PC Tech Thread

Sweet. Now to see how many £££ i have left after bills this month.

The way to think of all of this:

ISP Modems and consumer modems/routers are shit.

They are shit because they take 3 things, put them into 1 box, and then sell at the lowest possible price because no-one wants to pay.

The three things smashed into 1 box:

1. A router (literally routes between different networks - being internet and the one in your home)
   
2. A switch (connects multiple cabled things to 1 network)
   
3. A wifi access point (it's wifi)
   
   

The Ubiquiti solution is to recognise that all of the above is shit when combined and sold for the cheapest price, and instead to purchase each bit separately.

If you already ran Apple access points, you were already doing this for #3.

All I'm saying is that you can go the whole hog, and get professional equipment everywhere, and it will be very fast, rock solid, never need rebooting, offer software interfaces that let you see everything... and if you're tempted, you can configure the hell out of it (because there's a very powerful terminal available).

Hence... think of those 3 things, and build the network you need.

I personally have purchased all Ubiquiti as I really like the software (I can see how much traffic went to my NAS!), but Soul's suggestion of throwing a different PoE switch in there is also good and works fine.

If you've split your network like this, to have dedicated hardware for each function, then you are good to mix and match. The only thing really essential is a great single-purpose router, and the 3-port EdgeMax is that.

This is basically the internet equivalent of replacing a single unit stereo system with components. Or replacing a bean-to-cup coffee machine with a separate grinder and espresso machine.

Hipster internet.

Hipster internet.

I was almost convinced!

Seriously though... will i need a router between the Virgin box and the switch? The box will be in modem only mode...

#lastquestionprobably

so good

Seriously though... will i need a router between the Virgin box and the switch? The box will be in modem only mode...

Yes.

If your Virgin box is in modem mode... then it isn't doing anything other than terminating the internet connection.

If you connect a switch... you won't have internet because you'll have no:

• NAT
  
• DHCP
  
• DNS
  
• Routing
  
  

This is the stuff that the EdgeMax gives you. The ability to take a line signal, map it to a range of generated IP addresses on internal devices, and route the traffic between them all.

Switches are dumb (as fuck)... all they do is take IP addresses, and ask of each side (in and out) "Do you have 192.168.1.7?" and when something answers yes the switch sends traffic that way.

But switches don't do DHCP... so nothing on your network will have an IP address, and nothing will work.

You need a Router... more than you need a Switch - because you could just connect a single wifi and daisy chain wireless if this is the kind of crazy that gets you off ;)

One point, that EdgeMax router can act as a switch too.

You can either have all ports on the same network (like a bog standard home router), 2 ports on one network and the rest on another (this is what I use) or each different port a different network.

This is good except i need 6 ports on the main one (inc. one PoE) and 5 (inc. one PoE) on the upstairs one.

This means that i could get away with the edgemax 5 port PoE for one but will have to get one of those and a switch for downstairs which is a pain in the ass.

Switches are pretty cheap. Keep an eye on Amazon on the Black Friday deals, there are a variety on there. I got this for £13 the other day https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007DHTX7Y/

Will be a bit more expensive with PoE, although you can always use the separate PoE power adapter that come with the access points (it plugs into the mains and you plug the network cable in and then another coming out with power so still only one cable going to the access point).

@Sumo and @aggi

Cheers for the advice earlier. Had to go out to work not long after clearing my cookies but the wife used the computer while I was out and had no problems and I've been sat here an hour or so and no unwanted popups so far.

I've not been back on retrobike though. If it was a cookie issue, is it likely to happen again if I visit the site or...?

I've sacked off AVG and set Windows Defender up, also got Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit running and have scanned again with Malwarebytes Anti-Malware and nothing been reported so fingers crossed it's all sorted.

So I finally got my PC parts.

Played electronics Lego for the better part of the evening. I probably should have bought a different / smaller PSU, as this one has all the cables preattached. Seeing as I only need three (2 to Mainboard, 1 to SSD) that is overkill and a lot of unwanted cables.

Also the position of the cable output overlaps the USB3 bus on the Mainboard. I got the USB cable in but only just and with some force. Don't like it. Will probably buy new psu soonish.

On the brighter side: I got everything nicely arranged with zip-ties, airflow seems not too bad, everything works fine.

The mainboard glows in all the colors all the time (even when the PC is powered down), as it has a preinstalled LED strip that is glowing permanently. Neat. Probably will turn it off if I find the switch.

After faffing about trying to burn a .iso file to an USB stick for... hours, I managed to install Win10 in 15 minutes while sipping my breakfast tee this morning. Neato.

Now to fix the monitor scaling issue, get new drivers for everything... and go!

You'll probably find the switch for the MB LED in the Bios and there should be a utility app to download from the manufacturer that will also do it.

I have the same problem with the PSU, it's a really decent unit but the extra cables really mess up the place. You need a modular one if you want to only have the cables you need.

Probably. Haven't really looked into that yet. There's some software that came with the MB. I should find it there.

@Sumo the Case description specifically states that modular PSUs won't fit. Though I really don't know why.

A SFX PSU will fit though, maybe I'll just buy one of those.

Thanks both!

I think modular PSU's are generally a bit bigger than non-modular, is your case a mini size or something?

mini-ITX MB. And the case is really small, yes. So SFX maybe. Or just live with the cable madness.

Sits at the same place my old X-Box sat, though, so it's pretty neat and small and nice looking and quiet.

This looks perfect...
http://www.anandtech.com/show/10750/hp-announces-the-hp-envy-27-4k-thin-bezel-display

That looks spot on. Not a bad price either.

I'm now of the opinion that 27" is the perfect size for a desktop monitor.

Agreed, any bigger and you need to turn your head too much or sit too far away.

I dunno, 32" is working really well for me though it's pretty much only used for gaming at a distance of ~75-100cm away from the screen.

Not sure what it would be like to work from it but the Windows 10 scaling works to make all the space feel well used on most programs.

Aye, and old DD I worked with went nuts and bought 2 of the old Apple displays... 30 and 23.... gave him awful neck ache within a month. Too much. 27 feels decent.

Anyone know how running lower res (1080/1440) on a 4k for gaming works? When I lower the res on my 1440 it looks awful, but wondering if it isn't as obvious when the screen is higher res.

I'd assume running games at 1080p on a 4k screen would look good, as you're reducing the pixels by half each direction, so there's no odd scaling going on
1440 to 1080 or 4k to 1440 might look odd

Interesting... I guess thats why my 1440>1080 looks shit... and less than that also looks shit as its daft low res... anyone have real world experience? I am on a 4K screen now actually... maybe I should bring in my MBP/Hack to test.
Actually might.

See if you can change the scaling so it happens on the GPU instead, on the nvidia control panel that's under Display > Adjust desktop size and position. Might do a better job than the monitor.

Some games these days also have their own rendering resolution multiplier in the video options.