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 I suspect out of date firmware or rogue settings were to blame there ...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.