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

[Intel Core Ultra 7 265k]

Read the specs for the Z1 Extreme. This seems like it would be a pretty good CPU for daily computer use if you hook whatever handheld it's in up to a monitor and keyboard.

 

[4090 Chad]

Read the specs for the Z1 Extreme. This seems like it would be a pretty good CPU for daily computer use if you hook whatever handheld it's in up to a monitor and keyboard.

It’s held back by its limited TDP, but it has gotten impressive how capable these APUs are even with limited power.

I’d love to see what the switch 2’s chip could do if it could go up to like 40-50 watts.

 

[Intel Core Ultra 7 265k]

It’s held back by its limited TDP, but it has gotten impressive how capable these APUs are even with limited power.

I’d love to see what the switch 2’s chip could do if it could go up to like 40-50 watts.

What chip does the switch 2 have

 

[4090 Chad]

What chip does the switch 2 have

Nvidia’s tegra processor based on Ampere architecture.

 

[Betonhaus]

It’s held back by its limited TDP, but it has gotten impressive how capable these APUs are even with limited power.

I’d love to see what the switch 2’s chip could do if it could go up to like 40-50 watts.

You think we would ever see the Z series in a Mini PC?

Edit nevermind

https://videocardz.com/newz/first-amd-ryzen-z1-powered-mini-pc-has-been-tested-z1-extreme-variant-in-the-works

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

You think we would ever see the Z series in a Mini PC?

Edit nevermind

https://videocardz.com/newz/first-amd-ryzen-z1-powered-mini-pc-has-been-tested-z1-extreme-variant-in-the-works

I remember that. It probably doesn't make sense to use versus a regular Phoenix or Strix SKU given Z-series is "optimized" for battery life, allegedly.

BUT the Z2 Extreme disables 4 cores while retaining full Radeon 890M graphics (16 CUs), which might be a worthwhile tradeoff in a still TDP-constrained mini PC. If it's not cheaper for manufacturers than full 12-core Strix Point, then I shrug.

Memory bandwidth should usually be the bottleneck rather than graphics clocks though. Which is why 880M (12 CUs) is not far behind.

 

[Premium Dog Food]

Are mikrotik routers any good? Thinking of buying one for home use. I know little about networking but I am not afraid to learn.

 

[Fcret]

Are mikrotik routers any good? Thinking of buying one for home use. I know little about networking but I am not afraid to learn.

I have a gigabit wired router from them that I'm mostly using like a managed switch. It's actually fairly easy to use - most of the stuff you'll need for normal usage can be done via a straightforward web gui.

I wouldn't recommend their products if you're a 90 IQ normoid but anyone in this thread should probably not have any really issues setting them up.

 

[Post Reply]

Are mikrotik routers any good? Thinking of buying one for home use. I know little about networking but I am not afraid to learn.

I have a mikrotik router and AP, they've been great for learning some networking. My gear is a few years old so I am looking to upgrade soon. For a few years, their wireless access points had some driver issues which have supposedly been resolved recently. I was debating whether to risk it or just use a third party AP in bridge mode.

 

[Slav Power]

Are mikrotik routers any good? Thinking of buying one for home use. I know little about networking but I am not afraid to learn.

They're probably the cheapest and simultaneously most robust networking hardware you can get for home use. They have a fairly steep learning curve to them but there are enough guides and documentations to get you through. Note that they aren't exactly the best when it comes to WiFi, with the aforementioned driver issues as well as being incapable of keeping up with the current standards, so if you want 6GHz WiFi or WiFi7/802.11be, you'll want to get another device from a vendor that offers more modern WiFi standards like Ubiquiti. If not, then a good all-rounder would be a hAP ax3. If you only want a powerful wired router, then get the RB5009.

There isn't much sense in getting anything else besides these two for your home network. L009 has the same guts as the hAP ax lite at a considerably higher price so it's a waste of money. The hEX E50UG refresh is decent enough if you want a very cheap wired router with RouterOS, but you have to be wary of whether or not you're getting the modern ARM version or the old MIPS version due to Mikrotik's confusing branding and it'll be limited in terms of how much traffic it can manage, especially without FastTrack. Remember that with RouterOS you can do just about anything and disabling the WiFi is trivial, so if you want to get the hAP ax3 and set it up as a wired router only it's entirely possible to do so.

Mine is configured in such a way that it only has two ports occupied: one for the ONT and one for the managed switch where I do VLAN splitting. Fifth port is configured exclusively for backup management access in case I fuck up TCP/IP connectivity. I've been messing around with RouterOS for a while and I've made some glaring mistakes before getting the hang of how it all works and how to keep it locked down well so if you need help or tips about what cool shit you can do, feel free to ask.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

It's time to buy a new GPU. The new GPU is called the GeForce RTX 3050 A.

GeForce RTX 3050 refuses to die as Nvidia plans fifth iteration of its 2022 budget GPU — new Ada Lovelace-powered part suggests the name could even outlive Ampere silicon (archive)

The sooner Intel busts down the X3D wall = the sooner AMD has to charge less than $480 (street pricing $600) on release for it.

Intel Nova Lake Core Ultra 300K with 8P/16E cores to feature big L3 cache, aims to rival AMD 3D V-Cache (archive)

Turn on, plug in, drop out.

GPD WIN 5, the world’s first Ryzen AI MAX 395+ Strix Halo handheld, to debut on August 1 (archive)

 

[4090 Chad]

GPD WIN 5, the world’s first Ryzen AI MAX 395+ Strix Halo handheld, to debut on August 1

The battery life on that has to be dogshit, unless they managed to stuff a massive battery in to it as well.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

The battery life on that has to be dogshit, unless they managed to stuff a massive battery in to it as well.

Putting Strix Halo in a handheld is nutty and expensive, but it's not really infeasible when something like the ASUS ROG Ally X has a 50W profile. I think the crossover point for 16-core Strix Halo to start beating other APUs is around 20W, based on what I see in this video:

The 8-core 385 with one less CCD and only 32 CUs might do a little better for a handheld. Or it might be worse than the 16-core and 40 CUs with a CCD manually disabled, I don't know.

 

[los federales]

so it happens i've recently gotten a mikrotik:

Are mikrotik routers any good? Thinking of buying one for home use. I know little about networking but I am not afraid to learn.

my model is the CRS309-1G-8S+IN which was originally meant to be a switch but they enabled "gross misuse of the switch chip" and now it can do a reasonable amount of hardware accelerated router tasks right in routerOS with low power usage. it's definitely going to be my gateway drug into bigger and badder stuff but hopefully i can keep it all low power consumption.

had never looked at a tutorial of routerOS or anything before, also not a network administrator, but it was not too difficult. getting much better speeds (2 gigabit+) right at my PC since i also got it with a mellanox connectx 4 etc.

edit:
when you introduce SFP+ into the house there's definitely a cost curve to things, ive found that copper plugs are really expensive and definitely add up. it's cheaper long term to make as much things fiber as you can. there's no excuse when these mellanox cards are like $40 each and a single copper plug is more than that

 

[Premium Dog Food]

how to keep it locked down well

This is my main worry. Don't want to fuck up and somehow leave some service or port open that can be exploited or lock myself out of my stuff.
My plan is in the distant future to use wake on lan to wake up my workstation from the other side of the country and use it for hobby stuff. I will not be able to put hands on my workstation in any reasonable amount of time, nor have someone else put hands on it. I will most likely have a shit laptop so having a workstation to remote in would be quite comfy. Plus it could work as remote storage.
Currently eyeing the ax2 and ax3. ax3 is 30 bucks more expensive and it seems like the only thing it has over the ax2 is faster/better wifi (don't care), one 2.5Gbps port (no use) and a USB port.
My needs wifi wise are that it works. I use the phone for texting and the shit laptop to do some minor work stuff, none is bandwidth intensive. At worst, I can use my current router as an AP if it's somehow better than a newer router.

Spoiler: rambling

My current router, despite being 8 years old is decent hardware wise. What it lacks is good software. It's my old-old-old ISP router that I modded to unlock functionalities but over time stuff just stopped working. Doesn't help that it's using an ancient version of openwrt that can't be upgraded because of reasons beyond my understanding. I've slowly growing paranoid it might bite me in the ass someday and buying a router that actually gets updates will ease my worries.

 

[DavidS877]

wake on lan

As a backup I recommend a WiFi outlet with your PC set to power up when AC power comes on. Note, not a WiFi cloud outlet, just something when you connect to your VPN you can toggle over your home network.

(Works great until the AFCI/GFCI on that circuit blows for an unknown reason when you're out of town.)

 

[Slav Power]

This is my main worry. Don't want to fuck up and somehow leave some service or port open that can be exploited or lock myself out of my stuff.
My plan is in the distant future to use wake on lan to wake up my workstation from the other side of the country and use it for hobby stuff. I will not be able to put hands on my workstation in any reasonable amount of time, nor have someone else put hands on it. I will most likely have a shit laptop so having a workstation to remote in would be quite comfy. Plus it could work as remote storage.
Currently eyeing the ax2 and ax3. ax3 is 30 bucks more expensive and it seems like the only thing it has over the ax2 is faster/better wifi (don't care), one 2.5Gbps port (no use) and a USB port.
My needs wifi wise are that it works. I use the phone for texting and the shit laptop to do some minor work stuff, none is bandwidth intensive. At worst, I can use my current router as an AP if it's somehow better than a newer router.

Spoiler: rambling

My current router, despite being 8 years old is decent hardware wise. What it lacks is good software. It's my old-old-old ISP router that I modded to unlock functionalities but over time stuff just stopped working. Doesn't help that it's using an ancient version of openwrt that can't be upgraded because of reasons beyond my understanding. I've slowly growing paranoid it might bite me in the ass someday and buying a router that actually gets updates will ease my worries.

The ax3 also doesn't have a downclocked CPU, and it has a Level 6 license, but for home use it's meaningless.

However, the USB port is mighty useful in RouterOS. It can be used to hook up storage and create SMB shares, or to set up Linux containers that run directly on the router, if you're really creative you can hook up an SBC directly to it, you can hook up a UPS to then be able to act whenever you go into battery power, you can hook up an RS232 adapter for backup shell connection, or, and this is my favorite application, can be used to hook up your smartphone in USB tethering mode as it'll treat it as an LTE modem and that way you can have your mobile Internet applied to the entire network in case of an outage. USB hubs work to an extent as well.

The better WiFi in ax3 is also good to have just for the range so I'd still recommend going with the ax3. For the price it's still the best home router that you can get.

As for locking everything down, it takes a bit of knowledge to keep your security tight. First and foremost: the firewall and how it works. For example, here's a trimmed snippet of my filter rules based on Mikrotik's documentation:

/ip firewall filter
add action=drop chain=input comment="Drop invalid" connection-state=invalid
add action=accept chain=input comment="Accept established,related" connection-state=established,related
add action=accept chain=input comment="Router management" dst-port=22,80,8291 in-interface-list=LAN protocol=tcp src-address-list=allowed_to_router
add action=drop chain=input comment="Drop everything else"
add action=drop chain=forward comment="Drop invalid" connection-state=invalid
add action=accept chain=forward comment="Accept established,related" connection-state=established,related
add action=drop chain=forward comment="Drop tries to reach not public addresses from LAN" dst-address-list=not_in_internet in-interface-list=LAN log-prefix=!public_from_LAN out-interface-list=!LAN
add action=drop chain=forward comment="Drop all from WAN not DSTNATed" connection-nat-state=!dstnat connection-state=new in-interface-list=WAN
add action=drop chain=forward comment="Drop incoming from Internet which is not public IP" in-interface-list=WAN src-address-list=not_in_internet

The input chain is for traffic that goes into the router, and forward is the traffic that gets routed within it. The order of the rules on a given chain matters a lot, and while you can mix the chain rules they'll still be went through per chain so it's best to sort them like I do, first input, then forward, just to make it easier on yourself.

To go through the input chain, the first rule drops all invalid packets, so all the broken ones. It's the first thing in the chain just so that they get filtered before they go into the rest of the chain.
Next, you have accept established, related. This is what ultimately lets traffic go from the Internet to your router, assuming that it has been initiated from your network. It's the way you want your router to work, it won't let in any traffic just because it's coming in, but because something from within your network asked it to let it in, if that makes sense.

Router management and drop everything else. This here is something I kept bumbling around until I figured out exactly how the firewall works. If you were to swap these, you'd lose TCP access to the router. Why? The "Drop everything else" rule drops every packet that hasn't been accepted on the input chain up until this point. This includes any packets that are attempting to access the configuration ports of it. And if the rule that's meant to accept them is behind this one, then it doesn't do anything. That's why it has to be the penultimate rule where you allow your LAN devices to access the router.

The input chain is the one that you'll have to take care of the most here, but if you do it the explicit way like Mikrotik recommends, and do it right, then it's a tight configuration. It'll only let in the traffic that you tell it to let in. You can of course harden your configuration further, like in my case the router management rule declares the SSH, HTTP and WinBox port, the LAN interface list, the TCP protocol and the allowed_to_router address list where I define local addresses/subnets, and that's not including doing the same limits on the service ports and router management accounts. Normally just allowing everything from the LAN interface list where you do define just your LAN devices would be enough, but I made it extra tight. Speaking of the interface list, it's another important aspect of the configuration. RouterOS has no concept of a LAN or WAN port, and it's up to you to configure which port is for what, and then filter it appropriately. The LAN/WAN interface list is the simplest way to do this split, and as you can see the firewall relies on it to know what's meant to be treated hostile and what's okay.

I mean, I could go on and on explaining how to configure everything but this is already going in deep for someone who's yet to buy a Mikrotik router, but as you can see, RouterOS is a complicated, but an extremely powerful mess. There really isn't any other router firmware like this on the market, not even OpenWRT is this capable. Remember that Mikrotik still supports their 10 year old products with 16MB of FLASH with RouterOS v7 with all of these features, that's the sort of long term support that not even OpenWRT offers.

---

ANYWAYS A TL;DR​

Okay, so my advice is this:
1. Splurge out on the hAP ax3, the USB port will come in handy, the extra WiFi range as well, and it's CPU won't be clocked down to not overheat in that tiny form factor.
2. Play around with Mikrotik's demo router online to get the hang of RouterOS. It can be accessed via HTTPS, SSH as well as WinBox.
You'll want to mainly use SSH and WinBox. RouterOS' command line is important to know for configuration and scripting (yes, router scripting, it's fucking awesome), and WinBox is the WebUI but with multitasking which will be much needed with how complex RouterOS is. The neat part is that demo.mt.lv supports all three since it's a physical device in Mikrotik's HQ in Latvia so it's a very authentic RouterOS demo.
3. Read the fucking manual. With Mikrotik's documentation and their demo router you should be able to grasp the idea of how to use RouterOS.
4. If you want to do a sanity check on whether or not your configuration is tight, I recommend using Steve Gibson's ShieldsUP! test to make sure nothing is open.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

President Trump Wanted to Break NVIDIA —Until He Realized Jensen Was The “AI Warlord” and Said It’d Take a Decade to Beat Them, Even With The Greatest Minds Together

Intel Will Drop Out of the Cutting-Edge Chip Race If It Doesn’t See External Customer Interest, Possibly Marking the Fall of a Key Custodian of Moore’s Law

Intel Plans to Lay Off Up to a Whopping 30% of Its Workforce, Cutting Over 15,000 Jobs as CEO Lip-Bu Tan Declares That There Won’t Be Anymore “Blank Checks”

 

[4090 Chad]

Intel Plans to Lay Off Up to a Whopping 30% of Its Workforce, Cutting Over 15,000 Jobs as CEO Lip-Bu Tan Declares That There Won’t Be Anymore “Blank Checks”

I imagine that this means it's completely over for Intel Arc GPUs then. Really seems like the chink is just positioning Intel for acquisition.

 

[The Ugly One]

Intel Plans to Lay Off Up to a Whopping 30% of Its Workforce, Cutting Over 15,000 Jobs as CEO Lip-Bu Tan Declares That There Won’t Be Anymore “Blank Checks”

The entire chip market being dominated by a single supplier couldn't possibly be a bad thing.