Quick Tips
Expert solutions for everday problems.
Frame stutter problem
I’m experiencing an intermittent frame stutter issue in games as varied as World of Warships and Ghost Recon Breakpoint. It’s not tied to graphics quality settings, as I’ve tried everything from maxed out to turning them down to mud, and still have the issue. I’ve tried killing all background apps/processes, I update regularly, whether BIOS, drivers, or firmware. I’ve tried stock voltages, PBO enabled, Ryzen Master OC, and so on but can’t resolve it.
I built my PC in November 2019 – key specs are Gigabyte Aorus Ultra X570 MB, AMD Ryzen 3800X CPU, 32GB (4x 8GB) DDR 3600 RAM with XMP enabled, plenty of cooling, 2TB Seagate Firecuda PCIe 4.0 OS drive, 1TB Samsung 970 Evo PCIe 3.0 auxiliary drive, 2x 3TB Seagate mechanical drives in RAID 1, Windows 10 Home, and I reused my GeForce GTX 1080 Ti from my old rig. My temps are all far below the max thresholds during gaming. I have tried disabling XMP and dropping the memory to 3,200MHz in the BIOS, but still no dice.
I’d love to upgrade to a Ryzen 5900X and an RTX 3080 to try to resolve this issue that way, but we all know the vaporware status of those. Any ideas of what is causing this? Am I running too much gear over the PCI interface
and hitting bottlenecks, is the DDR4 3600 the issue, or something else entirely?
BJ KOHO
TechLife responds: Our first response was to ask about BJ’s display setup, as the internet was full of people exhibiting similar symptoms and finding common ground when looking into the connection to their monitors. BJ tried several of the solutions – he verified he was using the DisplayPort and bumped its response time to the maximum. He went into Device Manager, right-clicked “Communications Port,” and choose “Properties > Port Settings,” where he set “Flow control” to “Hardware,” and disabled FIFO under “Advanced.” He also uninstalled iCUE and disabled the 0 core in Ghost Recon Breakpoint in Task Manager
This helped a fair bit in Ghost Recon Breakpoint, although some frame stutter remained, but had no effect on WoWS. Undefeated, BJ kept plugging away and got back in touch two weeks later to share his final solution. While troubleshooting an issue with his Internet connection, BJ – with the aid of his ISP – traced a problem to his modem and router, both of which exhibited intermittent signal loss. He replaced these with a Netgear CM500 cable modem and Asus RT-AX82U router respectively, set up device priority for his PC and the requisite game profiles, and the problem vanished. BJ puts the problem down to the age of his old equipment, but wanted to share his fix in case it helped fellow readers.
SD card won’t format
I have a question about my Dell XPS 13. It has a built-in microSD card reader but when I insert a card and try to format it, I get an error saying that the disk is in use, asking if I want to force-eject it. I’ve tried disabling background apps, looked into what’s running with Process Explorer, and tried different tools to format the card, but no luck. One – GUI Format – throws up the same error, but with no option to force-eject. Another app, SmartDisk FAT32 Format Utility, won’t recognize the card as an external drive unless it’s plugged into an external reader/hub.
YOSEF SAFDEYE
TechLife responds: Despite Yosef providing lots of information, we still needed him to answer a few more questions, and Yosef was quick to reply. To summarise: The problem applied to all SD cards, as well as
USB flash drives, and when using an external SD hub. The same error popped up when Yosef attempted to format the card in Windows, but clicking “Yes” led to the card being formatted successfully – however, Windows can’t format 64GB-plus cards in FAT32 format, which is why he needs a third-party app. Finally, the same error popped up when attempting to eject the card – but this is common and trying again resulted in the “Safe to remove” message popping up.
One potential workaround arose from our conversations: If Yosef rebooted into Safe mode, he was able to format the card with no problems. Other suggested workarounds are to format the card in NTFS or exFAT
first, before trying again with FAT32, or to use a different tool, such as MiniTool Partition Wizard ( www.partitionwizard.com), which we have used in the past to partition and format drives other tools wouldn’t touch.
Yosef was worried the problem was linked to malware – it’s not, but there’s no harm in a quick security audit. Update and run a full scan with your existing tool – Yosef uses Microsoft Defender – then, if you want additional peace of mind, run scans with two further tools: Emsisoft Emergency Kit ( www.emsisoft.com/en/home/ emergencykit), which combines Emsisoft and Bitdefender virus scanners in a single tool, and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware ( www.malwarebytes.com), which reverts to a free scan-and-remove tool after the 14-day trial. MBAM’s reputation has taken a battering recently, but it does detect unwanted software other tools ignore, so is a good secondary tool.
Optimise MP4s
I recently set up Plex on my Ubuntu server for all my ripped media only to discover loads of files kept buffering when I or friends accessed them remotely. I discovered something called the “moov atom” that needs to be placed at the start of my MP4 files (rather than the end) to facilitate streaming. I know now I need to check “Web Optimised” on the “Summary” tab in Handbrake to set this up for any future files I create, but what about the hundreds of files I’ve already got? LIAM MCSHANE
TechLife responds: Luckily, there are tools that can move the required bits to the start of your file without having to reconvert it. This not only ensures the video and audio quality are unaffected, it’s also a far quicker process. You can combine two free tools and a script to perform the task in the background from the command line. First, install the two tools: AtomicParsley for detecting files that need optimising, plus MP4Box – part of GPAC – to perform the optimisation, then download the script:
$ sudo apt update && sudo apt install atomicparsley gpac
$ wget http://muzso.hu/dfiles/ public/fix_mp4_moov.sh
Open the script in nano (“nano fix_mp4_moov.sh”); the only part of this you need to modify is the “VIDEO_DIR=” variable, which you point to the directory containing media files—for example, VIDEO_DIR=’/home/ username/media/Movies/’. Save the file and exit. Now launch the script like so:
$ ./fix_mp4_moov.sh &
We’ve added the “&” operator to instruct the script to run in the background, so it doesn’t tie up your terminal. The process can take hours, depending on how many files need optimising, but you can monitor it using the “htop” tool. Once running (type “htop” and press Enter), press F4, and type “mp4” into the filter box. This enables you to monitor the running processes; you’ll see AtomicParsley checking each file and then, when it finds one that needs optimising, handing it over to MP4Box. Files are processed alphabetically, and are listed as they’re being processed, providing a progress indicator. Press F10 to close htop and return to the command line at any time.
Alternate NAS motherboard
I read with interest here the letter regarding a NAS. I was wondering if the Asrock J4005B-ITX is a suitable substitute for the board mentioned (Asrock’s J5040ITX)? The latter is out of stock and way overpriced elsewhere. ANTHRAX.ANCIENT TechLife responds: The chip shortage means the J5040ITX is now virtually impossible to get. It’s a shame because it’s the perfect board for a NAS. That said, you can do better than a J4005BITX – it only offers two SATA ports, which limits you to two internal drives unless you use a plug-in SATA card, which won’t perform as well as the native onboard SATA ports.
A better replacement is the Asrock J4125-ITX ( which – like the J5040-ITX – is a Gemini Lake Refresh board. It’s a Celeron rather than a Pentium processor, but is quicker than the J4005, and comes within 10–20 percent of the J5040’s performance. Crucially, the J4125 boasts the same Intel 600 graphics, so it’s suitable for hardware transcoding media streams if you want to use the NAS as a low-powered media server.
There are two models. The regular J4125-ITX has four onboard SATA3 ports – two native ports, plus two Asmedia ASM1061 ports. The J4125B-ITX has only two native SATA ports. If you only need up to four drives, the J4125-ITX is clearly the better option, but what if you need more?
The J4125-ITX has a single PCIe 2.0 x1 expansion slot, and you can pick up two- and four-port SATA PCIe x1 cards cheaply on eBay. But with the bandwidth limited to around 500MB/s, and shared with the onboard ASM1061 ports, you won’t get maximum performance from all your drives. The J4125BITX supports a PCIe 2.0 x16 slot, which maxes out at around 8GB/s, making it more suited for setups where five or more drives are needed; expect to pay north of
$100 for an eight-port SATA PCIe x16 card.
Both – like the J5040-ITX – also sport an M.2 slot, but this doesn’t support M.2 boot drives. M.2 is overkill for a server that’s on 24/7 anyway; just plug an SSD drive into one of the native SATA ports, and install your OS on that. Choose an SSD designed for the unique demands of network servers; TechLife recommends the WD Red SSD 500GB.