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July 2024 PC Gamer Article Discussion

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So fallout london finally launches. The challenge now is trying to get my copy of fallout 4 GOTY on steam to work with it. i suspect gog Galaxy is my key here, but i don't really use that browser. Even though its installed on my machine.

onto other news, Path of exile is launching soon and having looked at the rewards they certainly tasty. bad news is that all the good stuff is (unsurprisingly) in the 32+ challenges. i would LOVE to try and get them but, those challenges are obnoxiously difficult and unless they're going to make it easier or have more challenges (ie: instead of 40, they had 60 different ones) i doubt i'll see any of it.
You realize you have to go back to a previous version of Fallout 4?


That's it. I'm starting a space program. If Elon (I just call him E) can do it, I can do it. My budget won't be as large (I can probably go up to $40), but I think we can work around that.

I think we'll be dealing with some extreme temperature variations here. Do you think old aluminum cans will be fine to make a hull out of?
 

Zloth

Community Contributor
I think we'll be dealing with some extreme temperature variations here. Do you think old aluminum cans will be fine to make a hull out of?
The kind with the little push-in tabs or the old kind where you peel open the tab and then most definitely don't ever just drop it back into the can because you don't want to walk clear over to a trash can to throw the tab away?
 
Could herald a new era of long lasting SSDs
My last 2 ssd are likely to still work long after I stop using them.
Size is more likely to make them useless over breakage.
Expect I won't ever use my 250gb ssd again. its been sitting in my old PC for 3 years now, I don't need it.

Guess it depends on what brand you buy. So far haven't had any ssd/nvme fail on me. Its about 12 years since the last drive of mine died

Longer usage life is nice but until we have really massive size drives, the chances are the drive will be replaced before it dies anyway. its taken 3 years for my 1tb nvme to go from 100% health to 99%. I won't be using it by time it hits 90% unless I put it in next pc as storage drive.
 
My last 2 ssd are likely to still work long after I stop using them.
Size is more likely to make them useless over breakage.
Expect I won't ever use my 250gb ssd again. its been sitting in my old PC for 3 years now, I don't need it.

Guess it depends on what brand you buy. So far haven't had any ssd/nvme fail on me. Its about 12 years since the last drive of mine died

Longer usage life is nice but until we have really massive size drives, the chances are the drive will be replaced before it dies anyway. its taken 3 years for my 1tb nvme to go from 100% health to 99%. I won't be using it by time it hits 90% unless I put it in next pc as storage drive.
I've had a couple of Samsung external SSDs fail, but nothing internal.
 
I have a terrible record with external drives, they all die... but I haven't bothered getting one for about 15 years now. I don't really need one.
I have a 256gb usb drive if I really needed to put a lot of files onto something... also 2 32gb usb drives. I decided I was sick of having slow USB drives so I bought a few a couple of years ago. I don't really use them for much. Their tfr speed isn't bad, the 256gb one can do 300mb/s

The 256gb one is used as a backup for my music library. It is redundant now I use Tidal.

Both the USB and SSD/Nvme I own are all Samsung. If it works, why fix it.

The last drive I had that died was a Western Digital Velociraptor hdd. It ran at 10000 rpm, it was going as fast as it can but compared to ssd it was still standing still. It died in 2010 or somewhere near there... only lasted 2 years.
 
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Brian Boru

Legenda in Aeternum
Moderator
I won't ever use my 250gb ssd again

Ideal to clone your system and apps disk onto—very quick way to protect against emergencies. Or clone a new install of OS and software, all configured how you like it, as a green field fallback.

I'll probably always keep a 256 for OS and software, better for my organization and backup—verified system disk image in 30-40 minutes, data backup a simple drag n drop.
 
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I am not going to ever boot off an ssd again now that nvme are faster. Sata ssd max speed of 550mb is almost 7x slower than just a PCIe3 nvme. PCIe 5 nvme can do 12k mb/s,.... so um you 24x slower at loading anything.

If you want to stick to 256gb I would buy an nvme now as there is a good chance that size will stop being sold by the bigger makers. Or just stick to slow drives.
 
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I am not going to ever boot off an ssd again now that nvme are faster. Sata ssd max speed of 550mb is almost 7x slower than just a PCIe3 nvme. PCIe 5 nvme can do 12k mb/s,.... so um you 24x slower at loading anything.

If you want to stick to 256gb I would buy an nvme now as there is a good chance that size will stop being sold by the bigger makers. Or just stick to slow drives.
Why do you want to go so fast? Stop and smell the Sata HDD. It's very Zen. Think of how much more you would understand about life if you had to wait 5 minutes for your PC to boot. Some day, you could be nearly as wise as I am instead of ridiculous like Brian.
 
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Why do you want to go so fast? Stop and smell the Sata HDD. It's very Zen. Think of how much more you would understand about life if you had to wait 5 minutes for your PC to boot. Some day, you could be nearly as wise as I am.
I can do that now. If I start my mums PC that has a hdd still, it takes at least that amount of time to get to desktop and let her have any access to programs. Meanwhile, if I start my PC and walk away, it will turn the monitor off as I wasn't fast enough.
15 seconds start up gives me more time to waste finding a video to watch :)
 

Brian Boru

Legenda in Aeternum
Moderator
slow drives

My esteemed colleague in ridiculousness, listen up:
I boot up once a day and have plenty of other things to do between pressing the switch and sitting down at PC—a 5200 HDD would do fine for that :)

Speed isn't the thing, organization and backup are the things.
24x slower at loading anything

So 40 milliseconds instead of 1 second? Uh huh :rolleyes:

if I start my PC and walk away, it will turn the monitor off

So it's worse in practice—but hey, enjoy the theory :p
 
Look at all these chumps, regularly booting up their PCs. Who shuts theirs down anymore?

I'm seriousness, my laptop only ever goes to sleep and my desktop always stays on, only being shut off if we'll be gone for an extended period of time.

Interestingly, the HTPC, the one that gets booted every afternoon, boots the fastest and it has a traditional 2.5" SSD for a main boot drive.
 
Look at all these chumps, regularly booting up their PCs. Who shuts theirs down anymore?

I'm seriousness, my laptop only ever goes to sleep and my desktop always stays on, only being shut off if we'll be gone for an extended period of time.

Interestingly, the HTPC, the one that gets booted every afternoon, boots the fastest and it has a traditional 2.5" SSD for a main boot drive.
Not only do I not turn off my PC, but I have sleep disabled. It takes longer to come out of sleep sometimes than it takes to boot up.
 
So it's worse in practice—but hey, enjoy the theory
i don't walk away when starting pc, I don''t need to wait for it. I don't have that much I need to do compared to you, it seems :)
Look at all these chumps, regularly booting up their PCs. Who shuts theirs down anymore?

I'm seriousness, my laptop only ever goes to sleep and my desktop always stays on, only being shut off if we'll be gone for an extended period of time.
My PC is in my room, i don't need lights on at night when I am trying to sleep. RGB doesn't turn off in sleep mode...
So I don't use sleep, I use hibernate which is about same speed on an nvme anyway
Speed isn't the thing, organization and backup are the things.

Backups only necessary to use if PC has problems. Its been a long time since I had any that required reinstalling windows. The ones mentioned elsewhere happened on my last PC, so its about 6 years now. There is nothing on C drive I can't get online. All my documents backed up to Onedrive as soon as they made. All my music there too. Only thing missing is applications and reinstall great time to get new versions.
When I made this PC, I didn't need any files off the last one. They were all waiting on Onedrive for me. I made sure I wasn't missing anything since I had a while to be ready for swap.
 

Brian Boru

Legenda in Aeternum
Moderator
Look at all these chumps … Who shuts theirs down anymore?

my 15 PCs

Wuja looka de guy :eek:

No wonder you leave 'em on—if you turned 'em off, it'd be time to boot up the first again by the time you'd turned off the last!

It depends on your setup and needs tho—neither is 'definitely' the worse option, altho leaving it on is 'in general' less advisable.



I used to leave mine on all the time until 10-15 years ago—ie until whenever hardware got reliable enough that daily boot up power surges aren't a concern. I still leave on overnight to run the occasional long job.

Americans, living somewhere where the cost of leaving your computer on overnight wouldn't get you a deposit on a house

Unusually, Loki has a point:

EgITAzq.png


Electricity definitely isn't super cheap here

See above :)

I don't have that much I need to do compared to you, it seems

I have considered skipping breakfast and putting the savings towards a NVMe, so I see your point.

Backups only necessary to use if PC has problems

Agreed. Where we differ is I prefer to do them before the problem ;)
 
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Zloth

Community Contributor
I always shut mine down - and almost always shut down my work PC when work is done, too.

Biggest reason I do so is power surge worries. Just a couple of days ago, the power suddenly went out and there was a boom! Transformer blew up somewhere close. Tonight, we've got a good chance of thunderstorms, so I might even unplug.

Secondary reason is just to clean everything out. I'm running a desktop OS, not a server OS.

Updates aren't a problem with an nVME drive. Microsoft's monthly updates take maybe two minutes. (Work PC with its 3-or-so virus scanning systems takes a lot longer.)
 
its possible you could run into memory issues if you left PC in sleep and never did a restart process or shutdfown.
Only as windows doesn't refresh ram until a restart. Yes, there are programs that can clear ram but those are counter productive.

When you close a program in win 10/11, windows is going to compress the data and keep it in ram, in case you open that program again. As its faster to decompress in ram than to load off storage drives. It only clears that ram if another program needs the space. It only saves it to storage when PC is shutting down.

If you use the programs that clear ram, it means that every time you reload a program it has to get data off drives. This is slower than just letting CPU decompress it. Having free ram isn't really a good thing... its just extra not being used. People think it makes PC faster... nope.

It does help to not always be at max usage though as it too can slow you down, mainly as it has to use page file. A happy medium is the best option, don't have so little you run out but no need to have too much as it is also not used.
I probably have too much but as most I have ever used is 20gb, its clear I use more than the 16 I would have if not for using 16gb sticks. (though the 20gb only normally happens if I run a virtual machine and if I had less ram, I wouldn't have allocated 8gb to the machine when I made it)

Diablo 4 ran out of memory once as well, so 32gb of ram just meant the restarts of game were further apart. Games having memory leaks probably isn't a good reason to buy more ram, better they fix the game. Memory leaks will eat all your ram, no matter how much you have.

windows memory usage resizes based on what you have. It can run in as little as 256mb of ram but run is wrong word... walk is better. Its not the fastest since its mostly running off page file.

Kljqd3L.jpeg

mine uses about 10gb at idle, still leaving 21gb sitting there doing nothing. Sure, I could run less at idle but why? It doesn't slow PC down at all. that idle amount includes Firefox so its lower still if I have nothing running.
Committed is total memory used, includes cached and page file usage
Not sure what is in cached, perhaps the game I played yesterday?
Paged pool is mostly data, non paged is mostly drivers.

Luckily windows update needs a restart so unless you crazy and disable that, you need a restart once a month for updates.
 
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:eek:

No wonder you leave 'em on—if you turned 'em off, it'd be time to boot up the first again by the time you'd turned off the last!

To be fair, only 5 of them are typically running and not properly shut down. A sixth is turned on and off everyday, but the rest are not in use or see only occasional use. And actually I may only have like 10, sometimes I lose track.

EgITAzq.png




See above :)

Fair enough! I thought my occasional $300 electric bill was high before we had Solar.

Agreed. Where we differ is I prefer to do them before the problem ;)

I really only backup my 4Tb worth of file server data. If any of my PC's took a dump, there's nothing important on any of my C: drives.

its possible you could run into memory issues if you left PC in sleep and never did a restart process or shutdfown.
Only as windows doesn't refresh ram until a restart. Yes, there are programs that can clear ram but those are counter productive.

I do occasionally run into issues on my laptop due to sleeping it frequently and maybe gets rebooted once a week or so.
 

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