Author: aztpg8

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It’s not failure if you learn something. The important Z97 lesson.

How Did We Get Here?

That part’s easy. Computer component prices are ridiculous and people are looking anywhere they can to save money. This includes PCs and systems with older parts. In some cases, much older, as in ten years old.

One such case is trying to revive PCs that use DDR3 memory instead of the current standard DDR5. The problem there is that the dominant Operating system for these PCs no longer supports finely aged hardware. I won’t dwell on the details of the many different work arounds or the options, I’ll just say that those products are still in demand, and in some cases fetch as much as newer budget motherboards and components.

My plan was simple. I have a B85 motherboard that supports 4th gen Intel CPUs. It was suggested that I try thew Z97, which is the full feature version of that generation. I found one for a reasonable price, ordered it, received it, and set up to test. At this point I was happy, I found the board for a reasonable price and it came in beautiful shape. My happiness didn’t last.

It’s not failure, it’s learning.

The set up went well enough. I have a known good test bench and known good components, so I went to work. After setting everything up I hit the power switch and noticed my first issue. The signal initially come from the video card, then stopped. Luckily the i5 4670 has on board graphics, and I was able to get into the bios.

I though the RX480 I was using finally gave up the ghost, so I switched cards. Not only did I get a signal, but I was able to set up in the BIOS and on the reboot went straight into windows. Success! Except for about an hour later, the PC wouldn’t ‘wake’. The following reboot, didn’t boot.

I set about testing all of the component’s, the power switch, power supply, reset the BIOS, everything. Nothing. I even went back and tested the RX480 that I though might have dies and it works fine. There was only two possible culprits. After swapping the 4670 into the B*% motherboard, we were down to one.

What Did I learn?

The first thing I learned was that my troubleshooting process was sound. I also learned that even with a bad deal, something good can come of it. I made YT content and this blog. And, I learned, or relearned, that used parts fail. They don’t always fail spectacularly, like the RTX 2060 in the blog here , but eventually they do fail. Knowing that keeps me from being upset, but I am disappointed.

What do I plan to do next? I’m already looking for another Z97 board, but as I mentioned I’m trying to find a good deal, especially now that the investment has another seventy five bucks tacked onto it. When I find one, I’ll do more testing. Until then I will just do more learning, like not matching modern components with much older hardware.

If you are curious how this experiment went, feel free to check out the video here.

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Trying to play new games on an old PC

How Did We Get Here?

With companies pushing to develop Artificial Intelligence, many supporting components are outrageously priced. One of those components is memory. Although the memory data centers use is different than that used by the common consumer, when factories concentrate on producing data center memory, they don’t produce consumer products. Shortages mean higher prices.

Most systems now use DDR5, with AMD still producing some processors that use DDR4. That leaves DDR3. It has risen in price, but not as much as newer memory. It’s also over ten years old. That’s fine for some games, but those released in the last couple of years are sometimes poorly optimized. Some also have features that didn’t exist a decade ago. There is also the fact that systems with DDR3 don’t have Windows 11 support.

What About Gaming?

It’s still possible to use some versions of Windows 10 and, of course, Linux, but for this trial we used Win10 Pro without the latest updates. We tested games as old as ‘Shadow of the Tomb Raider’ from a decade ago, up to new releases like ‘Clar Obscur: Expedition 33’. The games had a wide array of features including Ray Tracing and Cheat Detection. The last is important because it requires a Trusted Point Module, specifically version 2.0.

Games with Anti-Cheat require both Secure Boot and TPM 2.0. Most Anti-Cheat also doesn’t work well on Linux, further pushing gamers to Windows 11. These are still compatible with Windows 10 Long Term Service and IOT editions, but TPM requires extra hardware. More recent CPUs have this built in. Most games will run fine on Linux, but demand for Linux gaming will have to increase quite a bit for developers start implementing it. The good news is, that may not be too far off with companies like VALVE striving to make their OS mainstream.

So, what are our options?

That depends on your favorite games. If you’re into competitive shooters, most require anti cheat and Windows 10 Long Term or IOT and a separate TPM module may help. Those into pretty much anything else, will find many Linux distros waiting to be explored, and they get better every day.

If that is your cup of tea, Pop OS, CachyOS, Nobara, Bazzite, and of course, Steam OS seem to be great options and I’ve actually played around with each to varying results. In testing Bazzite and Nobara Linux played the most games without issue. Nobara also has DaVinci Resolve as a working package. Many of these also use OBS well, if you stream what you play. All are options that I will continue to explore.

Those looking for videos can check out a few of videos on my Linux Gaming playlist here.

To read other blog entries, check out this link.

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New Hardware in an Old PC

How did we get here

Upgrading PCs is a delicate balance of finding the right parts that work together. Sometimes, this works well, and many parts work with each other n some capacity. Some parts compliment each other very well, but some struggle mightily. One such case is an older HP Pavilion and a newer generation graphics card.

The PC in question has a Ryzen 5 4600g, 16GB of 3200MTS DDR4 memory and a 400 watt power supply that itself, was an upgrade. The Ryzen processor was one of several in AMD’s line up that handles graphics. Not in the way Intel displays basic graphics, but an actual graphics processor built in. These units were far above any Intel offering and allowed a solution without the extra cost of a dedicated card. They weren’t very powerful, but they were effective.

These Processors also worked on a PCIe 3.0 bus to operate. The Peripheral Component Interface is how the processor interacts with all of the individual parts. All of these are designed to work at certain bus speeds and the newer GPU is no different. What is different, is what bus speed the newer graphics card is designed for. PCIe 5.0.

So?

With each major iteration of the PCIe standard, the bandwidth doubles. This effectively doubling the speed that all of the components communicate. This means that the CPU that communicates at 8GT/s with PCIe 3.0 is trying to push a graphics card that is expecting 32GT/s. One fourth of the GPUs designed capability.

This simply means that the card may perform up to 50% worse in some games and applications. The video for this is here. It shows anywhere from a 20% loss in performance to around 50% compared to a system running an i5 12400 running at PCIe 5.0. The card still functions and is a huge step up from the integrated graphics from the CPU itself, but it’s not the right tool for the job.

When IS it a good idea?

It’s not necessarily a bad idea, but it’s not very effective. In most cases applications will run well, and games will perform , but a more recent platform will give significant improvement. In the case of a graphics card, newer innovations like Ray Tracing and Frame Generation will also be able to take advantage of a broader bandwidth and could add much more than the 50% loss in some cases.

With the price of DDR5 and SSD’s still out of reach to some, a good deal on a graphics card might still be of use until someone can save enough to invest in newer parts. Storage like NVMe SSDs are also affected, but the difference is not as critical as the GPU. Newer NVMe drives can reach data speeds in excess of 10,000 MB/s, significantly higher than standard SSDs.

One of the next things to test on this same platform will be the RTX 3050. That graphics card is more in line with the Pavilion’s budget and it is PCIe 4.0. When I write about it, you will find it here.

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My exciting attempt to mess something up.

How did we get here?

One word. eBay.

In many other words, I attempted a trick I saw on YouTube to repair a graphics card with a similar problem. While my attempt is here, I will go over some of the finer points. This was almost successful, and I thought I had done something.

Several months ago, I was buying fixable parts on eBay for YouTube content. One of those was an OEM version of an RTX2060 that I believe came from a Dell system. The listing claimed that it worked under normal circumstances, but failed under any kind of load.

I immediately thought this was a thermal throttling issue and ordered it. This should be an easy repair and I would have another video card. It wasn’t until I opened the card and found it full of thermal paste that I realized someone else had the same idea. Still, I gave it a good cleaning, and tested it.

So, what happened?

To be quite honest, other things came in that I could repair and they made it to a video. This one literally was shelved. In fact, this card sat on a shelf until about a month ago when someone mentioned under-volting. This card was a perfect candidate.

Components rely on a few things to work, the right voltage and a limit to how much power it should use. In this case, if the power delivery system was faulty, I would decrease the voltage needed to reach the same frequencies it used. It may never reach that output, but it wouldn’t try to use too much voltage.

I found a stable voltage and using MSI Afterburner, set a voltage limit to reach the max frequency for the card. It took a few tries, but it worked. Well, okay, it passed a few tests, but it wasn’t under a true load. I have to say that I did have a bit of confidence that I pulled this off.

That confidence didn’t last long. As soon as I started the first game benchmark, there was a loud pop, and a burning smell. It didn’t just shut off, it was a catastrophic failure. I knew this card pulled more power than the PSU was rated, but thankfully, it was the card, not the PSU. The PC has a Ryzen 4600g and still works great, in spite of my calamity.

The smell came from the card, and it was very hot to the touch. There was no doubt, it suffered a tragic end. Still, the effort did result in a YouTube video, mentioned above.

What do I do now?

For the past year, the card sat on a shelf as decoration. It will take the same role now, but I know more certainly that I won’t attempt to fix it again. I’ve had success in the past buying untested or nonworking parts, so I will again, and I have another video card that still needs attention.

The other card doesn’t work, but the fans spin. It also doesn’t show up in any hardware profile or in BIOS. My though is, though, that cleaning the contacts on the x16 connector and the ports has a chance and doesn’t cost any money. The worst that can happen is that it still doesn’t work. No Loss.

Of course, if it does work, it will be a new video, and a blog, so I have that going for me, and that’s nice. For more of these blogs click here.

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When is saving an old PC a great idea?

How Did We Get Here?

To be quite frank, greed. Corporate greed and all around nosiness. Large tech companies want to maximize profit and any company that deals in information or software wants more information. If a company can make you existing item obsolete, many times they will. For example, Livermore, CA has a firehouse with a hundred year old light bulb. Except to move it or a power outage, its been operating since 1901. One hundred twenty five years. How many other bulbs have been changed in that same building? If all products were designed to last forever, we would only change them when they went out of style, or a natural disaster.

Planned Obsolescence, I’m sure is a term you have heard and its a very real thing. My opinion is that the recent solid operating system with a ten in it’s name and the shortages of hardware coinciding with an Artificial Intelligence boom were not by accident. Perfectly serviceable hardware that would be of great use during a product shortage is now obsolete. The information company’s new product excludes that same older hardware. They can’t collect the same amount of information on you to train, you guessed it, AI.

But Why?

Currently the Western world is in a state where the fear of missing out is a real thing. We want the newest mobile phone or the biggest TV. We need to keep up with everyone else, and we post it all, for everyone to see. It’s almost mandatory to prove our worth to others. It’s what large corporations count on, so they find ways to make that happen.

They emphasize that if you don’t have the new product, their new product, you’re missing out. You will fall behind. No one wants to fall behind, so you enter the vicious cycle and buy the next new thing. Consequently, they make the next new thing allowing the large companies to make something that still works, obsolete.

Enter where we are today. Some large companies, in an effort to get more of your information, find themselves impeded by the very thing they tried to promote. In the case of a company that sells a very popular Operating System, I don’t need to name names, they have rendered a massive amount of older hardware incompatible at the same time component shortages make it difficult to upgrade or buy new PCs.

I don’t think this was an accident. Not that I’m a conspiracy theorist, but when you make older products non functioning and new hardware is expensive due to shortages for AI, corporations have a huge opportunity to profit off us while telling us it’s in our own best interest. Greed. Greed for profit on new parts and greed for your information so they can train AI to ‘give you what you want’.

What choice do we have?

Part of it is simple. If your tech does what you need it to do, wait out the rush and them pushing the narrative that you will miss out. They need everyone’s help, let them sweeten the deal. If you do end up missing something, maybe you didn’t really need it.

Another option is find a way to make do with a little less. Systems I build now may only have 16GB of RAM instead of 32, or maybe you can size down on storage until prices adjust. They need us to buy, and although they will get the eager, or maybe the desperate, a calm demeanor and a little patience may work to our advantage. It will eventually bring prices back down, and it may signal to some that we don’t really want them having all of our information; we can make our own decisions without AI’s help.

Don’t forget to take a read through other blogs, here, or visit my YouTube Page