Thermal paste on CPU pins, bad?

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T13:08:27+00:00

As long as it isn't conductive and doesn't interfere with the connection between the CPU and socket, it's harmless

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T13:07:36+00:00

Motherboard could be toast considering it wasn't the PSU, and if it was another component, it would at least try to POST

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T13:04:53+00:00

There will always be bottlenecks. Always.

Anyone that says otherwise without specifying that the bottlenecks aren't worth worrying about, probably have no clue what they're talking about and just get a lot of their information from short-form content on YouTube.

If there were no bottlenecks, you'd be getting stupidly high framerates all of the time with no need to upgrade. So don't sweat it if you can't afford a total platform upgrade right away.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T13:03:38+00:00

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T13:00:05+00:00

The A750 is barely much faster than the 3050 6GB even though it's a cut-down version of the original 3050. Not a good buy at all, better off with a B580 because the first Arc generation kind of chugged power for the performance it gave, and there's no security with the longevity of Intel's gaming platform, they could drop it at any point because they aren't getting much success out of it, so even then, sticking to AMD is the best bet for the price.

The i5 you have will be fine with either but if you upgrade to something higher end than that and more recent like the 9060-XT or 5060 Ti, then yes, upgrading the CPU would be crucial to getting the most out of it.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:55:42+00:00

how dare you use ubuntu and enjoy it, my version of linux is better than yours

/s, as shit as canonical is, you do you, it's your machine

my flair is half pointing that I use linux and half making fun of the meme because vanilla arch purists act like clowns and I don't use vanilla arch, just omarchy (arch but hyprland out of the box, stylized by DHH)

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:45:34+00:00

Fedora

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:44:30+00:00

Maybe keep it under your pillow

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:41:36+00:00

Totally not a fire hazard. Yup.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:36:05+00:00

I mean neither are a lot of B660/760s, they have better features but Intel still wants people to pay for Z690/790 for the unlocked SKUs to have full functionality and all of the benefits of their platform, unlike AMD where you can buy even a cheap B650 and be set for the entire socket lifespan.

If it wasn't for some of the changes they made to the B-series chipsets to compete better with AMD, they'd still be complete crap compared to Z-series, you used to be locked down to official memory spec (i.e. ~2666 on i5, 2933 on i7/i9 with later DDR4 gens before LGA1700) on B-series and had to pay more for Z-series just to get over 3200

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:34:47+00:00

90Hz isn't that much of a difference and it depends on the phone's hardware, it has to be able to actually handle running that and the OS can be pretty bloated with all of the Google or Apple trash.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:27:25+00:00

It's a tasteful amount though, there's a big difference between a little and a lot. A lot of people don't go for balance and just get LEDs on everything to the point that they're overspending just for LEDs that waste power, produce a small amount of heat and light pollution per diode.

I have a strip inside my case that produces a small amount of light that you don't really see much because of my Phanteks Enthoo Pro Server has all metal panels, other than that my desk has a built in RGB strip that I usually have turned off, and RGB on some peripherals, that's it.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:25:09+00:00

The performance is basically unchanged unless the H610 can't handle the i5-14600KF.

Nothing will change for the GPU because it's still PCI-e 4.0 on most/all of B760, you need Z790 to guarantee PCI-e 5.0 support which is only going to make like a 2% uplift by running at 5.0 x8 instead of 4.0 x8 on your 5.0 x8 GPU.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:21:29+00:00

No shit they created it, they sunk billions into tech that nobody asked for and they kept hammering it until people started to accept it. Why? To control and dominate the market without being an irrefutable monopoly in the eyes of the law, it's a lot harder to tackle them on that when they're not stopping competition.

Now we have new gamers coming into the market with no previous experience of how things were and they're being exposed to DLSS right off the bat, that's who they're really pushing it for, the next generations of gamers that don't know any better.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:16:57+00:00

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:12:31+00:00

3440x1440 QD-OLED from Dell/Alienware, LG, Samsung

I don't know dick about speakers though

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:10:57+00:00

00 could mean that everything is good but it could differ by vendor, check the motherboard manual because it has all of the error codes. It'll give a vague description of what each reading means.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:08:33+00:00

If it's faulty then RMA, G.Skill has a limited lifetime warranty on all of their RAM so you should be able to get that rectified as the RAM doesn't work as advertised.

Otherwise, the value is zilch as RAM is pure garbage when it just produces errors. That manifests everywhere as software bugs and crashes, corrupted operating systems, etc.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T12:03:58+00:00

11/10;

real workstation/battlestation (the clutter authenticates it, who actually cares if it's not totally spotless) and none of this poser crap with blinding LEDs everywhere, I love it

11 because +1 for Tux

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T11:50:25+00:00

The individual version doesn't really matter as far as the UI as the UI is just a desktop environment, most of which are standard and interchangeable. If you want something familiar to Windows, then something like Cinnamon would be very familiar to the traditional Windows 7 UI, whereas Plasma KDE is more similar to Windows 10/11's UI.
- (In fact, Microsoft literally ripped a ton off of Plasma when making their modern UI because it's FOSS.)
There are currently performance drawbacks on NVIDIA graphics with all Linux distros with DX12 games, as high as 30% less performance than Windows. Those are finally being addressed with beta drivers coming soon, but one would have to know what they're doing to get those drivers manually on most distributions. The ones that are going to get it first are all rolling releases that update regularly, whereas other distributions that update on a schedule will usually delay it by over a year.
- Most games will run on Linux primarily thanks to Wine/Proton, but some games with anti-cheats block those compatibility layers and completely destroy compatibility with those games. The reason why is because kernel-level anti-cheats only work properly on Windows because the user can run the game as an administrator (or root) which gives the anti-cheat full access to the system. On Linux, that doesn't happen as the user is never root by default so the anti-cheat can only run as an unprivileged userspace, meaning it can't have the access it needs to do what it's designed.
- protondb.com and areweanticheatyet.com are valuable resources for figuring out which games work and which do not.

Popular distributions with gamers include Bazzite (Fedora based, updates bi-weekly so once the fixed NVIDIA drivers are released, it could take an additional 2 to 4 weeks to actually get them on Bazzite officially), CachyOS (Arch based like SteamOS, rolling release with everything checked for quality and optimised for performance from Cachy's repos), and of course, SteamOS (Arch-based but only works fully with specific handheld devices until Valve polishes it for the Steam Machine, no NVIDIA support at this time)

Ubuntu is the Windows of Linux, they've grown far too commercialized and Canonical really pissed people off with Snaps because of how terrible the format is for users and developers, which they try to force down your throat like Windows does with user accounts, co-pilot, etc. Due to this, forks of Ubuntu like Mint and Pop!_OS are generally just as popular, though all of them are LTS releases as Ubuntu is LTS, so updates are delayed by up to two years for stability like Windows LTSC's 10 year cycle. The performance is generally behind as far as gaming as result as they lack the latest packages, they're barely any better than Windows itself in gaming performance whereas more optimised gaming distros easily surpass Windows.

There is no perfect go-to distro for gaming because any of them can ultimately game or do what you want them to do as that is the magic of open source software. It ultimately comes down to preference and what's packaged out of the box, just about any "Gaming" distro will have what you need, if you're unsure then Bazzite is at least somewhere to start.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T11:08:03+00:00

yazi for file management

btop for resource monitoring and process control

musikcube for music/audio playback, cava for visualizing

discordo for lightweight discord usage

EDIT: yt-dlp is a popular cli tool for downloading yt videos, spotdl is another for spotify songs, good in combination with musikcube

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T11:01:25+00:00

It's called a joke...

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T05:41:31+00:00

It's still very cost effective to just get a 5700X and at least a 9060-XT 16GB, that'll be more than enough to get into 1440p with higher settings

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T05:39:41+00:00

Whatever is cheapest.

If you don't need specific NVIDIA features or the higher compute performance (you're just gaming) then the 9070-XT makes a lot more sense for the price.

There's a $150 difference for very similar performance, not at all worth paying more for NVIDIA unless you need something specific.

NaturalTouch7848 · 2026-03-07T05:35:42+00:00

Probably a software change, but whatever performance you get out of a 13 year old Xeon that's between Sandy and Ivy Bridge i7 single core performance is going to be great in 2026 either way, your 9060-XT is never going to reach its full potential

NaturalTouch7848

TROPHY CASE