Advice on a new PC motherboard 'bundle' Featured

Pretty much how I use my PC, plus online banking and SIPP+ISA management, and occasionally into Lightroom and less occasionally my Nikon slide scanner.

It has been for me for the last ten years or so

Notice how few posters there are here saying 'I cant get my Linux to work' compared with Windows/Mac users...

It's extremely rare that you'll see a Mac-related question here.

That's how mine (MATE) works All though it isn't an 'app' in the nomenclature

Well yes..:-)

I gave up on Macs because it became clear that no mac users actually knew anything about Macintoshes or OS/X.

There was no support beyond 'buy a new one' 'reinstall everything'

Linux users tend to be more technically minded.

Thanks that's useful to know. I'll be sticking with Mint as I have worked out how to do it by hand, and usage of Lin/Win for me is limited to providing a testbed for my email software as I want to be able to support all three desktops to the extent possible.

Only let's say naive users. But then the same is true for Windows. And why not, at that level.

Perhaps you might like to lurk there for a while to see what gets discussed. :-)

But in addition if figures are to be believed Linux accounts for around

Dave

Well Linux users don't ask here, but linux questions tend to be far more in depth. No one has any problem installing it....or with upgrades borking it.

I did. It profited me not one bit.

I have an HP MiniServer with Ubuntu, which has "borked" twice on upgrades. It also wiped one of the desktops. Its really just there as a test-bed for a package I work on. It spends more time applying updates than doing work....

Dave

The thread count on Intel is coming down. HT is off on the silicon. The third one is the newest of the three examples. It has 20 threads instead of 28 threads, as the 8 P-cores no longer have hyperthreading. And, it hasn't hurt performance, when compared to the 14700K. Stare as I might, looking at the Wikipedia Intel lists, I find it almost impossible to spot a strategy on their sockets/CPU designs for desktops. The 265K was likely selected to get roughly into a mid-price range.

single multi thread thread

Intel Core i7-6700K @ 4.00GHz 2,505 8,943 4 threads Intel Core i5-14400 3,766 25,253 $178.96 6*2 + 4 threads Faster than your 6700K Intel Core i7-14700K 4,478 52,711 $319.00 8*2 + 12 threads Selected for single thread, high clock Intel Core Ultra 7 265K 4,870 58,789 $332.99 8 + 12 threads No-HT, 13 TOPS NPU

E8400 1,234 1,210 2 threads (example of CPU where W11 cannot be installed now) N4000 1,036 1,428 2 threads N5000 1,130 2,610 4 threads (seems a starved design...)

AMD 5700G (Zen3) 3,284 24,477 $148.00 8*2 threads \___ selected for cheapness (price varies, like tomatoes) AMD 5600G (Zen3) 3,187 19,804 $148.00 6*2 threads / may be unavailable, depending on the tide table

Example system, power measured with a Kill-O-Watt meter at the wall.

The SuperPI or the "single thread" column, are a proxy for how annoying Microsoft Windows will be. A fast single thread pays dividends. Few activities use "all cores" with regularity, which is why heavy iron only pays off for heavy iron work. When people select some of the heavy iron numbers, it's just to get a better single thread clock. It is too bad they don't sell screaming fast 2 core CPUs.

My very first gutless PC (Celeron 300), used to idle at 150W and single threaded benchmarks drew 153W. The idle power has changed quite a bit since then. One of the processors I put in that machine, it drew a whole 35W, so the power wasn't exactly going where it counted. Nothing was power optimized back then. Even my CRT monitor, it drew just as much power on a loss of signal, as it drew with a signal (that is *dreadfully* bad as these things go).

And the above class of machine in the example, does quite frequently get left on when not in usage. My networking equipment draws 17W and must be left running for the VOIP ATA box to work.

Paul

The worlds oldest linux peripheral

Win10 is quite good at adapting to new hardware. So you would probably find if you made a clone[1] of your existing disk and showed it into your "new" machine, it would book ok and then sort out finding the right drivers etc. If the new machine already had Win 10 on it, it would reactivate with a digital license as well.

Except, as I discovered this week...

The old machine didn't support UEFI. I installed Win10 about two years ago.

Updated the motherboard this week, and it refused to boot from the disk. Turns out that Win10 didn't bother to install a UEFI partition.

Installing Win 10 to legacy BIOS/MBR is what I do to stop Win 11 being installed as an "update". You may need to set the BIOS to match your installation, it probably defaults to UEFI/Secure Boot.

The BIOS kept switching it back. In any case, Win 11 insists on UEFI, and I'm upgrading to that soon anyway.

So I'm just installing Win 11 a bit earlier.

The only route I can think of, is go back to the old machine, clone the disk, use the MBR2GPT.exe executable and convert the cloned disk to GPT... and hopefully UEFI. I think it will add an ESP for you (even if it doesn't put the partitions in the correct order, ESP goes on the left). But I don't know how it manages to populate the ESP with anything useful.

C:\Windows\System32\MBR2GPT.exe 340KB H:\Windows\System32\MBR2GPT.exe 1149KB <=== win10 one is bigger

After you do the conversion, it's quite possible the old machine won't be able to boot on it. But the new machine might be able to boot on it (now that it is converted).

The Macrium Rescue CD has a boot repair option, which uses maybe four different windows-included routines, for boot repair. And that does not have files to stick in an ESP. Once the MBR2GPT is finished with the disk drive, you can try a boot repair with Macrium CD.

{Picture] Example of of a GPT disk with a UEFI ESP ("EFI System Partition")

I managed to run MGR2GPT.exe once, on a VM setup here, but I only marveled that the run completed, and I didn't spend any time testing the thing after the conversion was done. I just noted some partitions weren't in the order I'd hoped for. I had been thwarted on previous runs, by complains it could not handle what I was giving it. But by the time I was down to three partition, it decided to work.

Paul

I would do that. But the old machine has died irretrievably.

I am installing on a fresh SSD on the new machine. I will then install the (relatively few) applications. There is no worry about the data because the home directory is on the house file server.

Not many applications as this is my workshop machine. Applications for the oscilloscope, multimeter, function generator, and PSU. Zoom (I use that room for quietness) and Office. Not much else.

The old disks are still in there if I find I have missed anything. They will be accessible for data.

I remember having a *graphics* screen dump routine that printed on a daisy wheel... it used the full stop for a dot, and the micro justification, and ascender / descender shift commands to achieve XY positioning of the full stop. Took 40 mins to print a page I seem to recall being told (I never had a daisy wheel printer that I could actually try it on)