Hyperstrike

Yep. It's nearly plug and play these days. The 7000-series AMD are pinless, meaning you can put a system together without any real possibility of damage.

Tossed you the 3.0.6 executable, lemme know how it works for you.

And, server side, Compaq took a massive dip in quality when they were acquired by HP.

Yep.

And I repeat, COMPRESSED AIR. If you have anything stuffed in there that cannot be blown out that way, you have a cooling solution that was designed by an inbred moron. PERIOD.

Sorry, I've USED liquid metal for cooling. While it works, using it in a laptop is a fargin gimmick. And there should be no need to pull apart a laptop to clean out dust when 90% of that can be achieved with a can of compressed air.

Please read to the end before responding. Just pointing out parts and problems. Not suggesting it isn't an acceptable machine. Just going to let you know that the monitor, while versatile, is actually kinda dim. 200 nits peak brightness. It's okay for most movies. But it's going to come out dark and under-saturated. If you're using it for photo-editing or anything like that, this is NOT the machine you want. If, you're just using it for long-session gaming or don't give a damn about accurate colore reproduction, it's probably fine though. And if you need a better presentation to do work or want a brighter, more color-saturated gaming, you can hook up external monitors. However, if you intend to use it as a multi-monitor work screen, you're better off economizing on a 15" unit and spending the difference on better externals. Speakers are front-mounted down-fire crap. Use a headset. On the plus side, so long as you're a righty, mousing should be comfortable. With no vent ports on the right hand side and only the USB port you'll likely use for the mouse. You've got a second M.2 slot and a SATA slot. So you have lots of expandability on storage. Check the device when you get it to make sure both SO-DIMM ranks are filled so you're getting maximum memory performance. And memory's expandable to 64GB. Though there's no realistic need for more than the base 32GB (again, provided dual ranks) right now. Honestly, looking at other options, this is probably the best bang-for-buck unit I can currently find if you're looking in the 17" space.

Yeah...You've never seen some of the "cooling" "solutions" used on some craptops...

Yup. Think I'm going to hang on 3.0.6 for now.

Testing, testing, 1, 2...

My mom's HP laptop had a major flaw. It had a hard drive from a known-bad batch. I basically caught it just before the drive utterly failed (took better than an hour to boot or do ANYTHING. Opened it up and replaced the HDD with an SSD. And while it was open, found it ALSO had an M.2 slot sitting in there unused. And, having just rebuilt my big rig after the motherboard went teats-up, I had one of those too! So she's got 2TB of SSD storage in the thing and I had to completely load the device from scratch (it couldn't clone the drive). IIRC, it's an older 7000-series i7. But, with disk bottlenecks pretty much ELIMINATED, the thing is an entirely acceptable device for web browsing and light Office work. And if I were going to be gaming seriously on such a device, I'd not trust the built in rig. https://www.newegg.com/rosewill-rwnb17a-gaming-laptop-cooler/p/N82E16848997104

I had to roll back to 3.0.6.0 3.4.ANYTHING currently just doesn't work for me. It installs fine. But results in broken forums output and anything you try to open with it requires it to be rebuilt.

Most important. WHAT SORT OF BUDGET ARE YOU LOOKING AT. Real dollar amount. Not "As little as possible." 2 numbers. The budget you'd like to stay in A slightly higher budget you could reasonably "stretch" for if it meant a DEMONSTRABLY superior device It's all well and good to suggest $900, 1000, 1500 rigs. If all you can afford is $200, it's ALMOST as useful as an empty squirt gun in a prairie fire.

https://archive.paragonwiki.com/wiki/The_Players'_Guide_to_the_Cities/System_Requirements The minimums pretty much aren't much higher than this. And, due to the way the game is built, simply throwing God-level hardware at a 17 year old game doesn't really make a HUGE difference. The only recommendation I would give is "use a solid state drive". It makes client-end loads MUCH faster. Also, Here's an update of my sub-$700 desktop screamer. https://newegg.io/ed09777 Basically the only major difference is a larger SSD from its previous iteration. You don't need some hugely expensive 3rd party graphics. I actually had one of my clients use this as the basis for a new small business server. The thing's got MASSIVE grunt.

Except I'd have done it in complete safety. It's called "tradeoffs"

And if I managed to splat you outside of the crashes?

As an SS tank, you'd have to come fight ME for it... If you want to change SS. I might not kill you (but don't underestimate me). But there's NO WAY IN HELL you do more than tickle me... Better off creating a new set that's SS with the numbers filed off, and tweaked for the Rage-haters. Call it "Grunt Hard" or something...

The eternal refrain... "Why'd you do that?" "I dunno. Seemed like a good idea at the time?"

No. Don't make it any worse than it already is. The widest I've seen thus far is 3.65 slots. But, realistically, anything over 3.0 slots is 4 slots.

It's looking like NVIDIA (and by extension, the board partners) got caught with their pants down on the cooling solution. Basically, mid-way through bringing the 4000 series to market, they switched manufacturers and manufacturing process. Previously, the chips had some fairly sizeable thermal demands. Hence the giant, case-filling cooling solutions. But the process switch brought all of that under control. But too late to change cooler design. So you have these cards 3090 Strix vs 3080 3080FE vs 4090FE 3080 vs 4090 Strix 4090FE vs 4090 Strix And note: The actual "CARD" (the PCB) is only roughly HALF the length of the FE unit! But the Asus unit? 14 INCHES LONG! (Bow chicka bow wow!) And most of the cards? 3.5 slots. The other Asus SKU? The TUF line? 3.65! PS5 vs 4090 Strix vs 3090 Strix. I think second-gen SKUs will be slimmed down by a much more modest cooler. And water cooling rigs will be downright SLIM

See what all the alt-coin mining gets them?

The long and short of it. NVIDIA RTX 4090. Total halo product. HUGE performance. But MASSIVE power draw. 470W! That's more than the rest of your system! Overclocked? 670W! Now, unless you're running 4K in EVERYTHING, there is precisely ZERO VALUE PROPOSITION You're simply better off buying an older product from down the stack.

The hero theme of every non-darkside hero since 1987. And the one every darkside here SECRETLY wishes they could use...(and is probably humming to himself in his/her head as they're busting faces)...

I've tried rolling back from 3.4.7 to 3.4.6 and 3.4.5. ALL of them are exhibiting this behavior. Also note that the artwork for the Winter IOs has been swapped to Mako's Bite. Not sure what happened there.