Snakecharmed

Fixed that for myself since I wasn't aware how insanely expensive pre-built Intel NUCs already were because I got a brand new barebones 8th gen NUC in 2021 as a home media server/future NVR for $300 and thought that wasn't too bad. If I were to do it over again today, I'd get a barebones ASRock DeskMini X300W plus a Ryzen 5 5600G that would blow away any NUC you could buy new or used for $300. I didn't consider gaming NUCs because why would anyone? Right on cue, now everyone in the hardware news universe is citing this brief article from Bits and Chips about a potential ROG NUC. https://www.bitsandchips.it/english-news/asus-is-studying-the-heir-of-the-intel-nuc-13-extreme

The draw with the Five Guys' fries is the quantity they give you because they fill the paper cup and then dump another cupful in the bag, so ordering anything more than the smallest size fries would have you eating potatoes for half an hour. Apart from that, their fries tend to be soggy with oil and I don't really like them if they're not Cajun style because the regular unseasoned ones were kind of bland. I used to go to Five Guys for a decent fast burger, but their prices got so expensive that I haven't been there in years now. There are also better burger spots in my town that I've since discovered, with one of them being a local butcher that's both the best and cheapest option of them all.

That's $450 USD worth of fans if they were all new, so that's a great deal. You could resell the ones you don't use at almost the original retail price and make a small profit, or perhaps you do have a use for them all, which would also be great. Hopefully there aren't any issues with them. I had a Silent Wings 4 120mm (non-Pro) that Be Quiet replaced under warranty because it was making a horrendous squealing noise a couple of months after I installed it, but overall, I like the Silent Wings 4 family of fans. I found them to have the best balance of static pressure and noise levels at low RPMs for my build.

In before Asus ROG NUCs for $1000 and bonus VRM coil whine. Who says no? Not Asus.

I cleaned up the room a bit to get some photos of the office/gaming space as well as a few specific A/V components. There are still some peripherals and cables laying around connected to the old rig in the white Montech case next to the console table since I still haven't migrated all my old Steam game installations and saved games/records from it. Whenever I get that done, all that extra cable, peripheral, and case clutter will go away. I have a perfectly sized floating mount, magnetic, tempered glass whiteboard on the wall above the sofa. It's exactly the width between the wall outlet plates. I knew I had to buy it despite being the most expensive tempered glass whiteboard available for sale. I also got a couple of roller storage bins to put under the sofa for convenience and decluttering. The whiteboard and sofa were my first two big purchases for this room in March 2021 when I started planning my home office in the midst of the pandemic. The colors in the room were very intentional once I realized I could pull it off. For the fabrics, it started with the sofa. Then came the window curtains on the other side of the room. I later found the stools next to the desk with a similarly matching fabric on Overstock, and the bottom shelf on those was a huge selling point too. When it came to finding some organizers for the console table shelf, when I saw those navy velvet baskets with the rope handles, there was no way I wasn't going to buy them. After that came the Steelcase Leap office chair which I've mentioned in other threads. Even that door stopper is a heavy ball wound with navy-colored rope, not to be confused for the actual mini basketball that's beside the Montech case. I've had this desk since 2003. It's not that great ergonomically nor very noteworthy since it's an inexpensive Bush furniture desk from one of the big box office stores, but it's sufficiently sturdy. I've been generally careful with it and it's survived two moves. it worked out well for this room because of the two attic access doors that would have been very annoying to position furniture around otherwise. The golden oak color led me to picking out the industrial and vaguely steampunk-styled ceiling fan, the console table, and also played a factor in getting the bamboo chair mat recently over getting another polycarbonate chair mat that would crack in another 3-5 years. An unintended bonus of the the bamboo mat is that it also goes well with the basketball hoop. They're nowhere near each other in the room and I can't really shoot the ball from anywhere on the mat other than the front corner because of the ceiling fan, but it ties the room together better than the Dude's rug. Above are all the black glass and piano black surfaces for the speakers, speaker stands, and subwoofer. The microfiber cloth is there so my footprints aren't all over the top of the subwoofer since I also use it as a footrest. My monitor stand's base is also black glass, which I'll go over below. The monitor stand is from my old Dell 2707WFP monitor years ago. I had to assemble a custom mount to adapt it to the 38" LG UltraGear monitor and set the bottom edge of the monitor to be perfectly aligned with the bottom edge of the 55" Samsung QN85A TV. I used long M4 screws, washers, and spacers to attach the monitor to slotted mending plates to allow for extra vertical height adjustment beyond the monitor arm's range, then used M4 bolts, nuts, and spacers to attach the mending plates to the cantilevered arm. The monitor arm base and sides being silver/chrome do a really nice job of reflecting the ARGB light ring from the back of the UltraGear monitor, adding to the ambient light effect. The glass stand is such a beautiful showpiece that, even beyond keeping it to match the aesthetic I wanted, I wouldn't have discarded it regardless after the 2707WFP became obsolete. It's more than a part of the monitor. It's closer to a piece of A/V furniture. Dell was on something back in 2007-08 putting this much effort into the monitor presentation for the 2707WFP and 3008WFP considering that these days, you often get a flimsy plastic stand with no panning and limited tilt and vertical adjustments. This stand even has a user-adjustable tensioner screw to tweak the arm's tension for raising/lowering the display. The wall mount for the TV is a dual-arm mount with a 36" max wall extension, which was one of the longest I found since many of them stopped at 19-20". This unit had the most versatile mounting options among all the mounts I looked at, and the backplate hole spacing gave me some offset options across two wall studs. I then mounted the TV onto it offset a bit more so the TV would be horizontally centered on the wall with the arms collapsed. For reference, the wire concealer is dead center along the wall. These days, I usually keep the mount extended to use the TV as a second monitor, but it goes against the wall to watch movies, play controller-based games, or access the upper attic door. This is perhaps my favorite original decorating idea. When the house was built, I had the builder install a cabinet knob for the attic door handle because I didn't have any other ideas back then. After all, who would? Nobody thinks about this stuff. I've seen the string and plastic pull handle that almost everyone has (and doesn't give a second thought about), and I've seen an eye hook on the door that used a wooden table/chair leg with a stainless hook screwed in as a pull handle. I wanted to do something more creative. As a nod to being a casual aviation enthusiast, this is a NAS1756-12 spec coated nylon canvas Remove Before Flight streamer attached to a carabiner attached to a cabinet pull ring on the door. At a later date after my upstairs Ethernet project is done, I'll probably make another post about some of the considerations for wiring up this room as well as show the fourth wall.

The 30 and 40-series reference boards have some solid engineering in their coolers unlike previous generations. That means that there's less room for an AIB partner to build a better solution while still charging a tolerable premium for their solution over the reference model. Nvidia is basically directly competing with the AIBs now. The value proposition for an AIB isn't what it used to be, and that's presumably partly why EVGA said screw it rather than get squeezed or fleece their customers. As for Asus, if there is any company in this space that is guilty of applying a brand tax to their products a la Apple, it's them. Whether it's motherboards or GPUs, Asus system components consistently deliver less for your money. I have an indifference-hate relationship with my ROG Strix AM5 motherboard and knowing what I know now, I would not consider the Micro Center bundle savings a sufficient tradeoff for having to own an Asus system component.

While I'm not planning to buy a replacement laptop anytime soon, this looks very intriguing. It looks like Framework has already done well with their Laptop 13, so they're already succeeding where others have failed (Alienware Area-51m R1). I might be looking at this 16" Framework in a few years. Along with the recent EU law on user-serviceable batteries, things are beginning to look good again for consumers in the portable electronics space.

With such a wide budget and perhaps not a proportionate amount of time, I guess the real questions are: How are you going to use your speakers? When and what is the use case of them over the headphones? What are you expecting versus your headphone setup? What headphones do you currently use? What's your actual budget? What justifies settling at $150, going up to $400, and then over all the way up to $1200? You could call this snobbery (and I could explain in another post at another time), but I think the Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 is overrated unless you really just want to escape with a PC speaker system in a box for $150 or less, in which case, you may as well go full budget and buy a used set for $80 or less and be done with it. That'll also give you a buffer for replacement parts since you'll probably need them sooner or later. The thing is, they're great for computer speakers, but all the reviews you read by people who don't review audio make the ProMedia 2.1 out to be something that it's not. They have a signature boomy bass and hollow mid-range sound that make music listening...unremarkable, and the reliability of the set has always been a mixed bag throughout all of its iterations over the past 20+ years. If you do a quick search on eBay, you'll find about as many parted out systems and components as complete functioning ones. Pook's got the formula for a budget setup. The same basic formula has been followed for about two decades with different Class T amp/speaker/sub combinations, but it'll allow you to do much better than the Klipsch ProMedia for $150.

Since I primarily listen to music, sometimes even while playing some games, I've never seriously looked at setting up more than a 2.1 in front of my computer. Given the challenges of setting up surround sound and running and hiding speaker wires, I'd rather have a strong 2.1 than a untidy surround setup. If you're not using the 5.1 surround setup of those Creative speakers now, you really won't miss it after you upgrade your speakers to something decent. HDMI or TOSLINK in to a receiver is probably the easiest solution if you have a place to put one. Otherwise, it's not lost on me that a good chunk of the expense for a desktop-friendly dedicated audio setup is in trying to make the hardware compact. A Schiit Stack of a Magni+ and Modi+ would get the job done and look good for headphone and speaker switching for relatively cheap. From what I've read, the Magni+ would also be an upgrade over the Objective 2. You'd have to run a sub with a speaker-level input with this combo though.

The rabbit hole is very, very deep. Your options are only limited by your creativity and your budget. I spent about $750 between bookshelf speakers, a subwoofer, a DAC, and an amplifier. I think the speakers were about $200. It's been about 12 years since I bought them so I don't recall exactly. The speaker options are seemingly endless if you choose to supply your own power. Because I rarely use headphones with my rig, I didn't prioritize routing headphone audio through the DAC, although I certainly could have when I was shopping for the hardware. I'm okay with onboard sound driving front panel headphone audio, but otherwise I'd probably have spent even more on my DAC and gotten the SMSL M500 MKⅢ. However, I still have an XtremPro X1-1 USB DAC that I can use if I need a boost over onboard. You could get away with a receiver if space isn't a concern. I couldn't put one on my desk and still have room for anything else.

Reddit got way too big to be trusted and their leadership has been extremely sus for years now. As a forum owner myself, I never saw a ton of user value in aggregator communities like Reddit (or Digg, or Fark, or Slashdot). They were good for breaking news, but the quality of discussion was never all that great. Hobbyist discussions on those platforms were useful, but knowing what Google has become, they would have been well-indexed anyway even if they were scattered across other forums instead of largely being on Reddit. At least in this hobby, there are still so many PC tech forums out there that Reddit was far from the only game in town. I've ditched smaller forums due to having no confidence in the owner(s) (I'm not even referring to OCN here, but you could toss them in the same bucket as well). If I don't believe in what you're doing or trying to do, I'm not going to participate in your effort to make a name for yourself when I don't think you deserve it. Social media has never been profitable unless you monetize the data. It's the same thing that Facebook dealt with but largely overcame, and it's the same thing Twitter is battling now with a more dubious outcome and a megalomaniac at the helm. At the end of the day though, I can't blame the users for not knowing how it all works and not having an exit strategy prepared. However, that doesn't excuse the disingenuous and anti-consumer actions of a company's leadership because they don't get to the position they're in without their userbase.

Some assorted updates: Be Quiet Screaming Banshee 4 120mm PWM fan One of the Be Quiet Slient Wings 4 120mm PWM fans on my heatsink started making some noise a few weeks ago. It took me a moment to track down where the noise was coming from, and then which CPU fan was making the noise. I swapped my CPU fans with my intake fans and then confirmed the specific fan that was howling like the bearing was shot. Be Quiet's RMA advance replacement process was nice and straightforward, but I had to live with an intake fan that could vary from a low-level ticking noise to a screaming banshee for nearly two weeks. It wasn't quite as bad as I'm making it seem, and I could have disconnected it if it was always in banshee mode, but the potential was always there. I hate creating e-waste per Be Quiet's RMA instructions, but I also hate this fan in particular for the aural torture it created for the last couple of weeks. Room temperature I underestimated the heat situation. The room consistently gets up to 86 °F after a session of gaming with the upstairs thermostat set to 76-78 °F, but the thermostat is in my bedroom on the opposite end of the floor, and I don't need the rest of the floor to be any cooler. The old rig didn't dump this much heat into the room, partly due to the airflow within the case being worse. Since I had this in mind from the early days of buying my house, I'm revisiting the idea of zoning the upstairs HVAC for each bedroom and now I'm planning to go forward with it. While a mini split system would have a lot of benefits, I just don't like the tacked-on aesthetics of them, so I'm going the expensive route. (That said, a mini split would be my only consideration for a garage HVAC project, but that's what I call a pure luxury home upgrade.) The only real consideration I need to make is how to order the different attic projects I have in mind between the zoned HVAC, whole-house Ethernet wiring, and enhanced attic insulation with extra blown insulation and radiant barrier installation on the rafters. I'm hiring contractors for all of these, by the way. I've long been done with trying to do major projects like these myself. Motherboard VRM noise For the first time since my previous post, the VRM chirping/grinding noise picked up at a significant volume last night. The only correlation I can make at the moment is that the noise really picks up if the motherboard probe listed in HWiNFO is close to 40 °C and trying to step down to a lower power state. Usually, it stays below 35 °C if I haven't been gaming. This appears to be a known issue now with numerous Asus motherboards with the AMD 600 series of chipsets. During my reading, I came across this moderator's reply on the ROG Forum, and it is the most idiotic, tone-deaf suggestion I've ever seen on a manufacturer forum. Re: ROG STRIX B650E-I: Coil whine? - Page 4 - Republic of Gamers Forum - 895136 ROG-FORUM.ASUS.COM Hello karakartal3, Once you get the motherboard installed in the case, you likely won't hear it with the case fans going and the side panel on... Yeah, let me go ahead and buy a PSU that costs more than the motherboard and maybe that will, but most likely won't fix the issue. FOH. Since motherboard swaps aren't as much of a pain in the ass with Windows 10 as it was with 7 or earlier, I may just accelerate my upgrade cycle if the issue persists and I can't find the golden BIOS settings that will silence it without compromising performance or low power idle capabilities. To be honest though, it's practically been a nonissue aside from last night ever since I used a manual offset to lower the vSOC voltage to 1.20V last month. My next motherboard is almost certainly going to be an ASRock or an MSI or anything but Asus or Gigabyte. It's funny that Gigabyte seems to be the least competent of the major motherboard manufacturers, and yet they still employ rootkit-style BIOS-injected malware software suite installs a la Asus and Armoury Crate. What the hell Gigabyte, you don't even have the legions of blind loyalists like Asus does to get away with that kind of BS. Go blow up some more power supplies and get lost. Case painting I'll finally respray the top of the case later this month before buffing the top and the one side I didn't finish buffing years ago to the glossy smooth finish I want. I've been wanting to take pictures of the finished product forever and it frustrates me to keep putting progress of this project on hold, but other priorities are getting in the way of both this and the home improvement projects.

I don't have a Reddit account and never wanted one, but I've been following this story since there is a lot of useful information there, especially for our hobby since we often rely on people's experiences with a product or troubleshooting. The 2-day blackout is dumb, but a lot of Reddit users are all about slacktivism and virtue signaling. The company's leadership is tone deaf and anti-consumer, and as a platform, they deserve to die. Meaningful change would involve cutting out Reddit completely and finding a new platform, which is obviously a very relatable concept to many of us here. In the case of migrating off Reddit though, that would introduce a number of short-term difficulties, especially for some of their niche communities. Lemmy has been gaining some attention as a decentralized Reddit-style platform. It is what Mastodon is to Twitter. Personally, I hope it takes off, but there will be some headwinds, including people who will go right back to Reddit tomorrow. We've seen this before with Voat when Reddit had its last major controversy, and Voat eventually turned into its own dumpster fire. From what I can gather, it seems the largest Lemmy node, lemmy.ml, is the ideological polar opposite of Voat, yet probably still a dumpster fire as far as I'm concerned. Here is a list of Lemmy nodes, with the most trending one that is open to registration being lemmy.world. the federation - a statistics hub THE-FEDERATION.INFO Node list and statistics for The Federation and Fediverse Anyway, it takes some unabashed greed and delusion to make VerticalScope look even semi-respectable. Congrats on the dubious honor, Reddit.

I would consider a smaller form factor as well for your only laptop since it will now be an all-purpose machine that you'll also take with you wherever. 17+" laptops are heavy and unwieldy. I consider them to be small form factor desktop replacements with limited, almost emergency-use portability. They are not good couch laptops. Also, I agree, literally using a laptop in your lap is not a pleasant experience. Not only is your body picking up all the radiant heat and exhaust, your skin or clothes don't aid the laptop's cooling either. My main laptop was a Lenovo ThinkPad for many years and both of them, despite being 15.4" and 15.6" respectively, were heavy, thick, and not pleasant to carry from one room to another, never mind travel with in a bag. My current laptop is way nicer to carry around despite still being 15.6". It's 4.3 lbs (1.9 kg) instead of the 5.75 (2.6 kg) of the ThinkPad W520. For comparison, my work MacBook Pro 16 (2019) is also 4.3 lbs. The 17-18" laptops that have been mentioned in this thread are bricks. The XMG Neo 17 is the lightest at 6.17 lbs (2.8 kg) and the Alienware m18 is a portly 8.90 lbs (4.04 kg). That doesn't even take into account their power supplies either.

I don't know why nobody wants to address the elephant in the room: the massive bloatware that comes with the laptops sold by the likes of pre-built manufacturers, especially from some brands who are notorious for that crap. With my B650E motherboard, I was so pissed off reading about Asus Armoury Crate while I waited out the pathetically long install time that I ended up nuking my whole Windows installation and started over from scratch (I didn't get that far in, I might have only lost an hour of customization time). At first, I figured I'd just give the software a spin to see if it was useful or any good, but I never did because of how slow it was to install—enough time for me to read how many people hated it and how it deposited orphaned files and even ghost processes after uninstalling. I made sure Armoury Crate was set to disabled in the BIOS prior to the SSD reformat. Anyway, that's how Asus lost my repeat business long before their AMD EXPO VSOC nonsense. I'm not giving them the benefit of the doubt when it comes to laptops either considering their intentional handicapping of their TUF Gaming and ROG Zephyrus lines' cooling designs back in 2020. I don't consider Razer nor Alienware any better in the bloatware category. I don't accept it on a desktop build and I don't find it more acceptable on a laptop either. Anyway, here's my recommendation considering that you're in the UK. Better to configure your own (and even omit the OS and all the user-serviceable hardware altogether if you'd like) instead of letting an OEM charge you for unwanted or substandard crap you don't want in your laptop. XMG | The best gaming laptops from Germany WWW.XMG.GG At XMG, we are passionate gamers and tech nerds, and we know first-hand what features matter most in the best mobile gaming laptops.

All VS does is destroy forum communities. There's no enhanced experience for them to offer when premium forums—the best offering in their upsell—are generally useless and unpopular if the forum owner hasn't defined a use for them, and they often end up being gossip circles if they get used at all. However, VS is so disliked by forum users in general that there isn't even a community remaining to prop up a premium gossip forum unless the gossip is to detail all the ways VS sucks. A forum doesn't work when the people who run it have no idea what the hell it's even about and aren't interested in tailoring it to the community's needs. Even subreddits have more customization, which says a lot about the potential for a VS forum because most subreddits suck. There is no reward for the admins who run a VS forum. They're not part of the community, and so it feels more like a job to them (and it literally is). But who wants to work at a job where the community you serve hates you, and you're not empowered to actually help them anyway? It's an endless circle of hatred. VS is trying to generically monetize forums and it's going over about as well as Yahoo Answers or Quora.

I ordered mine from Overstock late last year. Right now, I see them available on Amazon with a 10% off coupon. I wish the Leap was designed to fit an OEM headrest after purchase like the Series 1 though. I wouldn't bother trying to fit this thing onto the Series 1 when it has a properly matched headrest. Is it not actually in stock on either of these sites? https://www.thebackstore.com/steelcase-series-1-headrest-only.html https://bybluebox.com/products/steelcase-series-1-headrest This site is showing a 4-month backorder which matches what I saw from an Amazon Marketplace seller showing 4-5 months. https://smartfurniture.com/products/series-1-headrest-by-steelcase/

I never looked into how those knockoff racing seats are made but aside from not liking the PU leather material these chair manufacturers often use to cover the chairs, I would have just as well used an actual front bucket seat out of my car since I've been wanting for years to upgrade them with Corbeau or Procar seats. Ultimately though, I don't think the features of a racing seat are beneficial to sitting at a desk and there are plenty of articles and YouTube videos that point out issues with gaming chairs. Secretlab seems to be the only gaming chair company that has addressed some of those issues, but other issues are simply a byproduct of the bucket seat design.

I'm 5' 9" with a somewhat skinny but otherwise normal build. I have a 6' 2" friend who tried out the chair and really liked it too, although my headrest is positioned way too low for him since it basically digs into his shoulder blades with how I use it as a neckrest. I guess one's preferred sitting posture matters too, because I could see how some people might find the Leap to put too much pressure in the wrong spot on their back or something. I figured out what kind of posture the Leap was trying to encourage and realized it felt pretty good when my body was being supported in that way, so I adapted to it. Whenever I had an Aeron chair at work, it felt like I was just sitting on top of it rather than conforming to it. With my previous old office store chair, I was more comfortable balling up in it rather than stretching out like I do in the Leap. I guess the only thing I might like the Leap to have is a recline lock, but not having one is fine too since it keeps my lower back muscles engaged when reclining. As for the Knoll chair, the more I look into it, the more ridiculous it seems. I just find the marketing for the Generation to be hilarious. If you're doing this regularly, you don't need a chair. You need a chiropractor and/or an exorcist. It's like, really, we're completely ignoring the fact that these chairs swivel while treating climbing on the back of the chair like a child on a couch to be a normal adult human posture that can be comfortably held for more than 5 seconds at a time.

So this is what the jerry-rigged Engineered Now H3 headrest looks like on my Leap V2. It's really no different than any other example where someone did this, but the mineral gray is a little lighter than the chair, and it looks slightly less jerry-rigged (not by much though) with stainless rather than plastic zip ties. It's very secure though and also doesn't void the 12-year Crandall warranty. The headrest also has tension screw adjustments to lock the tilt position in place. The biggest adjustment I had to get used to was using the headrest as a neckrest because it's farther forward than where you would want a typical headrest to be positioned. However, it works better this way because the mesh contours well to my neck and also further stretches out my neck and upper back muscles. Despite having worked in an office for about 15 years, most of those companies didn't have very good chairs. The only other "good" chair I can compare the Leap V2 to is the Aeron, and it's not even close. One of the Leap's strengths is the versatility of its armrests and it reminds me of why I could never get an Aeron perfectly set up to my liking. The Leap's armrests are independent from the seat back and the heights are notched. Being independent from the seat back makes reclining less awkward and easier to adjust quickly. I also don't like infinitely adjustable armrest heights because it's tedious to get them perfectly level with each other. These are major drawbacks with the Aeron's armrests and I realized they were part of the reason I couldn't get the Aeron dialed in. I also never really liked the mesh seat or the hard plastic edge of the seat frame. This also applies to the Knoll Generation, which Sir Beregond mentioned in another thread was the worst chair he sat in. Some reviews have mentioned that the Generation's armrest anchor points feel loose, which reminds me of some worn out Aeron armrest adjustment tracks and tension wheels I've had the displeasure of using. It also doesn't make sense to me to tie an armrest to a seat back. Its armrest position when reclining looks uncomfortable and kind of absurd.

I found the Aeron generally unremarkable. All the ones I've ever sat in were fine unless they were damaged or broken, but I never could get them dialed in perfectly. I just looked up the Knoll Generation. Looks like a love it or hate it proposition. The shape of the back is pretty insane. I also have concerns about the completely foldable upper back. It looks like if it doesn't conform to your body (or more accurately, the other way around) perfectly, it's not going to be a comfortable fit at all. Some people have said the armrests are the worst part of the chair, which is a nonstarter for me when the armrests on the Leap are so good. No adjustable lumbar support on the Generation either, but it'll adjust your kidneys for you!

I've had mine for 8 months now and it's the most underrated quality of life purchase I've made in the last few years. I was not very familiar with office chairs despite working in an office for years, largely because most of them had second-hand Aerons in varying conditions at best, or some random POS chairs at worst. I had never sat in a Steelcase chair until I got my Leap V2. The lumbar support on it is exceptional and the extra thick seat pad makes bottoming out practically impossible. I did end up jerry-rigging an Engineered Now H3 headrest for the Aeron to my Leap. Even though it's jerry-rigged, it's pretty solid and I didn't cause any damage the chair to void the warranty. I also learned to use the headrest as a neckrest for optimal posture. It also stretches out my neck and upper back that way. I bought a new chair mat to upgrade from a polycarbonate mat that's been picking up more and more cracks lately. I like polycarbonate mats much more than PVC mats, but once you pick up one crack in them, they start going south quickly. The first polycarbonate mat I had for 7 years, and the most recent one made it to 4.5 years. I seriously considered a tempered glass mat, but for the size I want, they're heavy, cumbersome, expensive, and a bit fear-inducing because you still need to take some precautions with them even though shattering is generally very unlikely to happen. I ended up going with this Anji Mountain bamboo chair mat. Wayfair currently has the best price on these, which is something I don't say very often.

I saw a listing of the JayzTwoCents video on YouTube this morning before it got pulled and even opened it to see that it was someone else on his team—his camera guy, from what I understand—doing the actual review. I didn't actually watch it though. At the time, the comments weren't blistering...yet, but there were already some criticisms about how it was so incongruent from other 4060 Ti reviews. I told my friend that the 3060 Ti I sold him for $300 at the beginning of the year actually gained value after this release. Probably not literally true, but figuratively? Sure. The 4060 Ti provides no meaningful gain in games you would plan to play with a mid-range card like that, and regardless of new vs. used, it's 33% more than what he paid for the 3060 Ti. The second-hand market pricing adapts to the perceived value of the latest generation, and the 3060 Ti isn't looking any worse or more outdated after this release. How is the 4060 Ti actually slower than a 1080 Ti from 2017 at 4K? Even the 3060 Ti outperformed the 1080 Ti in practically every scenario. I don't like how a 128-bit memory bus reads on a spec sheet and I've always had a bias against GPUs with them. In terms of direct successors of a card I once owned, this is along the lines of the memory bus being slashed from the GTX 760 to 960, but worse. The results here are truly embarrassing considering what's at stake nowadays.

So that damn noise is coming from the motherboard. I realize now that it only started happening after I upgraded the BIOS to 1414 and made the manual adjustments to the CPU SOC voltage and memory voltage. My previous -25 PBO Curve Optimizer and 105W Eco Mode settings from before the BIOS upgrade didn't result in this noise. Here's what I've found to not work so far: Disconnecting the hard drive Swapping PSUs Running Auto SOC and RAM voltages with EXPO enabled Downgrading to 1222 BIOS (won't boot—this would have revealed a lot if it worked) Upgrading to 1602 BIOS Disabling EXPO (and consequently lowering voltages on the SOC and RAM to 1.0-1.1 V) Reducing PBO Curve Optimizer offset back to -20 At idle after leaving the rig alone for an extended period of time, the noise is gone. It reintroduces itself while it's in use without a clear pattern. It can happen now when I'm just typing in this form and have very little else running, or it can be during a heavy workload, or neither, or both. It sounds like a hard drive seek that lasts for a second. Sometimes it stops there, but if it's in a repetitive state, it will be quiet for at least 3 seconds before making that seeking noise again. There are times when the noise only happens once, and there are times when it happens dozens of times consecutively with that 3+ second break between each instance. The sound never occurs while in the BIOS, and I think that matters because that's when the voltages stay consistent and aren't fluctuating from actual use. I've never experienced coil whine in the traditional or closer-to-literal sense, but this has the makings of what I've found to be another form of a coil whine sound that people have described as a hard drive seeking. I've read that it's been observed with PSUs and in one instance, the ASRock X670E PG Lightning. Since it's been over a decade since I last built a rig for myself and had to deal with the consequences of electronic interference in modern rigs, I'm sure are few of you are thinking this: Apart from further messing around with the voltages, I do want to test the GPU as a potential culprit as well, because that's really the only remaining thing I can test, but that thing was heavily used before I bought it and I also briefly had it in my previous rig with no issues. I am very confident that it's not a problem with any of the fans in the case because it's just not a sound that a fan would make, and a fan wouldn't know it's in the BIOS or not because its speed can be adjusted whenever. If I've exhausted testing for all possible culprits and/or variables and the noise is still there, I'll plan to RMA this motherboard if the loudness and frequency of occurrence remain excessive. As an aside, the new 1602 BIOS with AGESA 1.0.0.7 and 48/24 GB DIMM support does seem to bring quicker cold boots and reboots. Also, after a few hours of trial and error, I will say that the noise is less frequent and less loud with 1602, although still not to the point where I'm satisfied. I did change one thing compared to before which was drastically lowering the SOC voltage by accident while using a negative offset rather than a fixed value. Now it's at 1.20 V instead of the 1.28 V it read at previously with my manual adjustments to properly get it under 1.30 V. The Asus BIOS cap was really putting it at 1.32 instead of 1.30. I don't know if any of that plays a factor in reducing the loudness or how much I hear it. After all this, at least I failed to pull the trigger on a new hard drive and didn't pull the trigger on a new PSU because both of those would have been a waste of money. That's the story of anything I troubleshoot: it's never the easy nor the obvious, and at least the first 2-3 things I check are guaranteed to not be the smoking gun.

Asus capped the SOC voltage to 1.30 V in their latest BIOSes for all Ryzen 7000 CPUs, not just the X3Ds, but it was still a bit over in HWiNFO on my motherboard, reading as high as 1.328. I manually lowered it to 1.25 and now it settles in at 1.272. It's still way over what other OEMs are doing with their AMD EXPO-enabled vSOC settings though. Before I updated the BIOS, I had the vSOC on Auto. The BIOS identified it as 1.32 V and it read as high as 1.38 in HWiNFO. That's pretty ridiculous and reckless on Asus's part considering other manufacturers were running around 1.20 V with EXPO enabled.