Chosing a new PC

[Skipweasel]

Yup - and in some odd cases you may even need a driver for the monitor. Or, more accurately, a .inf file.

[Davey]

Indeed, you are correct. And the only one to point out the error!

[D.M.Chapman]

Sun (sorry, Oracle) T3-4 has 64 DIMM slots, for 512GB RAM with 8GB DIMMs. Certainly not a home machine (not even x86 :-)) but certainly not top end stuff :)

For TBs of RAM you need to go *huge*

Darren

[Davey]

I get Error 403 when I try to go there.

[Nigel Wade]

I can achieve that on my 5 year old server, which has 64 slots. With 8GB DIMMs it could take 512GB of RAM. I don't know about the cost, but certainly it falls within the remit of "at any price". At the moment it has a measly 32GB (which was actually quite a lot 5 years ago) and is sufficient for our current requirements.

It's plenty, and will be for some time to come. At least to those not trying to model the Earth's atmosphere, or the stars of the Universe.

My server is an 8-way Opteron SMP box, so all processors are running in the same address space, and all able to access the full RAM. Small 4-way SMP boxes with 8- and 12-core Opterons are not uncommon these days. They are certainly not in the desktop PC category, but neither are they the preserve of the HPC community either. The building blocks of HPC maybe, but single units are affordable by small depts. or even motivated individuals.

[Skipweasel]

Yeah - I'm not sure why, it worked yesterday.

[chris]

From what I understand, new display port connections actually communicate between card and monitor, and the card will refuse to drive things that aren't capable.

We recently got a couple of ATI EyeFinity 6-port graphics cards, but found that they would only drive 6 DP monitors. Anything else is considered 'legacy' and the card will only drive a maximum of four. It doesn't matter whether you port a DP adaptor on or not, the card knows that it's not a DP connection.

[Adrian]

chris gurgled happily, sounding much like they were saying:

Good ol' VGA ports have been doing that for years.

[anahata]

Some keyboards have USB hubs in them for the similar reasons, but one advantage of having a hub in the monitor is that it can be powered from the monitor and thus run more power-hungry connected devices.

[anahata]

Look up DDC.

I think you'll find if the card doesn't get a response it assumes a safe default like VGA 640x480 at 60Hz which will get you a good enough display to use for debugging and fixing things, and is supported by almost any monitor.

[Phil Addison]

Thanks for the reccomendations :)

Phil

[Phil Addison]

I seriously recommend getting that copy of this months Computer Shopper

- it really has all you need to get you up to speed. Its number 279 May!! 2011.

Phil

[Nix]

On 16 Mar 2011, Tom Anderson uttered the following:

Ah, right, I see. Something I've been separated from on account of having a keyboard that lasts forever and uses a PS/2 connector :)

particular seems deeply arbitrary.)

A lot of cameras have really really crappy firmware. About 1/5th of the time, My Canon Digital IXUS (PowerShot IV under a new name) stalls forever when libgphoto tries to pull photos off it. The SD card reader always works.

[Nix]

On 17 Mar 2011, Daniel James outgrape:

True. Desktops are much more limited (my current one has 12Gb and it turns out not to supply enough power to run that much RAM at its rated top speed... a sign of untrodden snow.)

I have no idea :) I'm fairly sure you couldn't when I bought it, back in

2009, but I suppose the point of this sort of machine is to be crazy extensible and somewhat futureproofed.

True. I was being pedantic :)

[Tb RAM]

SGI-as-was sold quite a lot of them, many very very multiprocessor indeed: that's why the Linux kernel is known to scale to thousands of CPUs.

[Bob Eager]

Model M?

[Nix]

On 17 Mar 2011, Nigel Wade stated:

Pedant point: Intel multisocket systems are not SMP these days, and I'm fairly sure the same is true of AMD as well. They're NUMA, with some of the RAM accessible only through some of the scokets.

[Nix]

On 16 Mar 2011, Tony Houghton outgrape:

As long as they can do that without letting the bloody DRM cat out of the bag. I think they want it to work as a video card first. :)

[John Stumbles]

How do they fit all the penguins on the screen when it's booting?

;-)

[Davey]

Yep, I got it. I won't be building my own, thank you.

[Mark]

You'd hope. On my Ubuntu 8. it assumes my monitor is a widescreen running at high resolution, when connected via the KVM. :-(

Easily fixed by tweaking the config though. I don't know why they can't just connect through pin 12.