Advice on a new PC motherboard 'bundle' Featured

If you're using a commercial 3D printing company, they usually have equipment capable of using a wider range of filaments (at a price) I'm sure there'd be a suitable material ...

suggestions yesterday, but it's a different one, link is to the completed NAS, rewind to see the build if interested ...

That is DIY and a half :-)

That was a suggested video from the 12 bay one. Physical design looks nice, but I'm not a great fan of the 'Zimaboard' - too many compromises. And his choice of PSU is awful - sketchy Chinese junk, as he found out. And it needs a custom PCB. And I'm a bit dubious about his choice of SATA controller (no details in the video but I suspect it's a consumer grade controller).

But maybe there's enough space underneath to fit a RPi + SATA HAT or a mini ITX.

PS if you don't have a 3D printer the hot new thing is the Elegoo Centauri Carbon at $299 - two NAS cases and it's paid for itself. (well, minus electricity, filament, screws, magnets etc)

Theo

I've watched a lot of repair videos on YouTube. Often there is some kind of power monitoring circuitry that ultimately switches stuff off if a short is detected.

The repaiir dudses use visual inspection, Ohm checks on power rails and, in the limit voltage injection onto the power rails at very low voltage with a thermal camera to find the short. It's usually either a capacitor or a chip.

These are repair shops dealing with $1000 laptops that are worth fixing, that have access to hundreds of scrap motherboards (ones where the cost of replacing e.g. a CPU exceeds the cost of a new board etc)

The sad fact is that if the CPU and if fitted GPU are OK and easily swapped a mobo swap is by far and away the cheapest and easiest route

I got a Creality K1 with camera - buying them separately was cheaper - not cheap but its proved invaluable at making odd little plastic parts that have broken or got lost

Its quite a steep learning curve though...

I have an Elegoo Neptune4 Pro ... there's never a good time to buy.

The +5VSB rail has limited amperes to offer, and it does not matter whether the PC is 500 watts or 1500 watts. The rating is typically

Look carefully at such things as "USB bus powered loads" or "USB charging loads". When the +5VSB shuts off on overload, it takes out the operation of the PC with it.

Roughly the same behavior occurs on CPU THERMTRIP. Check the standing CPU temperature with a utility, to see whether it is too hot and the cooler needs "maintenance". THERMTRIP is roughly 20 degrees above the throttle temperature. The machine would slow down a bit, if it was getting too hot. Sometimes, a characteristics smell can tell you that the machine is not all that happy with how you've been treating it. (Such machines usually have very slow exhaust fans.)

If a heatsink falls off a CPU, it only takes around two seconds (at full power) to destroy a CPU. This is why THERMTRIP was invented, to stop the event before it toasts the chip. The thermal protection afforded by "BIOS checks" was not fast enough to avoid damage. A hardware based scheme was invented to take its place. This was introduced around the end of the AthlonXP era (when I bought my motherboard for the Athlon at the time, I made sure it had the small 14 pin Attansic chip that switches off the power for that). Later implementations, the signal comes right out of the CPU, to halt the action and drop the PC instantly. Both AMD and Intel had that signal, after the importance of protection was recognized.

For some of the (latching) power events, you have to use the switch on the back of the PC, switch it OFF, switch it ON, to allow an attempt to start it again. You can't just push the front button, after it's been dropped on a serious fault cause. It takes some back button or cord-action, to recover it.

Paul

Buy the DDR4 RAM you need soon. If there is any economic leverage applied to computer sales, the memory companies may respond by only selling the chip type that makes money, and that is DDR5. The DDR4 memory type could be discontinued.

Previous behavior of memory companies was not like that. Some good products continued to be available for years afterward. It's not quite the same today. When buying a trailing edge system, make sure there is still a quality product available for the RAM. If you were thinking of "I'll buy one stick today and leave the second stick for purchase tomorrow", that's not a good strategy particularly. Buy what you need now, as it's not going to get any cheaper. This is the perfect time of year for the purchase, anyway, not in the second half of the year.

Paul

Just cross posting because the behaviour described above could very well explain the sudden unexpected drop of the PSU.

Thread in uk.comp.homebuilt about sudden unexplained power off.

Cheers

Dave R

I have tried to follow this thread, because I am using a 2015 I5 desktop, which on the whole suits me, but what I cannot see is what a moderate home user like myself should be looking at for an upgrade which will perform with modern OSs and software?

As long as it connects to my 24" monitor and some speakers I don't mind if it is a tower or laptop, new or secondhand and I have not played a computer game in 30 years so that is not a requirement.

I suggest looking on ebay for a refurbished Dell, HP or Lenovo business box. Get one with an 8th generation Intel or Ryzen 3000 or later and it'll support Windows 11.

They come in a variety of sizes from Tiny/Mini/Micro (like a hardback book) through 'SFF' (small form factor, roughly the size of a hifi separate) to tower versions.

They should be perfectly adequate for office-type use, with none of the overheads of having a giant PSU or motherboard for putting a gamer graphics card in.

On most of them the RAM and storage can be upgraded easily - on refurbs often the old owner keeps the storage and the refurbisher puts in a small cheap SSD like 128GB or 256GB, which are easy to swap out for something bigger.

Theo

Thanks for that but what's the differences between generation and between I5 and I7?

Intel's 'generation' = year, roughly. '8th gen' = 2018 'i5' and 'i7' = performance grade, kinda like BMW 5 or 7 series. Intel suffix letters (U/T/H/HQ/S/K/...) = mostly power class (laptop, desktop, ...), although sometimes other things (F = no onboard graphics)

AMD have a different numbering scheme, although they also do 'Ryzen 3/5/7' to roughly compare with i3/i5/i7.

Sometimes there isn't a lot of difference between generations, and then there can be a big leap the next year.

Performance wise, I'd find out the exact model number (eg i7-9700k) including suffix letters then search and add it to a comparison here:

Theo

Thanks Theo

I have been building my own computers for over 40 years. I tend to buy components one stage back from bleeding edge.

Last August I started on a new build, the first yonks. I learned two things:

It took months, literally of returning stuff for testing. The supplier eBuyer were terrific but it drove me crazy.

Anyway, I would not worry too mmuch about the processor if you are not running games.

HTH

Alan

Processors have been made into "Price points", and it is up to you to discover what the difference is. Since most of the "pep" in CPUs, comes from the clock speed on a single thread, this is the best metric for "improvement".

In Google, you can enter

site:intel.com E8400

site:techpowerup.com E8400

and get the datasheet for each Intel processor. If Intel is too stupid to list their own product, Techpowerup will have to do.

The multi-thread rating, is applicable to situations where you are using WinRAR or 7ZIP compression or decompression. Some of those use all cores. These numbers help a bit for gaming (up to a point). For example, one of the flight simulators uses 8 cores. My best processor can compress at around 50MB/sec, the E8400 was about 2MB/sec by comparison. Most of the time, these excess cores are a waste. The really powerful machine stays off, most of the time (just the fan noise alone, sees to it). The fan noise level on my eight core daily driver (65W), is low.

When you identify a processor or a socket ("LGA1851"), then on motherboard maker web sites, they list CPU compatibility of the processors, with the motherboards on offer, info on memory compatibility, and so on. There is a "discovery order" to investigating computer kit.

The OS on the computer, represents a "tax" on your usage. If all you want to do is web surf and email, you still need enough horsepower to finish Windows Update in a decently short period of time.

The same goes for the TPM 2.0 module they insist on, or the MBEC support for virtualization (used for sandboxing the win32 programs you run, for "highest security"). Not a lot of the security rubbish is turned on here, or the machine would be like a molasses factory.

The influence of the OS and its scheduler is not on display here. About all I can do, is show you I can run two very specific different browsers.

Now, you might ask, why does this matter ? The threading model on the (Linux hosted) browser on the right, is better than the (Windows hosted) browser on the left. If I visit a site like Newegg, the left browser gets slower and slower to respond. The browser on the right, does not! The threading simply works better on the right.

So when I'm trying to shop, and the Javascript is thick as thieves, it is the browser on the right that allows me to finish my search. I write down the details.

Then, I boot the Win7 machine and make the purchase :-) So no errant software can be taking snapshots of my machine, that's why. It's a Trust Issue. F*ck with my machine ? Earn my Distrust. That's how it works.

This is one of the things I've always had on computers. Multiple OSes. This started with SoftWindows at work, on my Unix box, so we could run Windows Office (slowly). It continued with Connectix VirtualPC on my Mac (run two OSes). In the picture, I am still running two OSes, to select the best of a given situation. This is also why my machines have a little more RAM than the average. It's to run two OSes.

The browser on the right, is a "rootless window" that appears on the desktop, via WSLg support (the graphics path). That's not quite the same as VirtualBox which presents a "rooted desktop view" with the entire OS visible in a single rectangular region. This allows that browser on the right to "fit in", without being too intrusive.

Paul

I would agree with this opinion.

"Manufacturers had become sloppy"

The thing is, if they are three months late delivering products like their competitors, the feeling is they will "miss out" on the marketing window. This is what encourages manufacturers to ship things that don't work properly or will never work properly.

But the more recent observable problem, is the quality control really is slipping. There is not enough test. Some manufacturers have "continuous" security issues, like everything they do is an "exploit waiting to happen". One manufacturer even got censured and is supposed to be audited on a regular basis. It just isn't working, and they're still emitting crap.

The result of this, is a gradual increase in price, as the retailer selling the materials have to charge more, to cover all the returns they are getting and the amount of service needed to handle all of it.

The normal failure rate on motherboards is 3% by the way. One in thirty three new motherboards, will have some issue severe enough to require returning the board. Not all problems are the fault of the manufacturer. But there have been batches of boards with socket damage, and it's unknown how that is happening (a swapping of bad boards for good, by someone at the factory?). The boards receive a two minute functional test, on a table, before having the PNP cap installed and the lid on the retail box is closed up. It should all be working.

Today, you flash up the BIOS, even when it does not need it, as that is now "standard security practice".

Someone in another group, has been working on a build for months. He wants working ECC. A couple days ago, he was getting ready to return the motherboard. I kept his nose to the grind stone, and he got it working :-/ It means I have to write extra missives to "keep trying, you're closer than you think".

What a time to be alive.

Paul

Which one is that ?