BitWrangler wrote on 2023-07-03, 14:22:

Hmm this got me thinking about a GM206 GTX 960 for the daily driver.

edit: and looking into encode and decode bits and pieces further, a HD8570 I saw cheap might actually be useful for H.264 stuff.

I picked up a Quadro M6000 recently for ~180 AUD (~120 USD), since its a Titan X Maxwell it supports H.264, might be worth looking into a few of the Quadro parts like the M2000, M4000, M5000 or M6000 which usually can be found for really reasonable prices considering their lineage and capabilities.

Ive seen M2000 and M4000 parts going for under 100 USD if you are not opposed to nVidia parts. (M2000 is roughly a GTX960 and the M4000 is a close GTX970)

I get that people tend to avoid Quadro cards, but I find they can be cheaper than their desktop siblings while offering similar or same performance, their professional drivers also tend to be superior for production based apps like video encoding and such. I also tend to find the cards are in far better condition second hand than the desktop cards .. coming from a production machine they are usually clean and don't get abused by overclocking or punished by gaming.

The Quadro I got even still had its protective plastic on it and honestly doesn't look like it saw a lot of use.

They can also game just fine even on production drivers should you feel like dabbling in that 😉

Just bought a Seasonic e-atx case and 850 watt platinum p/s. 128$ to my door. Thing is neither will work with anything else. You can find both under shell shockers for 7/6.

Now I don't have to worry about being short a p/s. I would have bought it alone. But the case is a crazy good deal also. About an inch less on the height and depth compared to my Thermaltake f51 compressor window. I wonder if 850 is enough for my asus gundam z590 mobo + celeron? LOL LOL

Thanks, yes I keep an eye on Quadros and FirePros etc, the prices on that generation haven't done the big drop yet in my region, and not seen any low side outliers. I have a K620 I may use.

I've got two trains of thought going on there, one is the midrange, not too loud, not too power hungry but can still run a game @1080 and do recent media requirement for the "daily driver" spec box that will be in a living area. Which I've just ordered the cheapest claimed working on eBay 1060 for. The other is for a media box "tv snarfer" which is also gonna serve up content. That thing has the opposing requirements of not using too much power because it's going to be running 24/7 but also having some CPU power and some GPU encoding ability to reprocess captured TV. For that one I was thinking of the Hd8570 ... which still seems available locally, but having schedule clash with the seller and haven't made a date for pickup. AMD/ATI seems to be 2 or 3 years ahead of nVidia all the time for encoding features, so HD8570 is quite adequate for the H.264 encode on what will mostly be standard def and 720i content. Also desirable for that box is single slot, because it's gonna get ALL the capture cards in it. I may yet use the K620 in that, but it's encoding features are barely ahead of a HD7450 I've already got and GPU wise, feels like a waste when it might be better in some "sit and use" machine. Actually yeah I think K620 is "spoken for" by the SFF i7 HTPC build for the upstairs TV.

Guys, this is the Best Computer Deal on eBay.
The HP z440 Workstation/Server for about $100 USD
See my post:
Re: Bought this (Modern) hardware today

I have mine setup as a cheap NAS with a bunch of old hard drives I had lying around.
I have 8 Sata hard drives connected to the LSI HBA adapter.
And I still have 6 available Sata 6.0 ports on the motherboard.
I can add more PCIe Nvme SSD’s too.

I built mine for about $300
Specs:
HP z440 ( $100 )
Intel Xeon 1660v4 ( 8-cores, 16-threads ) CPU upgrade ( $50 )
64gb , 2133p ECC DDR4 RAM ( $50 )
LSI HBA 9211-8i controller with SAS to Sata cables ( $50 ) ( add small fan to heatsink for cooling )
Or
LSI 9300-8i SAS HBA with Sata cables ( need to add a small fan to heat sink for cooling )
20mm x 40mm fan for LSI controller ( $10 )
2tb Intel 670p Nvme SSD with PCIe adapter ( $80 )
Hard drive cage ( eBay ) $20
Molex power cable ribbon for 5 hard drives ( eBay ) $10

48 terabytes of old hard drives I had lying around.

It’s the Best deal for an inexpensive NAS option.

Eventually I will build a NAS out of Nvme drives as soon as the large capacity SSD’s become available for cheap.

It runs Windows-10 and Windows-11, Linux too.

This thing “Purrs” like a Cat.
Runs with very little resources.
Idles at 0%-2% CPU utilization.
Runs very good with the LSI HBA adapter 9211-8i

More photos:

Replaced the R9 Fury in my home office (and occasional light gaming) PC with a newly purchased RX 580 8G shower head edition.

The fury itself was a more recent purchase - bough it as-is for 10 Euros from on obvious post crypto-mining discard pile. I guess the former owner thought it had given up the ghost and I wouldn't blame him - after replacing the cemented paste I ran some test games on my main PC running Windows 10 and found that they were either showing a black screen, artifacting or causing AMDs control panel to constantly restart. Same on Windows 7. I almost gave up and put it in the recycling pile, but then decided to try it out with Ubuntu and everything just worked 99% - no crashes, artifacts or anything. AMD really dropped the ball with the drivers for HBM cards.

Just one issue - VLC player sometimes caused random crashes. Just VLC - the default video player, Youtube, etc. all worked great. Nobody else seems to have this issue online, but seeing as how nobody bought this card, I'm not surprised.

So as to not waste a 650Watt PSU on spreadsheets and light games like Team Fortress 2 and to get my favorite video player working, I got a cheap RX 580 to replace it and stuck 450W PSU i had lying around to go with it. Its a downgrade performance-wise, but nothing that I noticed so far.

I will have to check VLC when my Fury X is running in something. One thing I was noticing when reading round in circles about various decoder stuff, was that some features need to be backed by SSE4a and SSE4.1 in the CPU with implication that later drivers need higher CPU features, so don't know if something like that might be going on. E3 1275 has 4.1 tho?? There appears to be a lot better support in the open source linux stuff for all the non-DX features anyway. Though you know what, I had a possibly "bad" version of Lubuntu around 20.xx that VLC wasn't working right on, locking up. It had other problems too. Not sure if I put a 19.xx version in and updated over the top of it, or that's the machine I put a Xubuntu on because I thought Lu had lost it.

Update: 1060 is in a box heading this way arriving in ~4 days, HD8570 missed/gone. HD7450 may not have features I thought, damn it's confusing trying to get everything straight, wikipedia VDPAU etc articles aren't 100% and they're quoting sources of software that supports things or not, so no idea of whether it's a "didn't bother because high end user base will never use this" or "absolutely physically can't". Then also simple things about whether mythTV or something supports it, is all yes, yes, yes, and then the final ref, the ref refs is a section about playback support, DEcoding... so ummm yah, I knew that, tell me about the damn encoding. Possibly the GT 710 is looking the best now. I know it's not great, I've got HD6870s, R9-390X all much better, but all a lot of power to leave running a lot of case space to accommodate, etc, Plus my real grunty PSUs with multiple PCIe power I want in turn on, play, switch off, rigs, with like the fury X and R9-390X, not idling away all day... I know those cards would idle when not loaded, but it's like 100W idle vs 10W idle... anyhoo, gonna keep shaking trees for single slot, low power encoding capable cards to fall out... cheap.. wondering if I should have grabbed two 1060 now... it's kinda weird I can't find a 1050 as cheap.

So we've gone from Gundam themed mobos and systems to SONIC ( yes the very same hedgehog). I like Gundams. I don't think I've ever actuallu played the hedgehog. Asrock makes tje sonic noard. Asus the gundams.

I applied advanced guessalytics to figure out exact model I was getting, i.e. finally did some digging with the number visible on the board picture. And it's an ASUS Dual GTX1060 OC 3G ... without stock cooler... well got the bottom half.. just not the plastics and original fans.

Wondering a little whether to buy a local "dead 760" for $10, to steal it's parts. Co-inky-dinkly, I've got a couple of everflow 80mm GPU fans sitting here. Anyway, I knew it was gonna end up a Frankenstein, but cooling is cooling, may just roll with the supplied ziptied 120mm.

Teaser..

Edit: 1.5 hour later apology for the longer than intended tease, something came up, or didn't come up, back on track maybe...
editII: Oh holy crap, now a thing I needed turned out no good, normal service will be resumed as soon as possible, just have to scream into every soft furnishing in the house...

I didn't have anyone fooled did I?

Yeah it was that 1060 I was talking about... tis an Asus Dual GTX 1060 3G OC, just like the seller pic, he's still got 5 last I looked. Anyway, came 90% dusted off, could still see a little. Could not for the life of me find the right cable or adapter to use with the monitor/machine that was most available for testing it. I swear I had it just the other day, gah, anyway, broke out a new cable and rewired some crap and finally was ready to go. Monitor went and gave me a heart attack though, would not recognise DVI input until I powered it off and on again, ohhhkay, very funny. Testing it on a Win7 box, because a) it was the most sorted at the moment, i.e. stable install and all working so I knew whether it was the card or not causing troubles and b) every time I try to use win10 in a testing stuff out mode it still makes me want to kick puppies, show me the settings, no the real settings, I said the REAL settings dammit.... rrararaaaaarrrgh.

Anyhoo, so far, just the GPU-z screenie, looks "all there" it is what it's supposed to be, no glitches or anything worrying on desktop. Currently downloading half the internet, I mean a large damn benchmark, unigine superposition as I think that will give it a good workout. Seeing how nice it idles using under 15W I am a little miffed I didn't think to order 2. Fan is uncontrolled, just a 2 wire so far, full blow, maybe leave, maybe not, will test and then see how it fits and sits in it's destination machine.

Don't know what the heck is up with the unigine bench, trips up the instant I launch it, with a windows "problem occurred" no explanation. IDK if it's missing the right version of .net or something installed, thing is, seems to run on much lower GPU and system, can't find a straight answer about what CPU support is required though. Wonder if having dx12 GPU on dx11 OS confuses it. IDK, couldn't even find a crack to start prying as it were. I would have been more worried if there was a screen flash then it crashed then you at least know it got as far as the hardware then found a problem, but nope. Also possible it was finding the craptacular onboard graphics and barfing on them. Anyhooooooo, had enough of the massive downloads and wanted to do some quick stuff to find out if this sucker was working right or not...

GPUCaps viewer, found two things on there that loaded it up good, the coronavirus animation and the fur cube openGL I had it "pinging off the rev limiter" being the power limit, core was boosting to 1949 on the coronavirus, and just 1780 or something on the fur... Temp got up to 57C and stayed there, from about a 27C ambient in that room. Anyway, seemed to go full power okay.

Next needed some checkable numbers, found a small benchmark called 3D.Benchmark.OK from SoftwareOK ... it's Okay.. anyway, did that on medium and high, medium it might be dragging butt a bit because of the Athlon II X2 crappy CPU, high it seemed to be in good company, so feeling happy it's performing on a par with what it should be.

edit: 1060 discussion migrating to Re: What modern activity did you get up to today? as I start to do stuff to it.

Got this off eBay very recently:

A Pioneer BDR-XD07B Blu-ray burner for $40! It was unknown condition (powered on). This unit still has its shipping firmware: revision 1.02. CDs and DVDs (and its R/RW variants) work well, of course. Only Blu-ray discs I have so far are PS3 discs, and unsurprisingly they show as Incompatible Medium Installed when using ImgBurn, so the reading part of the Blu-ray blue laser seems to work. I did just order some Blu-ray BD-RE discs to actually test this. Also, an amusing quirk when full erasing discs on this unit with ImgBurn (at least when using the Renesas USB 3.0 port on my laptop): the progress bar starts from 0%, loops to 99%, then starts counting down back to 0%, and may show 100% afterwards. Then the disc is finished erasing.

While testing this unit on my laptop, I found out that on Windows 10, I needed to change the Renesas USB 3.0 drivers from the Microsoft ones to the last known Renesas ones (2.1.39.0) and disable power management functions with the Renesas utility.

--

And device capabilities:

Cool, I was pretty miffed they never got any market penetration due to ppl abandoning optical drives and desktops in general. Would have liked to have seen the mass market drop the prices some more. I did a stupid and put the BD drive, think it's ROM only that turned up in a box deal, "somewhere safe" so I'm never going to see it again obviously.

So it's Prime Day on dot ca, not sure it is everywhere, I was holding a small wad for a newer phone, something not too terrible and not too fancy, I couldn't take anything worth $200++ out of the house, carry it around on the daily, etc. been casually looking for 6 months, more urgently the last one since my battery is going to hell, nothing much appealing. I was a solid LG guy, but they done abandoned me. So just grabbed one of those BV4900Pro units, on a prime member/day deal will see how that goes. Plus I don't like the new crop of "cable remote" form factor, narrow and tall phones and this one was tolerable. While I was there my finger slipped and grabbed the cheapest and nastiest 2.5 SSDs a Lexar 512 and a flexwang or something 1TB ish. I was intending to look for some cheap low TB spindles, but 1TB in SSD for $40ish was too tempting. I was gonna add a second Lexar after remembering they had micron parts, but maybe they were temp unstocked or it was one per customer or something.

Edit: Fikwot that's the name... Found another test that ran on the A2X2W7 machine Basemark 1.2.3 OpenGL 4.5 test ran on High/default scored 4071 so think that is in right ballpark too. Anyway, should not spend any more time trying to set it up all nice on this box when I should prep it's destination box. i7-4770 Thinkcenter... I'm a dumbass, I forgot that every other GPU moves down a step now I've got this extra one, so this box I've been testing on can have the 650Ti instead of the HD7750 and the HD7750 might go nice in the tv capture rig.

Micron 1100 2TB can be had inexpensively, but the wear is open question.

Should had waited for Samsung S8 or S9 and put it on protective film and cheap case. Still rocking my S8 bought refurbished, and was me who refurbished that one 4 years ago for sale and wanted it so bought it at work. Or apple iphone X.

The cheap phones are not worth your time. Had lot of issues. Don't drop and don't put in your pants pocket. My mom kept dropping her cheap free phone, this came with Bell's plan, too often and now ruined her SD card with her precious photos of her mother. Now replaced with one of these Samsung Note while ago.

Not too long ago,
I advised the customer not to abuse, like I tell you as well, the cheap Samsung plastic A51 after replaced the motherboard's FPC connector and bridge flex cable. Came back again same thing, was bent too many times broke the FPC again.
Ended up got fixing enough to get data off onto another phone.

Good for you to give up on LG. No new OEM parts available even the newest ones, same with black berries, none new parts at all and poorly designed, not dust proof and plastic internal covers crumbles around the screws, hard to adhere screens only unless you use cold press glue which worked best otherwise screen falls off with time if cold press glue not used.

Google gives us the factory seconds on batteries, even we are authorized to service them and hard to get parts that is not frequently used. But screen, adhesive and backs are first rate OEM. 😳

Apple and Samsung are first rate on OEM parts especially at authorized shops, Mobile Klinik are one of these are authorized to service these. And pretty good third party parts if you get from decent shop that uses decent suppliers like Mobile Sentrix (located in both USA and Canada).

PS: Canadian franchise Ubreakifix was bought out last year in 2022 by Mobile Klinik. Klinik required us to train on their and register with both Samsung and Apple's accounts for access to their propitiatory services and OEM parts. Also trained on them too.

Cheers,

Micron 1100 2TB can be had inexpensively, but the wear is open question.

Should had waited for Samsung S8 or S9 and put it on protective film and cheap case. Still rocking my S8 bought refurbished, and was me who refurbished that one 4 years ago for sale and wanted it so bought it at work. Or apple iphone X.

The cheap phones are not worth your time. Had lot of issues. Don't drop and don't put in your pants pocket. My mom kept dropping her cheap free phone, this came with Bell's plan, too often and now ruined her SD card with her precious photos of her mother. Now replaced with one of these Samsung Note while ago.

Not too long ago,
I advised the customer not to abuse, like I tell you as well, the cheap Samsung plastic A51 after replaced the motherboard's FPC connector and bridge flex cable. Came back again same thing, was bent too many times broke the FPC again.
Ended up got fixing enough to get data off onto another phone.

Good for you to give up on LG. No new OEM parts available even the newest ones, same with black berries, none new parts at all and poorly designed, not dust proof and plastic internal covers crumbles around the screws, hard to adhere screens only unless you use cold press glue which worked best otherwise screen falls off with time if cold press glue not used.

Google gives us the factory seconds on batteries, even we are authorized to service them and hard to get parts that is not frequently used. But screen, adhesive and backs are first rate OEM. 😳

Apple and Samsung are first rate on OEM parts especially at authorized shops, Mobile Klinik are one of these are authorized to service these. And pretty good third party parts if you get from decent shop that uses decent suppliers like Mobile Sentrix (located in both USA and Canada).

PS: Canadian franchise Ubreakifix was bought out last year in 2022 by Mobile Klinik. Klinik required us to train on their and register with both Samsung and Apple's accounts for access to their propitiatory services and OEM parts. Also trained on them too.

Klinik also sells refurbished phones and new phones and also authorized to create cell plans by Telus, 24 month payment plan on used or new phones. After 24 months is up, cost drops down to normal standard plan, also stand lone plans too for one who bring their own phones.

Cheers,

I avoid Samsung like I avoid Apple, for doing crap totally their own way and "improving" on standards, or as rational people say, breaking them. ... also don't trust Samsung for SD card issues, I know half a dozen people that have had samsungs corrupt cards on them. uSe a qUaLitY cArD they say, well they eat samsungs own cards too, and the kingston/sandisk/corsair etc cards worked fine in any other phone and tablet. Dumbest move possible is to "invest" in a "quality" phone of either of those, when everyone you know who has one HAS to keep taking it in for screens and buttons twice a year and to replace your whole phone costs less than what they have to pay for a repair with original parts. "But it's worth it because it's quality.." yeahnah.. I know, keeps people in business, but I'll keep buying the phones they never see.

Samdung has the best batteries and the worst software. They won't allow you to uninstall the preinstalled apps, and then they install more bloatware without your permission, even long after the phone stops receiving security updates. I've been looking at new phones to replace my old Galaxy S7 (Google Maps gets pretty painful to use, and the battery life is down to three days when I just use it as a phone with bonus email), and I'm liking Motorola right now just because of the factory OS and software (basically stock Android with the usual preinstalled TikTok, but at least you're allowed to uninstall it).

I've totally lost faith in all Samsung consumer products at this point. If their products don't fail prematurely, their stupid business practices ruin it.

I still haven't actually bought anything since I got that external SSD, but I was thinking of upgrading my computer's internal storage to match (and free up some space on my boot drive to dual-boot). I'll just wait for the Mass Consumerism Day (which felt like two days) rush to end, and then I'll find a low-end drive (a Western Digital Blue or something). I think my motherboard's second M.2 slot is only PCIe 3.0 x2, but I also want something reasonably fast in case the drive is still around when I upgrade in a few years (or more than a few).

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-07-13, 22:44:

I avoid Samsung like I avoid Apple, for doing crap totally their own way and "improving" on standards, or as rational people say, breaking them. ... also don't trust Samsung for SD card issues, I know half a dozen people that have had samsungs corrupt cards on them. uSe a qUaLitY cArD they say, well they eat samsungs own cards too, and the kingston/sandisk/corsair etc cards worked fine in any other phone and tablet. Dumbest move possible is to "invest" in a "quality" phone of either of those, when everyone you know who has one HAS to keep taking it in for screens and buttons twice a year and to replace your whole phone costs less than what they have to pay for a repair with original parts. "But it's worth it because it's quality.." yeahnah.. I know, keeps people in business, but I'll keep buying the phones they never see.

The my mother who used SD card was cheap model, that can increase the chances of corruptions coupled with low end Samsung phone also increases the chances.

Are these low end samsung models? It is important to ask, as we see failure rate on these due to less sturdy frames bending the motherboard too much.

We have seen low issues with models that uses much stronger durable frame.

PS, this is Android based phones after all. Cheap phones are based on these too.

Cheers,

Bought an oscilloscope to finally have some more data when troubleshooting. DSO2512G.
Guess it's a good addition to my box.