Mystery Science News Thread 3,000

I know it’s wrong and anti-consumer but I love my Gsync monitor for reducing my PC game performance/tearing anxiety by almost everything

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this reminds me that my very expensive, very nice, very buggy Dell macbook cannot do OpenGL fullscreen without horrendous diagonal tearing and this has apparently been an Nvidia mobile chip bug for going on three years! It’s basically rendered it unusable for emulators.

discrete GPUs in notebooks have never ever ever been good

out of curiosity is this an XPS 13 you hackintoshed or something less good?? I think I already asked you this

2016 XPS 15 running Windows; I need the ‘laptop with mid-power GPU’ form for 3D game dev.

I much prefer the 2012 Sandy Bridge XPS I had before. Cheaper parts but it had looser manufacturing tolerance so it felt better-put together than light, thin, beautiful but with a bad keyboard and bad speakers and what’s wrong with the hinge now?

That was a bigger machine back when it was classed as a ‘multimedia’ laptop; now that segment is mostly disappeared and so we’ve got MacBook Pro-alikes that are decently more thermal-constrained and it’s not a worthwhile tradeoff for the bag space for me. But I don’t need a horrifying gaming laptop, so…

I’m still ridiculously happy with my 2013 Venue 11 Pro, it has things like “a detachable keyboard with a supportive hinge” and “regular-ass microUSB cable charging” and “LTE (which is user-removable (like everything else in the PCIe and SATA slots))” which everyone is still crowing about whenever a new laptop that’s almost equivalently powerful gets announced, plus I got it for $600 in 2014 from a refurbished seller on eBay when Dell’s Win8 hardware wasn’t moving at all, even though that was when their build quality really took off

the throttling is interesting (I’ve spent a little too much time playing with linux kernel patches trying to get the CPU to not lock to 600mhz per core whenever the GPU is maxed out) but given the form factor it’s not a deal breaker; it hasn’t actively prevented me from running anything on it that I would’ve otherwise.

good thing too because it’s gonna be at least another year and a half before 10nm iris ships in an MBP at this point

don’t remind me how much work I had to put in to fix the throttling on this thing; when I finally realized that the CPU was clocking to 800mhz because the GPU temp was too high (completely independent of the CPU temp) I disabled that feature so fast,

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I just wish I could tell it not to give the GPU clock priority over the CPU – I was able to take the temperature limit off completely with no problem at all, but the package still has an overall wattage threshold it won’t exceed (so it never clears 70c anyway), and it prioritizes the GPU. games that only use the GPU heavily enough to drop the CPU down to the regular non-boost clock of ~1.6ghz (like most unity stuff) are fine, but stuff that tries to max it out which would otherwise be fine on here (like original sin) becomes pretty borderline

Help a gaijin out here.

I also get the feeling that the aggressive speed-ramping of the modern CPU is noticeable on web browsers, standard desktop apps, and Unity. But the speed ramping is rated in milliseconds, so it should be something else – but I don’t know what.

it’s a little witch academia game

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that could just be SSD-speed swapping???

going back to windows on my desktop and being reminded that it basically can’t function without a pagefile was kind of irritating

Hmm, the nvme SSD is in a RAID setup because the standard-format drivers weren’t stable at the time this thing launched, which has lead to other weirdness like 20+ second wakeup from sleep times. It may be related to that.

I should look into a more standard setup now that things have settled but I haven’t been inclined to put more hours into this machine in a while.

simultaneous “yup, there you go” and “I don’t blame you” on that one

In this case it’s really Dell’s fault for shipping this machine with bad drivers because the proper ones weren’t finished, and in a situation that requires users to reformat once proper drivers come out. Ouch.

yeah that’s horrendous

on the other hand my Venue 11 Pro can extract the Dell BIOS updates and install them directly from the windows executable updaters if I put them in /boot and then boot to the UEFI so

that was a very nice surprise, they aren’t totally shitting up their low-level stuff; they unintentionally made an extremely functional, affordable, well-powered Linux convertible and only me and two other guys on the arch forums will ever know or care, but this was a way better purchase than it had any right to be. not so much so that I’m not looking forward to going back to a Mac once USB-C and LPDDR4 settle out a bit now that Linux game support is falling off again, but still, it’s been a-ok

even the display and speakers were/are way better than a comparable macbook air!

I’ve continued to buy Dell laptops because they’re easy to open, well-documented, and decently supported; this was my first whiff in about 5 purchases or purchase recommendations. Unfortunately this was also the most expensive one.

I was more interested in going Macbook for the hardware alone (I’d bootcamp for my toolchain anyway) but no function keys is kind of a gamebreaker for me.

yeah, I hope they keep the no-touchbar model around after the 10nm refresh, even if I’m irritated that it gets the 15w rather than the 28w iris chips, but it was suggested this week that Intel might finally be changing up their package configurations over the next generation, so we’ll see

Holy jesus when you people get to blabbin about computer shit I can’t even see the screen my eyes cross so hard

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can’t hear you over the sound of apparently compiling a whole separate version of qt4 so that my linux skype client will keep functioning, thanks arch guys for maintaining this

(I’m also drinking and watching hockey because I gotta maintain a good slow burn here)

uh oh is qmake gonna fill up tmp

UH OH ARE THE PENS GONNA SCORE AGAIN

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