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XFX RX 570 RS Thermal Pad Thickness

Thermal Throttling on the RX 570 when Folding@Home

I have been using my XFX RX 570 RS with Folding@Home during the COVID-19 pandemic. I noticed the GPU temperature was hitting 90°C and not going below ~ 50°C when idle with the GPU’s fans off. The GPU clock was running slower than expected in the range of ~ 1100 Mhz to ~1150 MHz. The RX 570 was obviously thermal throttling as articles I found indicating that 69°C to 74°C was typical for this GPU when under a heavy workload.

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Adding Wifi and Bluetooth to the Dell Optiplex 9020M

The simple solution is using a USB adaptor

The Dell Optiplex 9020M is a tiny office PC about 7 inches square by 1.4 inches thick. The 9020M specifications mention that some versions ship with an optional Wifi and Bluetooth (Intel Dual Band Wireless-AC 7260) WLAN card.

The 9020M I bought didn’t come with any internal Wifi or Bluetooth connectivity. The simple way to add these features would be to buy one or two USB adaptors and insert them into any of the two front or four rear USB 3.0 ports.

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Giving socket 775 Windows 10 desktops a second life with a cheap Xeon CPU

This blog post covers a span of five years, where I try and succeed to keep my customers Veriton M275 still functional and not an irritatingly slow experience when using Windows.

It starts off with some background info and then gives my preferred low-cost solution to the problem of your Intel socket 775 dual-core CPU being a bottleneck in your decade-old Windows 10 desktop PC. I end up falling for the Xeon L5420’s charms that I’m on a mission to upgrade every Core 2 Duo I find!

PC’s from 2010 have struggled with Windows since 2015

Around 2010 my client bought a Packard Bell PC from PC World. It had 2 GB of ram and an E3300 Dual-Core CPU. She contacted me in 2015 after her 5-year service contract with PC World had ended. Her PC was running slow under Windows 7 and she wanted to replace her PC. She wanted advice about which new PC to buy and so I visited her home to check out her existing hardware.

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