[Dave Rice]

Update from Bob:

I know many of my family and friends have not heard from me here.
I am still in Castle Hill Hull.
Have been here since August 2nd.
Last operation was supposed to be quicker and easier. NOT!
More pain, more sickness, lost the use of my legs. Blood clots, conflicts in the meds making me talk to people who were not there.
I am beginning to get better but it’s going to be a long road.
I also understand those who give up. For the moment, I don’t give up. But it’s been close.

I’ll drop him a message tomorrow.

[Dave Rice]

Amazing.

[Dave Rice]

Why can’t we edit any more? I hit edit, did a load to include the 3600 Teafie mentioned and saved, nothing changed.

Anyway, the R7 2700X and R5 3600 are neck and neck on performance and price. CCL do R5 300 bundles which you can customize. The Aurous mobo and app controls all the RGB and there are extra RGB headers on the mobo too. You have to keep it all the same protocol.

[Dave Rice]

There are some real bargains to be had with the 2nd Gen Ryzen, specifically the Ryzen 5 2600X (unlocked 6 cores 12 threads 3.6 – 4.25 Ghz) @ £140. The supplied Wraith Spire cooler is fine too.

And for another £60 there’s the Ryzen 7 2700X (unlocked 8 core 16 thread, 3.6 – 4.35 Ghz) with an RGB Wraith Prism Cooler. This time last year I built a gaming machine around the still available CCL Kallis Ryzen 7X AMD Motherboard Bundle @ £369 with 16GB HyperX DDR4 and the Gigabyte B450 AORUS ELITE 

Add BT 5 & WiFi 6 in one card, Gigabyte GC-WBAX200 802.11ax @ £27 and I added an Adata XPG SX8200 Pro 256GB M.2-2280 SSD & a 2TB Barracuda.

The GTX 970 won’t be too good with modern titles due to lack of VRAM. For the graphics we went with an MSI Radeon RX 580 ARMOR 8GB OC which at £180 is still good bang per buck.

I used a BitFenix Nova Mid Tower Gaming Case and some extra BitFenix Spectre PWM 120mm Fans,

but for a previous bling build (with a Ryzen 7 1700X) I used a Phanteks Eclipse P300 with a Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML120L RGB Liquid CPU Cooler and Cooler Master MasterFan MF121L RGB (120mm) Chassis Fans.

There’s a lot you can do with the RGB, it’s just set to all red for the photos.

 

[Dave Rice]

There’s a real shortage of CPUs at the moment. Cheapest AMD on E-Buyer is a Ryzen 5 2600 @ £130 the 3400G @ £135.

Intel not much better, but they do have an i3 9100F @ £75 for cheaper builds and an i5 9400F @ £133. Both need a graphics card though so not that cheap. 10th Gen starts at £142 for the i3-10300, the i5-10400 is £180.

There are some bundle deals about, CCL is the place to go for that as you can customize them. Amazon is always worth a look, but now is not the best time for self builds.

[Dave Rice]

Anyone still using a 5+ year old smart phone is doing well and has had their moneys worth. A basic modern smart phone can be had for <£50 that’s going to be in a different league. I don’t think we need to cry in our beer too much over this 😊

[Dave Rice]

Because it makes the whole PC  snappier. If you have run Windows from an SSD there is no way you’ll go back to a HDD. Indeed it’s getting like that with NVMe SSD drives vs SATA SSD.

There is no problem with having your Steam library on the second drive, you can have as many Steam libraries as you like. Likewise the traditional big disk space gobblers of video, music and photos can be stored on the HDD. It’s easy to move a library folder to a different location so the whole thing is transparent.

128GB s more than enough for Windows + Apps, indeed for most people it’s big enough for everything but their Steam library. The new (20H2) version of Windows includes Storage Sense which can automatically keep your storage optimized.

[Dave Rice]

E-Buyer have a Medion Erazer X30 for £629

Intel Core i5-9400F 2.9GHz
8GB RAM, 1TB HDD, 128GB SSD
NVIDIA GTX 1650 4GB
Windows 10 Home
3 Year Warranty

That’s going to be hard to beat. An extra £90 for the GTX 1660 6GB version.

[Dave Rice]

It’s what he’ll get up to in the next 3 months that worries me. The litigation is just not going to get off the ground without evidence, no matter how much his disinformation campaign works or doesn’t. The courts may be biased politically but they have to see something to apply that bias to.

I don’t think it’s wearing well with the American public (hotheads excepted) which will spur the GOP into action eventually. They have had a good election, President excepted, and mid terms are not that far away. There are a few reruns going to happen in January. If Trump’s actions continue the shift to Blue they could be in trouble there too.

I think that after the weekend there will be trips made down Pennsylvania Avenue to quieten Trump and his spawn, or make it clear they are own their own. But who knows? This may be setting up the first female President in 4 years time, Ivanka Trump vs Kamala Harris.

[Dave Rice]

Looks good to me. I tend to use them as headless devices so I’m sitting on my debit card!

Father-in-laws old Core 2 Pentium finally started playing up, it’s done very well considering but time for a new one. All he does is office type tasks and printing some photos but it has to be W10 as he won’t cope with a big change, otherwise that Pi would have been ideal.

Looked about and saw a Gigabyte Brix Intel Celeron N4000 on E-Buyer for £110. Not going to pull the skin off a rice pudding but it won’t need to and the price is right. Looked a bit further and Gigabyte are bundling a USB Keyboard & Mouse Set and a 120GB 2.5″ SATA SSD! Thank you very much, bite hand off.

It has:

• 1 x SO-DIMM DDR4 slot.
• Intel IEEE 802.11ac, Dual Band Wi-Fi & Bluetooth 4.2 NGFF M.2 card.
• HDMI plus D-Sub Outputs (Supports dual displays).
• 4 x USB 3.0 (1* USB Type-C™).
• Gigabit LAN
• Headphone and mic jack.

With an 8GB sodimm, next day delivery and W10 / O2019 from E-Bay it’s cost £149.

Windows 10 installed a bit slower than normal thanks to the weedy Celeron and you couldn’t call it snappy but then I’ve been spoiled with quad+ AMDs and NVMe drives. You get used to Word loading as fast as you can take your finger off the mouse button, waiting a second or two, sheesh.

Can’t wait to see his reaction when I turn up with a 3″ x 4″ box to replace the old tower :wacko:

 

[Dave Rice]

My mates got one, I’ve never been tempted. His house is covered in programmable lights, even his “Christmas Tree” is made of them. I believe he uses it to make custom parts for installation of all this stuff, but being an engineer by trade he’s OK doing whatever it is you need to do to make the patterns (or whatever they are called).

[Dave Rice]

He’s been quiet for a while. I tend to leave him alone if I see he’s not active as that usually means he’s cream crackered.

[Dave Rice]

I like the idea of the GPU and CPU (and their ram) being able to talk to each other.

[Dave Rice]

The first thing that sprang to mind was Google Photos.

[Dave Rice]

Yes the article alludes to as much. It was all about CUDA workloads.

Of course to even get a system that could handle this many top end cards it wasn’t your enthusiast mobo job. I didn’t realise just how different these non-mainstream boards have become until I built the X299 CAD monster. I just don’t get involved in server building any more either. I just spin up what I want in Digital Ocean’s cloud and only pay by the minute for projects that don’t quite work and $5 to $10 a month for those that do.

[Dave Rice]

I had a once state of the art CAD machine in here last year. First Gen i7, 8GB ram, RAID 0 HDDs and the then best graphics card (I forget what it was). The lights dimmed when you turned it on. I tried it with an SSD but it just wasn’t worth it.

In much the same way a mate inherited a 3rd Gen i5 from stepson ex game designer who was emigrating to Canada. We decided to leave the leccy sucking graphics card out as he was only going to use it for office and social media. Saved him a fortune.

[Dave Rice]

She’s part of the gravy train club. It’s modelled on the manager of the Hotel California’s job description.

[Dave Rice]

Insane :good:

[Dave Rice]

I noticed that U20.10 uses the latest Linux 5.8 kernel that has more Comet Lake tweaks. However Phoronix did their usual top notch testing using a Comet Lake system and the verdict is stick with 20.04.1 LTS.

[Dave Rice]

Well thin and light paints you into a corner, but TBH they’re all moving towards “no user serviceable parts inside”.

Specs wise it’s pretty much top of the tree without a dedicated graphics card so you’re not going to get much better anywhere. Storage wise it has USB C so I’d look there, or a NAS, for extra storage.

Go for it.

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