On Tue, 31 Dec 2024 15:53:20 -0800, Justisaur <justisaur@gmail.com>
wrote:

>I think I've got it all working now.
>
>TL;DR:
>
>1. Don't buy cases with GLASS panels (I didn't even realize it was
>glass, the one I bought for me is plexiglass)
>
>2. F Google keeping your bookmarks in the cloud. (I've actually had it
>lose them all for people a couple times at work too!) Export them to
>back them up.
>
>3. F Onedrive taking over your filesystem (It's been working pretty well
>at work, but it was an unmitigated disaster on my son's personal PC)
>
>4. Don't buy a CPU with built in GPU if you can avoid it and you're
>planning to use discrete.
>
>
>The LONG:
>
>Putting it all together was pretty easy. I installed windows 11 pro.
>Updated all the drivers.
>
>I brought over what I could, but he uses FL Studio (Audio studio of some
>sort) and that screwed it up where the most important plug in wouldn't
>work. Also got a bunch of errors that files weren't there when
>transferring the data.
>
>Wiped it, started over and brought very little over.
>
>Had an issue where Chrome wiped out all his favorites after he signed
>in. I tried to get the bookmarks from the old computer, but they were
>missing from where I saved them on the desktop when I popped the drive
>in the new one, back and forth several times and I finally figured out
>onedrive had somehow taken over his desktop, only the desktop wasn't
>there in onedrive, so the files just disappeared until I booted it back
>up. I eventually figured to put in in a folder on the root of c, and
>got them.
>
>Chrome would wipe them out though replacing them with nothing every time
>I tried. I loaded them up offline on the old computer, exported from
>them and brought them over, but somehow it picked up thousands of old
>bookmarks and not the few he wanted. We ended up just deleting them.
>
>FL Studio also had to export all his plugins he wanted and he dealt with
>loading them up. It was working.
>
>Somewhere in all taking the front panel off and on repeatedly the GLASS
>panel shattered into a million pieces when I placed it on the floor all
>of 1 inch below where I took it off. I got cut up and my arms and
>clothes looked like there was frost from microscopic shards of glass
>sticking to them. Most of it stuck to the thin flexible plastic that
>was on one side. I should've taken a picture, but wanted to get that
>out asap. I managed to slice both thumbs up getting it to the trash, an
>invisible splinter in one, took me a good half hour with a magnifying
>glass and tweezers to finally get it out. My other thumb was slashed up
>and wouldn't stop bleeding. I took the bandaid off a couple days later
>and it started bleeding. Two days later I tried again and there was a
>tiny amount of blood that oozed out, but I left the bandaid off and it
>stopped and finally dried up and just has a couple mm scab now.
>
>I cleaned up the rest of the glass after I'd gotten the splinter out and
>bandaided the slashed thumb, and a shower seemed to get rid of the rest
>of the frost like shards on me without drawing blood.
>
>The case is now without front panel. I want another panel like that so
>I'm trying to decide between putting cardboard there or leaving it open.
> The place is a bit dusty and it's on the floor so leaving it open
>probably isn't the best idea.
>
>It's a very nice case other than that major flaw.
>
>A day or too later my son brings up that FL Studio is running a bit slow
>as is Roblock and getting jerky movements. Task Manager shows no
>issues, CPU, GPU, Memory, storage, etc all very low - with only FL
>Studio CPU was only 3 %. I figure it's the nextwork as we're running
>off wifi, but I run an xfinity speedtest and his latency is better than
>mine, and I don't think FLStudio should be using network. I turn off
>the wifi and FLStudio is still slow and jerky. After trying about 20
>different things to troubleshoot it I install HW Monitor. I see the m.2
>drive is running pretty hot, 57 degrees, I installed a tester, and it
>climes to 80 while testing reads. I look and and find the plate that
>came with the mb isn't even warm, after checking it out I think the
>plate doesn't even touch the SDD, I double up the thermal silicone so it
>touches the chip on it, but it only makes about a degree difference.
>
>I order a cheap m.2 heatsink from amazon.
>
>Before it comes I poke around some more. I find the 6800 gpu is
>disabled and it's somehow using the garbage on the cpu even though hdmi
>is plugged into the gpu card. I realize the monitor hasn't come on off
>and on, and I've had to turn it off and fiddle with the power to it a
>couple times. It must've disabled from that. The power connectors
>don't seem to fit well. I'm not sure if that's the GPU card or the
>Thermaltake PSU that's slightly off spec enough to not fit quite right,
>but I give it a really forceful shove, and it seems stable now. I of
>course had to unsinstall the GPU drivers and reinstall and restart to
>get them working, I then disabled the CPU display drivers and it's been
>working fine since.
>
>I find it weird the "GPU" somehow didn't appear to be under load, but it
>was greatly affecting fps even in audio software. Maybe it was somehow
>picking up the card GPU as not being under load even though it was
>saying it was disabled.
>
>I got the m.2 heatsink, installed it, and the heat dropped to 48 C idle
>and 61 C under test load, much better. From what I've read at least the
>one I have the WD SN770 shouldn't need a heatsink, but it obviously
>makes a difference in heat if not that much in performance, as the test
>still came out about the same on the transfer rate.

I haven't used FLStudio in a long time (it's a popular DAW among
younger folks just getting started, because its very video-gamey in
its user interface -- the developers were originally video game
developers and just migrated to audio software... it's kind of fun to
work with in certain scenarios, and some famous artists like DeadMau5
who I've never liked did get their start with it). I don't use it at
all because it doesn't integrate well with pro-grade studio gear very
well, but it has some things in common with other DAW software.

If I knew you were building a system with audio production of any kind
in mind I might have offered a few tips.

One is, in general stay with Intel for the CPU/mobo. General
experience across the board is better and I've read a lot of issues
with AMD processors and their compatibility with certain hardware
drivers like audio interfaces. Single thread performance and ram
speed are important depending on what is actually being done with it
(there are a lot of ways to make music and every workflow is
different.. loading lots of samples needs a lot of ram and disk
access while lots of soft synths will prefer CPU power). A lot of
games in the last couple of years just seemed over-optimized for AMD
processors and were giving benchmarks that gave false impressions...
as an example look at the way Intel Core Ultra chips were recently
panned upon release as being much slower than AMD, with Cyperpunk 2077
being one of the main examples... then suddenly CDPR releases a patch
for the game that boosts framerates something like 30% for Intel Core
Ultra depending on the resolution and GPU.

This doesn't mean AMD won't work or be viable or good for FLStudio
especially if that's all he uses and he hasn't branched out to
hardware audio gear... I haven't followed what they've done so for
all I know they might be optimizing for AMD these days, but the
software is written in Delphi (Pascal) so I doubt it.

The first thing that comes to mind (and this may be really good news)
is what ASIO driver is he using? The right one for his audio
interface? And if his audio interface is the built in motherboard
audio, that's probably his problem. Just get a decent USB Focusrite
interface or something and have him switch to that for making music,
switch back to Realtek mobo audio (or whatever chip is there) when
playing games if there is an advantage to do so (probably will
actually sound better through a good audio interface).

And he may need to experiment with buffer size and latency settings
for whatever ASIO driver he is using. I don't know how much of this
is CaptainObvious info, it might be stuff he's already explored.. but
yeah out of the box on a brand new PC, its probably going to be
something like Realtek ASIO and that will certainly suck and spike the
CPU meter.

Just remember that in FLStudio and most DAWs, the CPU meter seen
inside the software is not a representation of total CPU on the system
or of what you'll see if you load Task Manager.