October Brain Dump

draft post subject to revision

Fix: Destiny 2 “Exodus Black” crash

As described at Bungie Support Forum threads 237011971 (NVIDIA) and 237140332 (AMD), as well as innumerable other threads on various forums.

TL;DR: The solution seems to have turned out to be temporarily underclocking the GPU Memory. I turned it down (from 1250MHz) to the same as the GPU’s core speed (1050MHz) and that was enough to fix it.

Confounders, specs, and other bonus info:

Continue Reading Fix: Destiny 2 “Exodus Black” crash

PCIe to PCI adapters

to avoid replacing the motherboard whose integrated sound is dying, and also actually use my cool and nice retro sound card from 2000 again (it still sounds better than every integrated [cheapest-bid OEM Realtek integrated soundcard in discarded office equipment] I’ve ever heard!), losing which was perhaps the biggest downside to upgrading from my previous computer.

(Previously, on “my motherboard is failing component-by-component”)

  • Asmedia 1083-based aftermarket adapter [sintech{Amazon}]
    • Somewhat well-known, it seems, for being integrated into motherboards by reputable manufacturers who want to provide a legacy PCI slot when the CPU/northbridge/southbridge/whatever doesn’t “natively” support it
    • PLENTY{Amazon}{Newegg} of other companies sell equivalent packagings of this chip, so you can take your pick
    • …of a bunch of identical knockoffs, none of which make it possible to use a full-height PCI chip without buying a separate riser cable.
  • Pericom PI7C9X111SL-based aftermarket adapter [sintech{Amazon}] [StarTech{Amazon}{Newegg}]
    • The chipset apparently supports turning a PCIe_x1 slot into two PCI ports
    • Adapters based on it are about twice as expensive, but may not need a separate riser cable, so weigh the costs.
    • For some reason, the chipset name is never associated with the product listing in an indexable way (title, description, etc), so you can’t just search for “PI7C9X111SL” and get usable results (though Amazon has a few overpriced listings for “PI7C9X”)
    • A lot less common, it looks like only 2 manufacturers actually made aftermarket boards around this; though the fact that it’s never mentioned in product titles/descriptions means it’s highly likely that my limited “investigation” for other packages returned a false negative.
    • StarTech’s implementation only provides one PCIe slot, and suffers from the same “no-flex” syndrome as the Asmedia-based adapters. (Who has half-height PCI cards, anyway?)
    • sintech’s implementation uses a cable with physical USB3 A-A form factor as a riser/flex to connect the PCIe port to the chip without requiring a separate riser cable. THIS IS NOT ELECTRICALLY USB. IT IS, ELECTRICALLY, PCIe. DO NOT PLUG A USB DEVICE INTO THIS; AS YOU CAN SEE, THE PCIe DAUGHTERBOARD DOES NOT HAVE ANY ICs ON IT, SO THERE’S NO WAY IT’S BEING CONVERTED TO USB.

BACK ONLINE

We’re back. Here’s a quick summary of important events:

Running, this time, on RancherOS because there’s no reason for me to be doing anything as root on my machines (I’ll just break stuff lol).

Also, up, is a git server, which I intend to keep much more stable from here on out. (Pardon the jenky SSH access; but you don’t care about that yet anyway since it’s not got public account creation. haha.)

Next project connected to the git server: a CI server providing a super-duper easy interface to build Android apps with. Every SDK is a flaming nuclear cluster garbagefire, but at if it’s a) contained in a container, AND b) “out of sight, out of mind” (that is, I only interact with it by pushing code to my nice clean Git server), then that’s about as cancer-free as it’s going to get.

For those of you who have admirably failed to partake in Zuckerbook (consider me pre-doxed), thereby missing out on the (deeply regrettable) “Facebook Exclusive” content I’ve been producing, the paragraph to follow comprises my reparations (and I plan to not make any more FB-exclusive content from here on out). Then again, 99% of my “content” so far is just sharing links to articles, so I will most likely adopt a “batch” model like Scott’s, for sharing links (That is the best blog in the world, though; be sure to check it out if you haven’t. Those “Links” posts are just one part of the stuff he curates.)