Re: Updating a BIOS on ASROCK

That is seriously the most convoluted BIOS flashing process I have ever seen. It's almost easier to install a newer AM4 processor just so you can skip most of those steps.

Yes, your chip is Summit Ridge. Your order of installations looks correct.

Re: What's the bottleneck with x58?

There's no single bottleneck point, I'd say it was a combination of CPU and GPU both. But certainly single-thread IPC performance is holding it back. Generally speaking games rely on a single main thread, and what little multicore offloading there happens to be is still reliant on the processing speed of that main thread. It doesn't matter how many cores/threads are available if all the dependent threads have to hurry up and wait on the main thread for more work. So as CPUs age you're not going to see them "max out" even though they're...

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...



Well I try to avoid delving into HDD brands because I'm only a sample size of one and everyone has had their own unique experiences. But my experience leans the other way. WDs would just die or crash after a few years often with no warning signs never getting to that 5-year requirement I expect from a quality drive. The really old <2004 WD drives were very good, but only had a single modern WD make it to five years whereas Seagates mostly just keep going as long as I kept them cool. Seagates were always particularly...

Re: failing hard drives after sitting for years...



I'd say no. Or at least, not nearly so frequently. Maybe every couple years? It's actually possible for drives to get over-lubricated too, if you remember the IBM Deathstars...

Wear on the motors/bearings is the worst when a drive spins up, and so if it does it constantly due to an overaggressive power profile or firmware bug then it can wear out the drive. If the motor can't maintain a specific platter RPM or RPM range then the drive will never be able to read the data and it's equally as dead as...

Re: Dell U3011 no display after a few minutes

Just wanted to give a big thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread!

Had the usual intermittent backlight failure after power on that was growing worse, but once the monitor heated up it would stay on without issue. Sounded like a dead ringer for the solder joint. Alas after resoldering the cracked joints the backlight still wasn't getting the juice to light up.



I noted both 2200uf 10v barrel caps were bulging and definitely on the way out. But the little grey box (which apparently...