On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 9:54 PM, R0b0t1 <[email protected]> wrote: > Hello, I apologize for the tangents. > > The only on-topic comments I can offer are that: yes, those parts seem > to be usable with Gentoo, whereas similarly old parts a decade ago > were not; and, I have been looking for a low power server setup and > would appreciate if you could communicate your ultimate part > selection. > > Also that a $350-$400 CPU seems to be more than sufficient. My > i7-4770K is still very capable and that I look forward to some day > using a multisocket system with very nice Xeons (or the AMD > equivalent, if it becomes competitive). > > On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 7:48 PM, Rich Freeman <[email protected]> wrote: >> On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 8:29 PM, wabe <[email protected]> wrote: >>> Rich Freeman <[email protected]> wrote: >>> >>>> On Mon, Aug 28, 2017 at 5:22 PM, wabe <[email protected]> wrote: >>>> > >>>> > I'm using an AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 965 Processor. I bought it six or >>>> > seven years ago when it was brand-new. It still works to my >>>> > satisfaction. But of course recent CPUs (for example AMD Ryzen) are >>>> > much faster. Therefore I wanna buy an AMD Threadripper next year. >>>> > This should be an enormous speedup. :-) >>>> >>>> Having just upgraded one of those to a Ryzen 5 1600 I can tell you >>>> that besides tripling your kernel build speeds, it will also sound >>>> less like a hair dryer and make your room feel less like it has a >>>> space heater inside. >>> >>> >>> I'm not sure what TDP my Phenoms have (95W or 125W). The TDP of the >>> 1950X is rated at 180W. But this is for all cores running at full load. >>> So the effective heat output over time should be lower than with my old >>> CPUs. >> >> Your old CPU has a TDP of 140W. I forget which model exactly I had >> but I think its TDP was 195W. >> >> Sure, the 1950X is going to pull quite a bit of power, but my 1600 >> only pulls 65W when going full tilt. It is a very noticeable >> difference. I suspect my old CPU probably used a good portion of that >> at idle. >> >>> >>> Because of the high price for the whole machine (board, ram, cpu...) >>> I will replace my two PCs (one Windoze and one Gentoo) with a single >>> machine. However I have some concerns regarding dualboot. I would >>> prefer NVMe SSDs but I think it may be better to use eSATA disks. Then >>> I easily can switch the disks and it should be impossible that one OS >>> can compromise the other. >> >> Seems like eSATA is harder to find these days. USB3 seems to be the >> way things are going. However, that works just fine. >> > > For a small amount of time you could find combination eSATA/USB 3 > connectors. I lament their demise. > > > Something to be aware of is that, in general, USB hubs will operate at > the speed of the slowest device connected. This is problematic because > a lot of motherboards and cases are such that a mouse and keyboard are > on the same hub that you would use at the front of your case. Mice and > keyboards are typically USB 1.1 devices. > > For USB 1.1 to USB 2, there is *supposed to be* one or more > transaction translators that take USB 1.1 data and retransmit it at > USB 2 speeds. Some hubs don't seem to implement this properly and > connecting a USB 1.1 device slows the entire bus down to USB 1.1 > speeds. Even if a transaction translator is present, the bus will > remain busy for the entire USB 1.1 communication time taken by the > device, slowing everything down. > > For USB 2 to USB 3, there is no conversion performed. This leads to a > situation contrary to what most people would expect - multiple USB 2 > devices can not take advantage of more than the default USB 2 > bandwidth. USB 2 connections to a USB 3 hub simply do not use the USB > 3 data lines, which are necessary for the increased bandwidth. > > Additionally, some hubs will downgrade USB 3 links to USB 2 speeds if > a USB 2 device is present for unknown reasons. This might be because > of the issue in the second paragraph, e.g. the requirement to wait for > USB 2 transmissions. Reading the specification as to whether this was > allowed behavior didn't make clarify anything to me. > > Regardless, the result is that if you plug a USB 1.1 device into a USB > 3 hub you might slow your file transfers down by an order of magnitude > or more. This is exactly what I experienced that led me to researching > this issue. > >> On my motherboard at least the PCI-based NVMe came at the cost of >> disabling one of the x16 slots, and the SATA-based one came at the >> cost of disabling one of the SATA ports. So, no PCI-based NVMe for me >> as I have an 8x card in addition to my graphics card. >> >> They really need to make more flexible slots as I believe that the >> slots themselves are electrically compatible - that is you can shove a >> 16x card in a 1x slot as long as you eliminate the plastic that blocks >> this from happening. Granted, I wouldn't want to put my LSI card in a >> 1x slot - it would be nicer if they had a 2x or 4x slot in there, but >> I realize that 1x and 16x seems to be where all the demand is. >> > > This is true. Unless the OS on the graphics card is making assumptions > it shouldn't be, it should be able to run with any number of lanes. A > lot of PCIe bridges can only allocate lanes in multiples of 2, 4, 8, > and 16, however. > > Based on some of my reading however the choices your motherboard > manufacturer made were made because non-server Intel (and AMD?) parts > have a very limited number of PCIe and other high speed interfaces > available. I would need to double check, but the configurations you > want might only be possible with server parts. > >>> >>> Hopefully the price for RAM will drop before I buy the new rig. It's >>> incredible high at the moment. >>> >> >> Yeah, the best price I could find as $99 for 8GB of DDR4 ECC, and only >> at 2400. Not much of a consumer market for ECC. >> > > There was recently a price fixing class action settlement for DDR2 > RAM. I hope there is another for modern RAM, as you can plot the price > against that natural disaster where the main manufacturing facilities > were and see that it never went back down afterwards. > > But I suppose my greed is getting to me. Our betters have decided what > the price should be, and I should be happy that I can afford RAM and a > nice computer to use. > > R0b0t1.
I apologize for my terrible spelling and grammar.
