'No Stupid Questions' (NSQ) Internet & Technology Edition

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

Okay, definitely probably the last set of dumb questions before finally ordering everything.
Do individual components come with everything necessary packaged (CPU cooler, thermal paste, screws and SATA cables, etc) or do I need to buy everything separately these days? If so, should Never mind, I checked AMD's page, and Ryzen 5s do come with a stock AMD Wraith Spire cooler with pre-applied thermal paste. However, manufacturers generally don't bundle cables with disk drives. Should I buy "better" thermal paste for example? Liquid metal is pretty bad, but there's still stuff like Cooler Master IC E2, Arctic MX-4 or Titan Nano Grease.

Plz no bully the last time I built a desktop was around the time power connectors started appearing on video cards. I had a friend who fried his brand spanking new GeForce uhhhh 7800 GTX I think it was.

 

[Kosher Dill]

However, manufacturers generally don't bundle cables with disk drives.

If you're buying a new motherboard, that will likely come with some SATA cables, but you should check on that.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

If you're buying a new motherboard, that will likely come with some SATA cables, but you should check on that.

No info about that, but a friend has a couple spares lying around, so it's all good.
However, I'm back to square one with cooling, since allegedly the bundled AMD Wraith Spire can't keep a Ryzen 5 cool enough.

 

[ce gars]

Since hardware sales are coming up, I've been wanting to upgrade my Ryzen 5 1600, but I'm a little torn on what I should upgrade to. On the one hand, the 5600X is launching soon, with nice improvements to IPC and such, but at $300, and on the other, I could get a 3700X for that price.

Is it worth it to wait for a 5600X, or just go for the 3700X? The reason I've been eyeing a 3700X is I like to do some video editing as a side hobby, but I'm an indecisive dummy when it comes to this stuff.

 

[Bongocat]

Since hardware sales are coming up, I've been wanting to upgrade my Ryzen 5 1600, but I'm a little torn on what I should upgrade to. On the one hand, the 5600X is launching soon, with nice improvements to IPC and such, but at $300, and on the other, I could get a 3700X for that price.

Is it worth it to wait for a 5600X, or just go for the 3700X? The reason I've been eyeing a 3700X is I like to do some video editing as a side hobby, but I'm an indecisive dummy when it comes to this stuff.

I usually have a general rule not to update when new products are right around the corner like that. I would wait and see what the performance/reviews/benchmarks say. The only thing that's been keeping me from jumping to Ryzen is their IPC and single core issues (the performance is significantly lower than you'd expect from the clockspeed). If the 5000 series fixes that, I'm on board.

 

[ce gars]

I usually have a general rule not to update when new products are right around the corner like that. I would wait and see what the performance/reviews/benchmarks say. The only thing that's been keeping me from jumping to Ryzen is their IPC and single core issues (the performance is significantly lower than you'd expect from the clockspeed). If the 5000 series fixes that, I'm on board.

I ask because if I go for a 5000 series, I figure I'll probably have to upgrade my motherboard as well. I bought a Crosshair VII with the intention of upgrading to a 3600, but then this lockdown stuff started up, so I decided to save my money just in case. I don't want to have to play around with BIOS updates, and if I ever decide to spring for one of AMD's new GPUs, it'd be nice to not miss out on extra performance just because of my mobo.

 

[Bongocat]

I ask because if I go for a 5000 series, I figure I'll probably have to upgrade my motherboard as well. I bought a Crosshair VII with the intention of upgrading to a 3600, but then this lockdown stuff started up, so I decided to save my money just in case. I don't want to have to play around with BIOS updates, and if I ever decide to spring for one of AMD's new GPUs, it'd be nice to not miss out on extra performance just because of my mobo.

Yeah, I would assume you'd need a mobo upgrade to run the new Ryzens. That's pretty much a given with all processor generations.

Two things though:

1) BIOS updates are not nearly as scary as they used to be. I think most asus boards now should have EZFlash and CrashFree that will let you rollback to a previous firmare if something goes horribly wrong.

2) Mobo doesn't really affect performance any (unless AMD did something strange that i'm not aware of). Manufactures SAY it does, but in those cases they're usually just applying (basically) slight overclocking settings as a marketing tool. It's scummy but it's legal somehow.

The main thing with mobos is quality of their power delivery and heat management. That's a more detailed topic than I can go into here. Watch some stuff from Gamer's Nexus if you want to know more. The basic point is, once you have a mobo that meets your needs sufficiently (without cutting corners), there's no benefit in going higher budget.

 

[ce gars]

Yeah, I would assume you'd need a mobo upgrade to run the new Ryzens. That's pretty much a given with all processor generations.

Two things though:

1) BIOS updates are not nearly as scary as they used to be. I think most asus boards now should have EZFlash and CrashFree that will let you rollback to a previous firmare if something goes horribly wrong.

2) Mobo doesn't really affect performance any (unless AMD did something strange that i'm not aware of). Manufactures SAY it does, but in those cases they're usually just applying (basically) slight overclocking settings as a marketing tool. It's scummy but it's legal somehow.

The main thing with mobos is quality of their power delivery and heat management. That's a more detailed topic than I can go into here. Watch some stuff from Gamer's Nexus if you want to know more. The basic point is, once you have a mobo that meets your needs sufficiently (without cutting corners), there's no benefit in going higher budget.

With the BIOS thing, maybe I read completely wrong, but I thought they were having to cut support for earlier CPUs to squeeze in the new ones in their BIOS? If I completely misread that though, then it's a non-issue.

The mobo thing is more AMD promising a performance uplift if you use a combo of motherboards made for the 5000 series and their new GPUs+CPUs, but that could also be not worth it. I'm honestly happy with my current one as long as nothing terrible happens to it. I'm also eyeing an 8 core because of new consoles, but if the 5600 ends up being a good performance uplift compared to what they have now, that's probably better.

 

[Bongocat]

The mobo thing is more AMD promising a performance uplift if you use a combo of motherboards made for the 5000 series and their new GPUs+CPUs

I just had to finally go dig into AMD's statements. Man, I'm used to Intels upgrade protocol which is typically a lot more cut and dry.

I guess all I can say is that you can probably just update one piece at a time, really. I would wait until the 5600 is out and if it's just a wallop of a boost, go with that. Worst case, it's not what you need but then the 3600 might drop in price because of it. You can grab the GPU later and if you don't use it in a way that you notice the missing performance, then I just wouldn't worry about it. You can upgrade your mobo later if you decide you want that extra boost.

Really, it sounds like you've got a pretty stress free upgrade path provided your mobo already works with the 5000 series.

 

[ce gars]

Worst case, it's not what you need but then the 3600 might drop in price because of it.

Funny enough, that was what I was originally going to go with before I saw the price of the 5600X, then decided maybe I should look at the 3700X. Here's hoping it's not a paper launch and I can actually get one if it all works out.

 

[Bongocat]

Funny enough, that was what I was originally going to go with before I saw the price of the 5600X, then decided maybe I should look at the 3700X. Here's hoping it's not a paper launch and I can actually get one if it all works out.

oh, I kept saying 3600 and meant the 3700. oops. retcon. it's like 12:30 here.

 

[ce gars]

oh, I kept saying 3600 and meant the 3700. oops. retcon. it's like 12:30 here.

It's 1:30 here and I just remembered these things actually release today. I guess the tiredness crept up on both of us.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

No info about that, but a friend has a couple spares lying around, so it's all good.
However, I'm back to square one with cooling, since allegedly the bundled AMD Wraith Spire can't keep a Ryzen 5 cool enough.

The Wraith Spire, while puny in size, is about the same size of coolers Intel shipped on hotter chips. I think 3.8-3.9ghz is how far the R5 2600(3.4ghz stock) can be pushed on the Wraith Spire, with better cooling it goes up to 4.2ghz. Idle temps will be higher but it's not the worst cooler ever.
Buying a new and better one is a good idea but there's no rush.

There's also an upside of using the stock one if you've been away from building computers for a long time: it's easy to figure out how mounting is done. Toss the shit around the CPU socket, put the cooler on on, make sure the cpu back plate is in place, tighten the retention screws until they click, done. Later on when you buy an aftermarket cooler you do the same thing, except now there's very likely more crap involved like mounting bars, the shape is different, but you already know how a modern AM4 cooler should fit and will realize if you're missing something or doing something wrong. That's just my opinion.

 

[The Fool]

I don't see a Brave thread so I'll just post here whatever

Does the Tor tab feature not work for anyone else? I tried to open the KF onion twice, first time it did nothing, second time it fucking crashed. I've never used Tor so I'm not familiar with how it works. Although even if I need to set something up I'm pretty sure it's not meant to fucking crash.

 

[Rafal Gan Ganowicz]

Some dirty shitcunt put me on a robocaller today. Calling from different fax #s every 60 seconds. Had to change my phone # after 14 hours of it. What IS this necromancy, and how do I do it back to him?

 

[Basil II]

redpill me on the BSDs and why I should use them over Linux.

 

[Least Concern]

redpill me on the BSDs and why I should use them over Linux.

The license is the biggest difference. Modern GNU/Linux ( ) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3. Holy fuck, look at this thing. It's pretty much the same kind of word salad you click through without reading when you install commercial software, and it's full of restrictions on what you are absolutely not allowed to do with that software.

Now let's look at the BSD license. Aww, it's so tiny. You could probably read the whole thing out loud in a single breath if you tried. It's much easier to understand and really doesn't have any restrictions to speak of. If you get a piece of code which is BSD-licensed, you can do pretty much whatever you damn well please with it.

You don't care about licenses because you're just an end user so you're not really worried about redistribution and so on? Okay, fine. You might like FreeBSD because it uses ports for software installation, rather than packages. What's the difference? Packages are pre-compiled, so installing them is basically the same as downloading and extracting a ZIP file on your system. With ports, your system downloads the original source code of the software, applies patches to get it to run on (in this case) FreeBSD, and then compiles it right there on the system. This means there's a lot of options about what bits and pieces you can choose to have compiled in to the final result. That sounds complicated, but FreeBSD's default ports manager uses a pretty Curses interface, so it can be just a matter of scrolling through a list and checking off the parts you like or unchecking the ones you don't need. And theoretically speaking optimizations specific to your hardware can be applied to the project as it's compiling for an extra speed boost, though in practice it might not be that much of a difference. Some other Linuxes have port managers too, but FreeBSD's has been around basically since its inception and works really well.

As for OpenBSD, it mostly expects you to use packages like most Linux distros, but I do like that significant parts, and I mean significant, of the current POSIX ecosystem originates and, in some cases, is still largely developed by the OpenBSD team. OpenSSH, LibreSSL, TMUX, OpenBGP, and PF are all OpenBSD projects and see use far beyond OpenBSD itself (and I'm sure I'm forgetting some). Their team deserves your attention and support even if you ultimately don't use their OS.

 

[Pomniman]

Is there any way for me to access my currently useless BAT tokens on Brave if I'm not able to make an Uphold account due to Uphold not currently being allowed to operate in my location?

 

[gangweedfan]

Hello Internet Today I have been playing with windows firewall and it really drains on me how everytime I want to block something with it I have to open up windows firewall and go through the whole process of adding a rule and navigating to the file location. Is there any third party firewall program or shortcut I can use to speed this up? Ideally I just want to right click a program and choose an option like "block with windows firewall". Also I already tried comodo Firewall and it was even worse.

 

[Boris Blank's glass eye]

The Wraith Spire, while puny in size, is about the same size of coolers Intel shipped on hotter chips. I think 3.8-3.9ghz is how far the R5 2600(3.4ghz stock) can be pushed on the Wraith Spire, with better cooling it goes up to 4.2ghz. Idle temps will be higher but it's not the worst cooler ever.
Buying a new and better one is a good idea but there's no rush.

There's also an upside of using the stock one if you've been away from building computers for a long time: it's easy to figure out how mounting is done. Toss the shit around the CPU socket, put the cooler on on, make sure the cpu back plate is in place, tighten the retention screws until they click, done. Later on when you buy an aftermarket cooler you do the same thing, except now there's very likely more crap involved like mounting bars, the shape is different, but you already know how a modern AM4 cooler should fit and will realize if you're missing something or doing something wrong. That's just my opinion.

It's a reasonable opinion, thank you. I have already ordered everything and decided to toss in a beefier cooler in case every positive reviewer is a paid shill and the negatives are right.
I won't be trying OCing for a while I think.