The Computer Thread

Fair point, They would have to show how the approval process are diffrent.

Yeah, I'm still on a pair of 1080 monitors at the moment. So upgrading might get better performance at that resolution (since apparently the 580 is getting a bit long in the tooth even at that level with modern games) but I don't need to run 1440 yet.

Reminds me that I should consider getting some sort of desk mount for dual monitors, too.

I gotten a 2070 Super months ago, I see this and I'm like "This is why PC gaming is a bitch"

At least you're not the poor sap who bought a 2080 ti in August.

But on the positive side, we know our cards will last us quite a while.

~Steven - PC Gaming has always had the risk of buying a nifty computer or computer part only for it to be obsolete when you open the box...

~RainehDaze - Check out Ergotron for good quality mounts for monitors.

Edited by TairaMai on Sep 3rd 2020 at 11:22:12 AM

Thanks, but I don't really need specific product recommendations.

So that's another demo nvidia has put out. And since there's no raytracing in this one, seems that it's a straight comparison of rasterisation?

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 3rd 2020 at 2:41:50 PM

Ars Technica: Amazon’s top UK reviewers appear to profit from fake 5-star posts

Amazon has always had problems with fake reviews, but Amazon UK in particular is plagued with them. A Financial Times investigation found that 9 of the top 10 most prolific Amazon UK product reviewers were getting kickbacks in the form of free goods from obscure Chinese companies in exchange for 5-star ratings. The goods would then be resold on eBay, often in "unused" or "new in box" condition.

After becoming aware of the investigation, the #1 reviewer went dark, deleting all their reviews, and the others suspected of this practice rapidly did the same.

The degree to which Amazon reviews influence sales of a product create enormous incentives to falsify them. Amazon's terms of service explicitly forbid receiving any compensation for a review, and it is using AI to detect phony reviews, but they continue to slip through at an alarming rate.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 4th 2020 at 12:53:06 PM

Yes. And I think the shows that in a best case scenario the RTX 3080 is about 40% or so better at rasterization then the 2080ti.

I'm honestly not as overly impressed as a lot of other people are by the uplift in performance, but it is still a lot better then Pascal to Turing. I'm not upgrading to 4k just yet so I'm probably going to hold on to my 1080ti until Hopper and RDNA 3 come next year.

Since I don't have a 4k capable card (Vega 64 wouldn't do that well) but do want to upgrade from a 1080p second hand office monitor, this is a good time for me. Knowing that it's going to be useful regardless of raytracing improvements help.

Though ordered a new PSU first of all. Not looking forward to installing that because of the CPU power header (socket? probably socket) location. It's under the cooler/heatsink and case fans. And installing this heatsink is terrible.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 4th 2020 at 8:44:35 PM

I don't suppose anyone here knows how to get a controller for the Steam version of Tomb Raider 2 to work properly?

If the controller is one steam supports, it should just work through that?

Tried three different controllers and nothing works. Looked up guides and patches. Nothing works. Hell, even with the default keyboard controls, pressing ALT makes Lara jump and opens the inventory at the same time. The fuck is this?

So my external harddrive has started having a problem where it'll either not connect at all or connect and disconnect continually. I'm thinking about getting a flash drive to replace it since apparently they make 1TB flash drives now and I think the lack of a cord would be better since the problem with the external seems to be that cord that came with it won't go into the harrdive all the way. Does anyone have experience with 1TB flash drives and if so would you recommend them/which would you recommend?

Edited by Chariot on Sep 9th 2020 at 7:18:43 AM

My experience with various SSD's† would suggest to me that any cheap 1TB USB drive is going to be awful, if it even has the rated capacity in the first place—and doesn't just identify itself as having a 1TB capacity but will promptly start having problems if you go over a reasonable amount. I'd recommend something by sandisk or kingston because they're reputable, but at that point you're paying like three to four times the amount of an external HDD that would fit in a reasonably large pocket.

Any USB drive with a capacity of 1TB advertising itself as cheaper than an internal SSD of the same capacity is some sort of con.

† And also any basic knowledge of flash storage. Getting something down that small is going to cost, just because the memory chip(s) themselves are going to be super dense. Then you have the fact that at that point you'd want a decent memory controller on it so that access isn't potato, even if you're not going to go for the whole DRAM cache that decent SSDs have for random access performance and buffering smaller reads/writes, since this is external mass storage...

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 9th 2020 at 11:53:19 AM

Hm. So would you recommend a wireless external harddrive instead then? Looked into Sandisk's 1TB flash drives and the only option isn't compatible with my computer.

I... don't see a problem with just being more careful with a wired one? I rarely unplugged the actual wire from my HDD and this had the disadvantage of being one with an externally needed PSU and everything. With one of the slim, portable ones you're probably fine if you just don't unplug that end.

nVidia buys ARM for US$40 billion.

Huh, I was waiting for that.

Good thing ARM licenses are already handed out, otherwise things would be about to get really damn complicated. Largely because Apple and nvidia have not been on good terms for a long time.

One thing I always forget when looking at Nvidia is that Jensen (CEO and guy who does the presentations) is actually one of the founders. That's pretty unusual by this point in the tech world.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 13th 2020 at 5:12:59 PM

Ah hell, this is a game changer.

ARM is making yuge inroads on the desktop and mobile, Apple was just the icing on the cake really. The one that this hurts is Intel.

At the start of 2020, Intel could at least pretend that Apple loved them and that they could catch AMD. 2020 was like a bad country song for Intel:

• Issues with memory speeds for their locked processors made a lot of reviewers mad^note  See here at this link.
• Apple left Intel for it's own ARM-based silicon.
• AMD ate their lunch with Ryzen and other processors giving near or better performance for less
• Now ARM isn't going away, not by a long shot. To rub salt in the wound, Intel and Nvidia were bros back when AMD first bought ATI.

Edited by TairaMai on Sep 13th 2020 at 5:31:59 PM

The absurd part is that the Ryzen... 4800U? I think that's the 15W top-of-the-line AMD processor...

Kept beating Intel's overly-numbery top of the line Y (so 45W) laptop CPU.

And Intel had an entire keynote presentation where they kept talking about the competition and somehow mentioned the 4800U more often than their own model.

Ars Technica: New Windows exploit lets you instantly become admin. Have you patched?

Okay, clickbait title. This is pretty serious, though. A newly discovered exploit allows an attacker who has LAN access to instantly gain administrator rights to your Active Directory domain controller. It's not an issue for home PCs unless they are connected to a domain, but for business and educational environments, it's a critical problem.

The good news is that Microsoft has released a patch in August. The bad news is that enterprise users are often very slow to perform domain controller updates.

Details: The exploit targets the Netlogon protocol, and allows someone with no authentication to gain administrative credentials as long as they can establish TCP connections. This usually means being inside a network's firewall, such as with local access. For example, an insider could run the exploit, or an outsider who enters an office and plugs into an Ethernet socket.

The actual flaw is in the AES-CFB8 cryptography protocol, which Windows did not implement correctly (of course). The exploit sends carefully crafted messages containing strings of zeroes in specific fields.

If you regularly update your PC, you aren't personally vulnerable, but make sure your IT folks know about this.

Edited by Fighteer on Sep 14th 2020 at 9:35:27 AM

So today the embargo lifted on Ampere reviews. In what shouldn't be too much of a surprise 3080 was a marked improvement over the 2080, but not nearly the double the performance Nvidia was touting, and in many case 70%+ performance uplift Digital Foundary was touting a couple of weeks ago. In fact performance seems to be all over the place given the charts from Hardware Unboxed and Gamer's Nexus.

It seems that the way the Ampere architecture was designed it does far better in compute focused tasks then in gaming focused tasks, which I guess shouldn't be surprising given the huge shader increase without much change in the clocks (and possibly IPC). It really does seem to be Nvidia's equivalent to AMD's Vega architecture, though not nearly as bad in terms of game performance and power consumption.

"Nvidia GPU improved where they said they were targeting improvements". Like... mostly they weren't aiming at rasterisation improvements nor touting improvements on that front? Their entire release was focusing on raytracing and DLSS, which rely on those compute functions (well, raytracing relies on raytracing, but DLSS uses the tensor hardware).

Either way, the 3080 is like... double what my FPS would be with my current card, and since I want higher resolutions, no reason for me to not ugprade to one of the two things coming up.

Edit: Hm, based on the Hardware Unboxed info (GN can wait for later), it seems like the performance improvements aren't as unreasonable as claimed? It does average around a 70% improvement compared to the 1080ti (which is where that comparison came from) at 4k, and about 50% to the 1080ti at 1440p. When the card is being sold for 4k gaming, that's pretty major.

Looks like all the performance weirdness is mostly around the 1440p mark; I'm wondering if it's an architectural oddity or something about how the games are optimised? Guess we'll find out later on if it's to do with the floating point changes.

And the DLSS/RTX stuff indicates that 4k raytracing at max settings might now be achievable, which is cool.

Edited by RainehDaze on Sep 16th 2020 at 6:28:05 PM