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

Betonhaus said:
SAS drives are designed to be used in enterprise cases where they are constantly random reading writing data 24/7. If you're only using it for anyone server that has maybe three people streaming at once, even a half worn out drive will last quite a while.
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So.....what? Spend more money on a lower durability, slower, lower warranty drive because...new? And can still fail out of the box?
 
Just Some Other Guy said:
Or you could spend $200 on better drives with the same warranty.

*Edit* $90 buckaroos. 12tb ultrastar. 5yr warranty. Great seller rating with shitload of sales:

750k hr durability on a blue vs 2.5mil on the ultrastar.
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Ebay... ah hello darkness my old friend. I find it sketchy man. And I won't be running it that hard.
Just Some Other Guy said:
So.....what? Spend more money on a lower durability, slower, lower warranty drive because...new? And can still fail out of the box?
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I mean anything can fail out of the box man.
 
Just Some Other Guy said:
So.....what? Spend more money on a lower durability, slower, lower warranty drive because...new? And can still fail out of the box?
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I can buy a 8TB drive from a guy off Facebook for $70, and I've worked with him before and he sells a LOT of drives and tests them
I can't seem to find an 8tb SAS drive new for anything under $250 unless I go to sketchy Chinese sites.
 
Betonhaus said:
I can buy a 8TB drive from a guy off Facebook for $70, and I've worked with him before and he sells a LOT of drives and tests them
I can't seem to find an 8tb SAS drive new for anything under $250 unless I go to sketchy Chinese sites.
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Right. So why care about buying new then? It means zero.

*Edit* FWIW the recert Exos I got had power on ratings of about 70hr. Unless they can reset that data in the process, idk. It's claimed that recert from Seagate means non server pulls and they're the drives that get sent out for RMA purposes. Those were $95/pop from https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...s-512e-256mb-3-5-manufacturer-recertified-hdd

8tbs just aren't as common. Seems the goodness starts at 12 and up.
 
Just Some Other Guy said:
Right. So why care about buying new then? It means zero.

*Edit* FWIW the recert Exos I got had power on ratings of about 70hr. Unless they can reset that data in the process, idk. It's claimed that recert from Seagate means non server pulls and they're the drives that get sent out for RMA purposes. Those were $95/pop from https://serverpartdeals.com/collect...s-512e-256mb-3-5-manufacturer-recertified-hdd

8tbs just aren't as common. Seems the goodness starts at 12 and up.
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It's because I want it new man. That is all. I'm not going to be doing crazy shit with it. I don't need a tank. I just want high capacity and I want it NIB.
 
Overwritten Tapes said:
So I have this spare laptop, a hp 255 g3. I've upped the ram to 8gb which is the max. I've been using it to emulate old nes/snes/ps1 games. I've downloaded a ps2 emulator but it lags and is very choppy. Apparently my cpu/gpu isn't strong enough.

What would you recommend I upgrade? And what else will be needed to support any upgrades?

I literally just want to sometimes write front end web code and play old games on it, I don't want to buy a new laptop that I'll use once or twice a month at best.
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Emulators are latency sensitive, so a laptop is always going to be a gamble because of power management issues. You could have a good system on paper that microstutters like hell because of thermal limiting. I’ve used laptops that emulated great and others that were shit, and it didn’t directly correlate with the specs. You can tweak settings to help, but it can only go so far.

I recommend a platform that’s known for staying cool and having good battery life. That was Thinkpad T-series ten years ago, but I haven’t been paying attention recently. Go Intel over AMD.
 
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Yeah, calling Intel efficient is laughable. Their laptop CPUs aren't nearly as bad as their desktop CPUs, but the efficiency scale still goes Apple > AMD > Qualcomm >>> Intel.
 
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George Lucas said:
Emulators are latency sensitive, so a laptop is always going to be a gamble because of power management issues. You could have a good system on paper that microstutters like hell because of thermal limiting. I’ve used laptops that emulated great and others that were shit, and it didn’t directly correlate with the specs. You can tweak settings to help, but it can only go so far.
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You'll want to look out for power limits too. My AMD Thinkpad throttled even below 70 C in a number of workloads and I couldn't figure out what the hell was going on - turns out that it absolutely will not exceed 25 W even if the heatsink and fan are capable of keeping it cool.

Performance is still acceptable, but it's annoying to know that it could be significantly better if it was capable of maxing out the cooler's capacity.
 
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Overwritten Tapes said:
So I have this spare laptop, a hp 255 g3. I've upped the ram to 8gb which is the max. I've been using it to emulate old nes/snes/ps1 games. I've downloaded a ps2 emulator but it lags and is very choppy. Apparently my cpu/gpu isn't strong enough.

What would you recommend I upgrade? And what else will be needed to support any upgrades?
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Emulation tends to be single-threaded and resource-intensive, because certain games would exploit the hardware in unique ways that a PC GPU can't do very efficiently. I would recommend an ASUS gaming laptop with an NVIDIA GPU. These tend to be able to run hot and, importantly, stay hot because they can blow off enough heat to keep the clock speed high. Battery life will suck, though, I get no more than about 2.5 hours out of mine under minimal loading, and gaming needs to stay plugged into the wall.

Betonhaus said:
AMD is consistently cheaper and more powerful and poee efficient then Intel ever since Ryzen game out. You really haven't been paying attention
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This hasn't really been true in laptops. A major reason for this is that in laptop, the overall power management strategy and the design of the laptop itself matters a lot in total power efficiency, so efficiency benchmarks are often counterintuitive to what you'd think they'd be based on which chip was fabricated on which process node. The R9 8945 HS is, on a flop-per-watt level, under identical loads and identical clock speeds, more efficient than any Intel CPU on the chart (5% better than the Core Ultra 7, according to a chart in the article). But of course, things aren't identical, and in quite a few benchmarks, the specific ASUS ROG laptop it's in ends up gobbling a lot of power.

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Example, Intel's new Core Ultras consume significantly less power when idling than AMD's do, despite using a less efficient compute-per-watt chiplet design. That probably won't affect these specific benchmarks, but it's a good example of laptop power management that you don't really care about in desktops or servers.

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Source: https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-R...r-crunching-and-GPU-performance.802637.0.html
 
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The Ugly One said:
Intel's new Core Ultras consume significantly less power when idling than AMD's do
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AMD have ridiculously high idle power draws in general. It seems to come down to the memory controller, AMD consistently have worse IMCs than Intel, which is why all the RAM overclocking records are set with Intels, and why AMD tends to struggle just to drive two DIMM per channel at JEDEC.
 
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Overwritten Tapes said:
So I have this spare laptop, a hp 255 g3. I've upped the ram to 8gb which is the max. I've been using it to emulate old nes/snes/ps1 games. I've downloaded a ps2 emulator but it lags and is very choppy. Apparently my cpu/gpu isn't strong enough.

What would you recommend I upgrade? And what else will be needed to support any upgrades?

I literally just want to sometimes write front end web code and play old games on it, I don't want to buy a new laptop that I'll use once or twice a month at best.
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Emulation tends to be much more CPU than GPU intensive, as opposed to most gaming applications which tend to be much more GPU heavy. You don't really need a dedicated GPU at all if that is your focus. Any Xe Intel iGPU, a reasonable AMD Vega iGPU, or really any one with RDNA will run even up to Switch and PS3 emulation (albeit without a few things like jacking up the internal resolution to 4k). For PS2, pretty much anything 8th gen Intel onwards and any Ryzen AMD chip will run it, even with just the integrated graphics.
 
Does anyone else have experience with these cheap chink mini PCs? They seem like they would be a nice cheap option for a portable workstation, but I am always iffy on trusting chink shit, especially if their is malicious shit embedded in the bios.
 
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