Build Thread 3.0

[majestic]

MSI's support hell is becoming legendary. So, you can't access the BIOS at all? You press DEL and nothing happens, or if you set something up nothing works afterwards?

On 7/23/2023 at 1:09 PM, teknoman2 said:

I got a MSI mobo, 32GB RAM and a Ryzen 7700X on April and i made 2 major mistakes on this purchase 1. i didn't buy them all from the same store 2. i reported the defect instead of asking for a refund. 

#3: Don't buy into a first generation AMD platform if you don't want to deal with the hassle. Wait for the second generation of mainboards. Chances are that even if you could access your BIOS, something with the memory wouldn't work anyway.

Not necessary to mention, I guess, but as long as you're on factory defaults, the your system is gimped to a point where it isn't even funny. You should definitely not choose to live with it.

Edited July 27, 2023 by majestic

[Zoraptor]

Dunno, buying a 1st gen amd platform worked out pretty well, for me. The 4 core Intel alternative... didn't age well at all.

It does, of course, absolutely suck when you get a lemon though. If it is a BIOS issue they're hard to diagnose beyond the very basic hard reset/ try and update via usb utility (if available) as they can have pretty much any set of symptoms. Also, get a dual BIOS MB, though that is literally no help at this point.

[majestic]

5 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

Dunno, buying a 1st gen amd platform worked out pretty well, for me. The 4 core Intel alternative... didn't age well at all.

Yeah, well, I am highly biased, and I'd reckon there are a lot of early AM5 adopters who have no issue whatsoever - the very vast majority, even, but there certainly seem to be issues more often on AM5 than on LGA 1700. Apples and oranges, AM5 is fairly new and will receive updates through 2026 (if AMD sticks to what they've said, that is - that documetary Gamers Nexus made had an interview where an engineer implied supporting AM4 for five years was not their wish, but an economic necessity), and LGA 1700 is on its way out.

23 minutes ago, Zoraptor said:

It does, of course, absolutely suck when you get a lemon though. If it is a BIOS issue they're hard to diagnose beyond the very basic hard reset/ try and update via usb utility (if available) as they can have pretty much any set of symptoms. Also, get a dual BIOS MB, though that is literally no help at this point.

Yeah, and to be fair, defects happen on any platform and with any manufacturer, and this one is probably not related to AM5 teething issues (like, dunno, needing five minutes to POST at times).

Wait, that reminds me, @teknoman2 do you really not get into the BIOS at all, or does it just not POST afterwards? Because that can take some time, and with entry level boards having no debug seven segment displays and, well, mostly useless debug LEDs, you might just need to leave the system until it is done memory training. Because... well, because.

[Bartimaeus]

On 7/27/2023 at 4:37 PM, majestic said:

I am highly biased

I think if I blacklisted every company I feel has unduly screwed me over, I wouldn't be able to buy a motherboard, GPU, or hard drive from anyone at this point. Power supplies and RAM out the wazoo, though!

[majestic]

14 minutes ago, Bartimaeus said:

I think if I blacklisted every company I feel has unduly screwed me over, I wouldn't be able to buy a motherboard, GPU, or hard drive from anyone at this point. Power supplies and RAM out the wazoo, though!

I never said I was reasonable.

It is ridiculous to still be annoyed by all the time I lost supporting cheap prebuilts with AMD's wonderful Super Socket 7 (which is now a quarter century in the past), a platform where what passed as quality mainboards were unstable and buggy at the best of times, never mind the OEM trash. Bonus points when they came with an ATI Rage graphics card. Combine that with Windows 98, and you have a recipe for disaster. Particularily for work computers with special requirements. Was at least once a week I came home from school at 7pm only to be greeted by "I couldn't access <something or another, more often than not the small PBX system through the on board serial port>, can we go check now?" or "My <friend/collegue/business partner/guy I need a favor from has problems playing games, can we go check now?"

*sigh*

Spoiler

I suppose there's something to be said for Super Socket 7. At least the platform never failed to boot just because you used all memory slots, never needed five minutes to POST for no reason, and the K6-2s never exploded. /SCNR

 

[Bartimaeus]

1 hour ago, majestic said:

At least the platform never failed to boot just because you used all memory slots, never needed five minutes to POST for no reason, and the K6-2s never exploded.

maybe you just didn't play around with them enough yet

there's still time to fix that

[majestic]

More fun with CPU vulnerabilities:

AMD: Zenbleed, Inception
Intel: Downfall

Downfall affects 6th to 11th gen CPUs. Zenbleed affects Ryzen CPUs up to and including Zen 2 while Inception is possible on all Zen based CPUs.

The Downfall patch seems to reduce performance on some applications, particularily those heavily optimized for Intel systems (including Intel's own software and libraries). Future software patches may or may not alleviate some of the performance loss*.

Updates should be out by now, except for Zenbleed, which will be patched later this year. If you happen to run a datacenter go and install the updates. If not, then you're probably good, unlike with Spectre/Wraith a couple of years ago, as there is - as of posting this, anyway - no proof that anyof these exploits could be possible through JavaScript. The Downfall exploit is based on the AVX-2/AVX-512 GATHER instruction, so researches think there is a possibility that a vulnerability like it could also exist in Ryzen CPUs. 

*Performance loss is worst with software making extensive use of AVX-512. OSPRay Studio from Intel suffers the currently greates known performance loss at up to 40% increased render times. Other applications are unlikely to suffer as much, due to not being this aggressively optimized.

Edited August 14, 2023 by majestic

[Sarex]

Damn I'm just at the brink of it. My original CPU was 5th gen, but the "new" one is 6th.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Sarex

[majestic]

We should rename this thread to "Random tech njuus" or something. Steve put out a piece on LMG's quality standards and business ethics:

LMG's channels are the only ones I have blocked on YouTube. I didn't even block Sargon of Akkad or The Critical Drinker, which both are Grade A All-Around Idiots...

[Bartimaeus]

Well, I've always just hated him as a presenter, but it's nice to hear why I can be a hater for better reasons than that.

[Sarex]

First off, a disclaimer I don't follow either of these channels apart from the videos posted here. Linus I've personally disliked since very early on, mostly because he had so many bad takes and made so many mistakes in which he came off as uneducated on the stuff he was making content for and on a more personal note I find him kind of annoying, but that is neither here nor there.

Having said that I do not particularly like GN either, while their methodology and results look great and professional, he comes off as such a drama queen and a lot of his content seems to be hunting for drama. Overall he seems to always trend towards the negative things.

My two cents, take that as you will.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Sarex

[Bartimaeus]

25 minutes ago, Sarex said:

Having said that I do not particularly like GN either, while their methodology and results look great and professional, he comes off as such a drama queen and a lot of his content seems to be hunting for drama. Overall he seems to always trend towards the negative things.

The vast majority of GN's videos are around 200-300K views where they simply cover news and products; the more controversial videos reach higher numbers. If you don't enjoy GN videos, you probably only know of the more controversial videos. It's a pretty natural kind of selection bias for someone who doesn't care for or follow something that happens to most of us. Like, I don't ever hear about Will Smith's best days or anything good he does, only the big negative crap ever reaches me, so it just reinforces my dislike of him...but really, that's not particularly fair to him. But what am I gonna do about it, actually go pay attention to that bozo? Hell no.

Edited August 14, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Sarex]

1 minute ago, Bartimaeus said:

The vast majority of GN's videos are around 200-300K views where they simply cover news and products; the more controversial videos reach higher numbers. If you don't enjoy GN videos, you probably only know of the more controversial videos.

Probably. As I said I do not follow the channel but watch what gets posted here, I use guru3d for my reviews as I can read through them quickly and not sit through an 1 hour video. Having said that GN still chooses to make these drama videos.

[Zoraptor]

That's, well, youtube. Videos are designed to hit monetisation milestones time wise, drama gets more hits, controversy gets more hits, tribalism gets more hits and these are businesses that want to make money, not (just) passion projects. Case in point: that ytimg. Is Steve going to rip out Linus' earrings and stuff them down his throat live on youtube to teach him a lesson in ethics and competence, because that's what it looks like.

Probably not; but don't you want to find out? OK you don't, but surely you want to be able to make informed remarks on internet forums about all the drama? If you don't watch you'll miss out... or have to wing it.

And that's why you get ludicrous crap like a depressive Linus wandering around a rainy Tokyo* bemoaning the state of Intel's CPUs as if he's a step away from being discovered in a wood by a Paul brother and similar OMG drama! stuff with little actual value. People love that crap a lot more than analysis of the idle wattage of a 4060Ti and how to shave 25% off it with a judicious undervolt and the correct windows settings.

*if it was Tokyo. Not like I actually watched the video, after all.

[Keyrock]

18 hours ago, majestic said:

We should rename this thread to "Random tech njuus" or something. Steve put out a piece on LMG's quality standards and business ethics:

LMG's channels are the only ones I have blocked on YouTube. I didn't even block Sargon of Akkad or The Critical Drinker, which both are Grade A All-Around Idiots...

I did not watch the video but it is proper internet procedure to write authoritatively about something one has no first-hand knowledge of. I was never a fan of Linus, I didn't hate him or anything, but he did himself a big favor by growing the pandemic beard. He had one of the most punchable faces ever when he was clean-shaven. I am, however, a fan of the other Linus, cantankerous as he often is. He created my Operating System of choice and once famously went on an explative-laden tirade against Nvidia and gave them the hand signal indicating that they're #1, that's easy bonus points in my book.

Edit: There are already reaction videos to the video quoted above, because of course there are.

Edited August 15, 2023 by Keyrock

[majestic]

Halt, there's more!

 

[Sarex]

The drama continues!

[Bartimaeus]

Lmao: "We didn't sell it, we auctioned it." What a dip. If nothing else, at least the GN video accomplished in getting Billet Labs getting compensated for Linus stealing and selling their stuff - Linus magically remembered they exist after weeks of ignoring them two hours after the GN video released.

Edited August 15, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[Zoraptor]

Irony is that Linus obviously didn't actually watch the video before responding (or didn't pay attention) since it was specifically mentioned that they auctioned it. So it wasn't a valid correction in even the most trivial sense.

[LadyCrimson]

I would not know of either if it wasn't for videos posted in forums like these. At this point if I'm interested in cpu/gpu charts I might YouTube-fu GamersNexus. When it comes to tech stuff I prefer a drier and more bulleted points type of presentation (vs. too much idle/padding chatter) easier to sift thru and find specific points I'm looking for. Oh, and I like Steve's flowing locks.  

I was not around for Linus' "geek in garage" (or so I hear) early phase, but what I've seen him the past few years, he's more like the HGTV guy for kewl-tech nerd-gasms. Didn't he do videos showing off his gazillionzare house and doing silly projects within it? I saw a few vids of his that were at least amusing to watch but I wouldn't go to his channels for serious research.

eg, I don't know enough to know/judge if anyone is being "proper and correct" in their methods etc. It all reminds of every other "drama" by "huge" YouTubers, whatever the genre/business they're in.

Edited August 15, 2023 by LadyCrimson

[Humanoid]

It's a shame the GamersNexus website is abandoned, would be useful to have their charts and such as static webpages rather than videos. In this regard I find Techspot reviews more generally useful, being literally written versions of Hardware Unboxed reviews. (That said, I'm aware some people end up wasting their time perusing both Techspot and HUB not realising it's the same author)

[LadyCrimson]

^ Yeah, I generally still prefer written reviews/charts when I'm researching. Easier to compare, refer to.

...we live more and more in the age of "just go watch the (30+ minute) video". I wonder if 500 years from now, humanity will have developed a society that only uses writing for brief things like traffic signs. Your DiY assemble desk will come with a 3D virtual video explaining how to put it together.

[Keyrock]

19 minutes ago, LadyCrimson said:

^ Yeah, I generally still prefer written reviews/charts when I'm researching. Easier to compare, refer to.

...we live more and more in the age of "just go watch the (30+ minute) video". I wonder if 500 years from now, humanity will have developed a society that only uses writing for brief things like traffic signs. Your DiY assemble desk will come with a 3D virtual video explaining how to put it together.

I'll give GN this, they're good at including timestamps in their videos making it easy to find what you're looking for if you just want to see something specific and not the whole typically 30 minute long video.

I shouldn't be praising anyone for timestamps, that should be standard procedure, but a surprising amount of "professional" videos still don't have them in 2023.

Edited August 17, 2023 by Keyrock

[Bartimaeus]

Fun (or at least I thought so) discussion between GN's Steve and Intel's Tom Peterson on a new tool and associated measures that should help identify bottlenecks between CPU and GPU in a more transparent manner, and possible expansion into even identifying specific causes of bottlenecks (e.g. too high resolution textures), which could be used by end users (and hopefully developers) to better optimize settings. Discussed at a mostly low level that should be understandable to all of us here, I would think. I don't really know that much about the whole "let's make a frame" pipeline, but they simplified it enough where I felt like I got the basic idea at least.

 

Edited August 19, 2023 by Bartimaeus

[majestic]

AMD Inception fix performance degredation benchmarks.

Does not really matter for consumers, but is potentially disastrous for workloads. Databases seem to have been hit the hardest, with degredations varying from 12 up to even 40% on common applications like PostgreSQL and MariaDB (the modern mySQL). nginx performance is down 12% too.

Image editing also seems to have taken a hit, at least with Gimp, up to almost 30%, depending on the task.

Edited August 19, 2023 by majestic
desastrous -> disastrous, silly english