Hello all,

So I built a new rig with some of the great CPU bundle deals that came along recently, and now I'm enjoying Cyberpunk with the absolutely glorious pathtracing+DLSS combo - thoroughly enjoying it. I've been customizing a lot of the keybindings to my exact preferences by editing the InputUserMappings.xml and UserSettings.json files and have been able to figure everything out except one.

I have installed a number of mods, one of which allows me to customize the first person driving camera to be much better for my setup. One thing I cannot change, however, is radio volume while I'm in the car.

So, I was wondering if it's possible to make a new keybinding that changes the CarRadioVolume setting in UserSettings.json up and down. Ideally, I'd bind it to my mousewheel so it would be like having a volume knob while I'm driving around. There are also some keybinds located in this same file, but they are a different type of value (a name) whereas the CarRadioVolume is an int value. I have not seen any other settings that are of the type I'm trying to make: a keybind that changes an int value up and down. If I did, I'd just try and copy that.

So, as someone very unfamiliar with programming, I was wondering if this is even possible to make a keybind for this without making a mod/extra script to do it? Or does the game's engine/logic have to already have this type of keybind built into it in order to edit it? Thanks in advance for any info!

So I'm in the market at the moment for a GPU upgrade. I haven't spent a dumb amount of money on something stupid in a while now and I'm thinking this Christmas season is the time. My only problem is, I've been really out of the loop since the Great Shortage. I've heard AMDs cards these days are actually more than complete jokes, and NVIDIA has been getting too big-headed and making some poor consumer choices. So a switch to AMD sounds like it might be viable for me.

At the moment, I've got an RTX 2070 8GB. I've read that lately, games have been utilizing VRAM like crazy so I want to bolster my numbers on that front. Was looking at 12GB cards since the 24GB ones are all ludicrously priced. At the moment, I'd say my budget is around 500/600 USD. Is AMD worth switching to at the moment? Or should I go for something like a 4060?

November's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Any advice should be suitable for a non tech person who knows how to google and follow instructions but not code in any way.

Can anyone suggest which firewall and or antivirus might be best? All suggestions for making life easier while dealing with a new machine are welcome.

I am a pretty big fan of the PCMR Battle station posts where everyone shares their computers and desk setups. I have never seen one here so I figured I would start one!

Here is my desk, three 32" monitors (two facing the desk, one facing my living room on the back ). I primarily use my lower monitor and have background stuff on the upper (spotify, torrent client, youtube, podcasts, winamp, twitch, discord, etc etc). I have a bunch of old Xbox360 controllers and enjoy playing PC games on the couch on my rear monitor (as well as streaming obviously). The rear monitor also has a firestick and my only source of sound (other than my headset) is an Amazon Echo (which also controls my living room lights). The PC is a prebuilt from iBUYPOWER, it was my first time buying a prebuilt (I was hesitant to do so) and the only reason I did was because I was wanting to build a new rig right as crypto mining was driving up the cost of everything and I was able to get a great deal on this one. So far it has performed great. I still have two RAM slots open so I think that is the next thing I am gonna do.

I built my last computer in 2008 so I was way overdue for a new one and my S.O. has informed me I went a little overboard =)

9200 i7-8700K 6-Core 3.7 GHz | Liquid Cooled | Z370 Motherboard| GeForce GTX 1070 | 16GB DDR4| 1TB HDD | 240GB SSD |

Lets see what you guys have!

EDIT: sorry for the low picture quality, my cell phone is garbage.

EDIT2: forgot to include a screenshot

It's the same background on all three, but the taskbar is basic on the two secondary (and icons are only on the main). And if anyone was confused about the random monitor hanging off of the back of my desk this kinda shows it better.

The new Forza Motorsport has released to the masses as of today, and has been available to those who paid extra for premium upgrades and the like for about a week. I got it via Xbox Gamepass and played about an hour of it this morning, and so far it feels like a nice return to form for the series, which hasn't seen a new non-Horizon edition since Forza Motorsport 7 in 2017.

That game had some baggage with the card system/gambling mechanics, and I'm glad to see none of that thus far in the new Forza Motorsport - which, you may have noticed, has dropped the number. There's a feeling that Microsoft/Turn 10 may be aiming to make this something of a long-term platform play rather than just another game in the series.

I'm enjoying it so far, and after playing Forza Horizon 4 and 5 a lot since FM7 came out, I'm glad to have the return to more traditional circuit racing, and absolutely do not miss the supremely annoying voiced characters from those games.

The thing I most immediately noticed upon playing the game (besides the graphics, which are a real showcase for the Xbox Series X or a sufficiently beefy PC) is the new upgrade/tuning system, which requires you to actually spend time driving a specific car in order to unlock the various upgrade parts for it. You earn car points for doing things like clean racing and fast lap times, which you can then spend on upgrade parts between races. The game keeps calling those CP, which makes me think that nobody at Turn 10 has spent any time on the internet. An unfortunate acronym...

I'm curious to know what everyone's opinion on this game is. I know a lot of the audience is turned off by the more sim-like/boring nature of the Forza Motorsport games versus the arcade fantasy for the Horizon games, but I'm very much on the FM side of that divide.

October's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Hello everyone, my CPU died and I'm at a crossroads and hoping for some advice. I bought my rig 4 years ago second-hand. It was originally built in 2017 using high-end parts. It was not something I was looking for TBH, but at the time GPUs were hard to get and it was a crazy deal. Here is what's left of the rig:

• Motherboard - ASUS x99 Deluxe II, fits Intel i7 LGA2011-v3 CPU socket
• PSU - EVGA Supernova 850 T2
• RAM - 32GB, 4 sticks of G.Skill Trident Z 3200 DDR4
• GPU - EVGA 1080 Ti Founder's Edition 11 GB
• Case - In Win 904 plus - large and spacious case
• Storage - Couple of Samsung SSDs
• CPU Cooler - Have ditched the Corsair AIO, picked up a lowest tier fan for $10 to keep it booting while I figure out what to do

Options I'm floating.

1. Get a compatible CPU, but that socket is harder to come by for my MOBO and likely to be second hand + get a new CPU cooler, and upgrade GPU.
2. Replace MOBO, GPU, and get a new CPU and CPU cooler. The PSU is 6 years old but it's decent quality and 850 watts should be enough?

Price range/goals:

• Happy to spend a bit on something that is mid to slightly upper range, but not high end. Thinking $$ will go into the GPU and CPU (maybe $600-800 USD ea?), something reasonably good that's just before the latest gen to get a discounted price. If replacing MOBO, something simple and medium range would be ideal.
• Play some current AAA games like Baulder's Gate 3 and Elden Ring decently, at medium-high settings (not ultra), and don't need super high FPS.
• Ideally supports 4k resolution for desktop use but for gaming I'd be mostly sticking to 1440p/1080p.
• I don't want to overclock (those days are over)
• Likely to sell in 2ish years, don't need heaps of futureproofing
• If replacing MOBO, open to going to the AMD ecosystem for price/performance ratio. I've only ever used Intel so know less about AMD systems.
• Don't need raytracing, DDR5
• For CPU cooler I don't mind AIO but if anyone has any non-water cooled recommendations I'm all ears

I'm at a bit of a loss at what to do, and there are not many PC-building threads here on Tildes, so I thought I'd ask for some advice. Anyone have opinions on option 1 or 2 above, or is there a third option I'm not thinking of? And does anyone have part recommendations? Thanks in advance.

It's seems to have been common sense for a while now that Windows has good-enough security software that you don't need 3rd party tools but is it actually the case now? Is there anything to lose or gain from trusting 3rd party with this stuff?

September's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Developer:

• Team Reptile (Megabyte Punch, Lethal League, Lethal League Blaze)

Platforms:

• Steam, GOG, Nintendo Switch (August 18)
• PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Xbox One (September 1)

Trailers:

• Official Release Trailer
• Official Special Trailer

Reviews:

• OpenCritic page

Description:

Team Reptile brings you Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, a future world from the mind of Dion Koster where self-styled graffiti crews equipped with personal boostpacks are battling each other for control of the streets. Start your own cypher and dance, paint graffiti, collect beats, combo your tricks and face off with the cops to stake your claim to the sprawling metropolis of New Amsterdam.

(What the official description won’t say is that this game is an unofficial love letter to Jet Set Radio on the Dreamcast and Jet Set Radio Future on the Xbox. Hideki Naganuma even contributed new songs to the soundtrack.)

As an amateur photographer, I'm looking for recommendations to improve my process for reviewing and selecting the best photos from my albums.

Currently, it goes something like this:

• (after I copy the photos to my PC) I open the folder containing the album
• I open the first photo and start looking at the pictures using the default photo viewing app
• I note mentally, on paper, or in a digital notepad the names of the files that I like the most
• manually select the files that I noted down

My ideal workflow would be something like:

• open the folder, open first photo, look through them all
• each time I see a picture that I like, hit space or some other simple shortcut, which adds the picture to the current selection
• after I am done viewing, I have all the files that I want already selected to do with as I please

I have tried multiple apps over the years but I haven't come across anything that had something similar, or I was too stupid to figure out how to do it. The workflow I described is using windows/linux, on macOS it's even more cumbersome (since one needs to select all photos in a folder before previewing them).

Do you have any recommendations for an app that has functionality like this, or if not, on how I can make my workflow better?

Thanks

August's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

*Both games that are marked as unsupported on Steam Deck on Steam itself are reported as working on Linux on ProtonDB.

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

I'm looking at starting to do a PC build and I'm a bit lost on which way to go CPU wise.

Proposed use case: linux, some gaming (usually older games), possibly trying to learn home lab/self hosting types of things probably in a VM but nothing really heavy. I do want to run Starfield when it comes out and maybe be able to try VR some time in the future.

I'd like to have a bit of a future proof system while getting value for my money, as in I'd like to spend less but I will spend more if it matters. This is where I'm sort of getting lost.

I tend to lean towards Intel because VM's and multitasking should work better (I think) but people seem to believe that AMD is better bang for the buck?

I feel like I'm likely not going to swap CPU's, but RAM, GPU, and storage are easy to swap so I'm not to worried.

July's Humble Choice is now available with the following eight Steam games:

Does anyone have experience with any of the games and, if so, would you recommend them? Is there anything in here that you're particularly excited to play?

Since the minimum and recommended specs for Starfield have come out, I've been budgeting to do a big upgrade on my PC with an AMD 6800 xt and a fancy new 1 TB SSD (which is the first game I've ever seen that requires an SSD) just so I can run the game in all it's space epicness.

What was the game that you were so excited for that you made the jump to upgrade your PC to the next gen of hardware? New or old!

For every big Steam sale r/gamedealsmeta does a Hidden Gems topic which is always one of my favorites to browse through. Given that the July 1 reddit fallout is upcoming though, I figure it's worth trying to roll our own version here too.

The purpose of this thread is for game discovery: surfacing games that are hard to find about elsewhere. As such, try to recommend things that are less well-known.

For general game recommendations of all popularities, use this thread. For general Steam Sale discussion, use this thread.

Yeah that's the question. I was thinking of the possibility of posting deals here. But it might just eat up the other tech content here. That's not my goal, but I'd like to start a PC building\support\tech deals tilde.

Just got a new laptop. Downloaded firefox plus a few extensions, found a thing that fixes Windows 11's weird task bar, deleted the bundled McAfee, installed steam, GOG, and Epic and switched everything to dark mode. I feel like I'm forgetting a ton of things, but I'm not sure what.

What do you include as part of the standard setup anyone should do with a new computer?

I need to replace my Logitech G935s, the plastic on the top broke on me. Ideally I would replace with something with:

• more battery life
• better sound stage
• well built/premium feel

It's very hard to tell what is good out there - with so many options, and my concern is if I just buy any bluetooth enabled headset it will introduce audio latency which isn't something I can live with in games. But I cannot stand having a cord attached that gets all twisted up.

I'm not tied to it having an attached mic, as I can buy one separately but its a plus.

Anyone out there have any good recommendations? What does everyone else use?

Suddenly, inventory mostly works. NPCs sit on chairs (!!!) but also move and fight worth a damn. There's less lag. The game hasn't crashed for me 2 days in a row! I've run more missions than I ever have!

It can't last, right? I just jinxed it?

My Lenovo laptop and Dell desktop have subpar specs on them, so playing a AAA game from the last decade is out of the question. They struggle to run Team Fortress 2, BioShock, and Minecraft at 30 FPS, but 1990's boomer shooters and some indie titles play fairly smoothly. Here are some of the games that they can run:

• Doom (1993 to Final)
• Quake (1-3)
• Deus Ex (2000)
• Max Payne 2
• Half-Life 2 and its episodes
• Portal series
• Batman: Arkham City
• Celeste
• Hue
• The Stanley Parable
• Borderlands 2

Any suggested games would be greatly appreciated.

My main needs are:

• Not too pricey
• Very low idle power
• At least 6 x SATA

I don't need a beefy GPU (the iGPU will be more than I need) or lots of CPU performance (I'll probably pick one of the cheapest compatible CPU).

AM5 is still pretty expensive and the cheap(-ish) motherboards mostly only have 4 x SATA so I would need an extension card. But I'm considering it because 5nm vs 7nm should improve the power efficiency, right? What kind of improvements should I expect there?

Are there any other reasons to go for AM5? I might prefer it for emotional reasons (the lastest and greatest always feels better) so I could use some input from kind strangers.

I could also just wait a bit longer. When should I expect the low-end AM5 comonents to become cheaper?