cyclone3d wrote on 2026-08-19, 19:02:

I looked at a tone of different boards, and the only ones that didn't have stupid disablement or PCIe lane reduction when popula […]
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I looked at a tone of different boards, and the only ones that didn't have stupid disablement or PCIe lane reduction when populating everything was a few similar MSI boards.

Also, the PCIe slots are arranged in a sane way.

Granted, I wasn't looking at purchasing a super expensive board either but I looked at a ton of different boards.

For the past many years it has been almost impossible to find a motherboard that doesn't have some stupid limitation or just plain horrible layout, usually both.

Me too, I went back to Asrock boards, no PCIe sharing but shares USB4 instead which I don't care one bit about.

Lately, I've been messing around with DLSS Override. Ever since updating to newer drivers which use the Nvidia App instead of the classic Nvidia Control Panel, I've been having problems with that. It seems that games which aren't officially supported for DLSS Override won't even accept DLSS changes made by Nvidia Profile Inspector. Not sure if that's just a local issue on my system, or if other people are experiencing it as well. In any case, I found a guide which can circumvent this, but I also needed to use the DLSS Swapper utility on top of that. Probably because the game I was testing (Rise of the Tomb Raider) uses a fairly old version of DLSS by default. Long story short, I made it work, which was confirmed by Nvidia Overlay (see top right corner of the screenshot):

It's a bit of a hassle to do things this way, compared to simply changing everything from Nvidia Profile Inspector, but at least it works. I specifically chose Preset K because that's the optimal DLSS version for my RTX 3060, based on everything I've read online. And since the game doesn't offer DLAA out of the box, I made sure to override that as well. The end result looks great and works very well on my system.

My 2014 windows 11 pc suffered bugs from integrated KB5121003 install by usb.
I disable the security isolation hypervisor support for gaming and 3rd party hypervisor performance but because of bugs that configuration on install bugs out the system. (I do not recommend switching off security when using steam it is rampant with malware these days)
I thought it was really rude my digital license wouldn't activate.
Anyhow after many hours I found a registry setting to deal with the security bug and a powershell command
that re synchronises windows digital license between PC and activation server.
Microsoft activation support was not very useful but at least they said the license is permanent which prompted me to look for a solution.
I would like to take this opportunity to recommend do not use this patch if possible until a fix is released or you may find yourself
playing with google all day and you'll have to go through all the obsolete stuff until it finally gives useful answers.
The popular bugs with this patch are GPU and other drivers but not in my case I messed with security.
I have configured autounattend.xml to write a registry key work around and it worked.
This bug has happened before so someone at Microsoft forgot their mistake and did it again.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-08-17, 13:50:

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs. […]
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Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs.

RTX 5070ti has gone from 1300 dollars in December to 1700 dollars now .. WTF, 5060Ti 16Gb is 1000 dollars.

RTX 5090s are 7000 dollars ...utterly insane price for a GPU, 5080s are 2000 dollars.

RX 9070XT is weirdly 1000 dollars down from 1200 in December and the 9060XT 16Gb is 650 Dollars. (9060 non XT is not even available locally from my usual store)

No idea why AMD has dropped in price but nVidia has skyrocketed, they are both using similar memory .

Not even going to look at memory or SSDs .. both are well beyond reasonable pricing, safe to say the DIY PC market here in Australia is beyond fucked.

When you know how inference engines work those prices make perfect sense.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-08-25, 06:54:

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-08-17, 13:50:

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs. […]
Show full quote

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs.

RTX 5070ti has gone from 1300 dollars in December to 1700 dollars now .. WTF, 5060Ti 16Gb is 1000 dollars.

RTX 5090s are 7000 dollars ...utterly insane price for a GPU, 5080s are 2000 dollars.

RX 9070XT is weirdly 1000 dollars down from 1200 in December and the 9060XT 16Gb is 650 Dollars. (9060 non XT is not even available locally from my usual store)

No idea why AMD has dropped in price but nVidia has skyrocketed, they are both using similar memory .

Not even going to look at memory or SSDs .. both are well beyond reasonable pricing, safe to say the DIY PC market here in Australia is beyond fucked.

When you know how inference engines work those prices make perfect sense.

Yeah nVidia is dumping as many Blackwell cores into AI as they can. means next to nothing for us consumers. AMD isn't quite as good at it but they can still run inference for AI.

The lack of 9000 series GPU stock is likely due to AMD funneling as many to AI as they can too, still its odd to have their 9070 XT prices drop when they should be going up as stock levels fall.

zapbuzz wrote on 2026-08-25, 06:30:

My 2014 windows 11 pc suffered bugs from integrated KB5121003 install by usb. I disable the security isolation hypervisor suppor […]
Show full quote

My 2014 windows 11 pc suffered bugs from integrated KB5121003 install by usb.
I disable the security isolation hypervisor support for gaming and 3rd party hypervisor performance but because of bugs that configuration on install bugs out the system. (I do not recommend switching off security when using steam it is rampant with malware these days)
I thought it was really rude my digital license wouldn't activate.
Anyhow after many hours I found a registry setting to deal with the security bug and a powershell command
that re synchronises windows digital license between PC and activation server.
Microsoft activation support was not very useful but at least they said the license is permanent which prompted me to look for a solution.
I would like to take this opportunity to recommend do not use this patch if possible until a fix is released or you may find yourself
playing with google all day and you'll have to go through all the obsolete stuff until it finally gives useful answers.
The popular bugs with this patch are GPU and other drivers but not in my case I messed with security.
I have configured autounattend.xml to write a registry key work around and it worked.
This bug has happened before so someone at Microsoft forgot their mistake and did it again.

Likely the AI Vibe coding they are doing these days is reintroducing older bugs fixed previously.

That said their patching of late has been a hot mess and even defender broke itself recently with one of its own security updates ...I got hit by it and had to force it manually to fix itself.

I was trying to do some Spore modding stuff and had to troubleshoot by booting into my Windows 10 LTSC install, eventually deciding on the issue I had being a WINE issue...

and either Windows hates my aggressive CPU undervolt that's been fine and stable for months on Linux, or Windows is a million times more unstable than I thought previously possible.
It had a blink-and-you'll-miss-it bluescreen when I tried to pull stuff from git, then tons of updates that took 10 minutes (this is on an SSD)...
then another crash trying to clone a repo (bc the local repo got corrupted by the first crash), then another crash trying to change the power-plan settings.
It probably is just the undervolt though.

Though that does remind me to look into disabling hyperthreading though, since Windows always makes my fans go BRRR due to my harsh fan curve. (it's optimised for how I can lower the max clockspeed on linux to 4.5ghz which is enough for basically anything but one or two more CPU-bound games.)
I'd rather try to reduce the power consumption and heat generation so that I can run at a higher clockspeed more often.

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-08-25, 09:32:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2026-08-25, 06:54:

Trashbytes wrote on 2026-08-17, 13:50:

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs. […]
Show full quote

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs.

RTX 5070ti has gone from 1300 dollars in December to 1700 dollars now .. WTF, 5060Ti 16Gb is 1000 dollars.

RTX 5090s are 7000 dollars ...utterly insane price for a GPU, 5080s are 2000 dollars.

RX 9070XT is weirdly 1000 dollars down from 1200 in December and the 9060XT 16Gb is 650 Dollars. (9060 non XT is not even available locally from my usual store)

No idea why AMD has dropped in price but nVidia has skyrocketed, they are both using similar memory .

Not even going to look at memory or SSDs .. both are well beyond reasonable pricing, safe to say the DIY PC market here in Australia is beyond fucked.

When you know how inference engines work those prices make perfect sense.

Yeah nVidia is dumping as many Blackwell cores into AI as they can. means next to nothing for us consumers. AMD isn't quite as good at it but they can still run inference for AI.

The lack of 9000 series GPU stock is likely due to AMD funneling as many to AI as they can too, still its odd to have their 9070 XT prices drop when they should be going up as stock levels fall.

There is no lack of 9000 series stock, thats one of the reasons the prices are falling.

Where you like AMD GPUs because they dont have all the AI sludge in their gaming other people still prefer nvidia.

The 9070 XT is no good for AI inference or training. Its good for gaming.
The prices reflect the market, if its not making sense to you then your way of thinking is wrong.

Spent the evening poking at a hobby project of mine — a little music player I've been writing for myself — trying to get a decent per-channel oscilloscope view out of old 4-channel Amiga .mod files.

Funny thing I ran into: with a tracker you get the waveform straight from the engine, one channel at a time, so measuring the first cycle of a wave actually works. Feed the same code an MP3 and the first cycle is always the bass of the whole mix, so the reading never moves. Ended up having to measure it a completely different way for modern files. The 1991 stuff is just more honest on a scope.

Also finally got around to backing up the sample library I mentioned over in the hoarding thread, so the day wasn't a total loss.

Spent a chunk of the evening tweaking a tracker player I've been building on and off — messing with how the oscilloscope lanes render on a busy .xm with a lot of channels going at once. Small thing, but getting the waveform to actually look right in real time instead of just "technically correct" ate way more of my evening than I planned. Anyone else lose hours to a detail like that nobody else would even notice?

VanillaFairy wrote on 2026-08-25, 16:34:

Though that does remind me to look into disabling hyperthreading though, since Windows always makes my fans go BRRR due to my harsh fan curve. (it's optimised for how I can lower the max clockspeed on linux to 4.5ghz which is enough for basically anything but one or two more CPU-bound games.)
I'd rather try to reduce the power consumption and heat generation so that I can run at a higher clockspeed more often.

On my two modern desktops, CPU power consumption is strangely high compared to CPU usage for a few hours after booting Windows.

After much setting up of Windows 11, getting it to log into a local account, which involved the reg key addition to unhide the check box to not require a username/password to log in (why does that not always appear when you disable Windows PIN?)
I installed World of Tanks onto my "new" i5-8500T/8Gb/256Gb based HP EliteDesk 800 G4 Mini with an RX560 4Gb and it runs wonderfully!
but on the loud side compared to the others I have with its fan but its nice never the less.

zapbuzz wrote on 2026-08-25, 06:30:

My 2014 windows 11 pc suffered bugs from integrated KB5121003 install by usb. I disable the security isolation hypervisor suppor […]
Show full quote

My 2014 windows 11 pc suffered bugs from integrated KB5121003 install by usb.
I disable the security isolation hypervisor support for gaming and 3rd party hypervisor performance but because of bugs that configuration on install bugs out the system. (I do not recommend switching off security when using steam it is rampant with malware these days)
I thought it was really rude my digital license wouldn't activate.
Anyhow after many hours I found a registry setting to deal with the security bug and a powershell command
that re synchronises windows digital license between PC and activation server.
Microsoft activation support was not very useful but at least they said the license is permanent which prompted me to look for a solution.
I would like to take this opportunity to recommend do not use this patch if possible until a fix is released or you may find yourself
playing with google all day and you'll have to go through all the obsolete stuff until it finally gives useful answers.
The popular bugs with this patch are GPU and other drivers but not in my case I messed with security.
I have configured autounattend.xml to write a registry key work around and it worked.
This bug has happened before so someone at Microsoft forgot their mistake and did it again.

Just to recap, it was 12 hours after this post when it started downloading KB5121003 again and being just a completely bad patch for my system I paused it.
Microsoft has released kb5120998 as a pre release for the next cumulative patch so I integrated it into my install USB and installed again.
No problems since (been 24 hours now) but I had to download it in public because Microsoft drained my quota in the update loop! I lost a lot of time over this rubbish!
Those cumulative patches are up to 5GB in size because in this way everything updated since OS launch is included and installing this one will reduce the size of the next one via automatic update as auto method only grabs what's updated which is usually a significantly smaller amount if a pre release is installed prior.

Modern activity today is testing 2 x 8TB WD red HDD's in RAID on this puter so far all is good considering its older intel RST but the drivers are years younger than the motherboard thanks to a free driver updater (whom received a donation) well I’m happy with it.
Glad I didn't have to go back to windows 10 there are reasons I used 11 instead like the focus of text characters in the discord windows app is blurred for me in windows 10 on this machine but with same drivers all is good on win11 but like all software it will always have bugs anyhow just what can I live with well not config all the time for one.
Oh if you don't want to trash your OS and have windows trigger downloads to replace corrupted data be sure not to use faulty RAM with Intel RST it swaps around data between the drives and memory bank.

I fired up Spider-Man Remastered on Steam for the first time today. Got it on sale some time ago, but haven't had the chance to play it until now. I was looking forward to testing out the DualSense there, only it didn't seem to work. Despite the controller being officially supported by the game, I wasn't getting any advanced haptics, and the adaptive triggers didn't work either.

Turns out Steam Input was enabled by default, which messed up the game's native DualSense support. After turning that off, everything worked fine. I googled this, and it looks like there's no way to disable Steam Input globally, and you instead need to do it individually for each game. That's kinda inconvenient, but I guess I'll need to remember it for the future. Just throwing a heads up here, in case someone else runs into the same issue.

I messed around with AviSynth, but I didn't improve performance. I downloaded the latest versions of the plugins I use and made sure to pick the AVX2 version. It seems to perform as expected on shorter videos, but longer ones are slower. I'll have to try different software than VirtualDub at some point. I like having a graphical NLE interface, but for testing, I could just send the AviSynth script to FFmpeg. Also, I ran into two files that lost audio after a while, but they're both T120 tapes recorded in EP mode (about 6 hours and 20 minutes) that were captured as one huge file.

I also realized that I forgot to enable fan control on my case fan when I accidentally cleared the CMOS. For some reason, my motherboard defaults to running the case fan at a fixed 7.2V (that's how it's listed in the BIOS). Maybe it's because it's a 3-wire fan instead of PWM.

I've cut open one of the X1 slots on a HP 800 G2

Wanted to share because it's the neatest PCIe cut i've done so far, almost like a bought one

andrea wrote on 2026-08-31, 15:02:

I've cut open one of the X1 slots on a HP 800 G2

The attachment Untitled.jpg is no longer available

Wanted to share because it's the neatest PCIe cut i've done so far, almost like a bought one

Yup, pretty neat, just clean up the burr with an Xacto knife and smear silicone grease on the end to bring back the shine and the almost gap shrink to "have to look REAL close"

Sounds like it's not your first rodeo, but I will point out for the uninitiated that not all PCIe cards like running as PCIe 1x only, you might have to jumper the enable wire. I think that's what it's called, but should be confirmed with a search, to get the right pins anyway.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-08-31, 19:32:

Yup, pretty neat, just clean up the burr with an Xacto knife and smear silicone grease on the end to bring back the shine and the almost gap shrink to "have to look REAL close"

Sounds like it's not your first rodeo, but I will point out for the uninitiated that not all PCIe cards like running as PCIe 1x only, you might have to jumper the enable wire. I think that's what it's called, but should be confirmed with a search, to get the right pins anyway.

I've only ever used these cut slots for network cards (always Intel though), toy-class GPUs (HD5450s and 6450s to be specific) and to be honest I've never had issues. Just once or twice had to tape the smbus pins on dell cards but that would have been needed anyways. LSI/Avago SAS controllers also work but the bandwidth is tight.

"Modern", let's say Sandy Bridge and newer, boards are MUCH more forgiving in regards of these shenanigans compared to earlier systems, and PCIe 2.0+ is fast enough to make a x1 slot practical.

Also, for those playing along at home, remember that only x16 is guaranteed to provide 75w of power, on the smaller slots the spec only requires 25W.

Also, things are meant to "wake up" on 25W and ask nicely if they can use more, rather than trying to suck 75W straight out. Now, older graphics, 1.0 maybe and not so nice 2.0 might use this to just check if they should do anything at all, or just play dead. Whereas later graphics with much more power control can at least do desktop on 25W and some of them may enable shader cores at low power, low frequency for limited DX performance. So when that happens and your FPS sucks, it's more that you are power limited than it's the bandwidth of 1x killing performance. If you've got a card with optional 6 pin power, plugging that in might restore full shader performance, failing that, you can get some "mining riser" cables with a drive power socket on to provide more power at the PCIe slot the card is on, while the motherboard only supplies the 25W.

I've been going down the rabbit hole of trying to get Dolby Vision to work on my HTPC: Windows 11, RTX 3060 Ti, Hisense 55U7sg, playing MKV rips of 4K UHD Dolby Vision titles on MPC-HC/MadVR or MPC Video Renderer. As far as I can tell, it's not possible for several reasons: TV EDIDs, incompatible Dolby Vision Profiles, GPU driver issues, Windows 11 HDR settings, Dolby Access and Extension issues, etc.