If you can afford it, consider this electric blower instead of compressed air. Cheaper in the long run and very versatile
Me and @BustedAstromech both have one. Not sure if Microcenter carries them
My favorite oddity I’ve picked up from Microcenter was a handful of empty CD spindles but ymmv
-Those tiny extension cords for ac adapters that are too wide for a normal power strip
-bawls
So I just got home from a fucking WILD Micro Center trip.
They did have that XPOWER Air Duster @Doolittle recommended so I picked up one of those! Looks like a great tool. I also grabbed some thermal paste, microfiber cloths, rubber bands, and an anti-static wrist brace.
And… one more thing. When I got in there, there was a huge crowd around their graphics card aisle. People were on their phones like “yeah bro! They have them! At retail price! I didn’t even have to camp out at 6am! Should I get one!? Fuck yeah I’m getting one!” So, like, I’ve been meaning to build a new desktop forever and I got swept up in the hype, so I just walked out of there with their last Gigabyte RTX 3070 Ti for $850.
Good GPU? Worth the price? Cuz I can return it for the next 30 days if this impulse buy was the wrong move.
So I guess I’m doing it, time to shop around for motherboards and CPUs. I think I’ll take @LaurelSoup’s suggestion and grab an Intel CPU. Any recommendations?
i have a similar powered air duster and it’s fantastic, seconding that recommendation
I have a 2080 Ti and it performs roughly like a 3070 Ti. They run upwards of $1,200 on eBay now and don’t have some features of the 3070 Ti.
You can also use hardware acceleration on it for your editing work. I’d keep it!
Oh, I do still recommend you wait on CPU for the Ryzen 7XXX parts. They’ll be a new generational advancement.
No harm in doing the upgrades piecemeal - you’ll appreciate each step. Drop that GPU in as long as your power supply has the two PCIe connectors for it (don’t use a single cable with forked connectors).
That’s good advice, but here are my circumstances:
The GPU’s box says it needs a 750W system power supply, but mine is only 550W, so I think I might be at the point where it’s time to just do a full rebuild. I’m also about to be screen recording footage for Preserving Worlds in a few weeks, so now I’m thinking I might just want to jump on it, since I think my CPU was the bottleneck on OBS last season.
550W is fine if you have it all on 12v
every manufacturer and half of reddit etc simplifies power supply requirements because somehow people can’t understand how to check 2 numbers
i’m running a 3070 on a 550w just fine
That’s good news, nice!
Both OBS and Premiere support nvenc so make sure you turn those on when testing the new card — should offload almost all of the work to your GPU and be just plain fast.
Great tip, thanks! I’ll see if I can get this running and do some OBS tests. If it all works and OBS behaves then perhaps I will wait for those newer Ryzens.
Also - if you don’t have it installed already, ImageMagick comes with a build of ffmpeg with nvenc support. Felix helped me out when I was transcoding some goofy 10-bit x264 anime a while ago.
My GTX1050 runs Elden Ring and I am happy about that
oh this makes me so happy to hear
I am running similarly old hardware and downloading it right now
Wasn’t sure if it was even going to run once it was done installing.
You know what unboxing videos don’t show is how things go in the box so you can rebox them.
just watch them backwards
As someone with a lot of board games and doing repairs and cleaning on electronics, somehow just doing the reverse of what you did to get it out doesn’t actually work most of the time.
be the change you want to see in the world — start making reboxing videos!
So that GPU I impulse bought turned out to be a huge chonker and it doesn’t fit in my old Corsair Air 240 case I’ve been using, lmao. Gosh darnit, I’m just gonna do it, I’m gonna build a new computer. At this point I’ve just gotta do it.
Any case recommendations? I’m OK with it being big. In fact, it probably has to be an ATX case.