Tech Ramblings: Don't Put Thermal Paste in Your CPU Socket/R9 380 Still Has It

 

For no reason in particular, other than I wanted to, I removed my Wraith Prism cooler from my Ryzen 7 3700x yesterday to clean it and add new thermal paste. During the cleaning process, I accidentally got some thermal paste in my motherboard's cpu socket. According to the internet, the next step was using a toothbrush and rubbing alcohol to remove the paste. So that's what I did, and after about fifteen minutes, I put my cpu back in and attempted to start my computer, dumb ass that I am. Well, nothing happened, because I have a good motherboard, and the wet alcohol on the cpu pins prevented (I'm assuming) my board from detecting a cpu, which meant it wouldn't power on. This safety precaution prevented my frying my board. After removing the cpu again, I called a local computer repair guy and he recommended putting a fan on the socket to evaporate the alcohol. Melancholy and convinced that I had either ruined a 300 dollar cpu or a 200 dollar motherboard, I went home and sat my computer in front of a fan. A couple hours later, my pc booted up, no worse for wear despite my stupidity. Lesson of the day, folks: moisture is bad for electronics. Also, don't fuck up computer parts in the middle of an electronics shortage.

In other news, I decided to mod my MSI 5700 xt Evoke OC, because it shipped with memory thermal pads that only covered about forty percent of two of the memory chips. Unfortunately, I took it apart before I received my thermal pads, so I stole my old R9 380 out of my parents' pc. It's doing surprisingly well! Retro shooter Amid Evil runs great at 1440p and High settings, while Red Dead Redemption 2, which I thought would be completely unplayable, averages around 47 frames per second at 1440p, with a mix of low and medium settings (textures at Ultra). I'm redownloading Doom Eternal to give it a go. Because of the ridiculous graphics card shortage, this old beast is worth far more than it would have been a year ago. I can't even find it in stock anywhere, but if you can get one somewhere for cheap, it's still a decent card, as long as you don't expect too much. From what you'd think reading the internet, if you're not rocking a 3090 and Threadripper, you're a piece of shit. Honestly, a smooth experience around forty frames per second is more than what most of the last-gen consoles offered. Go fire up an N64 and Goldeneye to see how far we've come. Twenty frames a second was playable when I was a kid. Now I'm going to go yell at a cloud or do something similarly odd.

Red Dead Redemption 2 at mostly low/medium settings. Looks great!