Second week of May
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa I am late, I was too busy re-100%ing ETS2 yesterday to make a post. And today I am busy with trying to choose with GPU to buy :/ (first world problems I know) Anyone got a 1080ti or 2080 they can recommend? There is too many too pick from D:
Completed SG win
Achievements: 2 of 2 (100%)
Review: A meh runner game that feels like a mobile port with button prompts for a controller even if you don't have one plugged in?! Even if my laptop easily passed the minimum required specs fir Linux, I couldn't get past level 13 because it kept freezing for 5 seconds at a time and ran at like 15fps. Worked fine on my desktop at least.
Other completed games
Achievements: 131 of 131 (100%)
Review: One of the only 3 games I remember buying because of the Steam discovery queue (the other 2 being games from the same series as this one) and I don't regret it one bit as it is a really nice puzzle game where you can solve 30 different puzzles on either of the 4 sizes - 40, 80, 200 or 400 pieces. Runs 100% fine with Proton.
Achievements: 0 of 0
Review: I have a meh-hate relationship with this tower diffenseish kinda game. At first I hated it, then I got the hang of thing and I thought it was kind of ok, but then I realised just how unbalanced it is. As a cherry on top the game also crashed once. Other than the crash it ran fine with Proton.
Achievements: 0 of 0
Review: Despair (noun)- utter loss of hope. Yes, utter loss of hope that the devs who made this game are half competent. It is a shit horror game where your mouse randomly disappears in the audio menu and once you actually start the game it just crashes (at least with Proton). I watched someone play it on Youtube and I am more than happy to call this shit done just with that.
Achievements: 0 of 0
Review: A shitty Russian VN with even shitter English... Blah...Only good thing I can say about it that it runs fine on Linux.
Oh the pains of re-100% things. 100% orange juice decided it’s time for another damn dlc so now I get to 100% that for a 5th time very soon whenever it decides to come out. It’s like it never wants me to reach perfect game for it. Also you got a lot of hours on it and all I wanted to do was confirm that I knew what ETS2 was
I am glad I still haven’t bothered starting that game yet then(mostly because I don’t have any of the DLC anyways). ETS2 is one of my favourite games ever :) Technically I haven’t re100%ed it yet because I am still missing one achievement that will come with a patch™, but when I do it will also be the 3rd or 4th time. Killing Floor 2 takes the record for me however, I lost the count of how many times I did it and there is more achievements added waiting for a patch to enable them already…
bwahahah i remember drakonika, which is actually called darconika?? can’t even bother to learn the proper name that much it’s bad
Considering just how bad the English translation is I am not even surprised they called it wrong :D
Looking at benchmarks, the RTX 2080 on average seems to be better by 1-2%. And I dunno about prices in Slovenia but 2080 seems to be cheaper by quite a lot, at least here in Poland. I tried using a site like ceneje.si but it seems like there’s only 1080ti from EVGA lol? On amazon it’s similar, prices can range from $800 to $1400 but just from my eye it looks like 2080 is ~$100 cheaper by looking at not expensive editions.
And if you want to play with Ray tracing on, 2080 beats 1080ti in every game. The extra cores just for that help a lot, here’s a good video from Digital Foundry on that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkY-20kdXl0
If I were you I would go for RTX 2080, similar price you can play with ray tracing easily on 60fps @1080p, and with your 1080p 144hz monitor it should pull that framerate on every other non-RTX game. (Yes I looked at your profile :D I also assume that ASUS monitor is the one you use for gaming).
I usually order my hardware from either alternate.de or mindfactory.de because the prices and availability in Slovenia are soooooooo bad. If I were to use Slovenian sites I would use either sestavi.si or mimovrste.com but especially Mimovrste is super overpriced. It is really hard to come by new 1080ti in general.
I really don’t care about raytracing, I don’t own any games that have it and even I don’t think any of them so far even work on Linux anyways. That will probably change in the next few years but by then I will probably be due for a GPU upgrade anyways. I originally wanted to wait for the next series of GPUs, but my 970 is bottlenecking that i9 a lot more than I thought it would lol. And holding off the CPU update was not an option for me anymore as my old i5 4690k could no keep up anymore even when overclocked as far as it could go (4.1GHz was the biggest overclock I could get stable :/)
I found an used 1080ti I am gonna test on Thursday for 450€ which if there is nothing wrong with I will take since it is over 200€ cheaper than any 2080 I could get. And I don’t relay on GPU power all that much anyways, CPU power is a lot more important to me and I got that sorted for a long time :) I will probably end up replacing it sooner than I would the 2080 but for 200€ cheaper I am fine with that. + I don’t have to deal with DVI to DP/HDMI cables/adapter because one of the other monitors doesn’t have any other ports than DVI and VGA and I was unable to find a single 2080 with DVI.
You assume correctly :) And thanks for your thoughts on it, I appreciate you taking your time :)
Just pick drumroll the best! Nah, I have no idea. :P Not even close to being able to fit in my possible budget so I don’t even look at them.
No experience on the games played either so cannot really comment on that either. So basically this is just a pointless comment.
Doesn’t using Linux now stop you from playing a lot of games though?
I found an used 1080ti that will most likely go for, so all good :P Yeaaa they are a bit expensive, but it is time to put my 970 to rest.
750 out of my 2137 games run native on Linux. Of the other 1387 games an estimated 15% should work flawlessly with SteamPlay/Proton/Wine/whatever you want to call it, the thing that makes Windows games run on Linux. Then 29% should run with some minor issues that can or can not be fixed, 24% with some bigger issues (that can or can not be fixed) and the other 29% (if I did the math right) are more or less fucked.
So what I am saying is, yes, it will prevent me from playing some games, but not all that many (~400 out of 2100) and the numbers are getting better with each day. These are the ones I found since the end of March that don’t work. Only the first 3 are actually 100% broken, the rest just have issues I don’t feel like dealing with (3 crash in fullscreen and I don’t wanna play them in windowed even if I could, one does some weird resulution switch if I tab out and I tab out a lot so I can’t be arsed to be constantly in the resolution menu, one crashes a lot but I heard some people also have issues on Windows)
Ah yeah, my whole computer is 2nd hand (in parts). But now that I’m having odd crashes it’s hard for me to pinpoint what it could be. But bang for buck wise it’s often a wise investment.
I thought Vice City worked under wine/steamplay, but looks like you put a lot more effort into finding out. :D All in all not too bad numbers then. Linux has come a long way damn.
I always bought new parts (I even upgraded CPU + RAM + Mobo + cooler in the end of March with brand new parts) but for GPU I was put in-front of a stupid decision:
The performance between the cards is about the same and I don’t care one little bit about the extra gimmicky features the 2080 has so the choice was quite easy.
It works(the graphical glitches are an issue with OBS, it doesn’t actually happen when you play), but it crashes a looooooooooooot and there is something weird with the movement.
It is far far from perfect, but if you can live without playing all AAA games and are tired of Windows nonsense it is more and more a viable option. And you can always dual boot or use a VM with GPU pass-thought for the games that don’t work and you still want to play.
Oh wow that looks janky. You happen to have a controller connected? Kinda looks similar to the mouse control I get in GTA IV sometimes, slightly touching (I believe the left) thumbstick on my controller fixes it (well, any input from the thumbstick, doesn’t have to be slight).
Doesn’t have to be related in any way of course, especially since the older titles in the 3D universe don’t come with controller support ‘out of the box’ IIRC and it seems to be an issue with switching control schemes between controller and kb+m on the fly, but could be something to try in case you’re ever gonna try it again.
That’s some first world problems. :D I only ‘upgraded’ last year to 2nd hand i7 2600k and GTX670 (plus mobo and ram). Which was quite an upgrade from an AMD fx-6100 and HD7700 hehe. Apart from the random crashes I get now. :/ But hey, what can you expect from a ±€250 2nd hand ‘upgrade’?
But given I had more money to spend on pc parts, I would probably have made the same choice, from the given ones.
I slapped Linux Mint on an old laptop just for ‘office ish’ use in case my pc ever ehh explodes or so. Quite userfriendly mostly, wireless module (although a pain in the behind to find and install a driver for) even can connect to modern networks now as opposed to the windows version. :P
Nope, I don’t really have a controller on hand to test it sadly :/
Yep, I know :/ :D
You paid that much for that o.o I sold a i5 2500 + 8GB of RAM + GTX 670 + motherboard and PSU for 210€ 3 and half years ago o.o Any idea what is causing the crashes? :o
How easy finding the wifi drivers is depends a lot on the hardware. For my laptop I don’t even have to anything, but I also heard before that some people had a lot of issues. Yep, Mint and Ubuntu are the most user friendly ones out there I would say. Did you get the Cinnamon version of Mint? Also if you need any help in regarding with it please feel free to ask :)
Ehm, got some tea to go with the reading? xD
About the crashes, problem about them is they can be there for a while but can also be absent for a while, which doesn’t exactly help in troubleshooting it. Although recently they seem to be there at least once a day if I play a game that will properly load my system.
Well, I bought the gtx670 for 80 I believe about a year and a half back when my hd7700 died, then last year got a motherboard (asrock p67) from a colleague (I gave him a pack of cigarettes for it but he didn’t ask anything for it) so I bought an i7-2600k with a decent cooler to go on it together from the same guy for 120ish (cooler was never used before and the guy has an extremely good reputation on the Dutch tech site that has a ‘marketplace’ section). Took the rest of the components from old build (gtx-670, ssd+hdd, psu, 2x4GB ram). Overclocked the CPU a bit to 4.2 or 4.0Ghz (I think I settled for 4.0 just to be on the safe side) which ran stable and didn’t give extreme temperatures, maxed out at 80-85 IIRC under stresstesting at 4.4Ghz (not very wishful temperatures but not harmful either). Got some errors after a while that seemed to be memory related, disabled OC but no difference, ran memtest and one of the two ram sticks turned out to be faulty. Ordered a replacement one, same id, but got a single sided memory module. No faults on it (memtested it), but yeah, single and dual sided memory… But seemed to work.
Still bothered me a bit and well, 8GB was also getting quite on the low end by that time. Saw an ad close by for what seemed to be 2x8 and 2x4 sticks for a good price, on a marketplace that isn’t very tech oriented (you know, the kind of ads along the lines of ‘good computer, 500GB’ with a picture of a pc case…) and doesn’t really have a review system, so I tend to not use it often. Turned out to be 2x4 and 2x2GB sticks. Although I’m not sure I could blame the guy for selling the wrong ones intentionally, as the labeling was 8GB (and then 4x2GB in smaller print below it) on the sticks.
Well, crap. Fun sidenote, he agreed to give me a bit of money back, when I came to collect that he wasn’t home, but his girlfriend was. Which I knew from years ago and used to be a good friend of my daughter’s mother. Some talking about the children and cigarettes later I went back home, thought ok, what now?
Tried throwing in the ‘new’ ram sticks, motherboard wouldn’t take it. Apparently it wants to run identical memory from all 4 slots and doesn’t allow for the (more common in my idea) different sets in the different channels.
Ok, old and ‘new’ memory are from the same manufacturer (Corsair), same size and judging by the ram codes seemed pretty much identical apart from the fancy ram covers, so tried slapping in all 4 4GB sticks, and low and behold, it worked! Well, at least until I got a couple crashes again. But memory itself seemed fine at this point (was still focused mostly on memory since most crashes happened in arma and when it crashed it gave memory errors). So started digging deeper into the memory, found out that single sided ram was running (or wanted to run, don’t remember at this point) at different timings then the other 3 sticks. Which was what I was skeptical about when I got that stick but since the method I checked timings with at the time showed it as the same (cpu-z?) I stopped worrying about it. But now I checked from within uefi or wherever I checked, and noticed it being off compared to the other 3.
So at this point, I’m pretty much done with the RAM issue and buy 16GB (2x8) ram 2nd hand for 75. Memtest says ok, so I use it, no more channel problems, identical sticks and seems to work fine.
But, it didn’t. Hello random crash one day again… Plus, when starting up windows, it now takes an oddly long time for the computer to connect to the network (cable) and a lot of programs requiring a connection seem to hang during that time.
So, at this point, I’m kinda clueless what it could be, apart from the ram, which would be very unlikely by now. :P
It could be the PSU which I took over from the older system, which by now is 6 yo.
It could be the motherboard from my ex-convict colleague (like over half my colleagues at the time) that came without an i/o shield for free, which might also explain the weird connection thing as lan port is located on mobo.
It could be the cpu throwing tantrums, although I don’t consider that very likely, in my experience cpu’s don’t tend to die quickly unless you do some stupid shit with them, and other components die much sooner.
It could be the gpu reaching a breaking point under stress (although temps are never extremely high, it can still die ofc and only show when stressed).
It could even be the SSD or OS. Which actually the OS being corrupted might be a contender as I’ve had that faulty memory in and don’t know exactly when that one died. Might give reinstalling a shot soon now that I think about it. Also the only thing I can try really at the moment, the rest needs ‘troubleshoot’ components to swap out what acould be off. And buying parts to replace them with untill I find the right part, well, if it’s the last part I swap out, might as well have spent that money on a complete rebuild.
We’ll see after I do a clean install of OS, biggest chance I think is mobo (bit shady background and connects everything) or maybe PSU since it’s quite old (although I would expect more ‘hard’ crashes if it is psu, but who knows, could be an issue with psu to gpu under load for all I know).
Yeah maybe I went a bit overboard with the explanation, but it helped run the troubleshoot cycle in my head again, so gonna do a reinstall soon. :D
About those drivers on Linux, yeah, had to download them through some odd command (I literally had no idea what it did, most I can at least partially understand) in the command line/prompt/bash whatever it’s called that I found online and with some files I also had to find. Seemed, even for Linux, quite a hassle. Think it was a driver someone partially wrote or put together themselves or something. Hope I never have to look for it again as it took me quite some time to find the working fix But hey, gave me a sense of accomplishment after managing to install it on an OS I am very unfamiliar with, with the end result being it working even better than on Windows!
I genuinely don’t know which version I’m running. I have cinnamon, xfce and ‘lite’ files in my downloads. Think I intended to try the lite to revive an ehh… exotic old build of mine (trying to run an os on an ide card with a socket a amd geode cpu, where you set the multiplier by jumpers on the mobo and IIRC has some metal wires I put in the socket to ‘unlock’ the cpu, in a way, simpler over-/underclock times), after getting either cinnamon or xfce running on the laptop.
Well, sorry for the ramble I guess. O.o
Edit: had to check, no idea where it says what distro you’re using, but I see some xfce processes running, so I guess it’s that. :D
grabs some tea well, that is a wall of text if I ever seen one o.o Good thing my teapot holds a litre and half of tea and it is full :D The whole thing doesn’t even fit in one piece on my portrait monitor :D no worries tho :)
While I can’t say for sure all those RAM issues smell a lot like a faulty motherboard to me. I had very similar issues with a PC that I was borrowing for a while where it would crash due to memory a lot and one of the RAM sticks wouldn’t get properly detected. I thought it was RAM at first as well but nope, that damn board killed off the original stick in the PC and the one I put in from my own build. However we do suspect the actual main causes of issues in that PC was the PSU as the PC had a long list of problems that even after trying to fix them they won’t go away or would just turn into a different problem (original GPU was died, original motherboard was fucked, replacement motherboard was fucked(the one that killed the RAM), the CPU would just die if you but any kind of stress on the FPU, my Windows SSD wouldn’t get detected but my Linux one would and they are the SAME exact model of SSD and both still work to this day, CMOS battery was dead but this one is not really surprising since it was a really old PC and hasn’t been used for years before).
So yea, I would first look at either the motherboard or PSU as well, but it is hard to say just over the internet. Other things I would look into are temps (but you probably did that already), the power draw of the PSU (is it strong enough, is it actually drawing anywhere as much power as it should be,…), if all cables are plugged in correctly (tho I highly doubt it is the problem) and if the RAM slots all look all right without any dirt in them (also highly unlikely).
Yea if you don’t have any friends near you with a similar build as you who are willing to sacrifice their build to be a guinea pig or have some spare parts yourself, hardware troubleshooting is the worst fucking thing :/
Hmmm the only 2 ways I could think of downloading it on the top of my head would be “apt-get install” or “wget” but I guess it was neither of those. Yep, the important part is that you managed to achieve it! I would save both the instructions/driver somewhere for safekeeping just in case.
You can check which version you have if you got into ugh Start (I have no idea how the hell that is supposed to be called on Linux) and then search for “System info” and it should tell you after “Linux Mint 19.1”. Or an even better way that tells you a lot more information about your PC: open the terminal:
It should look something like this (ignore the System monitor on the left, the image is old and was taken for something else). You can assume which version you have by looking what it says next to DM (stands for desktop environment). But yea if you have xfce stuff running I can only assume you have that :) I got Cinnamon so it looks a bit different but the functionality (beyond the looks) is pretty much the same.
I would not try to put Mint on that PC (especially not the Cinnamon version as it is more resource intensive). I would suggest something like Lubuntu as it is more lightweight and still decently popular. Just like Mint it is based on Ubuntu so any commands you find for either Mint/Ubuntu should more or less also work for Lubuntu, it will just look a little bit different. Not sure how good is the hardware support however for something that old. However the internet is a gold mine of information and I have heard of people putting Linux on some really old and/or weird shit so I am sure you can find some information on what would support that hardware the best.
Well, installed windows 10 yesterday, from windows 7 before, as support ends in less than a year anyway. And yeey, even managed to transfer the ‘activation’. I stopped pirating years ago but for windows I’m still making an exception. So far the good news.
Tried GTA V, and ehh, well, it crashed twice within 5 minutes of starting it. So it’s safe to say the corrupt OS angle is no more. So much for an easy fix right? :D
Guess I’m gonna look for a new PSU next time I’m gonna spend money on my pc, that’s a part you’re gonna need anyway, regardless of the system drawing power from it. Whatever it is, it seems to be degrading quite a bit as crashes are becoming more common.
I think I bookmarked the solution on the laptop for the time being. But it’s really what it is, a backup system. Too old and slow to really use, heck, my 2 year old 130 euro phone is probably faster with most things. But you wouldn’t want to have to type a lot of text on a touchscreen in case you have to. And yeah, it was neither of those options I’m pretty sure, as I’ve at least seen those type of commands before, even though I’ve never really had to use them. But hey, it gave me a chance to familiarize myself slightly with Linux!
Cinnamon definitely would be too heavy for that old build. Hence I got that ‘Lite’ version of Mint. It’s not really for any practical purpose at this point but more for shits and giggles. At the time, I had a broken down audio system, stereo, amplifier, don’t even know the correct word in Dutch, let alone in English. :D So I decided to put a secondary system in it at the time. Nvidia fx5500, amd geode (athlon xp pretty much, I believe it runs at 1,4Ghz or something by default), 1GBish ram. Depending on how old you are this may not even ring a single bell. Already quite dated at the time, these days? Heh….
Idea was to have a completely passive cooled build as a ‘hidden’ pc, inspired by all the fancy casemods people did back then, with one 12cm fan at the rear being the only moving part. Managed to get most of the case mod done. Had usb connectors ‘hidden’ in one of the two casette decks, so you could pop it open to plug in a usb device. Which actually looked pretty cool. Optical drive somehwat ‘hidden’ where normally the 3 cd drives where located (just ripped it out and glued the 3 front panels onto the optical tray lol). Don’t think I managed to get the power button to work at the original power button location on the tower though.
But got stuck on trying to run windows from compact flash on ide card. Tried quite some workarounds but none seemed to work (windows doesn’t want to run on anything it sees as ‘removable media’) so that’s where I thought, hmm, Linux doesn’t have that problem.
But that’s something for whenever I feel like thinkering with it. It’s fun, but also usually quite frustrating. :D If I ever get back to it before the whole thing ends up on the scrapyard.
You have a dedicated FPU? O.o Or is that a typo? And yeah, components killing other components is always fun…
Edit: Also, no idea how to check the actual power draw of the PSU.
Edit2: vacuumed the case, wasn’t much dust (just the usual around fans) but no crash (yet) since… Hmm
Windows is funny when it comes to activating it :D And picky as hell when it comes to activators too. I have at least 5 different ones saved on my PC and whenever someone asks me for one (it happens an absurd amount of times for some reason) I just send them all of them and tell them to try them one by one till they find one that works. One will always work, but not always the same one.
Yea phones nowadays have an absurd amount of power in them anyways o.o why the hell do you need an octa core with 8GB of RAM for in a phone, I don’t get it. I still use my “shitty” Note 3 from 2013 and it works just fine for everything o.o
Those 2 are the ones you use the most when downloading software/files via the terminal. If I would have to explain them I would say that apt-get is like going to the Play Store for Android and picking which app you want to download, just you do that in text from instead of graphical, wget is like going on to some XY site and clicking the download button.
I am old enough that my first PC that was not a hand me down/borrowed PC had a GeForce 6600 GT (I think, it has been a long time) in it and it still in use to this day (not by me and I have no idea how not a single part of that PC has failed yet… I probably just jinxed it) :D I don’t remember what the rest of the parts were however.
Oh that is a cool idea! Hope you will get it working as you wish at some point :)
I mean the floating-point unit thngy processors have (I am really not sure about the correct terminology here), I think it was a Bulldozer series CPU.
You need the right piece of electrical equipment for that (I got 0 clue what it is called) and it is not something the average person has (I sure don’t) so I can’t help in that regard sorry.
Just to let you know, I had read your reply at the time, just didn’t have a proper in-content reply. Still don’t, but I do appreciate the reply (online ‘conversations’ can be a bit weird, as they don’t really have a structure like offline ones do, you never say “bye” in this context). :)
I appreciate the though of letting me know ^^