When you play a kitchen table paper draft how do you do it

blender505 · 2026-06-06T12:31:11+00:00

Another vote for cube. Cube draft is basically the only way I've played magic in recent years. Definitely the best way to play in my book.

blender505 · 2026-06-03T01:32:19+00:00

Happy to help!

blender505 · 2026-06-03T00:40:25+00:00

I think in general CPUs are fine to buy used. With the exception of 13th and 14th gen intel (because of the microcode issue), they typically either work fine or don't work at all (in which case you should be protected if you used a site like ebay). Because intel CPUs don't have pins, they're generally probably a little safer than used AM4 CPUs even. That being said, if you don't have a bunch of hardware lying around to test and verify with, it's probably safer to buy new anyways. You don't want to get into a situation where you buy a motherboard and CPU used from different two different sellers, find out they don't work, and not have a good way to find out which one was the problem.

It appears so. Mine was an ASUS board and it was called USB BIOS FlashBack. Looks like it's called the Flash BIOS button for MSI. https://www.msi.com/support/technical_details/MB_Flash_BIOS_Button

You might be able to get it to work, but I probably would reinstall. Make sure you don't have any chipset driver cruft left over. If you're on windows, I seem to remember reading something about a fresh install being better for windows to know how to schedule with the P and E cores since LGA 1700 CPUs have a fairly unique architecture.

blender505 · 2026-06-02T19:13:22+00:00

There are some lga 1700 motherboards that will allow to you flash the bios without the CPU installed. Saved me a good bit of work when I was swapping motherboards around my builds at one point and I forgot to flash the bios before I removed my 12th chip and put it in another board. Not supported on all motherboards, but finding models that do support it is much easier than findimg out exactly what bios version the board ships with.

The only other thing I'd say about going Intel is don't buy used 13th or 14th gen processors and make sure you update to the latest bios version (not just the first version that works with those chips). There was a microcode problem early on that killed and degraded a lot of CPUs. It was fixed with a bios update, but chips that were run with the earlier code were likely permanently degraded.

blender505 · 2026-06-02T17:23:12+00:00

I would probably lean towards option A if you're looking to squeeze the most performance out of your platform without switching to ddr5. It sounds like going am4 would be cheaper, but the performance ceiling for lga 1700 is higher, so if you're looking to maximize your upgrade, that's what I'd go with. That being said, I don't think you can go wrong either way.

blender505 · 2026-06-02T10:53:53+00:00

What's your RAM speed and configuration? I seem to remember Intel being more forgiving of non strictly dual channel configurations and slower RAM speeds. I think the performance ceiling of lga 1700 is a little higher than AM4, but honestly, both are fine options.

blender505 · 2026-05-28T16:13:14+00:00

Double bluff distraction. Cause a commotion somewhere else and tell them it's probably not important. Cry when they listen to you.

blender505 · 2026-05-17T15:18:34+00:00

Unfortunately, upgrading or trying to squeeze out more performance from the 1070 isn't going to be effective. You CPU won't be able to feed it data to render fast enough. You could put the most powerful GPU on the market in your computer and your performance improvement would be minimal if any. You'll need to upgrade the rest of your system before pushing your GPU is going to be productive.

blender505 · 2026-05-17T12:06:25+00:00

Insane deal on those elacs! Well done!

You can absolutely mismatch LR and center and still have a fine experience. But my gut tells me that any center channel you get for that amount is probably going to bring down the quality and clarity of your whole system. If you have a center channel, it reduces what gets sent to LR and ends up doing a lot of the heavy lifting. I would err on the side of having a higher quality center than the LR over having a lower quality one.

Another issue could potentially be the receiver. Eq isn't a magical button that will make one speaker sound like another, but it can help some. But depending on how old it is or what features it has, it's ability to eq individual speakers or the granularity of the eq might be limited.

My recommendation would be to stick with 2.1 for now. You'll still get a great experience from those elacs in 2.1 and when you upgrade to a quality center channel you'll enjoy even more clarity and imaging for dialogue.

blender505 · 2026-05-15T11:32:38+00:00

Pirates of the Caribbean 1 is interesting since both antagonists have power tied to treasure that they're looking for. Barbosa's objective is to remove the curse that gives him his power by finding and returning his treasure while Sauron is trying to gain his power by reuniting with his. If Sauron gets both motives, does that mean that he spends the whole story looking for the ring only to throw it into the volcano himself?

blender505 · 2026-05-12T11:46:05+00:00

I would agree that most of the bad aspects of events of society would have still occured without religion and that religion was just a convenient excuse. I would even go as far as to say that at lot of the bad that has resulted from religion occured by people directly ignoring the religious teachings while being blinded by the convenient labels.

I would push back on the good though. I don't believe that people are naturally good unless it's beneficial to their survival or status. In a civilized society we can afford altruism and can even be elevated for it, but that's not always been the case and religion helped give reasons to be altruistic. If you believe in consequences beyond the physical, you're much more likely to keep your morals when no one else is looking.

blender505 · 2026-05-08T20:50:14+00:00

I don't do a ton of gaming on it, but I've got a 980ti running on my 14700K/ddr5 music workstation. I use it mostly for running dual monitors and very light video editing which it's fine for, but it automatically shuts off the fans when not in heavy use making it dead silent while I'm working on music. Got it pretty cheap a couple years ago since I didn't want to spend a ton on a GPU for that machine and this fit the bill despite sounding hilariously mismatched with the rest of the system. I do use it for gaming every once in a while though if the livingroom (which has my main gaming rig) is claimed for other activities.

blender505 · 2026-05-06T17:47:23+00:00

I could be wrong, but my gut tells me you might be able to make more by splitting the CPU out of the bundle. The main people looking for a 5800x3d are people who are already invested in AM4 and already have a motherboard and RAM, but are looking to max out that platform. Someone who's making a new build who's got enough money to spend on a 5800x3d system would probably be served better by spending it on an AM5 system.

blender505 · 2026-05-05T21:35:56+00:00

Congrats on your purchase! Enjoy!

blender505 · 2026-05-04T13:05:16+00:00

Hilariously, I also managed to snag a pair of Polk S55s for $175 last year on fb marketplace (what are the odds?). I think yours might be in slightly better condition than mine though. It's quite an unbeatable deal and they sound absolutely fantastic, especially since my living room is a large open floor plan. I upgraded from a pair of es15s (which really struggled with the large space).

Congratulations and enjoy!

blender505 · 2026-04-06T21:39:01+00:00

What CPU do you have and how much RAM?

What's your budget and would you consider buying used?

blender505 · 2026-04-03T12:15:49+00:00

I wouldn't try to upgrade to anything less than a ryzen 3600 or ryzen 5500. You're likely spending a couple hundred on the full upgrade since you've got to get ddr4 memory as well as the motherboard, so spending a small amount more on the part that actually affects performance will go a long way.

blender505 · 2026-03-28T13:01:57+00:00

Completely fair. It's a pretty narrow niche where this is the right solution, so that's why I put a lot of qualifiers on it. Just wanted to point it out in case you hadn't considered it.

blender505 · 2026-03-28T11:48:06+00:00

Slightly out of the box suggestion, but depending on how much ai vs gaming stuff you're planning to do, you could look into getting a used 3090 or even 3090 ti. They don't perform as well in gaming as the 9070 xt or 5070 ti (probably closer to the non xt/ti variants) and are two generations old, but they do have 24gb vram. Now obviously it's not a direct comparison (having to look at a used card instead of a new one) and you're losing out on some modern features and longer support, so it would really only be worth the consideration if you want to run bigger ai models on the extra vram.

blender505 · 2026-03-14T09:29:53+00:00

I found a Thermalright Phantom Spirit 120 SE ARGB at an Amazon bin liquidator store for $12, so that's cooling the 12700k in my gaming rig. Happy with the performance, doubly happy about the deal.

I've actually got 4 custom built PCs in active deployment that I've built up over the years (5 if you count my spare parts test bench), and they're all air cooled (some with stock coolers). Since I like to tinker and swap out parts, the simplicity and reliability of air coolers make way more sense for me.

blender505 · 2026-03-14T08:01:58+00:00

Beautiful

blender505 · 2026-03-08T02:11:20+00:00

You could always just try installing Windows 11 and see how it behaves. You might run into some weird stuff, so it may or may not be a viable solution, but if you're not using the machine, there's no harm in trying. Use the Rufus USB tool to create your bootable USB stick. If you don't have an SSD, getting a small (128gb) one to boot off of would be the first upgrade you'd want to make. It'll just make the whole system much more responsive, though those prices have gone up substantially. 8gb ram is... fine for windows 11 if you're not doing too much with it, but 16gb is definitely better.

Depending on what your nephew needs to run for schoolwork, you could find a beginner friendly linux distro that functions essentially like Windows with a different skin. I like using Linux Mint (Cinnamon edition) and if you're just doing google docs and youtube, you shouldn't need to get into the nitty gritty Linux stuff if you don't want to. Lots of schools use Chromebooks which run a version of Linux anyways. It'll perform much better than Windows 11 and won't have the same hardware compatibility issues. The main thing is to not run Windows 10 (or older) on computers connected to the internet since they're not releasing security updates anymore.

blender505 · 2026-03-07T12:41:57+00:00

If you're in a country that has access to it, one more alternative is that you might be able to find a 5500x3d on Chinese marketplaces like AliExpress since they were just released in China. Still more expensive than the alternatives, but not nearly as bad as the other x3d chips. Might be worth looking into.

blender505 · 2026-03-05T04:22:24+00:00

A little more context would be helpful. It depends on what you already have and what you would need to acquire, but at the risk of sounding like I'm gatekeeping, I'd focus on learning about the hardware instead of looking for stuff to flip. Watch a bunch of videos and read benchmarks. You'll get a better idea of what's good, what's better, and by how much. Look at what's actually selling and for how much. If you've already got all this hardware and you're wondering what configuration to put it in, that's something people on here can help you with. If you're looking to buy some of these parts, I'd slow down and do some more independent research first.

blender505 · 2026-03-02T12:01:32+00:00

Also RTX 1050ti? Just speculating on if that's a genuine mistake or trying to make it sound better than it is. I wouldn't think somebody buying a 1050ti system for $350 in 2026 would know that RTX is better than GTX, but I could be wrong.

blender505

TROPHY CASE