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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   2666 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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I finally got my pc set up. While the user experience on the desktop hasn't changed much, going from a perfectly decent Ryzen 5600x and an RTX 3070 to a 9800x3d and a 5080, the performance in games is night and day. It certainly spanks my gaming laptop.

Random observations:

  1. Using a 48" 4K OLED TV as a monitor feels unfair in FPS titles where you need to pixel peep. At the distance I'm (forced to) sit from it, everything is larger than life. No more wondering if that blob is an enemy or a bush.
  2. Using a TV that size from barely 3 feet away isn't the best experience, it takes up more horizontal real estate than any ultra wide monitor, and vertically, you need to actively move your head rather than just look at things in the corner.
  3. HDR rocks. It's nice having full-fat real HDR versus the anemic 400 nits my old monitor had.
  4. I have had pleasant experiences with running cheap Chinese mechanical keyboards. No difference this time, it looks pretty nice, until you look closely at the keycaps and see the etching is subpar. But the thing is solid metal, the keys feel good, and I doubt I'll care. I already don't notice it.
  5. The in-built wifi on my MSI Pro B650 motherboard sucks donkey dick. My phones and laptop pick up great signal in my bedroom, this thing barely wanted to connect. Fortunately, the router is some kind of 5g contraption, and I just moved it closer and kept the living room door proper open. I went from no stable connection to several hundred mbps down, which is good enough. Problem solved for now.

Edit:

I was also concerned that at such close distances, the effective resolution of the screen would show holes. To my surprise, it doesn't. I don't know if there's some subpixel wizardry going on, but it looks pretty damn sharp even from 2-3 feet away.

The in-built wifi on my MSI Pro B650 motherboard sucks donkey dick. My phones and laptop pick up great signal in my bedroom, this thing barely wanted to connect. Fortunately, the router is some kind of 5g contraption, and I just moved it closer and kept the living room door proper open. I went from no stable connection to several hundred mbps down, which is good enough. Problem solved for now.

You may want to consider one of those wall modules that have ethernet ports on them that you can plug into an electrical outlet, and uses the mains as a bridge. That's what I would do to get at a router far away from my desktop PC in a rental apartment.

I would never use powerline if there was any other option. It works fine if you're on the same circuit, but once it passes through the breaker panel it's a coin flip. Also sensitive to having stuff with shitty power factor on the same circuit. CFLs, LEDs, cheap appliance motors, etc. you never want to be trying to diagnose "why does my Internet cut out whenever my fridge compressor cycles?!"

I've actually got it running to a distant building 500' away, through the woods so a ptp wifi link would have been much harder to set up.
It works, but it adds a lot of latency and periodically drops unless you keep a device constantly pinging the router.

Just run an Ethernet cable across the floor and put a rug on it, 9 times out of 10 it's the best option.

Yeah mine wasn't ideal, I had to go down stairs and around some corners.

If I had to do it again I would've just drilled through some walls. Was my landlord going to like it? No. Would they have been able to stop me? Also no.

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