Many users buy a new gaming PC to finally be able to play modern AAA games in full detail again. But one gamer could only do that after finding a nasty bug. Only then does the computer work as it should.
Anyone who buys a new gaming PC usually wants to play the latest games directly and not adjust much. That’s the advantage of ready-made gaming PCs: you don’t have to do much yourself and save yourself a lot of work.
But it wasn’t that easy for a user. Because this user had bought a new gaming PC, but he did not achieve really high frame rates in any game. And this is important, because the higher the frame rate, the smoother and more pleasant the displayed image looks.
Gamer builds “surprisingly good PC” for €300, but cheats a bit in the process
Lousy software prevents users from playing with a new gaming PC
What exactly happened? A user had bought a new gaming PC. With a Ryzen 5600X as processor, a Radeon RX 6600 XT as graphics card and 32 GB of RAM, the computer officially offers more than enough power for all current top titles.
But despite powerful hardware, he only gets 15-40 FPS in most games, he explains in a post on reddit, which he calls “new PC runs drastically underperformance” (via reddit.com). Here he explains that he tried a variety of things:
The user was so unsettled by the poor performance because he had only built a gaming PC with the same hardware a few weeks before. Here he could play most games with 120 FPS and more.
What was the problem? Mining software was probably hidden in his new gaming PC. Once he connected the computer to the internet, without his knowledge, this malware used the computer’s power to farm cryptocurrencies.
Because instead of being able to use the performance for gaming, the malware used the computer’s performance for other purposes. And he only came to check the computer for such malware after a tip from a user.
Your next gaming PC stands on its feet, costs €2000 and doesn’t need an extra monitor
“I wouldn’t have found out without your help!”
How came he on the idea? On reddit, a user asked him if he had checked his new PC for malware. Because cryptomining malware steals most of the performance of the graphics card, so that there is hardly anything left for games.
And sure enough, when he unplugged the internet cable from his computer, the problems went away. And a little later he found the malware. What is particularly crazy is that the user joked that something like this could never happen to him:
I started laughing at that because I’m a software engineer and while I only have a bare minimum of knowledge about hardware, I’m familiar enough with this type of thing to look at it and see what’s going on. And we’ve been joking about hacking into other people’s stuff and mining cryptocurrencies on their graphics cards for the past week. And then it happened to me!
Where does the nasty software come from? In his thread he didn’t explain where the error came from. In the thread name he had written “new gaming PC”, which at least sounds like he bought the computer including malware. By the way, he doesn’t explain it.
What do you think? Has something like this happened to you, or do you protect yourself from dangers on the internet? Tell us in the comments!
Malware also threatens miners: Miners have also recently fallen for nasty malware. This should supposedly improve the mining performance of Nvidia graphics cards. But instead there was a nasty virus in the software:
Miners want to use a trick to make more money, but instead they get nasty malware