She came home today, and I was shocked at the size of the parcel. In my girlpla modeling career spanning several years, Shingen Kai is easily the largest box that I've ever seen, around 14" by 13". The height on the slimmer side though.
In the market for a new phone to upgrade from my tired S23 Plus that I've been using since 2023. In my country, the S25 and 17T are very similar in price. I'm a casual user who doesn't do anything taxing on my phones (e.g. heavy gaming or productivity), just browsing the web and social media, watching videos, and taking photos of events (people, indoor and outdoor functions), close-up shots of objects (toys, collectibles, food, products), and scenery/landscapes. So my main concerns are camera quality and versatility, display quality, and battery life. I want to hang on to this phone for as long as possible so software support is important to me too.
For the S25, all of my previous phones have been Samsungs (S5, Note 9, S23 Plus) so I'm already very used to the ecosystem and can start using it straight away. Going for the Xiaomi will involve a bit of a learning curve. It's also lighter and more compact, which will be good for bringing it outside. On the other hand, the battery life is much shorter but I always charge my phones every day or every two days anyway. Also, when I got the S23 Plus the "bananagate" issue came up and my phone was affected, will I see the same issue on the S25?
I haven't used a Xiaomi phone before so I don't know how the camera quality is like, but most reviews say it's pretty excellent for most situations. The huge battery and battery life sounds amazing too. But the 17T is about the same size as my S23 Plus, which I hate bringing outside since it's tricky to hold and use with one hand. Also have no idea about HyperOS and how it compares to OneUI.
I bought the Biostar Z890 Valkyrie because it was on sale and had three PCIe 5.0 slots connected to the CPU (x16 or x8/x8 or x8/x4/x4), which I thought would be great for running dual GPUs for LLM inference. The problem is that now I want to add a SATA expansion card to the bottom PCIe slot, but this will drop the middle slot to x4 speeds. Would I see a performance hit for inference if I run the two GPUs in x8/x4 mode, both when the model if fully loaded into VRAM and when I have to use partial offloading?
Warning, long post ahead!
This is my first ever DIY desktop using the Jonsbo Z20 and a mishmash of parts that probably make no sense to most people.
After using prebuilt desktops and then laptops for the past 30 years, I wanted to replace my current gaming laptop with a new desktop and also wanted to try building my own. I've been slowly collecting the parts for my main PC, but a few months ago I came across an [old computer](https://i.imgur.com/KUuw6EP.jpg) that someone in my apartment block threw away. Sitting next to the dustbin, it was awaiting its fate with the incinerator in the next few hours. I took it home, cleaned up the parts and tested it, and found that it was still working. It was an Intel i5-7500 with 16GB of DDR4-2666 RAM and a GTX 1070.
I decided to try building something simple with the salvaged parts to get my feet wet with PC building before building my main rig later. In hindsight, I should have chosen a bigger case than the Z20 for a more pleasant first build. I tried my best but I think my cable management sucks. Still waiting for a video cable to come in from Amazon so I can hook it up to a portable monitor and install Linux on it.
This is purely going to be a secondary/spare/light-use PC and not a daily driver. I am under no illusion that this will be a gaming beast in 2026 with parts that are this old. Maybe I might have even wasted money on e-waste. But it was a good learning experience and I learned lots of things to do and not do when the time comes to build my main PC later. And I guess I just didn't want the old parts to die in a landfill somewhere.
Parts: The salvaged parts were the CPU, GPU, and RAM. The used part was the motherboard (Asus Prime B250M-Plus). The new parts were the PSU (XPG Core Reactor II VE 850W), SSD (Transcend MTE115S 500GB), the fans (Deepcool), cooler (Thermalright Assassin X 120 Refined SE), and a Wifi card.
Some miscellaneous build notes:
That's it. Feel free to roast me or make fun of my Franken-PC.
I've been using my 15.6" laptop together with a small 14" portable monitor as a secondary display via USB-C for a while now. Today the laptop's screen died with a huge black area in the middle and lots of black and white lines around it. Luckily, I managed to use Windows Display Settings to set the portable monitor as the main display using "Show only on 2" before the laptop's monitor broke.
So the current setup is the portable monitor being the only working screen for now and I haven't turned the laptop off or restarted it yet, I was wondering about a few things. I'm just too nervous about doing anything else in case I do something irreversible.
On boot until the Windows login screen, will it display to the external monitor since I already set it to the main display in Windows?
I have another 15.6" portable monitor coming in soon that I want to replace the smaller 14" one with. Can I just unplug the 14" external monitor and plug in the 15.6" one as the new Display 2 without affecting anything in Windows, since the 14" is currently the only working display? Should I set the display settings to duplicate first before doing the switch?
I have a Biostar Z890 and the last BIOS update was from May 2025, although the chipset, Intel Management Engine, and some other stuff were updated in March of this year (2026). I sent Biostar an email asking if there was going to be a BIOS update to support the new Intel CPUs, and I got a reply saying that the latest BIOS already supports the 250K Plus and 270K Plus, which to be honest seems hard to believe since it predates the Arrow Lake refresh by almost a year, how is that possible?
Before I go out and spend money on one of the new CPUs, I was wondering if anybody tried dropping them into their existing motherboard without flashing the latest BIOS. Not necessary a Biostar board, but any Z890 or B860 board.
