Is any amount of artifacting acceptable?

I bought a mini pc MSI Cubi N ADL S with N100 cpu 10 days ago.

After installing windows 11 the screen would go black after 10-60 seconds or it would straight up reboot sometimes. There would also be occasional artifacting present and turning on high performance power plan would crank that up to 11 and even distort text on screen.

Even tried to install windows 10 which threw BSOD 2 times with VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE, dkmdn64.sys being the culprit. (installing linux mint worked completely fine which is super weird)

I wrote all that on a piece of paper and handed the pc back for an RMA.

An hour ago I received a call from the shop I bought it from that they sent it to MSI for an RMA and it came back fine (furmark testing was okay and a bunch of other tests that I can't remember) except that there would be slight artifacting at times.

I wouldn't call myself highly knowledgeable but as far as I know any artifacting is typically a sign of failing gpu. Occasionally it can be a sign of bad drivers but I tried 3 different gpu drivers (letting windows update handle it, directly from msi support page and latest from intel). In this case that would mean the integrated graphics is faulty.

I also tested the ram I used just in case but memtest passed with no issues.

There's no way in hell the RMA gets denied, right?

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 1 day ago

Is artifacting when using high performance or balanced power plan a cause for concern on low power pc?

I bought my parents a new mini pc MSI Cubi N ADL S with N100 as cpu. It had black screen issues and BSODs but I think I solved that - there were driver conflicts which were causing it I guess.

While troubleshooting I tried changing the power plan option from balanced to high performance. When selecting the Balanced option (which is on by default) you can rarely see artifacting (all sorts of colored shapes appearing when hovering over buttons/text with animations).

But when I select high performance plan this is cranked to 11. Nearly every animations makes various dots appear of all colors, some text would even get distorted and re-shaped. Screen also goes black for a split second.

Is that a cause for concern (I mean an RMA)? It's a low power mini pc and it makes sense it would cause problem if you want it to perform outside of its bounds (hence the artifacting) but I'm asking just to be sure.

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 13 days ago

Is artifacting when using high performance or balanced power plan a cause for concern on low power pc?

I bought my parents a new mini pc MSI Cubi N ADL S with N100 as cpu. It had black screen issues and BSODs but I think I solved that - there were driver conflicts which were causing it I guess.

While troubleshooting I tried changing the power plan option from balanced to high performance. When selecting the Balanced option (which is on by default) you can rarely see artifacting (all sorts of colored shapes appearing when hovering over buttons/text with animations).

But when I select high performance plan this is cranked to 11. Nearly every animations makes various dots appear of all colors, some text would even get distorted and re-shaped. Screen also goes black for a split second.

Is that a cause for concern (I mean an RMA)? It's a low power mini pc and it makes sense it would cause problem if you want it to perform outside of its bounds (hence the artifacting) but I'm asking just to be sure.

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 13 days ago

Afraid that seller will deny warranty

TL;DR at the bottom in bold.

I bought a barebones mini pc Msi cubi n adl s (N100 cpu) and put in 8gb of ram + a 500gb m.2 from previous mini pc that refused to boot up.

After windows 11 updates go through the pc black screens. Nothing works and it can only be powered down by holding the power button. After turning it on again it typically does the same thing after 10 to 60 seconds. On rare occasion it doesn't hang on black screen but it just reboots.

But if I revert the intel gpu driver from device manager (I have to do it quickly otherwise the pc black screens) that doesn't happen anymore.

I've been troubleshooting for 2 days straight. I reinstalled windows 11 like 5 times. I came to a conclusion that it's either a gpu driver that has trouble or a combination of two drivers.

I also tried linux mint and it worked flawlessly. I was curious about windows 10 too and well, same thing as on 11 but this time it would sometimes freeze and throw up a BSOD with VIDEO_TDR_FAILIURE, igdkmdn64.sys as what failed.

Bios update also did nothing and memtest passed.

What I noticed aswell is that there seems to be some artifacting appearing when hovering over buttons and other OS elements with animations and they are very visibly appearing far more often when choosing high performance power plan.

In theory then every pc with N100 should be having problems like this but I know this isn't reasonable.

I feel like I tried everything under the sun.

I'm coming to a conclusion that the integrated graphics is faulty and I'll have to RMA the pc. However I'm somewhat afraid that it will be denied because I updated the bios (dunno if that's considered as tampering) or they will use different ram+m.2 config (it's a barebones pc so I ofcourse am not sending it in with my ram and drive) and the pc will end up working fine so they'll refuse the rma.

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 13 days ago

Display driver is crashing/restarting a new pc

I bought a new mini pc for my parents. It's a mini pc MSI Cubi N ADL S-225BEU with N100 cpu. For drive and ram I used them from previous broken mini pc.

I installed windows 11 3 times.

First time I let windows 11 do it's updates after install. Pc screen was black after I came back. I figured I might aswell re-create a bootable usb and re-install the OS since the pc is empty anyway. Again same issues.

Third time is the charm, right? Guess not. I started thinking and came to a conclusion that it's either a bad cable or the driver. Well, I ruled out the cable by using another.

What's exactly the problem you may ask. Well, after the pc boots it black-screens after atleast 10 seconds. On occasion the pc would reboot but usually just turned to black screen.

Restoring the display driver to the basic microsoft one with device manager actually solves the issue. Sometimes I couldn't even make it to the device manager's driver revert button in time.

I did try the most recent drivers aswell and still same issue.

What else is there to do? Am I doing something wrong (I really hope so)?

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 14 days ago

Are N100, N200, N97, N250 cpus fine for basic office tasks?

My parents pc (i7 930 cpu) kicked the bucket so now they need a new one. They'd like a small one since it's 2026 and mini pcs are now a thing.

I see there's plenty of them on the market with N-series cpus but I'm not sure if they're better than the i7 930 they have right now. All they do on their computer is browse the internet and basic office things.

I'm looking at MSI Cubi N ADL S-225BEU barebone Intel N100 / WiFi 5 + BT 5.0 / 2x1Gbps / black for 180€.

How much can I trust this website with comparing the cpu performance?

There's also Acer Veriton NUC N1502G Intel Core 5 120U, 10 core, Iris Xe, without HDD, without RAM, without OS for 280€ but that would be overkill and paying for unnecessary cpu horsepower I think.

I do have sodimm ddr4 8gb ram stick and 500gb m.2 drive already so that's non-issue. Ofcourse I'd install windows 11 on it.

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 25 days ago

Samba doesn't show new files unless I create or modify a file from guest

I'm very much confused. I set up cachyos in in virtual machine and wanted to share a folder over that I'd use for sharing movies on local network. It was rather straightforward once I found the right way to do it.

I copied a movie into it. After connecting from my windows 10 machine nothing really showed up. So I created a new .txt file in the shared folder and refreshing suddenly made the movie show up.

Deleting the movie instantly made the it disappear when viewing the shared folder from my windows 10 machine. After that I tried again. This time I edited the .txt folder, wrote some garbage in it and saved it.

Refreshing made the movie appear again.

What's the deal here? Why can't my windows 10 machine see new files in shared folder without editing or creating the same file in it?

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 1 month ago
▲ 10 r/MiniPCs

Are N100, N200, N97, N250 cpus fine for basic office tasks?

Their previous mini asrock x300 pc with ryzen 3 4350g, 8gb ddr4 ram and 500gb m.2 just died. I'm fairly sure the motherboard on it died based on testing that I can do at home.

Technically we already have all components needed, the ram and ssd for a new mini pc. But what cpu to got for? I'm looking at barebones models and they have N100, N200, N97, N250 cpus.

The way they use their pc is very simple. 99% of time is spent with chrome and youtube open. The other 1% of time is either some simple word or excel document or maybe playing a media file (movies).

Nothing demanding. Is there in any way possible that any of cpus I mentioned above won't suffice?

I'm looking at MSI Cubi N ADL S-225BEU barebone Intel N100 / WiFi 5 + BT 5.0 / 2x1Gbps / black.

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 1 month ago

Mini pc for parents. What cpu to go for?

Their previous mini pc with ryzen 3 4350g, 8gb ddr4 ram and 500gb m.2 just died. I'm fairly sure the motherboard on it died.

Technically we already have all components needed, the ram and ssd for a new mini pc. But what cpu to got for? I'm looking at barebones models and they have N100, N200, N97, N250 cpus.

The way they use their pc is very simple. 99% of time is spent with chrome open. The other 1% of time is either some simple word or excel dock or maybe playing a media file (movies).

Nothing demanding. Is there in any way possible that any of cpus I mentioned above won't suffice?

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 1 month ago
▲ 0 r/LinusTechTips+1 crossposts

Mini pc died in front of my eyes

5 years ago I built a new pc for my parents:
- asrock deskmini x300
- ryzen 3 4350g
- 1x 8gb sodimm ddr4 ram
- 500gb m.2 ssd

Apparently it died in front of my eyes today.

When pressing the power on button the cpu fan spun a bit and stopped, the blue light at the front was still on. I couldn't power it off by holding the on/off button so I had to pull the plug from the wall. I did that several times.

Eventually I saw windows 11 loading circle before the welcome screen. After that the screen went black, the fan kept on spinning.

I tried again and got into bios. Cpu, ram and ssd were all detected - https://imgur.com/a/6iqO5pI

What did look weird hoewever were cpu temps, and fan rpms. Values updated every few seconds so they were constantly changing between "wtf is going on" to normal - https://imgur.com/a/42z1LUM

Then I shut it down and unplugged everything and took a bathroom break. After coming back I try again and pc boots into windows. So I copy everything on my drive, turn off the pc and try turning it on again. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. No fan spin, no lights. Just a minute ago I was in the OS. Like... wtf?

So I disassemble the pc and try to clear cmos, change ram slots and turn on the pc with screwdriver. Still nothing.

Is there anything left I can do? The only component I can test is the m.2 drive but I doubt that is the problem. Even without a drive I should be still getting into bios.

I'm guessing the thing that died is either the external power delivery cable or the motherboard.

If I'd be 100% sure it's not the ssd and ram I'd be already looking for new barebones mini pc. It's for my parents and they use it to browse the internet 99% of the time.

u/screwdriverfan — 1 month ago

Izotekt alternativa

Od domačih že dolgo časa poslušam, da se danes za izolacijo hiš uporablja še eno drugo zadevo, ki ni izotekt in je ubisvu le neka masa. Me lahko nekdo prosim razsvetli kako se tej zadevi reče, da si malce preberem o njej?

Mi gre že malce na živce, ker mi od domačih nihče ne uspe povedati imena tega premaza ampak vedno povejo, da obstaja boljša zadeva kot izotekt. Sami pa seveda tudi ne vejo 😅

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 2 months ago

I wish they either buffed or nerfed juno

I'm getting really tired of playing against torpedo spam builds. It's exactly the same build every match. If they either buffed the rest of juno's powers or nerfed the torpedo's second charge that would be great.

I also noticed that whenever juno is paired up with mercy they create their own circlejerk up in the air and my odds of winning goes down.

I'm also not saying she's OP, but fucking hell it's hard to enjoy the game when you have those projectiles following you everywhere you go. Or try to contest juno but she'll just plop two torpedoes on you.

https://preview.redd.it/cfxceq62h89h1.png?width=640&format=png&auto=webp&s=7e566ffc55455faca03e7d26c903aedf6c101632

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 2 months ago

Does this mean VR is going to be plug and play now?

I have very limited experience with linux. Most I did was play with it in a virtual machine and tried kubuntu on my laptop.

One of the VR games (the only one actually) I play is beat saber. When I was trying kubuntu I ran into a problem - during room setup I just couldn't progress after a certain step (iirc when placing down controllers on floor).

I just read steamos finally launched for regular PCs. Does this finally mean VR experience is going to be polished considering the frame is on its way?

Excuse my ignorance, I'm just curious.

reddit.com
u/screwdriverfan — 2 months ago