Advice on a new PC motherboard 'bundle' Featured

I have 2 x Lenovo V17 both bought when they were previous generation for about £600 each new with 17" screens.

Where do you think this lame performance manifests itself, on a general purpose machine?

What activities benefit from the Ryzen 5?

Connections with that sort of speed remain strictly science fiction in this house.

I think the reference is to "being ready for whatever whim Microsoft has next".

The NPU situation seems not all that good on desktops. Almost like the add-on video card will be tasked with inference (the best video card can do 1000 TOPs). The software is not nearly ready, for supporting AI tasks on all your hardware. Not even close. (They've actually been working on that for *four* years.)

One AMD desktop product claimed to have an NPU, but the TOPs value was so low, I couldn't find an actual spec for it. Which means it was a 10 or a 13, and not a 50 TOPS NPU. There are laptop processors that meet the Microsoft TOPS spec. The purpose of an NPU in a laptop, was supposed to be a lower power way of supporting the little tasks for AI (OCR, voice recognition, image sharpen).

The following selected for a slice of mid-range pricing. It's just an attempt at a slice, not driven by requirements.

NPU Peak TOPS (Int8) 13

Processor Base Power 65 W

NPU Peak TOPS (Int8) 0

Processor Base Power 125 W

Total Threads 16 (hyperthreading) Max Turbo Frequency 5.5 GHz

NPU Peak TOPS (Int8) 0

Processor Base Power 65 W

As the price goes up, the solution space changes. It's hard to say how much ordinary applications benefit from huge L3. Some of the AMD processors are good at gaming, because of their L3. The only thing I've ever seen that goes faster with cache, was 7ZIP compression (large dictionary).

The power numbers tend to be meaningless, as the turbo value can be quite a bit higher than the listed numbers. All that the listed numbers can be used for is a "class" indication. A 65W can be cooled with an in-box cooler. A higher base power than that, the heatsink can get pretty big, to bring the closed loop temperature control to heel. I had to toss a 150W cooler, because the software was reporting 90C fake spikes, and I wasn't about to leave it like that. A 250W cooler made it behave. The lower power cooler wasn't wasted - it's on my daily driver 65W CPU (8 cores).

My high power processor, runs turbo forever. It is not limited to 28 seconds or 56 seconds. But the processor also has a power limit, and the clock frequency comes down to cause the power to meet the power envelope. So while it's doing its best, it isn't all that impressive. It will definitely runs 5GHz on one core, which is what we want for a Microsoft desktop. On 16 cores it runs 4.4Ghz (and sucks down ~200W). It finishes Windows Update a little faster than the other machine :-/ But not by much. Yes, there is currently some fan noise.

There are a number of free programmes that say that they can do that but I have never tried any of them for this purpose.

Clonezilla -

Who knows? It's up to the vagaries of Microsoft.

I should also say that it is installed as a technical exercise & for familiarity. There is no personal information on there.

I put a W10 SDD, from a scrapped desktop, into an old laptop that had previously failed W10 upgrade compatibility. Everything just worked. I hadn't expected it to, but it did. None of the old hardware specific driver installation. The only thing I needed to do was get a W10 licence.

Win-11 runs nicely in a VirtualBox VM on my Mac Mini.

It's the first Win OS that I remember, that has decent fonts instead of all the dotty ones. So it even looks nice.

Well put the data on a server or something - or a usb drive. Or install the old data disk in the new computer etc.

Bugger. I paid 9.60 for these two days ago

FTTC is not capable of more tnan around 80Mps

Depends just where the cab is, I suppose. Here is about a quarter of a mile down the road and its copper from there. Much better than copper to the next village, however, as it used to be.

Comparatively sluggish response and general lacklustre performance. Poor experience with VMs or any CPU intensive task like transcoding/rendering video.

If you are used to using low end machines, then you might be ok with it. If you are more used to a reasonable business spec machine then a low end CPU will feel like a very poor relation.

Less of the above!

Sorry my typo - FTTP

Actually it can go to about 140 on SoGEA lines (i.e. VDSL without POTS)

-- Cheers,

John.

/=================================================================\ | Internode Ltd -

Are Openreach offering >80Mbps profiles? My line is around 76Mbps (Huawei cabinet, Broadcom modem) so I think it could go higher if a higher speed profile was available.

Deutsche Telekom will sell you 250Mbps VDSL. For a time BT would sell you

Theo

Snap.

My Novatech 'bundle' dates back to 2011 with 4Gb ram and

Lightroom V3.6 is still running but struggles sometimes,

What next, after October 2025 ?.

The Nikon scan software only ever ran on windows and Apple Macs <= 2008, so Linux is presumably out of the running. Moving to new hardware is not straightforward because of the limited options for firewire (but I have posted this before and people have pointed out the availability of pcie firewire boards. I suspect I will have to go down the apple mac mini route + adapters but only as a last resort since it still needs software to run an obsolete scanner.

There are 3rd party Windows scanner software packages that still target my scanner, like Silverfast but I tried that as a demo download and it was complicated to learn.

Andrew

When I was the only person in the street who had FTTC, my router estimated it could achieve 100 Mbps down and 30 Mbps up, but BT's 17a profile won't allow faster than 80/20, so that's what I got.

Now (different router) with lots of the street using FTTC (some have moved to virgin FTTP) I still get the full 80/20, but with lower estimated max achievable. Downstream Upstream Actual Rate 79990 Kbps 19999 Kbps Attainable Rate 84642 Kbps 25238 Kbps

My speed didn't budge when I switched to SoGEA, didn't think openreach used profile 35b due to interference? Might be nice if the offered it after POTS finally dies in 2027?