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My new desktop is like a time machine!


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After several months of illness, doctors, and other sorts of bother I finally got a chance to spend some money on the new hardware I have been wanting.  I upgraded my desktop from an Intel Haswell i7-4790S to an AMD Ryzen 3700X.  The memory went from DDR3-1600 to DDR4-3200 and the SSD from a Samsung Evo 850 SATA to a Samsung 970 Evo+ NVMe.  I felt as though I had been transported back in time to 2004 when I went to build Firefox and it took less than 11 minutes to compile.  Next month I hope to upgrade my home server to some similar CPU, RAM, and NVMe storage configuration.  I have no idea what I will do with all of the computing power.  It is exceeds my needs, but since my old systems are Intel based and will never get the BIOS updates they need to 100% free of L1FT and Spectre bugs I feel compelled to upgrade.

When was the last time all of you were amazed at when new hardware could do?

 

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New hardware is not always better. I have a notebook from circa 2012 which has an amazing sound codec, on the level with the best sound cards that you can buy for desktops today. But it was probably too expensive and the brand decided to drop it and replace with a cheap run-of-the-mill codec in their next generation of notebooks. I keep that laptop around just because of the amazing sound it has. It's not a slouch either, quad-core Ivy Bridge, 16GB and a SSD make it fly even with today's software.

 

The last time I was amazed by new hardware was a few years ago when I built my latest desktop: AMD Vishera FX-8370 8-core, 32GB, SSD, Radeon HD7970. A definite upgrade from my previous Sandy Bridge desktop. To this day I haven't felt the need to upgrade it, though I've been eyeing the new Ryzens. But I just can't justify it to myself.

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It's been a while.   Of course I usually lag the curve far enough for prices to be reasonable.   My gaming is pretty old school and as long as it can build a kernel in a reasonable amount of time, I'm good.

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2 hours ago, stamasd said:

@lazlo.vii

Off-topic: how do you like the Odroid-XU4? I have a C2 but haven't really done much with it. It has a tendency to overheat even with the extra cooling I added to it.

Oh, it runs hot, too.  It would often lock up if i used more than 2 threads to compile anything.  I hardly use it all these days.  I used to have it's root file system hosted on my server via NFS (Gigabit LAN is a lot faster than an SD card.) but every time I wanted to use it for something it turned out it was easier and more reliable to do it in a VM or container than on the XU4.  I have considered getting an Odroid-N2 because it's not only is it's CPU manufactued with a 12nm process so it generates less heat, it is 64 bit, and yo get an N2 with 4GB of RAM.  I don't know if they have gotten the hardware support for it to the point that you can compile a main line kernel.  The lack a of main line kernel for the XU-4 means (in this case) that it has no App Armor support.  No App Armor support means you can't use Ubuntu snaps and you can't mount network filesystems in containers.  So in short, for me the XU-4 really is just a toy that I pull out every now then to play with. 

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8 hours ago, nrc said:

It's been a while.   Of course I usually lag the curve far enough for prices to be reasonable.   My gaming is pretty old school and as long as it can build a kernel in a reasonable amount of time, I'm good.

I just ran into an issue with the Steam Docker install, so I built the debian-sources-lts real quick.  I want to post this for you before I reboot and test docker again:

* Messages for package sys-kernel/debian-sources-lts-4.19.67_p2-r1:
	 *
 * To avoid automounting and auto(un)installing with /boot,
 * just export the DONT_MOUNT_BOOT variable.
 *
 * With binary use flag enabled /usr/src/linux
 * symlink automatically set to debian kernel
>>> Auto-cleaning packages...
	>>> No outdated packages were found on your system.
	 * GNU info directory index is up-to-date.
	real    9m57.503s
user    113m29.248s
sys     10m18.853s
	

 

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