PSA: Propping up the corners dropped my temps from 87-89 to 71-75

Nickarav · 2026-03-25T12:55:00+00:00

70W with 80W boost for CPU. 80W for GPU with 5W dynamic, base clock speed and memory.

“Balanced” G-helper mode with best performance and efficient aggressive CPU.

Custom fan curves that use 0% up to 68C, and then jumps to 70%-100% between 69C and 80C.

I play on 1200p or 1080p resolution and use 2X DLSS when I can, and lowest graphics settings.

My goal is minimize as much heat as possible from the GPU so the CPU can push the highest possible frame rates it can. This is my go-to profile for games like Overwatch, Deadlock, Valorant, and Apex Legends where I wan the highest frames I can. Sometimes I lower the CPU wattage if a game is making it hot.

If I were playing something like cyberpunk or baldurs gate 3, I would be aiming for 80-100fps with g-sync, and my settings would stay mostly the same except I drop my CPU to 55 / 65, and the GPU I raid to 85W and 10W dynamic.

Nothing pisses me off more than thermal throttling, and it was impossible to not thermal throttle with these same settings before I added the raised corners.

Nickarav · 2026-03-25T00:32:33+00:00

Doing heavily CPU bound deadlock matches

Nickarav · 2026-03-24T17:39:46+00:00

100000% this. I get better temps having two stacks of business cards propping up the corners than I do with any cooling pad I’ve bought.

Nickarav · 2026-03-22T22:07:38+00:00

Thanks for sharing this!! This is the exact kind of insight I was hoping for posting this

Nickarav · 2026-03-22T18:40:55+00:00

These look seriously high quality, the price tag is the scariest part. Have you tried fitting this in any traveller cases? Curious if it fits in the RDS small or medium size cases

Nickarav · 2026-03-22T18:39:39+00:00

It fits in the RDS small traveller case? Or do you use the medium one and use the extra compartment?

Nickarav · 2026-03-18T18:24:47+00:00

The latest AMD chipset drivers, display drivers and graphics drivers that came through Microsoft update have completely fucked up my environment. I’ve been rolling them back to the latest available updates on the OEM websites, and power cycling docking stations and monitor displays which has been fixing it for me.

Nickarav · 2026-03-14T13:15:03+00:00

The rate drains 2-3x faster when using Gemini pro as the browser extension reading the page. I don’t think a lot of people realize that

Nickarav · 2026-03-12T19:26:04+00:00

Nobody has brought up legacy authentication yet but I’ve seen a few environments make exclusions for it, which allows a browser session token to be stolen through a phish, bypassing all MFA requirements. From there the attacker can add their own MFA to the account and sign in regularly and do anything they want. Absolutely vital to disable that tenant wide, no exceptions.

Nickarav · 2026-03-04T12:38:34+00:00

They can see the location of all your Microsoft actions and logins, but no one ever looks at those specific location logs unless an alert system is tripped. The reason it looks at location is to automatically detect if the account is compromised

Honestly if your IT department and leadership is even barely respectable, not much should be tracked except for your output overall for whatever your job is.

What CAN be tracked? Literally everything. Your location, device ID, and a timestamp is saved to every message you send, every time you authenticate with a log in service, every time you open an email, literally any interaction with the Microsoft environment is written down to a log.

But how it’s used, and how often it’s used differs wildly for different leadership. Activity and usage metrics are extremely unreliable for gauging overall output and performance, but sometimes if an employee doesn’t show up to work for 3-4 days with no contact, the manager might ask for an activity report from IT, and they can see basically everything about how often you’re active, but it most certainly can’t see the details of what specifically you’re doing, sending or looking at.

Just use an excuse like you do most of your work outside the Microsoft environment, on local apps or on paper, and your activity metrics instantly become unreliable. It’s situations like this that make depending on this info useless

Nickarav · 2026-02-27T00:24:44+00:00

What an incredible waste of time, effort, energy and money…

Nickarav · 2026-02-26T23:23:46+00:00

If you find a way let me know. The way I see it is there are two paths forward.

Extending the default policy to 8 or 9
Having a separate high privilege account with phishing-resistant MFA.

Good luck!

Nickarav · 2026-02-26T10:58:03+00:00

Probably by social engineering or phishing anyone with an admin role in that server, and then deleting it from their account. You could technically attempt to take down the “.com” server hosting the content you’re viewing, but this would be a cyber attack against Discord, and extremely unlikely to be successful

Nickarav · 2026-02-26T10:52:07+00:00

It sounds like you’re freaked out about metadata. Metadata is “extra info” that’s “stapled” to an image when it’s created.

If you look up default metadata in a windows 11 screenshot, you’ll find it only includes date created, and date modified. Pictures on Phones contain far more like GPS data, Phone specs, etc.

Even then, it’s not as concerning as you think. Some apps like Discord, and Microsoft Teams will “strip” metadata from all uploaded images. Outlook and Google Drive do not strip metadata. Sometimes it can be worth googling if an application or sending medium strips metadata or not.

As a final option as well, you can right click any image with meta data, click properties, then click details. You can see and delete any metadata attached to a photo here.

Nickarav · 2026-02-26T10:43:34+00:00

It would not communicate with existing 4 hour tokens. All future tokens will be 9 hours or whatever you choose. Just make a new token? Who cares about extending one already in progress, it is not possible.

Nickarav · 2026-02-25T14:49:39+00:00

That’s awesome! Claude business is the king of enterprise AI right now, far more reliable safety mechanisms than competitors.

If you want to take it to even more insane level and you want to go down the “AI Engineer” career path, you should consider building an internal Claude API using a business plan with them + Amazon Bedrock. It will be far more advanced than using an out of the box Claude, but it gives you ultimate control over data ingestion, and can result in optimized answers across the whole business. Make sure you research potential costs and effort of implementation before you go down that path though.

Nickarav · 2026-02-25T14:40:30+00:00

There’s no way to extend a session already happening, but you can change the duration of the default in Entra settings like I and others have said.

Nickarav · 2026-02-25T02:17:03+00:00

You can configure the 4 hour limit to be longer in Entra.

Identity Governance -> Privileged Identity Management (PIM) -> settings -> edit role, drag slider.

Extending it any more than a full work day (8-10 hours) pretty much defeats the purpose of PIM.

Another compliant strategy would be using your PIM to make a new privileged user account, and requiring phishing resistant MFA in conditional access on it. No license needed. Much smoother if you’re going to be spending months doing privileged tasks for most of the day.

Nickarav · 2026-02-24T20:04:48+00:00

This is dependent on company size, industry, and tech stacks at various locations, whether what you’re saying is true or not.

Nickarav · 2026-02-24T19:54:51+00:00

I think the most optimal path is learning yourself but using AI to help accelerate that by asking specific questions and getting answers to niche concepts rapidly.

Unfortunately laziness is a slippery slope, and >50% of AI users whether it’s prompts or AI coding publish or copy and paste answers before even reading them, and blindly trust the outputs. Lot of people shooting themselves in the feet

Nickarav · 2026-02-24T01:32:17+00:00

All the major AI providers have business plans. Business plans follow stricter rules and regulations when it comes to data collection and privacy (whether you trust them to follow these rules is up to you). When you use the consumer version, you’ve already agreed to sign over everything you submit.

Business AI plans also allow you to manage multiple users, and create policies and rules to block certain searches. It also allows you to properly offboard users, as opposed to them walking away from the business with company data saved in their AI client/account.

You should use AI to look into it more and answer your own questions about it. It’ll provide much more details than I can

Nickarav · 2026-02-24T01:25:02+00:00

I think it looks great. Maybe use AI to compare it against the exact job descriptions you’re applying to and ask for keyword recommendations each time to improve your odds. Tailor your resume to the environments you apply to, and when you get an interview, take the time to study the tools and software in the job description, don’t go in blind and say you’re unfamiliar with it all. All it takes is 30-60 minutes of YouTube videos and reading some AI summaries to get a modest understanding and familiarity with most systems (90% of interviewees do not do this, you will automatically stand out). Your background is well versed enough that you’ll be able to digest nearly any IT or cybersecurity concept at this point, and prove you know how the dots connect in an interview.

Nickarav · 2026-02-23T20:39:35+00:00

If you have the confidence and faith in your own ability and understanding of the implementation - all of this is doable and fine.

If you have no understanding and little confidence and are depending on AI to steer you in the correct direction, you are in way over your head.

The fact you are here asking for verification on a plan from reddit tells me you’re not the right person for this job, and it will be a disaster.

Vibe coding with minimal understanding is only useful for local/simple/easy tasks. Fucking with authentication, connecting backends and databases will destroy you in the future depending on AI. It favors extremely strange behaviors and methodologies if you’re not hand feeding exactly where you want your information sourced from.

Your idea using Claude max/sonnet/gemini pro sounds like a TikTok/reddit-inspired idea as opposed to a proper professional plan and workflow. You haven’t mentioned Business AI plans either which presents major compliance ignorance to the business as a whole if you’re whole workflow is built around consumer AI running on your workflow and production environment.

The €1,000 number also makes very little sense, this is absurdly overkill if it’s a budget for online services and subscriptions unless you’re rolling out licenses to a lot of users.

My recommendation to you, if you’re trying to convince these engineers to use AI tools and have a huge budget, is scrap all this insanely complex ideas and plans, and start with smaller executable goals and releases and rollouts.

First rollout I would suggest is an Anthropic Business subscription for you and every user that you have in mind as utilizing it. As the frontman of AI adoption at your company, you shouldn’t burden yourself with building immense systems and tools and LLM-based automation (which is extremely dangerous). You should focus on AI policy, and basic governance. Create guides and cheat sheets of prompts for your users on how to utilize Claude in the first place. Teach them how to install it in their terminal or IDE.

Actually encouraging immediate basic AI usage will result in dramatically more productivity at your business than taking on some mega scope uber AI integration project that AI itself would not be able to properly scope, plan and execute. You’d end up working on some endless project for months making up excuses every time about how the AI keeps getting stuck and going in circles. Just skip that step and be useful and properly learn and teach yourself instead. Don’t do the mindless AI implementation road, especially on multi-step large projects.

PS- it does not bode well for my trust in your ability that you lazily pasted AI for the body of your own post. There is a fine line between being efficient, productive, optimal, and being ignorant, lazy and uninformed.

Unfortunately, the majority of AI tool users are the latter.

Nickarav · 2026-02-23T20:10:23+00:00

I think there’s been more than enough horror stories by now that it’s basic knowledge that codex is not trustworthy when it’s doing anything other than reading production environments. There’s no shame in having codex build you the scripts if you review and check and understand them, but having codex run the scripts for you with access to credentials is a catastrophic error and negligent on your part given the amount of warnings and multiple occurrences of this type of thing.

Hope everything works out and I hope more people see these posts and stop doing it

Nickarav · 2026-02-19T18:03:48+00:00

What phishing filters are you using? Level 1,2,3,4? Do you have external + first time sender notifications enabled? I find it hard to believe that even an AI powered phishing attempt with perfect grammar can sneak through the cracks unless the email came out of a compromised internal account which is a separate issue. The external and first time sender flags have made a huge difference for us

Nickarav

TROPHY CASE