pctuning

Igor (Igor’s Lab) discovered a very dangerous bug in the MSI Center application that allows the Ryzen 7 5800X3D to be overclocked far beyond its limits. Although this seems like a good thing, the opposite is true. This CPU basically has lower clocks because the 3D cache is very sensitive and cannot handle what the regular Ryzen 7 5800X can handle. Therefore, the voltage is limited to 1.35V, this is the official maximum specified by AMD, but of course the processor uses less. Igor took advantage of a bug in the application and applied 1.3V to the processor, and then a little more, and the PC turned off. Needless to say it wouldn’t boot and the CPU was dead. But the bug allows up to 1.55V to be burned into the CPU, which is equivalent to the so-called “instakill”, i.e. immediate detonation.

Further investigation revealed that the same error also occurs in ASRock, Asus and Gigabyte applications. And we will add to the topic that der8auer tried a similar experiment with the Ryzen 7950X3D processor. To be sure, he cooled with liquid nitrogen, but as soon as 1.55V went into the processor, it was gone immediately. So if you’re working with your AMD processor with 3D cache, be damn careful about the volts. For now, there is no fix or update on the horizon to fix this.

We haven’t seen such a truly DIY approach to PC improvement in a long time. Today, everyone has millions of sophisticated tools, gauges, CNC machines and entire teams of experts behind their backs. But when we see how it is possible to achieve high-quality results with household items, it can be seen that PC tuning still has its place. South Korean YouTuber Tassi Ham posted a short video of how he delided the new Ryzen 7000 with the help of dental floss and an iron. Deliding this CPU is more difficult because the shape of the IHS resembles an octopus and there are tiny parts between the tentacles that should stay in place after deliding.

And here Tassi came up with a brilliant idea. He took dental floss, threaded it under each tentacle, and by pulling towards him (toward the CPU), simply flossed that tentacle “unstick”. He repeated eight times and behold, the IHS is ready to be removed. But since there is of course thermal paste between the CPU and the IHS, it will also need to be helped. Tassi solved it with an iron. He laid it on its back, dabbed some thermal paste on the CPU, and put the CPU on an iron for 30 seconds to loosen the IHS. Of course, then we don’t touch the CPU with our bare hands, if we don’t want to get serious burns. Well, the delid is done. Simple, right?

If we were to look for the really fundamental difference between console gaming and PC master race, then it is the fact that on console you play almost exclusively with a controller, while PC uses a combination of keyboard and mouse. This leads to all sorts of design differences and problems, because they are vastly different systems – and while you can theoretically use a keyboard on a console and play on a PC with a controller, practically no one does.

Of the keyboard-mouse pair, it was considered the only important mouse for a long time. Any keyboard will do for gaming, right? The main thing is that it is not wireless, because for a long time they suffered from the problem of falling asleep quickly, and this generated lag. Then it turned out that gamers like mechanical keyboards, which became a certain standard of durability and certainty. Instead of roughly 10 million hits, they promise up to 50 million hits – and that’s just the beginning.

Mechanical keyboards feel better to gamers because of one feature that makes them significantly worse for typing. They have a high switching point, at the beginning of their travel path, which means they switch earlier and this gives the impression that they are generally faster. The disadvantage of switching at the top is that if you change your mind about the movement or just press the key, there is no switching with a classic keyboard, which means that you have fewer typos. Classic mechanical switches can be like this or poppy, but they all switch in the upper part of the track, so you will probably make the same number of typos on them regardless of their “color”. That’s why I personally much prefer older conventional keyboards for typing.

Large mechanical keyboards are largely a matter of individual preference – I can’t rule out that someone just likes them. A much different thing are the shortened keyboards, which seem to be experimenting with how much they can be shrunk. This makes a lot of sense, because the less space the keyboard takes up, the more room there is for the mouse.

Traditional classic IBM keyboards are huge – and ergonomically speaking, if you place them with the alphanumeric part directly in front of you, you have a numeric pad in the places where a right-handed person grips the mouse. Early PCs didn’t use a mouse often, so it didn’t matter – but the IBM Model M is almost half a meter, so if you have a classic computer desk that has a 60-80 cm wide top, you really don’t have much room for a mouse.

The solution to the problem of how to get as much space as possible for a mouse on a small table is threefold. The first is to increase the sensitivity of the mouse and thus use less mouse movement for larger maneuvers, which is said to be done by gaming professionals, but not ideal for people who have a bit of a shaky hand. The second solution is to reduce the size of the keyboard, so you reach for one that does not have a numeric pad (eighty percent), does not have a numeric pad and cursor blocks (seventy-five percent), or is an even more reduced puppy.

A third solution is specialized gaming keyboards that are literally half the size. Initially, there were specialized commanders and controllers, the most bizarre of which was probably the Microsoft Sidewinder Strategic Commander (2001). The undoubtedly original device had a large hat that allowed panning and rotating of the map and a set of shift buttons. This particular attempt at a controller was somewhat over-engineered and also expensive. Like other “left-handed designed controllers”, it required configuration software to function.

So it happened that a graphics engineer accidentally published plans for a new Panther Lake processor architecture including an integrated graphics card. Of course, the editors at TomsHardware noticed and took a screenshot before the post disappeared. In this way, we learned what the employee is currently working on and what architectures are planned. The list includes the already known Meteor Lake and Arrow Lake, as well as IGPs of the Battlemage and Celestial architectures, and finally the mysterious Panther Lake, which should receive IGP Xe3, which means the Celestial architecture. Panther could arrive probably sometime around 2024 or 2025.

Regarding the timeline, the editors at TomsHardware speculate that since Panther Lake is the furthest product, it could already be made using the 20A process. This is a process where the physical parameters of the chip can no longer be measured precisely in nanometers, but in “angstroms” (1 angstrom = 0.1 nanometer). They also expect massive energy savings from this process, up to 50% compared to Alder Lake. However, we have to wait a few years to see how it will actually turn out. The closest processor to hit us will be of the Meteor Lake architecture and is expected in the second half of this year, although there have been rumors that Meteors will be cancelled.

Windows 11 hasn’t exactly met with a warm reception. Microsoft introduced radical system requirements without which the OS cannot be installed. In addition, the user interface is unfriendly, a lot of things that we are used to have disappeared and it is completely reminiscent of the tragicomic Windows 8. It is also comical that now there are reports that W11 has started to be offered and encouraged to upgrade even those users who do not have a machine for it , i.e. they do not meet the minimum requirements (Secure boot, TPM, etc.).

If the user gives in and tries to install the system update, it ends up with an error message about the minimum requirements. One visitor to the reddit network thought that the upgrade appeared even on a dig with 2 GB of DDR3 memory and a 1.1 GHz CPU, which can barely handle W10 (and I wonder if even the old W7 works properly on it). Overall, though, it looks more like a bug in the update than an intention. Microsoft has been quite tight-lipped about the requirements and we doubt they would suddenly allow and try to spread the OS to all online machines.

Just for the sake of time, let’s remember when the previous generations of Nvidia mobile graphics were released. The highest Ampere model presented by the RTX 3080 Mobile went on the market in January 2021. The graphics carried 6144 CUDA cores and has 8 GB of GDDR6 memory. Exactly one year later, Nvidia launched an improved version on the GA103 core. It is the current, most powerful mobile graphics RTX 3080 Ti (Mobile). It carries 7424 CUDA cores with 16 GB of GDDR6 memory.

Now we are a year later again, and Nvidia is introducing the successor to the RTX 3080 Ti, but also lower models. On this day, five GPUs intended for mobile computers officially go on the market. As the figure shows, it starts from the RTX 4090 as the most powerful model and ends with the RTX 4050 at the tail of the performance offer.

The position of the GeForce RTX 3080 Ti is taken over by the RTX 4080. It has the same number of CUDA cores (7424), but we have a narrower memory bus (192 bits versus 256 bits) and there is also a smaller memory capacity of 12 GB versus 16 GB for the older version. In terms of performance, it will probably be very similar, but this does not apply to games with DLSS 3. We will get to that later.

The flagship is of course the RTX 4090, its specifications are truly monstrous. It offers 9728 CUDA cores, 16 GB of GDDR6 memory and a frequency of up to 2 GHz. Compared to the mobile RTX 4080, the increase in computing cores is more than 30 percent, which could theoretically mean significantly higher performance. Of course, we know that the limit for similarly powerful GPUs is the processor, only tests will show the reality.