Any 6th/7th gen cpu in particular is worth at least 60-75$ USD at a minimum. Due to ebay gougers and the fact that many mining boards used those cpus. 15$ for all that was quite a bargain.

For anything but retro builds I’m all in on custom loops in ITX cases with an under volt / overclock on the CPU/GPU. They are not for the faint-hearted and you are almost guaranteed to come across at least one leak or forgotten step somewhere along the loop the first few times you try.

I’m now on my 5th custom loop since Covid began and honestly feel its part and parcel of building a system now. I love the tinkering, the measuring, the search for the perfect fitting, etc. I almost exclusively use EKWB Z-tubing and 10/16mm fittings and go for either all black or black/chrome without any RGB at all. Once built, I rarely have to maintain them apart from draining the loop once a year and refilling it with fresh coolant.

Air cooling works great for those wanting simplicity and don’t mind noise or custom fan control. It works much better in larger builds as when you start going sub 12L you’ll find heat builds up much quicker due to poorer ventilation, meaning you may need to compromise on your parts list.

If I’m not doing a full custom loop, I will do a half loop on the GPU-only and use either a Noctua L12S or Thermalright AXP-100 copper on the CPU (there aren't many choices for SFF). As others have mentioned, the GPU tends to get taxed the most these days, whether you’re gaming or mining (or both) and as long as you can stick a 240mm rad in the case somewhere, the GPU blocks are usually much, much more compact than a 2-slot let alone 3-slot behemoth standard air-cooled heatsink shroud.

As for AIOs, I’ve never bothered so can’t comment. They just seem so…restrictive to me. I prefer the customisation options available and have the money to spend on it - apart from my audio gear, I don’t spend on cars, bikes or booze (medical conditions prevent me from returning to that lifestyle) or whatever most guys my age spend their disposable income on. It’s a relatively cheap part of a wider hobby to explain away to my wife 😀

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-31, 18:35:

Here he goes again... rambling on about stuff that might be gone by the time he gets his ass in gear to buy... (Woulda liked tha […]
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Here he goes again... rambling on about stuff that might be gone by the time he gets his ass in gear to buy... (Woulda liked that Ryzen deal though, missed it)

Getting really tempted by local reseller having ThinkStation P300 machines, 16GB, Haswell Xeon, Quadro K2200 ... $399 CDN which is about $315 USD at present... those Haswells are real bruisers, seems like they beat up on the lower half of the Ryzens still. Like 7k assmarks or so.

On the other hand for $400, dealing with multiple sellers and driving all over the place, I could put a Ryzen 3 2200G in a B350 board with 16GB, corsair case, R9 260X and have parts for 2 or 3 A8-A10 APU machines left over.

The tax at the retailer is probably about the same as gas and aggravation to do the other. ... difference seems to be something like 20% faster CPU 20% slower GPU and vice versa. Well plus on the leftovers for second choice, which I'd like less of maybe but it's how I get the GPU and the good case... but then that might build a 3.8 Ghz A10 with an R9-250 which ain't terrible. (Though apart from the Ryzen and board all the rest is about buying two other peoples flaky/glitchy mess and hoping I'm right about what's going on with it, think one has a bad PSU, the other misconfig) Though the buy chain makes me nervous, you lock into your choices by buying one, and then another flakes out, sells, or whatever.

edit: misoverestimation CPU and GPU performance delta might be more like +/- 10%
edit2: damn, don't know my Rs from my elbow, should be R7 260X, R7 250.

Nowwwwww, I'm looking at a Dell Precision T1700 with an E3-1225V3 Haswell in it for under $150 CDN, compared to the P300, which we'll say is $300 if we minus the K2200, it's got 70% of the overall performance, 90% of the raw clock, 90% of the single thread performance, and I lose hyperthreading, but no real cores... for half the price. ... and I guess I could stick an E3-1286V3 in it later when they drop cheap... though even that one is only like 15% single core faster, kinda on the cusp of "you actually feel it" for upgrading. HerperThrerping is of course beneficial only on certain workloads, so P300 would be "some of the time" 30% faster, the rest of the time 10% faster.

In other news, dropped the trigger, or pulled the hammer or something on two Quadro K620 mini GPUs for two SFF boxes. Also impulse bought an E5430 for pocket change... because of course I want a C2Q class in every single frigging s775 box that can take one. Should figure out what I'm doing for modding it I guess. Though one board I have might have been modded to take Xeon.

Bought one of these for my PVM so I can watch my shows and other items on there.

Hope this works without issues.

Deciding what boxes to torture with the E5430... well, beat on until they run it or something... candidates include a Finkcenter M57 and an ITX box with an intel Dg45FC motherboard in... officially, the Finkcenter only came with 65nm CPUs I think, either that or I'm just finding the release docs and they did others later, but the chipset does 45nm and the 1333 bus on other CPU (Than quads) ... 2 quads it officially supports are Q6600 and Q6700. ... then the DG45FC does 45nm and 45nm quads... but "needs" 65W ones, the Q9550s is the top 65W.... however, if we look at actual power consumption rather than Intels TDP marketing number, we see it hits 132.48 watts maximum.. so ima guess the board survives that... the E5430 while nominally having the 80W TDP hits 133.25 watts maximum, just around half a percent higher... also got a sustained figure of 108, while sustained figure for the higher end 65nm dual cores it supports are at 105W and change, so maybe two and a half percent higher than those... so I reckon, with good attention to thermals, that I could potentially nail it into that box and not blow up the board... providing BIOS etc co-operate... which is also a large factor in the Finkcenter working too. ... I do have some much more wonderful boards I could run it on, but I've got other quads that are more amenable to overclocking, lower stock FSB etc, meaning I'd kinda "waste" those boards on a higher FSB chip that wouldn't go far.

Edit: Plan C confirmed... users report 45nm Xeon working on DG965SS boards... that one might get to be a media recombobulator.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2022-02-18, 00:00:

Bought one of these for my PVM so I can watch my shows and other items on there.

Legit stuff l like on my androids, Plex, Tubi, Gem, VLC ... plus whatever subscriptions you feel necessary. Biggest problem is if you try to plug it in something not HDMI legal, which triggers that HDPC crap and leaves you with black screens in your players. For some reason I can't get along with the youtube apps, one of them is too basic and one of them is too keyboardy, TV vs tablet versions, quite often end up using browser. It's all a bit piecemeal though what you do what with, grabbed amazon sticks to dumb stuff down for the local peasants. Dunno if you get a smoother ride with higher end hardware (and sotware package?) though, mines kinda patched up junk that other ppl gave up on 🤣

Yay, I can breathe, Paypal payment cleared the bank... (Paypal had jerked me around in the past) ... so I hope I can count those K620s as MINE real soon. One of the machines that was going to receive one might not benefit a great deal from it though, forgot it only had PCIe x1... so that gets a HD6450 still... but it will definitely find a home and I might still wish for more of them.

Grabbed a Gigabyte G1.Assassin 2 this morning. I still feel it is modern, even at roughly 10 years old.

Oh, and an Amiga LED sign.

I've noticed my Samsung Note 9 phone having less and less battery life in the last month or so.

Decided it was finally time to put the old girl out to pasture, while I can still get a reasonable trade-in credit.

I got the S22 ultra 512gb. https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s22-ultra/

It never ceases to amaze me just how much power is handheld. I still vividly remember replacing the family 8088 with a LCIII (386sx) and getting on the internet with AOL on a 2400 baud modem during Christmas of 93. Our first cell phone was literally the size, shape and weight of a brick and cost a dollar a minute to use. I honestly believe, most people take this advancement for granted, to say little of the roughly 1/4 of the population with a room temperature IQ that thinks this is literal magic and/or the work of the devil.

5g can barely penetrate the wall of my house. (Top) wifi (mid) outside (bottom)

luckybob wrote on 2022-02-23, 21:27:

I've noticed my Samsung Note 9 phone having less and less battery life in the last month or so.

Decided it was finally time to put the old girl out to pasture, while I can still get a reasonable trade-in credit.

I got the S22 ultra 512gb. https://www.samsung.com/us/smartphones/galaxy-s22-ultra/

I have a cheapo Samo and I hate it. It's an A11 and it pisses me off daily. I was so so much happier w/my LG Stylo 4 (and I believe the 6 has been out for a while). All around pleasant to use. FF would crash multiple times a day, but it would recover instantaneously. I guess high end Samsungs must be good. But based on this experience I'm bound to look at other brands.

luckybob wrote on 2022-02-23, 21:27:

It never ceases to amaze me just how much power is handheld. I still vividly remember replacing the family 8088 with a LCIII (386sx)

Is that a type? Did Macs have Intel micros long before we knew 😀

luckybob wrote on 2022-02-23, 21:27:

I honestly believe, most people take this advancement for granted, to say little of the roughly 1/4 of the population with a room temperature IQ that thinks this is literal magic and/or the work of the devil.

While I believe neither, some particularly devilish things are made.possible, make that very convenient, on account of the availability of such technology.

Not a typo, persay... but the LCIII is roughly equivalent to a 386sx. That's what my intent was

Though it didn't take as long as you think for the raw grunt to get into handheld devices, since the Palms were running on dragonball CPUs that had mostly the same architecture as the Mac 680x0s before the end of the 90s. The graphical sophistication took a bit longer though... well maybe not in late palms vs early Macs 🤣

Also around the twiddle of the millenithing was it Nokia communicators and blackberries had actua 386es in, embedded version.

In other news, my K620s arrived, both sets of brackets included, unusual for used or seller refurb. They look great, still a bit of messing around to so before I can test them though... w00t 25fps on low detail here we come...

wiretap wrote on 2022-02-21, 20:58:

Grabbed a Gigabyte G1.Assassin 2 this morning. I still feel it is modern, even at roughly 10 years old.

Screenshot_20220221-112715~2.png

It resembles my only partially working Supermicro c7z170 mobo. So much green. Rather gorgeous. But alas I can't get passed bios 🙁

Used Sound Blaster ZxR because I was so disappointed with the new Sound BlasterX AE-5 which I sent back on the first day.

DDR3-1333 strips are nowhere "retro" but I grabbed one Transcend 4GB strip from an e-waste recycler for NT$200 (US$7.15) and two Team 4GB strips from an online seller for NT$390. All three passed Memtest86 with flying colors.

Seeing computers equipped with DDR3 laying in e-waste is kind of sad; while they might not be able to run AAA games or video editing, they are more than capable running office software and browsing the web, yet many consumers buy brand new machines doing the same mundane tasks.

dormcat wrote on 2022-02-28, 12:15:

DDR3-1333 strips are nowhere "retro" but I grabbed one Transcend 4GB strip from an e-waste recycler for NT$200 (US$7.15) and two Team 4GB strips from an online seller for NT$390. All three passed Memtest86 with flying colors.

Seeing computers equipped with DDR3 laying in e-waste is kind of sad; while they might not be able to run AAA games or video editing, they are more than capable running office software and browsing the web, yet many consumers buy brand new machines doing the same mundane tasks.

Higher-end DDR3 systems can still do gaming. My home office PC equipped with a sandy-bridge Xeon and a Geforce 960 can still play most games out there with decent settings.

I have a dual Xeon x5675 based system with 48 gigs of ddr3 1333 in triple channel and a RTX 3050 and I play lots of games with no issues. DDR3 based systems are still quite capable regardless of what the PC influencers on YouTube say.

dormcat wrote on 2022-02-28, 12:15:

DDR3-1333 strips are nowhere "retro" but I grabbed one Transcend 4GB strip from an e-waste recycler for NT$200 (US$7.15) and two Team 4GB strips from an online seller for NT$390. All three passed Memtest86 with flying colors.

Seeing computers equipped with DDR3 laying in e-waste is kind of sad; while they might not be able to run AAA games or video editing, they are more than capable running office software and browsing the web, yet many consumers buy brand new machines doing the same mundane tasks.

I need to stumble on a supply of DDR3 (and DDR2) got a relative we don't see very often in IT and he promised me a bucket full, but it's been 6 months and no bucket full of RAM.

I've had relatively recent at the time, machines for free, or seen them discarded, just because the windows install was messed up, or loaded down with spyware/adware/viruses. Though it's been a few years since a good score there. Well I got a C2Quad last year, but that was not that recent, even though it could be put to use as a win10 box. Dunno if we'll see a rush of ppl dumping their "Pandemic PCs" or not.

Munx wrote on 2022-02-28, 12:39:

Higher-end DDR3 systems can still do gaming. My home office PC equipped with a sandy-bridge Xeon and a Geforce 960 can still play most games out there with decent settings.

DDR3 Core-i builds can be still highly capable, especially those with quad-core or more; my earlier post already made a similar point.

Most of those machines ended up in e-waste were with Core 2 Duo or Pentium Dual-Core CPU that scored CPU-Z x64 2017.1 with 4-500 points and a 500GB mechanical HDD. Their previous owners simply possessed no knowledge of refurbishing computers (replacing HDD with SSD, reapplying thermal paste, etc.) and treated computers as one-time consumer electronics. I know people who never change oil for their car engines so it's not surprising (shrug).

An interesting incident at e-waste: a guy came looking for a LGA1151 CPU for his Skylake MB. My friend and I both told him that a working 6th Gen. CPU is very unlikely ending up in e-waste as of today and suggested him auctions sites and used computer stores instead.

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-28, 14:03:

I've had relatively recent at the time, machines for free, or seen them discarded, just because the windows install was messed up, or loaded down with spyware/adware/viruses.

Yes, that's usually the reason for many people discarding completely functional (hardware-wise) computers; they have no knowledge of reinstalling a clean operating system.

schlang wrote on 2022-02-28, 10:22:

Used Sound Blaster ZxR because I was so disappointed with the new Sound BlasterX AE-5 which I sent back on the first day.

Why ?
(am looking myself for a 'new' sound card, for Win7)