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

[Dawdler]

Hey, how small could they make the pins or lands in a PGA/LGA chip, if you assume that chips would only be swapped out with specialty equipment with people with more training then the average PC builder?

Look at BGA array for CPU's - like 7 series portable ryzens or intel chips.
Somewhere in the range of BGA for memory.
If you want "records" in compactness you have to look at mobile devices, very tight pitch and very difficult to make
The real situation is - chiplets are actually soldered to interposer - if you'd remove the chiplet you'd find very tiny solder balls.
Mainboard has 0 requirements like that, pitches are larger so there's less waste and easier to manufacture.

Like, if a cpu is now being divided into chiplets, is there a way to make them somewhat replaceable by the end user as a trained tech with the right tools could add or remove chiplets with different features, kind of like adding more calculation chips to a really old computer, but all the chiplets are on a daughter board that connects to the motherboard like a traditional cpu?

It's easier and cheaper to just buy a different cpu and sell old one. When prices are 0, everything is easy to replace
You may be thinking of 486 computers, where you could add a math co-processor and extra cache
This all got integrated in next version, with mmx instructions and is what became Pentium 1 (or 5x86)

 

[The Ugly One]

Hey, how small could they make the pins or lands in a PGA/LGA chip, if you assume that chips would only be swapped out with specialty equipment with people with more training then the average PC builder?

Like, if a cpu is now being divided into chiplets, is there a way to make them somewhat replaceable by the end user as a trained tech with the right tools could add or remove chiplets with different features, kind of like adding more calculation chips to a really old computer, but all the chiplets are on a daughter board that connects to the motherboard like a traditional cpu?

The connections between chiplets are too tiny, and need to be so there aren't massive losses across the interface. Where this might be going, though, is made-to-order processors. Imagine CPU + accelerators + RAM all on the same package, but rather than the SKUs we have now, you have an online configurator where you can specify what, exactly you want on your package.

 

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It looks like a steal, but USB-wise it would be a downgrade for me.

If the five on the motherboard aren't enough you've got the header for two more and if you really wanted to go nuts you could always plug one of those M.2 to PCI.e risers in and then put some chinky 9-port USB card into that.

 

[geckogoy]

The connections between chiplets are too tiny, and need to be so there aren't massive losses across the interface. Where this might be going, though, is made-to-order processors. Imagine CPU + accelerators + RAM all on the same package, but rather than the SKUs we have now, you have an online configurator where you can specify what, exactly you want on your package.

That would be really cool

 

[Anti Lolicon Bomb]

My last 3 GPUs have had coil whine. Before that I had not encountered a single instance of it. I'm on such a bad run of luck here.
I'm looking at upgrading in January, on Linux so it would be AMD. At this point Its not so much performance as much as not having to deal with fucking coil whine again.
So whats the deal? Is there a brand or a certain tdp level to shoot for to avoid this shit? I read that high end cards almost all have coil whine.
I have a silent PC so its especially grating.

 

[Susanna]

My last 3 GPUs have had coil whine. Before that I had not encountered a single instance of it. I'm on such a bad run of luck here.
I'm looking at upgrading in January, on Linux so it would be AMD. At this point Its not so much performance as much as not having to deal with fucking coil whine again.
So whats the deal? Is there a brand or a certain tdp level to shoot for to avoid this shit? I read that high end cards almost all have coil whine.
I have a silent PC so its especially grating.

Noise-cancelling headphones. With my AirPods Max I can’t even hear my 4090’s fan going full blast right next to me.

 

[Vecr]

Noise-cancelling headphones. With my AirPods Max I can’t even hear my 4090’s fan going full blast right next to me.

Not sure how good those are for your hearing long term. On certain airplanes they're pretty much mandatory if you care about your hearing, but even then it's going to be worse than having a different job.

Real world soundwaves aren't simple, and they can do wacky things if not exactly canceled out.

Remember ultrasonics still damage your hearing, even if you can't hear them.

 

[Betonhaus]

I got an Antec P101 Silent case for my server that's supposed to be quiet, but I find I get a lot of loud humming from the hard drives that under load can be head throughout the apartment. I checked and it is none of the fans, however physically holding the drive rack makes it much quieter, and taking out the unused drive trays helps a lot with noise. For claiming to be a quiet case, it should've had more sound dampening in the frame itself. I need to get some adhesive rubber or foam, is there a better solution then that?

Whole I was typing the "load unread comments" thing popped up and made the page jump around so I clicked submit a bit too early

 

[Susanna]

Not sure how good those are for your hearing long term. On certain airplanes they're pretty much mandatory if you care about your hearing, but even then it's going to be worse than having a different job.

Real world soundwaves aren't simple, and they can do wacky things if not exactly canceled out.

Remember ultrasonics still damage your hearing, even if you can't hear them.

You're not going to get hearing damage from your GPU's coil whine. The ANC headphones are just so you won't have to hear it.
Often, coil whine will settle down after a year or so of moderate use, or less of heavy use. My old crypto rig used to whine loud enough that you could hear it over the fans, but just a few months in the whine stopped.

 

[Vecr]

You're not going to get hearing damage from your GPU's coil whine. The ANC headphones are just so you won't have to hear it.
Often, coil whine will settle down after a year or so of moderate use, or less of heavy use. My old crypto rig used to whine loud enough that you could hear it over the fans, but just a few months in the whine stopped.

No, I mean too much ANC use could cause hearing damage, plausibly worse than the white + fan noise.

 

[The Ugly One]

My last 3 GPUs have had coil whine. Before that I had not encountered a single instance of it. I'm on such a bad run of luck here.
I'm looking at upgrading in January, on Linux so it would be AMD. At this point Its not so much performance as much as not having to deal with fucking coil whine again.
So whats the deal? Is there a brand or a certain tdp level to shoot for to avoid this shit? I read that high end cards almost all have coil whine.
I have a silent PC so its especially grating.

They're probably skimping on the inductors to keep costs down. You could try backing off the max TDP until it goes away. I've capped the max TDP on my GPU just to keep the heat down.

 

[TheRaptorJesus]

My last 3 GPUs have had coil whine.

My Gpu is fine but my PSU has whine if I turn off my ceiling fan its noticeable.

Swap from 11900k to 7800x3d went smoothly except I had a leaking rotary. Thankfully I have far too many QDC so it was a quick and easy fix. Feels snappier even without a full windows reinstall. Modern windows is nice on that regard, guess I can stop using my USB 5 gig adapter since this has realtek 2.5 and not the buggy 1225v that kept dropping my connections. Now to decide what i'm gonna do with my old shit; I do not trust ebay anymore and could always use a few hundo back.

 

[AmpleApricots]

486

Funny story about intel's 487 (math coprocessor of the 486) - it was actually a full 486. All it did when inserted into the coprocessor socket of an SX was disable that CPU and do all the work, and no, you couldn't just use it by itself, it wouldn't work in the CPU socket and it would also detect and not work if it didn't see the 486SX present. Goes to show you intel has always been full of shit and tech corpos always have been like this and it's not a recent phenomenon (although it's hard to overstate intel's very steady and reliable, almost traditional scumminess). From that generation on the FPU was *always* internal. Speed demanded it and the idea of something like an external FPU nowadays would be preposterous at the latencies we are talking about here. You'd have to invent time travel first.

 

[ZMOT]

The Fractal North XL looks excellent, and from GN's review they gave it a pretty good and it still appears around the top in their new charts, and I'd be willing to be paying the price.

I'm biased so take it with a big grain of salt, but it seems fractal is slowly moving towards designer cases and there isn't much to improve on the define (unless some specs change) I'd grab a define R7 or even XL (although the base model should be big enough unless you want the front HDD cage) as long as they're still available.

They unplugged the battery but the CMOS battery is a pain in the ass to access in the 2021 model, it’s on the opposite side of the motherboard.

that reminds me of an asus ROG from 2011 I still use sometimes, out of curiosity I checked what it would take to change it... yeah fuck that shit, not disassembling 2/3 of it just to get to the fucking battery. a script to update the time and date every boot will suffice.

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.

zoomers don't know the horror of socket 7
hard mode: doing it upright in a barely lit case.

 

[AnimeSucksCopeAndSneed]

3090s are still insultingly expensive aren't they?

No. A used 3090 now is approximately $550.00. Very reasonable. I got mine recently for just $600.00 and have stressed it since. Amazing snag imo.

p40

P40 is unironically a fantastic budget option if you are doing Stable Diffusion. It's about as fast as a 4060ti. Given that a P40 right now is about $150.00, I recommend it if you want to spend on something 24 GB now. Not sure how it is for gaming, but I would recommend the 3090 if you want to game.

Edit: I think I am completely wrong about the P40 costing $150.00. I think I'm quoting an Ebay price and I trust the used market excluding anything that involves shipping.

 

[Leaded Gasoline]

No. A used 3090 now is approximately $550.00. Very reasonable. I got mine recently for just $600.00 and have stressed it since. Amazing snag imo.

Add like $100 to the final price because most people don't have power supplies that can deal with the power draw of that monstrosity

P40 is unironically a fantastic budget option if you are doing Stable Diffusion. It's about as fast as a 4060ti. Given that a P40 right now is about $150.00, I recommend it if you want to spend on something 24 GB now. Not sure how it is for gaming, but I would recommend the 3090 if you want to game.

A P40 performs like a 1080Ti with double the memory if you actually manage to get the drivers to work, I was only ever able to get 720p working on mine so it was still shit for games

 

[LegoTugboat]

A bit of an interesting tidbit from Notebookcheck. They're reporting that the M4 Pro uses LPDDR5x 8533 MHz RAM.

No word on if the base M4's using it in Macs, or the LPDDR5 7500 MHz that the M4 iPad used in May.

 

[Dawdler]

Funny story about intel's 487 (math coprocessor of the 486) - it was actually a full 486. All it did when inserted into the coprocessor socket of an SX was disable that CPU and do all the work, and no, you couldn't just use it by itself, it wouldn't work in the CPU socket and it would also detect and not work if it didn't see the 486SX present. Goes to show you intel has always been full of shit and tech corpos always have been like this and it's not a recent phenomenon (although it's hard to overstate intel's very steady and reliable, almost traditional scumminess). From that generation on the FPU was *always* internal. Speed demanded it and the idea of something like an external FPU nowadays would be preposterous at the latencies we are talking about here. You'd have to invent time travel first.

Very true, 486sx was just dx with fpu disabled. So basically, you were buying two cpu's for price of one.
The intel rebrandeons with celerons that had absolutely no cache and other crap towards pentium d, pentium n and other desktop garbage just shows how much shit you can sell and cpus that are better used as sand on beach. Remember RDRAM RIMMS ? That had worse performance than slightly tuned SDR system and completely fell on face in a DDR sys....

zoomers don't know the horror of socket 7
hard mode: doing it upright in a barely lit case.

Hardest mode, upper tab was against psu. Good luck.

I repaired many mobos that were damaged by a screw driver

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

zoomers don't know the horror of socket 7

Boomers don't know any of these horrors, no heatsink required or the heatsink came fucking glued to the CPU.

There's a part of that video that I clipped. It is important to watch it with the sound cranked up.

The intel rebrandeons with celerons that had absolutely no cache and other crap towards pentium d, pentium n and other desktop garbage just shows how much shit you can sell and cpus that are better used as sand on beach.

No no no, that was great. The first celerons with any L2 cache was such garbage that they had to add at least a little bit and they created a monster! Dual socket CPU support, running FB/Regged RAM and all kinds of shit that you would buy their new Xeons for. Why would anyone even bother to check if that was even available on a ~$100 CPU... that with a click in the BIOS and some 100mhz SDRAM would go head to head with their fastest and most expensive consumer CPU. This was when the price balance between graphics cards and CPUs were the opposite of what they are now.
That's number one on my list of Top 3 'oopsies'.

 

[Betonhaus]

zoomers don't know the horror of socket 7
hard mode: doing it upright in a barely lit case

I think AM3 or something used the same style of clip, as I distinctly remember swapping out the Watercooler for an air cooler on a system that used a clip like that