Quick Questions XIII: Answers Return

it must have been heat throttling like unbelievably badly before, that’s incredibly unlikely but possible

or you’re so close to maxing out your power supply that it was somehow drawing enough power over the 12v molex connector to make it throttle that way

both of these are like “geez, good thing you replaced it” level

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If you don’t want to start one, I will.

I started a small indie games review blog and a lot of the games I’m writing about there are things I’ve found on itch.io as well as on Freem!, a Japanese free games site.

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actually I’ve just reread your post and it was definitely the former. modern transistors definitely cannot be passively cooled unless they were intended to be, with massive fuckin’ heatsinks! usually a case fan won’t make that much difference unless airflow in your case is already very poor, but any fan on your computer reaching a state anywhere close to “not working” should immediately trigger “do not use computer, I will beep at you until you stop” alarms, it’s wild to me that you carried on like that for a while

I mean, it was sort of working.

I don’t do good maintenance on things, see my post in the car thread where i forgot to change my oil for a year and a half.

See, the weird thing is that it was still running slowly with the case wide open and the temperature apparently fine, and you would think that it wouldn’t start up faster, since the motherboard should be at a reasonable temperature if I’m starting from zero. Maybe I don’t understand how heat throttling works though.

Anyway, whatever the problem was I won’t be ignoring my fan again because yeah, that’s bad news bears. I don’t really have a choice on these things anyway, gotta keep using this computer for work and I don’t really have a solid backup. Opening the case seemed to be a fine temporary solution anyway.

I should get a laptop.

Please start that thread! Also, your blog rules, can’t wait to read through it after work with a nice, cold glass of Diet Cherry Coke.

Thanks! I made this thread! We need it, I think! Let's scratch that itch(io)

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Anandtech for instance has benchmark-filled reviews but you’ll only find them for flagship devices. Here’s one for the S8 for instance: https://www.anandtech.com/show/11540/samsung-galaxy-s8-exynos-versus-snapdragon/2 . But you likely won’t find any benchmark for most cheap phones.

IMO your framing doesn’t exactly make sense as a purchase criteria though. Every phone trades off CPU/GPU performance against battery life and screen resolution, for instance. And RAM for instance is very important for multitasking on phones, so that you don’t have to reload content that couldn’t fit in RAM. Benchmarks are more likely to mislead than anything else.

But anyway all 400$ phones should be a lot better at multitasking and web browsing than all 150$ phones even if it’s not totally apparent in benchmarks.

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Thanks!

Basically The fact that a “faster processor/more ram” seems to be always paired with a better camera and wireless charging and a fingerprint sensor and a bigger battery and water resistance and bigger screen and better speaker etc. etc. makes my computer parts ocd (refined to a razors edge from decades of budget gaming-pc building) go apeshit.

I don’t want to pay for any of those features because I never use them! But I also don’t want to wait 15 seconds when tabbing between twitter, messages, the bus tracker, and Chrome, which was definitely happening with my Nexus 5x before it bootlooped last week.

honestly if you’re concerned about performance at all (or at least unable to take the performance of “average phone” for granted) you should 100% get an iPhone, it’s not even close these days

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Yeah, it’s not really separable unless you find some really weird model that you would probably come to regret. Anyway, this is not really a decision similar to gaming PC and you’ll come to appreciate at least some of those features. For instance, I thought fingerprint sensors were stupid until I got a phone with one on the front, and then I was amazed at how convenient it was. Wireless charging likewise.

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as an aside i bought a 6s+ the other month and the sheer pleasure of using a device that’s responsive and snappy is most of why i started buying consoles again

I’m way out of the loop on Apple devices - What’s the user experience on the Iphone SE like these days? I don’t think I could spend $800 on a smartphone but the SE has always been interesting to me.

Monitor quality is a really important spec for something you stare at constantly too, although it’s hard to measure beyond resolution (which is actually the least important aspect). Brightness, color balance, size and well-calibrated light sensor all make a huge difference. I used to have a Nexus 5X and its monitor is dim, cramped and weirdly green-biased compared to an expensive current phone. iPhone has a slight edge over Samsung flagships on this front, mostly due to better system support for color depth and high framerate rather than monitor per se, although it’s pretty close.

omg my gf has one, i think it’s a Samsung, and whenever i saccade over it i get these RGB trails in my vision. do you know what’s up with that?

the SE was great when it launched and has become gradually less so since; its performance is still very competitive with most androids which is wild because the CPU is almost 3 years old but apple has been conspicuously neglecting to update it so idk what’s coming up next. a secondhand 7 is probably a better value at this point.

I’ve never heard of that, seems interesting though!

Thanks dudes! Good advice all around.

Looks like a refurb Iphone 7 (in rose gold, hell yeah) for $400 might scratch my itch just about perfectly in both performance and price point. Didn’t realize you could get them for so cheap!

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Hey, since we’re talking about iPhones on here…

I got a 6s. I like it a bunch, but the screen got cracked. I’m debating about wether or not to get the screen fixed, or if I should upgrade.

Far and away my biggest issue is the lack of a headphone jack. In theory, it should be possible to make a cell phone case that acts as a pass through for a pair of conventional headphones.

Does such a product exist? I know some cases that act as Bluetooth antennas are a thing, but i’d prefer something that was actually an adapter for headphones like the headphone/lighting adapter. Just, as one unit permanently affixed to my phone.

Is this a thing I can buy?

honestly, the little $9 headphone/lightning dongle that comes free with newer iPhones is … fine, in practice. it’s stupid, but it’s completely fine.

re: Splatoon - if you’re not going to play a bunch of multiplayer, I would wait to see if Nintendo ever releases a version with the Octo Expansion included, which would give you 10-15 hours of single player content out the gate

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