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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   2504 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 6, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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I finally got my pc set up. While the user experience on the desktop hasn't changed much, going from a perfectly decent Ryzen 5600x and an RTX 3070 to a 9800x3d and a 5080, the performance in games is night and day. It certainly spanks my gaming laptop.

Random observations:

  1. Using a 48" 4K OLED TV as a monitor feels unfair in FPS titles where you need to pixel peep. At the distance I'm (forced to) sit from it, everything is larger than life. No more wondering if that blob is an enemy or a bush.
  2. Using a TV that size from barely 3 feet away isn't the best experience, it takes up more horizontal real estate than any ultra wide monitor, and vertically, you need to actively move your head rather than just look at things in the corner.
  3. HDR rocks. It's nice having full-fat real HDR versus the anemic 400 nits my old monitor had.
  4. I have had pleasant experiences with running cheap Chinese mechanical keyboards. No difference this time, it looks pretty nice, until you look closely at the keycaps and see the etching is subpar. But the thing is solid metal, the keys feel good, and I doubt I'll care. I already don't notice it.
  5. The in-built wifi on my MSI Pro B650 motherboard sucks donkey dick. My phones and laptop pick up great signal in my bedroom, this thing barely wanted to connect. Fortunately, the router is some kind of 5g contraption, and I just moved it closer and kept the living room door proper open. I went from no stable connection to several hundred mbps down, which is good enough. Problem solved for now.

Edit:

I was also concerned that at such close distances, the effective resolution of the screen would show holes. To my surprise, it doesn't. I don't know if there's some subpixel wizardry going on, but it looks pretty damn sharp even from 2-3 feet away.

The in-built wifi on my MSI Pro B650 motherboard sucks donkey dick.

Make sure there isn't an external antenna somewhere in the box, or at the very least the port for an external antenna on the back of the motherboard. The plug will 99% be SMA, which is a little coax port with an outside thread. If there is one, get a cheap ($10 max) dipole antenna for it.

If there isn't, it's magic you get any signal at all. The PC case is a Faraday cage, and the back of the mainboard is a really bad place for a compact print antenna - it almost certainly points the wrong way. In that case, just get an external USB wifi card with external antennas. I've got an Alpha Networks card with two antenna ports for $25. I replaced one of the dipole antennas with a directional patch antenna. The thing gets signal at the other end of my parking lot, through several walls, inside the car.

The reason phones and laptops have such good wifi is that they usually have 3 antennas built in around the inside of the screen, behind the plastic bezel. Much better than a single antenna in/behind a Faraday cage.

The plug will 99% be SMA

WiFi antennas, at least in the US, are typically RP-SMA, which swaps the polarity of the pin and the socket from standard SMA. It's still a 1/4"-ish threaded connection, but it's explicitly not compatible with standard SMA RF equipment.

But this is just being fairly pedantic: it's the only flavor of SMA most consumers see. But it is a pain in the rear buying RF parts to make sure you get compatible ones.

Yes, important point. Buy a "2.4 GHz/5 GHz wifi antenna" on Amazon/Ali Express, not a "12 cm full band dipole antenna" at your local HAM/radio nerd supplier. That should get around the problem.

You just saved me. I was convinced that since this was a pre-built, they must have set up antennae, if the system had them. I'd looked around before and hasn't seen them. But given your strong insistence, I checked the motherboard pdf, saw them mentioned, then dug around in the box of parts and found them! I hope I've managed to screw them in now, thank you for the help!

If you're the sort to write reviews for places you buy from, I would recommend mentioning this as part of the review. The vendor may not realize it as a potential problem that could have been solved with a single-page printout or a sticker, and it's not just bad for the frustration. While modern WiFi is less likely to damage itself from running without a load than older devices, it's still not great for the hardware.

I'm tactically refraining from writing a review. I suspect the reason this particular pc was several hundred pounds cheaper than others with similar specs was because of the abysmal 3.2 star rating. Apparently a bunch of people received it missing the CPU. Well, mine boots and runs well, and if it's just the 5080 doing all the heavy lifting, Nvidia has my stamp of approval haha.

The in-built wifi on my MSI Pro B650 motherboard sucks donkey dick. My phones and laptop pick up great signal in my bedroom, this thing barely wanted to connect. Fortunately, the router is some kind of 5g contraption, and I just moved it closer and kept the living room door proper open. I went from no stable connection to several hundred mbps down, which is good enough. Problem solved for now.

You may want to consider one of those wall modules that have ethernet ports on them that you can plug into an electrical outlet, and uses the mains as a bridge. That's what I would do to get at a router far away from my desktop PC in a rental apartment.

I would never use powerline if there was any other option. It works fine if you're on the same circuit, but once it passes through the breaker panel it's a coin flip. Also sensitive to having stuff with shitty power factor on the same circuit. CFLs, LEDs, cheap appliance motors, etc. you never want to be trying to diagnose "why does my Internet cut out whenever my fridge compressor cycles?!"

I've actually got it running to a distant building 500' away, through the woods so a ptp wifi link would have been much harder to set up.
It works, but it adds a lot of latency and periodically drops unless you keep a device constantly pinging the router.

Just run an Ethernet cable across the floor and put a rug on it, 9 times out of 10 it's the best option.

Yeah mine wasn't ideal, I had to go down stairs and around some corners.

If I had to do it again I would've just drilled through some walls. Was my landlord going to like it? No. Would they have been able to stop me? Also no.

Just run an Ethernet cable on the floor lol. Stick it under a rug, job done. The important part is a wired connection to the router, because there's a lot of local interference on the WiFi spectrum (and very little on the regulated cell spectrum between the router and tower).

Although if there's no other channels around a 2.4ghz connection might give you a more reliable signal than 5.

Why are you using wifi to connect a stationary PC??

Anyway, congrats on your upgrade. A new PC is always a treat and now you understand the OLED religion.

Try playing the new Indiana Jones. It looks amazing.

I understand all the benefits of a wired connection, but sadly it's not an option. It's a rental, and my flatmate told me that the local ISPs won't roll out fiber this far. However, no data cap 5g isn't a bad experience at all!

A 5080 is a fucking beast. I've had an unfortunate habit of upgrading both my gpu and monitor at the same time, so a 1070ti and FHD to a 3070 and 1440p, which tends to eat up the performance gains. Well, even at native 4k, this baby flies. I've had an eye on the new IJ, will see about giving it a go!

Yeah, what pusher_robot said.

The 5080 is a fun gpu. It's perfectly adequate for everything out now. I had one for a month before I got a chance at a 5090. :)

Lucky you. I could have opted for a 5090, but I decided that this was good enough without bordering on extravagant. Maybe one of my elderly patients will die and leave one for me in their will, haha.

But the motherboard wifi is not talking to the LTE tower. Presumably there is an LTE device that bridges your private network with the Internet. You should at least hardwire the connection from your PC to that device.

@pbmonster just made me find the actual antennas for the wifi, but if that doesn't work well I'll bite the bullet and think about stringing up ethernet, thanks.

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