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My Head Hurts


raymac46

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As I consider replacing a power supply to keep my 5 year old Sandy Bridge desktop going, I was struck by some of the "bleeding edge" hardware announcements that just came out at Computex 2017 in Taiwan. Some of this is still vaporware but it looks like Intel will have a top end CPU with 18 cores and 36 threads and AMD one with 16 cores and 32 threads. New mobos and a new socket are needed in Intel's case - not so sure about AMD. Other features for Intel include massive PCIe and USB 3.1 capability, multiple NVME drive arrays, quad channel DDR4 ..blah blah blah.

All this gives me a headache. As a Linux user I am happy to cruise along years behind the times. I just don't see how I would need 16+ cores of power any time soon - and this doesn't even include the processing power of the latest GPUs. Will Linux even support this stuff in the foreseeable future?. Even a hardcore gamer would be hard pressed to use more than 4 cores on the CPU.

I kinda wonder what's going on and whether I should care about this stuff at all for another 5-6 years.

Edited by raymac46
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Or if you are into video rendering I suppose. Intel borrowed a lot of the design of its i9 processors from the Xeon workstation CPUs.

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V.T. Eric Layton

I have six cores and probably only use one. The other five are just hanging about snoozing, reading an ebook, or grabbing a Byte to eat.

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abarbarian

I have six cores and probably only use one. The other five are just hanging about snoozing, reading an ebook, or grabbing a Byte to eat.

 

Darn it I only have four cores. Looking at htop they all seem to spend mosyt of their time sleeping. :breakfast:

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There is no doubt that CPUs have come a long way since 1999. And a decent quad core CPU will kick butt compared to an underpowered pig like the Atoms they put in all those netbooks back around 2009.

That said, the whole CPU development thing lately has been more about reducing power consumption and extending battery life than it has about raw performance.

I have two desktops. Both of them I'd describe as powerful, responsive snappy. Desktop 1 has a Sandy Bridge quad core which is 5 generations behind the times. Desktop 2 has a second generation AMD Bulldozer APU which was crippled from the get-go by bad design decisions. Yet I'm happy with them both.

The reason for this is that there are many other factors today which influence perceived computer power and responsiveness, namely:

  1. An SSD . The difference in performance made by an SSD is night and day. Nothing I've ever seen comes close.
  2. Fast Internet. Better downloads, faster web browsing.
  3. Lotsa RAM. You want to load it and leave it in RAM, not swap it to the hard drive. Even if you have an SSD it's better to keep data in RAM.
  4. Decent graphics. It doesn't have to be state of the art But I see a definite improvement with a discrete video card.
  5. A lighter O/S. Linux is better than Windows with its CPU sucking security apps. And a lighter desktop environment is clearly snappier no matter how much computing horsepower you have.

In short, while I find it interesting to read about all the Intel Kaby Lake and AMD Ryzen CPUs I hope my old school quad cores keep on truckin' for a few years yet.

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abarbarian

Raymac46's comment

 

"An SSD . The difference in performance made by an SSD is night and day. Nothing I've ever seen comes close."

 

is spot on. When I built my new rig I donated my old one to my sister but before I gave it to her I popped in a cheapo ssd. The difference that made was to put it mildly amazing. A £30 hardware spend that turned a 2008 era pc into a reasonable 2015 performer. Whilst it may be a tad sluggish with bigger programs for everyday stuff like web surfing, viewing photos and officey tasks it performs pretty neatly.

 

I have also installed a cheapo ssd in an even older Dell which I have been using as my main rigg for 18 months and that has given decent performance too for ordinary daily tasks.

 

If I could have used a ssd and a newer graphics card I would have used them with my very old Athlon Thunderbird as I was sentimentaly attached to my first pc. Alas the graphics were not upgradeable and I never tried to upgrade to a ssd as the old girl did not have sata connections and without the more modern graphics I felt my time would be better spent on some other project.

 

:breakfast:

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securitybreach

If you think that's an improvement, try a more high end SSD like one of the Samsung EVO series. With those, you get the same write and read speeds.

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abarbarian

If you think that's an improvement, try a more high end SSD like one of the Samsung EVO series. With those, you get the same write ​and read speeds.

 

Why would I bother with old tech ? I have a SP951NVME running in a PCI-E slot to gain maximum performance :harhar:

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securitybreach

If you think that's an improvement, try a more high end SSD like one of the Samsung EVO series. With those, you get the same write ​and read speeds.

 

Why would I bother with old tech ? I have a SP951NVME running in a PCI-E slot to gain maximum performance :harhar:

 

Trust me, that 550 mb/s up and down is nice..

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abarbarian

If you think that's an improvement, try a more high end SSD like one of the Samsung EVO series. With those, you get the same write ​and read speeds.

 

Why would I bother with old tech ? I have a SP951NVME running in a PCI-E slot to gain maximum performance :harhar:

 

Trust me, that 550 mb/s up and down is nice..

 

Nice but slow.

 

7WpB16H.jpg

 

I have the 256 GB version. :tease:

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It's a matter of horses for courses, surely.

If you have the latest tech that supports NVME I'd certainly go that way. If you have something like my 2010 era Toshiba netbook, the cheapest SSD will do and still make a considerable difference. It'll turn something unusable into a decent travel companion.

I wouldn't bother with anything older than SATA II though. If you have first gen SATA chances are the rest of your hardware will be bottlenecked somehow.

As for IDE / PATA well... :shrug3:

Edited by raymac46
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securitybreach

If you think that's an improvement, try a more high end SSD like one of the Samsung EVO series. With those, you get the same write ​and read speeds.

 

Why would I bother with old tech ? I have a SP951NVME running in a PCI-E slot to gain maximum performance :harhar:

 

Trust me, that 550 mb/s up and down is nice..

 

Nice but slow.

 

7WpB16H.jpg

 

I have the 256 GB version. :tease:

 

Well I could be wrong on the speeds but I have an older EVO 840. I really should buy one of the new 850s..

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securitybreach
I have the 256 GB version. :tease:

 

I just ordered the Evo 850 256gb B)

 

IwYrLt4.png

 

I figure that I will put the 128gb 840 in my main laptop. I will be cloning the installations with Clonezilla so I can transfer them without having to reinstall.

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V.T. Eric Layton

One of these days, I'm going to have me one (or four) of those spiffy new-fangled solid state drives. :yes:

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Yes by now the SSD has gone mainstream for sure. Samsung is the brand that seems to get the most acclaim, but Toshiba makes some nice ones too. Toshiba recently got into the consumer biz in a big way by acquiring OCZ. SanDisk was bought by Western Digital. Interestingly Seagate seems to be concentrating more on NVME and server technology when it comes to soiid state.

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securitybreach

Yes by now the SSD has gone mainstream for sure. Samsung is the brand that seems to get the most acclaim, but Toshiba makes some nice ones too. Toshiba recently got into the consumer biz in a big way by acquiring OCZ. SanDisk was bought by Western Digital. Interestingly Seagate seems to be concentrating more on NVME and server technology when it comes to soiid state.

 

Nice, I didn't hear about (or at least do not remember if I did ;)).

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securitybreach

Nice but slow.

 

7WpB16H.jpg

 

I have the 256 GB version. :tease:

 

That is for the M2 Sata drives. I know they are starting to make pci-e adapters but I do not feel like giving up that rail so I just got the 2.5-Inch SATA III version.

 

My memory served me correct, this one does 550 read and 540 write. It's only the m2 sata versions that are much faster.

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Actually my motherboard does have a m2 sata port but "using M.2 will also render SATA ports 5 and 6 unavailable.". I knew there was a reason I didn't use it on this board.

 

I might have gone over the top slightly with my build but for once I wanted a pc that was leading edge.

 

Your right the 951 is a m2 which are pretty hot in use and on my board the m2 slots are darn close to some potentially hot stuff. So I hunted a pci-e add-on card that I could use in slot three which is the coolest place to use. I also knew I would be only using one gfx card so there would be plenty of space between the 951 and the gfx. Plus me gfx has three fans which help to draw heat away from the 951. Also using the pci-e slot for the 951 means it can run at full speed and no sata slots are lost. Win win all round. Mind you finding a decent cheap add on card took some time and getting Windows to boot was a nightmare. Still I have it all running sweet and dual booting is no problem so I'm a happy chappy.

 

http://techreport.com/review/29072/gigabyte-z170x-gaming-7-motherboard-reviewed/2

 

Since the M2H M.2 slot shares its PCIe lanes with the third PCIe x16 slot, installing a PCIe-based SSD in this slot while the controller is in normal mode doesn't cause you to lose any SATA ports.

 

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/GA-Z170X-Gaming-7-rev-10m

 

QYF83pC.jpg

 

Above are some benchmarks for the 951 from 2015 I added the results from a Crucial MX200 and a Patriot USB 3 stick both running on the new rig just for a bit of fun. cool.gif

 

I ran a thread about the build including all the disasters that occured if you fancy an amusing read,

 

https://www.pcreview.co.uk/threads/skylake-we-have-lift-off.4069430/

 

:breakfast:

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Awesome!! What m2 adapter are you using?

 

Then I came across this and though why not,

 

Samsung SM951 NVMe 256GB M.2 SSD

 

Of course I need a adapter card for the above, but where to get a red one from, took some searching but eventually I found this,

 

 

PCIe M.2 controller card for 2 SSD : 1x M2 SSD B Key SATA + 1x M2 M Key PCIe

 

Taken from my tread at the othere place. :breakfast:

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NVMe looks great but my old mobo doesn't support PCI-e 3.0 and has only a single PCI-e 1X 2.0 slot available. I think SATA3 would do better than this. I'll wait for the next generation of machine before I worry about NVMe.

In the meantime I can enjoy the boost I get from a SATA3 SSD.

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Cluttermagnet

Being a confirmed cheapskate, I tend to buy at the low end for SSD's. Even some

of the older designs are a quantum improvement over hard drives. I just bought

one recently that has something like 500GB plus, both up and down. I think it's

a 128GB drive. I got it for like 50 dollars, new in box. Think it's a Drevo... I'll

look when I get back to Casa Betty...

 

David

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securitybreach

Being a confirmed cheapskate, I tend to buy at the low end for SSD's. Even some

of the older designs are a quantum improvement over hard drives. I just bought

one recently that has something like 500GB plus, both up and down. I think it's

a 128GB drive. I got it for like 50 dollars, new in box. Think it's a Drevo... I'll

look when I get back to Casa Betty...

 

David

 

The higher end SSDs cost about the same. I just pay $99 for the 256gb samsung ssd. I was referring to the ones that are like $30-40 as there are a bunch of unknown brands of SSDs out there that are really slow to write to.

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Cluttermagnet

Yep, I've seen them, and have a couple. My newest (Drevo 128G) is

500M/560M, something like that. I thought at least that one is pretty

fast...

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securitybreach

Yep, I've seen them, and have a couple. My newest (Drevo 128G) is

500M/560M, something like that. I thought at least that one is pretty

fast...

 

Yeah, that is pretty fast.

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