April 2024 – techbloggingfool.com

I got lucky and obtained a 4090 GPU in the second wave, just before their prices skyrocketed. The purchase was expensive for me. My entire entertainment budget was blown for several winter months.

I went with an MSI 4090 Gaming TRIO 24G. It was the most affordable, and in-stock option that included 3 decent fans and had some mild factory overclocking. I was running an MSI DDR4 motherboard at the time and assumed that the MSI Center software should be able to control its lighting and cooling systems natively.

The software adapted to the new card like I thought it would. I ran it that way for almost a year. It had an i-7 Kaby Lake CPU, 270Z Chipset, 32 GB of DDR4 PCRAM, and a Samsung 980 Pro SSD. The components were being powered by a Corsair 1000-Watt power-supply and housed in a Thermaltake View 71 Full Tower case. A Lian-Li Galahad 360 AIO CPU cooler, and 6 SL case fans connected to Lian Li v 3 controllers and synced to the motherboard kept everything cool.

For the most part, the PCIe 4 platform and PCIe 5 card hybrid performed well. However, there were telltale signs of mismatched hardware generations showing up in odd places. For example, I could play Halo Infinite in 4K with everything on Ultra but if I didn’t enable V-Sync I heard a mild coil whine and suffered pretty serious screen tearing even though my monitor and cables are G-Sync rated and G-Sync is enabled.

I couldn’t get anywhere near the performance I had expected from my VR driving titles. In several other games like Hogwarts Legacy, I had to leave specific functions such as Volumetric Fog disabled, or the frame rate would tank. These signs combined with benchmarks and some good old-fashioned troubleshooting led me to understand that the previous PCIe-4 gen components were bottlenecking my super-expensive GPU.

Recently, I’ve finally saved up enough to upgrade the rest of my components to match the new GPU. I decided to stick with MSI when it came time to choose the new motherboard. I appreciate not having to run more software to control the GPU lighting and cooling features. I had also been impressed with the frequency and quality of their updates for the MSI Center software.

I ended up going with an MSI Tomahawk Z790 motherboard. I paired it with sixty-four gigs of GSKILL DDR5-6000 RAM. For storage, I opted for a Samsung 990 Pro. When it came to the CPU, I chose an i-9 14900K. Last, I installed a Thermaltake PCIe-5 1650 PSU just to be sure everything could run hard.

I spent four or five hours updating firmware for everything, installing Windows, all the drivers, all the control software (MSI Center, NVidia GeForce Experience, Lian-Li Connect, Samsung Magic Disk, etc.), and all the game launchers. Then I started on getting the games going. I couldn’t help myself and launched the first one, Halo Infinite, as soon as it finished installing.

Halo Infinite runs at 4K, 120, Ultra with ease.

Even with other games still in the process of downloading and installing I could visually tell that Halo was running better. I cranked up all the settings to Ultra and jumped into a Team Slayer match. There were no tears on the team presentation that plays just before a match starts and my system always suffered during that sequence, pre-upgrade. Best of all, no V-Sync was required. Yes, I know it is still checked in the screenshot above, but when I got around to unchecking the box, the coil whine was gone.

The entire game played smoother than I’ve ever seen it. Even at 4K with raytracing, HDR, and the post effects turned up to max, the game was pretty much flawless as far as graphical performance goes. My performance on the other hand, had some flaws. I lost several matches in a row. In my defense, I was distracted by trying to judge the outcome of all my efforts and expense.

Halo Infinite plays like a dream on this setup.

It didn’t just look better and play smoother. It was better in every way. The iconic soundtrack had more depth and richness coming out of the same speakers that were connected prior to the upgrade. Even the controls seemed more responsive.

I’ve been up and running on the new build for about three months. In that time, MSI has released several features and updates for MSI Center. A BIOS upgrade, new drivers, an updated Xbox game bar widget, and more.

MSI’s Companion Game Bar Widget is an easy way to check performance while playing.

This is the fourth motherboard from MSI that I’ve installed into one of my personal systems. I’ve been impressed each time. The connections are well labeled, and everything plugs in securely. The metal re-enforced GPU slot on their gaming-class boards holds up to the beefy 4090’s weight.

The UEFI BI0S is simple to use but powerful. The Z790 automatically detected all of the components and booted on the first attempt. The EZ user interface makes basic.
overclocking and tuning a snap. Windows 11 detected the MSI motherboard and offered to install MSI Center automatically.

The MSI Center software allows for integration better than its predecessor, MSI Dragon Center, did. By supporting numerous plug-ins, the software is able to become the single-pane-of-glass dashboard and control center usually found on more mainstream manufactured PCs. A series of toggles is used to control which piece of software is in charge of a particular component.

Everything you need to know in one window.

For the most part, the plug-in solution works well. However, it is fairly easy to misconfigure the toggles and end up in a situation where something isn’t working properly. I’ve accidentally disabled my case fans by having both MSI Center and Lian-Li Connect toggled on to control them.

In the picture above you can see that both toggles must be on to allow Mystic Light control over the Lian-Li cooling gear’s lights. There’s no checking or error control, so if you don’t get them set correctly across the board, something doesn’t work. This is not an issue inherent to MSI software. It’s an industry wide issue as far as I can tell.

Toggles aside, the MSI components and software I’ve used over the last few years have been top-notch in quality and performance. I haven’t had to RMA a single MSI product yet (knock-on-wood). That’s saying something considering that I’ve got an eight-year-old MSI RX-480 graphics card that’s still going strong in an active gaming PC.

I’ve had a DJI Mavic Air for years. I still get the little craft out from time to time. It’s fun to fly, and the AI keeps my rusty piloting skills from reeking too much havoc when I do.

The Mavic Air is an older drone but is still viable with a 4k camera and its 3-axis gimble.

I also have the first generation of XREAL’S AIR glasses. Another gadget I’ve gotten a lot of use out of. I started working on using them as first-person pilot goggles the day I unboxed them. The challenge has been that both my drone’s remote and the XREAL Air glasses need to connect to my phone via USB-C. Like most phones, mine only has one port.

I prefer AR glasses over external monitors for getting extra screen real-estate when I need it.

There are such things as USB-C splitters. Apparently, it should be technically possible to split the USB-C port with the correct cables and adapters. All of the adapters I found online were for power on one side and signal on the other. Or they were true splitters like the one below in which only one connection could be active at a time. The goggles idea would need both power and signal on both channels to work simeltaneously. If you know of something that works, please tell us in the comment section.

I tried several USB-C “Splitters” but was unable to get any of them to work.

Enter the XREAL BEAM. Just when I was about to give up and order an official pair of DJI goggles, XREAL releases an affordable option. The Beam is a small device that acts as a wireless bridge between the AIR glasses and other devices that can cast their screens.

You just cast your screen to the Beam in the same way you might cast to a Chromecast from Android or to your Apple TV from your iPhone. The screen or app is then displayed in the glasses. It has a battery that can power the glasses and the Beam itself for a couple of hours. The Beam device is doing quite a bit of the heavy lifting when it comes to processing the wireless video.

The Xreal Beam is a Wi-Fi screen mirroring companion device for the AIR/2 glasses.

It was all I needed to realize the first-person drone pilot experience. I connected my phone to the drone’s remote as normal. Then, I put on the AIR glasses and connected them to the Beam with their USB-C cable. I opened the DJI 4 Go software and logged in to the drone from my phone after I mounted it in the remote’s clamp, then used Smart View on my Samsung phone to cast its screen to the Beam.

The resulting experience was fantastic. The DJI app is rendered in near life-size on the AIR’s OLED display. The screen inside the glasses looks like a giant monitor because of the proximity to your eyeballs. The app shows the drone’s first-person view that is overlaid with pilot info. The heading, speed, altitude, GPS location, and object detection are all visible and easy to read because they are huge.

Casting the app to the Beam is almost perfect.

Flying in FPS is so much easier for my video game trained brain than ground piloting is. The thing is, though, when I remove the AIR’s sunshields, they become transparent. This allows me to see both the FPS view and the drone in reality simultaneously. As far as I know, this feature is unique to a setup like mine.

I was at a farm when I tested using the AIR and Beam in combination with my drone and phone. The signals involved are the 2.4 and 5 Ghz Wi-Fi bands for the most part. I was able to pilot the drone about one hundred meters away before the video signal dropped.

The video in the glasses was fast, clear, and smooth enough that I felt comfortable going into Sport mode and pushing the little tone to its max speed (40/64). I don’t think any DRL pilots are going to be ditching their goggle setups for this one anytime soon, but these things are awesome for an amature. Especially if you already have most of the equipment on hand.