Shenanigans and Shiny Things

There are shenanigans afoot in the computing world ...

Also shiny things in the sky :

What's the shenaniganning ?

Turns out that some of the manufacturers of motherboards have figured out a way to trick the system in order to allow more wigglyamps to be shoved into processors in order to make them go faster. Beware both the reporting and the conclusions from it ... The theory is that if the software in the motherboard reports one number and that number is too low, the software that governs automatic overclocking goes : I can drive this processor harder !

For this exploit, it's the numbers that do voltage and current. The processor should only be given up to a certain limit there, any higher will make it go too hot ... causing its life to be shortened. I quite liked getting 8 years out of my last processor !

Here's numbers from my machine from just now. The science sums are turned off, so the numbers are for low activity :

(You may need to click for bigger ...)

The crudely drawn arrow points to the suspect line ... Apparently my machine is reporting that the processor is taking about half the power that it is actually taking. (the electrical input power will turn into heat and the heat has to be taken away - too much heat = crash and boom).

I think the sum is coming from the "Core + SoC Power" and "Core PPT" (Package Power Tracking). However, when I read the HWInfo page saying what the Power Reporting Deviation meant, there wasn't enough there to say where it was coming from. Which makes me question its value and relevance.

The other terms there are "Core" - this is the bit that carries out the instructions. There are 6 of these on my processor. "SoC" is System on Chip, it's the bit that connects the cores to the rest of the system. Gotta get the data in to them and the data out of them. This allows the instructions to tell the rest of the system what to do (changing the picture in the graphics card) and allows it to tell the memory and drives to feed it more data.

What do I think this actually means ? Not actually very much unless you trust your system to automatically overclock itself, as processors will do these days. I don't believe in doing that, the automatic overclocking measures are usually intended for when the system isn't doing very much (i.e. marketing numbers) and are meaningless when you're running tasks on all cores, like I do with the BOINC Science Sums.

The more important numbers are the ones for temperature ... and whether the system crashes or not. The computer will crash when either the temperature goes too high and the electronics can't work thermally or when the signals are coming at it too fast and the switching isn't fast enough. Processors are filled with transistors, which are tiny little switches. You can make them switch faster if you brute force more electrons through them.

Oh - I may have almost broken something yesterday evening as well ... I was seeing if I could get more information out of the AMD Ryzen Master program and pressed one too many buttons ...

My processor usually runs at around 50 degrees C on idle. It'll go up to between 70 and 80 degrees C when it's doing science sums (depends on ambient conditions too). I should probably actually fit the aftermarket cooler I have at some point but I'm happy with what the stock Wraith Stealth cooler does.

After clicking a button last night, while it was doing sums, the chip overclocked itself to 1.4V, 4.2GHz ... and the temperatures shot up to 95 degrees C. Oops. And it didn't crash ! I think I may have a pretty good cpu there if it survived that without crashing or other ill effects. It's back down to the normal speeds of 1.1V, 3.6GHz.

The thing that matters with the overclocking is the temperature and whether the machine crashes or not. I'm taking a very dim view of my motherboard maker (who I won't be recommending any more) using this software fiddle but I don't think it actually means very much, unless you trust the automatic overclocking features ... which you should never, ever use. It's not worth it for small, inconsistent gains that shorten the life of the machine.

To the Shiny Things !

Tried putting the kettle on these geysers. The temperature was good but the lack of atmosphere makes the water boil off before the tea brews. There's probably a way around that.

And a higher shot. I made a little error here because in chasing the geological geyser formation, the nebula ended up a bit too high. (If you drive the camera drone thing below the surface, it blacks out the screen)

I did a bit more neutron star boosting along the way, this is the Tea and Medals about to dive in to that jet cone in order to get a boost.

More nebulae :-).

A planetary nebula poking out from behind a gas giant.

 

I did like this one, it's where I stopped on Thursday evening. Good shadows, an eclipse on the gas giant and it looks like they've added in some fogging too over there in the distance.

The nest stop was the Perimeter Nebula.

Today''s travels included the Perimeter Nebula.

Before heading off to the Damselfly nebula. Pretty and blue. The picture at the start of the post was taken at the neutron star inside that nebula.

The last place to visit today was the Child of Time nebula inside the Cloomeia sector. This one is another planetary nebula with ...

Black hole ! This one is a tiddler black hole at just 3 solar masses. The game lets you get right up close, with this one being taken at 25km away. I'll have a natter about spaghettification some time ...

There are benign black holes and rather more malicious black holes. It depends on high big the black hole is, with the smaller ones giving worse spaghettification effects than the big ones. What is spaghettification ? It's a difference in the force between the end of an objects that close to the black hole and the force at the end. When we stand up, there is a tiny difference in the gravity exerts on our toes and our head but it's so small that it doesn't matter. But if you're close enough to a black hole, there starts being a massive difference between the gravity exerted between close and far ... and the object rips apart due to differences in its weight. (Weight = Mass x Gravity with weight being a force)

I'll probably go into that more at a later date when my brain is up to doing the numbers on it. Brain is still not quite where it should be !

Oh and I'm still loving the effects of what happens when you fly away from the black holes. The minimum speed with the hyperdrive on is 30km/s, which lets the lensing effect unfold in a rather pretty way.

Stopping point for the night - nice bit of sun there.

Last one, looking back at the companion star and the black hole will be up in the sky there. Not sure where :-)

That's it for me for tonight !

Stay safe, be well.

Augmented Pacifism, Modest Machinery

Hello everyone,

Two things tonight ! First up :

Finished Deus Ex Mankind Divided ...

Got the Pacifist approach achievement. Yep, shooty shooty game that's possible to be played through without murdering anyone. Sure, limbs may have been broken and people put in hospital with severe concussions but ... they'll live right ?

Including that guy. You know, that one. The one I can't talk about cos of spoilers and all that.

After a shaky start, where I was finding the cover movement system to be a bit clunky, something eventually clicked and I really enjoyed playing through this one. It still has its bugs, including crash to desktop and I had one tonight which was a hang up when reloading (You reload a lot the way I was playing ...) But the bugs aren't particularly game breaking and the game comes back up again on a reload. I didn't lose my save at all ...

I'll be back playing this one again sometime. But not yet because I picked up The Outer Worlds in the latest Epic Games sale and that's supposed to be amazing. I'll play the original again too. There's potential for further games in the series but something strange happened in the games industry around the time this came out and outside of things like Assassins Creed, the studios got very wary about continuing current IPs. Bit like how the Mass Effect series ended with Andromeda.

Hopefully there's more to come from the Adam Jensen Deus Ex storyline. There's definitely more potential there, especially with threads started in the emails and articles scattered through the game and that Whopper in the credits.

Gotta do the Golden Penguin mission too, I completely missed that this time.

What else tonight ? I've seen a few things about PC upgrades again and doing it on the cheap ... So what would I get if it were around 20 years ago again and I was on a super strict budget ?

Before I dive in - disclosure note : I've never been offered any inducements by any hardware companies.

These all start with the core again and that'd be :
AMD Ryzen 3 3200G Quad core chip with graphics - £92. I'm not convinced the graphics here would allow for games like Deus Ex or other really pretty games but you can add a proper graphics card later. Point is, it saves £150-£200 as a get you going thing.
This goes in a MSI B450 motherboard for £99. This drops £75 on the board that I have. It's not the newest or shiniest but should still be a good foundation.
(A small and important edit - if you're looking at this post like a shopping list, DO NOT BUY YET. AMD are coming out with a B550 chipset which will go into better motherboards for about the same price.)
Memory spec calls for DDR4-2933. We'll actually go up to DDR4-3200 here. It's a bit faster and a bit cheaper. The system would clock it back to 2933 if it has to. Cost for 16GB - £91.

The common theme is that we're accepting these compromises in order to get a more affordable machine. It's a lower spec than what I have now ... but that's where I was 20 years ago where I had less disposable cash and income. What's appearing here wouldn't have an issue with games like Stellaris, Motorsport Manager and I suspect it'd be ok even with shooty games and Elite if the graphics were turned down a bit.

Power supply is going to be a Corsair 650W unit for £63. Don't get a cheap, nonbranded power supply ... it's a false economy. It's also just £10 to go from Corsair's 550W unit to the 650W unit. That £10 is worth it for when you'd want to later add in a graphics card.
Case - AVP K-11 Mid Tower Case with acrylic side panel. It's the cheapest Novatech have at £20.
SSD hard disc - Crucial P1 500GB M2, NVME for £73. Don't worry about the arcane stuff there, just look at "M2" - this is where it plugs in ... and "NVME" - this means it's faster.
Conventional hard disc - Toshiba 2GB 3.5" desktop drive for £56. Cheapest again and I think it's worth going up a bit from the £37 1GB drive.

And that's it !

How much ? £494 for that little lot. It isn't everything you might want though ... What's missing that you might have expected ?

Processor cooler - is included with the processor. I'm actually still using the AMD bundled cooler in my machine, I haven't had a reason to do the rigmarole involved in changing it.
Graphics - there's a basic functionality on the processor again. But this would be the first thing to change in a short term upgrade.
Optical drives - these seem to have gone out of fashion with the streaming video services. However, what I'm actually doing at the moment is to play dvds through a USB drive which uses software that comes with Windows. (£23 for dvd). You could get an external blu-ray drive for £73, although this needs software. You can get the software for free from Leawo.
Windows - you can download and run Windows 10 for free ... Here's a Tomshardware article for more info (Link - run a script or ad blocker or both). However, you get a Please Activate watermark on your desktop and some options are restricted. A Windows 10 Home OEM licence will cost a bone chilling £110.

The other items you will want are :
Keyboard - honestly, go for something really cheap. Logitech have a wired keyboard for £10. Should be just fine. I like my mechanical keyboard better but £10 level membrane keyboards are ok too.
Mouse - start around £3-£10. Best to get this in a shop where you can test the fit to your hand. Mice are all sizes and shapes and you want one you can get along with. That said, I'd look at the Logitech mice first again, I've had a £30 ish Logitech mouse for a few years ago and it does good.
Monitor - there's an IPS panel 22" LG screen in Novatech's listing for £87 but it's listed as "Ordered upon Request". I'd look at the 24" IPS panel from AOC for £150 (Scan price). IPS screens give a better image and ... the monitor is probably more important than anything else in the system, it's what you're looking at all the time.

Better make it kitty proof.

Oh and speakers - monitors can give sound but it's very meh. There's a pair from Logitech for £20 that look ok. You want your speakers to have a separate power supply and a volume control that's going to stay accessible. Mine's buried on the desk somewhere !

Beyond all that - if you're into the flight or space games, I'd look at picking up a Thrustmaster Hotas X for £48. I have one, it does me fine for internet spaceships. (Although I am suspecting it of causing wrist issues).
Graphics - can't buy my 1060 3GB card any more but it was around £200. I don't like spending more than that on graphics, there's definitely diminishing returns. A £400 card isn't twice as good as a £200 card. Options at the moment are :£140 ish for a 1650 and the 1660 cards start at £210.

That's it for me for tonight ! I don't think I've missed anything ...

There we go ! That's it for me for tonight. Almost bed time !

Totally not going to immediately follow up that pacifist run by murdering everything. Actually not ... I want to get the stealth achievement too and murder in the Deus Ex games is kinda noisy.

Besides ... I think it's The Outer Worlds next :-).

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Thinking techie thoughts tonight

I've been thinking about techie purchases again ...

Well, it's actually been sparked off by seeing comments about really (daftly) expensive gaming PCs and I thought I'd check the market again. One thing about getting techie stuff, it's good for the mind to just completely ignore the market for at least 3 months, preferably 6, after acquiring upgrades. Because if you'd just held on a few more weeks, you could have picked up something cheaper and better.

Personally, I think I did ok because I pulled the upgrade trigger for Meltdown (this PC) a couple of weeks after AMDs excellent new Ryzen 3000s came out. I'd had enough time to see if they were any good for performance and heating but managed to get bits before the stock ran out. Don't be an early adopter if you can help it, let someone else beta test the stuff first.

This post has two parts to it though ... There's a few items I'm looking into acquiring relatively soon, although not while we're in lockdown conditions. The items can wait and it's not fair on an already overloaded postal service.

Before I go diving in to naming companies though - disclosure note : I've never had anything provided by a hardware manufacturer, this is all stuff I've bought.

The bits I want are keyboard, flightstick and a graphics card.
Keyboard - this one is double bouncing more and more. I should really take the case off to see how much of a clean it needs (probably a lot). I'm looking at Logitech, Corsair and the own brand one from the local computer store (you know, the big one that shall not be named) actually feels good too. The own brand one is around £50, the Logitech and Corsair mechanical keyboards are around £100. It's worth it to go up the scale to mechanical because they feel really nice to type on.

Flightstick - probably more Logitech, with the X52 that they inherited from Saitek :

It has many buttons. This is a bit unnecessary though because my Thrustmaster Hotas X is still pretty strong and my hands mostly get on well with it. That's the real issue, the tendons that control the outside of my right hand are getting sore more and more lately.

And the last one is a graphics card. I have a nVidia 1060 3GB which was still offering great performance with Mass Effect Andromeda (probably my most stressing game) and it makes Elite Dangerous look amazing. But it's 3 year old technology in an area where performance is still improving fast. The issue here is that I look at £180-£220 graphics cards, think anything more than that is overpriced and there is nothing interesting in that range. The 1650 cards are typically £170, these would be a step backwards. The 1660 cards start at £210, this isn't an upgrade worth the money. The potential card is the 2060, at £310. I think not.

The 1060, 1650, 1660 and 2060 numbers there are all for the generation of cards and how high up the range they are. The 16x0 cards came after the 10x0 cards and the 2060 has extra performance bits included.

I'll be holding on to my cash for now. Everything else is just fine. Monitor's great, the Ryzen chip powering the desktop is excellent, I have future proofing for years and the (Logitech) mouse does me great too.

New techie stuff is always nice though.

But how about if we go money no object ... What would I actually get ? This won't be the absolute max components though. There are things I wouldn't go up to for reasons. For comparison purposes, Meltdown ended up costing about £900, not including the graphics card.

The core of all machines is the processor, motherboard and memory. With the benefit of knowing how good the AMD chips are now, it has to be :
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X 32 core (64 thread) at £1,957. Yep. Bit daft and not actually the best chip. There's a 64 core chip as well, the big difference is speed. The 32 core chip goes at 3.7GHz, the 64 core chip goes at 2.9GHz (it's also £3,700). Considering that most applications will see most of those cores being idle, go for the higher GHz.
This has a TRX40 socket which tells you which motherboard you need. In this case, I'm looking at the Asus ROG Zenith II Extreme costing £770. This is "E-ATX", which determines what cases you can look at.
Memory - the specs tell you what to get as well here, in this case the cpu page says it wants DDR4-3200. (Double Data Rate 4x running at 3.2GHz). You could get faster ... but you wouldn't get much benefit from that. Systems aren't held up by memory, they're held up by hard discs although if you buy silly amounts of memory, the spare will be used to hold info instead of going to the slow hard discs all the time. Memory comes in sticks and it's best to get matched pairs (they work in parallel). I'm kinda surprised that the 32GB I got from Kingston last year is still £180.

Polish that core off with a nVidia 2080 Ti card costing ... £1,100 and you've got the core of an incredibly fast machine that costs over 4x what mine did and it's not complete yet.

Keeping the budget honest means you have cash left over for other things, like Lego Star Destroyers (got my eye on the new A-Wing), movies, going out to catch up with lovely people (hopefully soon although +3weeks from now at least) and marshmallows from the internet people. Budgeting well means you can enjoy more stuff, rather than looking at just one megashiny thing.

I digress ... Every PC needs a case to go in, plus a few more things :

This looks all right and it doesn't have stuff I'm not interested in like flashy distracting lights. That's an E-ATX box from Phanteks and apparently has 5/5 for its review score. The case was the only thing I got burned on for Meltdown and that was from lack of research. £95 for this case and it looks like it's got the necessary like fans front and back and drive bays that I haven't used in Meltdown's box.
A computer needs a power supply and it's Essential that you get a decent quality one. Power supplies do implode and the budget ones will damage components as they go bang. This system will likely gobble the power more too, so it's a 1200W unit from Corsair costing £240. In comparison, Meltdown has I think 750W costing £75.
Cooling is important too, we want something big and metally to keep this cool. I'm looking at the Noctua NH-D14 dual 140mm fan cooler costing £75. The bigger the fans, the more diameter they have and the better the cooling. They can spin slower as well, which means you don't hear them and that's really important. (Normally, I'd look at £40 on a cooler).

Notice a lack of water cooling ... Cooling with water came back into fashion when kits appeared which made it very easy to implement. But. You still have fans on a radiator that make noise, you have a pump which makes noise and the fluid is subject to biogrowth which can gum up the works if the biocidal additives degrade and become ineffective. Having a water cooling system go wrong is an incredibly expensive disaster. If air cooling goes wrong, you'll see it on the monitoring applications first and it'll fail just as crashes that shouldn't get as far as physical damage.

Air cooling is maintenance free (outside of occasional dusting), water cooling is not.

Storage is next and I'm going to go for a slightly Mad Scientist solution ... I only use 1 set of drives in my machines because I like to live dangerously with reliability but there is a technique called RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives) which lets you duplicate data across multiple drives so if one goes bang, the data is available on the other one. But ... there's a catch. If the drives all come from the same batch and are used the same way, they're likely to fail at the same time. So :

SSDs (need these for speed) : Crucial 1TB M2 drive costing £110, plus a backup from Kingston costing £171.
Conventional (slower but masses of data space) : 6TB drives from Toshiba (£200) and Western Digital (£270). These are more expensive than most 6TB because they spin faster, which means less time to get to the data and it's quicker to read it off the disc. (This might be a moot point due to the electronics)

What's left ?

Keyboards and mice are heavily up to the individual preference but I'd steer people towards mechanical keyboards and gaming mice with reviews that say they stay reliable. Around £150. That sounds a huge amount ... but they're how you interact with the machine, which is the most important aspect of all. It's worth it to spend more here.
Flightstick depends on what you want to use it for. There's loads of toys and addons you can get if you're into flight sims but I'd be happy with the £50 Hotas X or the £130ish X52s.
Monitor is a key one too. The things to look for here are "IPS Panel", which makes the monitor have a crisper image that can be seen from more angles. I'm very happy with my 24" 1440p monitor from AOC, if they're any bigger than that physically, I struggle to see the sides of them. Yep, I think a monitor can be Too Big :-D. It would probably cost around £200 to replace mine. Again, it's worth spending extra here because it's how you interact with the machine. I'd actually look at having two screens here, one for game, one for everything else although I'd need a bigger desk too.
You'll want speakers or a headset as well, again this one's up to the reader. Personally, I have a cheap set of desk speakers that do a great job. Headsets are definitely and literally what fits on your head !

It's good to look after your hands and eyes.

And the last bit is that you will need a Windows 10 licence ... as it's a pain to try and play games on Linux. This is £110.

And that all adds up to ...

Way too much. Don't spend that much on a computer ! Spend only to what you need, save money for more important things.

Stay safe, be well !

A Test of Bandwidth

I thought I'd do a little bit of testing today.

Before I do though - Happy Mothers Day to all the Moms out there ! Sleepymum called earlier, she's ok and is enjoying the flowers that came through via non contact "just pop it down there please" type protocols.

Bandwidth ?

There is a story going around at the moment that an EU individual has asked the video streaming service people to tone down how much bandwidth they use ... and that they've complied (It might start tomorrow).

The idea is that people watching Prime, Netflix or The Baby Yoda Channel are soaking up the bandwidth that's needed for emergency services. I'll get back to what I think of that later.

There was another story about online gaming people taking up the bandwidth too. I thought I'd test this ...

First up is Twitch streaming and the lovely Kaeyi this morning doing a stream of the new Animal Crossing game :

This was after roughly an hour of 720p streaming, which goes at a steady 3ish Mbits/s. An hour was 1.542GB. For this activity, the compression and video encoding is done on the fly, so it isn't as effective as when the encoding has more time. Fuzzy's stream at the moment is in 720p as well and it's going at about 6Mbit/s over on the laptop.

By on the fly, we mean that it's pictures and sound being captured at the source, encoded into a video stream and sent over the internet to multiple viewers in 0.95 seconds between my laptop and Fuzzy currently. That's ... pretty impressive.

Next up was Amazon Prime, with 46 minutes of Star Trek Picard :

So that's 2.332GB in 46 minutes, correcting up to the hour makes it 3.04GB or double what Twitch were doing for that Animal Crossing stream. This is for a video on demand service and it looks like a really inefficient one too. Prime's quality isn't up to the next candidate's quality. This is shocking actually, for a service looking to send out prerecorded video to millions of people, it should be as efficient and high quality as possible.

On to Youtube and an Aavak video on his latest Rimworld colony. Youtube tends to skip up and down on quality, depending on whether you're paying attention. This was a 1080p video, running for 50 minutes :

There we go, 709MB for 50 minutes or 850.8MB per hour. Youtube video from people like Aavak looks pixel sharp, especially when compared to what Prime were pushing out. It's packaged up (rendered) for efficiency by both the viewer producer and then by Youtube as well.

And Aavak makes good videos too. He has a lovely Welsh accented voice that's a pleasure to listen to.

As does the Fuzzy One and Nerina Pallot who is playing on the iTunes at the moment.

Last one - gaming ! I did a 3 hour session on Elite earlier and the stats came out to :

There we go ... 216MB for 3 hours, or 72MB per hour. That's probably a low level in terms of what traffic gets generated by multiplayer games. As you bounce from system to system, the game and servers will figure out what's there and send the info back. The Elite Dangerous Market Connector application is also sending information back and forth on what I find. There's been minimal contact between me and other pilots though and no voice comms. That would have boosted it a fair bit.

Voice comms won't be that much higher though. Voice needs a fraction of the bandwidth that is required by video and you can chop the quality back a lot before you lose the ability to understand the person on the other end of the cable.

The big reason is that the coordination in the gaming world is done by data, not by pictures. The game system will send across detailed information on what the entities in the game are doing and then the highly detailed environment is generated from that. I'm thinking that it probably resembles a list of chess moves. Player 1 is at x, y, z pointing a certain direction going a certain speed. Update that often and that should be what's needed. You don't really need to keep sending across the detailed information on what they look like.

Just like Elite won't send across pictures of the space stations as you orbit around them, it'll send across the design info which maps to the graphics toolkit I suspect they have and then the local game does the grunt work.

And then the game makes it look super pretty.

So what's the point of the testing ?

We're in a time where we're being asked to stay at home and be isolated. We're not really that set up to do that psychologically. Humans are very definitely herd people. Even us introverts like being on the outskirts of a community. We also need things to keep our minds busy.

Sure, if the emergency services need to take control of limited bandwidth, let them do that. I suspect it would be very easy for the Netflix's, Amazons and Baby Yoda Channel people to flick a switch and stop the video watching.

But we need our entertainment to help keep us sane. Keep the tap on until it is required to turn the tap off. Say NO to people who need to look as if they are having an impact on the situation, especially when that something is ill conceived, not thought out and more than a little daft. Slowing the video feeds or turning off the online games takes away a reason for people to find their entertainment from within their little bit of isolation. People bored because they can't play FIFA over the internet are more likely to go for a kickabout in the park.

It's dangerous. And it's another precedent.

That's getting near politics though, which I try not to get in to here.

I'm preferring to do my sightseeing in game (rather than outdoors around people).

It's been interesting staying in my little isolation place.

May need to click and zoom in a bit for the name there.

And another cheeky sunrise for the landing.

To close - keep doing what keeps you sane ! As long as it's paying a healthy respect to this virus that's going around. I'm hoping not to leave the house for around a week now. I'll be doing the work from home thing, keeping on with the online games (and the offline games), watching the streams and a little bit of video watching online.

Might be an idea to keep the dvds and blurays in reserve in case they do have to cut the Net/Prime quality down a bit though.

Stay safe everyone, be well.

Addon - just seen this on the Twitters :

Click for the text.

Keep playing games, dust off the dvds, stay at home, be well.

Meltdown plus one month. And a bit.

I've been keeping up with the techie stories more than usual lately.

Maybe I should have been doing that before making the leap and buying the bits but ... there you go. It has been good to get a certain amount of confirmation bias coming in from what I've been reading though.

Before I go any further - disclosure note. I buy and fund all my own computer kit. I can't recall being given anything computer related outside of a USB memory stick that was acquired and then wiped without looking at what's on it. I think it's still around somewhere. (Be very wary of geeks bearing free USB memory stick gifts)

Oh the thing about techie stories may have something to do with a new internet gateway being put in at work and me no longer being able to indulge in Rockpapershotgun reading at lunchtime. Mind you, that site has gone downhill a massive amount in the last month or so anyway. Tomshardware has replaced it for the lunchtime stuff.

One thing there though. Always be aware of the likely bias in what you're reading. Make your own mind up as to what you want to believe. Statistics help there ... but statistics can be twisted to suit the ends of the person presenting them.

In my case, the Asrock motherboard that I bought is apparently not as good as the Asus or Gigabyte competitors. The raw performance is nigh on identical, to within 1-2% but the power consumption figures were higher. I suspect out of date firmware or rogue settings were to blame there ... but those results are still being presented. I acquired the Asrock board because, despite a blip with the sound hardware, it was very solid for the 8 years I had Pumpkin.

There's a lot of partisanship amongst computer techies. I try to keep a clear head amongst all that, while keeping up my own prejudices brought on by experience with the kit.

But for every "I don't use Corsair kit because it's let me down a few times" (it has, I've had a couple of memory sticks be dead on arrival), there will be a small army come out of the woodwork and say they've never had a problem. I use Corsair power supplies and will continue to do so because, while their memory was dodgy, the power supplies are top notch. A good power supply will still go BANG. Quietly. A poor power supply will go BANG and take half of your computer with it.

A Corsair power supply went bang and was replaced in Pumpkin, no other issues. A Seasonic (I think) power supply went bang in one of my other machines and damaged a couple of other components as it went.

So yeah, remember prejudices. Act on them if you must ... but update them often because stuff relevant to a manufacturer's gear one year becomes completely irrelevant with the next round of gear.

But also look at other people's prejudices too. Are they advising you to go in one particular direction because they're blinkered towards the alternatives ? Or is that kit genuinely better. The statistics will tell you. There's usually a middle ground where the statistics tell you what you need to know.

And then there are the ghosts in the machine.

The latest article to spark off the Deep Thoughts is one on the processor I bought for Meltdown and Intel scaremongering about how it might have a short life ... Let's look at that :

AMD and Intel are rival processor manufacturers. After years of little progress from Intel, AMD have come out with something that blows away the Intel rival. The market share is going up. It's taking over. So Intel react by sowing doubt and uncertainty. It's an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 by the way.

To be honest, the AMD chip has a lot to live up to. The i5-2500k Sandy Bridge processor in Pumpkin lasted trouble free for 8 years. However, I know one streamer I don't watch any more had a Haswell iSomething-4000ish chip die after probably half that. I'm hoping for similar life out of the AMD chip. (To Pumpkin, not the failed Haswell chip).

The speed advantage is real too. There's 3x the processing power available in the AMD chip compared to the i5-2500k in Pumpkin. That's more than what I need (I'll come back to this point in a bit). I haven't done a comparative test on my laptop yet but its chip had a 50% advantage over Pumpkin. (Clock for clock, it's actually 2x instead of 1.5x but it's downrated for laptop battery life).

What I want is for a similar amount of life to what Pumpkin had.

HOWEVER ! I don't think it would have managed even a year with the settings it had when first activated.

There's been a few Tomshardware articles (I'm not linking it, they shove notifications at you if you let them, that's Bad) that talk about the Boost clock performance of the chip and they cast doubt as to how likely it is for the chip to reach that boost performance.

This is irrelevant to most normal users of a computer.

Oi ! Who's picking these pictures ! Erm.

Ok. Boost clock speeds. These will happen for a short time, the computer will overheat and then slow down. And that hot cold fast slow puts strain on the machine. I've actually disabled that Precision Boost Overclock and the computer is running at a constant 100% at a comfortable 67 degrees C at the moment. Here's what it was doing before, at idle :

The 53 degrees was at the low point of the graph, it was spiking up to 75 degrees C. That's really dangerous for electronics. When it was on load, it seemed stable (you'll get processing errors or the dreaded Blue Screen of Death) but I think it was derating at 87 degrees C. This agrees with what Tomshardware put in today's article. They had a machine under load and ... turned the cooling off to see what would happen.

Sensible people don't do that. Unless they have something they don't care about breaking. That seems to be a common theme with the hardware review sites. They will run kit to destruction without much second thoughts, which makes other people attempt to do the same ...

Anyway. Meltdown after 6 weeks now is utterly stable. Totally solid. And it actually has an easier time playing Elite than when it's doing those SETI sums ! Elite maybe uses 30% of its capability. It feels a little smoother although when things were getting busy in the combat zone, it was getting jumpy. Odd.

That makes me think of an older laptop. It was an Acer Aspire running another AMD chip, an ancient Athlon X2 running at 2GHz. Except when you wanted that performance, like when watching streamed video, it would overheat, derate itself down to 0.8GHz and the video would go super choppy.

That brings me back to that "I'll come back to this later.". Just because someone says you need the top graphics card and the best processor, doesn't mean that's what you should buy. Always look at your own requirements. They won't be the same as anyone else's.

The AMD Ryzen 5 3600 was Just Right for what I want. Plenty of power, acceptable price at £190. I wasn't convinced that the next one up (Ryzen 5 3600X at £256) gave sufficient extra to justify the price. By saving that money, I could go up to more memory, which definitely has a benefit. An 8GB machine struggled with Battletech and the Roguetech mod was unplayable. 16GB would have coped better. 32GB was strong and gives future proofing.

Someone who isn't interested in gaming with great graphics (one who likes Stellaris and avoids Wolfenstein perhaps) could go for the cheaper processor with built in graphics. You can get one of those for £95 or £145. I think the £145 one is the one to go for there because it has 4 cores and 8 threads instead of 4 cores and 4 threads. That makes a difference apparently.

I don't need a new graphics card. I have an 18 month old nVidia 1060 3GB card that cost £200 and could be replaced for the same amount now. A newer card would be a genuine improvement but ... do I need to spend £320 on a shiny new 2060 with this ray tracing feature ?

Nope.

Not quite that nope.

To be honest, I'd rather save that money and buy a better flight stick. Who am I kidding. I'd rather spend the money and buy one of these :

You have to get your priorities right. That Lego Star Destroyer is very expensive though. (And I wouldn't be able to get it on VIP release anyway because my Lego VIP account is fatally broken).

Expensive ... but TOTALLY AWESOME and I want it.

That feels like a long wall of text today ... here's some key points :

Trust No One especially when they're trying to spend your money. It's your money. Spend it how you please. Don't spend it to please others.
Make your own mind up.
Stick to your requirements. Anything extra is nice (especially if it involves cake) but ... ask if there's something nicer that the money could go on.
Sometimes it's best to stay within design limits than try and push them too far.

Throw out prejudices that are no longer relevant. It's good to do this in every aspect of your life occasionally, not just when it concerns things you are buying.

PS The only change I would have made to Meltdown's spec in hindsight would have been to research the box more and get a better one.