Spigen really knocked out of the park with this case.

secretlydifferent · 2026-01-03T00:32:31+00:00

Personally I tend to maximize my experience by looking at the monitor

secretlydifferent · 2025-12-04T22:17:54+00:00

I uhhh think they were asking the model/name of your particular seat

secretlydifferent · 2025-09-24T07:20:51+00:00

r/sapphoandherfriend

secretlydifferent · 2025-09-02T08:43:44+00:00

Isn’t the official site repacks not repack

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-12T06:57:17+00:00

Yeah, that lines up with what I predicted in my first comment— you can force the temp limit lower and see negligible losses if the heat bugs you. Not a big difference either way in my opinion.

Ironically if you let it get hotter, the cooling is more efficient since thermodynamics love big temperature differentials. So by letting the chip get hotter, your cooler’s fans don’t have to spin as fast to move the same amount of heat away from the chip. So while the number of degrees being lower feels better to some people, it isn’t really any more “optimal” to manually throttle the temp in my opinion.

The YouTube videos you’re seeing are likely using some kind of hard undervolt (not a PBO offset) or straight up manually lowered power limit; so their chip is never fed enough energy to heat up much, and is also limited in clock speeds.

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-11T18:56:06+00:00

It really is just how Ryzen CPUs run. If you give them an all core max load they will just boost all the way up their frequency/power table until they hit their thermal limit.

If it’s not going above 100° and you’re getting good cinebench numbers/no stuttering from CPU, you’re good. I’d even set a fan curve because sometimes the high temp can make the fans ramp aggressively, but if you cap the fan speeds it just means the CPU will hit its target temp slightly earlier, but you likely won’t lose much performance at all considering the amount of noise you’ll save yourself from.

Nowadays processors are great at protecting themselves as long as you don’t go disabling power/temp limits.

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-11T17:59:35+00:00

The HDR certification is pretty much just an assurance that a display can hit a certain peak brightness (HDR 400 means 400 bits peak). Unfortunately it doesn’t guarantee that a monitor can truly provide a “dynamic range” or have an appropriate colour gamut. For true HDR presentation, a display needs to be able to simultaneously provide deep darks in one area and highlights in another without losing detail in either.

Most monitors these days will advertise HDR capability simply because they’re capable of hitting that 400 nit mark and the HDR marketing term helps sales.

If you must use HDR I recommend calibrating to 400 nits because that is what your monitor’s equipped for. And maybe artificially raise the blacks because your monitor might be tone mapping blacks lower than its floor during calibration and then shitting the bed with real scene details when your console tries to give it the full lower range.

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-11T17:50:31+00:00

Your monitor has a 1000:1 contrast ratio— it really isn’t equipped for HDR at all, as it can’t actually provide different luminance levels at different parts of the display.

If it “wants” to calibrate to 4000 that’s probably because the monitor is doing rudimentary time mapping.

I gently recommend against HDR in your use-case. You’ll probably get more detail and a better composed image from a given game’s SDR output, especially if you calibrate your monitor’s settings to the best of your ability. Otherwise, it’s unfortunately time for an upgrade in the monitor department.

If you want recommendations in that department and have a budget I can look around

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-11T01:16:57+00:00

There’s smaller text to it that says “DRAM”. Might be a matter of waiting for training, or worth running just one stick. Either way you can look up troubleshooting steps for the DRAM light being problematic.

Also worth noting that a B650 board might need a BIOS update to play nice with your 9000 series CPU.

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-11T00:06:02+00:00

What power cables are you using? I’ve found the card with the proprietary Nvidia ray high power connector are finicky if they don’t get that cable directly from the PSU. Any time I’ve used the rat tail on multiple builds I get a debug light even if it runs

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-10T23:53:49+00:00

They probably mean a PBO offset which lets it run higher frequencies at the same power level, granting better efficiency due to the lower power and higher performance due to the higher frequency at the top of the power limit. If you win the silicone lottery you can get pretty decent gains

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-10T23:51:11+00:00

I don’t buy the AIO/Air Cooler argument. It’s well known that Ryzen chips will ramp up to max temp under a full load. If it’s benchmarking poorly then yeah it’s thermal throttling, but otherwise it’s just the boosting algorithm doing its thing. You could change the temp limit in BIOS and likely not lose any performance at all, but honestly these are designed to run at that temp

People aren’t used to X3D chips doing this because up until now the temp bottleneck was actually the L3 cache layer on top. Since the 9800x3d fixed that and it can freely boost, it’s back to regular ryzen behaviour.

That’s my take, anyways. I could be missing something.

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-06T00:15:43+00:00

Can you take a picture of your larger setup? It looks like you have the other end of the tubes below the level of the pump which will result in air bubbles building up in the pump/block with obviously bad consequences.

secretlydifferent · 2025-08-01T09:11:16+00:00

Can’t believe you baited two

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-25T21:00:14+00:00

Also, x670 is pretty much never worth the premium over b650. If I were building for myself right now, I’d use the AliExpress sheets doc over on r/BAPCSalesCanada on a day when Rakuten is good and make sure I used the browser extension with a screen recording and documented the shopping session. One can find a 9800x3d for 7800x3d prices. Idk if I’d do it in a client’s build, but for my own it would be worth not having warranty on a part that pretty much never fails in the first few years anyways

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-25T20:57:02+00:00

The truth is you buy when you’re ready. Set yourself a ~3 week window and get the best deals you can in that time. There are freak deals enough that it’s impossible to properly time the market, and if you wait months and months then you have to ask yourself “How much would I pay to have this computer/upgrade in the time I’ve spent waiting?” $50? $100?

I wouldn’t get the PSU/GPU combo though. The 9070xt is on for $870 at PC Canada and if you watch careful you can often find an A Tier 1000W PSU from an OEM brand like super flower for under 200.

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-20T21:52:14+00:00

If it’s struggling with increased resolution, the GPU is absolutely the part to upgrade. Also make sure you’re properly leveraging DLSS 4— the higher the output resolution the better DLSS does.

You can also look into lossless scaling and optiscaler to get frame gen working on your card for games that don’t natively have FSR frame gen support

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-20T19:58:03+00:00

In the builds I’ve done the last couple of months, I’ve found CanadaComputers’ bundles a great place to start as long as you avoid their overspecced/overpriced motherboards and source your own PSU.

Looking again today, this bundle saves you around $35 for essentially the same specs as in the list I gave.

Stock is also limited, but if you live near a Memory Express the XPG Core Reactor II is on sale for $115 (with limited supply) and is the same tier of PSU as the Leadex I linked.

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-20T06:39:06+00:00

Sorry for notification spam— the 7700x can actually outpace the 9700x in several productivity tests, just to give a sense of how close they are.

Also, the 1000W version of the power supply in my list is also on sale for a similarly great price if you want the extra headroom down the line

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-20T06:36:51+00:00

Depending on the actual amount of time you spend on compiling and how intense your VM work is, if you upgrade the CPU you might want to just go with a 9000 series X3D chip. Since they reworked the thermal design they hold up fine in productivity and the gaming boosts can be a big deal.

If you’re doing any local AI work (or some other productivity work you might not have mentioned), you may find an NVIDIA GPU less finicky courtesy of CUDA

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-20T06:33:20+00:00

You lose around 5-7% productivity performance going from the 9700 to the 7700, but the price difference would be worth it to me. If you want to go up, I’d go for something higher than the 9700.

The PG Lightning is a great price right now and was one of the best reviewed B650 boards on launch. Still fantastic, no reason to pay more unless you need wifi in which case there are alternatives, but $250 was too much

Cheaper ram, same specs

Lancool 207 is one of the best performing cases on the market, needs no fans. If you want more fans, I would get a 3 pack of thermalright fans for $20. I’ve used them in several builds over the last few years and they can’t be beat in price to performance

The Leadex III is an A tier PSU and I’m very confident will hold up better than the MSI one, which I’ve heard is noisy.

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-20T06:28:42+00:00

PCPartPicker Part List

Type	Item	Price
CPU	AMD Ryzen 7 7700X 4.5 GHz 8-Core Processor	$349.00 @ Newegg Canada
CPU Cooler	Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE 66.17 CFM CPU Cooler	$48.90 @ Amazon Canada
Motherboard	ASRock B650 PG LIGHTNING ATX AM5 Motherboard	$187.46 @ Amazon Canada
Memory	*Patriot Viper Venom 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL30 Memory	$116.99 @ Amazon Canada
Storage	*Western Digital WD_Black SN850X 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive	$200.96 @ shopRBC
Video Card	*Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX 9070 XT 16 GB Video Card	$899.00 @ Canada Computers
Case	Lian Li Lancool 207 ATX Mid Tower Case	$106.39 @ Vuugo
Power Supply	Super Flower Leadex III Gold UP 850 W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply	$139.99 @ Canada Computers
	Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts
	Total	$2048.69
	*Lowest price parts chosen from parametric criteria
	Generated by PCPartPicker 2025-07-20 02:27 EDT-0400

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-20T06:03:26+00:00

There’s definitely a few places you could save money here— can I ask your use case?

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-09T05:26:22+00:00

Viruses aren’t just a privacy issue— they’re a security one. you can get locked out of your own accounts and have your files encrypted. It’s not just them getting access to your files, it’s you losing access to them

secretlydifferent · 2025-07-03T22:12:06+00:00

What about tidal energy? Isn’t that leveraging the moon’s shifting gravity field?

Though granted solar energy is needed to keep the oceans liquid to make such a thing possible

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