Calling ricedg

[johnbarry]

Thanks Dave

Once I get the money back I will re visit the ram link (above) with CCL. However I had to request an amendmant to cancel part of an order So the order is now on hold. I fear the oher parts (from CCL will take longer?)

Nice one

Cheers
John

[Ed P]

Just to go back on your Win11 fears, M$ have now made it easier to run Win11 on older kit:

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/08/youll-be-able-to-run-windows-11-on-older-pcs-if-you-install-the-update-manually/

 

[Dave Rice]

here’s some in Amazon for £31 https://amz.run/4qcu

 

[johnbarry]

Bloomin marvelous Ed I will keep my eye open for the manual update.

Thanks Dave

I did order the same from Kingston direct as fas as I am aware it will be here next week.

Cheers
John

[JayCeeDee]

Looking at this and the M2 SSD topic, I had a thought – do we have the makings of a new Dave Special???!!!

I’ve been watching it because I’ve been thinking about upgrading for a while now, I’ve had my current PC – Zoostorm i5 6400 480 (was 240 ) SSD 8Gb – for 5 years now and it’s been a dream. The SSD has made loading W10 and programmes speedy and web pages lightning fast, only let down by my propensity to have multiple browser pages to hand, all with multiple tabs open. This has led to pages opening and the graphics playing catchup as you scroll through. Obviously overburdening the onboard graphics.

I’ve decided to give myself a 70th birthday present and may well go down this route. I was impressed with the SSD’s role in improving performance and I think the M2 will be an extra improvement on that, from all I’ve read.

As I’m not a gamer I’ve always coped with onboard graphics, but everything else has improved so much now that I think I need a graphics card to keep up with the speed of processor and drive. My last graphics card came with a Pentium III 500 from Mesh – yes, it was that long ago. I’ve been dismantling a couple of 1st gen i7’s that my son no longer uses and thought to utilise a card from one of them, to solve my page graphics problem, but neither is supported by W10 without a lot of messing around!

@ricedg – come on Dave, time to give it a name!!😄😁😉

[Dave Rice]

Onboard graphics of a modern CPU are still fine for anything but gaming, and the new AMDs are making inroads into that. For i3 and above, the UHD630 graphics are better than the GT710 cards, so if you want a bit better the next step up is the GT 1030 2GB at £70 – £75. And it’s a big step up, much more than you need for the desktop but still not enough for gaming. However it does give a boost to games like Civilization 5 and anything that can use a graphics card for specialist processing.

The difference between an i3 10105F and a non F is £52, so that’s a big chunk of the cost but it’s not essential and you must makes sure you get the DDR4 model and not the rubbish DDR2 models that are being peddled about. MSI and Gigabyte are the ones to look for and I use the passively cooled versions.

There is nothing Ryzen with o/b graphics at the moment and in any case the latest Intel’s are just as good as CPUs. The AMD graphics are between the UHD630 and a GT1030, so there really is no point in buying a discrete card. In the Mini PC world the Asus AMD series are much better VFM than the Intel NUCs or Gigabyte Brix never mind the better graphics. If you can get your hands on any of them!

[JayCeeDee]

Well, I’ve been researching and so far my collection of bits is coming in at around about £600 for new everything, except monitors, so I’m going to hold on until Black Friday and see if that brings it closer to my £500 limit.

I’m showing Amazon links but I’m also pricing it through CCL and Ebuyer giving me similar prices, but missing a couple of items due to spotty stock levels of CPU and Mobo. Not after RGB at all.

Case

PSU

Mobo

CPU

Ram

M.2 SSD

GPU

Some bits are overkill, but what the heck!! I’ll use a spare SSD for storage on the PC and some old HDD’s for backup.

I’ve got some old PSU’s but I’m leary about using them, they were working prior to removal, but I wouldn’t want to risk one blowing and taking what will be a new PC with it!! Am I being over cautious?? I remember these scenarios from MM days – is that still the case or have they improved a lot in the last 7 years. One is an OCZ modular 700 and the other is ( modular? ), branded,  but I can’t recall which.

[JayCeeDee]

My other bit of research was looking into what would improve problematic performance of multiple browser pages with multiple tabs open, all at the same time. The main factor affecting performance was either RAM or CPU/Cores and the answers come roughly split between both camps, so I’ve got a Mobo with 4 x RAM slots so I can boost it at a later date and went overkill on the CPU!!

Just checked the second PSU ( mentioned in post above ) and it’s a CoolerMaster 500 ( non-modular ) of 2013 vintage so that’s on it’s way out!!

[JayCeeDee]

Well, I’m still holding out for Black Friday, but my list of items has ben increasing in price at Amazon over the past few weeks. My case above on 6/10 was £64.98 is now £74.99, Mobo was £89.99 is now £93.05, Ram was £68.44 is now £75.90. Prices at CCL and Ebuyer have stayed about the same, but availability has gone down. Amazon seem to be increasing prices now just to drop them come Black Friday. They’re going to need to drop drastically if I’m going to source from there.

I’m going to have to buy cagily, and maybe from different suppliers to get the best deal. I was hoping to get them all from one place in case of any incompatibility, but at the moment that’s up in the air!!

[Dave Rice]

That’s very much the case at the moment. AMD’s are silly prices and hard to get hold of, the Ryzen 5 5600G is a very good chip but at £260?

I’m using the Asus PN50 mini PC more and more, at £315 it’s a bargain in the current light https://amz.run/52K2 16GB DDR4 3200 £64 https://amz.run/52K4 Western Digital 500GB WD Blue SN550 NVMe £44

So for the total £425 you also get Wi-Fi 6, BT4, microphone, IR receiver, 4 display support and room for an additional 2.5″ drive. The R5 4200U is 6 core and of course decent graphics. With a spare SODIMM slot and that 2.5″ drive bay, you have expansion potential too. There is a Ryzen 7 4700u 8C for £395 still available at Scan  https://bityl.co/9TNu which is probably the one I’d go for, purely down to the CCTV CAD app I use.

If I didn’t need a PC I can add bits to (for testing) I would have one myself. Some of my customers have them on the desk between the monitors, one has them on a gas arm with the help of a £10 bracket https://amz.run/52K5 which is what I would do. They have small desks so it saves loads of space, plus they may want to show patients x-rays or scans (it’s a physio clinic) and the gas arm makes a huge difference.

The clinic has 10th Gen i3 NUCs as well which are 2C / 4T plus the same bells & whistles, and a little bit cheaper. In general use they are very similar but Intel make a dogs dinner of the driver installation, you’ll find yourself doing a lot manually. For an office scenario it’s a coin toss, but they aren’t available.

 

[Ed P]

Depending on the service, I have found that the mini PCs can run very hot and generate read/write errors. The cure however is very simple. Add a laptop cooler for the mini to sit on.  I use a ‘TECKNET Laptop and Notebook Cooling Pad 2 Fans Laptop Cooler fits 9″-16″ ‘ and it solved all my overheating problems. (Mini  is on 24/7 running my security camera setup.)

[johnbarry]

Seen as this thread came out the archives.

In the end after all the problems I had I sent the mobo back and had this one with this gfx card.

I am now running Windows 11.

Cheers
John

[Dave Rice]

I’ve not noticed any over heating and I install Syspectr on all my systems. However decoding can be hard on CPUs / GPUs.

[Ed P]

I am running four Internet network connected full HD Pan/tilt CCTV security cameras which eat up some 60-70% of an i5’s CPU capacity. The operating Blue Iris management software also includes scripting with tracking capability because I have pond koi/heron troubles and like to keep an eye on what the sneaky winged barstewards have done while I’m not around.

The pond is wire fenced and netted against kingfishers, but it is always a compromise between aesthetics and effectiveness. The CCTV alerted me to a kingfisher problem with small fish, hence the netting. The videos also showed that the original single wire low amp electric zapper just tickled the herons and was virtually ineffective.It also showed that herons are quite capable of near vertical take-offs and landings which eliminated quite a few options. To be effective I needed a full-size cattle zapper to really discourage the herons, but that would have been a very risky choice near water – hence the wire mesh fencing.

The security system ran well under normal conditions and no auxiliary cooling, however some M$ Windows 10 updates in the last six months ramped up CPU loads to well over 90% and generated read/write errors, and led to system crashes. This was obviously unacceptable on a security system and needed the external cooler to fix.

I’d happily run Linux software instead of Windows except I have not found any with the same ease of script customization.

[Les.]

Edp, When I was living in Staffs, I had a stream with trout running through the garden. I also dug a deep pond and put in 3 small Koi and seven TINY golden orfe. Two Koi died within a week, but 15 years later the remaining eight  were all massive. My assistant rom work threw in about 4 (bleached white) gold fish from his TROPICAL aquarium. After a few years, there was a pond full of goldfish.

The heron was a regular stream visitor, but one day I caught him eyeing up the fish. I bought some green, plastic coated fencing, about 2 ft high, and fixed as close to the edge of the pond as I could. He could not reach over, and the water was too deep for him to land in. Often watched the kingfisher catching small fish (bullheads most likely) from the stream, but never saw one at the pond. Whenever they were in the stream area, I could hear their warbling song, so would sneak up and watch them, so would likely have heard if they visited the pond. Probably just lucky.

Les.

[Dave Rice]

Just looked at the HDD temperatures, they all have the same Kingston A2000 drives and the same 8GB SODIMM. All are on 24 / 7 and all are currently idling. All are mounted in the same way.

The Asus are all at 42 / 43, the i3’s are at 26 – 32. That’s quite a difference.

[Dave Rice]

Out of interest I’ve been running a stress test all day on the Ryzen 3 PN50, maxing out the CPU, GPU and constantly writing to the drive.

The max temp of 91 was reached with 2 minutes but it then quickly dropped back to 77 where it stayed (105 is the operational limit). This was run remotely and I couldn’t find any software that could read the fan speeds, so it’s supposition but seems obvious the BIOS stepped in and upped the fans. I am guessing it maxed out, but whatever happened it did the job.

Syspectr kept an eye on the SSD temp and this didn’t move from 43 in the first hour, after which I stopped looking at any stats. After 9 hours I got an email warning that the SSD had hit 70, which is the top end of it’s operational limit. An hour later it was still at 70.

After turning off the stress tests things were back to the low 40’s in two or three minutes but the HDD is staying stubbornly at 70. Syspectr has raised another alert so it’s being monitored.

So it seems on this model at least, Asus has done it’s homework and even if you thrash it the CPU isn’t going to over heat. The constant writing to the HDD is very artificial, but a cheap heat sink would keep things under 70.

In the real world, for an general purpose machine you’re not going to have any issues and it can even handle being maxed out for long periods. What would cause that I can’t guess as if you had such a regular heavy workload you’d be looking at R5 or R7.

[JayCeeDee]

Well, I dropped the hammer. Reason behind that call was some parts were getting out of stock on all three sites, ( the GT1030 I was after, as per Dave’s recommend ) which were like rocking horse poo at one stage, only place was Amazon so I got it there along with the case, which was disappearing fast. The rest I was waiting for on Ebuyer and when I saw their Black Friday promise that if the price went down further on BF they would refund the difference that sealed it, no more twice daily checking and waiting.

Case arrives Friday, mobo, CPU, memory, M2 and PSU the same day, with the graphics card on Sat/Monday.

Just over £600 after some cashback on the mobo ( which I upgraded to the MSI MAG B560 TORPEDO ATX  simply because I liked the look, seeing as it will be on display through the glass side.

The wife has decided it’s time my old desk was retired, so she’s getting me THIS, with THIS by the side for my printer. Fun times ahead!!

[PlaneMan]

JCD, hope it all works out for you.

My nephew will be after a gaming PC upgrade fairly soon. The way things are now, he’ll have to wait a good few months or start earning £ himself.

[JayCeeDee]

Cheers PM👍👍 It all arrived today, so I’m reading the installation details for any ‘gotchas’, but I’ll need a W10 ( Pro ) key and they all seem to have vanished – well the cheap ones anyway. I’ll check for some old links from on here.

[Author]

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