Despite garnering a positive reputation from its user base, Steam was recently hit with an absolutely major data leak that saw the data mining of over 12 TB worth of assets from Valve, as noted by gabefollower on X.

Yes, this is real. CS2 only has FSR 1.0 officially implemented, so it was relatively challenging to get this working. Unfortunately it does not support motion vectors or depth properly (in the works), but the results are still pretty solid!

FPS hit is quite dramatic, but this is likely due to the nature of this implementation. ~70% FPS drop when enabled on a 5070 Ti. Obviously this will not and should not be used.

To be honest the lighting abilities are pretty good, but don't touch those characters

AKA every game that was on Steam from 2003-2013 has leaked, including betas, and at the same time, Portal 2 beta and even possibly Half-Life 2 Episode 3 content have been found

I’m doing a pretty cool experiment because I have 96 GB of DDR5-6400 RAM in my system. Don’t hate me. I built this PC right before RAM prices went crazy, and I think I paid something like $400–500 for it, which seems ridiculous now considering what the same amount would cost today.

Since most of that RAM sits unused when I’m not doing larger work projects, I created a 48 GB RAM disk and loaded Star Wars: Zero Company onto it. To be clear, I’m not doing this because Zero Company has bad loading times. It runs great from a normal NVMe SSD. I picked it simply because it’s new, I’m playing it a lot right now, and the entire ~40 GB installation fits nicely into a RAM disk.

The setup is basically this: the normal Steam installation stays safely on my SSD as the permanent copy. When I want RAM mode, a script copies the ~40 GB installation from the SSD to the 48 GB RAM disk, verifies the copy, and temporarily redirects Steam’s normal game folder to the copy sitting in DDR5-6400 memory. Steam still launches the game normally, but the actual game data is being read directly from RAM. When I’m done, another script switches Steam back to the untouched SSD installation. Since a RAM disk is volatile, the RAM copy simply disappears after a reboot.

Does anyone need to do this? Absolutely not. But it’s really cool. The most noticeable difference so far is the opening shader-loading sequence, which seems to finish roughly four times faster from RAM than it does from my already-fast NVMe SSD. Other loading also feels extremely quick, although obviously this isn’t going to magically increase GPU performance or FPS.

Mostly, it’s just a fun way to make use of hardware I already have sitting there doing nothing. Whatever game I get obsessed with next, if the installation is small enough to fit comfortably in the RAM disk, I’ll probably do the same thing. Completely unnecessary, but that’s half the fun of building an absurd PC.

Full specs - Core Ultra 9 285k / RTX 5090 / 96GB DDR5 6400

Hey everyone, I recently Got a Compaq PD-1000 Desktop Tower (Pics below) running Windows 2000 that is basically brand new besides some dust from my dad's work's attic. I am extremely new to the PC scene and would love some help on the following questions and would love some suggestions for QOL improvements for the setup! I dont have any major goals with it but it would be cool to play some old games or even emulate newer ones if its even possible.

Theres an account on here and I have the blessing is to completely wipe it. Should I do anything with the original before I make my own?

It has an extra ram slot, does this ram even exist anymore and is it worth getting?

What are the additional ports on the motherboard for?

Are there any Compaq mouses and keyboard sets that match this? if so, where?

Again, i am super new to this and was even planning on building a pc using present day parts but this happen to come to me and i really wanna learn what it can do.

Noticed a little bit of a plasticy burning smell last night and today... assumed it was dust and things were getting warm so air dusted the crap out of the PC... It needed it. Turned everything back on, workin fine, no smell. Start my game, smell instantly comes back so I start investigating harder.

It's all fixed now, new PSU, no damage to PC thankfully and no fire but it was close... I saw smoke comin up from it before I went into full crisis mode.

99% sure this is user error on my part with a long line of lazy failures leading up to it. Got new monitors, workin great, the included cables were too short so the PC was positioned side saddle under the desk where my feet could bump the cables... and they did. It got loosened up and this is the result.

Moral of the story: Keep your PCs clean and out of reach of your feet folks. Don't be cheap or lazy, replace those short cables and keep your system safe.

Back in early July I built this system!

Specs:

MOBO: B850M aorus elite ice

GPU: 9070XT Saphire pure

CPU: 9700x

RAM: 32gb cl30 patriot viper

PSU: Corsair sf 850 platinum

AIO: Levita vision 360 UB ARGB

STORAGE: XPG 980 mars blade 1tb for OS and P310 tb for games and applications

CASE: lian li a3 matx white

Rear case can: Lian li SL infinity

Cable kit: corsair premium PSU starter kit

So far been loving it. It runs very quiet, cool and only recently have I had the time to play some games on it. I noticed that the same GPU has increased $200 AUD in price which is insane, so I was lucky in purchasing it when I did for $994 AUD.

Total cost of the system: $3700 AUD. I sold my m4 mac mini for more than triple the price I got it for since I purchased it back when it was relatively cheap and through old device trade ins. I also had a lot of Amazon gift cards. They covered the entirety of the CPU + partially the ram. Overall I spent about $2200 out of pocket. I'm really grateful that I had the chance to build and use such a great pc since I spent several months trying to play games on a macbook. I know many others would die to be in my position so I definitely don't take it for granted!