I don’t know the brand but from the reviews it is decent, and pretty much the same price as similarly spec’d monitors, so I am sure you will be happy with it. It even has some extra USB ports, which may come handy for charging etc, though personally I don’t like cables dangling from the side.
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I’m of the opinion that 2k is fine.
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Well today a 32inch 4k screen was switched on at cyberport. It is big but also very impressive. I didnt see any pixels but I saw some „steps“ and the image was slightly blurry. I think that was because the wrong display resolution was set in Windows.
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Like color banding? Or what steps do you mean
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No, not banding, I mean when there is a diagonal line and you see tiny steps.
Oh like jagged line edges from the lack of antialiasing.
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Exactly.
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FWIW, with modern high resolution screens you are unlikely to see pixels in any context without a magnifying glass. Almost all displays are at least decent now, you have to make an effort to find something really bad.
Sigh. I have seen that a lot too. It beats me my why Windows doesn’t just default to the native resolution when you plug in a display.
I am equally puzzled why monitors even advertise their non-native resolutions. Yes, I have this QHD display, but please do set it to VGA, because I have 1990s nostalgia? (I get it that sometimes people want scaling. But graphics cards do it effortlessly.)
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I heard that monitors are 60Hz by default too. Why not set the highest available refresh rate?
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Sometimes that puts the GPU into a higher-power state.
Personally my dev and photo editing desktop has 60hz 4k monitors (24 and 27") with no scaling.
My gaming machine has a 24" 1080p240 with backlight strobing for super clean motion.
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Well most of the displays on view at Cyberport and Mediamarkt are like fullhd @ 27 inch, so there you definitely do see the pixels.
And of course 1080p on a 4K screen looks much more jaggedy than on a 1080p screen.
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Well, at least the pixels do not need any interpolation for fractional scaling. I remember using 1600×900 on a 1080p screen so that I could get the scaling right (fractional scaling was pretty poor on Linux back then – a lot of the software was blurry). It was less sharp, but on a 15.6" screen it was much more comfortable size-wise
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Well maybe upgrading to 32gb of ram is moremreasonable given the fact that the computer is already 5 years old. Even though…. it seems to be in a good shape, Temperatures are fine. It wasnt used ever day. Processor is Ryzen 7 5800X - it is realistic to use it 4 or 5 more years? Or are 2-3 more realistic?
Btw, AI „thinks“ comsidering current ram prices, I should ignore the 64 gb kits.
I upgraded my 5 year old T14 from 32 to 48gb*. But that was a year ago when memory prices were still not crazy (actually, I don’t know what they are now).
The Ryzen 7 PRO 4750U still rocks. But the integrated gpu struggles with heavy tasks.
*Did I need it? Not really. There’s a case use for running local LLMs but it’s pointless without a decent gpu.
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Or 10? That’s a pretty decent CPU and I would just keep using it.
You can get maybe a 10–20% user-facing performance gain for CPUs (not benchmarks, but how fast things are practically) by spending quite a bit of money. Similarly for RAM, the gains are there, but incremental.
We have a lot of similar conversations with colleagues (about updating infrastructure for scientific computing, on the scales of 20–50 kEUR) and in almost all cases the answer is just “wait it out” in almost all cases for equipment no more than a decade old. Everyone is hoping that prices will revert at some point.
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Well eventually I will have to renew the thermal paste, right? Thats definitely something I am extremely afraid of, but on the other hand, you cannot risk much with a 7 or 8 year sold pc, right? There is not very much financial damage if I break it. But if I am successful, I save the money for a new machine.
Yes, definitely. FWIW, I usually take the machine to a computer shop to have this done. Most places can do it while you wait.
Yes, I know I could learn to do it, but for me it is like replacing the headset crown race in a bike: something I would need to do very, very rarely, that requires specialized tools and knowledge, so what the heck, that’s what bike shops are for.
I would not think in terms of the price of the old parts, but about the need to get a new computer, so I would consider the damage significant. Personally I would take it to a shop, even though I have done it myself before.
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On a desktop it’s extremely easy. Unscrew heat sink, remove it, clean the CPU heatspreader with alcohol, let it dry, reapply paste, screw it back in. In laptops it gets a little more complicated.
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Erm… I have never done it.
But what I did, when I added RAM and replaced the battery by myself, is opening up the Thinkpad for the first time, which was scary but assisted by plenty of online videos. It was also the chance to clean up a lot of dust (the fans were obscenely dirty).
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