[X] My Assistant

Thinking of building a new PC for around 500$.

I'll wait a bit for B550 boards.



EDIT : actually i'm thinking of building 2, the second one a mini-itx case with some APU like the athlon200ge or 3200g

This post has been edited by Pillowgirl: May 30 2020, 01:49

Thinking of building a new PC for around 500$.

I'll wait a bit for B550 boards.
EDIT : actually i'm thinking of building 2, the second one a mini-itx case with some APU like the athlon200ge or 3200g

I'd take your old stuff if you're getting rid of anything. It's probably still newer than my newest.

Not that I really need to upgrade, but a full ATX board for my full ATX case would be nice. It'd mean less card juggling. Though if it doesn't have at least two conventional PCI slots I'd need to get a new SCSI controller and sound card anyway (assuming parallel SCSI PCIe cards exist) (they do, but I'd still like to keep my PCI-X one).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 30 2020, 06:35

(pls delete, accidental dupe)

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jun 1 2020, 10:02

I understand the mouse thing is dead and buried in this thread now, but I finally got out my own wireless mouse so I could do that size comparison I wanted to do earlier with the one I regularly use. And something closer to standard mouse size on the right. Wish that one had three buttons or a wheel; I quite like it and it matches my keyboard.

[i.imgur.com] (IMG:[i.imgur.com] https://i.imgur.com/7U8X2elg.jpg)

I can't really use the wireless one on my mousepad (it's a laser mouse), so I have to use it on the bare tabletop. Not a massive problem but it still bothers me slightly. It shares this problem with another wireless laser mouse I own (a 2006-vintage logitech V450 wireless mouse). That one predates Logitech's "unifying receiver" trash, which is a nice plus.
Battery tabs need little tinfoil inserts to make a solid connection now, though.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 30 2020, 08:26

I kinda miss the lead tracking ball bearing.

yeah, i believe you. My Seagates might just be too old to have been made in the modern era of seagate shittiness. Or maybe I'm lucky.

Seagate had the lowest fail rate for consumer drives up until about 1TB and when they moved the manufacturing.

They are now and still are extremely sensitive to physical shock due to a weirdly bad design that they have not bothered to fix???

WD is weak against high heats.

I still have old seagate drives that are still working, but after that had about 10 fail. +1 there was a brand of supposedly shock proof drives that had rubber enclosures, accidentally dropped it and it bricked... was a seagate. Just shitty marketing, paying extra for a non-feature.

I had 1 WD fail but it had poor cooling and was used and died after being used as public NAS at an event.

One intel SSD fail. When intel engineers thought it was cool to have encryption by default but then a fault accidentally forgets the decryption key. I think they replaced it under warranty but with the same series of drive...

Everything else either just became obsolete or is still working.

This post has been edited by EsotericSatire: May 30 2020, 15:37

I can't really use the wireless one on my mousepad (it's a laser mouse), so I have to use it on the bare tabletop.

Instead of using mice directly on the tabletop, I put them on hard plastic mousepads. They are nice and thin and their slightly unsmooth surface lets the plastic mouse feet slide on them with very little friction. It's easier for me to slide the mouse around on those than on the bare tabletop.

Seagate had the lowest fail rate for consumer drives up until about 1TB and when they moved the manufacturing.

They are now and still are extremely sensitive to physical shock due to a weirdly bad design that they have not bothered to fix???

WD is weak against high heats.

…Everything else either just became obsolete or is still working.

Mine's 500GB. I don't think I'd get new Seagate today in all likelihood. Unless it was cheap and I knew I didn't care.

I have an intake fan in my case that pushes air over my HDD's on the way in, so they'll probably be okay for a while then (I have a ~5 year old WD black 2TB). My case never really gets too warm inside either. Chassis and CPU fans are all set to a fixed rate.

IDK if storage really goes obsolete as long as you have a controller and it's big enough and dependable enough to be worth keeping in a slot. 500GB is still enough to qualify for me.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: May 31 2020, 07:16

I use a mouse either directly on my laptop, or the tabletop.

Trying to install Windows 7 SP1 Pro, got an OEM disk as my dell thumb drive gets stuck in a boot loop on this machine. Turns out win7 doesn't know what USB 3.2 is, and that's what all my motherboard back ports are and ditto the front panel ports. I have an expansion slot with no pci-e port behind it, so sticking a 2x USB 2.0 bracket there to bring out a motherboard header.

I also completed my power supply mod, replacing it's 160CFM 2900RPM 135MM fan with a 4-pin/PWM 100CFM 2000RPM 140MM one. The old fan measured 140mm- but has figure-8 mounting holes for 135 or 140, and ofc used the 135 ones. It took a good deal of drilling and cutting on the fan, then using 6-32 nuts and bolts to mount it, but it's in there and running. For the time being, I just brought out the lead unmolested along with the new thermistor, and plugged those into the mobo. PSU fan is on a splitter with the bottom of case fan, tach signal coming the the PSU one, and mobo is set to control that fan port off the thermistor instead of CPU core temp. I forgot to document that process.

Also took the opportunity to redo the cabling again, I spread out the bundles now so the back panel goes on without much force, and now everything is done in velcro instead of zip ties. Pics incoming when I get the USB bracket installed tomorrow, assuming [$civil_unrest I will not discuss in this subforum] doesn't hamper logistics.

Instead of using mice directly on the tabletop, I put them on hard plastic mousepads. They are nice and thin and their slightly unsmooth surface lets the plastic mouse feet slide on them with very little friction. It's easier for me to slide the mouse around on those than on the bare tabletop.

I hate hard mousepads.

Trying to install Windows 7 SP1 Pro, got an OEM disk as my dell thumb drive gets stuck in a boot loop on this machine. Turns out win7 doesn't know what USB 3.2 is, and that's what all my motherboard back ports are and ditto the front panel ports. I have an expansion slot with no pci-e port behind it, so sticking a 2x USB 2.0 bracket there to bring out a motherboard header.

All of this to use an inferior operating system? For shame.
Also just use a SATA optical drive.
But yeah, I thought Win7 not having USB3/xHCI drivers built-in was common knowledge. Like XP not having SATA AHCI drivers on-disc.

If this weren't windows we were talking about I'd suggest just raw-copying the flash drive's image to a sacrificial HDD and using that to boot via SATA, but I somewhat doubt Windows 7 is flexible enough to handle that without complaining. MS has given me very low expectations in the past with how their OS handles hardware swaps.

Apart from that, I maintain I never notice the noise from my PSU fan even at full-on; my other case fans are louder.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jun 1 2020, 10:16

(fuck I did the doublepost thing again)

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jun 1 2020, 10:06

You shouldn't be using anything less then win10 with the hardware you ordered.

I know Zen has unofficial support for Win7 but not sure about Zen+ and Zen2.

And the USB drivers missing means you need to insert the drivers yourself into the install iso/usb, there are premade ones around so just look.

It's an easy oversight to make if you don't upgrade systems in a long time and aren't aware of PS/2 support during install being dropped and other FUN!! stuff.

It's an easy oversight to make if you don't upgrade systems in a long time and aren't aware of PS/2 support during install being dropped and other FUN!! stuff.

Wait, when did they drop PS/2 keyboard support during the installer?
I seem to remember it working to install 7; I have a PS/2 port on my board still and I use a Model M usually.

Or do you just mean you can't install it successfully on an actual IBM PS/2 computer with MCA slots?

Edit:
Looks like maybe if there isn't a PS/2 board plugged in during installation it doesn't load the driver on future boots.
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\i8042prt apparently controls it.

Still I don't have access to the source code so I guess I'll never know for sure unless I compromise on my values in the near future.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jun 1 2020, 19:16

Checked the temperatures of my pc today.
Temperatures going down after use has ended is fine, but I still worry about those peak values I see, but it's probably better not to look into it too much.

Checked the temperatures of my pc today.
Temperatures going down after use has ended is fine, but I still worry about those peak values I see, but it's probably better not to look into it too much.

What are your peak temps?
Mine appear to be around 71°C peak for the CPU, based on decoding h.265 4K video in software and resizing/encoding to 1080p h.264. I run my CPU fan at max speed constantly regardless of load though.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jun 2 2020, 01:20

With 5 minutes of running 'stress' set to 16 workers, and all 8 cores/16 threads at 100%, it never got above 43C if I recall correctly. Big 'ol cooler, with air moving in a straight line though, instead of doing ??? with a low profile model.

Installed the USB 2.0 bracket, but another problem: win7 doesn't know how to use my mobo chipset. Win 10 it is...
(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/jRXXcWK5/20200601-185725.jpg)
(IMG:[i.postimg.cc] https://i.postimg.cc/Rv9dw7ky/20200601-190054.jpg)

This post has been edited by Wayward_Vagabond: Jun 2 2020, 06:56

With 5 minutes of running 'stress' set to 16 workers, and all 8 cores/16 threads at 100%, it never got above 43C if I recall correctly. Big 'ol cooler, with air moving in a straight line though, instead of doing ??? with a low profile model.

Ah, see, I'm using the stock intel cooler and one of the retaining pins is broken. I've also re-used the same thermal compound for the last five years.
'high' temperature is 85°C according to 'sensors,' and critical is 105°C.

Installed the USB 2.0 bracket, but another problem: win7 doesn't know how to use my mobo chipset. Win 10 it is...

Or stop using windows.
That's another benefit of abstaining from the upgrade train. I have been able to use everything from MS-DOS 6.22 through 7 on here (although DOS is slightly hampered by the lack of floppy drives, I have hard disks so it doesn't matter much as long as they're MBR-style disks). I used XP on it for a while as well and had drivers for everything. Never tried higher than 7 on it because I can't abide the direction MS has taken from a user rights or privacy perspective.
None of those are currently installed on my machine.

I kind of feel like trying to draw a large pixel art image for my next mousepad. Probably 256x240 or something. 320x240 at most. My current one's pretty worn down.

All of that stuff about not upgrading being said, I'm considering upgrading if I can find a new AM4 B550 board that has two conventional PCI slots. I've found [www.biostar.com.tw] a Biostar ATX board with one PCI slot, which may also be good enough, since PCIe SCSI controllers are relatively affordable and it's pretty much just my sound card that doesn't have a nice cheap PCIe replacement and offer similar features.

The other thing I'd like would be a parallel port header on the motherboard, but I am not seeing that anymore. It does at least have a COM port (serial), which is good. I use a parallel port to program microcontrollers sometimes.

All this is moot if (when the boards are actually available to buy from somewhere) they are priced too high, though. I predict it will cost more than I'm willing to spend especially when coupled with a new CPU and new RAM (my current stuff is 16GB DDR3).

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jun 2 2020, 21:59

This is the first time I've tried to install windows on a 'production' machine instead of an experiment in maybe 8 years? This is also the first time in ever I've tried to put windows on brand new hardware. The windows I have played with since I switched in '09 has all been on older hardware.
The vendor I ordered the win10 dvd from instead shipped me what feels like a scrawny usb key in a small paper envelope with a blurry label. Returning it and trying again, as it's authenticity, especially from a vendor that didn't ask me, seems suspect. And this computer got stuck in a boot loop the last time I tried to install windows from flash media.
I do have a toughbook laptop with a win XP/7 dual boot seetup, but it's hardware of similar age to the OSs, wasn't imaged/setup by me, and is a tool I keep air-gapped from internet. I have it to program radios, and I added some allen bradley PLC software recently.


Server motherboards seem to keep using PCI slots, I saw quite a few in ASUS's current lineup, including one for AMD's current top of the line cpu, and 16 sticks of ram. I didn't look at pricing, but suspect these boards might cost more than a late model car.
I have a star tech pci-e 1x to pci riser card if you want it, works for low profile cards, or full ones if your case is tall enough and they don't have connectors to cover up.

Server motherboards seem to keep using PCI slots, I saw quite a few in ASUS's current lineup, including one for AMD's current top of the line cpu, and 16 sticks of ram. I didn't look at pricing, but suspect these boards might cost more than a late model car.

Sounds about right. And forget about finding a board with ISA or AGP slots.

I have a star tech pci-e 1x to pci riser card if you want it, works for low profile cards, or full ones if your case is tall enough and they don't have connectors to cover up.

I might take you up on that, but I'd likely have to do some modifications to make my sound card fit if I did so. I'll have to see how feasible it'll be.
I'm not against goring my case though.

I fixed the bent locking pin on my CPU heat sink today. Now it's idling at around 40°C instead of 45°C. Also moved my GPU to a PCIe 2.0 x4 slot (it's a 750 Ti, and I've not noticed an actual performance difference in practice yet). That freed up my second conventional PCI slot on my current board (which sits directly under the PCIe 3.0 x16 slot).
Ironically there's now an ethernet NIC on the x16 3.0 slot.

Alternately if I do just keep what I've got (which is most likely) I could find some conventional PCI ribbon riser thingy and stick the card down near the bottom of the case (I have a micro ATX board in a full ATX shell). Since my PCI cards are either 33 or 66 mhz (I know the Audigy is 33MHz, not sure about the SCSI controller or the PCI bridge in my machine), it'd probably be fine.

I'll wait a bit for B550 boards.

If I end up doing it (probably won't), I'm planning B550 as well.

This post has been edited by dragontamer8740: Jun 3 2020, 05:51

There was a "Hottest Gadget Sale" going on a few days ago and sellers instead of creating attractive deals, they responded by increasing GPU prices. Dang. Even the prices of old RX580 and used 1660 Ti/Super are bloated. Welp. I can forget about replaying Crysis 2 & 3, or even try the upcoming Crysis Remastered. My RX560 will not do it for max. settings at 1080p. It struggles even for a game like Halo SPV3.

I expect Nvidia's next gen products to be highly expensive, while AMD's RDNA2 will also be priced higher than expected (just like current Navi-based products) because they're going to do what they always do - follow behind Nvidia. Fingers crossed that Intel's GPU efforts will eventually come to fruition. Both Nvidia and AMD need to be pressured immensely.