Looking to Build a Desktop

[GohanX]

I got most of the parts and put the computer together yesterday. For a cheapass system using a $100 processor, this thing is super impressive. Paired with a SSD the thing pretty much boots instantly, and has done well with all the software I've tried (Office, Photoshop, ect.) I downloaded a couple of demos off of Steam to see how gaming performance is. It's not much of a test, but it ran Ikaruga perfectly at max settings. Tried Doom 2016 and I had to turn some of the quality settings down a bit but it played very well. I'm really impressed that a chip with integrated graphics could run it at all. If I ever throw a real video card in it this thing could probably make a legit gaming machine.

[GohanX]

...and a sleepy late night low-ball eBay bid that I actually won scored me a video card. I guess I can start making fun of console peasants now, I dunno, I need Yoshi to tell me how to do this.

Final build:

Ryzen 3 2400g (overclocked to 3.9 GHz)
RX 580 8gb video card
8 gb ram pc3000 (running at 3200)
256 gb Samsung SSD

Should be good enough to run most everything well at 1080p I think. Not bad for a cheapass build that cost less than my Xbone.

[gamevet]

The RX 580 is pretty much the same GPU in the Xbox One X, though with higher clocks.

[GohanX]

I really am impressed by the performance of this chip. For a single bill it's amazing. I got much better overclocking results than the video though, either through luck or the fact that I upgraded my cooler and have a cool case, I dunno. I actually had it stable at 4.0 GHz running stress tests but I backed it down to 3.9 since there was a pretty significant temperature jump under load for a gain of only 100 MHz.

I haven't overclocked a precessor since the early Celeron back in 1998 or something. Feels weird jumping get first into computer nerddom after over a decade of not caring.

[Josh]

You should use your overclocked CPU to mine JSECoin.

[cigsthecat]

Someone really should

[GohanX]

Maybe if it was in the wiki

[GohanX]

Got the RX 580 in, and also threw in a 1 TB platter I had laying around and some more memory (bringing it up to 16 GB.)

Holy fucking shit. Yoshi's PC thing, I totally get it now. I haven't played anything too intense yet since I had games loaded that would run on the old APU, but I've tried a few PS3 era games running at max everything. I set my Radeon driver to lock the refresh rate to 60 hz on this crappy monitor and everything is smooth as silk.

Also, people playing games on Youtube really need to fix their settings.

[gamevet]

So, I've been messing around with this Intel NUC all weekend. I got the thing for free, about 2 months ago and hadn't really messed around with it since then.

I tried several different USB thumb drives with Windows 7 Pro on them, to see if the NUC would recognize them. It wasn't until I used a 16GB (USB 2.0) thumb drive that I got the NUC to recognize the drive, but there was another problem. Windows 7 doesn't have the drivers for USB 3.0, so every time I was loading up the file, it would cause the thumb drive to drop off once Windows 7 took over. I scoured the internet for driver solutions and finally found a program to add the USB 3.0 driver to the Windows 7 file on the drive. I'd thought that everything was going great, until the Windows software told me that there was a bug in program (probably the USB fix) and that it could not continue. Frustrated, I took the new 240GB SSD I'd just got, plugged it into my working PC in the living room, burned a disc of Windows 7 and loaded it up on that system. I used another PC to update the ethernet driver, once everything was installed, but for some reason it told me that my hardware (P8-Z68v-pro) was beyond the minimum specs of the USB 3.0 driver. I took that same drive over to my main PC and it too told me the same message, but for some reason the USB 3.0 ports on the front of the case were recognizing when I plugged in a thumb drive. I'd thought that I'd finally found a solution. I took the SSD, put it into the NUC and verified that it was being recognized in the UEFI. I chose the SSD as the 1st boot drive and proceeded to boot up the NUC. I get a message that no boot media was found. WTF?!

I boxed that shit up and put it back on the shelf. What the hell is going on with that stupid NUC?

[Dunlap]

I have an old mini-PC that only recognizes boot media from one of the many USB ports. It was documented in some administration guide and there was nothing obvious on the unit to distinguish the port that was set up. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why my USB wasn’t being recognized.