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[wierd]

That's a solid option.  I too am partial to nVidia cards, because I totally HATE how amd's driver stack works. I should not need to install the .net framework (which is a damn abstraction layer!), just for the driver to work.  thats bullshit, and I wont tolerate it. AMD can get my money when they stop being tools.


However, AMD totally CAN get my money for one of their processors.  Currently, AMD's chips are outperforming Intel's again, both for efficiency and raw compute. Often price too.

[Reelya]

I really need to get a new PC or at least get on top of the current specs myself so I did some research.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

AMD Ryzen is apparently the thing to go for, for budget gaming PCs these days.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryzen

Here's a recent video about memory performance on the Ryzens
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHJ16hD4ysk
Note that frame rates on games don't really jump all that much between DDR4-2133 and DDR4-3200 memory, and over that speed, further increases don't seem cost-effective.

Ryzen comes in ranges of Ryzen-3, Ryzen-5, Ryzen-7, and Ryzen-9, similar to Intel i3, i5, i7, i9 in pricing.

You probably want a Ryzen 3 if your CPU budget is about $100 or a Ryzen 5 if your CPU budget is ~ $200

Ryzen 3 3200G = $91 on Amazon US, 3.6 GHz, DDR4-2933 Benchmark = 7773

Ryzen 5 3400G = $170 on Amazon US, 3.7 GHz, DDR4-2933 Benchmark = 9948

Ryzen 5 3600 = $175 on Amazon US, 3.6 GHz, DDR4-3200 Benchmark = 14792

Ryzen 5 3600X = $210 on Amazon US, 3.8 GHz, Benchmark = 20493
* however the 3600X is 95 Watts, the others are all 65 Watts, so it's a power-hog.

After that, Ryzen 7's start at $300, so out of budget range.

Personally, I'd go for the Ryzen 5 3600.

The next is the motherboard. There are 4 main AM4 chipsets to consider:
B450 - basic motherboard, previous iteration
X470 - more comprehensive motherboard, previous iteration
B550 - basic motherboard, current iteration
X570 - more comprehensive motherboard, current iteration

You can get a B450 motherboard for $100. Here's a convenient video where a guy just happens to be trying to install a Ryzen 5 3600 on various old motherboards:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHdeyAuQCtM
Turns out you probably have to do a bios update to get one of these suckers working with the current Ryzen processors. Some boards support bios flashback (meaning, flash from USB without needing a working processor). Here is a convenient list of some boards for this processor:
https://graphicscardhub.com/bios-flashback-motherboard/

So, I'd probably go for this motherboard
https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/B450-GAMING-PLUS-MAX ... about $100 on Amazon.
If you don't mind having to flash the bios on the board then that saves about $200 on the price. For the low-end Ryzens 3/5, having the latest board doesn't seem cost-effective since the memory is going to be slow anyway.

And a 32 GB DDR4 kit (2 sticks) ... $150. Which conveniently leaves two slots open to expand to 64 GB later, since that B450 motherboard happens to have 4 memory slots, for a nice upgrade down the track.

So that's about $450 for processor, board and RAM so far. Which if you were going for the $1000 total on a whole box would seem about right.

Maybe other people can give an opinion on this.

EDIT: as for that PowerSpec thing, I can't work out how the hell they can afford to have that processor in that box for that price?!? buying just an Intel i7-9700 should cost more than that.

[BigD145]

Ryzen 3600 is a great price point. 1660 super for a GPU if you need it. I can't speak much to motherboards as I have not been researching those much. ETA Prime does budget builds to stress test for emulation so maybe have a look https://www.youtube.com/user/Mretaprime/videos .

I dropped off Paul's Hardware awhile back. Every once in awhile they have very flawed testing and spend way too much time covering it up. They did this very recently with a x570 board. Every other tester and many users said "this board overheats way too much" while Tom's said "no, you're all wrong and you're bad people" while the manufacturer (msi) said "hey everybody else, we replicated your conditions and results and we did a bad thing. we'll fix it. new model in the works." MSI's other boards were totally fine. I would likely go Gigabyte or MSI myself. Probably 470's for the price and the fact I'm not putting another processor in there for 3-5 years down the road, which would likely mean a new mobo anyway.

[Mephisto]

I guess this is a generic computer question.

Would there be any interest in a homelab/home server thread, or would it end up going the way of my old homebrewing thread (i.e. me speaking into the void and then pretending it doesn't exist)?

[wierd]

If people actually ask questions in such a thread, I would happily provide answers?

Repurposing old network appliances to serve as small servers is something I find fun and entertaining, so I have plenty of advice on the topic.

[Iduno]

I just got an email that a web site here is improved, and uses Drupal 8. The improvements are:

●   Enhances communication, collaboration, and engagement;
●   Establishes greater consistency; and
●   Implements new standards for secure data collection, storage, and sharing.


I bet someone spent over an hour making up buzzwords and other BS to create an email about a website nobody uses, without telling anyone anything about it.

I guess my question is "what is a drupal, and what information are they trying to communicate by mentioning it?" Answer without using words like "triple" or "double".

[Mephisto]

Drupal is a content management system. Mentioning it in a job posting would tell prospective developers a lot. Mentioning it in a marketing blast is filler.

(a bunch of ifs here:)
If
- Drupal has any sort of built-in theming and
- this site is meant to be used in conjunction with others and
- those sites are kept more significantly up-to-date,
then upgrading this site to be more in line with the others can reduce cognitive load on the end user.

If the site was built on something ancient, like PHP 5, they were forced to upgrade to something less ripe for exploitation - Drupal 8.something dropped support for that version last year. One way of spinning "our system was insecure and we were forced to upgrade" is "we've implemented new security standards."

[Reelya]

It's likely those buzzwords were lifted directly from the marketing spiel for Drupal 8.

The error here is that Drupal 8 may have features that allow, for example enhanced "communication, collaboration, and engagement" ... but your developers actually need to make proper use of those features for that to also be true of a product built using Drupal 8. And "enhanced" is a relative qualified. Enhanced compared to Drupal 7, clearly, so to get the enhancement you need to take full advantage of whatever specific new Drupal 8 features they've brought in.

It's like porting your old Unity3D game to the latest Unity build then rattling off Unity's marketing about the new Unity 5.X features, and saying your game has got that as a result of having been ported in. For example say the new engine boasts "more realistic skin textures" and "enhanced support for online multiplayer lobbies" so you say sure, I'll list "more realistic skin textures" and "enhanced support for online multiplayer lobbies" as the features of my game's new build. Except that's a complete lie. The new Unity may support both those things, but you need to actually redesign the game to use them or your game won't even know those are options.

[Parsely]

●   Establishes greater consistency

The website doesn't do that by itself it takes ME spending countless hours copying the sentences off a marketing manager's screenshot of a powerpoint and combing 100s of pages manually for mistakes and new problems to attack. If only websites made actual accessible markup by themselves then we wouldn't need the threat of expensive lawsuits to force schools to actually make readable content

[methylatedspirit]

Is the performance difference between an i5-8300H and an i5-9300H big enough that it actually matters? In other words, will I be able to feel any difference in normal use?

[wierd]

From these lacklustre comparisons, not really.

https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-9300H-vs-Intel-Core-i5-8300H/m744904vsm425634

[Reelya]

I've got a $30 a month unlimited mobile data plan I stuck on a broadband modem, it's supposed to get throttled down to 1.5 Mb/s after my data runs out. However, somehow it glitched last month and permanently says I had 2 MB's left, and hasn't got throttled down, it's getting the peak rate of > 8Mb/s all the time, so I've downloaded an absolutely ridiculous amount of stuff this month. Also, it has daily totals for data and costs (some plans without throttling have extra data you can buy), so I checked that out and it does says my additional data per day is costing $0.00 a day.

I'll have to see what happens when the billing period rolls over, which it does in a couple of days. If they try and bill me for excess data, I'm going to appeal it, because the plan clearly states there's no such thing as an over-use charge, and it's not my fault if their metering system is broken Here's hoping the metering is just permanently broken on my account and they still bill $30 a month from now on.

[Reelya]

Separate post, but this is a question I have.

I recently noticed a slight burn-in on my 32" LCD monitor. It's along the line separating the header part of my webrowser from the content-part. I had darkmode turned on, on Firefox, and most content areas are much brighter. The Firefox header area has become slightly but noticeably darker than the rest of the screen. Ironically even though the difference in color at the bottom where the Windows taskbar is has a higher difference in brightness, there's absolutely no burn-in difference down there. Don't know why, but maybe it's because the Windows taskbar is just pure black, whereas the Firefox header is dark grey, so it's darkened just the Firefox header area somehow, whereas the absolutely black pixels were just turned off to start with.

So what I did right away was switch Firefox to a light theme more similar to typical sites, so that any further darkening will be even. And there are some articles saying that LCD burn-in can be reduced or eliminated. Anyone come across this issue before and tried to fix it?

[wierd]

LCDs should not burn in.

OLED totally does.  Verify your screen technology.

[Reelya]

Apparently, that's a myth.

https://www.techhive.com/article/3147408/how-to-get-rid-of-image-burn-in-on-an-lcd-display.html

And here's the manual for my model, which is a Philips LCD. It definitely says LCD, I made sure to get one that said that on the box.

https://www.download.p4c.philips.com/files/2/276e8vjsb_27/276e8vjsb_27_dfu_aen.pdf

"Burn-in", "after-imaging", or "ghost imaging" is a well-known phenom-enon in LCD panel technology. In most cases, the “burned in” or “after-imaging” or “ghost imag-ing” will disappear gradually over a period of time after the power has been switched off.