TrashPanda wrote on 2023-04-14, 01:33:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-04-14, 01:21:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-04-14, 00:47:

That 1080ti will handle pretty much everything you want to do on the HTPC aside from AV1, once you get your 7900XTX swap them over.

The one big thing that everything pre RTX 3000 series is lacking is HDMI 2.1 support, so if you want to run at 4k @ 120Hz with Full RGB or 4:4:4 chroma, you'd need at least an RTX 3050. Anything older will be limited to formats that can create visual artifacts, especially on text and fine details.

This is the main reason my HTPC has a 3050... well, that and it was actually available under MSRP in early 2022, which was pretty much unheard of at the time.

120Hz 4k is still rather new TV wise, but this would be a good reason if you own such a TV.

For sure you won't have proper Full RGB 120Hz 4K support on most TVs still, but it is getting to be more common each year and some are surprisingly affordable (if you are the type that considers a TV a long term investment anyway).

After having the same 40" Vizio M series from ~2013 for about 9 years we got an excellent deal on an LG C1 55" (new) last spring, right when the C2 was released. We decided it would be our "anniversary present" to each other (I love my wife). It has been a fantastic TV and still blows me away when we watch something on it. 120Hz 4K OLED is just a sight to behold, and a PC with the right video card is the only thing I will probably ever own that will take full advantage of it. I definitely would not blame someone for putting an unbalanced video card in an HTPC just to run one of these TVs. I honestly don't see how a TV could look appreciably better than this in the future without some massive leap in technology.

I'm hoping to keep mine for many many years and never ever having to complain about image quality\clarity\backlights\black levels etc. It has been probably 6-9 months since I've adjusted any settings on it because it just looks right. The old Vizio had a decent picture but the backlight was was quite uneven along the sides, and in dark scenes (especially in games) there was really terrible color smudging unless the brightness was turned up to the point that the sides were washed out. And yet it still looked overall better than most other LCDs I saw.

Anyway... yeah. If I gamed more on my HTPC I would probably put my best video card in that system, regardless of the CPU it had. Totally worth it.

BTW... this seems like the appropriate place to put this... a small Life Pro Tip: Put furniture sliders under the legs on your couch. If you want to watch a movie and get the full theater experience, just slide it closer. It takes like 5 seconds and probably saved us $1200 versus buying some huge TV just so we could sit farther away.

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-04-14, 01:33:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-04-14, 01:21:

TrashPanda wrote on 2023-04-14, 00:47:

That 1080ti will handle pretty much everything you want to do on the HTPC aside from AV1, once you get your 7900XTX swap them over.

The one big thing that everything pre RTX 3000 series is lacking is HDMI 2.1 support, so if you want to run at 4k @ 120Hz with Full RGB or 4:4:4 chroma, you'd need at least an RTX 3050. Anything older will be limited to formats that can create visual artifacts, especially on text and fine details.

This is the main reason my HTPC has a 3050... well, that and it was actually available under MSRP in early 2022, which was pretty much unheard of at the time.

120Hz 4k is still rather new TV wise, but this would be a good reason if you own such a TV.

Projector here. It actually runs at a slightly weird 4096x2160 DCI resolution, but is limited to 60Hz.

And yeah, I was actually thinking of putting the 1080Ti in the HTPC, but eventually decided against it. TBH, the 1080Ti isn't ideal for 4K gaming either, and as I wrote earlier, I'm upgrading mainly for better gaming performance. Hardware AV1 is just icing on the cake. The 1650 Super that's currently in the HTPC just cannot game at 4K resolution. And although 1080p does scale quite cleanly to native res, the 1650 Super is actually starting to struggle a bit at that lower resolution, too. So I'm thinking/hoping that at 4k, Haswell @ 4.7GHz won't be much of a bottleneck for the RTX 4070. Especially with the 60Hz limit of the display.

And besides, if I were to temporarily install the 1080Ti in my HTPC, I'd be upgrading it again in a few months, when I finally get that 7900 XTX for my main PC. And the way that HTPC is wedged into a component stack with a bunch of controllers that are surprisingly picky about which USB ports they're plugged into, pulling that PC out for any reason at all is a major pain in the butt. I'd rather do it all just once.

The beast will have 512GB RAM.

Ended up bidding on some more 4x 32GB RAM kits for the Dell T7910 after going back and forth about just buying 6x 16GB sticks to finish filling the slots.

No reason to get the 16GB sticks when I can get 32GB sticks for a couple dollars more.

cyclone3d wrote on 2023-04-18, 17:59:

The beast will have 512GB RAM.

Ended up bidding on some more 4x 32GB RAM kits for the Dell T7910 after going back and forth about just buying 6x 16GB sticks to finish filling the slots.

No reason to get the 16GB sticks when I can get 32GB sticks for a couple dollars more.

Nice! Remember accessing the CPU2's ram from CPU1 introduces latency losses or vice vesa , just keep in mind while you programming.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-04-19, 00:03:

cyclone3d wrote on 2023-04-18, 17:59:

The beast will have 512GB RAM.

Ended up bidding on some more 4x 32GB RAM kits for the Dell T7910 after going back and forth about just buying 6x 16GB sticks to finish filling the slots.

No reason to get the 16GB sticks when I can get 32GB sticks for a couple dollars more.

Nice! Remember accessing the CPU2's ram from CPU1 introduces latency losses or vice vesa , just keep in mind while you programming.

Cheers,

The BIOS has an option to put all the RAM into a huge pool for non-NUMA aware OSes but it can also do it per CPU.

I'll have to test and see how it performs both ways.

This does not mask this regardless.

But options to make non-NUMA OSe compatible doesn't change the latency losses. To access CPU to CPU ram accesses had to go many parts of pathways. Direct CPU to ram is the quickest.

Cheers,

I highly doubt there will be any physical addressing going on, we're all at the mercy of the OS virtual addressing for allocation and access these days.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2023-04-19, 21:47:

This does not mask this regardless.

But options to make non-NUMA OSe compatible doesn't change the latency losses. To access CPU to CPU ram accesses had to go many parts of pathways. Direct CPU to ram is the quickest.

Cheers,

The BIOS literally has options to choose lower latency or higher throughput.

I replaced the monitor I've been using with my daily driver. It was a Philips BDM4037UW. I initially bought it explicitly to function as a TV, the 40" screen was a little bit big and not really ideal as a monitor. It had some serious ghosting and wasn't the best when it came to contrast. Now it went to the living room to serve my Xbox 360, PS3 and HP T520 multimedia client. I used to be using them with my old SyncMaster 2032MW I had since high school. Or should I say they were connected to it. it's only 20" and the image quality and viewing angle really wasn't good by today's standards.

The new one is a Philips 27M1N3500LS. Not that I'd be a big fan of Philips, but it just turned out this way. Much better contrast (even though it supposed to be the same), much better response time, much less ghosting. It'll take some time to get used to the 27" 1440p screen after spending years with the 40" 4k, tiling 3 or 4 1080p windows on one workspace, but a like the increased desk space on my forever messy desk.

Impulse-ish buy, happened to be in Mall-Wart and this branch had WD Mybook 6TB drives marked down to $99 CDN, so snarfed one to unload all my "archive" drives to, and plug into router.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-04-22, 17:17:

Impulse-ish buy, happened to be in Mall-Wart and this branch had WD Mybook 6TB drives marked down to $99 CDN, so snarfed one to unload all my "archive" drives to, and plug into router.

Wow! Great price. I would have impulse-ish bought 3 or 4 of them 😁

It did cross my mind, there was only one more on the shelf, but I just had the card for household funds on tap at the time and needed to fill the gas tank on the way home so was worried about cutting it too close.

Just ordered a refurbished ThinkPad P52, not sure about it's specs but the listing mentioned this one as having a i7-8850H and a Quadro P1000-something of some kind, and a 512GB NVMe SSD.

The listing didn't really mention anything about the dGPU that this one has (base dGPU on these is a Quadro P1000, so I'm [blindly] assuming it has this one) only the iGP that's built into the CPU.

That would be my 2nd ThinkPad and the 1st one I can finally call my own, I used to have a L540 on loan for school, but that one met a rather, shall we say, unfortunate and unpleasant end. (=the shell started cracking around the screws).

Edit: It finally arrived, it didn't have a Quadro P1000 as I thought but it has a Quadro P2000!

"Bin store" binge... $2 day.

"Bin stores" are springing up all over Southern Ontario like mushrooms, and are stores with raised bins on legs into which are dumped Amazon and other warehouse, liquidation and closeout returns. Some have a fixed price like $5 to $7 an item on all days, and cherry pick the higher ticket stuff to shelf on the walls, priced individually. Some put it all in the bins, but Thursday it's $25, Friday $20, Sat $15 so the more valuable and worth it stuff gets picked out as the week goes on.... So basically a bit like thrift stores for more recent stuff. Anyway, this one I went to was $2 on Tuesdays, and I think I found some stuff worth $2+ each...

5V mini blower, these have some pressure, so blast through a heatsink better than a fan. Bluetooth Casette adapter, turns any cassette boombox or car stereo into a bluetooth speaker. Universal remote... sucks BT, spits IR and RF, think this lets you control any IR/RF controlled AV devices with bluetooth... SNES controller, repro, got 3 SNES to fix, all controllers are hammered to death and not sure how many will repair. Gigabit PCIe NIC, should find a home. GPU fans, random, these will prolly find applications, might go looking for cheap cards with dead fans that they'll fit. VGA converter, IDK if it's suuuper useful, might be for Whacky Wheels on the tube TV or something.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-05-09, 21:45:

"Bin store" binge... $2 day.

"Bin stores" are springing up all over Southern Ontario like mushrooms, and are stores with raised bins on legs into which are dumped Amazon and other warehouse, liquidation and closeout returns. Some have a fixed price like $5 to $7 an item on all days, and cherry pick the higher ticket stuff to shelf on the walls, priced individually. Some put it all in the bins, but Thursday it's $25, Friday $20, Sat $15 so the more valuable and worth it stuff gets picked out as the week goes on.... So basically a bit like thrift stores for more recent stuff. Anyway, this one I went to was $2 on Tuesdays, and I think I found some stuff worth $2+ each...

5V mini blower, these have some pressure, so blast through a heatsink better than a fan. Bluetooth Casette adapter, turns any cassette boombox or car stereo into a bluetooth speaker. Universal remote... sucks BT, spits IR and RF, think this lets you control any IR/RF controlled AV devices with bluetooth... SNES controller, repro, got 3 SNES to fix, all controllers are hammered to death and not sure how many will repair. Gigabit PCIe NIC, should find a home. GPU fans, random, these will prolly find applications, might go looking for cheap cards with dead fans that they'll fit. VGA converter, IDK if it's suuuper useful, might be for Whacky Wheels on the tube TV or something.

This is a dumb thought, but seeing one of those bluetooth cassette adapters mentioned on a retro computing site immediately made me think of using bluetooth to playback or record data wirelessly between a vintage PC cassette drive and a modern PC or smart phone. 🤣

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-05-11, 14:17:

This is a dumb thought, but seeing one of those bluetooth cassette adapters mentioned on a retro computing site immediately made me think of using bluetooth to playback or record data wirelessly between a vintage PC cassette drive and a modern PC or smart phone. 🤣

Yes you might be able to load software off an audio file tape image on a phone or tablet etc to an 8 bit datasette type computer. Those with audio input jacks though without using built in deck are probably easier to use with direct jack input from headphone socket, or if you insist on getting BT involved through one of the BT dongle things. I think all of the cassette adapters, BlueTooth or wired, that I have seen through the years, are incapable of being "recorded" to though as the record head is in a different position to the play head, and they've only got the play head.

Turns out that that adapter I got though has a solder problem on the charge socket, which I will have to fix. That is somewhat expected as all items are returns. Though there are a number of items where people didn't like the color, size for their use, only needed an item to use once or twice or on vacation, their kid ordered it, etc etc, so perfectly fine, bit of a lottery though. I looked up some of my $20 worth though and there's $200 retail value in that pic at least, so basically you're breaking even if only one or two are perfect. Also have to look at a wireless phone charger my wife picked, it had a mag release connector which is missing for the power cord, so probably gotta bypass that and solder a cord in.

edit: BTW that remote thing is much more exciting than I first thought, can hook it into your network on wifi, and control google home and alexa devices and also old IR stuff like VCRs AND may be possible to use oldschool X10 plugs with it too. It also looks like it is flexible enough that you can cut out "big brother" services and locally host your own server or pick less creepy services to use those IoT devices with. Really amazing potential to glom half a dozen ecosystems together.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-05-11, 15:43:

Also have to look at a wireless phone charger my wife picked, it had a mag release connector which is missing for the power cord, so probably gotta bypass that and solder a cord in.

Isn't that a loose magnetic connector just plugged in some kind of USB?

H3nrik V! wrote on 2023-05-11, 16:03:

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-05-11, 15:43:

Also have to look at a wireless phone charger my wife picked, it had a mag release connector which is missing for the power cord, so probably gotta bypass that and solder a cord in.

Isn't that a loose magnetic connector just plugged in some kind of USB?

Yeah probably, the kind of ppl that always think they know a better arrangement than standard should be eternally cursed with a wet sock.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-05-11, 15:43:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2023-05-11, 14:17:

This is a dumb thought, but seeing one of those bluetooth cassette adapters mentioned on a retro computing site immediately made me think of using bluetooth to playback or record data wirelessly between a vintage PC cassette drive and a modern PC or smart phone. 🤣

Yes you might be able to load software off an audio file tape image on a phone or tablet etc to an 8 bit datasette type computer. Those with audio input jacks though without using built in deck are probably easier to use with direct jack input from headphone socket, or if you insist on getting BT involved through one of the BT dongle things. I think all of the cassette adapters, BlueTooth or wired, that I have seen through the years, are incapable of being "recorded" to though as the record head is in a different position to the play head, and they've only got the play head.

Yeah, it just gave me a chuckle when I thought of it. The closest I have done to this was to use this website to pipe programs into the cassette input on my Apple IIe from a phone with nothing but an aux cable.

I picked up this adorable little Lenovo desktop today.

$200 CDN got me:
-i7-7700 processor
-16GB of DDR-2666
-A freakin' low-profile GTX 1650
-512GB M.2/PCIe SSD
-I was more than a little surprised to find this all running off of a 220w proprietary PSU. Crikey, how does it even manage?!

I like it. It's barely audible and obviously sips power, making it perfect for web surfing and video streaming in the workshop.
Running the world's most relevant benchmark, 3DMark 2001, this conservative little business box actually impressed the hell out of me. The CPU maintained its 4.2GHz turbo state through most of the benchmark and pelted 93,899 points.