The Spam Thread!

[cpd2009]

I spoke too soon... now the Sony isn't displaying the Dell output again even with the splitter. It's USB powered, and I plugged the splitter in to a dedicated walll wart to see if that changes anything...

And even if it is a Dell, I would like to try and get it working somehow. The main culprit appears to be my Sony TV. I may have to dig out my Huion tablet, and connect it to the Dell. If the Huion can display the output with Secure Boot on, it would have to be the TV for sure.

I have no idea how Secure Boot could mess up an HDMI signal so bad it would cause my TV to not accept it?

[cpd2009]

And... the problem is fixed. And it was a very simple solution, of course.

I had to configure the Sony's HDMI settings. Only HDMI 3 or 4 can accept a 4K signal, and I had to set those ports to Enhanced mode. I also turned off Bravia Sync.

Now the Dell is displaying fine with Secure Boot on! I guess it's time to setup Windows 11... tomorrow. I'm getting sleepy...

[huckleberrypie]

And... the problem is fixed. And it was a very simple solution, of course.

I had to configure the Sony's HDMI settings. Only HDMI 3 or 4 can accept a 4K signal, and I had to set those ports to Enhanced mode. I also turned off Bravia Sync.

Now the Dell is displaying fine with Secure Boot on! I guess it's time to setup Windows 11... tomorrow. I'm getting sleepy...

That's nice! Hope your Windows 11 install turns out as simple as pie.

[cpd2009]

It's rather interesting how I found the solution. I noticed when the Sony wasn't accepting the Dell video output, it wasn't actually POST-ing and instead was blinking an error code. At first I thought the hardware was failing since a single blink indicates BIOS corruption or failing ROM. But I knew it wasn't that because the Dell would POST when connected to another HDMI input on another device like my capture dongle.

I then tweaked my search criteria to something along the lines of "PC not booting when connected to TV". I then found a Tom's Hardware forum post that offered the idea of changing the HDMI input settings, and viola, it worked!

Windows 11 is now all set up, and the driver installation was easy. No need for any crappy Dell software (except for maybe the light bar controller), and the display is beautiful. Windows 11 scales nicely to 4K, and my Sony TV even has HDR support!

All I need to do now is purchase an app that can play BluRay movie discs. It's a shame that the DRM is so tough to crack that VLC can't play commercial BDs.

[cpd2009]

First impressions of Windows 11...

It's looking promising. Performance wise, it's excellent. I installed it to the boot SSD and it loads up in less than a minute. The scaling of the Windows UI when used with the Sony TV is also very good, nearly as good as scaling on a Mac. It falls short with older Win32 apps, such as some program installers that use older APIs. RetroArch is one of them. The setup wizard shows obvious pixelization in the text and buttons compared to the installer of EmulationStation DE, which scales great. Modern apps like Firefox, built-in Windows apps, and the file manager all look amazing on a 4K display.

Windows was already activated after setup, which is one advantage of having a second-hand pre-built rig.

I've tested BluRay playback with the trial version of Cyberlink PowerDVD 22, and it's good, though I may have to go into the AMD graphics settings to tweak the video quality. It's going to be a few more days before I can call it a success. I still need to install Steam and my purchased games and see how they play, give a thorough test run of various game emulators, and watch a movie or two.

[cpd2009]

Wow... scraping ROM metadata in EmulationStation takes a while....

[huckleberrypie]

First impressions of Windows 11...

It's looking promising. Performance wise, it's excellent. I installed it to the boot SSD and it loads up in less than a minute. The scaling of the Windows UI when used with the Sony TV is also very good, nearly as good as scaling on a Mac. It falls short with older Win32 apps, such as some program installers that use older APIs. RetroArch is one of them. The setup wizard shows obvious pixelization in the text and buttons compared to the installer of EmulationStation DE, which scales great. Modern apps like Firefox, built-in Windows apps, and the file manager all look amazing on a 4K display.

Windows was already activated after setup, which is one advantage of having a second-hand pre-built rig.

I've tested BluRay playback with the trial version of Cyberlink PowerDVD 22, and it's good, though I may have to go into the AMD graphics settings to tweak the video quality. It's going to be a few more days before I can call it a success. I still need to install Steam and my purchased games and see how they play, give a thorough test run of various game emulators, and watch a movie or two.

Regarding the RX 580, you may have to undervolt the GPU through the Adrenalin Edition tuning panel. That is, if you're getting red-hot temps in intense workloads such as gaming or GPU-accelerated encoding. Otherwise you should be good to go.

Also, I hate not having the ability to drag and drop to the taskbar so I had to install Start11. Besides, I am more accustomed to the Windows 7-style start menu anyway.

[cpd2009]

I still need to do GPU temps, but when running various game emulators, it remains stable. Game emulators are one thing, but it's another when wanting to try a game on Steam that can be very demanding, such as the recently released Stray. I'm always tempted to try Furmark, but I've heard anecdotes of GPUs becoming fried by that, so I may just run a modern benchmark and monitor the temps.

Oh, when it comes to Antivirus, is that not enough? Do I need Protegent? XD

In all seriousness, do you just use the built in Windows Defender for antivirus, or do you use a different one? I used to use AVG, but they have become rather shady when it comes to bundling applications with third-party apps.

[cpd2009]

Here is the final score from the Unigine Superposition benchmark..



The highest the GPU got was 88C, but after running the benchmark four times, it cooled down slightly to 84C.

[huckleberrypie]

I still need to do GPU temps, but when running various game emulators, it remains stable. Game emulators are one thing, but it's another when wanting to try a game on Steam that can be very demanding, such as the recently released Stray. I'm always tempted to try Furmark, but I've heard anecdotes of GPUs becoming fried by that, so I may just run a modern benchmark and monitor the temps.

Oh, when it comes to Antivirus, is that not enough? Do I need Protegent? XD

In all seriousness, do you just use the built in Windows Defender for antivirus, or do you use a different one? I used to use AVG, but they have become rather shady when it comes to bundling applications with third-party apps.

I am honestly not sure with antivirus software right now apart from Avast, as Windows Defender doesn't have that much of a glowing reputation from what I've gathered.

Last time I had my GPU spaz out on me was when I ran an AI upscale tool on a bunch of pictures, and I presume the intense workload may have forced the GPU to shut itself down. Undervolting it via the GPU control panel seems to have knocked a few degrees down but my beef with it is that the control panel tends to revert to stock when it perceives an unclean system shutdown.