GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

Installing AMD PGA was not bad. But I was a total bitch when it came to getting the cooler on.
It could be so much worse...
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That's not a delidded Athlon, it is a normal athlon.

But before that there was Slot-1/Slot-A for CPUs. Those looked cool and if you've ever put a game into a Super Nintendo you knew exactly how to install it.
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Looking at that picture I now realize that they were as wide as my penis is long. 14 inches. Weird.
 
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DIP sockets, much worse, especially until you got a DIP puller and tried to use a small screwdriver and ended up with several pins stuck in your finger.
The ones in the sockets weren't that hard to get out, don't remember which kitchen utensils were my goto but that looks like a job for akimbo forks.
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Look at that, a graphics card with drop-in VRAM!
 
That's not a delidded Athlon, it is a normal athlon.
I destroyed one of those by crushing it with the heatsink on accident. Think that little accident costed me around 300 bucks.

Look at that, a graphics card with drop-in VRAM!
I still have one or two of these Deaccelerators and I needed one of these sockets for a project of mine. Unobtanium (or I googled the wrong things).

DIP sockets
small, wide, soft plastic shim that ideally fits entirely under the chip. You place the fingers of one hand on top of the IC and press a little down so it doesn't suddenly jump out and bends pins, then you twist (not lever!) the shim carefully clockwise and counter-clockwise, when the IC comes loose on one side, do the other side. IC comes out with nary a bent pin or scratches.

The worst were LIF (low insertion force, although the "low" was a cruel joke) sockets.
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They were used on PGA chips, commonly seen up to the 486 in PCs and pretty much all later 68k 32 bit processors, and their various FPUs and MMUs and whatever they might have had externally on consumer hardware. Industrial hardware had them long into Pentium times (and the Pentium's pins were a lot less robust). The smaller ones were ok but the 168 pin (68040/060, 486 and later) ones were brutal. You had to pound the chip into the socket with your flat hand, pretty much, if you didn't have the right tool that also looked a lot like the extractor tool. Oh you want to get it out again and don't have this device?
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Man, are you in for a fun ride, because you can get two of these shit things:
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(I have still a bunch of intel branded ones flying around here)

and try to work your way around the socket. You won't do it often because neither CPU nor socket will survive that.
 
Oh you want to get it out again and don't have this device?
1730743772860.png

Man, are you in for a fun ride, because you can get two of these shit things:
1730743957712.png
(I have still a bunch of intel branded ones flying around here)

and try to work your way around the socket. You won't do it often because neither CPU nor socket will survive that.
“Fuck it, I’ll just desolder the socket instead.”
 
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The good old days when, if you installed your cooler wrong, you'd crack the actual silicon in half.
I googled for some cracked Athlons and found this
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I remember those strapper coolers. More frightening than anything modern in my opinion, it was like readying a mouse trap.

edit: it's like mounting the fans on a tower cooler, except tighter, stiffer, smaller and probably using a screwdriver to pull it out while always being oh so close to the components on the motherboard. Man, I remember sweating that part.
 
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I just did one, and the previous one before that was like 10 years ago. It's easy as long as you aren't completely mechanically retarded. Pick a case with good airflow, fan layout, access and ease of assembly. I got a Lian Li, and they have since released the Lancool 207 which looks really good.
That's good to hear, I'm one of the more technically-minded folks between my friends and family, I actually managed to repair my DSi's busted screens (the bottom to be precise, the top one is a bit more funky and requires one to know how to handle a soldiering iron).
 
It could be so much worse...
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That's not a delidded Athlon, it is a normal athlon.
Yeah heaps of people straight up broke their cpu's from cracking the cpu die, those little foam pads were a joke, they did fuck all.

I was very careful installing my old 2500+ Barton as it was a bootsale used deal and was warned by the seller. First pc as a teen, and it was fine, and even despite that still had more little chips off the edges than when I bought it.
 

TL;DW: The 9800X3D is good. Not just in 500+ FPS titles, some of the gains are significant, like Stellaris, Starfield, Dragon's Dogma 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Homeworld 3, etc. Hardware Unboxed average was +11% vs. the 7800X3D instead of AMD's claimed 8%.
Today is the day the 9800x3d embargo lifts,

Seems to be a hit, but you know it won't touch MSRP.
Hmmm... maybe it's time to move to AMD for my future CPU needs.
 
AMD outsold Intel in the datacenter for the first time ever:

This is the area where Intel's process node disadvantage hurts them the most. Datacenters are particularly sensitive to power consumption. Last year was Genoa + Bergamo facing off against Sapphire Rapids + Emerald Rapids. AMD offered 50% more memory bandwidth and 50% more cores, while Intel offered little more than blazing hot temperatures.

SPR had been delayed multiple times, the final delay being because it wasn't passing QA. Server chips usually are on a 5-year depreciation schedule, so better late than broken. But still, SPR was a massive turd. I was unimpressed with it. You needed a quad-socket box to approach the performance of a dual-socket EPYC box, and the thing ran hot as blazes. The one we were testing had severe thermal throttling problems.

It looks like this is the last server chip to face Intel's process woes, though. We'll see if Granite Rapids stops the bleeding. It's MRDIMM support is going to be popular in some sectors.
 
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