Tag: PC

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New uses for older processors

How did we get here?

To say this started with a failure is a bit of an understatement. It actually goes back much further.

A couple of years ago, I made the choice to have a back up storage server. There are two routes for this.

One, buy a new Network Attached Storage device at retail. These are specialized and easy to set up, but the cost can be prohibitive. The software is sometime proprietary, so it’s a bit like adopting an ecosystem. They are reliable, and of course usually brand new, so that is a huge plus.

Two, build your own NAS. There are literally thousands of PCs not suitable for a certain large company’s operating system that lived worthy lives as someone’s home PC or Office unit. There are even more components with no driver support. Used parts and open source software can give many of these a new life. Used parts, though cheap, fail more than new ones. So beware.

How to Choose

How tech savvy are you? Do you like to tinker? What is the budget like?

All of these are relevant questions when it comes time to decide, but if you decided as a casual user that you need it, you probably aren’t too afraid of choice number two. It was the choice I made and it served me well, until lately. Twice.

The process was easy enough. I have been building PCs for a while and this was just a PC with a different Operating System and more storage. Instead of streaming, gaming and making videos, I was storing data and for a while running other apps like Home Assistant. I then started splitting those duties up into more power efficient, smaller PCs, but kept the big one for data. Until it failed.

No errors, no warning, no indication of any kind that it failed, it just did, and then refused to post. I spent the better part of a day swapping into a different set up that thankfully I had already been testing and I was back in business. That is until I messed with it.

Bad Luck, or Bad Choices

It may have been a bit of both. My buddy Gus has a new project he is working on and needs a place to store back ups, and of course bulk data. It was an easy choice for me to build him something using, you guessed it, some of the parts I had just put together for my replacement server.

His server works great. My rebuild didn’t. Things like my security and Home Assistant were fine, I had already migrated them, but my NAS wasn’t “NAS-ing” anymore.

In steps the Ryzen3 3100, that I hadn’t even written about in here yet. (Some of the reasons for that can be found here.) I had most of the platform already built, and I already had the storage in the case, I just needed a transplant.

TrueNas doesn’t care what kind of hardware I’m using. I discovered recently that TrueNas is hardware agnostic and easily swaps between set ups. The last change went from later XEON to fourth gen intel. You can find that YT video here. This change was from intel to AMD. If I wasn’t a believer then, I am now.

What’s Next?

Um, actually, it’s probably going to be newer equipment. I’m not buying a new NAS, no, I meant newer parts for my custom effort. It’s proven itself twice and been reliable even when the hardware wasn’t. The learning curve for the software is small and I don’t have to worry about where my files are being stored. They’re on my equipment.

Is that the correct answer then? Nope, but it’s correct for me. In a way this is just one man’s experience, but I encourage anyone out there to try something that might make you uncomfortable. Yes, this is PC stuff, but it can apply to anything. Try learning a new language, to read music, anything. Life is a wonderful chance for us to live. Live it.

As a note, I am also putting my effort where my writing is. In the next few weeks a new site will be live, and I’m helping my buddy Gus with his stuff. There is a lot going on, I hope you’ll join me for at least part of it.

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Choosing the Best Budget Motherboard

How Did We Get Here?

The price and availability of new PC products often force us to seek budget options. This can turn out well if someone is parting with older hardware for a fair price, but it can lead to problems. The most obvious issue is matching a processor with a motherboard, or compatible memory. Intel processors don’t work in AMD sockets and vice versa. That is far from the worst problem, though and sometimes a socket that fits still won’t work.

Intel’s LGA 1151 socket spans four generations of chip architecture, but supporting infrastructure keeps ninth generation motherboards from running with a sixth generation CPU. They will physically fit into the socket, but will not function. The type of Double Density Rate memory also makes a difference. Sixth generation CPUs run on DDR3 and DDR4 in most cases, but seventh gen rarely works with DDR3.

AMD also has it’s quirks. Earlier AM4 motherboards lacked the ability to store configurations for all compatible chips forcing users to choose older Zen CPUs or more recent ones. This was corrected in newer hardware, but when AM4 was originally released, it wasn’t a thought.

So, what can we do?

Research. This doesn’t mean prompting your chat bot to see if hardware will coexist. This means actually finding examples, getting support information from company websites, or forums on the subject. There are many quirks when matching hardware other than a graphics cards limitations when running on a board with PCIe 3.0 as opposed to PCIe 4. And yes, that can be a real problem. I touch on it a bit in this video.

AMD and Intel both have full listings of chip set compatibility on their support pages. This, coupled with information from motherboard manufacturer’s support pages can help you find the right platform. It should also help you pick the right type of memory. Keep in mind, there are differences in DDR3 and DDR3L, and very big differences in ECC and standard. Servers often use Error Correcting Code ram to limit failures, while retail DDR is more tolerant. They are no more cross compatible than DDR3 is to 4 or even DDR5.

Make allowances for some parts still being in high demand and out of your target budget, when a similar item may do the job. Earlier fourth generation Xeon processors (LGA 1150) CPUs fit and worked in mainstream motherboards. In some cases, you may find an i5 that runs almost as well as it’s 7th gen cousin for half the price. Many earlier multi-threaded platforms didn’t take advantage of all of the cores available, and a faster clocked i5 may work better than a slower clocked i7 for your need.

Any Last Tips?

Be Patient. The perfect deal may not come until after you have something that may be ‘good enough’. If you find an upgrade for your use case, it’s okay to get faster memory later, or upgrade that 9500 to a 9700K when it fits your budget. Just remember, someone may want that 9500. With prices like they are, there is a thriving market for used hardware. It was one major software company that tried to tell us our hardware was no good, but there are other software options if you are a bit adventurous. But, that’s for another blog.

I touch on some of the struggles with software in this blog. I’ll post more as I explore Linux Distros.

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When a PC Hardware Repair Goes Better than Expected

How Did We Get Here

Lately, I find myself making attempts to find broken or untested hardware on the cheap. I don’t go randomly selecting things that have no hope for repair; I search listings looking for clues that may indicate what the issue is before I start looking at prices. When I find something I may be able fix, and the price is right, I’ll take the chance.

There have been a number of such purchases lately, with the most success coming from motherboards. There have also been a few misses, mainly with graphics cards. The latest video attempting to repair a motherboard is here, while the extra details here. It doesn’t always work, sometimes you get a bad CPU and it’s difficult to tell on which component to lay the blame

This particular case is a Z390 Phantom Gaming 6 from AsRock. It’s a quality board and the price was right. The seller did disclose not testing the board due to bent pins, and they could be seen in the pictures. I set my sights on a cheap processor to test with and all in with shipping I was in for about fifty bucks.

Testing

The pins were tedious, but repairable. After about two hours of meticulous work, it was ready to test. My new Celeron G4900 was actually a used CPU, but the whole set up worked. The two cores of the Celeron aren’t a great match for the motherboard, but it’s a good starting point. At the time of this writing, an upgrade has arrived.

I have a suite of games I normally test, and these worked with one exception. Borderlands Three stayed on the intro screen, the entire forty-five minutes I let it. I point that game out because Borderlands Four actually did work on the new set up and the results were predictable. Neither the processor nor the graphics card are suitable for playing this game but it turned in a respectable 20-24 frames per second on low with upscaling.

I was able to update the bios, and run other games including Call of Duty, that requires anti cheat. The results weren’t great, barely reaching 30FPS in most situations, but we are ready to move on to the next phase. That is where things took a turn.

Failure

Having tested the Celeron, I looked for a more powerful processor and arrived on an 8700K with six cores and twelve threads. Ideally, this would rival newer budget type setups and I looked forward to it. This, however, didn’t go as well. The 8700K doesn’t post, even with a new BIOS, clearing the CMOS, and trying different RAM placement. The motherboard has a debug indicator that stays on ’00’ with the fans running full speed.

I tried several things to troubleshoot and have to believe that the CPU itself is bad. This presents me with two options. I can buy another board to test, whether its just a board, or an old Optiplex, or I can get another CPU. I have plenty of ‘broken’ prebuilts, and found a ninth generation i5, that should be here this week.

If the issue turns out to be the 8700K I’ll have to file a claim, but the platform I purchased on has a great buyer protection program, so I should be safe. If the issue is the board, it complicates things just a bit, because I can’t completely rule out the processor. Getting a new board means all new tests and by the time I am able to verify the 8700K is the issue, it may be too late to file a claim.

So, What’s next?

That was actually dictated by more shopping for used parts. Ideally, a score would have been a cheap office prebuilt with an eighth or ninth gen processor. That allows me to check both parts in question. What I’ve found so far is an i5 9400F, which allows me to test the motherboard. If it arrives quickly enough, I can at least test the three sock theory.

Okay, for those unfamiliar, it’s a dark laundry room and you have two different color socks in the dryer. How do you pull a matching pair? You have to pull at least three to take into the light, two of the three will be the same color, possibly all three. Having three CPUs helps me reasonably assess if the problem is the processor, or the board.

This won’t be the last stop for the 8th or 9th gen set up. It’s not a current platform, but collecting at least one working platform over the past several generations helps me test a variety of conditions. It allows me to test a variety of games, Linux distros, applications and even hardware for compatibility. I will eventually get another motherboard, but for the time being, I’ll go with what I have.

I spent as much time troubleshooting the new CPU as I did fixing the board in the first place and there are better things to do with the set up, even if I can’t get my money back. I’m still happy with the board and the initial testing and when I get the i5 to test, there will be a video and of course, a blog.

Feel free to check out the other YouTube videos and Blogs.

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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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Do you really need that shiny new PC?

How did we get here?

That question is actually very easy to explain this time around.

With the focus on AI, and companies diverting their resources to the corporate customer instead of the consumer, pricing has soared. Specifically, anything with a memory component has seen a drastic increase almost overnight. In some cases, increases were more than 100%.

Data centers use a different type of memory than consumers, so you might not see a problem, but the big three are committing to more data center products and less consumer. Good for data centers, bad for us. A shortage of newer memory means people panic buy any memory they can get, driving the price of DDR4 up. We’ll discuss the issue for one company involved in a bit.

There are three major memory manufacturers, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron, with the latter recently saying they will drop their consumer effort completely. Crucial is a very popular and dependable brand, producing memory and storage, and now they are gone. That leaves two companies to produce the entire supply and they have already announced they are scaling back.

PC memory saw the most immediate effect, but pricing for everything that uses memory will increase. All solid state devices use some form of memory and now that will be in shorter supply with no end in sight. That means everything from TVs to mobile phones, and cameras to tablets get more expensive. Even if another company wanted to take advantage, factories don’t come online overnight.

The Biggest Loser? (Besides us)

There will be several, but one company that will suffer is AMD. This will be especially tough on them with the AM5 platform taking only DDR5. Any modern processor they make will be dependent on DDR5 and they are sure to see a downturn. Intel, and maybe even Qualcomm gain an advantage with some of their modern products using older memory.

Intel’s LGA 1170 socket has DDR4 version support available and Qualcomm has shown itself to be very adaptable. Their mobile sector may suffer, but their PC processors could have an advantage. AMD could save itself a bit though if they stretch the AM4 processors. It’s something they have done recently, and many of us thought it was a bit silly. It may be a genius move.

AMD has produced several new AM4 CPUs well after introducing AM5 and they have continued BIOS updates. It could be a great stop gap. It does not help their graphics division, though. Nor does it give high hopes for Intel continuing with the Celestial line of GPU, but that’s a different conversation.

So, what do we do?

The simplest answer for that is nothing. If you don’t need a new PC, don’t go shopping for a bit until thew market calms. If you do need a new PC, look at slightly older platforms like the AM4 or LGA 1170. Older generations are also a possibility, but you have to be mindful of the Windows 10 retirement. That’s a whole other story as well.

I have YouTube videos on using much older platforms, one of them here. I’ll also be writing and publishing videos on more current generations that will accept Windows 11. Don’t forget, Linux is also an option for your operating system instead of large corporations offer. Thank you Steam for pushing this to a higher level. If you would like to read my last effort discussing some older platforms, try this one.

I’ll keep my eyes and ears open, and of course, I’ll discuss it in the blogs.