Nexxen wrote on 2026-07-26, 09:50:

I bought 2 AIOs, one for me and one for my father. I didn't bother using the thermal paste it came with and just removed it put […]
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I bought 2 AIOs, one for me and one for my father.
I didn't bother using the thermal paste it came with and just removed it put GD-900 for my father's. Low temps, all good. He doesn't do much and no hardcore gaming (naval stuff mainly).
Improvement was noticeable, air was good too though.

Is the paste they put on usually any good? I don't talk what's best, that would be top level pastes.
I use GD-900 and GD-2 for me, generally never has issues.

I tried hard to make the LCD screen on my AIO work in Linux as well.
Nothing, I have a nice display changing color, might as well put back a USB 2.0 bracket instead of this.

Linux is widespread, why wouldn't they put out drivers that work with it?

Well, I switched from an RX 6600 8GB card to an RX 9060XT 16GB card in my primary gaming system.

Still running a Ryzen 5600X and 32GB RAM on the B450 platform, meaning I'm limited to PCIe Gen3, but this card only looses about 8% performance, at most, with that bottleneck in place. Still a huge step up from the 6600, and the 6600 is a fantastic card in my opinion. I really only wanted the 9060 becasue I wanted a 16GB card for some specific games, and it was the cheapest and best out there for the price I was looking at. I'm quite happy with it. Just as a baseline, my Time Spy graphics score more than doubled.

The 9060 is also a full x16 card, where the 6600 is an x8. If I had got an x8 card of some kind, the PCIe Gen3 bottleneck would have been considerably worse.

I'm considering moving to B550 just to move to PCIe Gen4, we will see. No way I'm building an AM5 platform right now with RAM prices as they are. Going to B550 would remove that PCIe bottleneck and I could still use my current Ryzen 5600X and DDR4 RAM. Time will tell.

Europe got hit by yet another heat wave, so I went and undervolted my 5700X via AMD's official Ryzen Master utility. It's a very basic undervolt, using the built-in Curve Optimizer on all cores. I just went with the values that the utility suggested after performing its automated tests.

The results are not bad for such a low effort tweak. CPU temperature dropped by 6C under load, and the Cinebench 2026 multi-thread score went up by 173 points. I didn't bother with overclocking, so any performance gains seen here are likely from holding the boost clocks more easily due to lower temps. Though I have yet to test the stability in more demanding games. So far, I mostly played around with the ShadPS4 emulator, and that seems to work fine with the undervolt while running Bloodborne. I don't play a lot of CPU intensive titles anyway, but I'll be keeping an eye out for any issues over the next couple of weeks.

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-08-01, 05:00:

Europe got hit by yet another heat wave, so I went and undervolted my 5700X via AMD's official Ryzen Master utility. It's a very basic undervolt, using the built-in Curve Optimizer on all cores. I just went with the values that the utility suggested after performing its automated tests.

The results are not bad for such a low effort tweak. CPU temperature dropped by 6C under load, and the Cinebench 2026 multi-thread score went up by 173 points. I didn't bother with overclocking, so any performance gains seen here are likely from holding the boost clocks more easily due to lower temps. Though I have yet to test the stability in more demanding games. So far, I mostly played around with the ShadPS4 emulator, and that seems to work fine with the undervolt while running Bloodborne. I don't play a lot of CPU intensive titles anyway, but I'll be keeping an eye out for any issues over the next couple of weeks.

Very nice. Depending on your silicon, you might be able to push it quite far. On my 5950X, I can get away with -20 on the first three cores, and -30 on all the rest; but I really won the silicon lottery when I bought this thing off eBay!

If you decide to do it manually -30 is the most you can go per core, consider trying -20 on all cores, and if that's stable maybe push them a bit further.

Best thing about curve optimiser, aside from the fact that's it cooler and faster, is that it's one of the safest tweaks you can make for free performance, worst that happens is it doesn't post and needs the CMOS cleared.

Dan386DX wrote on 2026-08-01, 05:26:

Very nice. Depending on your silicon, you might be able to push it quite far. On my 5950X, I can get away with -20 on the first three cores, and -30 on all the rest; but I really won the silicon lottery when I bought this thing off eBay!

For my particular 5700X, AMD's Ryzen Master utility suggested -30 on each core after a 12 hour automated test session (I manually increased the test duration to 300 seconds). That's what I've been using so far.

Since I'm still new to CPU undervolting, I wasn't sure how good or bad that was, but after watching a few more videos, it seems to be quite nice. Hopefully, it remains stable at those settings, but if not, I'll try tweaking them manually.

Undervolting my 9700X didn't help much, and Ryzen Master suggested -46 on all cores, which wasn't stable. The 5700X architecture probably gives a larger improvement from undervolting compared to the AM5 chips with the I/O die drawing 20-25W at all times.

Since I got a window air conditioner, I got AviSynth+ installed in Wine on that Ryzen for some video processing. QTGMC deinterlacing started out fast, but after a few minutes, it slowed down to the point where I felt like it wasn't worth using the Ryzen over my older i5-8500... again. I also lost my I/O die undervolt because I accidentally pressed the Clear CMOS button on the rear I/O panel, and I don't remember which voltage I reduced. What moron made that button stick out instead of needing a paper clip to press? It's the same on all "gamer" motherboards.

On the i5, I don't like the PCH hitting 60C now that temperatures have gone up, but I guess it's fine since Dell never puts a heatsink on any kind of Intel chipset (even back when their computers weren't so horribly unreliable that I wonder how corporate IT departments tolerate their failure rates). I don't really like moving the case fan to the front (making the power supply fan the only exhaust fan) or adding a second fan on a system with integrated graphics.

lti wrote on 2026-08-01, 15:37:

Undervolting my 9700X didn't help much, and Ryzen Master suggested -46 on all cores, which wasn't stable. The 5700X architecture probably gives a larger improvement from undervolting compared to the AM5 chips with the I/O die drawing 20-25W at all times.

Since I got a window air conditioner, I got AviSynth+ installed in Wine on that Ryzen for some video processing. QTGMC deinterlacing started out fast, but after a few minutes, it slowed down to the point where I felt like it wasn't worth using the Ryzen over my older i5-8500... again. I also lost my I/O die undervolt because I accidentally pressed the Clear CMOS button on the rear I/O panel, and I don't remember which voltage I reduced. What moron made that button stick out instead of needing a paper clip to press? It's the same on all "gamer" motherboards.

On the i5, I don't like the PCH hitting 60C now that temperatures have gone up, but I guess it's fine since Dell never puts a heatsink on any kind of Intel chipset (even back when their computers weren't so horribly unreliable that I wonder how corporate IT departments tolerate their failure rates). I don't really like moving the case fan to the front (making the power supply fan the only exhaust fan) or adding a second fan on a system with integrated graphics.

Good luck on the undervolting and dealing with badly designed resets. I have some power bars with a side-mounted main power button that is not recessed or otherwise protected against accidental triggering, so I know the feeling (I did not think to check for something that bone-headed before buying). Anyway, for things like settings in BIOS or TV service menus, I take photos with my phone and try to remember to tag them for easy access.

Without knowing more about your Avisynth setup and potential bottlenecks/issues (threading, thermal throttling, etc), I couldn't really guess why your QTGMC run feels so slow. Last time I ran that or other filters (like deshake) on a 5700x and later 5900 XT, it felt much snappier than whatever I had been running it on before (most likely an i9 9900k, AFAICR). I did run some apples to apples benchmarks (same video file and same settings), which I no longer remember, back in the day and, from what I recall, there was a significant performance gain on my then new AMD CPU. If your Avisynth build and associated plugins used by your QTGMC script are quite old, it may be worth trying newer versions with better support for newer CPU instructions and architectures and threading.

As for your aversion to added fans to your i5 setup, that is obviously your decision to make, but I personally would not trust an OEM's tolerances and thresholds in terms of thermal management on any hardware that is not relatively "high end", and even then. OEMs typically design their PCs, especially baseline office ones, for "a reasonable lifespan with an acceptable performance profile while staying within safe temperature ranges and acceptable at the lowest cost possible". I design my builds to always operate well below maximum component temperature specs in all but the most demanding scenarios, and use high end, low noise fans as needed to avoid hot spots and throttling. I aim for acceptable noise levels and maximum reasonable longevity without compromising performance. All the words in italic can have vastly different meanings depending on if one is an OEM or a user. I do not know how long I might want or need to use a given machine, so I do not compromise on thermals, even on arguably pedestrian builds, but that is just my opinion.

darry wrote on 2026-08-01, 16:33:

Good luck on the undervolting and dealing with badly designed resets. I have some power bars with a side-mounted main power button that is not recessed or otherwise protected against accidental triggering, so I know the feeling (I did not think to check for something that bone-headed before buying). Anyway, for things like settings in BIOS or TV service menus, I take photos with my phone and try to remember to tag them for easy access.

Yeah, I should have logged that somewhere. I don't even remember what voltage I was changing, but I remember that Ryzen Master needed to restart every time I changed it from software.

darry wrote on 2026-08-01, 16:33:

Without knowing more about your Avisynth setup and potential bottlenecks/issues (threading, thermal throttling, etc), I couldn't really guess why your QTGMC run feels so slow. Last time I ran that or other filters (like deshake) on a 5700x and later 5900 XT, it felt much snappier than whatever I had been running it on before (most likely an i9 9900k, AFAICR). I did run some apples to apples benchmarks (same video file and same settings), which I no longer remember, back in the day and, from what I recall, there was a significant performance gain on my then new AMD CPU. If your Avisynth build and associated plugins used by your QTGMC script are quite old, it may be worth trying newer versions with better support for newer CPU instructions and architectures and threading.

Now that I think about it, the whole setup is a mess. My Avisynth version and plugins are six years old, and I didn't use the AVX2-optimized versions. I'll have to update those some day. I tried the Avisynth and plugin versions that were in the AUR a while back (before the malicious attacks), and it just exits without displaying any errors. I had to use Wine, and because I don't know if I can access the Wine version from native Linux software, I'm doing other edits in VirtualDub2 (the 64-bit version) inside Wine as well. I never figured out how to build a native Linux version because the AviSynth developers only provide Ubuntu-specific instructions.

QTGMC is single-threaded. There's a multithreading option, but no matter how many threads I set, it would crash after a few seconds. I don't think I'm throttling, but with the final video encoding step using all 16 threads, the CPU runs at 4.6GHz instead of the single-core maximum (I think it was 5.5GHz by default). The maximum temperature I saw was 72°C (using a 120mm single-tower Thermalright cooler), so it doesn't seem to be throttling.

Since I mentioned the AUR, apparently a package I installed using standard pacman pulled a dependency from the AUR without my knowledge, and it's one of the affected packages from the malicious attack. I don't think I updated during the malicious campaign, but it's flagged by the package checking script I ran.

darry wrote on 2026-08-01, 16:33:

As for your aversion to added fans to your i5 setup, that is obviously your decision to make, but I personally would not trust an OEM's tolerances and thresholds in terms of thermal management on any hardware that is not relatively "high end", and even then. OEMs typically design their PCs, especially baseline office ones, for "a reasonable lifespan with an acceptable performance profile while staying within safe temperature ranges and acceptable at the lowest cost possible". I design my builds to always operate well below maximum component temperature specs in all but the most demanding scenarios, and use high end, low noise fans as needed to avoid hot spots and throttling. I aim for acceptable noise levels and maximum reasonable longevity without compromising performance. All the words in italic can have vastly different meanings depending on if one is an OEM or a user. I do not know how long I might want or need to use a given machine, so I do not compromise on thermals, even on arguably pedestrian builds, but that is just my opinion.

It always ran hot, but now the room temperature is higher than before. I said several weeks ago that I wanted to try a front fan, but I never did it. Gigabyte's heatsink on this H370 HD3 is a joke (a flat metal plate about 4mm thick with no fins), and it uses a weird mounting hole pattern. Maybe there's a clip-on heatsink (the kind that clips directly onto the chip package) that fits, but Intel says that it's a non-square package (23x24mm instead of 23x23mm).

Dear diary,
It has been an exceptionally tubular Friday. Went to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day, then got my booty handed to me a multitude of times in laser tag. However, the crippling humiliation and defeat were short-lived, because when we got home I found this box of glorificness waiting on the doorstep:

omgomgomg I've been dreaming of this moment for ten years now! My only regret is that I rewatched the entire series in December. I absolutely would have waited had I known it'd get a physical 4K release so soon -- and by Arrow Video, no less! Oh diary, Arrow Video does such dreamy encodes. ♥️ Oh, what I'd give to have them author all of my favourite discs! Unfortunately, I'm just a nobody and they don't even know I exist. Pity. 💔

Oh, but it's no biggie. On the bright side, by the time I rip all 25 discs, we'll probably be ready to watch the whole damn thing again!

I got a smoking deal on a brand new Intel ARC A750 a month or two ago and just finally got around to putting it through some quick tests today. I have to say, I am thoroughly impressed.

I had been waiting to get my hands on a system appropriate for it (with Resizable BAR support) and one fell into my lap last week. Since that system also came with an RTX 2070 I figured it'd be really interesting to compare the two. I have only had time to run Superposition benchmark so far, but I was NOT expecting these results!

Without ReBAR enabled:

2070

A750

With ReBAR enabled:

2070

A750

I know the A750 probably won't be consistently this much faster, but if its 40% faster in any situations where it'll be used, that is awesome! This is basically 3060 Ti level performance... at higher idle power consumption, of course. Still not bad for a $139 card purchased in box brand new from a store.

I really hope Intel sticks with the GPU market. It's a shame that the market is massively stacked against the production of consumer GPUs right now. It could very well kill off ARC, despite being the only competitive dedicated GPU alternative to Nvidia or AMD\ATI since 3dfx or maybe PowerVR's Kyro II.

Recently picked up myself a nice new "HP Mini IP Conference PC with Microsoft Team Rooms"
That is believe it or not exacly how the computer identifies itself!
Its an HP Elite Mini 800 G9 with some custom firmware, Windows 11 IoT Enterprise licence and a rather nice built in piece of hardware that is 2.5Gig Realtec POE nic, USB 3.2 with DP++ on one port and USB 3.2 on the other and a HDMI IN port for video capture.

Nice spec too, i7 13700T, 512Gb NVME, 16Gb DDR5 (now upgraded to 32Gb for CPU inference (Gemma 4 26B is slow but possible)).
Runs quiet as a mouse too even when streaming OBS to YT.

StriderTR wrote on 2026-07-28, 15:29:

Still running a Ryzen 5600X and 32GB RAM on the B450 platform, meaning I'm limited to PCIe Gen3

I'm considering moving to B550 just to move to PCIe Gen4

I bought a B550 motherboard a couple of years ago, but got a Ryzen 5 5600G CPU with integrated graphics, which, unbeknownst to me at the time, only supports PCIe Gen3. Oh well, it was for an HTPC. I guess if I ever re-baptize it as a gaming PC, I could just swap out the CPU.

I have a 500GB 2.5" HDD that climbs up to ≃50°C for no reason.
Tried to look into it but my bet is a component going bad and starting to fry until it'll die.
Still have to unscrew the motherboard and see whether there are signs of "departure" somewhere or a specific component slow cooking.
It was normal temp before.

Barley wrote on 2026-08-13, 19:19:

StriderTR wrote on 2026-07-28, 15:29:

Still running a Ryzen 5600X and 32GB RAM on the B450 platform, meaning I'm limited to PCIe Gen3

I'm considering moving to B550 just to move to PCIe Gen4

I bought a B550 motherboard a couple of years ago, but got a Ryzen 5 5600G CPU with integrated graphics, which, unbeknownst to me at the time, only supports PCIe Gen3. Oh well, it was for an HTPC. I guess if I ever re-baptize it as a gaming PC, I could just swap out the CPU.

Yeah, the Ryzen lineup is a bit weird, well, I guess they're all guilty of misleading nomenclature.

In my case, the 5600 and 5600X are identical, the clock speeds are the only real difference. 32MB L3 and PCIe 4 support are identical.

I considered jumping to a 5700 for the extra cores. Nope. The 5700 (no iGPU) only has 20MB L3 and PCIe 3 support.... So, the 5600 and 5600X both actually perform better in some tasks I need than the "better and faster" 5700. It's kinda silly IMHO. I'd have to get a 5700X just to keep what I already have if I want to add 2 cores.

I ultimately decided to just keep the 5600X and actually get a couple 5600's to use in other systems.

Though, if I go to B550, I may look at the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but at $340 ... I don't know. My little 5600X is still getting the job done quite nicely. I'll likely keep my $340 and just keep the 5600X. Time will tell.

StriderTR wrote on 2026-08-15, 15:42:

Yeah, the Ryzen lineup is a bit weird, well, I guess they're all guilty of misleading nomenclature. […]
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Barley wrote on 2026-08-13, 19:19:

StriderTR wrote on 2026-07-28, 15:29:

Still running a Ryzen 5600X and 32GB RAM on the B450 platform, meaning I'm limited to PCIe Gen3

I'm considering moving to B550 just to move to PCIe Gen4

I bought a B550 motherboard a couple of years ago, but got a Ryzen 5 5600G CPU with integrated graphics, which, unbeknownst to me at the time, only supports PCIe Gen3. Oh well, it was for an HTPC. I guess if I ever re-baptize it as a gaming PC, I could just swap out the CPU.

Yeah, the Ryzen lineup is a bit weird, well, I guess they're all guilty of misleading nomenclature.

In my case, the 5600 and 5600X are identical, the clock speeds are the only real difference. 32MB L3 and PCIe 4 support are identical.

I considered jumping to a 5700 for the extra cores. Nope. The 5700 (no iGPU) only has 20MB L3 and PCIe 3 support.... So, the 5600 and 5600X both actually perform better in some tasks I need than the "better and faster" 5700. It's kinda silly IMHO. I'd have to get a 5700X just to keep what I already have if I want to add 2 cores.

I ultimately decided to just keep the 5600X and actually get a couple 5600's to use in other systems.

Though, if I go to B550, I may look at the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, but at $340 ... I don't know. My little 5600X is still getting the job done quite nicely. I'll likely keep my $340 and just keep the 5600X. Time will tell.

I wouldn't worry about being limited to PCI-E Gen3 unless you're doing something specific where you're noticing a bottleneck. As long as your GPU utilizes a full 16 lanes then Gen3 is plenty fast enough to keep up for gaming, unless you're using a 5090... in which case the rest of the system is more of a bottleneck anyway.

Also, with the prices of SSDs these days I wouldn't be too concerned about supporting high end NVMe drives that benefit from higher PCI-E bandwidth. The real-world difference between some random 1TB Gen3 drive harvested out of a broken laptop vs a high end Gen4\Gen5 drive is pretty minimal... but these day's you'll pay dearly to get any higher performance drives. Not really worth it.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-08-15, 16:04:

I wouldn't worry about being limited to PCI-E Gen3 unless you're doing something specific where you're noticing a bottleneck. As long as your GPU utilizes a full 16 lanes then Gen3 is plenty fast enough to keep up for gaming, unless you're using a 5090... in which case the rest of the system is more of a bottleneck anyway.

Also, with the prices of SSDs these days I wouldn't be too concerned about supporting high end NVMe drives that benefit from higher PCI-E bandwidth. The real-world difference between some random 1TB Gen3 drive harvested out of a broken laptop vs a high end Gen4\Gen5 drive is pretty minimal... but these day's you'll pay dearly to get any higher performance drives. Not really worth it.

True. My only real consideration for jumping to B550 was to better support my RX 9060XT and hold me over until the "memory crisis" dies down. There is only one game I play where the Gen 3 limitation is somewhat noticeable, and that's Ark Survival Ascended, but even there, it runs fine on my current B450 setup. Again, time will tell.

StriderTR wrote on 2026-08-15, 17:24:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-08-15, 16:04:

I wouldn't worry about being limited to PCI-E Gen3 unless you're doing something specific where you're noticing a bottleneck. As long as your GPU utilizes a full 16 lanes then Gen3 is plenty fast enough to keep up for gaming, unless you're using a 5090... in which case the rest of the system is more of a bottleneck anyway.

Also, with the prices of SSDs these days I wouldn't be too concerned about supporting high end NVMe drives that benefit from higher PCI-E bandwidth. The real-world difference between some random 1TB Gen3 drive harvested out of a broken laptop vs a high end Gen4\Gen5 drive is pretty minimal... but these day's you'll pay dearly to get any higher performance drives. Not really worth it.

True. My only real consideration for jumping to B550 was to better support my RX 9060XT and hold me over until the "memory crisis" dies down. There is only one game I play where the Gen 3 limitation is somewhat noticeable, and that's Ark Survival Ascended, but even there, it runs fine on my current B450 setup. Again, time will tell.

Yeah, if it's an 8GB 9060XT then there would be more of a difference when you are near the VRAM limits of the card. If it's a 16GB model then I wouldn't expect there to be much if any difference between Gen3 and Gen4.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-08-15, 17:39:

Yeah, if it's an 8GB 9060XT then there would be more of a difference when you are near the VRAM limits of the card. If it's a 16GB model then I wouldn't expect there to be much if any difference between Gen3 and Gen4.

Yep, it's 16GB. So no VRAM issues. No slowdowns with having to unnecessarily transfer tons of extra data over PCIe 3. Plus, this card will likely follow me to my next build, whenever that may be.

In the two weeks since my last post, I finally tried the front fan, and it reduced chipset temperatures. It might not have been a big deal (as I mentioned, Dell is allergic to chipset heatsinks, and they seem to last a long time that way), but I can hold my finger on the flat plate "heatsink" now. I tested two fans (front and rear), and it didn't make a difference to temperatures compared to just a front fan. I still like having an exhaust fan other than the power supply fan, though.

I need to uninstall Kompose next. It doesn't update my inbox reliably, and it constantly spams me with notifications for emails in my spam folder (ironically) about two hours after those emails were actually received.

For something that isn't computer-related, I also tried some microcontroller stuff and learned that BME680 sensors suck (or the one board I've powered up so far is broken - I bought two at what I think is a high price of $18 each). It's reading temperature high (out of spec), and if the gas sensor heater is enabled (the fact that this exists should have been a warning sign), the measured temperature drifts both up and down instead of simply being even higher. I don't have a reference for its other measurements, but humidity seems high and barometric pressure seems low. I haven't even started to write my own code for my target chip yet (just using an Arduino library as a test of the sensor itself because it's so complicated), but that creates its own problems because Arduino libraries tend to have no documentation beyond how to make a simple "hello world" program (along with the final compiled program size being ridiculously large). Sometimes I never figure it out, like the old nRF24L01 wireless modules that I could never get to transmit data (even the Arduino examples either transmitted long strings of garbage or nothing at all, and code I wrote myself never transmitted anything). Why didn't I just buy something that works?

3D printed an arm mount for my cheap USB camera microscope. Seems to work well, all be it a bit wobbly.

Will work for checking traces, solder joints, and other such things as needed. Sure beats holding it all the time. 😜

Mount: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4928947