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I recently bought an external PCIe enclosure so I could make use of a specific PCIe device in an editing setup. One of the nice things about this particular enclosure is that it also happens to come with an m.2 slot for NVME drives as well. Usually when I edit with my home set up, I'm provided with the storage by the client, and even if not, at the very least, video media, plus backups takes up a lot of room and NVME drives are expensive so I'd usually opt for something cheaper as the actual location for the footage and assets. I figured then that it might be take advantage of an NVME drive of a smaller, more affordable capacity and use it just as a location for video render cache that I just clear after every project wraps. The high speeds of these drives seems like it would be a good fit for this purpose. However I've heard that SSDs, including NVME are famously short lived and have particularly short life spans in terms of number of write operations. Is that still the case and would the constant writing and clearing of relatively small video files actually be kind of the worst use of one of these drives?
I’m looking to leverage the Thunderbolt port on my desktop to get more USB ports. Looking around and most Thunderbolt hubs are for laptops and have hdmi and Ethernet and such that I don’t really want. Does anyone have a recommendation for a simple hub? Some Type-a and c ports world be lovely.
(I am a noob. I have many misconceptions. I am willing to listen however, so please be kind) I wonder if: * a mini PC might be a good thing to lug around (instead of a laptop) * nice also because it is much cheaper than a laptop (due to different design constraints) * but whom to trust? Beelink and Minisforum come up in HackerNews discussions, but I have trust issues **My question:** which (mini) PC manufacturers are kind, reliable, trustworthy? My trust issues are: * I find it difficult to believe that I am buying anything of quality whether or not I am not paying a lot (briefly I had a period of hope where I thought that perhaps paying more in general would be a good thing as far as quality is concerned, and that hypothesis did not hold up) * I find it difficult to believe that most products created in China/Asia-more-generally are built with kindness in mind (kindness for the worker, kindness for the consumer, kindness for everything in between): e.g. see the plethora of absolute shit that floods Amazon, Temu, etc.) The second point, on China, deserves clarification: * I only mention China specifically because computer hardware in general is designed and produced there, and when mini PCs are concerned, most manufacturers are based in China: e.g. Beelink and Minisforum * it is not an issue of worker skill or product quality: I know I can get *excellent* goods that are worth far more than what they actually sell for (e.g. Chi-fi earbuds!), and that almost everything is made in Asia * I work for a company that produces goods in China, and "we" ""make"" (I make nothing) good stuff! Part of our edge comes from comes from the fact that my company's owner is Chinese and puts in a lot of care into working with factories that are kind (to their workers: clothing manufacturers are often shit to women and pay them less, because misogyny is a thing everywhere) --- they wouldn't have to put in this care if it wasn't a problem to begin with * my trust issue is ultimately due to: I think most persons working in the production chain for most goods that western consumers consume are *unhappy*, regardless of where they live (e.g. from the people who do the final delivery to our doorstep, to the people who initially mine the raw materials) * most of this anger is well-justified: e.g. my government and companies operating out of my country are in general, callous, but especially when it comes to Asians and Africans; some of this anger is due to how convenient it is for local leaders to make the "other" a problem, as a distraction * anyway, getting distracted, but my point is that: if a product I buy is being made by unhappy people, then I am going to be cursed for using it: it will be full of toxic chemicals *they* had to endure while making it, it will be full of their spite they have *for me* not paying enough for their hard work, etc. the list goes ever on (Sorry for this insanity.)
Hi, my laptop got fried because of getting caught in the rain :( I got a gaming laptop for work a few years ago, because appearantly the CPU AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX was about the best thing to be found for updating some ridiculously complicated excel power query circusses at work, according to the internet back then (i think I found that info on pc master race on reddit before the reddit-api-fall), and finding those CPU's in business laptops was rather difficult at the time. They were right, this CPU handled the queries like a walk in the park. Is the AMD Ryzen 9 6900H* still a very good CPU for this kind of thing, or should I put in a lot more time investigating again, is there better cost-efficiency available now in other CPU? Sorry if this is not a right place for this question. I'm usually not really a hardware guy. Just need a CPU that handles this Excel shit as fast as possible, preferably without locking up the entire machine and without being as noisy as an F16 getting ready for lift off. On "regular" work laptops with i5 or i7, these files can take literally over an hour to update.
My understanding between TB4 and TB3 is that they're essentially the same, it's just that the standard of TB4 essentially mandates that the device *must* do all that TB3 maybe *could* do. Minimum bandwidth is increased and I think I read something about power delivery minimums as well. This eGPU chassis I bought came with it's own TB4 cable, which is actually the first Thunderbolt cable I've seen that specifically says "4" on it. I assume the reason they supplied this is because, given what it does, an eGPU chassis is going to need to support some pretty bandwidth for a GPU. In my case though, I'm actually using this chassis not for a balls to the wall kick ass Graphics card, but actually to allow me to attach an old and very humble i/o card from Blackmagic. It's currently working just fine for that purpose. Thing is, the supplied TB4 cable is pretty short and the chassis along with the ATX power supply mounted on it makes for a pretty hefty desk-space consuming setup. I'd like to move the whole setup somewhere fairly far off from the laptop to save me some precious desk space. I looked up 2m thunderbolt 4 cables which I understand is the longest distance you can get for TB4 and still maintain bandwidth and while it's not too bad, the prices are high for a cable. It occurs to me though that since I'm barely using a fraction of the available bandwidth anyway, could I use other, cheaper, long cables. USB4 comes up a lot in my search for 2m TB4 cables for example. (although they are mostly from AliExpress so don't know how good an idea it is to buy from them). If the chassis has TB4 controllers in it, as does the laptop to which it's attached, can one just put a USB4 cable between them? Are they physically different? For that matter, since my bandwidth needs are so tiny, could I just find cheaper, longer TB3 cables?
I don't know my terminology very well. I just bought this eGPU enclosure. It also comes with an m.2 slot I suspect that's probably what this 4 pin power slot is for. I have a spare ATX PSU to power this thing with and it's not modular, the cables come out of the PSU box in a big messy bundle and there's no where to detach or attach cables. There's lots of different connectors that come out of this bundle but alas no square arrangement of 2 rows of 2 pins as needed by this chassis. There are however 2 such connectors that are kind of joined together through a little plastic catch, but in a manner where you can slide them apart. It's clearly intended that you can be *able* to separate these if you want to, but them being attached to each other in the first place has me a little worried. The cable from which they each branch has TKG written on it and each of the connectors has L and R printed on it respectively. If I separate them, I can definitely fit one in to the slot, but is there any reason one shouldn't do this? UPDATE: It works!! Initially the chassis wouldn't power on but I discovered that if I simply don't plug in the 4 pin slot at all then it does. I'm pretty sure that slot is for powering an m.2 drive if you have one and that was one of the things that made me decide to buy this particular chassis so it doesn't look great but I'm hoping that if I actually had an m.2 drive to test it with, that plugging in that PSU connector to the 4 pin slot would work, but at the moment, when there is no such drive connected, the entire chassis doesn't power on. Even better still, the blackmagic card works!! This is great because the manufacturer actually responded to my email asking if it would work too late and I had already ordered it and they said it wouldn't work so the fact that it does is a big relief. Word of advice for anyone testing this with standard computer monitors instead of proper reference monitors like me, it might say "out of range" or similar on your monitor for a lot of standard video frame rates, but for testing purposes, I was able to get it to work at 60p. No good for a real project, but hopefully with a real reference monitor that wouldn't be an issue.
I occasionally do some paid editing work in my home suite. I use a MBP and I just use whatever storage I have left on external drives or buy new ones as the project budget permits. Most of the time, my work is done on-site using a production company's facilities so it's not a big time operation here at home. I also like to download and watch video over my wifi to to TV or my phone in other rooms of the house (don't typically move the laptop much). I tend to use the laptop's internal drive for that. I'm beginning to outgrow my storage for both purposes, but only just. I could continue as I am for quite some time, deleting media at home after I watch it, and buying physically fairly small drives to put away in cupboards for work. However, I'm thinking I could fix both storage needs for a very long time by spending a bit bigger (but not *MUCH*), and getting a proper RAID. My mind immediately went to NAS, but it occurs to me that, that mightn't necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way to go given the limited scope of my needs. My home network is very slow consumer equipment, and I have no ethernet infrastructure at all. I thought I could maybe just hook the NAS up to the laptop via ethernet but then at that point, isn't that just DAS with the extra complications of networking? Would I need a switch between the 2? My home streaming is just done over wifi, since everything is compressed media anyway. If I buy a decent thunderbolt DAS RAID and expose it to the wifi network via the laptop, would the costs stack up in terms of power consumption and wear and tear of the expensive lappy (given it'd be powered on nearly constantly)? Are there NAS devices that I can directly attach to the lappy for editing, but leave on and connected to wifi for home streaming? Would it need any additional networking equipment in that use case? Can I run jellyfin on it? I feel like a NAS doesn't make sense but would like help puzzling this out.
www.phoronix.com
Last Wednesday was the review embargo for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Zen 5 desktop processors that proved to be very exciting for Linux workloads from developers to creators to AVX-512 embracing AI and HPC workloads. Today the review embargo lifts on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X and as expected given the prior 6-core/8-core tests: these new chips are wild! The Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X are fabulous processors for those engaging in heavy real-world Linux workloads with excellent performance uplift and stunning power efficiency. I have been very much enjoying my time testing out AMD's Zen 5 wares from the Ryzen AI 300 series to the Ryzen 9000 series. The Ryzen 5 9600X / Ryzen 7 9700X were great for whetting my appetite while awaiting the Ryzen 9 9900 series. I had been very much enjoying them to the extent I was rather surprised myself last week when hearing of some reviewers not finding much excitement out of these new Zen 5 processors but typically those just looking at Windows gaming performance or running only a few canned/synthetic benchmarks. Following the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Linux testing when the Ryzen 9 9900X/9950X arrived, they were put immediately to my gauntlet of hundreds of Linux benchmarks and indeed living up to expectations.
Will AMD release a Ryzen 9000 processor analogous to the Ryzen 9 7900? Non x variant.
www.wired.com
Samy Kamkar's latest at Defcon. Archive link: https://archive.ph/UtTtp
Keyboards have been around for over 40 years and since then not much has really changed in terms of the standard keyboard functionality at the driver/os level. In the past decade we have seen quite a few keyboards coming out with analogue keys which is great but they are really sketchy to try and actually use for anything as it's not something an OS expects a keyboard to be doing so you need special 3rd party drivers/software which often don't get used in a truly analogue way anyway. For example in a lot of games analogue directional sticks are the norm, so altering movement speed/sneaking based off the analogue amount is pretty normal, however when you get to PCs you just get keydown/keyup events so you can't process it in an analogue way. So given we are seeing more keyboards coming out with this functionality at a lower price point is there any company/person/body trying to put together a standard that would allow for analogue key events at OS level or even DirectX (DirectInput) / OpenGl? I imagine the answer is no, but wanted to ask incase anyone in the know had more info.
www.phoronix.com
Motherboard vendors have begun releasing updated BIOS versions for Intel Core 13th/14th Gen motherboards that offer the new "0x129" CPU microcode that is intended to address the Raptor Lake stability issues that have been causing instability problems and crashing errors for a growing number of Intel Core 13th/14th Gen processors. Intel reported in their (Windows) testing that the 0x129 CPU microcode should offer negligible performance impact but I was curious to run my benchmarks under Linux of this new CPU microcode.
wccftech.com
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/18516067
I wouldn't want to find out the hard way. I have a BMD decklink 4k mini monitor PCIe card. I used to use it in a PC, but I upgraded to a laptop. To replace with an external input device is too expensive unless I downgrade capability significantly. PCIe chassis are more expensive than expected but I've noticed ones that specifically call themselves 'eGPU enclosures'. For some reason when they're marketed to that specific purpose, they cost a lot less, probably because they often don't come with power supplies (which I actually have spare). I'm looking at 2 such eGPU enclosures and they are a decent price and I think they should work, but I'm a little scared by them specifically saying "eGPU". Would I likely have any problems buying one of those for my PCIe device rather than for a graphics card? Or is PCIe, PCIe regardless?
www.phoronix.com
The AMD Ryzen 9000 series starting with the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X launching tomorrow are some truly great desktop processors. The generational uplift is very compelling, even in single-threaded Linux workloads shooting ahead of Intel's 14th Gen Core competition, across nearly 400 benchmarks these new Zen 5 desktop CPUs impress, and these new Zen 5 desktop processors are priced competitively. I was already loving the Ryzen 7000 series performance on Linux with its AVX-512 implementation and performing so well across hundreds of different Linux workloads but now with the AMD Ryzen 9000 series, AMD is hitting it out of the ball park. That paired with the issues Intel is currently experiencing for the Intel Core 13th/14th Gen CPUs and the ~400 benchmark results makes this a home run for AMD on the desktop side with only some minor Linux caveats.
I'm looking to replace a 6TB G-Drive for my Mac. I'm considering the OWC Express 1M2 NVMe enclosure along with a WD Black 4TB SN850X. The drive is mostly used as my photography drive. I work off of it with Capture One. About 20% of it is archive data. I'd like to upgrade to SSD for the sake of longevity and speed. And because I find the ticking and knocking my existing drive makes to be annoying. And because MacOS does this weird thing where opening random apps causes the external HDD to spin up and stalls operation. I fear everyday that this seven year old drive is suddenly going to die on me. Just looking for some suggestions if anyone's familiar with these OWC + WD products or if you'd recommend something else.
www.anandtech.com
Back at Computex 2024, AMD unveiled their highly anticipated Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture during AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su's opening keynote. AMD announced not one but two new client platforms that will utilize the latest Zen 5 cores. This includes AMD's latest AI PC-focused chip family for the laptop market, the Ryzen AI 300 series. In comparison, the Ryzen 9000 series caters to the desktop market, which uses the preexisting AM5 platform. Built around the new Zen 5 CPU microarchitecture with some fundamental improvements to both graphics and AI performance, the Ryzen AI 300 series, code-named Strix Point, is set to deliver improvements in several areas. The Ryzen AI 300 series looks set to add another footnote in the march towards the AI PC with its mobile SoC featuring a new XDNA 2 NPU, from which AMD promises 50 TOPS of performance. AMD has also upgraded the integrated graphics with the RDNA 3.5, which is designed to replace the last generation of RDNA 3 mobile graphics, for better performance in games than we've seen before. Further to this, during AMD's recent Tech Day last week, AMD disclosed some of the technical details regarding Zen 5, which also covers a number of key elements under the hood on both the Ryzen AI 300 and the Ryzen 9000 series. On paper, the Zen 5 architecture looks quite a big step up compared to Zen 4, with the key component driving Zen 5 forward through higher instructions per cycle than its predecessor, which is something AMD has managed to do consistently from Zen to Zen 2, Zen 3, Zen 4, and now Zen 5.
www.techpowerup.com
Zen 5 marks the fifth generation of AMD's winning Zen series CPU microarchitectures that have turned a once written-off company in the processor market back to competitiveness. It seems like just a couple of years have gone by, but AMD Zen is now into its seventh year, and the company has transitioned two desktop sockets, five chipset series, and seven processor lines. The new Zen 5 microarchitecture powers the new AMD Ryzen 9000 series "Granite Ridge" processors on the desktop, the all important Ryzen AI 300 series "Strix Point" processors on notebooks, and the 5th Gen EPYC "Turin" server processors. AMD is planning to launch the new server processors a little later this year, but has dedicated Summer 2024 to its client segment—desktops and notebooks. The new Zen 5 microarchitecture builds on AMD's proven CPU core technology, and doesn't try anything fancy like its generational counterpart from Intel, the Lion Cove P-core used on Arrow Lake. Zen 5 still brings a double-digit percentage IPC gain over the previous generation, and introduces several efficiency improvements over Zen 4 thanks not just to its newer 4 nm process, but also a host of other innovations. AMD was able to increase clock speeds, and lower TDP across the desktop processor lineup, while still achieving good performance gains.
www.youtube.com
What's Being Done? 13:30 - the systems deployed for both companies with either one of these processors to within one percentage Point are experiencing the same stability issues even disabling ecores has not fully resolved the issue for one of these companies the error rate also seems to be going up over time on the server side
I've found 2 vintage desktops from around the 2000's era. One already had a broken power supply that won't even turn on (and thankfully didn't break anything else). The other desktop had a working ATX PSU, but it just blew out a few days ago. The PSU is an Elitech LC-B450E and I believe it has 4 molex connectors. Now, I was wondering, would it be possible to repair the PSU (not that I would do that myself because I don't even know how to solder)? If not, would it be possible to get a relatively new one that's compatible?
