PC Tech Thread

If you're going to go down any rabbit hole for improvements, using task manager to identify what is running and asking why it is running and doing something about it will yield far greater improvement than tweaking the power management settings whilst all of that stuff runs.

Ah, that makes sense will look into that 👍

@ectoplasmosis just got a couple of smart plugs to measure energy use, and unrelatedly a CD drive to archive CDs, and realising that the PC uses almost the same amount of power whilst just ripping a CD, as it does whilst playing games.

I'm resigned to games being a relatively large power sink, but wondered if I could optimise general power usage for when I'm just browsing or doing other non-GPU bound tasks

the PC uses almost the same amount of power whilst just ripping a CD, as it does whilst playing games

beyond a bright laptop monitor, the major sources of power use:

• GPU (gaming or other sustained GPU load)
  
• optical drives (high speed motors and lasers!)
  
  

I hadn't considered other people run optical drives still, but I do for ripping music and video, and yes they consume a very healthy amount of power. Typically they have their own power supply, but if not they tend to use 2 USB ports at a time and try to draw max power from both.

Oh. Yeah. I guess it requires energy to move physical objects, kinda forget about that as being a thing, with modern computers.

Anyway thanks for the tips both, something to consider on the long list of PC tasks

Looking for an internal HDD, something in the 8-10TB range, mostly for storing my family photos and videos and editing. So, looking for reliability over pure out and out performance. What's your recommendations?

I wouldn’t use a spinning drive for editing anything, not would I recommend a solution involving only a single drive without redundancy.

The big NAS servers I’ve built for work contain a mix of Toshiba N300 and Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives (always best to mix manufacturers and batches as part of a redundant array in case you end up with multiple failures from a single bad batch). Not had one drive failure in 3 years across 64 drives.

Avoid any drives which use SMR.

So edit on a SSD, how would that work? I have an external drive to back up my photos. Granted, not the most secure approach, but I'm not at the stage to making a home server (it's intimidating for me to contemplate)

What’s in your machine currently? If you can fit a decent ~2TB NVME SSD, you’d use this for ingesting and editing (I’m assuming you mean video editing as well as photos), then dump the output onto slower, larger cold storage (HDD) when you begin to run out of space.

On my computer I have a 1tb NVME drive, this has all the OS stuff and a seperate SSD used mostly for gaming. Haven't got anything else in terms of storage. It was built mostly as a gaming rig, but I'm getting slowly back into photography and doing some video stuff so know this can add up quickly in terms of storage.

Process explorer will help too.

Whatever you do, don’t attempt to edit video using a spinning hard drive, you’ll have a very bad time.

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Maybe something for a more private part of the forum, if such places exist?

Say no more.

Which option would you guys choose out of these three? About to build a new budget PC for around £1k. All other parts like GPU etc will be identical. Just not sure what route to go for CPU and memory.

1. i5-12600K 3.2ghz 10 Core / 16 Threads (LGA1700) + 32GB 3600mhz DDR4 RAM
2. Ryzen 7 7700 3.8ghz - 8 Core / 16 Threads (AM5) + 32GB 5600mhz DDR5 RAM
3. Ryzen 7 5700X 3.4ghz - 8 Core / 16 Threads (AM4) + 32GB 4600mhz DDR4 RAM

Due to my budget i'm locked into using the specified RAM for each processor. DDR5 and Ryzen 7700 looks most tempting but i have no idea what would be the best choice.

Will mostly be used for (light) photo and video editing. Music production. Some light Blender work and occasionally some gaming. Is Intel still king when it comes to productivity etc?

Personal laptop: Dell XPS, 2x usb c ports.
Work dell laptop, ports galore.

My desk at home has 2 screens. Connect one to my work laptop with a HDMI, and the other with a usb c.

I need to be able to charge my laptop in one port, and have an adapter/doc which will let me extend my screen to 2 displays (one via HDMI, one via usb C).

This looks to fit the bill, even though can't extend screen using the usb C. Get around would be use one of my laptop's ports to plug monitor to laptop (usb c), then can use the port to both charge the laptop and use the HDMI screen.

Any fault in that logic? And is 85W pass through charging sound for my laptop's battery? Cheers!

what monitors do you have? Some monitors allow daisy chaining, so you could connect the two monitors together, then one USB-C to the laptop would drive both screens.

I’ll try that! One is relatively new (18 months old, dell one). The other one is an older dell one
Cheers

Now that hirens has not been updated for a while and the hirens with all the pirate software is also out of date.
What do you use now? Any recommendations?
Been looking at medicat usb. Any one use this? What do you think?

If I press the enter key to download a photo after processing it it now comes with a sound notification - which it never did yesterday or before. I can't think how I have accidently changed a setting and Googling hasn't helped. Any idea how to stop it? Thanks. Chrome on Win 10.

And now it seems to have stopped.

And now it's doing it when I click on 'save'. FML.

And now it's not.

Ok so it's the notification that I am going to replace a file that already exists that prompts the sound.

Now it's stopped again. I did have my phone connected to charge for a while - could that be it? It makes the same sound when I connect and disconnect it. Stupid computers.

Must have been the phone. Thanks anyway.