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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   2929 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.

Make sure there isn't an external antenna somewhere in the box, or at the very least the port for an external antenna on the back of the motherboard. The plug will 99% be SMA, which is a little coax port with an outside thread. If there is one, get a cheap ($10 max) dipole antenna for it.

If there isn't, it's magic you get any signal at all. The PC case is a Faraday cage, and the back of the mainboard is a really bad place for a compact print antenna - it almost certainly points the wrong way. In that case, just get an external USB wifi card with external antennas. I've got an Alpha Networks card with two antenna ports for $25. I replaced one of the dipole antennas with a directional patch antenna. The thing gets signal at the other end of my parking lot, through several walls, inside the car.

The reason phones and laptops have such good wifi is that they usually have 3 antennas built in around the inside of the screen, behind the plastic bezel. Much better than a single antenna in/behind a Faraday cage.

The plug will 99% be SMA

WiFi antennas, at least in the US, are typically RP-SMA, which swaps the polarity of the pin and the socket from standard SMA. It's still a 1/4"-ish threaded connection, but it's explicitly not compatible with standard SMA RF equipment.

But this is just being fairly pedantic: it's the only flavor of SMA most consumers see. But it is a pain in the rear buying RF parts to make sure you get compatible ones.

Yes, important point. Buy a "2.4 GHz/5 GHz wifi antenna" on Amazon/Ali Express, not a "12 cm full band dipole antenna" at your local HAM/radio nerd supplier. That should get around the problem.

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