What's your latest tech purchase?

[Hyderz]

Excellent! Glad you got it worked out! The dimming issue wouldn't bother me at all as you can set Windows to simply shut off the screen instead of dimming it.


What is it? Looks MSI...

Msi GP76 11UG - 17" i7-11800h 16gb ddr4-3200 512gb ssd rtx3070(140w)

 

[Ruru]

I'm really amazed how people can use a 60% or TKL keyboard as a daily driver. Maybe its just me and my large dependency on the numpad.

Been using TKL for ages, though I have an external numpad as the <- and -> keys are broken

 

[Hachi_Roku256563]

i kinda wanna get a switch for its games but then its far too big imho
it cant fit in my pocket

$250 Au, owner used it for smash bros, got bored, never used again

 

[Valantar]

I don't have that problem. A bright screen in a dark room doesn't bother me at all. So that is a personal preference thing and not a universal rule.

Preference, sure, but that goes both ways. Just because something isn't a problem for you doesn't mean it isn't for anyone. And the main function of dimming (or brightening) a screen is to adjust its brightness to be comfortable in whatever ambient light is there, not power savings. So, while I understand your view, it's a rather limited take on the possible issues stemming from lack of brightness controls

i mean... turn a lamp on

I typically do (I've long since stopped finding gaming in the dark particularly pleasant), and I've found a good balance where I rarely have to adjust my main monitor's brightness, but with a laptop you often don't have that level of control if you're moving around. A classroom, coffee shop or library might have wildly varying levels of light (not to mention if there are windows around and the possibility of direct sunlight) that can make for some pretty uncomfortable brightness levels without the ability to adjust on the fly. I spent most of yesterday working from a café, catching up on interesting papers from a conference last week, and if I hadn't been able to adjust my laptop's brightness my eyes would have been dry as the Sahara by the end of the day.

Housing cheap in Sweden?! Daim! It must be crazy in Norway now then.
It's three years since I was in Norway last and although the currency is almost the same these days, everything was 10-20% more expensive in Norway, with restaurants being even more expensive. Norway used to be expensive due the currency being worth more, but now it's just more expensive for no reason.

My oldest brother moved to Lund around 30 years ago and several of his kids speaks the local "dialect" which is just awful... But yeah, I would guess that it being a student town would help a bit. I speak very "plain" Swedish, it's in fact so plain that no-one really speaks like me...
My stepmum is from Fredrikstad, so I'm used to that kind of Norwegian. Oslo dialect was actually a lot harder to understand than I expected. Bergensisk, forget about it...
Somehow I seem to comprehend a lot of weird Norwegian terms of things, as I had to translate for my stepmum last year when I ended up being stuck in Sweden for almost six months. I can fake Norwegian, but same problem, limited vocabulary. We bastardised a lot of French words, it's actually quite funny how mangled some of them are, like fåtölj. Then again, anything beats Danish...

I actually just googled it, for some reason I never even thought about doing it before and it's a universal currency sign if you can't type the local currency sign...

Currency sign (generic) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Very odd and it must be some kind of relic from way back when.

Yeah, the Nordic layout is less than ideal sometimes, but I guess it should mean more affordable keyboards/computers/laptops due to fewer custom keys having to be made. You'd think the Nordics (not counting Iceland) could've agreed on a common standard way back in the day, but apparently not. Hmmm, FN+§ seems like a very odd way if hitting Esc indeed, since Esc is used far more than §½ (as it is in Swedish). I guess this comes back to the part about sitting down and having a think about your product and go over how it will be used/assembled/etc. I've had to deal with designers that have been adamant that their design is great, yet it has needed several changes/fixes/emergency workarounds before the product could ship, just because the designer got their way... The joy of being involved in making products...

We paid just over 2.1M SEK for a recently renovated (including kitchen+bathroom in the past 2 years) 76m² 2-bedroom apartment a ~20 minute walk from the city centre in Lund - to even get close to that price level in Trondheim you're looking at something much, much, much further outside of the city (which means needing a car, which is another significant cost of living increase). Now, Trondheim is ~3x the size of Lund, which partly explains it, but it's still a remarkable difference. At a similar distance, anything comparable would cost at least 1M NOK more (though 4-5M NOK isn't unusual at all) putting it very firmly outside of our price range (and IMO well into "who tf can afford this stuff at all?" territory). The Norwegian housing market has run rampant for something like 20 years, in large part due to being the chief investment vehicle for an ever-growing class of semi-wealthy upper middle class people (who also have ridiculous amounts of debt, of course), as well as the complete deregulation of all sectors of the housing market for quite a while now. There's a recurring news cycle of "nodoby can afford to live in Oslo", repeatedly demonstrating how any single person with an average-for-Oslo income (which means quite high even for Norway) has no chance whatsoever of buying any type of property. And renting is essentially not an option - the Norwegian rental market is an utter s***show, being both tiny, expensive, and entirely controlled by a class of unscrupulous robber-baron companies that treat their tenants like garbage. So while I'm well aware of things being pretty bad in Sweden (especially the overall housing shortage), Norway is significantly worse in pretty much every regard.

Fredrikstad (and overall Østfold)-style Norwegian is IMO a kind of Norwegian-Swedish hybrid language, so I guess that's a pretty useful stepping stone in moving between the two. And Bergensk can be difficult to understand for anyone - though it's got nothing on Sandnes/Stavanger or the various dialects found in the various fjords up the West coast! I like fåtölj, to me it's kind of emblematic of the distinctly Swedish branch of francophone influence. It's a fascinating journey, that's for sure

I've never heard of a universal currency symbol, though I guess it could be kind of useful? Though IMO currency codes are far easier to understand (I mean, how many types of $ exist throughout the world?). At this point I've entirely given up hope of keyboard layouts being updated to something more rational - they're too entrenched, and changing them would mess up far too much for far too many people. I'm constantly shocked that anyone can actually use something like Dvorak or Colemak these days, as the chance of having to interact with a random QWERTY layout at some point in any given day seems to creep ever closer to 100%. That Esc thing to me seems emblematic of a simplistic checkbox design style. It it a keyboard? Does it have mech switches? Does it have all the main keys, including ÆØÅ? Does it have RGB? Ship it! For this price, I'm frankly surprised there aren't more glaring issues than this.

i kinda wanna get a switch for its games but then its far too big imho
it cant fit in my pocket

If you're looking for something that fits in your pocket, the Switch is not what you're looking for. It's portable, not pocketable, and frankly nothing pockeatble will ever have even reasonably good controller ergonomics (unless you're willing to fill several pockets with detachable controllers etc. - the Backbone One looks good if that's your thing). There's just not enough space in a reasonably sized pocket to fit human hand-sized inputs and a decently sized screen. Of course, if you're happy with touchscreen input any decent smartphone does that well enough. The strength of the Switch is striking a good balance - small enough to fit in any bag or backpack easily, light enough to carry, but also big enough to have half decent controllers and a decently sized screen. It's not a one size fits all solution - there's no such thing - but it ticks a lot of boxes for a lot of people.

 

[TheLostSwede]

We paid just over 2.1M SEK for a recently renovated (including kitchen+bathroom in the past 2 years) 76m² 2-bedroom apartment a ~20 minute walk from the city centre in Lund - to even get close to that price level in Trondheim you're looking at something much, much, much further outside of the city (which means needing a car, which is another significant cost of living increase). Now, Trondheim is ~3x the size of Lund, which partly explains it, but it's still a remarkable difference. At a similar distance, anything comparable would cost at least 1M NOK more (though 4-5M NOK isn't unusual at all) putting it very firmly outside of our price range (and IMO well into "who tf can afford this stuff at all?" territory). The Norwegian housing market has run rampant for something like 20 years, in large part due to being the chief investment vehicle for an ever-growing class of semi-wealthy upper middle class people (who also have ridiculous amounts of debt, of course), as well as the complete deregulation of all sectors of the housing market for quite a while now. There's a recurring news cycle of "nodoby can afford to live in Oslo", repeatedly demonstrating how any single person with an average-for-Oslo income (which means quite high even for Norway) has no chance whatsoever of buying any type of property. And renting is essentially not an option - the Norwegian rental market is an utter s***show, being both tiny, expensive, and entirely controlled by a class of unscrupulous robber-baron companies that treat their tenants like garbage. So while I'm well aware of things being pretty bad in Sweden (especially the overall housing shortage), Norway is significantly worse in pretty much every regard.

Fredrikstad (and overall Østfold)-style Norwegian is IMO a kind of Norwegian-Swedish hybrid language, so I guess that's a pretty useful stepping stone in moving between the two. And Bergensk can be difficult to understand for anyone - though it's got nothing on Sandnes/Stavanger or the various dialects found in the various fjords up the West coast! I like fåtölj, to me it's kind of emblematic of the distinctly Swedish branch of francophone influence. It's a fascinating journey, that's for sure

I've never heard of a universal currency symbol, though I guess it could be kind of useful? Though IMO currency codes are far easier to understand (I mean, how many types of $ exist throughout the world?). At this point I've entirely given up hope of keyboard layouts being updated to something more rational - they're too entrenched, and changing them would mess up far too much for far too many people. I'm constantly shocked that anyone can actually use something like Dvorak or Colemak these days, as the chance of having to interact with a random QWERTY layout at some point in any given day seems to creep ever closer to 100%. That Esc thing to me seems emblematic of a simplistic checkbox design style. It it a keyboard? Does it have mech switches? Does it have all the main keys, including ÆØÅ? Does it have RGB? Ship it! For this price, I'm frankly surprised there aren't more glaring issues than this.

Interesting, as some parties in Sweden is pushing for deregulating the rental market, so it can "fix it self" which I guess Norway would be a great example of then...
I really had no idea it was that bad in Norway.

Well, Sweden has it's share of near impossible to understand dialects up north too, plus we have Gotland that technically didn't even speak a Scandinavian language at all...
But hey, you guys have Nynorsk

Yeah, Taiwan use New Taiwan Dollars...
I can't even type properly on an ANSI keyboard, due to a few shifted keys, so Dvorak or Colemak would be a nightmare, even though it claims to be faster/better for computer input...
What really bugs me is touch screens or UI's with an ABC layout, it's so hard to find the right letters on them...
It looks like a lot of notebooks in Europe now have pseudo ANSI layouts, where somehow notebook makers thinks that's somehow acceptable to squeeze in a 2/3 size key, because that's all there was space for. Of course you can't see that when you're browsing pictures of said notebooks, as they all use generic pictures with the ANSI layout and all stores are too cheap to produce their own product photography, so buying notebooks online is a big no-no to me. At one point it was easy to change notebook keyboards, but not so any more.

 

[lexluthermiester]

Msi GP76 11UG - 17" i7-11800h 16gb ddr4-3200 512gb ssd rtx3080(140w)

Nice.

Preference, sure, but that goes both ways. Just because something isn't a problem for you doesn't mean it isn't for anyone. And the main function of dimming (or brightening) a screen is to adjust its brightness to be comfortable in whatever ambient light is there, not power savings. So, while I understand your view, it's a rather limited take on the possible issues stemming from lack of brightness controls

Yeah but we're not talking about a system that has access to dimming features and I'm trying to say that it's better to not use it. That's not the situation. Sam's screen is not dimming at all, so the feature is not working. My suggestion was an alternate solution given the particular circumstances of that situation. I'm NOT suggesting that solution as a general rule, only a solution for him on that machine.

 

[Athlonite]

maybe it's the left hand thing, and the fact I grew up solely using the arrow keys...I don't know, but things just seemed too cramped for me.

Hay same here arrow keys all day long for gaming

 

[Valantar]

Nice.


Yeah but we're not talking about a system that has access to dimming features and I'm trying to say that it's better to not use it. That's not the situation. Sam's screen is not dimming at all, so the feature is not working. My suggestion was an alternate solution given the particular circumstances of that situation. I'm NOT suggesting that solution as a general rule, only a solution for him on that machine.

Sure. My point was simply that your alternate solution addresses only a very tiny portion of the actual usefulness of the missing feature, and as such can't really be said to solve much

 

[Mussels]

Got the switch, now i can do mario kart live with my kid (or regular mario kart in different rooms )

 

[Hachi_Roku256563]

If you're looking for something that fits in your pocket, the Switch is not what you're looking for. It's portable, not pocketable, and frankly nothing pockeatble will ever have even reasonably good controller ergonomics (unless you're willing to fill several pockets with detachable controllers etc. - the Backbone One looks good if that's your thing). There's just not enough space in a reasonably sized pocket to fit human hand-sized inputs and a decently sized screen. Of course, if you're happy with touchscreen input any decent smartphone does that well enough. The strength of the Switch is striking a good balance - small enough to fit in any bag or backpack easily, light enough to carry, but also big enough to have half decent controllers and a decently sized screen. It's not a one size fits all solution - there's no such thing - but it ticks a lot of boxes for a lot of people.

actually for me its a 3ds
i love me launch 3ds

 

[Valantar]

actually for me its a 3ds
i love me launch 3ds

Yep, that's a viable option - though it's incredibly old in terms of hardware, it's still a good pocketable handheld in the more traditional sense. It kind of sidesteps the ergonomics issue partially through form factor and partially by not really accomodating the types of games where ergonomics really matter (though I've heard plenty of people complain of 3DS-induced hand cramps). The Switch has never been intended to replace that, but be more of a hybrid device. It would be pretty interesting to see if Nintendo is willing to make some sort of clamshell Switch Lite in a few years though - but that would require a bespoke Nvidia chip on a new process node, which they likely aren't willing to pay for. Guess we'll see.

 

[Space Lynx]

i mean... turn a lamp on

I may be about to buy a second nintendo switch, so my son has one and i have one for mario kart live racing...

$250 Au, owner used it for smash bros, got bored, never used again

I got Switch OLED pre-ordered. I am a sucker for OLED. Also, Metroid Fusion is one of my all time favorite games, so I am pretty excited for Metroid Dread, also a lot of indie games I just would like to play in OLED. If I get burn in, I am going to be ****** but I doubt if I do, I only play in like 30-40 minute sessions cause of my ADHD lol

Msi GP76 11UG - 17" i7-11800h 16gb ddr4-3200 512gb ssd rtx3080(140w)

where did you buy it from? i know if you buy from HID evolution they use liquid conductonaut for the cpu paste. professionally installed so no risk.

i know some Asus laptops use conductonaut as well now straight from factory. but i don't trust them as much to apply it right.

 

[WhitetailAni]

actually for me its a 3ds
i love me launch 3ds

I love my 3DS, and use it to play Pokemon (I have every single 3DS-compatible game, from Gen I-Gen VII), Mario (MKDS, MK7, SMM1, NSMBDS, NSMB2, and Smash 3DS), and Hyrule Warriors: Legends.
I also got the super ultra deluxe version that is the New Nintendo 3DS XL from my dad, and completely waste its potential by playing old Pokemon games (currently playing Diamond) that are capable of running fine on an OG DS.

Don't worry, I also play Hyrule Warriors: Legends in 3D mode which is only for New consoles.

 

[freeagent]

Maybe its just me, but that card says it boosts to 1860 in GPUZ, but it s hitting 1980 on its own.. noice!

 

[toilet pepper]

Why is it the Danes had to swap Ö and Ä around? The Nordic layout would've been so much simpler if they didn't mess around with those.
And what is this ¤ for on all Nordic keyboards?

Must be hard living in Skåne as a Norwegian, in fact, I understand Swedish border Norwegian (think Fredrikstad) better than skånska
Also, Norway is a ripoff...


Do you work in accounting perchance?

My work deals with a lot of numbers so there's that.

I went the other way around. Have a full key board and went with a gaming oriented keypad.

 

[lexluthermiester]

actually for me its a 3ds
i love me launch 3ds

I love the 3DS! It's my very favorite portable gaming console!

 

[Mussels]

Maybe its just me, but that card says it boosts to 1860 in GPUZ, but it s hitting 1980 on its own.. noice!

boost hasnt been accurate for Nv cards for a long time now... annoying AF

 

[Ruru]

boost hasnt been accurate for Nv cards for a long time now... annoying AF

Yeah, it says boost 1713 on my 1080 Ti but in reality it's around 2GHz.

 

[sam_86314]

boost hasnt been accurate for Nv cards for a long time now... annoying AF

NVIDIA cards have a feature called GPU Boost which allows them to increase clock speeds until a power target is reached.

From my layman's perspective, it's identical in concept to XFR and PBO on AMD CPUs. The 5800X has an official boost clock of 4.7GHz, yet mine regularly hits 4.85GHz with PBO.

The "boost" clock in GPU-Z is probably the official boost clock, but GPU Boost can go past that.

 

[Ruru]

Well at least I have the power limit set to maximum (120%).

 

[Mussels]

NVIDIA cards have a feature called GPU Boost which allows them to increase clock speeds until a power target is reached.

From my layman's perspective, it's identical in concept to XFR and PBO on AMD CPUs. The 5800X has an official boost clock of 4.7GHz, yet mine regularly hits 4.85GHz with PBO.

The "boost" clock in GPU-Z is probably the official boost clock, but GPU Boost can go past that.

yeah but they tell you a maximum boost, and blow past it
my 3090 hangs around 1950Mhz in gaming yet stock boost is like 1700

 

[freeagent]

yeah but they tell you a maximum boost, and blow past it

That's why I was surprised. Official boost for my card is 1860 but it runs at 1980. Same with my 980 Classified, official boost is like 1290 but it routinely ran at 1417. Same with my old 970ftw dual 6 pin, official boost of 1290 and it ran at 1410 or something.

 

[Mr Bill]

I feel like I did pretty good, an i7-4790k, 4x4GB Corsair Vengeance 1600 DDR3 memory, and a maybe not working MSI Z97 Gaming 7 for $200 CAD.

I just bought this last week off eBay "ASRock z97 Extreme 4 I7 4790k 32gb G.Skill DDR 3 -2133 ram combo" $250.00 US. Wasn't really looking for a deal, just wanted this setup, so I bought it.

 

[Remeca]

I just bought this last week off eBay "ASRock z97 Extreme 4 I7 4790k 32gb G.Skill DDR 3 -2133 ram combo" $250.00 US. Wasn't really looking for a deal, just wanted this setup, so I bought it.

Good find. Probably a better deal than I got, because my Z97 isn't posting. The 4790k and 16GB ddr3 are working great though, so still got what I paid for.

 

[lexluthermiester]

boost hasnt been accurate for Nv cards for a long time now... annoying AF

I've noticed this too. It's usually on the generous side, giving more boost that stated specs.