Help me diagnose my spouse's poor financial decision

[Bob's Fuckass Head]

It's embarrassing that people have to take a thread like this and make it all about how dumb and therefore irredeemable they imagine this man to be. It's easy for people who are relatively knowledgeable about electronics to sit here and talk about 50 red flags they definitely would have seen before going through with this purchase, but even the most "trustworthy" names have been out there scamming people going back almost 20 years now. Who remembers Nvidia's GTX980 "technically 4GB vram" shitshow?

I can totally understand why relatively low-info buyers wouldn't be alert to just how fake and gay the whole industry is right now, with GPU smuggling and chinese vram chop shops and fake CPUs. As these things go, it's far from the most expensive lesson you could learn in terms of trying to avoid bad purchases. Reading the thread, it doesn't seem to me like there's much that can be done to salvage things; I'd personally chuck it in the sin bin and write it off. Assuming OP can find a workable solution, it would likely take so much time and labor that you're better off spending that time earning income. I'll hope to be proven wrong though, because OP's suffering can at least teach us something.

 

[harbringer883]

Just resell it for like 100 bucks on facebook marketplace lmao

 

[Froggy Fresh Sextape]

I sincerely hope Lidl Drip is suffering unimaginable self-inflicted mental anguish every single waking day of her life for what she did to this site's discourse, if not chronic pain from being morbidly obese. Gender wars seeping into I&T, for fucks sake.

Pretty sure OP is a gay man.

Anyway, whatever, don't buy Chinesium again. At least he didn't buy a USB stick that fried every component in your desktop, including all the storage.

 

[Baguette Child]

make it all about how dumb and therefore irredeemable they imagine this man to be.

To be honest, this is why I regret having made this thread when I was still angry. He's not a bad guy. He's been reliable and hardworking the entire time I've known him. Normally he's quite practical; he just did a really dumb thing here and I should have calmed down before posting. That's on me. I've been here long enough that I should have known not to post while mad.

Assuming OP can find a workable solution,

So I've been looking at the SSD I took out of the GPD Win 4 and I'm maybe 75% sure it was the culprit. It's in really poor condition, covered in external scuffing. No clue what the seller did to this thing. But, so far, husband hasn't complained of any further issues with the handheld. I still feel like the weird display patterning that accompanied the crash seems like a GPU thing but since I can't feasibly replace that anyway I am choosing to not worry about it and move on with my life.


Again, thanks to everyone who tried to help me troubleshoot. I'm gonna call case closed on this one.

 

[Slav Power]

even the most "trustworthy" names have been out there scamming people going back almost 20 years now. Who remembers Nvidia's GTX980 "technically 4GB vram" shitshow?

Look no further than the 5060 and the 5050. 8GB of VRAM in an age where 12-16GB is the minimum. Performance so bad it loses out to GPU's on the Ampere architecture, let alone Ada. Why? Because the average consumer knows shit about fuck. You force those sand wastes onto prebuild OEM's, and what does the average consumer see? First number bigger, therefore better, because lower number worse.

Same goes with people looking for a bargain on chinkshit, where you have to be vigilant and have an instinctual shit radar. Even on Amazon or any other major e-commerce site. Just like the mantra of /csg/, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I can't blame people for falling for shit like this since whenever I look for something online I'm basically doing detective work before hitting "Order" on anything. 99% of the population doesn't do that and just goes by the vibe, which is what every major e-commerce site abuses relentlessly. not just Aliexpress. Of course you can find great bargains on chinkshit, but you have to be mindful of what's the range of a chinkshit bargain, because it's not the miraculous "1/3rd the price of an equivalent product", but more like "1/5th less that of an equivalent product".

There's a reason you have entire communities digging through Aliexpress, ordering shit and reviewing it, because some of the shit you can find in Zhongguo is genuinely amazing for the price. but you're sure as hell not going to get a Steam Deck equivalent for half the price. The very least you can do after getting scammed is learning from your mistakes and being more vigilant next time you look for mainland bargains. Let's not act like its just men who fall for this, plenty of women do awful financial decisions as well and that's fine, it's nothing out of the ordinary. Sadly, but like I said, no one's gonna be studying how not to get scammed with how much BS you have to deal with when looking to buy something, it's just human nature of being lazy and that's understandable.

 

[Almighty Space Duck]

Who remembers Nvidia's GTX980 "technically 4GB vram" shitshow?

It was the GTX970 with the 3.5+0.5 fucked up bus.

 

[Bob's Fuckass Head]

It was the GTX970 with the 3.5+0.5 fucked up bus.

This is correct, I misremembered. They thought giving people $30 rebate tickets was good enough by way of apology.

 

[GlupShitto]

I think that the best course of action is probably to resell it on eBay for around what you paid for it and if your retard manchild husband needs a toy to play on the potty, just get him a Steam Deck or a Switch which are both like half the price.

 

[oh no its pipkun]

GPD was making Windows based handhelds for several years before Valve, ASUS, and the rest. Their earliest devices actually came out in the mid-2010s and they kept on making them even after the market became flooded with like devices. GPD's gaming handhelds are basically a bit more niche. The Win and the palmtop-like Win Mini are among the most portable x86 based gaming handhelds that you can buy and tend to have superior processing power to the Steam Deck. The big downside to using them is that they have much smaller batteries. Basically, if someone wants a smaller device and doesn't consistently need the longer playtime that comes with larger devices, they can just get one of these devices and hook up a larger powerbank if they do need longer playtime.

But yeah, you're absolutely correct. The man should have just bought a Steam Deck.

on the newer gpd win minis 2022-2024 have insufficient cooling and need a tdp app to limit clockrates on the cpu and ssd. I had to repaste my cpu and repad the ssd to save 3 degrees. i assume its the same shit for the win 4. unfortunately its the only company making tiny laptops with any chooch to the cpu/gpu.

what year was the win 4 and was the ssd swapped out yet?

@Baguette Child Make sure that you get the device specific drivers from their website if you haven't already. Apparently, that can be an issue when people wipe the drive and reinstall Windows.

Yeah, the oem drivers are important. in my experience fucking around with other gpd products you should reboot after every driver instead of at the end or there will be issues like bootloops or no sound on reboot.

e: didn't see the third page

 

[Baguette Child]

what year was the win 4 and was the ssd swapped out yet?

2023, 7840U model. The original owner installed a Crucial 4TB drive in place of whatever was stock. I replaced that drive with a WD 2TB I had laying around from a homelab project.


On disassembly I noticed the Crucial drive had scarring and surface damage suggesting it had been mishandled during installation. Since I put in the new SSD husband's unit has only had a single unexpected failure versus the every few hours crashes with the one I took out. Maybe there's other problems going on but I feel safe in assuming I alleviated at least one contributing factor.


As a side tangent; GPD Win4 is extremely annoying to disassemble/reassemble. Several steps made me feel nervous and I am not new to tinkering with electronics. I recommend avoiding doing so if you own one of these unless absolutely necessary.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Why would OP, as a man, let their husband do stupid things like this?

 

[George Lucas]

I’m not familiar with this device but I’m guessing memory is shared by the CPU and GPU. If you can open it up, you might be able to replace the memory modules. However, it’s more likely to be a controller that’s failing, and that’s not really serviceable.