

[itsyoung!!]

Anyone got any experience with these monitors ?



they're on sale right now, seems to be $199 every where regularly $250-280

144 hz - 1 ms Acer 24" monitor

how is the picture quality ?

its either that or this;





BenQ monitors have great stand alone pictures but the 144 hz options are just too expensive

 

[Anonymous Being #17]

So brehs, it wasn't my 970 that was defective. I got a defective PCI-e slot

 

[Ruck]

So brehs, it wasn't my 970 that was defective. I got a defective PCI-e slot

what motherboard do you have?

@daze23 @Ciggavelli @2gunsup. brehz, i got something special coming in on friday

 

[Ciggavelli]

what motherboard do you have?

@daze23 @Ciggavelli @2gunsup. brehz, i got something special coming in on friday

I have an Asus Maximus VII Formula

What do you have coming?

 

[Ruck]

I have an Asus Maximus VII Formula

What do you have coming?

the mobo question was for the breh i was quoting.

breh, i don't want spoil or jinx it. its an early christmas present for myself tho. ive been waiting for this product for year and a half.

 

[Anonymous Being #17]

what motherboard do you have?

@daze23 @Ciggavelli @2gunsup. brehz, i got something special coming in on friday

I got an Asrock z77 Extreme3. I was able to confirm it being defective by putting my Wi-Fi card in that slot and the shyt wouldn't even boot up

 

[Ciggavelli]

the mobo question was for the breh i was quoting.

breh, i don't want spoil or jinx it. its an early christmas present for myself tho. ive been waiting for this product for year and a half.

Oops