Minotaurtoo

Yes I did and my stomach was in turmoil, I'm still hoping it's all good now, so far all seems well

This is a bit long and convoluted, but I'll try to keep it concise You may have seen my post in the 1 million post thread showing my new light bar with "MINOTAUR" carved in it with a laser. I started out with white LED's inside and swapped out to blues a couple days ago. While swapping out the LED's the PC cut on to do it's DVR job... instead of cutting it off and sacrificing whatever show it was recording or waiting till later I thought "it's just a molex connector, I'll plug the lights in while it's running". I fed the wires into the case, still through the side panel as I haven't had time to create the permanent wiring harness yet.... as I pulled the molex plug out to reach my wire, all monitors went black just after I made contact to the lights plug... I thought "maybe there was a voltage ripple caused by plugging them in that triggered some protection in the GPU".... finished plugging in the wires and put the side panel back on... powered off, and restart... all screens came back... all's well... not Yesterday I got up and began my usual morning routine... shortly after... monitors cut off... hmmm... restarted and all came back... now I'm worried... no time to play had to go to work. After work, woke PC up from sleep... all seemed fine... watched some video and poof all screens off... sound from video still playing... UH OH... now I'm in pure panic mode... almost as bad as when I thought I blew my engine up in my truck... seriously, heart pounding OH OH OH OH full panic... Proceeded to do what any person my position would do... Google... found some possible solutions... tried them all at once... full nuclear attack problem solution... now keep in mind I was panicked and wasn't thinking... normally I would never do that... I DDU'd, I reinstalled drivers, I disabled hardware acceleration in my web browser and even stopped my wallpaper engine... Rebooted, started to play a game... all screens off... OK, now I'm thinking, maybe my lights are faulty, I unplug the lights and hear a windows disconnect sound, yes I was dumb and panicked enough to do this BEFORE shutting off the PC again... SMH... but that did hint to me that there was in fact a wire issue here.... but also made me think I may have killed my GPU... I shutdown, full power off and.... Powered up the PC to a wonderful diagnostic alarm on the motherboard with no VGA indicated. OH OH OH OH OH OH Now a bit of sanity has came back to me... I thought, well at least I still have my old 5700xt while I get this sorted... so my mind now clearing a bit, I think, ok if it is wiring, maybe there's a lose connection... I push on the 2 8pin connections on the GPU.. didn't really feel anything, but thought what the heck... tried for a reboot... It worked, windows was now concerned about my PC's health and was offering their repair solution screen, I just went for full boot... I gamed, I played around in windows, no issues.... OK then... Shut down and powered off, pulled all wires out, blew them out with an air duster and re-seated the plugs... I now have ran 2 complete stress tests on it and as of typing this all seems well... I sure hope so.... guess what else I learned... my PC's side panel now drags across my GPU's 8 pin wires as it opens and closes... guess this one is wider than my old 5700xt... I'd be lying if I said I'm not still scared though. Thanks for reading, I hope this is over, it seems to be... here's a link to my stress test pass Clicky

I didn't save my test, so I had to re-run it... score was a little lower, probably something running in the background... This PC is my whole entertainment center, complete with PVR and quad tv tuners lol... so no telling what might have been running in the background.... interesting differences though... some sub scores the Ryzen scores much better, others the 12700k takes the win by a mile... single thread being the most notable to me.

memory is some old Gskill Flare X C14 4x 8GB kit, I bought it back when I had my R7 1700 I think... I tightened up the timings a bit using the DRAM calculator... so that helped... the R9 3900X is just set on whatever ASUS decided to put it at with PBO enabled lol... I think this board auto overclocks it a bit more than most... I see it hitting 4.65ghz on single threads all the time and even holding it during single thread tests for quite some time... maybe because it's underwater it feels the temp headroom, I dunno, but me trying to get it to do better manually was pretty much a giant fail, so I let it do it's thing. I plan on putting a 5950X in here at some point, but for now, this old 3900x is serving my needs well.

not bad.. but I think I still have some tuning to do, or so it would seem

I need to run passmark again... I haven't run it since I put in the 6900xt... also, my version is old now... 10.2 seems to be tougher on the overall scoring. I scored an 8714 on 10.1 with my 3900x and old 5700xt, but your individual scores are miles ahead of mine on all but the cpu and 2D graphics... so yeah, I have two reasons to re-run... will have to be later though, have to get ready for work now.

Ok... first off, I'm not having any trouble and I'm loving my 6900xt... but overclocking seems to be a lost cause on this reference edition card... getting my best performance by undervolting. I've determined that thermals are a limiting factor as anything over stock power limit at default voltage will send the hotspot straight to 110C in stress tests even with my case open and 100%fans (games usually don't pass 100C)... at default settings, hot spot temps are more subdued in stress tests hitting just over 100C and rarely go above 90C in game.... but with a small undervolt to 1130mv instead of temps dropping more, the card seems to automatically push harder hitting higher clocks.. 2480mhz max while holding 2200+ in games. I did put a fan blowing on the backplate and that helped a little...very little... but repeatably 1-2C less than without... So... am I missing something or is this just like the old Vega cards where undervolting is pretty much all you can do with a reference card.... again, I don't need the overclock, just playing around to see what I can do... so far, mine is as meh as meh can get lol. side note: ram overclocking was super easy... so easy I forgot I had done it... just slid the bar over and it worked.

well... for better or worse I just paid for a 6900 xt... I found a new reference edition for only 40% over MSRP and my 2:30AM tired butt bid on it... no one else did... not sure if I messed up or not, but I really shouldn't be on ebay that early in the morning... At least I can still sell my 5700 XT for way over what I paid for it lol... will make up some of the cost... FYI, it was paid for with tax return money, turns out I filed my dependents wrong with my employer and too much money was being taken out... fixed that now

I'm legitimately impressed with the 12900K. I'll be sticking with my 3900x for a bit though, honestly it's more than I need at the moment and likely will be for some time... still nice to see Intel back in the running again, can't wait to see if AMD can answer them.

I'm not sure if we will even try to replace the cable channels... my wife says she might miss the hallmark channel, but I can get it directly from hallmark for about 7$ a month if needed.... as you said, much better than the price for cable/satellite. I was really surprised to see just how many channels had been added to OTA around here... we pretty much always had an antenna here and last I had checked there was only 20 or so watchable channels, but now it's 34 "good" channels that don't fade in and out with weather... tuner found 50+ channels, but I weeded them down to 34 that stayed in... We live about 60 miles from the transmitters so when we moved in I put up a tower about 20 years ago...back then cable wasn't even available and satellite was iffy at best because of trees... it's old now, but here's a pic of the antenna, it still is doing it's job quite well.

I'm loving the tuner card, just wish I had done a little more research before jumping on a cheapo... there are some pretty good ones out there with up to 4 tuners in a single card... I'm actually thinking of getting one of those so I can record multiple channels at once or make it look like Back to the Future with all the channels across one screen... might be great for sports lol I'll check into Plex, thanks for the tip... The overkill PSU was one of those components I had laying around, the original plan was for a 500w, but I was in the attic and happened on that old 750w and thought, what the hey, this was a good one back in the day and just went with it... the only issue with that PSU is it's not modular... lots of cables tucked away in the 5.25" bays since I wasn't using them anyway.

Been working on this off and on for a while now, but the results are great. We cut the cable and now only use this for TV in the living room... we get 34 OTA channels on this. Case: DIYPC MA01-R Black SECC Micro ATX Mini Tower Components: Ryzen 3200G MSI B450 Pro-M2 max Ultra LSP 750w PSU GEIL GeIL EVO POTENZA 8GB 3000mhz PNY CS900 250GB boot drive MaxDigitalData 4TB hdd for DVR storage some generic 1TB hdd I found laying around for extra space Samsung 970evo nvme 250GB for a few games Digital ATSC tuner card.. generic branding, but works good... antenna is the same old antenna we've had for years... antennas direct 91XG I think it's called. generic wifi card, again works good though.... we don't play multiplayer games on this system. Software: Windows 10 various steam games VLC media player Brave browser (great for no ads on YT) SichboPVR4 for TV tuning and DVR recording LINKY I tried the software that came with my tuner, about 3 others I found online, but honestly the only one that "just worked" was sichbo... only downside is, it's a dollar a month, but for me and my sanity... it's worth it... Overall, I'm very pleased with a build that only set me back a little over 400$ total. I bought things as sales came along and used some components I already had laying around. With the hdd's installed we have a little over 2k hours of record time at 1080p top quality settings. The build is nearly dead silent and temps are well within acceptable limits. I know there was some room for improvements, but budget was king here. Sorry no internal pictures, but rest assured I did a reasonable job on cable management, especially since this is a mini-tower case. Feel free to ask any questions or just make fun of it

Thanks for the link and information guys.... my update to windows 11 has been dramatically underwhelming thanks to being prepared...

welcome, I left there some time ago and haven't looked back.

mouse pad or T-shirt, If I ever buy a case again, I'd like to be able to buy a decent case with a EHW theme...

I knew you'd find a great job soon! A good guy like you is hard to find these days. Hope you love the job!

This is the slowest connection available with our carrier here, or at least this is the slowest they'd tell me about... they keep trying to get me to sign up for gigabit, but I really can't see me needing it.... ATT only offers 12 Mbps here, and WISPs only offer around 6... but these guys came by and said "hold my beer" then hooked up this god tier connection and acted all shocked when I only wanted the min package.... Spectrum is good here, I know some places they're crap, but here they are the best.

oh that is soooo tempting... It'd be about a 7 hour drive for me...not that I'd mind visiting there, and I'd need to get a good case... this old rag has done it's duty... I realy appreciate that offer for sure. I haven't posted it anywhere yet, but I nearly chopped off my finger at work... it's okay, but I can't move it properly anymore and I have to see an ortho to see if they can fix the broken tendon... having to relearn how to type atm lol... but given my circumstances, I'd best stay close by home for now, just in case they call me in.... I'd share a pic of my finger, but I'm pretty sure no one wants to see stitches...

there are days on here where I think about hiring some of you to make my crap look good.... sigh... don't get me wrong, my water cooler works fine, nothing ever overheats....but it looks like it was beaten with the entire ugly tree and the ugly vine too...

would be interesting to have enough ram to run the entire OS, software and all in a ram drive for benching purposes... not sure how that would work, but at those sizes it would have plenty of room

While I personally wouldn't create posts using it, I do love the functionality it adds. Good addition, thanks!

Hello there! I love how you are "new to this world of PCs" yet your rig looks 10x better than mine. Welcome to EHW!

I was waiting to post as I wasn't sure if the bios was causing the issues or not, but since you seemed to have had issues, I'll say I too had some issues with it, they started yesterday. I lost half my USB ports I tried everything else, but finally decided to re-flash the bios and it worked... used the same one, but for some reason this time it worked... what scared me though, is one of the ports that died, was the bios flashback, but apparently it only affected them in windows. I may go back to the older bios I had. The 2404 beta bios has been the most stable I've tried so far, it just worked.

give it time we have "protection blocks" on our tube laser's PC... unplug that and we can't even run it lol... I don't get it, who's going to steal the software to run a tube laser? Edit: loving the dark theme!

Don't give them ideas! Next thing, we'll have to have a "block" plugged in to a usb port to unlock windows