New PC build p0rn photos. - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2022, 09:39:22 pm
content: Obligatory spec lines:AMD Ryzen 7 5800X. NVidia 3080. 32Gb 3600Mhz DDR4. Firecuda PCIeGen4 MV.2 6Gb/s SSD. (+500Gb SSD +1Tb SSD)Kraken X73 360mm Radiator CPU cooler. EisWolf 360mm Radiator GPU cooler.24 MegaPixel High Res here if you want to ogle those components (right click each, open in new tab, zoom in):https://imgur.com/a/IZwG3Jx

author: Benta
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2022, 11:00:04 pm
content: Yawn.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 12, 2022, 11:09:26 pm
content: meh. drop cpu in socket ,plug card in pci slot , power up , launch setup for os.That's not a computer build.Back in the day you had to do jumper settings on the plugin cards , carefully handcraft a config.sys , find out what interrupts were available to hook up the parallel port card. find the settings for the mfm drive and enter those in the bios.This is even simpler than a hardwhino.

author: DavidAlfa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 12:05:07 am
content: So you built a computer? Congrats!But calling that p0rn? What do you expect? That Gen-Z computer phoolery hype?Get the extreme ultra RGB, does the same, coststwicetriple4x more but it's what gamers use!Sorry, but it seems this is the wrong forum, consider going to reddit for thatPS: I would have chosen a 12700K, I even considered upgrading, but my 3770K is still up to the job and I don't follow silly capitalist desires

author: IanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 12:18:30 am
content: Could you zoom in a bit more? It's kind of hard to see anything with the camera so far away like that.

author: xrunner
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 12:31:50 am
content: No custom coolant piping?

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 01:51:38 am
content: Quote from: xrunner on April 13, 2022, 12:31:50 amjust dunk the whole thing in a vat of fluorinert and blow airbubbles through it. Seymour did that already back in the late 70's. So nothing new.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 05:09:58 am
content: Wow. A roasting thread.Cat looks more interested than anyone here.Cat is wondering where the mouse is?It's a loooong time since I built anything out of new parts. So I found it interesting due to the fact that the gear isn't covered in dust or infested with insects.

author: tszaboo
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 07:58:12 am
content: Isn't your memory placed wrong? For dual channel, the sticks had to be next to each other on every PC I built.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 08:14:37 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on April 12, 2022, 11:09:26 pmAwww sounds like your manly hood is being challenged by modern components working together.Yea, I remember the days of IDE select jumpers in drives and on PCI cards I even remember ISA cards. Everything else was just a poor, old OS with no plug and play, you can't blame the hardware for that.There is also a LOT more going on than in a 286. Things have changed a lot since those days. Sure most of the components, assuming you know what you are buying, fit together and the OS recognises them or at least tries. There is a lot more to do now though, so being honest, par for par I think they are about as difficult to build just not for the same reasons.Heat plays a massive part these days. Chips have been able to go much faster than we can actually run them, for a while now. Keeping them cool has been the biggest hurdle.Dismantling and refitting new CPU socket brackets and the cooler. Tearing down the £1000 GPU and refitting a new water die, ram and VRM cooler/pump block to it. Building 2x360mm radiators, with 3 fans each, 2 independent cooling loops into the case is a challenge, a mechanical one, but still. Setting up all the pumps, fans, temp sensors to keep things cool is another challenge. Then you have to consider with all those pumps and fans running it sounds like a drone about to take off. So you have to profile and curve the cooling to only get loud when it needs to be.I mean, back in the day you are taking about, you ham fisted a cpu with pins the size of the arduino pin headers into a socket with such delicacy that you could do it wearing space suit gloves. Put a heatsink on it if you were pushing the boat out. You slapped a SIMM module into it's slot (if it even had expandable ram) and... asides from a few 2.5mm spaced jumpers, all you had to do was plug it in and get the OS to play ball.There is more effort today getting your case front panel hooked up to the motherboard for god sake.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 08:30:31 am
content: Quote from: tszaboo on April 13, 2022, 07:58:12 amCertainly on AMD it's been this way for a while. Yes, it was the first thing I checked, then fitted them, got a cup of tea, came back and double checked them.The only thing I did manage to screw up and did not double check or even check once I was so "sure". I put the front radiator in upside down. Pipes at the top! Means air in the pick up area, means air bubbles and noise. Had to take it out and flip it over again and move it up as the tubes didn't reach.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 08:36:09 am
content: Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on April 13, 2022, 05:09:58 amAh. Spending the time and effort on the cooling pays off in the end. I used to experience the birds nests of pet hair, the fluff bunnies the size of rats. The caked and baked orange gunk, the bed bugs and carpet beetles.Those where the days when you stuffed 1 or 2 12V 90mm fans into a case, put up with the whine all day, and didn't care you turned the PC into a stationary vacuum cleaner.Since I actually started to care and pay attention to the cooling and airflow issue more, I learn the ways of filters and positive pressure to prevent unmanaged air intake and thus, prevent dust. (Its not perfect, but in 4 years my last build had a very small amount of dust inside. The fans and radiators had brown crud on the leading edges, but nothing a hoover and paint brush couldn't remove in seconds.Not running the fans all the time when not needed extends the life of their bearings massively. So even after 4 years of hard use all of the fans where still as quiet as when I bought them.Sometimes the bling is bling, sometimes it's just practical stuff that looks pretty.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 08:46:56 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on April 13, 2022, 01:51:38 amTo be honest, anywhere there was an option to not have unicorn vomit, I went that option.The top three fans for the GPU radiator were actually supposed to not be RGB enabled. However the dispatch note "upgraded" me apparently.I figured it might as well connect the LED headers. Same for the CPU cooler and GPU block.When I first turn it all with all of them connected, it was absolutely vile. Rainbow marques and much "My little pony" love and happiness.I set them all to "white". I think it looks ok. I can, and probably will set them all to black later. All but the CPU which will be white as a nice power LED. Then again, they can have a purpose, lighting the case up different colours to show different things. Like flashing red if it's overheating or a pump/fan has died etc. Or just the CPU and GPU blocks reflecting their temperature.No custom loop, no custom tubing. Two sealed all-in-one loops. You could see it as the difference between a vented lead acid and a sealed zero-maintenance one, except AIOs last longer. Hassle and leak free. (touch wood)Again the ethos is function over form, but if it has a function AND looks good, I'm fine with that.I don't think there was a single part of the build specced or bought purely for athestics or bling. Except maybe the clear tempered glass side panel. I did choose the untinted one over the blacked out one. Figured if I had to choose one, I'd pick the one which improved it's function (a window!) and didn't hinder it for looks.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 09:08:49 am
content: Quote from: DavidAlfa on April 13, 2022, 12:05:07 amDefine "the job". And sure if you call gaming a capitalist desire, I'm guilty.You find me a good spec'ed motherboard which DOESNT have RGB.Where it was an option, I went with the non-RGB option. You'd be surprised how limiting that can be though. If you start out by searching for "No god damn unicorn vomit", you find yourself browsing the corporate thin client components.On some of the excesses, like the flagship mainboard and the premium case. For me these are "nice to haves", but for peace of mind and quality of life more than "dick waving". The same goes for a lot of things in life. You can go with the cheap option, it'll get your by, you might need to fiddle with it and add essential (to you) features later. Or you can go with the more premium model and be safe it will have what you need. It will have a dozen other things you couldn't care less about, but it will meet your needs and then some where it maters without the hassle."Quality of life", like the motherboard coming with a front panel header block, so you can assemble the half dozen jumpers onto it from the case and then in one go reach into the case, hold you tonque the right way, get it onto the header pins in the darkest, narrowest, spikiest bit of the case.Or the case having the radiator brackets unscrew and slide out, so you can assemble the radiators and fans outside the case, cable manage them and just slide them in. Reverse to remove for servicing.CPU, Memory and GPU are all just numbers. Pound per stat. Price curves. 90 percentile. Maybe reviews, but in each range they only really change in the raw numbers.Cooling and fans, and their proper configuration, alignment, flows and control is somewhere I spend money because I know it's value in using auto-overclocking components that if you keep them cool, the run faster. Add £200 to the price of the graphics card itself just for cooling, will usually net you another 20-25% over all performance. Same for the CPU.

author: newbrain
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 02:43:37 pm
content: Nice build, and quite balanced choice of components, for a game oriented machine!It's not so dissimilar from mine - Fractal Design Meshify C, R9 5900X, GTX 3060 Ti, 2×16GB GSkill 3600 MHz CL16, Asus ROG Stryx B550-f gaming, WD SM-850 1 TB NVME.No water cooling for me - a classic Noctua NH-D15 - as I'm often abroad and using the machine remotely, I'm a bit queasy with possible leaks - mostly silent unless under very heavy load.My choice is a bit more compute oriented, but still very 'playable' (and Idoplay) if one does not go overboard with the quality settings.One thing that you - and I! - could have slightly improved is using 4×8GB sticks of RAM, rather than 2×16GB: IIUC, it has a performance advantage with Ryzen processors.QuoteThis.I also use a lot of gaming stuff, including keyboard and mouse. Apart from the ubiquitous "unicorn vomit" (that can mostly be turned off, of made inconspicuous as you did), it's often higher quality and more reliable.PS: My sarcasm/humor meter is out for calibration, so I don't understand if some of the answer here are ironical or just sour grapes...

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 02:49:37 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on April 13, 2022, 08:14:37 amMust not be a good design if you need to rip it up , out of the box, and start altering the cooling. I would buy a manufacturer that knows how to do proper cooling. I would take it back and write a bad review on how the board manufacturer doesn;t know didly squat about cooling the GPU and how i had to put water coolers on it.Quoteso you didn't build a computer. you did some plumbing and noise abatement.Quotepooh. SIMM . lol ! 18 pin dil ic's in sockets. HUNDREDS on them on an intel above-board with daughtercard ! double stack em with the top one having pin 14 bent outwards and wired to ground to double the memory.Quotemetric, LOL. we used 100 mil jumpers !Quotea proper one only needs a 10 pin usb cable in idc header.I stopped building my own computers when intel stopped making motherboards. It's not worth the hassle anymore. I did setups with hundreds of machines for lab automation. Supermicro or intel motherboards , 19 inch rackmounted cases.My last personal build was 10 years ago. I've switched to used Z workstations. Cheap ,( written off ) , lots of power / memory / storage and compact (laptop). no need for hefty water cooled towers.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 03:43:20 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on April 13, 2022, 02:49:37 pmA watercooled one from the same or similar manufacturer exists, but its just as pricey and in addition requires a whole set of other custom water loop components.It's not about a "bad" product, it's like buying the family model car and swapping the parts that make it the sports model for much less money. Follow?QuoteThis isn't the 1980s.QuoteFans? How many USB? What type? A or C? What version, 2.1? 3.0? 3.2? 3.2 Gen 2? Turns out you use a lot of them these days. I have about 16 in total and more than half are occupied + 4 hanging off a hub.Disk headers? Expansion cards? I suppose in those days a motherboard did jack shit all except manage CPU and memory and the PCI/ISA bus. These days the only expansion card you would consider is a video card and even then if your not interested you can get CPUs and Mother boards with onboard video.So that's: CPU, Memory, HDMI 4K video output, HD Audio, Wifi, 8-16 USB ports front and back, audio plugs front and back, half a dozen individually controlled fan headers, Sata and PCIe disk controllers, hardware raid controller. All of that and more on top no just the motherboard. Not a PCI card in sight yet. I2C bus, GPIO bus, SPI bus, RGB 281* buses, analgoue RGB buses. 5Gigabit network adapter + 2.5Gb adapater.QuoteSounds like you missed the fun stuff. The big change requiring the tower (and mines a MIDI Tower) is the amount of power these things consume and thus the heat they produce. 320W for just the video card. Another 120-140W for the CPU. Another 100W for the mainboard. That's a LOT of heat to get rid of. "Why get rid?", all modern components will slow themselves down to remain within thermal limits and stability. So your lovely 4.6Ghz processor in your latest Z workstation with it's rubbish, "to a budget" cooler, rapidly drops it's clocks to 3.8Ghz as it can't handle the heat output at 4.6Ghz. You might as well have bought the 3.8Ghz beside it for £300 cheaper.I too use ex-corporate surplus PCs. At £400-500 they are not exactly free though and typically from looking at the, about 4 generations out of date. Circa 2010 maybe. I prefer the older SFF PCs for media centres. With a cheap 1030 video card they do decent 4K output for the TVs. Rubbish for gaming though, they can't even work the 1030 hard the CPU is so slow, like Gen3 or Gen4 intel.I also notice, if you care to look at the newer models, they seem to be using an awful lot of the same components as I am. Most likely more OEM models, or 'white labelled' where they can. Not sure about HP, but Dell make nice cases, although, again, all the bits that really matter beyond the headline stats are made to a budget and it shows in all their models.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 03:58:57 pm
content: What do I do with such horsepower?This is probably one of the driving use cases.... In VR. Though not just the Apache. Game is a beast on machines.https://youtu.be/ZgBNp5p2MpM

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 07:09:43 pm
content: I hope all those pretty lights and illuminated logos improve its performance, it would beterribleif they were pointless.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 07:27:12 pm
content: Quote from: Gyro on April 13, 2022, 07:09:43 pmChris, do come along chap, we did that 10 posts ago.

author: Gyro
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 07:30:40 pm
content: Oops, sorry. I got dazzled.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 08:46:08 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on April 13, 2022, 03:43:20 pmIt'll never be a sportscar. The chassis is wrong. The weight distribution wrong. It just looks like the other. Reminds me of those "kit" cars. look i drive a ferrari on a datsun chassis.QuoteWait. what happened to the water cooling ?Quotebackplane has plenty.QuoteHow about PCIe Flash drive ? GPIB adapter ? couple of I/O cards ? Got plenty of those laying around. Or, if you are into video editing , some fast SDI interfaces and H264/5 accelerators.Quotewait, what happened to the water cooling ? must not be very good if you still need 16 fans.Quotenow we're talking !QuoteDoes that speed up the machine in any way ?QuoteWifi on the motherboard broken already ?I'm yanking your chain of course (if you haven't figured it out yet.)Like i said i gave up building machines. All that remains are crappy overclocked motherboards with shit chipsets, badly written biosses and eye-watering bling-bling.Show me one stable machine that can run rock solid for years on end. It won't be assembled from those kind of parts. It'll be a very expensive piece of Dell or HP kit properly designed , cooled and powered sitting in a climate controlled room somewhere.

author: Ed.Kloonk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 09:52:12 pm
content: Quote from: Gyro on April 13, 2022, 07:30:40 pmYou should see what he does when we pull out the laser pointer.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 13, 2022, 10:01:06 pm
content: Quote from: Ed.Kloonk on April 13, 2022, 09:52:12 pmmiauw ! careful with cats. when they are on their back , remember they have 5 point ends !

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 03:22:45 am
content: Quote from: paulca on April 13, 2022, 09:08:49 amI have yet to find a server board with RGB, granted you'll probably have to buy used to get a reasonable price. It most likely would also include a CPU or two (still top notch performance if not too old) and support for more RAM than you're likely to use anytime soon. The cooling design isn't going to get skimped on either and if you're lucky, it would have a high ambient option (e.g. Dell Fresh Air) that improves things even more.QuoteThe best fans available don't even have RGB options, just loads of power with high quality bearings and variable speed control.Quote from: paulca on April 13, 2022, 03:43:20 pmI doubt a proper *workstation* is going to compromise much on thermal design.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 09:38:50 am
content: Quote from: NiHaoMike on April 14, 2022, 03:22:45 amServer != Workstation != Gaming Desktop.They all have different requirements and workloads. The former two are typically tuned for large parallel loads. The later for heavy single threaded load and real time graphical framerate production. A server might run a TitanX or A5000 card to run 64 parallel encoder and FX threads on the GPU rendering a 4K video. A task which can be predicted, planned, optimized and then executed. A gaming PC hands it a stream of objects, light sources etc. etc. etc. in realtime expecting a frame back in under 20ms and sustain that for hours at 100 frames per second.When benchmarked, high end servers and workstations tend to out perform gaming PCs on pure parallel compute tasks, especially when they have multiple CPUs and GPUs. Video editing, timeline scrubbing, rendering and CAD, CAM, aero/hydro etc. etc. simulations run better. But when it comes to running games on server and workstation hardware, they struggle. They tend to aim for efficiency and parallelism rather than balls to the wall 100% caned to get those last 10 FPS in live rendering. So they struggle and underperform.That's not to say you can't pimp and mod a server board to play games. But it wouldn't be cheap. (Linus Tech Tips did build a machine with 8 GPUs in it on a server board, ran 8 VMs, assigned each a GPU and got 8 gamers to play simultaneously on it. I believe they then tried to show how hard it was to cool with ridiculous aircon units and duct fans etc. etc. Sure they were playable, but not exactly out performing a standalone rig... and the cost was eye watering).Turning a rack server into a gaming rig would be very much like taking a Ford Transit and completely refitting it with a Jaquar XJ220 engine and creating a race car out of it.To extend that further.Server = Truck.Workstation = VanDesktop = HatchbackGaming PC = Sports carSure the van will carry more stuff and do the whole job faster, but it's just not as much fun.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 10:36:35 am
content: It is hard to avoid RGB lightning on PC parts these days.If you are after building a fast desktop PC from brand new parts you will get the best bang per buck using parts for gaming PCs. The economy of scale does it's thing here.Sure you can get even more performance by going into servers and serious workstations but the price of those quickly starts going trough the roof while they are very specialized machines that are overly optimized for a single kind of workload. That dual socket 64 core server board with 1TB of RAM might be awesome for ruining a database server but it is not going to be that great of a desktop machine. Its expensive, its loud, its power hungy, yet a modern midrange laptop will beat it at single threaded performance.If you have a specialized need go ahead and build a mean powerful machine for the job. Even then just using a server board is not a magic bullet, servers are specialized for certain tasks so you need the right kind of server board and server CPU.However for the kind of stuff people do at home on a PC it turns out that "gaming PCs" are the most performant PC you can get on a reasonable budget. These computers have a decent core count CPU that also has top notch single threaded performance, a decedent amount of RAM running at high clock speeds, a fast SSD(>3GB/s on NVME), lots of cooling that is optimized to be quiet, powerful hardware accelerated graphics (that also include video encode/decode acceleration and compute), extra slots for expansion cards.. etc All in a machine that costs around 1000 bucks brand new(Well maybe not right now with the component shortage shitshow).It is all you need for compiling code, CAD software, content creation etc... and if its your thing they can also run games afterwards. Very few things out there it couldn't do.If you want ECC then go ahead and just buy a board/CPU that supports ECC RAM sticks and a Quadro card.And if you find it fun to mess with fancy and obscure server hardware, go ahead and hoard together some machines from the used market and do some neat stuff with them. IT can be a hobby too.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 11:59:00 am
content: After many years and ££££ i gave up trying to maintain a gaming pc and just bought a games console.No more chasing the latest graphics card or trying to tweak the last bit of performance whilst putting up with the noise of multiple fans,now the computer sits,almost silently doing everything it needs to.My last console cost less than the new motherboard/proccesor /power supply /case upgrade loop i would need to complete to play the latest games i wanted at a decent speed. An added advantage is the abundance of second hand games available for the console.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 01:54:04 pm
content: Quote from: Berni on April 14, 2022, 10:36:35 amReally ? i must be looking in the wrong places. then. Supermicro motherboards , Smart Modular Tech and Micron technologies RAM , Samsung SSD's. no RGB in sight.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 03:17:20 pm
content: Quote from: themadhippy on April 14, 2022, 11:59:00 amDoesn't mean you have to use a gaming PC for actual gaming if it is not your thing.Just that due to the economy of scale these are the most powerful PCs that you can get for a good price. For example i seen a lot of mechanical engineers carry around gaming laptops (The ones with the ugly gamery design that screams gaming computer from a mile away). They also don't like the looks of it, but the reason they have one is that those laptops are powerful while still being relatively cheep. They let them quickly open very big 3D CAD models and manipulate them smoothly.For me personally i never been into gaming consoles. I would have a decent PC in any case, so i just stuck a decent GPU in there for doing a bit of gaming here and there. My current GTX 1070 cost me 180€ about 3 years ago, i even downclock it since its plenty fast. The cheapest new PS5 is 400€ so over twice as much (while it has no optical drive so no used games). PC games can be had on sales for 10 bucks a piece, or if i want to avoid giving the developer/publisher any money (i reserve this for the asshole ones with shitty business practices like EA, Ubisoft..etc) then i pirate it. Buying and installing a game on Steam is just as easy as on a console, just press install and then run.Quote from: free_electron on April 14, 2022, 01:54:04 pmWell i should have said more the gamer-y visual designs.Don't think i have seen any SSD with RGB yet. More that most of the cost effective high performance PC parts have gamer marketing plastered all over it. For example the WD Black SN750 M.2 SSD i recently bought has a all black design with funky fonts all over it, even says "High performance Gaming NVMe SSD" on the box. It was simply the cheapest high performance 1TB SSD that can do sustained writes in the GB/s ranges all day long without eating up the write endurance any time soon. Most of the motherboards these days have some decorative gamery designs to make them look "cool". All the cheep high performance CPU coolers have gamery designs plastered all over. The high quality PSUs have all black cables because it looks cooler...etcI would actually prefer it if PC components looked more like they did in the Pentium 3 days of bland green boards. But i just buy whatever performs well for a good price. Sure server stuff might be even better built and sometimes offer a little bit more performance but i am not willing to pay 2x or 3x or 4x the normal price for that luxury. My desktop PC is not a mission critical control center for a nuclear plant. If it dies then il just fix it. My PCs have always been reliable so far.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 04:59:16 pm
content: Quote from: free_electron on April 14, 2022, 01:54:04 pmI'm sorry but if you are buying your hardware purely because it DOESNT have RGB, you need to have a sit down and a talk with yourself, as that's just as bad as buying hardware BECAUSE it has RGB.You can turn RGB off or just not connected it but you'll need to spend money to make a bad board good.EDIT:I looked at SuperMicro's gaming motherboards. No RGB, but seriously underspeced as well and ... not cheap at ~£500. It has half the capability in everything buy Mv.2 drives and 10Gbe. 4 fan headers supporting only 1 fan each. No variable fan speed for DC fans. Only 2 V3Gen2 ports, one 1 internal USB 3 header. 4 SATA ports, not 8. and so on and so on.Oh and they are in bed with Intel. They don't list a single AMD board. They also bullshit you that the MV.2 slots have to use Intel MV.2 drives.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 05:48:35 pm
content: QuoteBut thats one component,my 6 year old machine id need at least a new motherboard and cpu if i wanted to play the latest releases at the speed the console can ,and now microsoft own activision how long before win 11 becomes a requirementQuoteyea theirs cheap pc stuff available ,but here at least,its much easier to find second hand versions of the recent releases for consoles than it is for pcQuoteno thanks ,i want the physical media wherever possible

author: DavidAlfa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 05:49:38 pm
content: The RGBCRAPhas f*** computing.Brands know that adding "RGB" to the box will sell a lot better than anythign else, they priorize that.Thanks, Youtube/Twitch kids.I wanted a simple CMOS reset switch and a led display for diagnosis, not even f** that under $400!Before, you could get a decent mobo, good VRM, decent cooling, plenty of I/O expansions, dual bios, useful switches, diagnostic leds, and it wasn't crazy expensive, perhabs $150-$200.An Asus MAXIMUS V EXTREME was the most crazy expensive shit for $400.Not caused by the inflation at all, but to the semiconductor crysis and these stupid hyped kids buying anythything at any means, now for $200 you barely get an empty box.Brands now know they can sell whatever at any price, as long the streaming crap keeps working.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 08:15:34 pm
content: True, but things are changing.Nvidia are, for example, shipping LHR cards since last year or so. (Low Hash Rate, not great for mining until they are hacked). But also filling out the low end, like 3060, 3050. These don't disappear to miners and so have lesser value. So stocks have risen, supply is starting to meet demand. Prices are holding RRP + 20% right now, but falling.Also, deliberately devaluing scalped cards stockpiled by releasing at least 1 revision to the reference spec. to improve stability. So Rev 1 cards are devalued as soon as supply kicks back in, best hope scalpers don't have stock when that crashes.I didn't want to wait as I had promised a few weeks before the virus crap hit that I'd give my then current PC (2700X:1070Ti:16Gb) to my brother, also a gamer, who is disabled and has not been able to afford to upgrade his PC since 2016! Next time I looked, stock = 0, prices = 250%. I waited and waited and waited and while I still went in at 20% over MSRP for most things ... waiting till January sales 2023 would probably see MSRP and MSRP-20% on many things.What did 1070Ti to 3080 get me?The games that were "fine" with the 1070Ti with VSync on at 60Hz are still fine, it's just the video card doesn't make as much heat so the fans stay low or off entirely.The games that were struggling, like DCS World were like night and day. Going from barely 60fps lagging down to 25-30fps frequently... was suddenly a solid 80 FPS dropping to 60fps on occasion. That is AFTER going from "VR - LOW" to normal "HIGH" detail spec. Smoother and far more detailed, far further into the distance.Now it's time to upgrade the VR headset from a 2x1080p to something like the Reverb G2 at 2x2200p (ish?).

author: DavidAlfa
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 14, 2022, 11:52:02 pm
content: Well, that 1070 was pretty old if you're a frequent gamer.I had a GTX970 which I had bought in 2014-2015, used, for 220€, was a great performer.At the start of 2021 I was recovering from a really hard sugery, barely could walk, on top of that the lockdown came in, so everyone was bored at home.Me and my small brother started gaming again, found a KFA2 RTX2060 offer for 299€ and couldn't resist, buying two.Then I auctioned my GTX970 on eBay, bid starting from 1€... someone paid 140€ for it. After 6 years. Crazy.The boost clocks were not great, so I moded the shunt resistors and flashed a Asus Strix BIOS.The damn thing never sees the power limit (50-60% at max load), made a proper fan profile in Afterburner, the boost clocks are 2010MHz 24/7.So yeah, no RGB, no fancy, no shiny crap, but a RTX2060 for 160€

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 12:13:11 am
content: Quote from: paulca on April 14, 2022, 09:38:50 amWhat hardware do professional flight simulators run on? I doubt they're just putting gaming PCs into those. My guess would be rack servers with GPUs and some sort of high speed backplane like Infiniband.Back when I just graduated from high school, I was shopping for a laptop to use for college. I narrowed down the choices to 2 Dells - a gaming model as well as a workstation. The only real differences between the two were that IEEE1394 was standard on the workstation but optional on the gaming and the gaming had a whole rainbow of color choices while the workstation is "any color you like as long as it's flat black". I went with the workstation since I used IEEE1394 as a cheap high speed LAN back then.Quote from: themadhippy on April 14, 2022, 11:59:00 amAnd a level of user-hostile "security" that would make an iPad look like an open platform. For that matter, might M1 Macs become the new "console"?

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 06:04:33 am
content: Yep my desktop machine is pretty old.It is a i7 4790K with 32GB of DDR3 with that GTX 1070. So this is a 8 year old CPU at this point. But thanks to AMD being out of the picture and Intel doing nothing because of it that CPU is not that horribly slow by todays standards(just the 4 cores is a bit few these days). It does the job fine. So unless you really want to be on the bleeding edge you don't actually need to upgrade a PC all that often (Amusing you buy a decently fast PC to begin with).As for gaming. I am not that serious of a gamer, just something i do here or there when i don't feel like doing work. I don't tend to play the latest AAA tiles right out of the gate, if they are very demanding i am fine with dropping graphics settings lower, my screens are only 1080p anyway, i don't have VR..etc so that GTX 1070 is still serving me well.I also don't really care for physical copies of games. They are more of a hassle to buy, have to keep them somewhere and get the disc when you want to play it. My i7 machine never even had a optical drive (the DVD drive on IDE from the old PC could not work with the new motherboard, so i just didn't put one in and never missed it). So i like Steam where i can just buy a game in seconds with a single click, download it and play it minutes later. There is no draconian DRM with it. I can install Steam on multiple PCs and just install any game with a click. Once authenticated the games also work in offline mode without internet. Sure my game collection would be gone if Steam goes out of business, but that is pretty unlikely to happen any time soon.Quote from: NiHaoMike on April 15, 2022, 12:13:11 amYou can build a FAA certified flight training simulator using X-Plane 11. It just takes special licenses for all of it, as well as certified hardware for the controls. As usual in aviation the hard part is the certification and being certified does not actually mean its particularly good, it just means it was signed off by a bunch of people as being good enough.So you basically just need a stack of "gaming PCs" to run it. But by the time you spend the money on just the software licenses you are already in the 6 digit figures, so you might as well also spend some extra money on more enterprise grade offerings from NVidia like the Quadro GPUs and a proper server board. But it is still just a PC.The more fancy Nvidia enterprise solutions where they pack >10kW of GPUs in a single server case, those tend to be specialized for compute and so don't have a video output connector. Those instead get used for doing raytrace rendering of CGI movies, AI training, weather simulations etc...

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 09:57:45 am
content: I think the solution integrators like Dell, HP, et. al. That sell high end hardware that isn't for gaming, tend to target their markets towards corporates. Johny and his gaming PC going off line because he remounted the radiator upside down is not a big deal. Having a customer have to pay £200 a hour for a technician in a far away country to physcially pull the server and repair it, while it has down time = big deal.Corporates are willing to pay way over premium if the system comes with on-site support and warranty. Corporates want to know they can have Dell/HP/whomever at their datacentre the next morning with an identical replacement. So when you spent £3500 on a basic 1U rack server based on "commodity hardware" you are really only getting about £2000 worth of kit and are paying the £1500 premium for that "Enterprise grade" warranty and support... which a gamer who only has 1 to look after and it sits right beside him isn't interested in. It's just not worth paying for support when you built it yourself! Just replace the parts yourself.I remember doing computer hardware specs for companies several times. We basically broke it down into categories desktop/office PC/Laptops, General workstation, Specialist workstation, Server. But all that really meant was the general workstation had lots of RAM, a bigger CPU and 2 monitors (see software engineer or electronics designer). The specialist workstations where those that came with titles like "CAD" or "CAM", they tended to have a defacto application which you just fed the best specced parts to meet its needs. There was no consultation. The customer just ordered X desktops, Y workstations, Z cad or cam machines. They trusted we specced them fine, they trusted we would support them, etc. etc. They didn't even ask about specs, they just assumed we knew what we were doing and to be honest, they were running 1995 hardware in 2005 (Compact Presario servers etc). It wasn't going to be hard to impress them. The desktops ended up being MicroATX boards with onboard video and 1G RAM, in Windows XP days. I scooped myself a nice Presario server for my network, including SCSI RAID array (4Gb, LOL) and a 4Gb tape drive.... which ended up in the bin not that long after.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 10:14:42 am
content: Server side, things scale immensely these days.In work we are migrating from one data-warehouse solution (IBM) to another (Apache Hadoop, Cloudera stack).I ran a query the other day, nothing special, just count the number of rows in the primary partitions. Shrug. The number of rows as impressive, but no where near as impressive as how long the query took. It gave me my answer in 5 minutes. What made my eyes go wide however was the total CPU time for the query was 4 days.I pulled up the cluster stats and the number of cores was over 4,000, total available memory around 16 Terrabyte and disk space measured in Petabytes. That was just our quota/segment of the cluster and SAN.An individual edge node, proxy, agent box ... basically a standard server ... has a spec featuring 128 Cores and 1Tb or RAM. They share a highspeed RAID NAS redundant pair of 100Tb for "local" storage.Mostly they are integrated rack / blade systems. Big storage array and power supplies at the bottom, then blade after blade after blade of processor/memory units.Behind all this is layers and layers upon layers of virtualisation. So you could assign all those resources to one "machine" or you could carve it up statically or dynamically into a dozen lesser dev or application servers for example.I think they have moved a lot of actual "host nodes" into the AWS and Azure clouds and seemlessly integrate them into the virtualisation/logical layouts.It's pretty insane, tier 1 enterprise stuff. My view into that stuff is quiet limited, I don't even know the full extent of that data cluster for production. The UAT/QA system alone is massive and for production there are 2 exact copies of the entire cluster as redundant hot/hot load sharing and resilience.

author: tom66
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 10:18:45 am
content: Well, I'll go against the sentiment, nice buildAnd who cares about the RGB lights - it's your PC, you can make it look like however you want. Personally I chose components with no built in lighting (exception being the stock AMD cooler) because my PC sits out of direct view of my desk. But if it was on show I could see myself putting some lights in there.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 12:50:27 pm
content: Well, the fun I'm having with the cooling system and testing, tweaking, testing to see what the limitations are and just how hot it will run or how cool it will run, for each component and how they interact.Using:* Prime95 for synthetic CPU loading (of different flavours and levels of torture)* Furmark @3440x1440 for synthetic GPU stress loading* MSI Afterburner for detailed metrics and graphs (stupid name, great program, previously known as RivaTuner until it was bought by MSI)* MSI Afterburner for GPU clocks, voltage, limiters tuning.* Argus Monitor for fan/pump control, more detailed metrics and graphs* 3DMark "Time Spy" benchmark for short term performance 'scores' and comparisons with other peoples scores, not for competition, but as actual ... well benchmarks.First with all fans and pumps at max, maximum noise, all vents, doors and grills open to the dust produced a performance benchmark score of 15,960. I soak tested the system with both prime95 and furmark and the GPU didn't get past 50*C, the CPU did get to 80*C (more on that later).Then with all the doors, vents and filters back in place and a "sensible" quiet fan profile which is almost silent when not under load, but turns into the tornado again when it sees GPU and/or CPU load. That only dropped the benchmark score by 40 points. Heat soaking it showed only a few degrees increase and virtually no effect on peak clocks, though I didn't test/graph average clocks across cores. The "peak core clock" will be the "golden core" the rest will be less than that.So, I tried to set up a "quiet gaming" profile. Again, pumps, fans all low or off until load is detected, but this time not immediately spinning up to full performance mode, but slowly following the temperature not reaching 100% until 80*C on the GPU. Similar profile for the CPU. The benchmark was still 15,9xx and the GPU didn't get past 61*C even under full stress load 61*C with a fan speed of 25% and it was stable. Wow. Maybe I went OTT on the cooling LOL, a bit.So, why the hell not? I switched all the fans off and hit it in both the CPU and GPU with max load. After 5 minutes, the CPU was at 90*C, but still holding peak core clocks of 4.7Ghz! Damn psychopathic thing! However it was the GPU that was raising much more concern. It was slowly creeping up through 70*C. The GPU radiator had become too hot to hold my finger on. When would it stop? What temperature of water can the fittings, tubes and radiators handle (quick google, target under 40C, don't exceed 60C). Abort!This test was so interesting because it forced me to try and derive the water temperature from the core temperatures. Alternating between 100% load and 0% load with no fan support produces a sloppy square wave on the thermals with an amplitude of, in my case about 30*C for the GPU and a huge 50*C on the CPU. Poking at the radiators with my mark one temp probe (my finger), it seemed fair that this amplitude more or less accounts for the thermal junction delta between the cores and the water (the main heat mass) in the loop and as it's circulating, the radiator.So at 75*C which is where I chicken out, the water temp would only have been 45*C, too hot for me to stand in a shower that temp, so as it was uncomfortable under my finger after 10 seconds or so, I took 45*C as the finger in the air estimate. Which is fine.I'm tempted to see how far I can actually push that, can I get the card to hit the thermal limiter before the water cooling system blows a radiator fitting out.But first. I need a set of stick on thermal couples and a way to data log them on to the PC. (Sit down at the back Ardy folks!). Don't want to push it higher without an actual measured temp on the radiator and/or block itself.Back to the CPU. 50*C is too high, and higher still if the CPU gets up to 95*C the water temp is still under 40C. I will have to remove the cooler, clean off the "came on it from the factory" thermal goo, add some "actually bought" stuff and see if that helps. I fear it won't help much. The issue is the heat spreader and multi die design. Unlike the GPU which is a dead flat block of silicon to interface with, the CPU has a tin lid on it which is thermally bonded to the dies underneath and tries to spread the heat out and prevent hot spotting. But it also introduces another thermal junction (or two) which do add up. De-lidded CPUs (when they were single die) would usually lower their junction loss to 40*C or less. I'm not going to start delidding it. As long as I can use the fans to keep the radiator under 35*C a 50*C delta I can live with.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 12:55:30 pm
content: Overclocking the GPU got me a little more benchmark score of 16,444 however it later turned out to be unstable. +200 core and +800 RAM seemed to be stable, but to be honest, I don't think I'll bother to keep it overclocked. It's hitting it's power limiter 99.9% of the time, so the boost clocks are limited by that anyway, if I clock it up, it will just clock itself back down again, the higher boost clocks will only effect light loads not hitting the limiter, but will most likely hit the voltage limiter and become unstable.Much the same for the CPU, switch on it's auto AI overclocking gubbins and let it be.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 12:58:14 pm
content: Now... I could pull the wool over it's eyes and flash a compatible BIOS from a "more expensive" card, like the OC version BIOS which goes to 110% power limiter. Or the top of the range which goes to 125% power limit, I believe. Trouble is, at some point something in there that wasn't specced for a 125% power limit card is going to melt or let magic smoke out and that's an £800 replacement as I'm not getting that one past RMI inspection.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 01:08:26 pm
content: To get significantly more speed out of a graphics card you usually need to upgrade the cooling to keep up. Watercooling does wonders on those, but it can get rather complicated because you not only need to cool the GPU but also the RAM around it and the VRMs. Due to every card being slightly different means that you need a solution designed for a particular card or be creative with adapting a generic solution. Even more serious overclocking involves replacing the shunt resistor that measures the power draw, this can trick a card into pulling >500W but as you might think not all VRMs are designed with enough heard room to survive that. Also an exploding VRM has a good chance of frying the GPU since it is what is making its core voltage.For actual day to day use i tend to downclock graphics cards. They run a lot quieter at about 75% of max TDP and are typically still fast enough to do the job. Also helps with the room not getting as hot in the summer.For the CPU the easiest speed gain is adjusting the bios to allow all cores to constantly run at the max boost clock speed. That generally will never become unstable unless the motherboard can't keep up with power delivery or the cooling can't keep it cool. Each core is capable of reaching that boost speed anyway, it just takes a lot of power if all do it.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 01:57:02 pm
content: Interesting points. It seems things have changed somewhat in 2020+. NVidia GPUs used to come with power and temp limiters set at 100%, but could be slammed up to 120% to "overclock" the card out of the box. At 120% power limit it is able to clock high enough to overwhelm it's cooling. So throwing more and more cooling at it gives you higher and higher clocks and more and more fps.But today, the cards are hard limited to 100% power limit, unless you pay more for the card with upgraded VRMs et.al and a different BIOS to get 110% power limit... it's only when you pay through the nose for the top of the line variants do you get access to the full 120/125% overclock. Only then is it likely to overload an air only cooler and could thermal throttle the boost clocks.Which is another NVidia change from 10xx cards to 30xx cards. They are absolute psycopaths with their own internal overclocking. I've push it to 85*C before it even started to clock back the boost. It carried on until it hit 95*C when the screen went black for a heart stopping second, it force slammed it's fans to 100% for a few seconds, recovered at 80*C again and carried on.I just ran 3 3DMark bench marks. With full fans. With minimal fans and with no fans at all. All of them gave scores within 1% of each other. All of them limited by the power limiter.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 02:00:42 pm
content: In that case of CPUs though. Certainly on AMD, it is not longer viable to set fixed core frequencies and work out the fastest stable speed you can get. The chips are fully capable of melting themselves in minutes, so hitting it with it's full 4.8Ghz on all cores will very quickly create thermal issues and instability. You end up running them at 4.5Ghz to be stable. Throwing away 300Mhz because your pride won't let you switch to auto overclocking.The AMD overclocker is far more aggressive than I would be doing it manually. If it's idle and you hit it with a single thread, it splits it between the 2 best cores so both stay cool and both go to maximum (stable for that moment) boost clock, which switching all but 1 of the other cores to Standby. That last core takes everything else the PC is doing. Automatic thread balancing and dynamic core affinity at the CPU level.

author: themadhippy
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 02:56:08 pm
content: To think,not that long ago all you needed to overclock your cpu was a pencil

author: BrianHG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 15, 2022, 06:25:25 pm
content: How come I do not see your 'home made' USB Audio DAC in the images?No sound?

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 16, 2022, 07:20:08 am
content: Quote from: BrianHG on April 15, 2022, 06:25:25 pmThis one?The audio in the new board is betterActually the audio in the last one was better too.I still have my amp I made back then though. Still working fine. Runs off the 12V solar feed so it's quiet. The new PC audio with headphones current limits at 20mA as is normal. So it destroys bass at volume. Thus I still use my custom headphone, which is theoretically capable of 200mA, though I hardly see it pull more than 40mA.

author: tautech
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 16, 2022, 01:08:55 pm
content: Liquid cooled PC's....pffff, this is how our mod gnif does it:https://www.eevblog.com/forum/general-computing/$1000-usd-cad-and-rendering-workhorse-getting-the-balance-right/

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 18, 2022, 01:03:23 pm
content: Quote from: paulca on April 14, 2022, 09:38:50 amVery true.Here's the email machine I built over the past year, RTX 3090 and 5950x.Useless for server stuff as it only has 32GB RAM. I've found that it does play Flight Simulator in VR reasonably well though.For my day to day productivity, I run an 11th gen i7 NUC w/64GB RAM & 2TB Gen 4 NVMe SSD.My laptop of choice is an LG Gram 17 2020 w/40GB RAM 10th Gen i7 with 4TB NVMe SSD, which, as well as having the best laptop screen I've ever encountered, for embedded dev it enjoys great I/O including 3 x USB A 3.1, so no dongle world for me.For servers, I have two headless dual socket 24c/48t Ivy Bridge era boxes, one with 64GB and the other with 192GB, for spinning up multiple VMs to test out infrastructure projects.Of interest is that if you spin up a VM in the cloud, there's still a fair bit of Ivy Bridge hanging around, although more modern power efficient stuff is coming along to replace it.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2022, 08:59:38 am
content: So I finally found the key to the cage they were keeping the CPU horsepower in.It's a 3.8Ghz base clock and max boost of 4.8Ghz. Yes sure I've seen it hit 4.7+Ghz, but when I give it a full 16 threads of prime calculations and FFTs it heats up and drops, eventually to 3.8-3.9Ghz. Most people would just shrug and accept that.Nope. There is the concept of the voltage curves. Basically as the clock goes up the core needs more voltage to be stable. So as clocks go up, die power goes up. There is a hard limiter on 120W total die power. However my motherboard has awesome VRMs with uber stable voltage at up to 200Amps... so I found the curve offset settings and dropped the whole curve by 30mV. The furthest it will go without getting nasty with it.Now when it was pushed hard it didn't reach that power limiter until it was happily boost clocking on all cores to 4.7Ghz. So having maxed out the benchmark for multi-threading, leaving every other 8 core way, way behind and tripping on the heels of the 16 core threadripper ahead... I moved onto single threading.Here the magic is in the AMD percision boost overdrive system and... primary max boost clock. Straight away it was slamming it's two "golden cores" to max boost clock of 4850Mhz and alternating them to prevent the individual cores thermal throttling. It shuts off all the other cores, leaving the 2 primary single thread cores and 1 core to run everything else. Doing everything it can to keep that one thread at absolutely max performance.Of course my cooling system with the -30mV under volt didn't seem all that stressed and the CPU was churning through stress tests and benchmarks, beating even the Intel chips and leading the leader board (on Cinebench). But I still wanted to crash the thing. So I went digging for what else I could turn up.Found the Max boost clock override. Did a quick bit of maths and said, "Will it do a full 5Ghz?" and set it to +200Mhz and ran the benchmark. It actually worked with single cores boosting to 5050Mhz.Then the screens went black and it rebooted. I was able to complete benchmarks and get scores, but I had another 2 instant resets and another thing morning. So, it's not stable. I think I might just take that 200Mhz down to 150Mhz and see.And, yes, placebo effect or not, I did notice the desktop feel more snappy and boot time come down the first time it booted with the 30mV under volt. Over all it's about 25% faster over all. Oddly it's not producing much more heat, the CPU socket power went from ~130W to ~150W which isn't exactly a big leap in thermals.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2022, 09:12:49 am
content: Because it boots and runs single threaded and multi-threaded benchmarks and seems to only crash on the desktop, I suspect the 5050Mhz max boost which is applied to all cores is too much for one (or more) of the lesser cores. The main "golden cores" handle it fine, but occasionally if one of the lesser cores gets boosted to 5050Mhz it might make an error, if that operation cannot be repipelined or if it create an unrecoverable CPU fault, then it's night night.So, maybe I should look at per-core max boost clocks and take the lesser 6 cores down 20Mhz at a time until no more resets.Maybe I could go even higher on the golden-cores.

author: Berni
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2022, 10:37:08 am
content: Yep power is the most important thing in overclocking.If you can give it more power and cool that power then you can give it more voltage to get higher clocks. But this eventually gets into diminishing returns where it takes more and more power for smaller and smaller gains.For this reason i don't tend to overclock any of my CPUs. The only thing i do is crank up the power limit to something like 150W in the bios to just let the CPU pull as much juice as it wants to, usually this makes the CPU run at max boost clock on all cores when under heavy load, but has no effect when under light load. It doesn't tend to cause any instability (unless the motherboard can't keep up with delivering this much power) Thing is not all benchmarks make the CPU produce the same amount of heat even tho they all hold it pegged at 100% utilization. Some instructions or combinations of instructions take more power to execute, this is especially apparent for the new AVX512 instructions that do a massive amount of math in parallel.As for overclocks crashing during light load but stable during a benchmark, this is typically the fault of the CPU pulling too sharp of a power spike (when switching clock speed), making the core voltage regulation too slow to respond. This is why huge overclocks tend to lock the CPU freqency to be max all the time, but this is obviously a very bad idea for every day use since the CPU will be burning tons of power even when just sitting on a desktop. Not like you are going to notice the slight performance gain.

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2022, 05:20:39 pm
content: Quote!!!My mail and DNS (and some other stuff) server has 3GB memory. Surely it depends on what the server's function is - 'server' covers as many variations as 'vehicle', and a 5-litre turbo-charged V12 isn't necessary for mowing the lawn (although it could be fun).

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2022, 06:24:22 pm
content: Quote from: dunkemhigh on April 19, 2022, 05:20:39 pmAs already explained, I use physical servers to run multiple VMs, a couple of dozen on a single physical machine is not unusual when you're testing a typical distributed application. Hope that explains it!

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 19, 2022, 06:28:21 pm
content: QuoteSure, sorry for missing the earlier bit.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 01:08:04 am
content: Quote from: dunkemhigh on April 19, 2022, 05:20:39 pm

author: PlainName
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 01:47:46 am
content: Gosh, don't they look young. And slim!

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 08:36:17 am
content: I spent 2 hours trying to over clock the 3080 GPU. I could get a little here and there, but nothing substantial.It's a bit like riding a bull. It has a mind of it's own. Primarily the effective limiter is the power limiter.On default config, when loaded to 100%, it initially overshoots to 2000Mhz, slams into the power limiter and backs off to around 1860Mhz. It fluctuates a lot as obviously slightly differing loads, different power requirements etc. Maybe peaks at 1900Mhz and averages around 1880Mhz.Now I can forcefully add 200Mhz to whatever it suggests and this is where it gets really odd. It will initially spike, again to 2000Mhz and again it will fall back to 1860Mhz. Yet if you let it run the full benchmark it produces a slightly, 2-3% higher score.So digging a bit deeper the board (or driver) maintains a table of clocks per volt. The driver basically runs up that table taking the clock and thus voltage higher and higher until it hits one of it's limiters. Most likely the power limiter. If it hits one of those limiters it steps back one step on the table and sees if that is within limits.The software lets me lock the clock to a point on that curve, so I painstakingly tried to find it's maximum clock per watt. Pushing the clocks higher at lower voltages until it crashed. After an hour moving about 10 points on the graph a dozen times each, until it crashed and then back off and change to a different voltage....I could get it to run stable at 1920Mhz at 925mV. However, then it threw another twist at me. Running a benchmark and it just undid my "clock lock". Basically the 1920@925 hit the power limiter under benchmark, so it moved "left" in voltage and dropped the clocks back to around 1860Mhz again. Grrr.Another hour moving key voltage milestones up and down, I could find it's mostefficientcurve point with a slight under-volt and setting that as the TOP of the curve, resulting in slightly slower peak clocks, but much less power, only 260W and no limiters. Which is nice and an option to keep as a profile I think for power/heat efficiency.What I determined after these hours I won't get back... is the driver has done this all before and while I might squeeze a 100Mhz here or there on the curve, that damn power limiter will get me nearly every time. Seeking peek clocks with that hard power limit, is a fools errand. I even ran the MSI scanner which does similar, but much more thorough and it came back with it's best of +50Mhz Core and +100Mhz RAM... but said it was "unstable".So why does it benchmark higher when you set a higher peak clock, even if it doesn't appear to use that peak clock? I think this comes down to the slight under volting the +200Mhz actually relates to, while watched on a display with an update of 1 second or so, I expect I am not seeing the faster adjustments and with the given power limit, the voltage average per Mhz being a few mV lower is actually getting a few dozen more MHz here and there throughout the benchmark.Went off to play one of the latest triple A titles - Far Cry 6. With V-Sync set to my monitor refresh of 75Hz... the GPU, without any overclock, wasn't even hitting 100% usage. The fans barely came on.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 08:50:21 am
content: A thought provoking thing is that pulling 320W at 900mV is about 350Amps. The CPU is 140A EDC on the dies and 160A total. The motherboard can supply it with 200A.But that GPU figure of 350 Amps is insane. I've not seen a pin map of it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that as much as 50% of them are going to be 1.5V rail and ground. There is no way they are push 350Amps through a bit of silicon on 7nm process. I expect that power enters the die in a widely parallel fashion spread out across the whole die and isn't "transported" around the chip unless absolutely necessary, so each little 5mm square area is only pulling a few amps locally and only a few dozen amps on the nearest Vcore pin.What do you think?I know power is generated from multiphased VRMs, so each VRM is only generating a burst of high current on a duty cycle. I assume again that those VRMs output along many parallel tracks which cover the shortest possible distance to a Vcore pin.Of course the main issue with amps is heat. But given these things have coolers capable of handling 500+W, certainly for the die and VRMs, there should be little concern of it melting.The mobo has (IIRC) 12+4 VRM phases, which I believe is 12 CPU Core VRMs and 4 for the rest. I didn't count the GPU VRMs when I had it apart, but there are two solid lines of Vcore VRMs either side of the chip socket. The modded cooler has heat transfer pads for both rows, front and back side of the board, in addition to the VRAM modules and of course the GPU die. It must be 8 each side? 10 each side?

author: Howardlong
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 11:48:31 am
content: Quote from: paulca on April 20, 2022, 08:36:17 amThe overclocking thing is a sure fire way to lose much of your life!I had a reasonable uptick in Ethereum hashrate on my 3090 using a static config, but it's a completely different config on the card for gaming, where I used a voltage/frequency curve.Overclocking the 5950x took several weeks elapsed delving into the per core curve optimiser to get it 100% stable, tweaking each core until none crashed anymore.I'm still not really sure I've ever benefitted that much from the tweaking.

author: Ranayna
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 12:56:05 pm
content: Modern hardware, both CPUs and GPUs, are already near their limits.These beasts gobble up power like no tomorrow, for at best marginal performance increases while gaming.You should look at undervolting to reduce power consumption for little to no actual performance loss, outside of artificial benchmarks.Some cards can actually increase in performance when undervolted.Or even actual underclocking, to further reduce power consumption with a little more performance loss, depending on the workload.

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 02:22:53 pm
content: Exactly. On my server I run a 5600G processor. In the interest ofefficiency(it's a server - not a desktop), I've chosen to reduce the package power to 35W. These CPU dies are derivatives of their mobile SOCs, so the BIOS may support multiple TDP profiles. In my testing it yielded only 10-15% lower Cinebench scores, but *halved* power consumption (went from 130W system load to about 60-65W, around 12W idle). Since my server will transcode the odd movie for storage, this significantly cuts back on the energy cost for that job.In my desktop I run a 3900X, and never gained anything by tweaking the settings. Out of the box it boosts 4GHz+ all core at around 80-85C under a big tower cooler. I've tried a slight undervolt, enabling PBO, etc. but I was not very impressed by what any of these did. Either the CPU became unstable for the same performance, or ran extremely hot (90C+ with PBO) for a 0.5% performance bump.And I haven't even looked at the 3080 card I've got. The release with unstable BIOS's from some manufacturers (and the red herring that looked at a bunch of capacitors) didn't warrant me investigating any further.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 05:37:08 pm
content: It amusing how many people don't "like" PBO. Some people say it idles at 1.5V which they don't like so they don't use it. Others say it runs the system hotter than it should. Both non-sense according to AMD, the chips are fine to 105 and will shutdown at 95-100 anyway. Also reading into PBO it is a complicated beast doing a lot more than most overclockers can, but doing it 100 times a second. I mean at very least there will be times when a core won't got to 4.xGhz and a static overclock will become unstable. A PBO one won't, because PBO will know to back off a bit.The thing about PBO is, it will save you power, it turns core OFF when it needs to. It undervolts and underclocks them when they are no being used much. The 3400X will boost higher than 4Ghz. It's clock boost is 4.3Ghz and it will go higher than that.The other thing about PBO is that motherboard manufacturers often ship with "their" tweaked/optimized versions of the control parameters, which may not be ideal or may be too unstable.

author: paulca
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: April 20, 2022, 05:44:23 pm
content: I suppose it's a good question. Does it actually do any harm.Leaving aside the concerns that overclocking boards like the motherboard I have, allow you to play with the dangerous settings and could probably override the CPUs protections enough to cook it fairly quickly.Running the chips hard on high power does apparently degrade the silicon faster. So maybe the chip might last 12 years instead of 15. Shrug. Who will want a 5800X in 12 years?The other issue gamers face is that different overclocks (especially manual ones) are prone to seasonal issues, warmer in summer etc. That silicon degradation can also bite when the chip or some tiny part of it will not longer clock or volt as high as before.I normally find the peak overclock, get a few benchmarks and then reduce it down to something much more sane and stable for daily use.I have set an undervolt/underpower profile, which as suggested only loses about 1% performance for a reduction on 50W of power.