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The Hole I’m Writing This On
Amy and I both play World of Warcraft. As the game progressed, we had to use lower settings and had reduced frame rate as our systems aged. So, on Black Friday, we saw some Graphics cards on sale, so we bought a couple. I swapped Amy’s card out in 10 minutes. Old one out, new one in, no problem. For my computer, I had two problems — perhaps you can see one.
Old Case
If I removed the hard drive, then I might have gotten it to fit, but the power supply would not have been enough.
So I waited, and ordered a new case (that could fit a kitten, no picture) and power supply. I got all the parts last night, and was able to swap the motherboard.
At midnight, I decided that sleep would be a good thing. Coming back this morning, I got everything installed and “tidied” up.
The sharp-eyed among you might notice some unconnected cables. Well, the front panel I/O headers on the MoBo are under the Graphics Card, and there’s not clearance to plug them in. There are solutions, but I’ve spent more on this upgrade than I did on the original computer. To be fair, it was a return so it was a reduced price.
Some lessons: another computer is helpful to look up motherboard pinouts. Think about the form factor when buying hardware.
On another note, I might have to unplug the power LED indicator. I can see the light on the ceiling.
Anyone else have some holes that suck money?
Published in Humor
According to most Greek scholars, Theseus was a Mac guy.
I want one . . .
That can’t be right; Theseus was supposed to be one of the more intelligent heros.
I used to build my own desktop computers, but then I started buying laptops. I have two I currently use – a nine-year old Dell (which I’m using right now as I type), and an Alienware mothership with more bells and whistles than a marching band (big $$$).
I use my old laptop for mostly word processing and older games, but the new one for modern games that require tons of memory and a high horsepower processor and graphics card.
The only thing I don’t like about my new machine is I’m stuck with Windows 10.
I forget the guy’s name, he was the editor of PC Magazine, but he used to say that the computer you want always costs $3,500. I guess that’s outdated now.
I have a sister in law who runs an alpaca factory (guess that’s what you call it). They turn fur into yarn.
Very much so. AMD has provided a challenge to Intel on the CPU side, and hopefully between AMD and Intel there will be some competition for high end graphics against Nvidia soon. Per Tom’s Hardware, the $1500 rig would rock VR, and you can knock a couple of bones off that by going with an RTX 2070 instead of a GTX 1080Ti (which you probably can’t get anymore anyway.)
I’ve obviously been looking at these things too much lately, but it’s where I’ve put all my disposable income (and some not so disposable income) lately. Thanks to this topic I’ve had to talk myself out of a new monitor and added debt twice already today. Funny thing is I haven’t even fired up a game at all today.
Also, I’ll vouch for the parts in this build. I’ve got the R5 2600X in my rig and it is quite underutilized because I only have an RX 580 for my GPU. Honestly, unless you’re into content creation and need 2 more cores the 2600X (or 2600 if you don’t mind overclocking, which is now super simple) is more than enough for any gaming rig. You don’t even really need to spend the extra money on the X470 motherboard. The B450 (especially the MSI Tomahawk) is more than capable even for a bit of overclocking.
If I were building a solid 1080p gaming rig right now I’d put this together. If I were building a decent 1080p budget rig it would be this.
This is why I haven’t gotten a new laptop, or updated my desktop HD. My desktop has W7, and I’m perfectly happy with that. I was a fool and upgraded my laptop from 8.1 to 10, and I really hate it – my system can’t really handle all the stuff Windows wants to constantly do, especially in the first hour or so after it wakes up for the day (which is my most productive computer time, of course…). That, in addition to the forced updates, spying, etc. I wouldn’t mind the Pro version, but I certainly mind paying for it.
I hope you do.
A few months back, I decided to replace my ancient 1080p monitor with a new 2K screen. I found that my GTX 960 SSE graphics card simply could not handle textures at that resolution. Even quite aged games would simply choke as the 2 GB of RAM were maxed out. I got frame rates in the teens.
Fortunately, one of my co-workers decided to upgrade to the latest and greatest, and was willing to let his barely 6 month old GTX 1070 with go for $200.
The long and short of it, don’t even consider going over 1080p if you don’t have at least 3 GB of RAM in your graphics card, and 8 GB if you’re doing 4K.
How do I find the memory on my memory card other than an exhausstive Google search?
I do lots of photo editing and I have one 4K and one 1080P and performance is fine.
How much you use vs what is stashed for that future dream project that you don’t know what it is but you just know that yarn will be perfect.
Fabric is my hole.
Sorry, I could have been a bit clearer. My statement applies to gaming, 3D rendering, or CAD.
Photo editing and general productivity apps use a much different process than 3D rendering since there are only 2 dimensions to work with, and are much less graphics memory intensive because of this. Gaming, 3D rendering, and CAD are usually dependent on complete 3 dimensional redraws of everything on the screen 60-120 times a second. Textures in a 3D space tend to be the big RAM hog.
If you’re using Windows 10, your graphics card memory can be found by opening Task Manager and going to the Performance tab. GPU is a should be an option on the left side. There are details if you click on it.
Lucky. I want to upgrade to that level of GPU, but budgets, desire to stay married, etc.
My mother could sympathize with this. I think she has about 500 sq. feet of space dedicated to storing sewing materials, fabric, yarn, ribbon, batting, etc. I’ve lost count of the various machines, though one of these days she’s going to want me to come get the computer to interface with the embroidery machine she bought . . .
Note that we both got one.
Yes, but my money holes are all mechanical.
I build
/rebuild my own computers, but since I’m not a gamer mine are much more utilitarian in nature. I just added two 4TB drives to my main house server. . There are 12 drives in that rackmount chassis, each set up as Raid1 (11TB useable). One volume dedicated to OS, 1 for playing with Hyper-V, 1 for all my personal docs, 1 one for all my digitized CDs, one for Movies & TV shows & the last volume for the 10,000+ of car pictures my friends have taken. I have other machines in the rack – One is a PVR with a dual-tuner card. Another is a dedicated ESXi machine with a bunch of single-purpose Debian machines on it. And a RPi cluster I put in an old Compaq chassis
ARs are fun. It’s basically adult Lego. I only have one AR now… and just 80% of the other two ;)
(c.f 80% Lower )
Still cheaper – and more socially acceptable – than actual cars. The data collection systems I have in my 5 serious vehicles range in price from $1K to $5K… and they just collect data to tell me how to improve performance. They don’t even contribute directly to the car’s performance: The data they record tells me where to spend the real money.
There’s still a decent number of kids still playing with cars…. and given the number of computers onboard, it’s a bit of a combination of the old & new hobbies you list. The modern car kids are much more exclusively blue collar than in the past, and given the way that the woke crowd has indoctrinated the “educated” kids against automobiles, the blue collar car kids are definitely shunned. It used to be the High School QB with the fast car was the cool kid…. now it’s the woke pajama boy with the Tesla.
As far as the modern electronic hobbies, look at the Arduino/Raspberry Pi realm. The Maker crowd does lots of interesting things.
The consensus seems to be that it’s probably going to suck. The maker has a habit of overpromising and underdelivering.
If you want to go cheap, get a PS4 VR setup. The resolution isn’t that great, and it’s a sit-down system, but there are some nice games for it (including the currently-exclusive VR version of Borderlands 2).
Arduinos are pretty damned spiffy. I have a bunch of them, and have been doing things like controlling stepper motors and such.
There’s also a really neat Arduino variation called the M5Stack, which is basically a fast Arduino in a tiny little 2″ x 2″ case, modular, with a battery and an LCD built in.
She got a Sapphire RX 580 for Christmas because Amazon is evil and sold it to me for $160 on a daily deal…
If another one wanders my way at a reasonable price, I’ll let you know. A few of my other coworkers are talking about splurging on the RTX 2080 Ti to match the guy that sold me his “old” card.
FIFY. Craft stashes such as this are like icebergs. You only see the ten percent the stash-holder wants you to see. The really good stuff is private and below the surface. As for how much space it occupies, or its actual value, you really don’t want to know.
Translation: Better men than you have been turned into newts.
It fits in a box.
I worry some about what I would get if I had a house and yard.
It’s an Acer inspire tc-120, so at least 3 years old. It was just a smaller form factor. The next upgrade will be Amy’s her board is tenish(I think) years old.
Barely.
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
Sure it does.