I'm settled in for the most part and started at my new job. It's not anywhere near as stressful as my last, but I can definitely see it getting crazy once we're in the tourism season especially with stuff reopening.
I managed to blow through 75% of a 1.25TB monthly data cap on the cable letting Steam finally finish up its queue I'd had set up for... something like a year now? I'd leave my machine on for literal weeks at a time up in Kentucky to download one of these games. They download here in, like, an hour, tops. Needless to say I tightened the belt immediately -- throttled my PC as a whole back down to 3mbps, and steam to 1KB/s to functionally make it unable to fetch anything until the rollover. I'm going to see about upping to an unlimited tier, as well, and paying the difference plus my share. I don't see myself using anywhere close to that much in a normal month, but I want the peace of mind of not having to worry about it at all. I'd heard about cable companies planning to implement these caps but I'd (mistakenly, obviously) assumed the massive public outcry made them backpedal. I finally understand what people mean when they say cable companies are evil.
I just wish I could then, in turn, step down to a tiered plan on my phone -- most of my phone stuff I do at home, on the WiFi, so now I have no need for unlimited LTE, but alas, my phone is only on promotion if I have an unlimited plan. Thankfully the minimum one isn't too expensive -- in fact, to jump down to tiered data and knock the phone back up to normal price would actually be more expensive! It's just a shame my new hometown is all but completely an AT&T dead zone... I get one bar consistently throughout the house, nothing in the laundry room, and maybe two on a good day upstairs next to the window. Then again, Verizon and co. don't do much better out here, either -- my cousin's got Verizon and he gets roughly the same signal. In other phone-related news the battery that was the Achilles' heel of it before now isn't an issue. Now that the novelty has worn off and I'm not on it every spare minute, it actually lasts all day and then some, easily.
I'm far more disappointed in the R9 380 than I thought possible. It being the 2GB variant, Doom Eternal even at minimum settings consumes a gigabyte more VRAM than the thing has. Forza Horizon 3 is constantly throwing "low video memory" notices, and stutters badly. Having a decent connection, I actually want to play some games for once... I may have to upgrade sooner rather than later. Even just sidegrading to the same thing with a bit more VRAM would make it way more tolerable. The thing doesn't even undervolt well -- anything below -100mV makes it crash in BeamNG, even if it was good at -160mV in Kombustor. At 190W, the MSI Armor cooler has to work pretty hard to keep the core below 70C. I don't have access to custom fan curves like I had (and took for granted, and abused to get a pseudo-silent mode) on my 480. Overclocking it is a no-go -- not that it matters, because the games it would help with would benefit more from having double the VRAM -- it slams right into the power limit. I've been sort of spoiled by the 480 -- this 380 is roughly equal to the GTX960 I had before, only with half the VRAM, and I just can't make do with low-detail textures anymore... I forgot how awful Borderlands 2 looks at anything below High. The only thing I can't complain about was the price, I was given a fantastic deal on it... it's just a shame how poorly 2GB cards have aged recently.
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