Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Tag: graphics card

  • New graphics card setup adventures

    Throughout the week I have been making little updates and modifications to the Substack post for this week. All of that pre-work was really smart this week to help ensure quality for the next issue of The Lindahl Letter that will come up on Friday. Right now this computer is running my new ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti graphics card that arrived yesterday. Overall it is much louder than my last graphics card and it required a totally different power cable setup. I had to do some work in terms of cable management yesterday to get ready for the graphics card installation. A trip was made to the basement to find the bag of extra Corsair modular power supply cables and fortunately they had included a lovely Corsair Type-4 PCIe 6+2 cable. With the right cable in hand the only challenge was removing the power supply shroud in my award winning Dark Base Pro 900 Black rev. 2 from the “be quiet!” computer case. Right now the shroud has been put back into place without the middle section 3.5” solid state hard drive section. That space now supports a direct path for the power cable to run up to the graphics card. At some point, it might be prudent to do some better cable management, but that will be a project for later. Everything works right now and that is good. 

    All of this brought me to the world of trying to figure out and manage my myriad of case fans. I’m still shocked that my Windows 11 instance does not have an easy way to manage computer temperatures. I installed the software associated with my motherboard manufacturer to examine and control the fan speeds. After looking at that dashboard for a few minutes I installed the ASUS GPU Tweak II software. That was easier to understand and it had a few profiles related to gaming and silent modes. The GPU temperature scale goes from zero up to 131 degrees celsius which would be insanely hot. According to the docked monitor my graphics card is running with a minimum of 38 and a maximum of 49 degrees celsius. I have been watching it for a few minutes and it appears to be running at around 39 degrees which seems fine.

  • A new graphics card arrives today

    A trajectory statement was reviewed at the start of the day. You can consider today day 1 of 7 within that challenge. I’m considering printing out the trajectory statement written on September 18, 2021 to make it easier to complete that challenge. 

    Trajectory statement:

    Tomorrow will be considered in due time. Be present in the moment and strive to make a lasting contribution to the academy today. Review your research paper progress grid and make substantial progress on a section today. Remember to unlock your potential by taking the time to focus on delivering by closing out objectives.

    Before starting the day review your core beliefs:

    1. A vibrant civil society is intrinsic to a functioning society. 
    2. The intersection of technology and modernity will fundamentally change what it means to be human. 
    3. We have to learn more than we lose to be successful. 
    4. Kindness foments civility. 
    5. We have to work to understand and consider intergenerational equity within policy decisions.

    An alert from Newegg arrived yesterday and it turns out I had won a Newegg Shuffle for popular products. Alerts from both the Newegg application on my smartphone arrived via push notification and an email of congratulations arrived in my inbox. It turns out that I won the right to buy an ASUS branded TUF gaming GeForce RTX 3070 Ti 8GB GDDR6X graphics video card. Pretty much every day I open the Newegg Shuffle website in a browser tab to watch the countdown window and enter the contest to be able to buy a graphics card. Over the course of the last few months I might have missed a few shuffle events by accident. You have a limited amount of time to enter the shuffle. Sometimes I would just miss the window. It would have been easy enough to set up an automatic entry system, but that seemed wrong given my interest in playing fair in the question for a new graphics card.

    However, this time around randomness was on my side and victory occurred. Later today this very computer right here in front of me will be powered by the latest generation of Nvidia graphics card technology. You might be wondering if I had to buy one of those horrible power supplies they were bundling with it. Fortunately, the answer to that question is a hard no. For me the bundle in question included a new ASUS ROG computer case. It looks like a nice enough computer case. I’ll probably try to sell it or just put it in the basement for my next computer build. 

    My current computer case is the award winning Dark Base Pro 900 Black rev. 2 from the “be quiet!” case building company. Obviously, based on my purchase of an award winning computer case within the last year I do not need the new case being shipped, but I have been trying to buy a new graphics card with the latest Nvidia RTX 30 series standard since they released the GeForce RTX 3090 on Thursday September 24, 2020. Which as you can tell from the date of this missive was about a year ago. To be more exact it was roughly 4 days short of an entire year of trying to get one of these graphics cards. I’m rather excited about testing out this new graphics card later today.