Hit a problem last week where my tower all of a sudden it wanted to throttle all the wifi speed from the usb adaptor after I in a fit of weakness I used one of those driver search and autoinstall programs. Tried doing a system restore and decided that it didn’t want to take and then all my restore points disappeared from the list. Now I got a different wifi usb adapter and have gotten back to sense of normalcy but now my usb headset only wants to be detected if it’s in a usb 3.0 slot. Windows, plz.
Thinking I’ll just endure until I can afford an SSD and do a more clinical reinstall and put linux on my other HDD.
windows on an HDD is pretty miserable these days, even my VMs will bottleneck on arbitrary library installs
(I keep those VMs for games that wine doesn’t support very well, but which don’t need dx11 or > 256mb of vram, because virtualbox doesn’t support that, because uh of course I do. only two in that category that I care about playing are both recent releases, downwell and her story).
Don’t take this as snide or anything, but I think the prices and benfits of an SDD, even if only for booting, are enough to the point where you should budget for it ASAP. It’s honestly fast enough that you wonder how the hell we got on before they came along.
How much practical value does overclocking on Skylake have? It seems like the only ITX boards that can handle it are the hideous l33tgAmZoRZ models and I want to know how much performance I’ll be buying with my aesthetic suffering.
Realistically, overclocking will benefit you if you want to do more CPU intensive activities. If you’re just going to play games at 1080p or 1440p, you will probably have enough power to not bottleneck any GPU you use if you grab an i5 or i7. If you’re pushing 4k or you like doing render-y things like working with video or photo files, spending that 40-50 bucks for an unlocked proc will save you time in the short term and let the system last longer in the long term if you push the clocks to a reasonable level (or: you have to actually overclock it. This seems obvious but plenty of people run K procs at stock clocks because they just don’t need the extra speed).
Besides, odds are good that whatever might be offending your eyes are heatsinks for the VRMs on the board, which help the motherboard not burst into flames when you do overclock (fire would generally make the CPU run too hot). You also don’t need the highest tier of chipset to overlock unlocked CPUs either, since you will just be mucking with the turbo speed multiplier and maybe the base clock and the former is dictated by the CPU (hence the extra cost). Some Z170 boards can overclock locked Skylake procs, but newer BIOSes (and, presumably, newer boards) will be patching that out, and that’s achieved through base clock OC only.
So, my answer is who the hell is going to be looking in your tiny box anyway, just throw some guts in a case and compute already
he says, as he moves the HDA cable in his case ever so slightly for aesthetics
real talk, 99% of your computer’s guts not looking like shit will be down to cable management, so fancy cases and/or modular PSUs are recommended if you want to keep things tidy. Wanting a mini-ITX board is already giving up on some of that.
I shrank from ATX to mini-ITX and stuck with Haswell! Now our PCs are both quad core and we have an i3 box to convert into an NAS.
I put it in a Fractal Design Node 304 and wouldn’t really recommend the case from a practical perspective. I ended up learning to love the solid state and just put my SSD behind the front cover with 3M nu-velcro. The Thermalright cooler is nice because it’s low profile and the pipes slant to give lots of RAM clearance.
What’s wrong with the Node 304? My fileserver lives in that case and I actually remember it being pretty easy to work on while I was pulling a lot of drives in and out to do firmware updates.
I think it’d be great for that purpose. I was trying to fit a air cooled gaming setup, though, and it was a little aggravating because of:
PSU/GPU clearance (ASUS 780 DCII so I recognize my card is dumb huge)
drive cage cable management (ended up just ditching mechanical drives)
molex on the fan controller
the shroud clips
PSU pass through
It’s better than the CM130 from earlier in this thread (my brother has one and CPU clearance is always a pain) but I feel like I should have gone with a tiny tower like the EVGA Hadron or Define Nano S for my purposes. ITX cases have gotten much friendlier to cramming big components in since 2012 (?) when these came out. I like the form factor now that it’s under my TV, though!
(I should probably mention that I went with the 304 knowing most of these drawbacks but it was $60 on Newegg with free shipping so I traded a couple of hours of messing with wiring for the savings.)
Oh yeah, I could see that. Video card clearance never entered my mind as unsurprisingly my server doesn’t have a discrete one.
What’s the state of next gen video cards? This next round is supposed to be a big one right? AMD getting its new memory working well and nvidia with a big process shrink?
Yup first process shrink since 2012, I think. I don’t know if HBM2 can keep AMD in the game. I wish they’d just spin off ATi so they have a shot at competing with Nvidia.
AMD has kinda sorta spun the GPU chunk of the company into a separate unit, which means if AMD were to decide to liquidate, they could easily sell the Radeon Technology Group as its own piece (never mind the constant rumors of AMD being bought whole by Samsung).
Looking at DX12/Vulkan stuff, current AMD cards seem to be faring better than Nvidia by virtue of doing async compute tasks in hardware (as it stands, Nvidia does this in the driver). Of course, DX12 and Vulkan aren’t relevant yet and Nvidia spends more on R&D than AMD’s market cap as a company, so.
I’m still not remotely convinced that we’ll see individual devs do much of note with vulkan outside of big AAA engines and maybe whatever implementation unity comes up with, but arguably no one other than that should be writing OpenGL directly in the first place, so
and also I think we’re seeing just how good Nvidia’s driver already is at doing this.
with the upcoming GPU process shrink I’m beginning to wonder if I used up my academic allocation from Nvidia to get a Titan X too early, oh well
Unrelatedly, I’m excited to see skylake iris pro benchmarks when the new MBPs come out. I think I’m gonna hold off on buying one until they do a quad-core 13" which probably won’t happen until 10nm, but on paper this next batch should be within 10-20% of the PS4’s GPU unless they’re heavily TDP constrained which is pretty cool.
Babby’s first Linux desktop is 75% operational, with all of the remainder being Skylake graphics. At this point, I’m sufficiently tired of OS repair that I’m willing to suck it up and wait for the official Mint firmware release. Maybe while I’m not playing games I’ll make some shorter PSU cables, because the thicket in my case is haunting me.
maaaaan don’t use mint, that’s the only reason you’re having to do that OS repair in the first place
also, just for my own edification: linux graphics drivers are not complicated. add an upstream source for nvidia binary if you’re on nvidia, and an add an upstream source for mesa if you’re not. period. done.
it’s not your fault, a lot of this stuff is not at all well presented and is totally sideways to people coming from windows
I particularly dislike mint because it’s basically like ubuntu except with all of the modern UX walked back – so you still get the questionable, aging compositor stack, and the somewhat inadequate default repos, except now it acts more like windows XP, too.
I am a big fan of https://antergos.com/ which is based on arch, which isn’t nearly as scary as it sounds – particularly if, like me, using ubuntu leads to you having 20 different upstream sources configured for different/newer packages, because on arch literally everything is in either the official repos or the AUR – but it does mean that you have to rely more on the (excellent) arch wiki for troubleshooting rather than askubuntu and google, and in the off chance that you do want a stable freeze of something (which most distros provide much more often than is convenient), it’s kind of a pain to configure.
that said, a recent release of ubuntu is fine, though I’d strongly recommend you use a modern desktop spin like gnome 3 or KDE/plasma 5, and get comfortable adding various upstream sources like so. I forget how far back mint tends to track with ubuntu releases.
I like my Lenovo x230 a lot but it’s getting beat up p hard and I have to do weird things like use a (miraculously $20) docking station to do things like charge or push the power button bc those things don’t work on the base station. Has anyone done any laptop case repairs? This shit is more daunting than building a desktop…
