Any thoughts on placing your PC in a bar-fridge/freezer, for that little bit of extra cooling? Refrigerators absorb moisture, so shouldn't be a problem, provided ventilation is sufficient?
So, back in December of 2015, for Christmas I got a pre-built gaming computer, with some pretty good specs for a budget computer. R7 360, FX 4300, pretty good computer for what I needed to do. Then, in July of 2016 we move. Now, at first, I didn't notice anything different. And then it hit me, that bo3 was running at bare minimum settings and yet not hitting 60 FPS. At first, I thought just some updates, game got bad. Stuff like that. Then, I start doing some research, and I'm the only one on the entire planet that is reporting this issue in the game. So, I just let it be and work on the other stuff, I was busy. Yesterday, I tried to fix it. First thing I did was plug it straight into the wall, no change. After school today, I decided to try and move it to a different corner of the house, one that was otherwise unused. It turns out, because the refrigerator was on the same power circuit, as long as a few other things, my computer was underpowered! So I decided to move it into my room for a bit, granted I don't have Ethernet or Wifi in here so that's got to be changed, but now it's running the game Max settings at 60fps. It booted faster, and the game I'm actually developing, ran like it should have.
Moral of the story: your computer performance is the directly impacted by whether or not it has power. I am now looking into a $20 USB wifi adapter.
EDIT: OH, SO YOU CAN AT IT ON MOBILE. Well, that considered, I'm going to see how well it runs Fallout 4 now. Wish me luck.
The hot exhaust airflow from your undoubtedly glorious gaming PC is just about perfect for dehumidifying small stuff rapidly. It doesn't dehumidify the room because the room is a mostly closed system and the moisture eventually ends up back in the room anyway, but for small amounts of residual water it will evaporate that stuff so fast it's like it's the sahara desert back there.
How it works:
To evaporate water requires a few things to happen.
Dessicants (like rice, or silica gel) only provide the first of those three things, and that's good! It definitely helps. They are good at drying the air out, and that gives the air lots of room to accept new moisture from the device. But for even better drying power you would ideally have all three, and what do you know, PCs are an excellent source for all three!
I've used this technique to dry out several devices and some of my friends and family members and it has worked wonders. I have yet to have a device that was not at least partially rescued by this process, although I'm sure it's still totally possible to ruin a device completely with water especially in this day and age of glued in batteries and other nonsense, but, assuming you do everything you everything you can to get the device powered off as quickly as you can after it's exposed to water, I think you'll have a good chance of rescuing it.
And now for the probably sappy part... I do hope this helps some people down the road, and I think it's a good technique in general, but I've known about it for awhile, and what really made me decide to post this now is the flooding going on around Houston. I know there are probably a lot more important things right now than some waterlogged cellphones but even if it helps a few people I'll feel happy. If you've been evacuated you probably do not have access to a PC, but anything that puts out warm dry airflow like a refrigerator or vending machine or even just some sort of airflow at all like a ceiling fan or air return vent may help bring that phone back to life more quickly, and phones can be a vital lifeline in situations like this. Not to mention they may contain the only photos and memories some people have left. I've been in a flood situation like that before myself, and I know people often assume it's over once you've made it to the evacuation center, and it's all just a formality from there, but far from it! In some ways, for a lot of people, the hardest parts are still ahead. Good luck to everyone.
Liquid cooling would be my first choice, unfortunately you need a fan to actively draw air over the radiator. I suppose you could stick a refrigerator compressor in your case...but then it wouldn't be silent...hmm...
Thanks to the one person that encouraged my review of this case!
On the heels of the New Fractal Design Define C, a cheaper lesser-known competitor hopes to shake up the market as well: DIYPC. Since I just bought the case in question I thought I would post a review for you all interested. Here Goes...
Here is the Imgur album of a few photos from my completed build. http://ift.tt/2eyS7wY
Overview:
The Good
Big ole side window
Power Supply basement and sound dampening foam
3 included fans and not 1, but 2 fan controllers
Built in SD and MicroSD Card Reader
Filtered Front Intake, removable power supply filter
Moduvent-like system for the top (see this link: http://ift.tt/2fWidPh) Vents can be replaced with an included filter for more airflow.
Magnetically closing refrigerator-style front panel cover
The Not So Good
Manufacturing tolerances are a bit low, had some trouble screwing in my motherboard
Gets much hotter than my old NZXT Source 220 (to be expected)
Power Supply mount is not on rails making it necessary to pre- route all cables before plugging them into the PSU and then shoving it all in with the force of Satan himself
Fan Controllers are Molex so i didn't use them as my motherboard had three fan headers
Screws aren't magnetic
Really should have a cable routing hole below the GPU power connectors. Routing them was a pain and they will be hard to move if I want to add extensions in the future.
Conclusion:
For the price I paid of 59.99 I think I got a lot for my money. The case looks darn good and has so many good features, (moduvent,3 fans, fan filters, fan controllers, SD card reader) that I can't say that I am unhappy with my purchase.
Coming from the Source 220 from NZXT I was able to see the less thoughtful design put into the lower-tier brand DIYPC. However, most of the issues I had building won't be a problem now that the build is done and all of my complaints could easily be addressed in a V2.0 of this case.
For 60 bucks, you are getting all of the aesthetics and silence of a Fractal Define C or an NZXT S340 and since the price is right, I would recommend it to a baller on a budget.
TLDR: Good case for the price if not as thoughtfully built as some of its higher tier bretheren.
I'm sure this is a simple question, but I have tried to do my own research and I see conflicting forum posts all over the internet. I want to put a small refrigerator magnet on my case as it's less permanent than a decal - is this problematic? I understand the HDD has magnets in it, and modern cases are designed to protect the outside from internal fields/problems and vice versa, but a concrete explanation one way or the other would put my mind at ease.
my pc is humming like a refrigerator but only when i rest my hand or leg on it, what is happening? i would record it but its to faint for a microphone to pick it up.
So I was just sitting here watching youtube videos and suddenly my refrigerator's icemaker starting making a horrible buzzing sound. At First I thought it was my pc so I open up the side to check on the fans. I see that they are fine, realize its the fridge and go to look at that. However as I start to leave the room windows 10 goes "Your pc has run into a problem and needs to restart" then proceeds to crash and try to reboot over and over from the bios while saying "no operating system found" Now keep in mind I am new to pc gaming and was horrified if something happend to my rig. Its really expensive and I cant afford to replace it. So I hit the power button again and now its running slowly but working and here I am on reddit. Did I do something obviously stupid? Should I be worried?
I'm sooooooo sick of just rehashes of the same old tower/refrigerator style cases from all the makers. No one had made anything close to make me wanna part with my Cooler Master HAF XB Evo still and that's just sad!
Disclaimer: GOTY is stupid. I don't care about GOTY. I am not discussing GOTY. I am discussing The Witcher 3 and the unending circlejerk surrounding it.
I don't think it's fair to call Witcher 3 groundbreaking. Or the best RPG ever (not by a long shot). Or even a particularly good game. It was good, but it was not the best thing anyone's ever touched in their lives, and if it is, I feel sorry for them.
What about this game is groundbreaking?
The dialogue system? That's found in tons of modern games, and in The Witcher 3, it affects next to nothing. Winner: Other games. Where it matters.
The storyline? Other games have storylines, you know. People act like before The Witcher 3 came along, no game ever had a plot. The Witcher 3's plot isn't the theatrical masterpiece it's made out to be. Nothing in particular about it really stands out and it does a poor job for players who haven't played earlier titles as well (despite the devs claiming it's not necessary). Some of the sidequests had cool stories, but that's just it. Cool stories. Is that really that incredible? The sidequests took me out of the game half the time anyway because there's a whopping 8 NPC models or so used for all of them. I did a voiced quest involving a werewolf and a woman and some other guy and it was cool. Then I was immediately taken out of it when the next quest I did featured the exact same woman and guy who was just moments ago a werewolf. They weren't even unique character models. Other games have plenty of unique character models for unique situations, what is this game's excuse? These character models are on the level of an early GTA game, heavily repeating with little to no randomization of features. But even early GTA games made sure that voiced dialogue and "quests" were given by and involved mostly unique character models. Not "that lady in the sun hat" over and over.
The complete failure of an open world that tells you exactly where to find every secret as soon as you check a notice board? Yeah, that's fun to explore- a world where you know exactly where you are sure to not find anything, and where all the secrets are marked on the map. Checking a notice board revealed a note about missing chickens, a slutty farmer, a dog, meat for sale, a quest, and general news from the town. From these 6 snippets of information, Geralt is able to activate one sidequest, and also know the exact location of all recently bandit-killed bodies in the area (of which, conveniently, there's many), all the monster nests, all the point thingies you find hidden in tombs nobody's gone into in years, all the treasure nobody's claimed for a century. That's not fun. "But you can turn off map markers!" you say? Well, it's still badly designed, and I want some map markers, just not the ones that spoil the locations of every single thing in the game. Turning off map markers doesn't solve the problem, it creates a new one- notice boards are worthless.
The combat system that was done in the previous two games and is pretty clunky all things considered? The combat feels like Fable 1 way back on the xbox, it's heavy and sluggish and clumsy, not in a gratifying way like Dark Souls. All the enemies have more range of movement and agility than you. Speaking of Fable 1, Witcher 3 also has awful refrigerator-in-a-shopping-cart-with-broken-wheels controls where your character turns on a monster truck tire instead of a dime. That's not groundbreaking. It's awful. They patched it, because it was awful. But before they patched it you'd be lucky to find people who wouldn't rush to defend the controls because "real people move like that". I can only assume these people are severely disabled, because real people do not mimic circling a redwood tree to get out of a doorway. They turn around.
Perks? Skill trees? Super original stuff, there. A whopping two weapon types and 5 spells? You know what had more than that? Final Fantasy on the NES. Hell, Dragon Quest (arguably a smaller scale title) had more than that.
A progression system so poorly designed that you cannot complete sidequests without fear of being too powerful to actually get rewards from later quests (you don't get exp from quests beyond a certain level threshold), and where your armor and weapons are always stronger than the loot you find? I played for about 20 hours and never once found any loot better than what I had on me. There was no point to looting anything. Every single weapon and armor dropped by enemies or found in chests or whatever was bad. It was always underleveled. And if you did too many sidequests, others became too low level, and you were no longer rewarded experience for doing them. Then you'd advance to the next area and be overleveled, resulting in the quests you do there giving you no experience. This was a huge problem when the game came out, and I htink they fixed it after a while but I don't know. Completionists were punished for completing things.
The level progression is some of the worst I've ever experienced, including in games like Oblivion (where you literally fucked up unique loot if you found it too early, because it was leveled to your character and thus would be useless a few levels later). At least in Oblivion finding weapons made you stronger, even if they were eventually outclassed despite being the best sword in the game base-stats-wise. In The Witcher 3 finding weapons is just the same as finding junk. It's never worth using.
UI issues that the previous two games in the series also launched with but the developer somehow didn't learn from and didn't fix until a month after launch? They had menu problems in this game that were also in Witcher 1 and Witcher 2. The exact same poor design choices. The exact same solutions implemented in patches for those games. But after screwing that up twice, they couldn't figure it out for the third game, either? Books, notes, randomly slapped in with other miscellaneous objects, consumables slapped in with unusable items. This was a problem in Witcher 1. They patched it. This was a problem in Witcher 2. They patched it. Then they developed Witcher 3 and not one person ont eh dev team said "HM, PERHAPS WE SHOULD LAUNCH THE GAME WITH A COMPETENT UI THIS TIME", and it launched with the same problem, and again, they had to patch it later. The UI is also entirely console focused and clunky as balls on PC. Try interacting with an object that's at geralts feet. What's that? You can't? Yeah, because the camera can't see it. Makes sense, right? The camera isn't able to see an object, so it doesn't exist to be looted. So walk away from it (turning in a 4 foot circle in the process), then walk towards it, BUT DON'T WALK TOO FAR TOWARDS IT, because then you'll be too close to loot it, and have to wander away from it and try again. This got through testing. They tested this game and apparently every person involved said "yeah, I love finicky controls where I wobble around next to an object for 40 seconds before I can finally interact with it and accidentally light a candle instead".
Complete lack of interactivity with the game world and NPCs? The entire game world is a bunch of setpieces with no purpose. Every building is as interactive as a building in a JRPG, there's nothing groundbreaking there. The buildings can be entered without a load screen? That's nice, but they're just four walls and static objects. Of course you don't have to load them. They're simple setpieces. It's not like in a Bethesda game where you can pick things up, or where objects are visible in the game world, or whatever. It's the same models of the same furniture over and over again, except it's "a container" and it has different stuff in it when you interact with it. The NPCs are a step below even the most remedial JRPG, they just parrot the same canned dialogue, if they say anything, and next to none of it has any use to the player, and you can't talk to anyone who isn't part of the storyline. Even FF1 on the NES had NPCs you could talk to for flavor text and general information (and again, the more remedial Dragon Quest), but not Witcher 3. But at least we know Chetty's that one kid's best mate and his alzheimer's dad keeps forgetting he already punished him.
What about this stuff is groundbreaking? It's a Far Cry game with an RPG slapped into it.
Far Cry- follow the map icons to complete repeating concepts across the landscape such as clearing camps, finding caches, and taking down a source of strife. Collect resources to craft new equipment that outclasses anything you find. Gain perks that change your combat in vague ways too far spread out to feel satisfying. Take down spooky wild animals.
Witcher 3- Follow the map icons to complete repeating concepts across the landscape such as clearing camps, finding caches, and taking down monster nests. Collect resources to craft new equipment that outclasses anything you find. Gain perks that change your combat in vague ways too far spread out to feel satisfying. Take down spooky wild animals.
The only difference is that there's more dialogue and more story. But it's a just-above-mediocre adventure game (akin to far cry, uncharted, etc) with stats, not a groundbreaking RPG from which all future RPGs should be molded. It is an interactive movie, and not even that good of a movie, with clunky everything, and zero replayability to speak of.
It's pretty. It has an interesting-ish storyline. But god damn is it mediocre in pretty much all aspects. It's fun! But I don't understand what the big deal is about it.
I have a mini fridge and a microwave in my house and its plugged into the same circuit as my pc. but i have my pc connected to a Belkin surge protector that has grounded led indicators and are lit. but when the compressor inside the refrigerator turns on it causes a small kick in the power for a second and several hard drives in my pc get detected as if they were unplugged and plugged back in suddenly, will this hurt my pc in any way? and is there a way to stop this from happening??
Hey brothers, I am suspicious of how low my temperatures are with my i5-3570k. Multipliers are locked at 43x, giving all four cores a constant 4.34GHz. But my idle temps are 32-34°C, and under load I've never seen it break 43°C. Speed and temps both verified by bios, CPU-Z, Speedfan, and a couple other third party apps.
This seems abnormally low, not that I'm complaining, but is that about right? And no, I don't live in a refrigerator or anything. Room temps are pretty typical.
So my electric company is having major issues today (not outages). For some reason all the lights flicker in my house (and other cities in my county). My electric company said to not use big energy components. I understand that some outlets might produce 2x the normal voltage because of this. Since this is the case should I leave my PC off even though I'm using a surge breaker? The 3 TVs in my house are all currently being used, and my refrigerator hasn't overloaded so I'm tempted to turn it on. What are your thoughts?
Currently I can play GTA V on Medium for about 6 minutes followed by a one minute break to let the gfx cool down. Fan is already on maximum. Sometimes I put an icepack under the laptop and that helps but I don't like moisture aspect of it.
