LI Staff' Post

How to Diagnose and Improve In-game Lag, Latency, and Access Issues

How to Diagnose and Improve In-game Lag and Latency Issues

It is safe to say that PC gaming is vastly different to console gaming. Players on PC have a much greater ability to customize and refine their experience, and the most powerful PCs put consoles to shame in terms of the quality of the experience that they offer.

However, with the almost infinite number of potential hardware and software combinations for PC gamers, there are pitfalls to be avoided.

Developers can’t account for every possibility when they are testing their games for bugs. Developers also can’t optimize their brand new games to run on computer parts from many years ago. Similarly, internet connections sometimes don’t live up to the standards promised. This is why you should be prepared to research around to find the best internet plan. This means scouring locally to find the right one for you. And finally, certain games may end up being restricted to certain areas of the world for various reasons.

Whether your problem is related to your graphics processing power, the quality of your internet connection, or something else entirely—there are a number of ways you can try to fix these issues. We’re going to go through some of the most important ways in this article.

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What is a Mechanical Keyboard? Guide to Buying a Mechanical Keyboard

mechanicalkeyboard

Your keyboard is the part of your computer with which you have the most contact. But despite all the time many people spend with their keyboards, very few consider the variety of choices available.

So, what options are there for your keyboard, and how do you know when you’ve found the right keyboard for you? Are you looking for the best cheap mechanical keyboard or a gaming keyboard? And what are these “mechanical” keyboards you keep hearing about?

Read on to get an intro to mechanical keyboards, or just watch this video:

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What’s an SSD? Here’s everything you need to know (with video)

For a long time, the only way to store information on your PC in a long term, easily accessible manner, was to use a hard drive disk, which is a technology that dates all the way back to the 1950s. The refrigerator-sized IBM 305 computers shown below held 3.75 megabytes of data each, which is just about the amount of data used to store one photo taken by a modern mobile phone.

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The Ultimate Guide to Buying a Computer Mouse

The average PC user spends several hours a day touching a computer mouse, making it one of the most critical computer peripherals. And yet, few PC users spend much time considering mice before purchasing one that they’ll end up using for years. It can be interesting to learn more about specific models of a mouse at places similar to Review Loft, check them out.

Today, PC users have an enormous variety of mice to choose from, as well as numerous factors to consider before choosing the best mouse for them. Everyone’s hand is a little different, so it makes sense that different hands may prefer different mice.

This guide should serve as a primer to help find your hand the best possible mouse companion. We’ve separated the guide into four sections based on the four main criteria to consider when selecting a mouse: comfort, precision, button layout, and extra features.

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PC Cable Management 101

This article was a team effort by the Logical Increments staff and Micah Dilse (@vidyajunkie)

An important and sometimes overlooked step to building your own PC is cable management. It may seem trivial, but good cable management can keep your computer running cooler and faster, and lengthen the time between cleanings. All the cables inside your case – especially ones with webbing – are major dust magnets. Any chassis, from the $30 entry-level boxes to the fortress disguised as the Corsair 900D, can give you cable management options. With good cable management, you get better airflow (keeping your components cooler), and minimize dust buildup (also keeping your components cooler). The Speedtech International company is a manufacturer for custom Velcro cable tie fabrication or custom printed cable ties which will be great for cable management.

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Clean cable management by Reddit user OriginSuperKingXero.

There are three important elements to good cable management:

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A Tale of Logical Increments

Greetings, traveler. Sit ye down, have a cup of dark coffee, and hearken to my tale.

I have enjoyed tinkering with technology for as long as I can remember. I roasted my first PC at the age of 12, by playing around with the PSU switch. During my university stay, I assembled several computers for both myself and for my friends, since none of them really cared much about technology: They just wanted to play. 

In the early months of 2010, I noticed that many people had a problem getting specific builds for specific budgets. While it is easy to find an answer to “What is the best CPU for $200?” it is not as easy to get “The best build for $800.”

Many people came to /g/ for advice, and I started collecting sample builds from various “build advice” threads. After a few months, it was clear that some items were much more likely to be suggested than others, and some advice (e.g. get a quality PSU) was constantly repeated to people new to PC buying and assembly. I thought it would be nice if /g/’s advice could be compiled into a simple source, so that people could get as much info as needed (for a novice), without having to wait for a nice person to make a build and give advice. This was what prompted me to compile the Logical Increments PC buying guide.

The guide has a list of PC builds, each with a descriptive name, ranging in price from less than USD$300 to over USD$2000. Each tier is slightly better than the one before it, either by having more powerful components, or higher quality components. There is also a list of infoboxes, describing some aspects of each component that you should watch out for when making a purchasing decision. The components selection and advice are compiled from /g/, and from PC-related websites and articles.

/g/’s advice proved to be of extremely high quality, and as a result, the guide received nearly 2 million views, and continues to get several thousand views every month. It is also featured in several websites as a “sticky” for users to refer to, since it answers many questions that novices may ask. /g/ as a whole is knowledgeable, intelligent, resourceful, well-read, and often quite helpful.

Over the last two years, the number of tiers has increased, and the infoboxes increased too. The guide is in .png form, and cannot exceed 5000 pixels, leading to space constraints. An image needs to be hosted, and photobucket has a long URL, and tinyURL was banned on /g/. A .png cannot have links, nor can it have collapsible items. With more requests for more things, it is inevitable that one day the guide moves to a proper site. An exceedingly nice gentleman who wishes to be known as Orion has shouldered the burden of creating the site (design, hosting, testing etc, were all done by him), and we are now ready to transition to a proper website, instead of one static image.

So please do take a moment to let us know if the new layout is to your liking, and if it is not, then tell us how we can improve it. If there are any features you like, let us know too. It is our hope to take all the elements that made the guide good, and expand them further, while still having an easy-to-remember URL.

Thanks for reading!

– The Falcon

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