StriderTR wrote on Yesterday, 02:43:

3D printed an arm mount for my cheap USB camera microscope. Seems to work well, all be it a bit wobbly.

Will work for checking traces, solder joints, and other such things as needed. Sure beats holding it all the time. 😜

Mount: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4928947

Nice, I might need to do that. Mine came with a stand, but it hasn't got much "throat", meaning it won't get into the middle of a larger board.

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 03:48:

StriderTR wrote on Yesterday, 02:43:

3D printed an arm mount for my cheap USB camera microscope. Seems to work well, all be it a bit wobbly.

Will work for checking traces, solder joints, and other such things as needed. Sure beats holding it all the time. 😜

Mount: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4928947

Nice, I might need to do that. Mine came with a stand, but it hasn't got much "throat", meaning it won't get into the middle of a larger board.

I was going to say the same thing. I bought one and used it a few times before I realized that it just doesn't work for anything larger than a small card. I still have it, but I mainly use a non-electronic binocular scope now. I honestly found the clarity of my digital scope to be really lacking. It was hard to see the depth and details of things so it felt like it didn't help much. With an extension arm it would definitely be more practical though!

I will say though... using a decent binocular scope feels like peering into a different world and being able to poke at it... with a tree trunk or something. Seriously, tools look so huge and useless under a scope 🤣 . It's amazing that anything can even be repaired this way, but so far it has been a huge help.

Having a AMD graphics card I decided to purge all the nvidia drivers.
Then I decided to rename /X11 to /X11backup

This morning I powered on my pc, no desktop...
Lost 2 hours, using my 2nd PC to both look up stuff and troubleshoot my pc.
<--- this makes me feel very bad for those who had to go through reinstall when internet wasn't available to get help, losing all data in the process

Serves me well!

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs.

RTX 5070ti has gone from 1300 dollars in December to 1700 dollars now .. WTF, 5060Ti 16Gb is 1000 dollars.

RTX 5090s are 7000 dollars ...utterly insane price for a GPU, 5080s are 2000 dollars.

RX 9070XT is weirdly 1000 dollars down from 1200 in December and the 9060XT 16Gb is 650 Dollars. (9060 non XT is not even available locally from my usual store)

No idea why AMD has dropped in price but nVidia has skyrocketed, they are both using similar memory .

Not even going to look at memory or SSDs .. both are well beyond reasonable pricing, safe to say the DIY PC market here in Australia is beyond fucked.

Today I have used an updated windows 11 USB for installation purposes originally created with RUFUS tool.
This is for an Intel Haswell motherboard by ASUS which is of course 100% unsupported by either ASUS or Microsoft.
It supports secure boot and I updated it accordingly but no TPM 2.0 which I'm not interested in anyway I just don't need or want file system encryption because i'm not into retention trade secrets FFS.
Although official ASUS driver support for my motherboard was up to windows 7 a free 3rd party tool linked me to all the latest versions that support windows 10 and 11.
The Intel RST driver support is pretty much broken and generates an error message in original windows 11 setup so I am happy integrating the latest ones into installer which fixed the problem.
Windows 10 gave the initial Intel RST driver support for windows 11 to run setup from windows 10 and afterwards I updated those drivers for installer integration.
I simply told DISM to grab them from the running system and pack them into install.wim after integrating the latest windows 11 update (the update is the size of a Distro!!!)
Everything was fully automatic the partitioning and local account creation also other prompts all automatically answered.
I saved ages without the update windows before first login etc I have slow internet I don't want to dick around.
Although RUFUS can do many configurations to Windows 11 I only make the USB installer with it and use an online autounattend.xml generator that has many more options just goes into the root directory of the USB partition that contains windows 11 install on any USB.
Unlike those tools that delete things already installed only for them to return when updates arrive this method doesn't do that and that’s why I still haven't converted to Linux!
No store app, edge, suggested apps, AI, and all the other bloated crap is not there the start menu is empty and I can do whatever I want with it!
First thing as always, install firefox!

Trashbytes wrote on Yesterday, 13:50:

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs. […]
Show full quote

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs.

RTX 5070ti has gone from 1300 dollars in December to 1700 dollars now .. WTF, 5060Ti 16Gb is 1000 dollars.

RTX 5090s are 7000 dollars ...utterly insane price for a GPU, 5080s are 2000 dollars.

RX 9070XT is weirdly 1000 dollars down from 1200 in December and the 9060XT 16Gb is 650 Dollars. (9060 non XT is not even available locally from my usual store)

No idea why AMD has dropped in price but nVidia has skyrocketed, they are both using similar memory .

Not even going to look at memory or SSDs .. both are well beyond reasonable pricing, safe to say the DIY PC market here in Australia is beyond fucked.

Such exotic tastes in hardware are better satisfied by purchasing them in new PC's online as they are usually the price of a decent computer than the price of a computer on their own.
Store fronts can be approached with reasonable offers especially if your a regular customer.
For me the latest isn't worth it anyhow they sometimes catch fire and come with bugs in drivers and firmware often not fixed for ages.
Thank AI companies for acquiring consumer marketed products to build datacenters leaving a scrape behind for scalpers.

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 06:00:

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 03:48:

Nice, I might need to do that. Mine came with a stand, but it hasn't got much "throat", meaning it won't get into the middle of a larger board.

I was going to say the same thing. I bought one and used it a few times before I realized that it just doesn't work for anything larger than a small card. I still have it, but I mainly use a non-electronic binocular scope now. I honestly found the clarity of my digital scope to be really lacking. It was hard to see the depth and details of things so it felt like it didn't help much. With an extension arm it would definitely be more practical though!

I will say though... using a decent binocular scope feels like peering into a different world and being able to poke at it... with a tree trunk or something. Seriously, tools look so huge and useless under a scope 🤣 . It's amazing that anything can even be repaired this way, but so far it has been a huge help.

That's exactly why I did it. Mine works well enough to see traces and solder joints really well when displayed on the TV you see in the photo. That little stand that it came with was just too small, and it finally broke on me last week, so I went looking for something better.

If you do decide to print that arm, you may want to note that it's made to work in increments, it has teeth on the arms to help hold it in place. When you go to adjust its position, you need to loosen the bolts at the desired pivot point. Works well for my needs, but I just wanted to mention it becasue it can be a bit finicky.

With the arm being extended out over my workpad, bumping the table or moving around does wobble the arm and camera. I modified the base (made it a lot thinner) to slide under the mat to be held in place while I'm using it, so it's not as stable as it could be if I had it mounted more securely. Still, it works for me.

Trashbytes wrote on Yesterday, 13:50:

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs. […]
Show full quote

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs.

RTX 5070ti has gone from 1300 dollars in December to 1700 dollars now .. WTF, 5060Ti 16Gb is 1000 dollars.

RTX 5090s are 7000 dollars ...utterly insane price for a GPU, 5080s are 2000 dollars.

RX 9070XT is weirdly 1000 dollars down from 1200 in December and the 9060XT 16Gb is 650 Dollars. (9060 non XT is not even available locally from my usual store)

No idea why AMD has dropped in price but nVidia has skyrocketed, they are both using similar memory .

Not even going to look at memory or SSDs .. both are well beyond reasonable pricing, safe to say the DIY PC market here in Australia is beyond fucked.

Yeah.... I just picked up a 9060XT 16GB here in the US and cost me $430. More than I wanted to pay, but the best price I could find considering the crazy memory market right now.

AMD underselling nVidia is normal, not exactly sure how they're doing it though in the current market. I mean, I use AMD over nVidia becasue of the cost, nVidia simply charges way too much for the performance I'm looking for, but it's been that way for a long time. I guess when they have the lions share of the market, they can pretty much do what they want. AMD prices are obviously high right now as well, but I think they're just doing what they always try and do, undersell nVidia, and have only adjusted to compensate for the memory cost, nothing more, so they remain cheaper?

Honestly, if nVidia was to ever actually undersell AMD, that would be a very bad day for AMD's GPU division. AMD offers a really good price to performance ratio for most people, myself included, but nVidia is the technology leader. If you could buy a top tier nVidia card for less than a top tier AMD card, I think AMD's market share would take a massive hit, or they would have to drop their prices so much that they loose profits, either way it would be bad. No worries though, I think nVidia is far too greedy to ever do that. They can charge what they want and they know people will buy it, they always do. 🤣

StriderTR wrote on Yesterday, 15:55:

That's exactly why I did it. Mine works well enough to see traces and solder joints really well when displayed on the TV you see […]
Show full quote

Ozzuneoj wrote on Yesterday, 06:00:

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 03:48:

Nice, I might need to do that. Mine came with a stand, but it hasn't got much "throat", meaning it won't get into the middle of a larger board.

I was going to say the same thing. I bought one and used it a few times before I realized that it just doesn't work for anything larger than a small card. I still have it, but I mainly use a non-electronic binocular scope now. I honestly found the clarity of my digital scope to be really lacking. It was hard to see the depth and details of things so it felt like it didn't help much. With an extension arm it would definitely be more practical though!

I will say though... using a decent binocular scope feels like peering into a different world and being able to poke at it... with a tree trunk or something. Seriously, tools look so huge and useless under a scope 🤣 . It's amazing that anything can even be repaired this way, but so far it has been a huge help.

That's exactly why I did it. Mine works well enough to see traces and solder joints really well when displayed on the TV you see in the photo. That little stand that it came with was just too small, and it finally broke on me last week, so I went looking for something better.

If you do decide to print that arm, you may want to note that it's made to work in increments, it has teeth on the arms to help hold it in place. When you go to adjust its position, you need to loosen the bolts at the desired pivot point. Works well for my needs, but I just wanted to mention it becasue it can be a bit finicky.

With the arm being extended out over my workpad, bumping the table or moving around does wobble the arm and camera. I modified the base (made it a lot thinner) to slide under the mat to be held in place while I'm using it, so it's not as stable as it could be if I had it mounted more securely. Still, it works for me.

Trashbytes wrote on Yesterday, 13:50:

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs. […]
Show full quote

Just checked local Australian prices for GPUs.

RTX 5070ti has gone from 1300 dollars in December to 1700 dollars now .. WTF, 5060Ti 16Gb is 1000 dollars.

RTX 5090s are 7000 dollars ...utterly insane price for a GPU, 5080s are 2000 dollars.

RX 9070XT is weirdly 1000 dollars down from 1200 in December and the 9060XT 16Gb is 650 Dollars. (9060 non XT is not even available locally from my usual store)

No idea why AMD has dropped in price but nVidia has skyrocketed, they are both using similar memory .

Not even going to look at memory or SSDs .. both are well beyond reasonable pricing, safe to say the DIY PC market here in Australia is beyond fucked.

Yeah.... I just picked up a 9060XT 16GB here in the US and cost me $430. More than I wanted to pay, but the best price I could find considering the crazy memory market right now.

AMD underselling nVidia is normal, not exactly sure how they're doing it though in the current market. I mean, I use AMD over nVidia becasue of the cost, nVidia simply charges way too much for the performance I'm looking for, but it's been that way for a long time. I guess when they have the lions share of the market, they can pretty much do what they want. AMD prices are obviously high right now as well, but I think they're just doing what they always try and do, undersell nVidia, and have only adjusted to compensate for the memory cost, nothing more, so they remain cheaper?

Honestly, if nVidia was to ever actually undersell AMD, that would be a very bad day for AMD's GPU division. AMD offers a really good price to performance ratio for most people, myself included, but nVidia is the technology leader. If you could buy a top tier nVidia card for less than a top tier AMD card, I think AMD's market share would take a massive hit, or they would have to drop their prices so much that they loose profits, either way it would be bad. No worries though, I think nVidia is far too greedy to ever do that. They can charge what they want and they know people will buy it, they always do. 🤣

Thing is AMD beats nVidia at pure raster performance, Nvidia has not held that crown for quite a while now and its only their AI that is propping up their GPUs by faking the extra performance. Their total reliance on heavy AI upscaling and AI RT optimisation will come to bite them in the ass shortly as it looks like UDNA is going to be a monster of a solution for pure raster performance from AMD along with their new RT rendering pipeline using matrix cores. I doubt nVidia can at this point do much if anything to take that crown back, if they didn't have AI faking performance they wouldn't be where they are as their current GPUs clearly show they are tapped out on pure hardware performance both realistically and power efficiency wise.

AMD bringing their Chiplet and fabric tech and know how to GPUs is going to be a winner, its taking a bit to get all the pieces in place though but if you look past all the fluff you can see what they are doing .. exactly what they did to Intel small incremental steps till the ball gets rolling downhill. (I'm no AMD fanboy but I do like how they are letting nVidia sit and stew much like they let Intel sit stew, now if they can keep their drivers in order they may actually pull this off)

You only need to look at how much extra power the 5090 is using to get where it is over the 5080 ...this situation wont continue for too much longer either as the market is quickly tiring of 600+ watt GPUs and their 6000 series is likely to continue that upward trend of more power usage to get that 30% performance uplift. They already have 1 kilowatt 5090s on the market so I cant see them stopping at 600watts, its honestly crazy to be putting a 1 kilo watt space heater in your PC...utterly bonkers.

Not that anyone can currently afford to be buying 5080s or 5090s, even the 5070ti is not worth it at 1700 dollars. (I have my 4090 and my 9070XT so I think I'm going to sit back and watch this all come bite nVidia in the ass)

Trashbytes wrote on Yesterday, 16:57:

Thing is AMD beats nVidia at pure raster performance, Nvidia has not held that crown for quite a while now and its only their AI […]
Show full quote

Thing is AMD beats nVidia at pure raster performance, Nvidia has not held that crown for quite a while now and its only their AI that is propping up their GPUs by faking the extra performance. Their total reliance on heavy AI upscaling and AI RT optimisation will come to bite them in the ass shortly as it looks like UDNA is going to be a monster of a solution for pure raster performance from AMD along with their new RT rendering pipeline using matrix cores. I doubt nVidia can at this point do much if anything to take that crown back, if they didn't have AI faking performance they wouldn't be where they are as their current GPUs clearly show they are tapped out on pure hardware performance both realistically and power efficiency wise.

AMD bringing their Chiplet and fabric tech and know how to GPUs is going to be a winner, its taking a bit to get all the pieces in place though but if you look past all the fluff you can see what they are doing .. exactly what they did to Intel small incremental steps till the ball gets rolling downhill. (I'm no AMD fanboy but I do like how they are letting nVidia sit and stew much like they let Intel sit stew, now if they can keep their drivers in order they may actually pull this off)

You only need to look at how much extra power the 5090 is using to get where it is over the 5080 ...this situation wont continue for too much longer either as the market is quickly tiring of 600+ watt GPUs and their 6000 series is likely to continue that upward trend of more power usage to get that 30% performance uplift. They already have 1 kilowatt 5090s on the market so I cant see them stopping at 600watts, its honestly crazy to be putting a 1 kilo watt space heater in your PC...utterly bonkers.

Not that anyone can currently afford to be buying 5080s or 5090s, even the 5070ti is not worth it at 1700 dollars. (I have my 4090 and my 9070XT so I think I'm going to sit back and watch this all come bite nVidia in the ass)

Very excellent points.

I personally dislike the push to for AI performance trickery. I'm also not a fan of it being used so heavily to create content in the video game space, again, you can tell. Everything feels off, at least it does to me.

The next few years are going to be interesting that's for sure. So much uncertainty right now with the "AI Bubble" inflated with false promises, runaway theft of intellectual properties and copyrighted materials, driving up prices, and rapidly growing public distrust. Not to mention the fact a vast majority of the money in the bubble is circulating among just a handful of compaines. It's not sustainable, but are we going to see the bubble pop, or slowly deflate? Time will tell.

In the meantime, I'm putting off any full system upgrades until I know more and start seeing the prices drop. Sticking to AM4 on all the systems I own for now.

StriderTR wrote on Yesterday, 17:21:

Very excellent points. […]
Show full quote

Trashbytes wrote on Yesterday, 16:57:

Thing is AMD beats nVidia at pure raster performance, Nvidia has not held that crown for quite a while now and its only their AI […]
Show full quote

Thing is AMD beats nVidia at pure raster performance, Nvidia has not held that crown for quite a while now and its only their AI that is propping up their GPUs by faking the extra performance. Their total reliance on heavy AI upscaling and AI RT optimisation will come to bite them in the ass shortly as it looks like UDNA is going to be a monster of a solution for pure raster performance from AMD along with their new RT rendering pipeline using matrix cores. I doubt nVidia can at this point do much if anything to take that crown back, if they didn't have AI faking performance they wouldn't be where they are as their current GPUs clearly show they are tapped out on pure hardware performance both realistically and power efficiency wise.

AMD bringing their Chiplet and fabric tech and know how to GPUs is going to be a winner, its taking a bit to get all the pieces in place though but if you look past all the fluff you can see what they are doing .. exactly what they did to Intel small incremental steps till the ball gets rolling downhill. (I'm no AMD fanboy but I do like how they are letting nVidia sit and stew much like they let Intel sit stew, now if they can keep their drivers in order they may actually pull this off)

You only need to look at how much extra power the 5090 is using to get where it is over the 5080 ...this situation wont continue for too much longer either as the market is quickly tiring of 600+ watt GPUs and their 6000 series is likely to continue that upward trend of more power usage to get that 30% performance uplift. They already have 1 kilowatt 5090s on the market so I cant see them stopping at 600watts, its honestly crazy to be putting a 1 kilo watt space heater in your PC...utterly bonkers.

Not that anyone can currently afford to be buying 5080s or 5090s, even the 5070ti is not worth it at 1700 dollars. (I have my 4090 and my 9070XT so I think I'm going to sit back and watch this all come bite nVidia in the ass)

Very excellent points.

I personally dislike the push to for AI performance trickery. I'm also not a fan of it being used so heavily to create content in the video game space, again, you can tell. Everything feels off, at least it does to me.

The next few years are going to be interesting that's for sure. So much uncertainty right now with the "AI Bubble" inflated with false promises, runaway theft of intellectual properties and copyrighted materials, driving up prices, and rapidly growing public distrust. Not to mention the fact a vast majority of the money in the bubble is circulating among just a handful of compaines. It's not sustainable, but are we going to see the bubble pop, or slowly deflate? Time will tell.

In the meantime, I'm putting off any full system upgrades until I know more and start seeing the prices drop. Sticking to AM4 on all the systems I own for now.

I have an AM5 system but I actually use my old work X299 system more ...I know right, its a Dinosaur by comparison but its still fast and efficient for everything but modern gaming. (It can still game ok but modern games stress the CPU far more than they should)

I just got a Z87 Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today board, and because it will take 32GB of DDR3, I am pondering setting that up as modern duty backup machine, donkeywork for upstairs vs main rig for office. The question being though, do I want to go all out on an i7-4790k, which are seemingly guaranteed to do 4.5Ghz and may go higher, vs a hit or miss but half the price 4770k ... or just say screw it, see what turns up and put the on hand i5-4570 in it.

Though I am still trying to fill out the Ryzen B550 board, so far collected 24GB of RAM, CPU is being elusive though, local pricing for used is whack. Go on eBay start low and it's "just another $5" for something slightly better, and end up saying "Nah, not spending $250" and forgetting about it until a day or two later and doing the same thing.

BitWrangler wrote on Yesterday, 20:25:

I just got a Z87 Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today board, and because it will take 32GB of DDR3, I am pondering setting that up as modern duty backup machine, donkeywork for upstairs vs main rig for office. The question being though, do I want to go all out on an i7-4790k, which are seemingly guaranteed to do 4.5Ghz and may go higher, vs a hit or miss but half the price 4770k ... or just say screw it, see what turns up and put the on hand i5-4570 in it.

Though I am still trying to fill out the Ryzen B550 board, so far collected 24GB of RAM, CPU is being elusive though, local pricing for used is whack. Go on eBay start low and it's "just another $5" for something slightly better, and end up saying "Nah, not spending $250" and forgetting about it until a day or two later and doing the same thing.

IMO if you have some i7 just go for it, i5 is low bottom.
OC it if you know how.

Trashbytes wrote on Yesterday, 17:39:

I have an AM5 system but I actually use my old work X299 system more ...I know right, its a Dinosaur by comparison but its still fast and efficient for everything but modern gaming. (It can still game ok but modern games stress the CPU far more than they should)

Nothing wrong with that. I've never minded using old systems. For me, old doesn't mean it can't be useful.

My bench PC is an old Zotac ZBox Nano (2014) with a quad-core Intel Celeron (1.83 GHz to 2.16 GHz) and just 8GB of DDR3L 1333, but it gets the job done! I've got Ubuntu installed on a small 240GB SSD and it runs all my bench software (OpenHantek, PulseView, EasyEDA, Fritzing, ArduinoIDE, etc) just fine. I wanted something small, but with good USB connectivity for my testing hardware, and that ZBox fit the bill. Picked it up on Ebay for $45 a few years ago.

I'm actually considering trying to put Mint on it. Been wanting to play around with it for a while now. I've also considered getting something a bit newer, but this ZBox still works good, so I just keep using it. 😀