efaardvark

Just gave 8th Son a test run. Only the first three episodes and just to see if I want to put in on my short list. Hard to tell since the first two episodes are kind of prequel and the 3rd episode makes it look like the rest will be rather different. Thinking it might turn into another Noukin? I'll see. At any rate it's now on the list for a post-season binge.

Me too. Well, tbh I'm not a big fan of either MSFT or Sony. Pretty much all my console and portable experience to date has been Nintendo. That said, for better or worse the PS5 and xbox are pretty much the entire industry between them, and it is good to see what they're doing. A huge percentage of game devs are going to be writing games for those two platforms, and that process will inevitably affect everything else, including the phone and PC gamers. If nothing else it sets a minimum expectation for the PC crowd.

Honestly? Unless you enjoy the process of tweaking itself I'd advise against going too far down that path. The manufacturers of things like memory and CPUs are pretty good at "binning", or testing their parts to see how well they run at certain speeds. Parts that test higher are sold as higher-performance parts, and of course at higher-performance prices. The chances that you will buy a lower-spec part that you can get radically higher performance out of are pretty slim. Also, doing things like pushing the clock rate higher will have negative results even if you manage significant gains. Heat output will go up for instance, so you will need to have a better - and more expensive - cooling solution. Heat will also affect the lifetime of the part(s). And of course if you push things too far you can get into instability and reliability problems. If you're the kind of person who just wants your computer to be a reliable platform for email, web, games, etc. then it is best to stick with stock settings. That said, you can often get a 10-20% increase in performance without too much trouble. Manufacturers do bin their parts, but they also leave good margins so that their parts work reliably no matter what system they find themselves running in. BIOSs these days often have features and settings that allow the owner to fiddle with things to overclock or otherwise improve performance. Don't expect to be able to get much out of a cost-conscious build created from low-end parts, but if your motherboard has good power and your BIOS gives you the control then you can often tweak things to get better performance out of your system's particular collection of parts without using up all the margin left by the manufacturers. For myself I usually spend a little bit more up front to make sure I have as much margin as possible. Especially for things like power supplies that I can reuse over several builds I think it makes sense to get the one that has higher efficiency, produces more stable power, and gives me more "headroom" to use if I need it. Even a low-end motherboard + RAM + CPU + stock cooler will work fine at stock speeds, at least if you stick to the well-known brands. But I'd rather have the one with better VRMs and a BIOS that gives me the option to adjust clock rates, voltages, and RAM timings, even if it is few $$ more. A button on the motherboard to reset to *your* last known-good settings rather than a jumper to reset to factory-specs is also handy, as is a built-in POST-code display. I'll also go for the heat sink that's slightly bigger than necessary and maybe an extra case fan or two. Maybe even a nice water cooler. Stuff like that. It'll cost extra, but if you don't go too crazy spending money - or if you can justify the extra expense in terms of enjoying the tweaking process itself - then that's probably fine. As long as it doesn't break your budget of course. Even then I often stick with pretty much stock settings to start with. I do somewhat enjoy the tweaking process, but I also use my computer for a lot of other things as well. I prefer a stable platform for those things. It is only after I've had the system for a while that I start messing with pushing the performance envelope. Usually what pushes me over the edge is hearing about the next generation's performance. Then I'll get in there and see if I can get an extra 10 or 20% out of what I've got. At that point I've usually had a couple/few years of reliable computing on the system anyway. If I'm already starting to think about upgrading parts, or even getting a whole new system, then pushing the limits of the old parts/system can help me avoid that expense for a while longer. I never get TOO crazy, but even breaking things typically isn't going to cause much of a problem at that point. There's a lot less stress in breaking something you were kind of thinking of replacing anyway than letting the magic smoke out of that expensive bit of kit you just bought.

There's a bee in my house!

Imagine if GPUs get as much development and advances over the next few years as CPUs have over the last couple. Also, did you catch the reference to rendered -audio-? Imagine caves that sound like caves, virtual amphitheatres that are actually good for VR concerts/shows, and virtual renditions of architecture from all over the world that actually let you participate in the acoustics as well as the visuals. That's the kind of thing that could be the "killer app" that gets VR out of its niche. I was hoping there would at least be some PS and Xbox console tidbits leaked/announced at E3. I guess you could call the Unreal Engine V a PS5 announcement of a sort. Nothing prevents companies from making announcements on their own either.

E3 2020 is officially cancelled. Not unexpected, and not a big loss tbh, given the lack of participation by some of the big players the last few years.

Since I have the AiO water cooler in my system I've been wanting to run my CPU mildly overclocked. The base clock is 3.7GHz but I've seen many, many reports of people getting up to 4.1 without having to do anything more radical than having a good heatsink and telling the BIOS to auto-detect the max safe overclocking frequency. (This board's BIOS has me spoiled.) My RAM is rated at 2600Mhz but again I've read online that people were getting it to run reliably at up to 3200Mhz. The problem has been that I've never run the RAM at its (claimed) max speed with the CPU overclocked as well. After some quick experimentation immediately post-build I found that I could either OC the processor or the RAM, but not both. I didn't have the time to fiddle with it so I just let the BIOS run with the stock speeds. However, I had some time on my hands tonight so I decided to try running the memory at the 3200 speed and see how far I could push the CPU before the system became unstable. Long story short, after "only" about half a dozen BIOS visits it turns out that I just had to back the CPU off to a bit under 4Ghz! (3.98 to be precise.) Geekbench says my 2700X's single-core performance did drop slightly (from 1100 to 1088) vs a 4.1Ghz max rate, but the multi-core score jumped from 7543 to 8278 with the extra memory bandwidth enabled. I probably won't even notice the single-core difference, but I'm sure folding@home will appreciate the ~10% multi-core bump. I've had F@H running for a couple hours now and it seems stable. No noticeable increase in fan noise either. I'll let it run overnight. If the system is still working, stable, and quiet in the morning then I think I'll be sticking with these settings.

If this is a preview of stuff we'll see on PS5.... and btw the licencing terms have changed for unreal engine as well. Now it is free for the first $1M of revenue... https://youtu.be/dK9JytK_sBg

I’m not too worried about AMD stagnating like Intel. The market was already looking for alternatives before AMD came roaring back. There’s already ARM versions of both Windows and Linux for instance, and actually some good reasons to believe that x86 is overcooked as a processor architecture. (Not least of which is the licensing situation, which is another good argument for something like ARM.) Also, Intel has oodles of money and some very good scientists and engineers. You might argue that those people have taken a back seat to the beancounters in recent years, but even the beancounters will have to throw resources at the engineering department(s) with AMD taking away market share even on the server side. Who knows what that will produce? There’s plenty of reasons for AMD to keep pushing the limits of both price and performance. And yes, I’d like to see more competition in the GPU market as well.

Saint Young Men.

Drat.. looks like my X470 chipset motherboard is not going to be compatible with the new "Zen 3" CPUs after all. The CPU socket is the same, but there's just too many other hardware changes (chipset and CPU wattage increasing, PCIe 4.0, limited room for CPU-specific configuration in the BIOS firmware, etc.) to make practical supporting anything beyond the 3000-series CPUs on my "old" (ca. 2Q2018) motherboard. Well, if this one gives me another year or two before I max it out that is all I was really hoping for anyway. CPU tech is changing so fast. 2 years is a couple centuries in computer years.. who knows where we'll be by then? Threadripper's 64 cores might be The Thing, or maybe something RISCy like ARM. Maybe Intel will be desperate enough to counter AMD's Ryzens and Threadrippers with something radical they've had gestating in their labs. We'll see. For now I'll just go scope out some X570 and TRX40 motherboards and ponder potential future use cases and price points. I hear DDR5 is a definite maybe for the X670 chipset mobos coming out at the end of the year too, though that would probably require a new CPU socket as well..... Hard to keep up. If price is no limit then motherboards with 10Gb ethernet are already here from places like MSI and Gigabyte, even for the X570/Ryzen (i.e. high-end home) market. Still in the "if you have to ask you don't want to know" price range, but this being electronics I'm sure that will come down over time. We've already got 10Gb USB on the most recent motherboards too.

It has been fun and educational to talk to some of the old people like my mom who remember quarantines and regular occurrences of serious communicable diseases like measles and polio. We've had it easy for a long time thanks to modern medicine. These people that are rebelling against that legacy are ignorant morons. Crazy Eddie lives.

Blast from the past! Still works, though the battery is wasted.

If you haven’t already you might add Lovely Complex to your list.

Similar situation here as well. I'd like to build a Steam box around one of these new "i5 killer" Ryzen CPUs too. Kind of a console thing for the front room entertainment center. Just haven't had the time (or the energy) lately though. I'd like to get back to my brother's mc too. He's got a hard survival realms game going and we found a village that's literally within visual loading distance of a raider outpost. So of course we started fortifying the heck out of the village. We were trying to see how high we could get the villager population and when we were done with the fortifications we were going to trigger a raid sequence to have a little fun with that. Then the virus came along & I've basically had no time since to play.

Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is out and I just upgraded my system from 19.10. Not a lot different in terms of desktop environment but a few things have been added to the software repository that might make the newbie experience a lot less intimidating. Things like Steam and Minecraft are now available as point-and-click installs from the software catalog for instance. Current versions too, not last-years'. Even the latest version of Folding@Home is in there. At least now the newbies rage-quitting Windows 10 have less of a cliff and more of a hill to climb if they turn to Ubuntu Linux. This being a Long Term Support release there will be a tighter focus on bug fixes and stability as well. Canonical still has plenty of room to improve but the progress is there.

I usually put a 500GB nvme ssd in as a system/boot drive, then mount a network drive that has all my data on it from my Synology NAS. 500G is kind of overkill as a system drive but it does give me plenty of space to store active project/games locally to take advantage of the SSDs speed if I need it. Most stuff I just leave on the NAS drive though. I have a gigabit LAN so that’s plenty fast for most things. It wasn’t so long ago that 800mbit FireWire was the bees knees, and gigabit ether is at least as fast.

These days I'd totally go for something to put in that M.2 slot instead of the SATA SSD. A 250GB drive is only about $50 for the M.2 version and you'll save a cable and thus get a neater build. If your motherboard allows (and most do these days, especially for AMD CPUs) you can upgrade to an NVME SSD, which can run at PCI bus speeds and literally be many times faster than the SATA protocol allows. That SATA SSD in the video maxes out at about 6Gb or ~550 megabytes/second data transfer rates and costs $50. An NVME drive from the same mfr and with the same capacity can hit about 1,800 megabytes/sec writes for ~$70. And if you're willing to spend a bit more for the performance you can get a high-performance name-brand (here's a Samsung) that'll hit 3,500MB/s reads and 2,300MB/s writes for only $83, again at the same capacity. Also I prefer a fully-modular power supply. They're a bit more expensive but you only use the sockets you need so it won't leave you with unused cables flopping around inside your case and potentially getting into trouble with the fans. Again, cleaner build, and fewer cables means better air flow & cooling.

I don't really have a favorite computer activity. I use my computer for everything. Programming, entertainment, productivity, research, communication... Favorite software .... I usually have a web browser open (with about a million tabs), discord, about a dozen bash terminals, email, and spotify. After that it kind of depends on the activity of the moment. My web browser is currently firefox. Never got into chrome but I've been toying with the idea of trying brave. Computers help me think. If I want to move a heavy physical object I get a lever. If I want to travel I use wheels. If I want to get something into or out of my brain I use a computer.