Posts by William Miller8

If I were in your shoes, I’d just grab an SSD right now. Honestly, don't even bother trying to cram all your games onto that 120 GB drive—it's a headache waiting to happen. Personally, I found 120 GB way too small; some games won't even fit on there at all.

RAM prices should drop soon enough.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dr...rch,38644.html

Though, I guess I'm not entirely sure how much that'll actually impact DDR3. So, maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to just wait a month or two.

As for the GPU, just wait until AMD drops their mid-range card, probably sometime around summer. By then, Nvidia should probably react by adjusting their prices, and then you can actually see what makes the most sense for your wallet.

I've run into similar headaches a few times now, and honestly, it usually boils down to software—specifically some mess Windows Update left behind. I'm running an Intel card myself, but the fix should be pretty much the same regardless. For me, the symptom was basically the screen freezing up for maybe 5 or 10 seconds—the audio keeps playing, though—and then the monitor just goes black. At that point, you're stuck with nothing but a hard reset.
The first time I dealt with this, a clean driver reinstall was the only way out, but I had to be super thorough. I ran DDU from Safe Mode and made sure to scrub the registry of any leftover driver junk before installing anything new. I also ran everything as an admin. I mean, I’m not 100% sure if every single one of those steps was strictly necessary, but it was the only thing that actually worked for me.
The second time it happened, the driver trick didn't do the job, but this did:

Open CMD as an administrator
Type in SFC /scannow and hit enter
Once that's done, in that same window, type DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth and hit enter
When that finishes, run SFC /scannow one more time and hit enter
Restart

That whole process should repair most of your system files, including DirectX. So, there's a decent chance it might fix the issue while it's at it.

I did notice that these issues tended to pop up whenever I installed those "optional" drivers, especially when Windows Update tried to do its own thing while they were being installed. I never really had problems with the "recommended" ones.
Also, a word of advice: don't bother installing the DirectX versions that come bundled with games. You might end up with older files that have different digital signatures than what the system expects. It's probably better to just let Windows Update handle it on its own.
If you pull up dxdiag, you can actually uncheck > digital signatures. I turned that off on my end. Personally, I get the feeling that setting causes more trouble than it's worth.

Anyway, I don't know if your issue is exactly the same as mine, but maybe one of these will help you out.

Personally, I feel like > and > are a bit of a step down for him, though—everything else he’s done is pretty much flawless. I’ve always been a fan of how he plays with color palettes, especially those pops of red and yellow. And that subtle, dry sense of humor? It's just great. If we're talking about his work alongside > Anderson, he’s definitely at his peak here. 😁 Honestly, I'd easily slot both of them into my top 10 directors of all time.

I’m just guessing here, but I’m assuming you’ve got Razer Synapse installed—you know, that software that lets you mess with all the advanced keyboard settings, like remapping keys, setting up macros, and all that stuff. Usually, there are a few different profiles you can swap between depending on what you're doing. I don't actually own a Logitech keyboard myself, so I can't give you the play-by-play, but my best guess is that you accidentally hit some weird key combo that switched your profile. It sounds like whatever profile you landed on has Ctrl+Shift+Esc mapped to your left Ctrl key—which, obviously, just pulls up the Task Manager. Anyway, I'd say just dive into that software and fiddle around with the settings; the fix should be buried in there somewhere.

So, my Samsung 840 EVO 120GB is over four years old now—according to Samsung Magician, I’ve clocked about 15 TB of writes—but the health status is still sitting at "Good." Honestly, the drive is running perfectly fine; speeds haven't really budged since day one. I mean, if you're looking at your own setup, things should actually be even better than mine because, as everyone knows, SSD longevity usually scales with capacity—bigger drives generally last longer.
If you're willing to sacrifice maybe 10% of your total storage space, setting up some over-provisioning should definitely help boost the drive's overall endurance.

I’m honestly hoping that once this whole wave passes, the massive flood of used mining cards hitting the market will finally drag down the prices of everything else being sold second-hand. Right now, prices feel totally inflated—it's ridiculous—so maybe we'll see the opposite happen and things get insanely cheap. I guess the real headache is just figuring out how to spot a card that’s been hammered by crypto mining versus one that was actually treated decently, you know?

The Samsung EVO is a bit faster than the Seagate BarraCuda, but—to be honest—it’s definitely louder and pulls more power too. I guess the Samsung should come with a longer warranty, though.
Back in the day, you’d pick the Samsung because it was meant for an OS since it's faster, but honestly, with how SSDs are now, that whole distinction kind of lost its meaning.
If you just need something for extra storage, the Seagate BarraCuda is perfectly fine if you're looking at Western Digital drives.

I mean, they could just hold off on selling anything until they actually have the new card in hand. It’d probably make more sense to sell the whole rig right before picking up the new GPU—that way, they can just dump that cash directly into the upgrade.

So, what kind of GPU are you running in your old rig? If it isn't absolute garbage—which, I guess, depends on your definition of bad—it might actually make sense to just pull the trigger on a whole new PC right now without a dedicated graphics card. You could just limp along using your old one or maybe some integrated graphics for a bit, then wait three to six months for prices to actually stabilize before picking up a real card at a normal price.

silentcobra3 said:Take Fortnite, for example (any settings, even if everything is set to low)
It keeps dropping from a smooth 60fps down to 15-20fps, and then it just hangs at around 15fps for maybe 10 seconds before bouncing back up to 60fps.

Getting Over It (everything on low)
Same exact situation—drops from 60fps down to 15-20fps and then fixes itself after a few seconds (maybe 5-10 seconds).

GTA V
It usually runs around 50-60 fps, but then it drops to 5-10fps and then recovers.

I honestly don't know why these drops are happening, but that part where it gets stuck at a lower fps for 5-10 seconds might be due to Vsync. That's just how Vsync works, I guess—if it can't load all the frames, it drops to half sync, which is usually 30 if you have a 60Hz monitor, but if the drop goes below 30, it might stick to an even lower value. I think it has to be a divisor of 60 (like 30, 20, 15, 10, 5), though I'm not entirely sure. I've never quite wrapped my head around exactly how Vsync operates.
You could try turning Vsync off and see if anything changes, though you'll probably deal with screen tearing. Or better yet, turn Vsync off and enable Enhanced sync under the Wait for vertical refresh setting within the Nvidia settings profile for that specific game. Sometimes that actually yields better results.

Though, none of this really explains why the actual drops are occurring in the first place.
I doubt it's the RAM because Windows usually throws that "Windows is low on memory..." warning if that's the case.
Maybe it's the VRAM, but that shouldn't really happen on low settings since your whole setup seems beefy enough to handle high settings easily.
Is it possible some other background program is occasionally hogging the CPU, leaving nothing left for the game? You could try playing around with the CPU priorities for individual programs.
We should probably check if your voltages are stable. You mentioned a 500W power supply, but you didn't say which one.
The best bet would be to grab HWInfo, reset the sensors, and run the game. Once you hit those drops, close it out and look at the min and max columns for everything to see what kind of extremes you're hitting. Specifically, keep an eye on the voltages—see if any of them dip way below the average. That could point toward a power supply issue, or maybe an overclock that's too aggressive or unstable.

I have the same graphics card and a motherboard with a similar phase design (but it's Intel) and I highly doubt that's the culprit. For me, GTA V runs without any issues at around 60 fps on most High settings. That phase design might be an issue if you're doing heavy overclocking, but at stock clocks, it should work fine with any processor for that socket. I mean, they test this stuff, right? God knows.

Alright, thanks. I hadn't even really sat down to look at how much bandwidth we're talking about with SATA2 compared to actual HDD speeds. So, yeah—it's basically overkill, I guess.
And honestly, Apple might be the best bet here, especially since they were practically the ones who pioneered the first SSD anyway.
Thanks, guys!

I might as well jump into this thread since my situation is pretty much the same.
I’m looking to pick up a second SSD—something in the 240-250 GB range—because the 120 GB one I’m currently running is just way too small for all the programs and games I want to load up. I don't need anything fancy, just some of the cheaper options, as long as it’s noticeably faster than a standard Hard Disk Drive.
Right now, I'm eyeing these two

Which one of these is actually worth the money? Or does anyone have a better suggestion?

Also, is TLC really a dealbreaker? Should I be hunting for an SSD with MLC technology instead, or does that even matter for what I'm doing here?
Another thing—my motherboard only has two SATA III ports; the rest are just SATA II. Both are already taken by my current SSD and a Hard Disk Drive. I was thinking about grabbing a PCI-E controller to get some extra SATA III ports, but I'm having a hell of a time finding one in any of the local shops around here. Does anyone have a recommendation for a decent controller? Or should I just sacrifice the Hard Disk Drive and plug it into a SATA II port, then keep the SSDs on the SATA III ones? And would such a controller even be bootable, or should I make sure the drive with the OS is plugged directly into the motherboard?

I'm shopping in New York City. Thanks for the help.