It was past time to upgrade my OS to Debian Bullseye, and I got carried away. It is still the same old machine with a new case, PSU, SSD, USB3 PCIe card and some LEDs. I don't play games so my old quad core Phenom II and 8 gigs of ram do everything I need.
It was past time to upgrade my OS to Debian Bullseye, and I got carried away. It is still the same old machine with a new case, PSU, SSD, USB3 PCIe card and some LEDs. I don't play games so my old quad core Phenom II and 8 gigs of ram do everything I need.
Of course you don't game you're runUnix.
Why that distro? What were you running? 8GB getting you by? The SSD I'm guessing it is a SATA2 mobo? The M.2 are insane, but at that age you likely wouldn't notice. I just added an SSD to a 2012 Dell laptop and with that and the RAM they were extremely happy. They could only run 8GB, but I put Win7 back on and that is typically adequate.
It's kind of funny how computer "culture" has changed over time.
I got into computers in the mid to late 80s, but didn't really start working on them or building them until I was a teenager... say, ~1993.
This computer building crazy really took off in the mid 90s... with magazines like the Computer Shopper. As it is today, it was all about the graphics card, processor, and ram. I remember the old VESA Local Bus graphics cards, which were... what... 24-bit? Basically a really long 16-bit ISA card slot with an additional multi-channel slot on the end of it.
We go back and forth between light beige and black computers, whichever seems to be the most cool at any given time.
LEDs really help make a computer look like it's doing stuff, haha... and now they have actual water pumps with radiators for cooling the processor. it's so crazy. The computer I'm using has LED's in the grill... it's a Lenovo Legion T7, which has a Core i9 and whatever. But it has the 2080 GTX which at the time I got it I think was more or less just one model shy of the best. But it has water cooling in it, which is a bit much. The computer I had before that was one that I purchased in 2011... a Core i7. I'd used it for 9.5 years before I finally upgraded to this one... so I didn't mind spending the money on it.
I also really don't play games. I mean, I want to... but when I sit down and play a game, I feel like I'm wasting time because there's so many other things I SHOULD be doing.
I would love to take a year off, with no obligations, and nothing to do except spend time with the family, work out in the morning and play games the rest of the day... and occasional snorkling on the weekend. Sigh... by the time I retire, I'll be too old to fully enjoy any of it.
Deep thought tangent here...
I plan to retire as absolutely soon as I'm legally able to. The second any of my pensions or whatever allow early retirement, I'm taking it.
I have been using Debian for over 20 years. For me it is the most stable, versatile, highly configurable , no BS distro. It also has the biggest list of available packages.
Most other "popular" distros are really Debian with one hand tired behind their back. They are designed for a specific purpose, either to do one task (Kali, AVLinux) or to be less intimidating (Ubuntu, Mint). Willie don't play dat.
quote
8GB getting you by?
Yeah, the heaviest things I run are GIMP and Ardour.
quote
The SSD I'm guessing it is a SATA2 mobo?
Yes, Asrock K10N78M. I have two of them.
quote
The M.2 are insane, but at that age you likely wouldn't notice.
Me or the MoBo?
quote
I just added an SSD to a 2012 Dell laptop and with that and the RAM they were extremely happy. They could only run 8GB, but I put Win7 back on and that is typically adequate.
I had been wanting to try SSD and they are really cheap, nowadays. And like I said, I was bored. The biggest difference I noticed was in boot time and install time.
I added an M.2 to an old laptop that was using a spinning disk and almost unusable. I could not believe the difference, so I did the same with my desktop. Big difference between the SSD and the M.2 in performance and boot time. If your computer supports M.2 drives I would suggest using one.
With yall talking about M.2, it should be said they are not equal. M.2 is just a physical connector. What is important is the communication protocol. You can get M.2 drives that still use the SATA III protocol, and will yield no benefit over a standard 2.5" SATA III SSD. You want to get an NVMe M.2 SSD. NVMe uses i believe 4 PCIe lanes, and is mind bogglingly faster than SATA. Both NVMe and SATA can be run on M.2 ports. Some M.2 ports only support SATA, but if it supports NVMe it likely supports both. Easiest way to tell if a drive is NVMe or SATA is by the connector, SATA has 2 gaps in the pins while NVMe only has one.
With yall talking about M.2, it should be said they are not equal. M.2 is just a physical connector. What is important is the communication protocol. You can get M.2 drives that still use the SATA III protocol, and will yield no benefit over a standard 2.5" SATA III SSD. You want to get an NVMe M.2 SSD. NVMe uses i believe 4 PCIe lanes, and is mind bogglingly faster than SATA. Both NVMe and SATA can be run on M.2 ports. Some M.2 ports only support SATA, but if it supports NVMe it likely supports both. Easiest way to tell if a drive is NVMe or SATA is by the connector, SATA has 2 gaps in the pins while NVMe only has one.
This is solid solid information. I am sure it is something Jake, Chris and Todd already knew. Willie's system obviously would be too old to utilize. I haven't heard of anyone adding an expansion to an older PC. I would think the other components at that point are probably a bottle neck and not worth it. Would be fun to see test though.
When I was doing Dell Mini they were coming with uBuntu. Everyone was hot to buy them from me, but all wanted to install bootleg Windows or Hackintosh. I have tried many distros over the years. I think Red Hat or Mandrake were my first foray. When I was playing WoW obviously had to have Windows. At work I wanted to swap us to a unix environment, but I just couldn't get any inventory systems that I liked. Quickbooks and Peachtree for all the expense and flaws are used so often because they're widely supported and easy to use. Emulation wasn't very unusable and the online access was all but useless, which would have been my preferred method for all to access.
These days I just run an old T470 and Win10. I keep looking out for the T480, the last of this particular build type. All the chassis parts are the same for like 4 lines so I slowly just swap to better stuff. It is exactly what I used to do with the Dell Mini. I bought mine for $99 or less than swap all the guts from others until mine was maxed.
With yall talking about M.2, it should be said they are not equal. M.2 is just a physical connector. What is important is the communication protocol. You can get M.2 drives that still use the SATA III protocol, and will yield no benefit over a standard 2.5" SATA III SSD. You want to get an NVMe M.2 SSD. NVMe uses i believe 4 PCIe lanes, and is mind bogglingly faster than SATA. Both NVMe and SATA can be run on M.2 ports. Some M.2 ports only support SATA, but if it supports NVMe it likely supports both. Easiest way to tell if a drive is NVMe or SATA is by the connector, SATA has 2 gaps in the pins while NVMe only has one.
Yes I should have explained it better, take it for granted when I'm not talking to PC guys that they will just know what I'm thinking Well done explanation.
This is the one I got, was the largest one the laptop would support. I got two but ended up using one in my desktop when I found out it would also support it. SAMSUNG 980 SSD 1TB M.2 NVMe
[This message has been edited by Jake_Dragon (edited 06-13-2022).]
Yes I should have explained it better, take it for granted when I'm not talking to PC guys that they will just know what I'm thinking Well done explanation.
This is the one I got, was the largest one the laptop would support. I got two but ended up using one in my desktop when I found out it would also support it. SAMSUNG 980 SSD 1TB M.2 NVMe
Why won't it support larger? You don't mean physically larger, right?
Why won't it support larger? You don't mean physically larger, right?
The laptop bios wouldn't support the 2 TB drive. As the price difference between 1TB and 2TB was significant I was just going to install two 1TB drives in my laptop and call it a day. But once I saw how much of an improvement it made in the laptop I put the second one in my PC as the boot drive.
[This message has been edited by Jake_Dragon (edited 06-14-2022).]
Willie's system obviously would be too old to utilize. I haven't heard of anyone adding an expansion to an older PC. I would think the other components at that point are probably a bottle neck and not worth it. Would be fun to see test though.
Since NVMe uses PCIe, you can get an expansion card that just slots into a PCIe slot on your mobo, so he could do it. Realistically, there isn't a whole lot of real world improvement going from a SATAIII SSD to an NVMe, unless you deal with data transfers a lot of the time. A lot of subsystems arent optimized for 2GB/s read and writes, and can't take full advantage of it. Let alone the new gen5 ones, (8 GIGABYTES a second????)
quote
...When I was playing WoW obviously had to have Windows. At work I wanted to swap us to a unix environment...
I want to get out of windows at some point, but i primarily use my computer for gaming and the support just isnt there yet. Valve is making huge progress, but there's still a ways to go.
quote
These days I just run an old T470 and Win10. I keep looking out for the T480
Desktop for me, Ryzen 5 3600, 1070ti. Looking to upgrade my card soon though, it pulls its own, but a 3070 can do so much more...
[This message has been edited by A_Lonely_Potato (edited 06-14-2022).]
This is solid solid information. I am sure it is something Jake, Chris and Todd already knew. Willie's system obviously would be too old to utilize. I haven't heard of anyone adding an expansion to an older PC. I would think the other components at that point are probably a bottle neck and not worth it. Would be fun to see test though.
No way man, I wish. I agree, that was awesome information, I did the right-click, save-as dance on that one.
~20 years ago, I was pretty confident enough to say I knew all the standards and knew all the things (which I didn't, but at least I thought I did). I kind of stopped paying attention at some point, and things have changed so much. Back in the day, we had only a few standards for things like chips... you had the various ZIF sockets in the Pentium days, and prior to that it was chip pullers. But now there are probably close to ~30 different socket types. I purchased a Lenovo Legion about 2 years ago. It has a Core i9 3.4Ghz processor with 8 cores. I wrongly assumed that because it was an i9, and only two years old, that I could easily upgrade to the newer Core i9s whenever I wanted to. I was wrong. Apparently what I have is the best processor for that socket, and ALL the other newer i9s (of which there are many now) won't fit my motherboard. Ugh... haha...
Stuff changes so fast now... but things are light-years ahead of what they were ~20 years ago. It's really hard to keep up.
I purchased a Lenovo Legion about 2 years ago. It has a Core i9 3.4Ghz processor with 8 cores. I wrongly assumed that because it was an i9, and only two years old, that I could easily upgrade to the newer Core i9s whenever I wanted to. I was wrong. Apparently what I have is the best processor for that socket, and ALL the other newer i9s (of which there are many now) won't fit my motherboard. Ugh... haha...
Stuff changes so fast now... but things are light-years ahead of what they were ~20 years ago. It's really hard to keep up.
Intel has been REALLY bad about socket support. Pretty much every generation for the last i htink 8 years has needed a new socket. AMD has had amazing support for the AM4 socket, i think we are on 5 generations of CPUs on the same socket? Some motherboards have had issues with support, due to having 16MB BIOS chips and not 32MB(which was needed for supporting the new and old CPUs. They could update for the newer ones but had to drop support for older, so it was an imperfect solution) Some chipsets also didn't play well with the newest CPUs.
No way man, I wish. I agree, that was awesome information, I did the right-click, save-as dance on that one.
~20 years ago, I was pretty confident enough to say I knew all the standards and knew all the things (which I didn't, but at least I thought I did). I kind of stopped paying attention at some point, and things have changed so much. Back in the day, we had only a few standards for things like chips... you had the various ZIF sockets in the Pentium days, and prior to that it was chip pullers. But now there are probably close to ~30 different socket types. I purchased a Lenovo Legion about 2 years ago. It has a Core i9 3.4Ghz processor with 8 cores. I wrongly assumed that because it was an i9, and only two years old, that I could easily upgrade to the newer Core i9s whenever I wanted to. I was wrong. Apparently what I have is the best processor for that socket, and ALL the other newer i9s (of which there are many now) won't fit my motherboard. Ugh... haha...
Stuff changes so fast now... but things are light-years ahead of what they were ~20 years ago. It's really hard to keep up.
I bought a, I want to say LGA1175, years ago thinking I could just pop a new one in too. It was an i7 and a K series. It was the "business class" damned if it has ever got an upgrade as it seems it was just abandoned. Same crap as your i9.
I was thinking about different I/O the other night when I had an issue with an old HDD. I was thinking about how my first computer wouldn't even take a PS2 mouse and how if I told anyone that today they'd wonder what I was trying to use Playstation stuff with my old hardware. My issue is I could only recover drives from a computer. Ordered a SATA to USB. It only does SATA that takes the old molex adapter or power. I don't know what that swift was maybe a change in SATA standard, but now I have to order another one that supplies power through the USB.
Here is one I have been seeing my entire life and not once have I ever used one. RS-232. I have always heard it as a programming port. It was on TONS of TVs. TVs which I never saw get an update. I think that is the right one.
Here is one I have been seeing my entire life and not once have I ever used one. RS-232. I have always heard it as a programming port. It was on TONS of TVs. TVs which I never saw get an update. I think that is the right one.
I've used serial and tons of other dead standards. I just have never once seen that port used. In fairness until recently TVs were so damned expensive people didn't have 10 in a house, so I saw a lot less of them and you really never work on a TV*. Computers though, I did have parts and crap people would give me and constantly working on and upgrading as a poor kid.
Is it the same as the old serial ports mice of yore used? I remember PS2/AT also and their adapters. Was that little serial an RS-232? If it was I just never pieced that together, and I may be calling it the wrong connection.
*My family used to tell stories of buying tubes and such at 7-11 to replace. Maybe the only meant stereos. Still not something I have ever done.
Todd is right though. It changes rapidly. Next big thing is going to be batteries. Fast charging is GREAT, but battery life still isn't there. Speeds are effing plenty fine and really have been for years. The shift has been going mobile for so long and the phones are insane now.
1st PC if you guys can recal.
IBM compatible either 286 or 386.Data cards for storage. No mouse, had to add it and some adapters. No soundcard. No CDROM. 3.5" and 5.25" floppy. I think it had both. VGA output. Windows 3.11 in all its' glory.
I've used serial and tons of other dead standards. I just have never once seen that port used. In fairness until recently TVs were so damned expensive people didn't have 10 in a house, so I saw a lot less of them and you really never work on a TV*. Computers though, I did have parts and crap people would give me and constantly working on and upgrading as a poor kid.
Is it the same as the old serial ports mice of yore used? I remember PS2/AT also and their adapters. Was that little serial an RS-232? If it was I just never pieced that together, and I may be calling it the wrong connection.
*My family used to tell stories of buying tubes and such at 7-11 to replace. Maybe the only meant stereos. Still not something I have ever done.
Todd is right though. It changes rapidly. Next big thing is going to be batteries. Fast charging is GREAT, but battery life still isn't there. Speeds are effing plenty fine and really have been for years. The shift has been going mobile for so long and the phones are insane now.
1st PC if you guys can recal.
IBM compatible either 286 or 386.Data cards for storage. No mouse, had to add it and some adapters. No soundcard. No CDROM. 3.5" and 5.25" floppy. I think it had both. VGA output. Windows 3.11 in all its' glory.
Here is an old serial (rs232) mouse with a DB-9 connector, a DB-9 to PS2 adapter and an ISA expansion card with both DB-9 and DB-25 connectors. Just stuff I happen to have laying around.
Do I get to keep my geek card? I learned BASIC in 1967, on a terminal that had an acoustic modem and no CRT, only an IBM Selectric print head.
Todd is right though. It changes rapidly. Next big thing is going to be batteries. Fast charging is GREAT, but battery life still isn't there. Speeds are effing plenty fine and really have been for years. The shift has been going mobile for so long and the phones are insane now.
Yup. While new architectures have made massive improvements for efficiency, it seems things may be shifting away from x86, and to ARM. Apple did it with the M1 chip, and that spurred microsoft to finally give the ARM version of windows some attention. Progress is being made.
Debian is crazy stable. It's by far the most stable distro I've ever run. And I've ran a bunch. In fact, PFF has been running on Debian since day one, back in 1999.
Debian is crazy stable. It's by far the most stable distro I've ever run. And I've ran a bunch. In fact, PFF has been running on Debian since day one, back in 1999.
This I shall keep in mind I am super rusty. Does this run KDE GUI. Is that even a good one anymore.
[This message has been edited by ls3mach (edited 06-15-2022).]
Had to go through my old stash. Back in the AMD K6 400mhz days, this was THE gaming card, a Voodoo 3DFX.
I don't have any of my stuff. My 2nd computer was an AMD-K62. 233Mhz overclocked to 266Mhz, I had a TV Tuner and a 56K modem. Neither of which we could afford service for (cable or internet).
Had to go through my old stash. Back in the AMD K6 400mhz days, this was THE gaming card, a Voodoo 3DFX.
Very cool.. Is that an original voodoo 4mb card? My first ever video card was a Voodoo 2 12meg.. Wish i still had it.
I've got a few retro PC setups. One is an old Gateway PC i bought back in 98.. 400mhz P2, 386megs of ram, a SB-16 sound card, and a Voodoo 3 (the first AGP voodoo card) .. Runs Win98SE.
Then i have an WinXP machine, with a P4-2.4ghz, and 4gigs of ram, a Sound Blaster Live Gamer sound card, and running a Geforce 4 512meg video card.
I have a Voodoo 5 card with 512megs of ram on it. But don't have a machine to put it in at the moment. Remember when you had to buy sound cards if you wanted decent sound on your PC? lol..
[This message has been edited by Jonesy (edited 08-01-2022).]
I can also remember a few unique incidents at the dawn of the PC age. I skipped the first few iterations and did not get involved until the 286 machine was available (at least in parts). I had to do some very long and repetitious calculations every month that were related to power production efficiency over a large power system. I managed to get my hands on one of the three or four PC in the company and did some spreadsheet development that drastically cut the calculation man-hours involved. Then we has a few other engineers start scheduling computer use reservations on a 24 hour per day basis. I was not allowed to purchase an additional computer for engineering use, but did manage to squeak through a requisition for "spare computer parts". Purely by "accident", the parts were adequate to produce a second 286 computer.
I set up a PC at home for use in my consulting business and had absolutely the latest and greatest PC components available. Ten to 20 MB hard drives were the standard at the time but my needs exceeded that capacity. After a lot of looking I saw a new machine that had twin ejectable 30 MB hard drives. If I wanted to run a different program, I just swapped to the required hard drive. Then I ran into memory issues as programs became more complex. I got an add on memory card and hand soldered 256k chips until I ran out of space. This was an improvement but I still had some memory issues until I learned about the difference in expandable versus extended memory.
Thankfully, PC have improved since those days and I can get more computing power out of my cell phone that an old IBM 360/375 computer that required an entire room and punch cards to function. I am happy that the "good old days" are gone (wrt PCs at least).
3090??? man im just trying to get an MSRP 3070! my 1070ti is holding up alright, but at 1440p ultrawide it showing its age. im assuming you do more on the rendering side with dual 1080s given the state of SLI
3090??? man im just trying to get an MSRP 3070! my 1070ti is holding up alright, but at 1440p ultrawide it showing its age. im assuming you do more on the rendering side with dual 1080s given the state of SLI
I don't know your budget, but I saw a 3080 10GB for $600 local not long ago. It was in what I assume an Amazon returns pallet. My buddy didn't want it or I would've snatched it up. He said it was a little slow for his taste. I don't know if he was being sarcastic or not.
I don't know your budget, but I saw a 3080 10GB for $600 local not long ago. It was in what I assume an Amazon returns pallet. My buddy didn't want it or I would've snatched it up. He said it was a little slow for his taste. I don't know if he was being sarcastic or not.
Yeah probably one of the many used video card that spent a few thousand hours running at full bore in some crypto mining machine. Apparently the crypto market had a bit of a bust or something and tons of miners are now flooding the market with used burnt up old video cards.. So buy used with extreme caution right now.
Slow? lol.. Well i know the 4000 series cards are about to come out. But Intel has a new line of GPU's about to hit the market fairly soon, and some of the tests on these cards have been pretty impressive, and supposed to be more affordable. Just need to get the drivers tuned up. Intel may have an uphill battler to compete with Nvidia or AMD, since they literally have decades of experience making gpu's and drivers, but i welcome any other competition if it will help bring prices of these things down to a more "affordable" level.
[This message has been edited by Jonesy (edited 08-05-2022).]
Yeah probably one of the many used video card that spent a few thousand hours running at full bore in some crypto mining machine. Apparently the crypto market had a bit of a bust or something and tons of miners are now flooding the market with used burnt up old video cards.. So buy used with extreme caution right now.
Slow? lol.. Well i know the 4000 series cards are about to come out. But Intel has a new line of GPU's about to hit the market fairly soon, and some of the tests on these cards have been pretty impressive, and supposed to be more affordable. Just need to get the drivers tuned up. Intel may have an uphill battler to compete with Nvidia or AMD, since they literally have decades of experience making gpu's and drivers, but i welcome any other competition if it will help bring prices of these things down to a more "affordable" level.
This wasn't used. It was new in box. Amazon pallets are a big thing right now. He works in IT and has been a game the 2 decades we've been friends. He might have a more powerful rig. I haven't been over in a couple months. He might have just not wanted to spend $600. Who can say.
)
