Tom's Hardware of Finland

I was going through stuff in my mom’s attic and look, its my second ever aftermarket CPU heatsink. This baby was used to cool a socket 939 AMD Athlon 64. Socket 939 released in June 2004. So that’s right about when I would have bought this cooler. I had just graduated higschool. Had my first trip to Japan. 18 years old.

Its made by Gigabyte. 3D Rocket Cooler Pro. A turbine fan design. The lower fin thing, deflects air downward, to cool the VRMs and RAM. It worked really well. The turbine fan was super loud, however. After this build, I would go on to emphasize quiet cooling.

cooler_design

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BLAST from the past, literally!
What a tower

so, since the Athlon 200GE doesn’t want ECC, it has been outcast into the wilderness:

didn’t want to boot with 1804LTS usb-thumbdrive, plays along nicely with 1904.

Now for testing how loud (or not loud) it’ll be…

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AFAIK 1804 LTS needs workarounds to boot with Vega/590s, which would probably have been the issue

anyway, now you have a nice little emulator box

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Should be pretty good with that Noctua fan. Which CPU is in there now? And is that the heatsink from AMD’s Wraith cooler? or is that something which came with the Asrock package?

exactly.
May also serve as my thin-client to the NAS (where the Athlon originally was supposed to go), let’s see…

Specs as of now are:

CPU == (AM4) Athlon 200ge
RAM == SO-DIMM 2x 16gb Kingston Hyper X == 32gb
Storage == old’ish SAMSUNG 512gb NVMe m2
Cooler == Noctua NH-L9… a i think it was.
The cooler itself is from noctua as well, tbh i gave the stock cooler-thingy they included with the Athlon 200GE a try and instantly removed it from the board, since it was too loud in idle mode already. Bought that noctua cooler/fan combo, silence… so that’ll remain with that CPU.





… now i only need to buy a mITX board that can do ECC (will be asrock again, :thinking:) and decide whether i can wait for zen2, or whether i jump for a ryzen3 2nd gen and upgade to a zen2 in a year or so, if the board will permit that… re:AGESA and board-flash-remaining space-issues…

Oh, I thought you got rid of the 200ge and bought something new. I misunderstood!

All of the current AMD boards should support Zen 2, assuming bios upgrades. You’ll likely miss out on some PCI-E lanes and 1 or 2 other embedded features. Overclocking could be limited, especially for budget boards.

Athlons are multiplier locked unless you have specific bios revisions or specific boards, otherwise you have to make die with good old PCIE clock adjustments

Yeah I meant if you buy a Zen 2 in the future and put it on a current board, you may be limited in overclocking heardroom, depending upon the board.

Also, some newer bios (starting December 2018) have unlocked the multiplier on the Athlon 200GE. So, YMMV

would have loved to put the Athlon 200 Pro in the NAS, tbh, but i think i will wait for what zen gen3 will bring/that Computex keynote from AMD, and then decide whether i will wait.
it’d be cool to have one CPU from each Ryzen gen…

I need some computer stuff. I am incredibly ignorant about computers, which is probably one of the reasons why I’m one of the great game developers of the 21st century. Can anyone help me here?

My computer has a 128GB SSD HD. It’s non upgradable. This is not big enough to store all my work shit.

Yes, it is a Mac. How did you know?

I have two external SSDs and I’d like to stick at least one of them into a USB-c (I think?) enclosure. Does anyone have recommendations for such enclosures? Ideally the enclosure(s) will be cheap, reliable, silent, sold on a site that takes Paypal, and will deliver my goods promptly, though I’ll settle for Amazon if I gotta.

Normally I’d spend half a day reading up on the best options for this shit but I have no clue where to turn for computer stuff nowadays and I just spent the last 48 hours trying to solve one technical problem after another so I am behind on work and I can’t be making poor purchases right now even if they’re super cheap and also I never wanna have to research anything about computers ever again. So uh if anyone has any recs I’d appreciate it.

I also blew up the HDMI port on my monitor, I think? It does not work and it doesn’t seem like I’m going to be able to fix it. I’m currently using an HDMI > DVI cable and that seems fine, but now I can’t play Tekken without swapping DVI cables and that’s a pain in the behind. This monitor has a VGA port, but my old ass PC doesn’t. I think my GPU is an nVidia 660. Will a DVI > VGA cable work ok? I tried reading Amazon reviews for this shit but I got confused and tired and decided I’d rather scrub my floors than think hard about computer.

I also blew up my speakers. I have an old pair where only the right channel works. I assume something is up with the wiring. Does anyone know if it’s possible to like…fix wiring. Can I do that using wire cutters and tape? That would be ideal. I have those things.

Thank you for reading my silly questions. I’m a natural born genius, I swear. I just have my weak points. Like being incredibly lazy and having zero hangups about asking more knowledgable people to do my homework for me. Thanks.

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Also am I going to regret leaving my Arale model resting atop a Mac mini? Is there any chance this model might melt, or damage this computer? This is the most important question of all and I would appreciate a sincere answer. Thanks.

I’ve never heard of a surplus of external SSDs before, do you mean they’re just regular SSDs and you want to put them in enclosures? I’m surprised your Mac is new enough to have USB-C but only has a 128G disk

please re-explain the situation with Tekken and cables, because I’m not following along.

DVI ports will pass an analog (VGA) signal, if you have the 4 extra holes on the right side. So, 3 of these will pass an analog signal, out from the DVI port.

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Oh yeah oops they’re old regular SSDs. I used them in my old Macbook. I’d like to keep using them as external storage. I currently have one in an old usb enclosure and it’s fine for now but this thing only has 2 USB ports and I don’t wanna buy another damn hub. I’d rather make use of one of the Thunderbolt ports cuz they’re all empty and I sure as shit ain’t gonna buy anything else for them anytime soon.

Unless Thunderbolt to old timey USB hubs are cheaper than enclosures. Then sure I’ll buy one of those damn things instead.

(Computer is the basic 2018 Mac mini, with the i3 whatever and 8GB ram and a 128GB HD. It is a billion times faster than my old computer. It is amazing. Tonight I was able to simultaneously draw and watch pro-wrestling and a FG stream while tabbing out to attend to other matters and not once did my computer lock up! Is this what I’ve been missing out on all this time? Is this what computers are like now? Wow. Please don’t tell me they get better than this. I don’t want to think about it.)

I have a gaming PC that’s almost a decade old but it plays all the games I like so it’s pretty sweet. It was hooked up to my monitor via DVI but now my Mac is hogging that port. My monitor is an ASUS VE248. The only other free port on the monitor is a…ok I just looked it up and it’s a “D-Sub” port. It looks like the GPU – nVidia 660 Ti, I think? – has the two DVI-D ports. Is it possible to get a cable that hooks up to this D-Sub port?

two of those things should work?

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Thank you!! This is very much the nice price.

Here’s a photo of Arale and friend. They also say “Thanks!”

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You can just get a little multi port switch/hub for your Monitor’s DVI port.

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hi there

this thread is now about how AMD committed murder in the first degree for the next 24 hours

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they did it!!

officially no reason to buy Intel on desktop for the next year at least, welcome to 2003 everybody

also 1.4x performance per watt on the GPU side is not bad at all but it’s still mostly attributable to 16nm → 7nm, which means Nvidia isn’t nearly as threatened as Intel