Build Thread 3.0

[Sarex]

2 hours ago, Keyrock said:

Do they make monitors with no bezel? I'm not talking a really really thin bezel, I know those monitors exist, I'm talking ZERO bezel. Phones exist with no bezel and while scaling that up to 27" or whatever does present some technical challenges, it should be completely doable, albeit expensive. Anyway, the reason I ask is were I ever to do a multi-monitor setup, I'd want no bezels so that I could potentially run it as a single screen without that ugly and distracting line where the monitors meet.

They would have to glue in the panels I think. There is no big reason to eliminate the bezels besides esthetic and side by side monitors (ultrawide exist though.)

[Bokishi]

Thinking of switching to DDR 5, will games be faster?

[Sarex]

2 hours ago, Bokishi said:

Thinking of switching to DDR 5, will games be faster?

Depends on what kit you get and what kit you have. Although from everything I read, ddr5 doesn't bring anything performance wise to the table, at least not yet. Someone can correct me if I'm out of date.

[Humanoid]

Generally about 5% difference if you average it across a broad spectrum of games. I wouldn't even contemplate doing anything until the Zen 4 3D CPUs are released and reviewed.

Edited December 10, 2022 by Humanoid

[Keyrock]

14 hours ago, Bokishi said:

Thinking of switching to DDR 5, will games be faster?

Yes, but not appreciably so. It would help tremendously with an iGPU but with a discrete GPU you are going to get very little bang for your buck.

Edited December 10, 2022 by Keyrock

[Bokishi]

I'm hearing that DDR5 @ 7200+ appears to be luck of the draw at the moment, even when the dimms are spec'd out for it, and using the z790 chipset

[Keyrock]

I would imagine 6000 MHz would be the sweet spot for Zen4 so that you could have a 3:1 ratio with Infinity Fabric clock at 2000 MHz. If they ever manage to hit 8000 MHz with a sane voltage that would be the hookup, but who knows how feasible that is with DDR5?

[Sarex]

10 minutes ago, Bokishi said:

I'm hearing that DDR5 @ 7200+ appears to be luck of the draw at the moment, even when the dimms are spec'd out for it, and using the z790 chipset

The issue is that people usually use XMP profiles to hit those numbers and early on in the generation it's always hit or miss. I remember that being the case with DDR4 too. It's usually the CPU/BIOS that are the culprit and you need a different voltage to achieve the numbers, ie. it won't work out of the box. That's why you want to stick with the certified ram kits for that CPU/MB combo.

Edited December 11, 2022 by Sarex

[Bokishi]

Found this ancient thing hanging out in storage. Maybe I can put together a Windows XP Retro Box 

 

[Keyrock]

I wish I still had my Voodoo 3 3000, my first ever GPU.

[majestic]

Hardware memory lane, one of my favorite places to be!

So, this was the first graphics adapter I ever had, a Video Seven VEGA EGA from a longer while back:

Changed eventually to a Trident TVGA9000B from '92:

And technically, I suppose this counts as the first GPU of mine, an S3 ViRGE:

I no longer have the Riva 128 I upgraded to, I started upgrading my cards fairly regularily and gave my old ones to friends and family. I had a Riva TNT too, the original GeForce 256, a GeForce 2 and 3, one of the 7 series (a 7950 GT, I think), a 560 TI, a GTX 970 and currently the RTX 3060. I'm pretty sure I'm missing cards in between there (most likely something between the 7950 GT and the 560 TI, and something between the GeForce 3 and the 7950 GT). Quite noticably I moved from getting the flagship cards in the early GeForce series to more budget oriented ones.

Although, technically, for the GeForce 256, there was no such thing as a 'budget' oriented version, only one that had laughable SDR memory on it, which I think never made it here. That was 23 years ago already, feels like yesterday. Bizzare.

Edited December 15, 2022 by majestic

[Bartimaeus]

Right, I guess it's about time to go recycle all my useless junk before it joins the other fossils.

Edited December 16, 2022 by Bartimaeus

[Pidesco]

9 hours ago, majestic said:

Hardware memory lane, one of my favorite places to be!

So, this was the first graphics adapter I ever had, a Video Seven VEGA EGA from a longer while back:

Changed eventually to a Trident TVGA9000B from '92:

And technically, I suppose this counts as the first GPU of mine, an S3 ViRGE:

I no longer have the Riva 128 I upgraded to, I started upgrading my cards fairly regularily and gave my old ones to friends and family. I had a Riva TNT too, the original GeForce 256, a GeForce 2 and 3, one of the 7 series (a 7950 GT, I think), a 560 TI, a GTX 970 and currently the RTX 3060. I'm pretty sure I'm missing cards in between there (most likely something between the 7950 GT and the 560 TI, and something between the GeForce 3 and the 7950 GT). Quite noticably I moved from getting the flagship cards in the early GeForce series to more budget oriented ones.

Although, technically, for the GeForce 256, there was no such thing as a 'budget' oriented version, only one that had laughable SDR memory on it, which I think never made it here. That was 23 years ago already, feels like yesterday. Bizzare.

Sweet!

 

No Hercules graphics card?

[majestic]

3 hours ago, Pidesco said:

No Hercules graphics card?

Those things are as old as I am. I started kind of early with having a PC, but not that early. Basically with the TVGA card, more or less - was one of the first upgrades, along with adding a 387SX to our 386SX based system. We once switched cases which was quite an undertaking at the time, or at least it seemed like that to me. With no mainboard manual, we had to draw up diagrams and tag the cables with numbers - not like the mainboards at the time were built to make sure users don't accidentially plug the cables where they're not supposed to go, never mind all the jumper settings and whatnot. 

Upgrades were also kind of strange and sometimes did not do what I expected them to do. We once added another 4 MB RAM to the system because I could not get Strike Commander to run, but imagine my confusion when more memory did not fix the issue of not having enough conventional memory free for Strike Commander. The great irony of the time, adding really expensive memory modules did not help (how could they, with that being based on a hardware limitation that little 9-year-old me was not aware of), but replacing the old mouse with a newer one fixed that. Why? Because the silly mouse driver that came with the newer mice took a third of the memory of the old one. Like from 17 KB down to 6. That was enough to push memory usage down to meet SC's insane 595 KB requirement. 

Then came the great waiting, because on my old system, the game needed like 15 minutes to start, and almost as long to prepare takeoff for the first mission. It did not run all that great and was all but unplayable. You know, generally, when old timers say that they had to walk backwards up a mountain each day to get to school they're just being ridiculous, but in some cases that isn't far from the truth.  

Had that one for a long while. Later upgraded to a system with a P-120, which was quite a leap in performance. Also pretty necessary because Windows 95 did not run with the ancient 386SX CPUs. 

[Pidesco]

11 minutes ago, majestic said:

Those things are as old as I am. I started kind of early with having a PC, but not that early. Basically with the TVGA card, more or less - was one of the first upgrades, along with adding a 387SX to our 386SX based system. We once switched cases which was quite an undertaking at the time, or at least it seemed like that to me. With no mainboard manual, we had to draw up diagrams and tag the cables with numbers - not like the mainboards at the time were built to make sure users don't accidentially plug the cables where they're not supposed to go, never mind all the jumper settings and whatnot. 

Upgrades were also kind of strange and sometimes did not do what I expected them to do. We once added another 4 MB RAM to the system because I could not get Strike Commander to run, but imagine my confusion when more memory did not fix the issue of not having enough conventional memory free for Strike Commander. The great irony of the time, adding really expensive memory modules did not help (how could they, with that being based on a hardware limitation that little 9-year-old me was not aware of), but replacing the old mouse with a newer one fixed that. Why? Because the silly mouse driver that came with the newer mice took a third of the memory of the old one. Like from 17 KB down to 6. That was enough to push memory usage down to meet SC's insane 595 KB requirement. 

Then came the great waiting, because on my old system, the game needed like 15 minutes to start, and almost as long to prepare takeoff for the first mission. It did not run all that great and was all but unplayable. You know, generally, when old timers say that they had to walk backwards up a mountain each day to get to school they're just being ridiculous, but in some cases that isn't far from the truth.  

Had that one for a long while. Later upgraded to a system with a P-120, which was quite a leap in performance. Also pretty necessary because Windows 95 did not run with the ancient 386SX CPUs. 

595KB out of 640KB is really, really tight.

[Keyrock]

My first PC was a Tandy 1000:

I was one of the cool kids because it had the brand new and HIGHLY ADVANCED 3.5" floppy drive.

[majestic]

What a misnomer that was for the 3.5" disks anyway. They weren't floppy at all. 

Heh, our computer came with some version of DOS on 5.25" floppies. I also got 5.0 on 5,25" floppies, and Red Baron 2. My mother was not really happy that we had a war game, and my limited knowledge of history made it all the more frustrating, because no matter how well I played and how many medals I was awarded, I just could not get the Central Powers to win the damned war.  

[Keyrock]

Remember playing a game and a prompt would come up:

Quote

Please insert disk 5 of 8 then press ENTER

Aah, those were the days.

Edited December 16, 2022 by Keyrock

[majestic]

My copy of Corel Draw 4 had 45 disks... that was a 'fun' installation. 

[Bokishi]

So I was unable to get the TeamGroup DDR5 7800 sticks stable on my z790 board at any voltage, as it would refuse to boot. 7600 would boot but was unstable as well. I could get it to 7200 stable but that’s way below the extra premium that these sticks were at. So I returned it and ordered some cheaper 7200 sticks. 

it just suck because DDR5 8000 was advertised on this board, but I guess only if you win the silicon lottery 

[Bokishi]

Update: So my DDR5 7200 Vengeance sticks quit being stable at 7200 after a couple days, I tried various voltages and even put a fan on it, but it just errors in Testmem after 5 mins. I'm sure the magic voltage combo is there somewhere but that's going to hours of trial and error. I'm currently running them at 7000 but with much tighter timings (good compromise?). I've been stable for 2 weeks so far. I think Raptor Lake marketing has been way too optimistic with the speeds you can reach, it should be marked with a disclaimer of "under very special circumstances." Next gen I'll probably go for a 2 dimm board for better oc chances to 9000+

My XP retro build is going to be wild tho. I'm going to use my Core 2 duo, 7800 GTX, and 2 gigs of DDR2 800. I'm curious about how well the 7800 GTX can perform without being constrained by a Pentium 4

[Bartimaeus]

I know somebody who was using an ancient Core 2 Duo with a GTX 970 up until just a couple of years ago... The system, I understand, had some performance inconsistencies.

[Sarex]

2 hours ago, Bartimaeus said:

I know somebody who was using an ancient Core 2 Duo with a GTX 970 up until just a couple of years ago... The system, I understand, had some performance inconsistencies.

Some of us are still using ancient systems...

Got an intel ax210 wifi car for my MB (the old card is useless now (since windows 10) because of drivers), buuuut it's got different plugs for the cable and it has 2 connections instead of 3. The number of connections is not an issue and I knew that it had a different connection on the card (U.FL), but for some reason they used MMCX connectors for the antenna instead of the SMA ones that are pretty much standard and I thought they were SMA because they looked similar. Finding an MMCX/U.FL cable locally turned out to not be possible, so now I wait for ebay again. I ordered a RPSMA/U.FL set of cables too, in case I decide to go with a 2 wire antenna for some reason, but I doubt I will have the will power to disassemble the board again unless the signal is really weak. Will take some pictures of the process when I get all I need.

Edited February 19, 2023 by Sarex

[Malcador]

On 12/16/2022 at 9:11 AM, majestic said:

What a misnomer that was for the 3.5" disks anyway. They weren't floppy at all. 

When I was very young I thought those were the hard disks people were talking about.

 

[Gorgon]

the disks were floppy, the plastic housing weren't