This is a consolidation post for all activities related to this Ryzen build.
This was a pretty straightforward installation. I had to dismount the GPU from the case to give me access to the middle PCIe 16x slot that was behind it. Using the lowest slot wasn’t feasible, as the riser cable is quite long and I didn’t want to fold it too much.
I noticed that the initial installation of the CableMod Vertical Riser Kit has caused the expansion slots to bend outwards due to pressure from the HDMI cables; will deal with that another time. Haha.
After that I was going to put in a right angle USB3.0 adapter or two to hide the USB3.0 header that was sticking out from behind the cable bar. Somehow just decided to stuff it at the back there somewhere. Had some trouble remounting the back of the case as I was too lazy to take the PC off the shelf.
The AverMedia LiveGamer 4K solves my issue of multi-channel LPCM pass-through from my PS4 Pro to my TV, but maybe due to the length of the cables (2x 3m UGREEN HDMI 2.1 cables) or the capture device itself, the PS4 Pro is now complaining about lack of bandwidth available in the HDMI 2.0 protocol. Currently fine if I drop the number of channels down from 7.1 to 5.1, which I guess is sufficient since I have a 5.1.2 setup. Gonna try moving my PC to the other side of the TV and using shorter cables to see if it helps.
Check out Part 3: GPU Upgrade!
Consolidated build post: https://purrfectbliss.com/2020/08/28/ryzen-build-2020/ for all parts!
I’ve traditionally been an Intel builder, with my last build being a Core i7 920 on an Asus P6T motherboard. That was maybe about 10 years ago about the time Faizah and I got married. My Intel builds have been generally straightforward and worry free, so I thought, how could an AMD build be much different?
Boy, was I wrong.
Read MoreIt has only been about a month since I got my LG C9 display which I use with my newly built PC (another post on that later). People talk a lot about how this OLED+PC combination is bad because there is higher chance of burn-in, so here are the current measures I’ve tried to alleviate this.
Read MoreOur desktops at home, Alexstrasza and Keristrasza, have seen little use in the past years. Firstly, because the room they’re in got messed up by our cats. Secondly, because we’ve primarily moved to mobile and console gaming. Lastly, because lounging on a sofa or bed is much more comfortable than sitting in an IKEA work chair. 😛
Seeing how we prefer working on laptops instead of desktops nowadays, I shifted our future PC landscape plan to replace the obsolete PCs with laptops and some accessories to help them out. One of these accessories is an external Thunderbolt 3 GPU enclosure, to give our slim laptops a boost when playing games or rendering video. Essentially, I wanted to have a single portable device that I’ll bring to work and everywhere, while having the ability to hook it up at home and play AAA games on it.
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Amongst the sea of cooking posts, comes a single travel/videography post. 😀
This was our 3rd time in Annupuri, Niseko. The first two times, weather wasn’t great, despite being closer to the peak periods. This time, I’d say the weather was perfect. 🙂 We hit our usual makan spots, and tried some new ones. Went all the way to Hirafu to try out Bang Bang, one of the best izakayas around. Hideo-san helped us make a reservation for dinner at Sobadokoro Rakuichi, but the boss lady lost our reservation so we got turned away. Needless to say, Hideo-san was pissed, and our eagerness to try the place has dropped quite a bit, so we might not bother trying to dine there ever again (in Hideo-san’s words, “never again”). On the flipside, we got to try Taj Mahal, which is an Indian restaurant close by. It can actually give our local Indian restaurants here a run for their money. We also managed a trip to Milk Kobo, which is a milk farm serving fresh milk products! Soft serve cone on a hot sunny winter day is the best!
As always, dining with Hideo-san at the villa causes us to meletop every- single- time. Please do not ask how many KGs we gained. 😛 In addition to the shabu-shabu or sukiyaki, he’d ply us with clams, scallops, kinki fish, yanagi no mai or yellow rockfish, sashimi, hairy crabs, rice. We always feel bad not being able to finish the food, but seriously-lah, Hideo-san! You know from our last visit we can’t each much. =.= Anyway, he pleasantly surprised us with a nice balcony BBQ for lunch on our last day, which was cold but awesome!
The video above is my first foray into video capture and editing with my new drone and action cam, so please forgive the rough edges. I’m quite proud of it though, and glad that I finally got around to doing it after so many months. I think I rely too much on the FDR-X3000’s optical stabilization though, as can be seen from the not so steady footage. Proper frame rate selection needs to improve too, as mixing 24fps and 60fps videos prolly isn’t a good idea. Post-processing was done with Davinci Resolve Lite, and in lazy mode: trim according to music and auto color the flat drone footage. Might try straight up 4K next time; thought the 60Mbps limit on the Mavic wouldn’t look nice, but Youtube seems to compress videos up to that level anyways.
Also, I crashed my drone on the 5th day. Yep, totally pilot error. Was trying out the POI function to do an orbit around the villa, but I didn’t check for clearance so it crashed into a low tree. Fortunately, it fell into soft ungroomed snow, so besides losing two propellers and introducing some looseness in the gimbal mount, it came back relatively unscathed.
Anyway, looking forward to our next trip back to this place. Love it!
(Had this drafted months ago, but thought it would be pointless. Recently though, my sound bar / AVR somehow reset all its settings and I had to figure out how the wiring goes again. After sorting everything out, I thought I should make a record just in case I forget again :P)
#Start of First Draft
Recently acquired a new TV to replace the 9 year old Sammie. Full HD and 3D goodness, finally!
With every new purchase however, there would be some work involved. All those cables on the existing devices will need to be rerouted or removed. And you need to figure out the limitations with the various equipment to try to get the most out of them without having to spend even more money upgrading them.
So TV arrived the same day of purchase (thanks Sony!), and first thing to do was to move the HDMI inputs from the switch onto the TV. We wouldn’t want to lose any resolution or colour along the way. Also had to buy a digital optical cable to route audio from the TV to the AVR (just a sound bar).
Tested the gaming consoles, and Astro, and so far so good. But wait, we’re not getting complete audio from the HTPC. One whole night of troubleshooting revealed that I couldn’t passthrough DTS audio to the TV, because the TV can only send out Dolby Digital through its optical output. The workaround for this was to get another digital optical cable so that I can connect my HDMI switch (which supports ARC) directly to the AVR. The HTPC then connects to the switch as an input, and the output goes to the TV. The TV will then send back the audio signal to the switch via ARC, and this gets routed over to the AVR via optical cable. Sounds convoluted doesn’t it? Surprisingly, the TV supports DTS via ARC, but not via optical. On the other hand, it might just be the audio feed directly from the HTPC to the AVR. I had spent another night trying to figure this part out, cuz it wouldn’t work for some reason.
#End of First Draft
So here we are in 2015 to continue this post. ARC is the feature that’s working here because the only input connections that the AVR are getting are digital optical ones.
Another use for the switcher is to route the legacy devices to the TV via HDMI. This part gets kind of interesting. The DVD player and PS2 do not have HDMI outputs, so they were originally connected to the AVR via RCA or Coaxial inputs. Now that the AVR no longer outputs HDMI to the TV, I connected it to the HDMI Switch instead. So whenever I need to use the DVD player or the PS2, which I rarely do, I just had to switch inputs on the Switch.
Then, somewhere along the way, we decided to try making the HTPC into a karaoke player. For karaoke, we need to use a separate karaoke amp and speakers instead of the AVR. We originally used this karaoke audio system separately using a laptop connected via a stereo jack, and ran Karafun on the laptop for song queuing and Windows Search for the library. Now that we wanted to connect to it via the NUC, which only supports HDMI or DisplayPort, we needed to somehow convert the HDMI audio to RCA. So we had to buy a HDMI splitter that had RCA output for this.
The problem with this HDMI-to-RCA splitter is that its HDMI output would sometimes turn off for some reason. Maybe it’s a limitation of the device itself, so I went out and bought another HDMI splitter so that the original HDMI output can be split off cleanly before heading to the HDMI-to-RCA splitter. In the end, we have 2 HDMI devices between the HTPC and the AVR/karaoke amp.
Everything’s all dandy now, except that XBMC can’t seem to handle the karaoke queueing very well. But that’s a different post for a different day.
So this thing arrived in the mail a week ago, something I backed on Kickstarter cuz it looks fun. It took a while for me to start playing with it, but I finally got around today.
Well, actually I tried last weekend, but I couldn’t get the thing to pair with my phone.
Read MorePreviously I wrote about installing this awesome media server onto a Synology NAS here. However this guide referred to another guide on a different site which subsequently went down, and I couldn’t find a copy of it anywhere else.
So here’s an attempt to rebuild the guide to include the missing steps. Since I’ll just be copying and pasting from the original forum discussion, there might still be errors. If you encounter any, let me know in the comments and we’ll see how we can get it corrected. As always, follow these steps at your own risk. This “worked” when my DSM was 4.0-2197; I cannot guarantee that these steps will work any more (or work at all).
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