… in my defense, it had to be done for a long time now, i rest my case (or rather: filled it w/ more tech than I’d probably need).
so, I really went with the asus (strix) R9 380X OC 4GB model in the end.
It really is a silent card, since the fans have rarely beem running yet. I had a bad feeling about this at first and went on to install the windows-drivers to check if this is supposed to be this way (and lo and behold, you can actually manually override the settings, so i tested the fans on 80% settings just to see that yes, the fans are working as they are expected to work. Idling around means no fans, no noise. Strange times we live in, but i approve of that).
Now that my gfx-card has as much RAM as my PC does, I’m tempted to upgrade there as well …
Ubuntu was a bit more finnicky about this, wouldn’t let me install AMD drivers at first, so after kicking the nvidia-packages to the curb, i finally could install the free(ish) fglrx-drivers, which somehow think I have a R9 2xx card. Ah well, that’s why you get updated drivers from AMD itself/most recent version. Installing & rebooting into X afterwards didn’t work/hangs somewhere during sysV init (#facepalm, yup), so rollback to free(ish) drivers for now and that’s good enough for me atm.
fglrx is a mess. AMD is trying to move toward supporting the mesa package because nobody but Nvidia has the means to support their own standalone packages and kernel modules (not that it’s a good idea in the first place) but it’s taking some doing because all their drivers are incomplete in different ways and the codebases are totally different
@felix i second this sentiment, maybe do the obvious thing and replace e.g. upgrade w/ it?
(and the occasional hiccup that occured during (re-) booting thrice yesterday seems to be gone (for whatever reason), so I think upgrading going skylake went well).
Boring tinker update: so, when I first got the 290 in, I was having problems with overheating. This is because I am dumb and accidentally disabled the fan speed curve in Afterburner, which then left the Catalyst drivers to handle fan control, which totally felt it was cool to 1)define both a max temp target and a fan speed target, which just seems ??? and 2)have the default max temp target at 95°. So the card would run to 95°, start filling the case with heat, then the driver would crash. That’s bad. Nice little space heater though.
So anyway, I went back into Afterburner, defined a not-obnoxious fan speed curve and have curtailed temps to the 75°-80° range with minimal sound added. I also went ahead and made a couple of extra profiles, one for desktop use with the core and memory clocks and power draw turned down and one with stock clocks since some games aren’t stable with the ~10% overclock I gave the card.
Now I just have to figure out why the card is constantly reporting 100% utilization in most games or if even that’s just a quirk of the card (I can see the core clocks constantly fluctuating). Except in Outrun C2C, where it runs at 0% utilization, which is even more confusing.
some AMD-driver-gibberish will be coming to linux kernel 4.X version, so i expect all that performance being there for no gain until you boot to wi-
wait a minute, come to think of it; what’s up with steamOS, do we now, in 2K16, finally have the future where I just can play a game using linux? like, e.g. Cave shmups?
SteamOS is just Linux stripped down to the bare essentials, but still uses the binary drivers from AMD and Nvidia, so AMD cards will still do badly on it. And developers have to support Linux to begin with, it just won’t play any old game.
If you want every game, install Windows, if you want most games, install Wine, if you want some games, go Linux-only stuff.
there’s very little benefit (none?) to running steamOS over some other distro if you already use/understand Linux, and I can’t imagine the experience is super exciting if you don’t already like Linux
But if you use your distro of choice with up-to-date mesa packages on Intel or binary packages on NVIDIA, and you run upstream wine-staging, and you follow their directions to not blow up a .NET install, then pretty much everything dx9 works these days, and given how Linux continues to get a surprising number of indie and midbudget releases, you can run pretty much everything other than new dx11 AAA stuff on Linux (or OSX), much of it natively, which is kind of incredible even if it’s still an iffy proposition for most people
also you have to be periodically willing to set single-library overrides in winecfg when things crash but it clearly says msvcp120 (darkest dungeon) or openal32 (titan souls) in the crash output in order to have them work perfectly
one of my favourite recent discoveries is that you can even make stuff like fxinjector (or whatever it’s called) work by setting a d3d9 override in winecfg (so that wine will look for override dll’s in the exe directory same as windows will), and likewise make dsfix work by setting a dinput8 override (since that’s what the dll is called).
anyway, most linux people still dual boot I guess because they hate futzing with this stuff (which has always surprised me tbh, like if you’re already on linux for pragmatic reasons surely you can handle futzing with this, it’s not like documentation doesn’t exist), and there’s some performance overhead but usually that’s confined to the CPU and if you’re already running a bunch of dual-core-targeted dx9 games on a 2500k or better then it’s negligible.
and I personally find maintaining a windows install (let alone having to dual boot to use it) to be more irritating than playing with wine
hell, it’s 2016, so the prospect of dualbooting till the end of time feels kinda lame, if you ask me.
I will come back here and sob and cry when I get around to doing this™, but you’re right, felix, there’s no reason not to try tinkering with it when I’m basically exclusively using linux anyway. The only time I’ve booted into win (on this computer) this year was for installing the windows AMD drivers. (and that was only to see why no fans are turning. turns out that this is normal these days, not a sign for impending doom like’d been last time when I’ve bought a card. Progress!
More fun in the land of computing: so I think I need a new PSU
The short version is between the overclock on my CPU (recently bumped to a healthy 4.6, all hail the 2500k) and the 290 being a modern AMD GPU, my PSU doesn’t like doing its job anymore. The GPU sensors through GPU-Z show a 12V reading under load of ~11.4V, which is actually out of spec, and I’ve been getting crashes (like, fuck you time to restart crashes) even at stock GPU clocks. So the obvious conclusion is to drop a hundred bucks on a beefier PSU.
Thank god I only make enough money to get a decent tax refund
My archlinux steam install broke because some underlying libraries were too new or whatever. Reminder that Valve only officially support Debian-based OSes for Steam on Linux.
Hmm. I wonder if it’s feasible to just run Steam on an ubuntu docker container…
I planned on dual booting for my current machine, but gave up on it bc I can just run Windows and then use a VM when I need to do serious stuff, now that I have enough RAM to do so.
Still, I often miss the flexibility of a Linux desktop and tinkering with it occasionally. I’m also curious about how Arch would run on an SSD.
i’m looking at getting this because i need to fulfill a pretty obscure usage case: a very light laptop (because my 5.5 lb laptop is heavy enough that i end up leaving it in my room; this thing is half the weight) with decent battery life and a detachable touchscreen (because i need a good way to pull up sheet music at a piano), and which is also linux-capable because i’m insane. cpu and ram aren’t too important because this thing only needs to be able to deal with a few browser tabs and the occasional flash plugin/youtube video (though buying anything with a clockspeed of 1.33 GHz in 2016 makes me cringe). also, it has to be cheap as shit so that i can justify owning two laptops to myself when i don’t have any source of income.
I haven’t had this problem and I pacman weekly-ish. Have you tried just restarting after an update? That can fix linked libraries that are suddenly “too new”
Yay, I stabilized my 12V and all it took was buying a server grade PSU. Now I get to spend hours repeatedly crashing my system to hone on the perfect (read: stable) overclock. Which I almost had today, and then my system crashed when I went to close the benchmark.
Speaking of server grade, is wanting to scoop up some surplus Xeons being dumped on ebay along with a dual-slot motherboard wrong, because it looks like it could be fun, a “why not” scenario that would totally not ever backfire.
