Other What Makes Your Life, Meh?

Spent most of the day sorting out the ITX PC move and found late in the day that both rigs need additional power cables...

The NR200 rig has an SF 600 PSU which needs a second 8 pin PCIE cable to power the RX6700XT, and it's not where I thought it was. Cue a trip to the attic tomorrow. In the meantime, it's happily running the GTX 1080 which should be elsewhere...

The Sliger rig is should be having the GTX 1080 back in it but with the SX 500LG SFX PSU which I now see has an 8 pin socket on the modular array but only came with a doubled up 6 pin cable, which is no good for an 8 pin GPU...

It's also missing a SATA power cable from when I bought it used, so I'll have to order custom cables for it this week. I can build the Sliger with the bus powered GTX 1650, which will get me to LAN night this week OK.
The OS move was fine and after driver juggling and telling Windows to leave it alone, everything works, including some of the cranky older games. Some progress then!

 

He's currently Chancellor of the Exchequer isn't he?

 

I first heard that one about 40 years ago...

 

There are few other things in this world that provoke quite as much swearing from me as printers.

 

Never forget that it's called hardware as it is the bit that you can kick...

Some sort of printing output device is probably the oldest piece of hardware still in recognisable use, and it is still the one bit that has never become 100% reliable (or even close to). Whether it be old punch card or tikker tape jams, to ink running out or drying up (or not running out, just reporting that you have and refusing to work unless the cartridge that you not using anyway is replaced...) and modern paper jams, there is always something going on that messes you around.

 

When I need a printer, the vast majority of the time I need to print a shipping label - it's extremely rare that I need to actually print a document. Today was one of those rare latter cases, hence why it caused so many headaches!

I'll be giving the thing away soon; it's a fussy bugger, but it's also a colour laser printer. I have no need for such a beast at home... Stuff it, I'll get a 4x6 label printer instead.

 

HP - hold my overpriced ink subscriptions service...

 

I have found the Gigabyte proprietary fan cables, but not the 8 pin PCIe cable. I hope to have a look later, but am currently laid up with a streaming cold.
I haven't been ill for ages and it's really grotty.
Took hours to get to sleep and woke far too early and dozed since.
I should be able to clear a few work emails but am not leaving the house as I don't want to pass it on.

It's all a bit crap after a nice weekend seeing friends a walk by the river and a few hours playing with a camera outdoors.

On the printer front, just ditched an ageing HP MFP for a Brother mono laser MFP at work. Toner £34 rather than £80 for XL colour and bw carts with the possibility of a cheap refill option down the line from urefilltoner, who have been great for my Brother colour laser.

 

Been getting some weird glitches now and then - random mouse lockups, occasional graphics glitching/artefacts, and a full-blown BSOD not too long ago.

Started digging through Event Viewer and found errors being reported by nvlddmkm - clearly Nvidia-related, i.e. GPU



But this seems to be a bit of a red-herring.... There are also a crapload of warnings logged by WHEA-Logger - 298 of them since 3rd March, to be exact.



Vast majority of them are warnings



But there was also one error on the same PCI Device ID



So what's that PCI device.... VEN_8086, DEV_460D... That's the CPU's PCIe controller



Found the corresponding device in Device Manager - down to the exact subsystem and revision in the event log



Side note - I did not know you could change the Device Manager view to show devices by connection instead of by type - very handy tidbit!

So... Did some googling on that device - Intel PEG10 460D - and found a ton of other people reporting the exact same thing. Many suggestions offered: RMA'ing faulty hardware (is it faulty though?), install up to date drivers (done), update the BIOS (also done), set PCIe link speed to Gen3 (don't want to do this if I don't have to), turn off PCIe link state power management (yeah, I could try that), etc...

The suggestion about power management rang a bell - a little while back I disabled power saving features for... some reason I can't remember... So: into UEFI, turned on all power saving options, and set PCIe link speed manually to Gen4.

I made that change about 45 minutes ago but there are still warnings being flagged - albeit there are now far fewer than there were previously... Out of all the times I've seen this error today, it's only happened once since making that change



I'm also not getting the glitches/lockups that I was. But.... the warning is still there, so still more digging to do.

 

This is interesting. I had an almost identical issue when I "upgraded" from win 10 to 11. Didn't dig as much as you did and assumed it was the GPU. (Fell for the red herring?). Win11 did do a number on my UEFI settings, but reflashing the GPU bios reduced the lockups and bsod, but not artefacts. Changing GPU power settings to max performance (or something like that) in nv control panel stopped the lockups, and stopped the artifacts on desktop (but not in games), and massively increased idle power consumption.

I never got to the bottom of it, replacing the gpu cured it, and I haven't got round to taking the waterblock off and testing the old one in a spare pc yet.

 

Well since I made some changes in BIOS I haven’t seen anything being reported by nvlddmkm in the event viewer, so this does seem to eliminate the possibility of a faulty GPU (I have a 3070Ti).

I was wary of it before, but I’m going to try setting the PCIe link speed to Gen3 - in reality there’s very little difference between Gen3 and Gen4 speeds, especially for the tier of GPU I have.

I do want to upgrade this CPU anyway but I was planning to go 12th gen Intel again. There aren’t really any performance gains to be had from 13th/14th gen in the “budget-to-midrange” sort of tier I’m looking at, but there might be a difference in the implementation of the PCIe controller; if the price isn’t too egregious, maybe I’ll go to a 13th or 14th gen i5 instead.

 

Shower has seemingly died which is annoying, but new keyboard arrived which is nice, albeit annoying that it arrived the day after it went on sale, so may look to see if I can return and rebuy.

 

Have a BikeSafe workshop booked tomorrow with South Wales Police over in Bridgend. Spaces usually sell out pretty fast, so I was chuffed to get it.

But I have to be there for 0845… Which means being on the road by absolutely 100% no later than 0800 (preferably earlier, ‘cos I’ve no idea where the fudge I’m going in Bridgend and I could easily take a wrong turn even with sat nav). Which means getting up at 0700. On a Saturday.

Urgh…

 

That sucks, but it's good practise for when you get older, I wake up at 07:00 everyday now whether I need to or not, buggered if I know why I still set my alarm for 08:00

 

I’m whingeing, but to be fair it’ll probably be worth it. I’ve seen a lot of positive feedback about BikeSafe, and if I’m going to do the Enhanced Rider Scheme later this year this seems like a good first step.

Besides, it’s gotta be worth it for novelty alone: how often do you actually want to be followed by a police biker?

 

If it's at the SWP headquarters, it's pretty hard to miss

 

Amazon suck.

Delivery was pushed back four times. Then at 5pm it said delivered and of course wasn't.

Tossers.

 

Done something to my foot, it's not awful but I'm walking like John McClane.