For a long while now, I've heard it said that for most users "computers are more than fast enough." On the other hand, we have Wirth's Law: "software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."
For a typical user who just does e-mail, web browsing, and word processing… I suspect any reasonably current machine is, indeed, more than good enough.
I am not a typical user, so I find that I could always use more "computing power". I have been making do with an old PC but am now at a point where I need to consider an upgrade. Although I would love to get the biggest and fastest computer out there, finances are a factor as well. So, I'm considering getting a relatively recent, used machine. I'd rather not spend any more than I have to, but I'd also like to avoid buying a system only to find that it comes up short for my needs. So, before I take the plunge and make that investment, I thought I would reach out to my fellow Soylents and try to learn from your experiences.
In my own case, I have a laptop with an Athlon64 at 1 GHz (speed steps to 2GHz under load) with 1.25Gbytes RAM, 80 Gbytes HDD (at a measly 5400 RPM). I don't do any audio or video processing nor do I do any gaming, so graphics is not a real concern of mine. I would like to run some VMs so I could help out on this site's code development. Though it limits upgradability somewhat, I enjoy having the portability of a laptop.
What is your current system and what do you do with it? Is it fast enough? If not, where is it lacking? Do you find yourself running out of RAM? Need more storage space or faster I/O? Do you need a faster clock (serial processing) or more cores? Better graphics capabilities? What would you need in order for it to be ideal? If you had it to do over, what would you change?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Monday September 08 2014, @04:10PM
The last two or three computers I've had have been "more than enough" for typical domestic use: ie email, browsing, light office stuff, futzing with linux, p,laying videos & music, playing the odd game (not cutting edge games, admittedly). Until recently I always used laptops, due to a shortage of living space. They usually lasted me about 3 or 4 years each.
However I currently use a 5 or 6 year old Dell optipliex 755 (inherited from work) which I plugged it into the TV, bought a tiny wireless keyboard / mouse combo for and have been happy with ever since. It's a PC for when I need a PC, and a media centre when I boot into XBMC. Specs aren't great compared to modern machines but the only thing I've felt the need to upgrade was the hard drive (got a small SSD for the OS and a big spinning drive for data), and that's only because the media centre always needs moar media!
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday September 08 2014, @07:14PM
There's no such thing as "fast enough".
There is such a thing as "as fast as I'm willing to pay for".
Spending most of yesterday compiling (then recompiling after I fucked it up) a large system on a quad core machine with a a modest 6gig of memory pointed out to me that there is still a fairly large amount of time that I spend waiting for the machine.
That said, Yeah, I'd gladly pick up another similar machine even though its about as old as yours.
This thing has been a work horse, and hasn't given me any trouble if all the years I had it.
And there are quality machines that can be had second hand from corporate upgrades or other used markets. Just shitcan the drives, max out the memory, FRESH INSTALL your OS of choice and you can often be up and running on system for less than 300 bucks.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday September 08 2014, @08:01PM
I don't see the problem.
http://xkcd.com/303/ [xkcd.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by Hairyfeet on Tuesday September 09 2014, @01:20AM
Sure there is...is every single task you have finished fairly quickly? Would be able to tell without a stopwatch if somebody switched its guts for the latest and greatest? if the answer to 1 is yes and 2 is no then guess what? Its fast enough!
Take myself for example, I like to play games so one would THINK I'd need the latest and greatest but that simply isn't true anymore, in fact my current gaming PC is 5 years old! But 5 years ago we had hexacores which is honestly 4 cores more than most games use, and likewise 8GB of RAM is 4-5GB more than most games need. Could I blow a ton of money and get a faster system? Sure but I wouldn't be able to actually feel it , hell if I did a blind A/B test I seriously doubt I'd be able to tell one from the other. I have a customer who does 3D robotics designs on something even older, a Phenom I X3 with an HD4850 GPU and even with that 2007 era system his models render smooth as butter, 3d rotation is slick and fast, he is quite happy with the system.
So yes Virginia there is such a thing as fast enough, unless you are one of the 3% or so that slam the shit out of every cycle (like the guy I talked to that did impact simulations to design safer cars) or are one of those hobbyists that spend their time trying to get the high score on some leaderboard like CPU-Z or Passmark.
ACs are never seen so don't bother. Always ready to show SJWs for the racists they are.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @04:12PM
A few years ago, I got my current laptop: a Dell (I think an Inspiron model) that I got from their "business" site (they can be relatively low cost if you poke around and have Win 7 options.) The specs were, 15.6" monitor, a core i7 2640M CPU/GPU and the lowest amount of hard drive and RAM I could get (but added Bluetooth and dual band wifi.)
The first thing I did was add more RAM (8GB) and a year later added an SSD.
The thing is pretty quick for most normal stuff and even lets me play some games (World of Tanks, Wizard 101 with my son) on lower graphics options.
I suspect if your primary reason for using CPU's is VM's you might be better off with somethign with more cores, but I purposely looked for a lower cost notebook with faster clock speed (because many games still didn't use multiple cores as effectively as a single faster one back then.)
The only thing I really wish I had that it doesn't is a dedicated GPU for games (REALLY wish laptops would be designed to repalce/upgrade these!!!), but those models were outside my budget. Since you said no games, it's probably a good choice for you as well?
Hope this helps.
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday September 08 2014, @04:13PM
My rig was cobbled together from a couple litecoin mining rigs that stoped being profitable about 6 months ago.
Quad core AMD running at some number of GHz
16GB RAM running at another number of MHz
120GB ssd that seems to constantly be running out of space
1 AMD 7950 GPU
1 AMD 7850 GPU (they aren't SLI'd or whatever AMD calls their thing -- oh yea, Crossfire)
1 cheap gigabyte or maybe MSI motherboard
1 cheap case (the cheapest that money can buy)
It runs good for me. I mostly play DOTA, and for that the biggest thing is the GPU and I've got a pretty beefy one for now. IT does sometime get a little choppy, but I think that's because of the PCIe running at 8x because of the dual cards. I haven't cared enough to look into it futher... When I get home, I don't want to screw around with computers.
If you are looking for a new computer and are really cheap, check out ebay and craigslist for used graghic cards. You can get really good cards for dirt cheap because GPU mining is all but extinct. Just keep in mind that those cards have probabaly been running balls to the wall for months on end.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday September 08 2014, @04:47PM
Nice GPU setup, i'm jealous : ) (only have one 6970)
My setup is nearly identical to yours but with two 160GB ssd in raid 1.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 08 2014, @04:15PM
I'm on an aging machine myself. But, the wife built herself a machine this spring for just about $500. Newegg had an offer for an Alien-like case, mainboard, 8 core AMD CPU, 8 gig of memory, a terrabyte hard drive, DVD drive, a modest video card, and Windows 7. Personally, I would have passed on the Windows 7 and saved ~$90.
Every desktop in our home for the past fifteen years has been assembled from components. It's not difficult to assemble one - no step is any more difficult than changing a lightbulb, or plugging in an electrical plug.
If you like, I can find a link to the machine she built, or you can just visit Newegg and/or Tiger Direct to find one to your liking.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @05:11PM
a terrabyte hard drive
You should bump that up to a lunabyte...
(Score: 4, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 08 2014, @05:28PM
The lag between the earth and the moon is terrible.
(Score: 2) by rts008 on Tuesday September 09 2014, @12:42PM
Not to mention the fact that if you live in a warm climate, and a fan dies, it's pure frustration trying to get all of that melted green cheese cleaned up.
But on the other hand, if you wrap your lunabyte drive in bread before mounting it in the case in a Pentium IV rig, you can set up a grilled cheese sandwich factory.
This is how I made beer money in college...selling grilled cheese sandwiches in the dorms. :-)
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday September 08 2014, @05:30PM
I built a machine similar to that. I have built 3 computers over the last 6 years and none of them have broken down. The first was a Dual-Core (gave to my brother), the Second was a Quad-Core (gave to my wife), and the third was a Six-Core (current machine). They've all been AMD with Radeon Graphics Cards. I just updated my machine and made the poor choice of upgrading my graphics and RAM. I should have upgraded to a solid-state drive at least for loading my OS. I noticed a net 0% increase of speed by upgrading the graphics and RAM. There might have been a small percentage increase in something, but it definitely wasn't noticeable. The interesting thing about my current machine is that a friend just built almost the exact same machine that I have without knowing my specs. We both shop at Newegg and look for the same kinds of things.
New Six-Core Processor Machine 2012: (The RAM Actually went up in price since then.)
Cooler Master Sleeve Bearing 120mm Blue LED Silent Fan for Computer Cases, CPU Coolers, and Radiators (Value 2-Pack)
1 x Cooler Master Sleeve Bearing 120mm Blue LED Silent Fan for Computer Cases, CPU Coolers, and Radiators (Value 2-Pack)
RAIDMAX Typhoon ATX-312WSP Black SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450W Power Supply
1 x RAIDMAX Typhoon ATX-312WSP Black SECC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case 450W Power Supply
GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX + SB950 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
1 x GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD3 AM3+ AMD 990FX + SB950 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard
CORSAIR CX series CX600 600W ATX12V v2.3 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply
1 x CORSAIR CX series CX600 600W ATX12V v2.3 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Active PFC Power Supply
SAPPHIRE Ultimate Radeon HD 6670 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card (100326UL)
1 x SAPPHIRE Ultimate Radeon HD 6670 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card (100326UL)
AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core 3.5GHz (4.1GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Desktop Processor FD6300WMHKBOX
1 x AMD FX-6300 Vishera 6-Core 3.5GHz (4.1GHz Turbo) Socket AM3+ 95W Desktop Processor FD6300WMHKBOX
G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model F3-14900CL9D-8GBSR
1 x G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model F3-14900CL9D-8GBSR
Total Cost of Machine: $485.69 + Windows 7 $139.99 (I used a copy I had bought almost a year before.)
Upgrade Summer 2014:
G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model F3-14900CL9D-8GBSR
1 x G.SKILL Sniper Series 8GB (2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1866 (PC3 14900) Desktop Memory Model F3-14900CL9D-8GBSR
MSI R9 270 GAMING 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
1 x MSI R9 270 GAMING 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5 HDCP Ready CrossFireX Support Video Card
Total Cost of Upgrade: $211.69
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Monday September 08 2014, @05:38PM
I prefer a self-built machine myself and for years that's what I had. My theory was that I would only replace the parts that NEEDED updating at a time. Unfortunately ram sockets, expansion card busses, etc... have started changing too fast. I find that little beyond the enclosure is re-usable! The sum of a full computer's worth of parts tend to be more expensive than a whole computer. Now I am forced to concede that buying a pre-built from a big name box store is probably the better deal.
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Monday September 08 2014, @05:40PM
There are still advantages to self-built though. Pre-built computers tend to have few expansion slots so if you want to add a lot of perephierals they are forced to be external, probably usb. Also, if you want to run anything other than Windows (and only the latest version of that) then it is good to be able to chose your parts for driver compatibility.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 08 2014, @06:27PM
Yes, I gave up on piecemeal upgrades quite awhile ago. If a component dies, you can always replace it, but trying to upgrade has become a losing game.
Your followup post mentions Linux compatibility - and that is part of the reason I prefer to build my own. If there are five options for a component, a quick search for drivers helps me to decide which to choose. As mentioned, the wife opted to purchase Windows this time around, but I haven't installed windows anywhere outside a VM for several years now.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Monday September 08 2014, @10:31PM
Usually, the only parts you can't carry with you are the CPU, motherboard, and RAM. That still leaves GPU, case, power supply, hard disks, discrete sound card (if applicable), and any other odd bits you may have. How is that "little beyond the enclosure"?
The problem with buying a pre-built is it's often a better deal because they cut corners on everything that isn't a common bullet point. If it's not the GPU, CPU speed, or RAM size, you can't trust what you get. If you get your own, decent case you'll usually have better accessibility, air flow, more disk bays, etc. than what the pre-built gives you. Choosing your own cooling can reduce system noise and have fewer potential problems with other components.
Especially the power supply. You rarely get a good, reputable power supply out of those pre-builts, because nobody looks at a box and goes "oh hell yeah, that power supply is great! It's going to last forever!" So, instead, you get a generic shit-box that, if will probably either 1) die 2) fry something or 3) barely be able to power the system, so if you decide to swap out the GPU you're screwed. A decent power supply will also have more/better cabling, such as the modular PSUs that let you remove the cables you don't need to remove clutter, which helps with airflow.
In summary: if you think there's nothing worth salvaging when switching PCs, you're grossly understating the situation. You can get years and years of use out of those other parts if you invest just a bit more.
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Friday September 12 2014, @05:23PM
So I take it you weren't there for:
the switch from isa to pci? (Let's not forgot the poor sobs who invested in VLB video cards in between those two)
the switch from pci (video) to AGP?
the switch from AT to ATX?
The other, second motherboard connector from the power supply (whatever that is called)
the switch from AGP to PCIE?
I think there is more than one kind of those second motherboard connectors coming from the power supply now aren't there?
How about the switch from PATA to SATA
Back in college I went through Pentium 1, K6-2, K6-3 still able to use the same RAM. From K6-2 to K6-3 (roughly equivalent to Pentium II, III) I even used the same motherboard!
I admit, after Athlon MP I did wait a while to upgrade, computer hardware just wasn't on the budget for a few years. Also, I had dual processors so even though it was old it was still fast for quite a while longer than most home machines of that era.
I found myself wanting to upgrade my computer which had an AGP video card, and several PATA devices and a PCI digital TV card that I do not want to replace (no broadcast flag support). All I really wanted was a faster CPU and more RAM.
I'm kind of afraid to spend money on computer stuff now. How much longer will PCIE and SATA be the standard?
(Score: 2) by Marand on Friday September 12 2014, @06:03PM
I've been through all of that, but it didn't all happen at once, even when the changes were at their worst in the late '90s, and between any given upgrade, most of the system will still generally be useable. ISA and PCI were both available in boards for a very long time, as one example. Furthermore, PCI slots still exist, AGP had a long lifetime and PCI-e seems to have one as well. ATX has had an extremely long one and shows no sign of being replaced. Motherboards still exist with the IDE connections in addition to SATA, and when SATA gets a successor it will still be on boards alongside the next-gen standard for a good while.
Outside of the RAM/CPU/Mobo combo, the fastest moving thing is the GPU socket, but at the same point that's also one of the most-changed pieces of hardware, so depending on when you decide to update it can be a crap-shoot on whether you get to keep it. However, the GPU socket changes have followed large increases in GPU power, so if it ends up a forced switch it's probably a huge improvement any way...
As for the rest, there seems to be no desire to abandon ATX, so a good case and good modular power supply aren't bad investments. Good cooling (outside of the CPU) is still a good investment. Furthermore, you can still get motherboards with IDE and regular PCI slots, and when successors to SATA and PCI-e appear there will still be boards around that support them in addition to the next-gen counterparts. You might not be getting it for bargain-basement prices, but if you've got good, serviceable hardware it can still be cheaper than replacing all the stuff.
Generally the odds of losing all your parts in a single CPU/mobo/RAM upgrade are low unless you insist on using the cheapest, shittiest motherboard possible instead of tailoring it to your needs. Of course, if you're doing that, you're more likely to just be buying pre-builts every couple years and wondering why they run like shit after only a year or two...
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Sunday September 14 2014, @04:35AM
"ISA and PCI were both available in boards for a very long time"
There was a whole generation of boards in the Pentium II / K6 days that seemed to extend ISA's lifetime by including one ISA slot along with the PCI ones. My own experience was that this ISA slot almost never functioned properly.
"AGP had a long lifetime"
It did???
"ATX has had an extremely long one"
Meh. Which ATX. It's been a long time since motherboards only required the one ATX power connector. They all have that second, little one. But how many different standards have there been for that second connector? I think I have seen at least 3! Just because we are still using ATX power supplies doesn't mean you can still use your original ATX power supply in a currently relevant computer.
(Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday September 14 2014, @05:51PM
Opposite experience for me. I was still using an ISA card on a mostly-PCI board all the way into the late 90s, early 2000s...years after PCI showed up to replace it. I can't even remember what it was for, but I had this one card I didn't want to give up, I think it was for an extra IDE slot or something. So, I kept getting boards with at least one ISA slot for it until they became impossible to find and they were never broken for me.
first showed up in '96 and PCI-e didn't appear until 2004. The last AGP GPU for nvidia was in the geforce 7 series from 2006, and you could still get AGP motherboards a year or so past that. So, about a ten year lifespan with two year overlap. I'd say that's pretty good for a socket intended only for the GPU. I didn't move to PCI-e until sometime around late 2007 because my last AGP card still worked well enough even for most gaming until then.
As for the power supply, even if you can't retain it between systems (but it's likely you can, at least for one upgrade cycle), it's still a good idea to put a bit extra into it. I've found cheap power supplies to be a frequent source of frustration. Their capability degrades over time, which makes miscellaneous hardware upgrades potentially problematic with a cheap, barely-passable PSU. The cheap generic ones often can't handle the wattage they claim, too, creating another potential problem. Of course, even if you have an awesome one, you probably won't want to use it beyond 2-3 upgrade cycles depending on how far apart they are due to the same degradation...but a decent supply with some extra wiggle-room wattage is still not a bad thing to have.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday September 08 2014, @04:22PM
I assume you are using VMs not for servers in background, but only one at a time (all but one can be paused at any time), "main" system also VM on minimalistic Linux (to avoid unnecessary background processes when doing your thing in the other VMs). In that case CPU is not so critical. With eSATA you could have some VMs on cheanext ext. drive.
Memory and disk space will be important, and in my experience Intel CPUs perform better nowadays. (Sorry, like competition and all that, but that's my honest experience at the time...)
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @04:33PM
"In that case CPU is not so critical."
Many years ago, last time I set up a machine at home specifically for VM work, this was a huge problem as only some CPU / motherboard combinations supported the hardware virtualization extensions. Maybe more than a couple years ago now, LOL. This might be dating how old that system is... Or maybe not.
There were other "virtualization class" problems WRT memory. I wanted more than "normal" at the time which was only 8 gigs. I could buy any number of mobos with 5 to 15 SATA plugs but it was hard to stuff more than 16 gigs on a mobo at that time, which was annoying. Oh you'd like 32 gigs of ram, no problem, we have a perfectly good "server class" board thats only $7K right here and has infiniband and onboard fiber iscsi or whatever it was... oh no thanks I was hoping for more like $200.
I gave up hope on even trying to find a multiple processor mobo with the hardware support and memory support as listed above.
Is this kind of stuff still a problem? Anyway, kids, thats how much of a PITA virtualization was back in the good old days, like the 00s, now get off my lawn...
(Score: 2) by emg on Monday September 08 2014, @05:04PM
I have 32GB in my gaming PC, though it's single CPU. RAM was a fraction of current prices when I built it, so I just maxed it out.
Think it's an Asus or Asrock motherboard.
As for whether it's fast enough, it can't sustain 60fps in modern games with everything maxed out, so, no, it's not. CPU is barely used, RAM is mostly a disk cache, but it needs a faster GPU.
(Score: 2) by q.kontinuum on Monday September 08 2014, @05:24PM
You are right about the CPU virtualization features, I forgot. I was only focusing only on CPU power and multi-core. When only one VM is active at a time and the underlying system is a bit minimalistic, the virtualization layer shouldn't add to the CPU load.
Registered IRC nick on chat.soylentnews.org: qkontinuum
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @05:48PM
I suppose it depends on your virt layer and other tech. I've run LXC with no special hardware support at all.
But you aren't running KVM without seeing a "vmx" or "svm" in your /proc/cpuinfo
http://www.linux-kvm.org/page/Processor_support [linux-kvm.org]
Some / Many years ago marketing was shoveling intentionally crippled hardware / BIOS at regular prices or full featured hardware virt at like double price, to screw over people trying to "save money" by server consolidation... They dare to consolidate 2 into 1, F them we'll charge twice as much for hardware that doesn't disable VMX. Unfortunately I'm not kidding. And I don't know if this era is over yet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @06:49PM
> Some / Many years ago marketing was shoveling intentionally crippled hardware / BIOS at regular prices or full featured hardware virt at like double price,
They still are. You can see Intel's effective monopoly on CPUs by the wide variation in features, it is artificial differentiation at its worst.
AMD hardly ever does that, but Intel seems just get worse and worse with each new generation.
(Score: 2) by monster on Tuesday September 09 2014, @01:21PM
I bumped into this fact some years ago at work. Since then, I swore to never buy Intel or HP again unless I had no other options.
It's really outrageous when your several thousand dollars Intel server can't do virtualization (even when the processor theoretically supports it) but your cheap, home computer AMD can.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by eapache on Monday September 08 2014, @04:22PM
For me, the biggest limiting factor is RAM, especially if you want to run VMs. A slow disk or cpu just makes things run slower, but if you don't have enough RAM and things start swapping then everything grinds to a halt and the machine becomes unusable. I could make do with a CPU half the speed of my current one, but if you took away half my RAM I'd be toast.
(Score: 2) by Lagg on Monday September 08 2014, @04:44PM
Yeah, because I decided to get 12GB in my last machine build I haven't felt any need whatsoever to rebuild again and probably won't for a few more years yet. Very good for file caching and rarely swaps.
http://lagg.me [lagg.me] 🗿
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday September 08 2014, @05:00PM
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Monday September 08 2014, @06:11PM
I remember having to partition the 15GB hard drive because the you could not address more than ~13GB. Not that it mattered too much. What the hell were you going to do with 13GB anyway? Keep a version library of AOL disks?
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @07:41PM
noobs. I had to work around the 32 meg limit up till msdos 3.3. I vaguely remember I kept the same partitioning scheme to install a SLS linux install downloaded disk images off some BBS (execPC?) then I had a 32 meg linux partition and a 8 meg msdos partition on my 40 meg hard drive. I later wiped dos and used the 8 meg partition for swap, which you pretty much required to compile the kernel if you only had 4 megs (later, added 4 256 K simms to get 5 megs total ram). Later, I remember going to comp usa perhaps Christmas-ish of 1994 or so to buy a 120 meg drive at the amazing price of a dollar a meg, which was quite unthinkable at that time. That began my life of two drives in the machine at all time, where the larger one held linux and the smaller held swap and maybe a vestigal dos (much later, windows) partition. I believe the next step up from the 120 was a 420 (ha ha) meg drive, and after than I got my first gig and after that its all a blur.
There was a day, which must be very confusing to modern noobs, when optical media was "always" about an order of magnitude larger than the size of reasonably affordable hard drives. So I had a "new" mitsumi cdrom, which required a special linux driver, to work. I vaguely remember a similar era with DVDs. When you installed Linux (perhaps a very early Debian) you left the cdrom in the drive and installed packages off it, because obviously they wouldn't all fit. I was quite proud of my read only NFS exports of all of one early Debian release at work because it took like 7 machines but then every machine in the cluster (maybe 20-30 of them) could access everything packaged in Debian.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @07:56PM
And as a follow up, I went with my dad in 1981 to an early computer store to buy hundreds of dollars worth of 4116 dynamic ram for a TRS80 model 3, which I believe was sixteen 16 kilobit dram chips sufficient to upgrade from 16K to it full 48K of ram. And dram, in those days, boys, came in 16 pin DIP packages just like TTL glue logic, not SIMMs or DIMMs although there was some funkiness with supply voltages that I don't fully remember.
I also vaguely remember picking up with my dad, two 5 meg external hard drives for his employer's model II, that cost a bit more than his brand new economy car, so we had a lot of joking about that. It was unusual for Radio Shack salesmen to have a commissioned sales ticket in the low five digits revenue and he had to pay with a cashiers check, again a bit unusual for Radio Shack. I sometimes wondered how much that sales dude made off that one ticket. A grand? Maybe more? I repeated a stunt similar in spirit when I got my second "real" job and loaded up a $75K protocol analyzer and three test pattern bit error rate testers each about $13K into my old beater of a car which I later sold for about $500 for a previous employer visiting a remote office (and yes I gave them back, didn't run for a Caribbean island or whatever)
(Score: 1) by archfeld on Monday September 08 2014, @10:41PM
LOL I have similar experiences but I still have the trs-80 16K machine around the house, and yes it was the COLOR model. I recently donated the Heathkit computer I built with help from my middle school (jr. high)math teacher, there were no such things as computer classes then, to a local computer museum. Anyone want a floppy set of windows 3.0 ? :)
For the NSA : Explosives, guns, assassination, conspiracy, primers, detonators, initiators, main charge, nuclear charge
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Tuesday September 09 2014, @04:38AM
This makes me feel young. I remember my fathers commodore 64 and later his commodore 128 after the 64 was struck by lightning. But I really cut my teeth on his Packard Bell 386. He spend the extra cash for the co-processor and IBM DOS 6.0. I remember fondly navigating the prompt to play some of my favorites: battlechess, A-10 tank killer, harrier, king's quest V. Come to think of it, I haven't found a chess game that I like as much as battle chess. Next time I'm visiting, I better fire it up and copy it onto some floppies. I'm sure I have a floppy drive on an old computer with a network card so I can archive it on the samba server. Hmm... I think the one I built in 2004 has a floppy drive and a gigabit nic, but I think I stole it's hard drive and I don't think it boots from a usb stick. Of course I might have an old live cd. Ubuntu 7.10 or something like that. The really fun project would be to get 10baseT ISA network card to work on the Packard Bell, and then FTP it to the samba server. But then again, my wife tells me that I should have a life. If only I could get her excited about this stuff. Then she would understand the joy found in frustration, irritation, agony, and absolute disgust.
Which reminds me, I should also rob the 2004 build of it's power supply. The synthesized sinewave of the UPS just killed the active PFC power supply of the 2007 build. I don't have time to play 'crispy components' and 'which diode is blown' on the deceased power supply. The UPS will just kill it again.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1) by Wierd0n3 on Monday September 08 2014, @05:16PM
In my case, I'm running into a wall with the I/O. I have a core 2 duo with 3GB ram. I upgraded the HDD to 1TB, and installed a intel AC 3160 Wifi Card. the processor is fast enough in my opinion, but the SATA is limited to around 10-15 MBps. This hurts load times and my startup (non hybernate) is measured in minutes. (even with a freash re-install. my startup includes Steam, CCleaner, 2 Download managers, antivirus, firewall, bitcoin wallet, and one or two more background services that don't show in the tray)
I have been eyeing a i5 laptop for a while, probably have a second drive bay instead of a CD drive.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Monday September 08 2014, @07:28PM
The fact that you are running CCleaner points to the root of your problem.
1) Call someone like http://www.crucial.com/ [crucial.com] with your computer model and they will sell you more memory than the manufacturer claims will work and they will guarantee it will work or money back. Ram is the #1 upgrade.
2) Find any random Linux OS to see what that machine is REALLY capable of,
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by Wierd0n3 on Wednesday September 10 2014, @09:51AM
The machine is 7 years old, and i already maxed out the ram (3gb, went to crucial for it too lol), upped the HD to 1TB, and swapped out the wireless to a N card. this laptop is pretty much at it's limit. (remember, I said it's a core 2 processor and Intel series 4 graphics) That said, as long as i don't mind hitting the power button and walking away for 5-8 minutes, it serves it purpose. but i noticed that i have a few dead pixels, and transferring data to my HTPC takes a while. So, like i said, maybe i could start looking at a I5 (or even a I7) with 16GB ram.
I do have a linux partition on this laptop, and i think it's really close to being all that i need. especially now that chrome experimental can run netflix. but i have a couple of apps that just don't translate over to linux well, even using wine. Plus the window managers don't integrate well with apps as nicely as in windows. it somewhat grates on my peeves, especially when the fonts look as nice as they do in the web pages.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by gallondr00nk on Monday September 08 2014, @04:32PM
My GUI computing is split between an Athlon dual core Windows desktop (w/ 4GB RAM) built out of donated parts and a Pentium M Arch Linux ThinkPad (w/ 1.5GB RAM). Both are perfectly acceptable, though web browsing is starting to feel a tad strained on the laptop (Tumblr is the worst - like the Myspace of the 2010's). I've got a bunch of older stuff as well, which mostly just gets used for gateways, file servers or just for fun.
FreeBSD in particular allows me to use stuff that should really be in a landfill quite comfortably. NT 4 was good for that, back in the day.
I don't think software has been getting much slower, but in the last 2 or 3 years web browsing certainly has. Up to about 2011 I got by with a Pentium 3 laptop with about half a gig of ram, but since then a load of sites have been redesigned with the seemingly explicit goal to peg the user's CPU as much as possible. Fortunately, I can browse Soylent comfortably on just about anything Pentium II class or newer :)
In many cases, I don't see the purpose of the site rewrite other than to look "moderner". It sometimes looks nice , but I'd take the free CPU cycles over the design. That said, I realise I'm using some pretty archaic shit.
Upgrades come by usually when a game I'd like requires it. The last game I upgraded for was Anno 2070. You can say one thing for the current lack of decent games on the PC, it's sure saving me from spending money on upgrades. I'll probably get a X60 ThinkPad in the next year.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday September 08 2014, @04:42PM
I don't think software has been getting much slower, but in the last 2 or 3 years web browsing certainly has. Up to about 2011 I got by with a Pentium 3 laptop with about half a gig of ram, but since then a load of sites have been redesigned with the seemingly explicit goal to peg the user's CPU as much as possible. Fortunately, I can browse Soylent comfortably on just about anything Pentium II class or newer :)
In many cases, I don't see the purpose of the site rewrite other than to look "moderner". It sometimes looks nice , but I'd take the free CPU cycles over the design. That said, I realise I'm using some pretty archaic shit.
Many sites are using a lot of very heavy JavaScript these days, and often loading it from alternate sites (i.e. target.com loading things from targetimg1.com, targetimg2.com, targetimg3.com, richrelevance.com and ensighten.com), and sometimes loading scripts that do NOTHING for the user (looking at you, google-analytics.com). NoScript allows you disable this unless/until it's actually necessary for the site; and AdBlock Plus allows you to not load ads (which are often coming from overloaded ad-network sites). Between the two of them, loading web pages is usually pretty speedy.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 2) by gallondr00nk on Monday September 08 2014, @07:55PM
Already doing so, but perhaps the trouble is that a lot of sites aren't implementing a functional version without Javascript.
Another useful tool is RequestPolicy [mozilla.org], which can block these third party sites completely. Sadly, it relies on Firefox, the most resource heavy browser of them all, which sort of defies the point of using it to increase performance.
As an aside, for those who are still using very old hardware, Midori [midori-browser.org] is probably my favourite "light" browser for *nix, now that Opera has more or less left the market. Another useful program is Livestreamer [readthedocs.org], which pipes video from the likes of Youtube or Twitch.tv into VLC or mplayer.
(Score: 2) by AndyTheAbsurd on Monday September 08 2014, @08:33PM
I'm actually using PaleMoon [palemoon.org] now, which is a fork of Firefox and - so far at least - compatible with all of my Firefox extensions. It's still not really "lightweight" but it seems to be less of a heavyweight than Firefox was (without changing my usage patterns).
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kebes on Monday September 08 2014, @04:40PM
I'd like to contest that. Sure, the average user won't notice much difference between a brand-new computer and one a couple years old. They are also demonstrably not pushing their machines to the breaking point 100% of the time. Nevertheless, I'm always bothered by notions like "5 year old computers are good enough for email and word processing", for at least two reasons:
1. It ignores the myriad of future 'routine' uses that would be enabled if our computers were vastly more powerful. There was a time when a pad of paper was 'good enough' for the calculations the average person would typically perform. But this is backwards: people perform tasks of complexity commensurate to what's available. Nowadays people watch HD video because their computers can handle it. So "good enough" is a constantly shifting target (as it should be!). With more powerful computers, we might well see the "average user" frequently using compute-intensive applications. (It's hard to predict the future, so any examples I come up with will be lacking. Nevertheless, if typical home computers were billions of times more powerful, people would probably have applications that let them do fast/easy 3D modelling, data-mining, AI-based image sorting, etc. Or consider if everyone's computer had an application that could do highly accurate/realistic generic physics modelling (with easy UI): people could do things like see whether their deck could handle the weight of the hot-tub they want to install, visualize the most likely places their house is losing heat, or just have fun by throwing asteroids at the earth, ...)
2. Tasks people do nowadays are not instantaneous... and it annoys them! If our computers were truly fast enough for a typical user, then this 'typical user' would never encounter any kind of pause or delay. But they routinely do. Even something as simple as saving a file can take a noticeable amount of time. Searching for a file is certainly not instant. Average users do plenty of things that cause the computer to 'think' for awhile... and these typical users do indeed get annoyed and frustrated staring at the 'spinning beach ball' wondering what the heck is going on. (Of course, there are many reasons for these delays, not the least of which is the unoptimized nature of much modern code, as well as user's general disregard for system maintenance. Nevertheless, it is not that hard to find modern tasks whose completion is limited by the system's CPU speed, disk speed, or I/O speed. So, all these tasks could be improved if the computer were faster.)
Are computers fast enough? No way. There's a massive landscape of awesome potential software that haven't been written simply because they would run too slowly on modern machines. If we all have access to more powerful computers, a myriad of awesome applications we can't even dream of will become a reality.
(Score: 1) by Runaway1956 on Monday September 08 2014, @04:56PM
Andy posted above about problems with javascript, and third party sites. And, I agree with him. The aging machine I am on right now is "fast enough" for almost everything I want to do. My most serious slowdowns are centered on the internet, that is, communications. Disabling javascript, as well as third party sites, and establishing strict rules in AdBlock Plus, and Ghostery helps me to keep up with much faster computers.
Of course I can't keep up with a faster computer on the benchmarks, or much of anything else. But removing the corporate hobbles put on my computer by the advertisers makes my computer almost as fast as those other computers that remain hobbled!
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:57AM
But more than fast enough? Definitely not. Most still have to wait seconds or even more than a minute for their computers to boot up!
It's only more than fast enough if the maximum time a typical user had to wait the computer to do anything was less than 16ms (assuming a typical user's display runs at 60Hz).
As for me, I'm not a typical user so computers are too slow. Nonlossy compression, video encoding, compiling, backups, copying/downloads of large files, all take significant time. But I'm the hard to please sort who grumbles about the speed of light - 180ms transoceanic pings are 170ms too high ;). And I also submitted a grumble on high keyboard latency (it's amazing how high the latencies are on some models of input and output devices - LCDs, keyboards, mice).
(Score: 1) by arashi no garou on Monday September 08 2014, @04:50PM
I'd say you should focus mostly on how many threads the CPU can run, whether it has hardware virtualization support, and the maximum RAM supported. For a good budget laptop, a used quad core i5 with 8GB or more of RAM would be ideal. If it's one of those with the hybrid Intel/Nvidia GPU, I would strongly recommend disabling the Nvidia side, as it is problematic in all but a very few distros, or just avoid that type altogether and get one with either the Intel GPU only or a dedicated, non-hybrid Nvidia GPU.
For reference, my old workstation was a Lenovo ThinkCentre M91P with a quad core i5-2400K, 8GB RAM (max 16GB) and an SSD. It was overkill for what I used it for, which included lots of work in VMs, with both Windows 7 and Crunchbang Linux as hosts. I sold it to the company I work for when they needed a faster production machine, and now I'm rocking a Dell Vostro Core2Duo machine at home with 2GB RAM and a much slower CPU/GPU. I honestly don't feel much difference in everyday web browsing and such, it's only when I spin up a VM or try to play some games that I can tell I'm on a more limited machine. I'm debating whether to max this one out on RAM and CPU and eke out another couple of years' use, or just build a new one from scratch with current components so I'll have a good base moving forward.
(Score: 2) by TheLink on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:38AM
The limiting factors for the stuff I see are RAM and IO not CPU. Of course if you went SSDs maybe IO won't be a problem but then $$$$ starts to be a limiting factor :).
(Score: 1) by arashi no garou on Tuesday September 09 2014, @11:48AM
My experience with running VMs on older generation CPUs vs newer ones does show a marked difference. A quad core i-series CPU is (depending on the virtualization software) going to run the guest OS at near native speed, whereas the older Core/Core2 series will be painfully slow with certain guests, regardless of the virtualization software used. Yes, RAM and I/O are very important, but VMs are already inherently slow. A faster, more modern CPU, especially one with four or more cores, can make the difference between a tolerable experience and a comfortable one.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday September 08 2014, @04:51PM
(Score: 2) by Snow on Monday September 08 2014, @05:17PM
Hmm, that FTL game looks interesting. How much is it? How long does a game last? Is this something were a game takes 20-4 minutes, or is it more like a marathon like Civ?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday September 08 2014, @05:56PM
You can lose your ship in the first few minutes or drag it out to 30 min or so. Depends if you are reading any dialog too. It has some replay value in doing achievements that unlock new ship types (and crew). It is a good StarTrek-like command experience. You can vent parts of the ship to space to put out fires. You can teleport your crew onto the enemy ship to take out their oxygen generator. Crew level up based on what their experiences are. Sort of creates an attachment to them. It sucks to lose a good crew member to an enemy boarding party, or fire, or laser, or bomb, or suffocation, or all the other ways people can die : )
I have 35 hours logged and the game is selling for 10$.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday September 08 2014, @07:58PM
I got it from the humble bundle a while ago. I don't read cheats online so it took me 40-something tries to win the first time. It is hard. I tend to read everything and so a game will take me like 3 hours but you can pause at anytime and save+quit anytime you are not in a fight or in danger.
Just because you have beat it 10 time doesn't mean you will live next time. It is often called rouge-like.
Different ships have different layouts and advantages against fighting fires or boarding parties and such. Being able to suffocate boarders is awesome.
Maps are randomly generated and you are being chased so choose carefully.
There are like 7 or 8 species with different advantages including one that sucks all the O2 out of a room.
There are lots of possible upgrades and stuff to buy.
Tibmen didn't mention you can reroute power, you pick which systems are running. I often find myself yelling in my head "all power to the shields!" My kids flip out when I reroute power from life support.
The soundtrack is good too. fits the game very well.
I have played it on my MacBook with GMA 950 graphics with some stutter, so not a power hog of a game. Which it shouldn't be since it is all 2D
They added a free expansion, the Advanced Edition, which has more awesome good stuff too.
I am not on the company payroll.
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday September 08 2014, @07:33PM
I sit and wait for up to an hour at work sometimes for CNC remachining stock models to regenerate. It's usually more like a minute or two, but no, it's never fast enough. Time is money.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday September 08 2014, @05:11PM
"80 Gb HDD (at a measly 5400 RPM)"
I checked amazon and if you prime it, you could have a quarter TB SSD by Wednesday for about a hundred bucks. Just saying. Assuming its new enough to be SATA and not a really old PATA drive. There are probably still old PATA SSDs still available... probably? Maybe you'd be better off with one of those PATA to CF adapters and a CF card. Those were usually mechanically designed to fit in the space of a laptop HD.
Even if you buy a "new" used laptop, may as well rip out the old worn spinning rust drive and stick a new SSD in it.
"so graphics is not a real concern of mine."
I bet you look at the screen and use the keyboard when doing code development, so that being your primary UI I'd make the purchasing decisions based on that. I'd rather use a raspberry pi with an IBM model M keyboard, than a new machine with an inferior keyboard. And I find glossy screens incredibly distracting / bothersome in all but the most subdued light, so a dull screen is vital for the user experience.
May want to look into the RAM situation too. I suspect another couple gigs ram would do more for the user experience than anything other than the SSD upgrade. And again, if you buy a "new" used laptop, highest shopping priority would be sticking in as much after market ram as fits... its not going to cost that much, after all.
Oh and another UI thing... fan noise. Bet you don't like it, most people don't. Something to think about.
You might need a couple gigs and heavy CPU access... but if you have decent network and do everything over SSH it need not be in your laptop bag. I've done plenty of virtualization stuff with Connectbot on my tablet and a bluetooth keyboard to ssh into my basement server. You really can get 10 hours of battery life and 16 gigs of memory and 3 terabytes of raid'd disk on something the size of a tablet, IF you have decent network connectivity and some VPN ability. Also desktops and small servers are cheaper than laptops. You could use your old laptop as a VPN and SSH terminal into the big machine. Or into a linode.
(Score: 2) by jackb_guppy on Monday September 08 2014, @05:13PM
I now have quad-core Dell OptiPlex 780 DT from ebay for $100. The only real need is more ram DDR3, USB3 and Wireless. USB3 is hard because there is only open PCI slots for 2010 machine. Wireless is easy but I am limited to 300N. DDR3 ram in 4GB dim will get this up to 16GB, but that is a high cost $160. Will get there so my VM run faster.
Old machine was Dell Ispersion 530. It too was quad-core, 8GB DDR2, 2006 vintage. I was very happy with it, bough my wife one from ebay 3 years ago, but daughter had immediate need for faster machine (the Acer dual core Atom was to slow :) good for college, not games) So I gave it to her and bought a replacement.
Now I did just see, on ebay, a Dell, with dual hex core xeons, with a lot of ram and many PCI-e slots... $1200. So the $100, is good buy. But dual hex cores!!!!
Over all:
quad core is better - 2.4GHz is low end good, few cores more clocks!
ram is must, 2GB works good for desktop (Linux) but to add VMs... max is better, improves caching
SSD is better than HDD, from a daily use bases. SSD can also lower the need of ram since time of reading is fast
wireless - here look to future, 801.11ac standard should be must for new, though 300N is fast enough for todays internet. Do not settle for 54G - using that now instead of 300N, to slow and some sites actually fail! Amazon for one.
USB3 a must also, allows for future additions with a plug. Watch for using USB3 cards to add to older equipment. PCI gives you only get 1/4 of max speed. PCI-E 1x v1 again only 1/4 of max speed.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @05:14PM
Whatever you get, make sure you have a reputable SSD (Samsung 840/850 series) for the base OS - It was hands down the most noticeable upgrade I've ever made.
(Score: 2) by etherscythe on Monday September 08 2014, @09:05PM
+1 to an SSD. Stay away from the ones with a Sandforce controller and you'll be in good shape. For VMs I would also add a boatload of RAM. Depending on what else you do, you may or may not need to get anything other than a decent midrange processor.
Since you asked about current rigs, my general PC had an older quad core processor recently upgraded to a used Phenom II 940. I've yet to have any issues with it except that sometimes I open too many browser windows and max out the RAM; I only upgraded because it was free, and it was time for a new CPU fan. This includes torrents, watching movies, playing music, and other light programs. I also have a gaming machine with a few Raptors in it (one for the OS, one for Steam) that has only had to be upgraded once in 4 years (GPU), and which I am planning to replace in the next 6 months as a few heavy games come out that won't run so well on the existing hardware. For general use, you don't need anything super expensive. AMD has a great bang-to-buck ratio, but Intel owns the top end. Stay away from low-end CPUs and you should do well for the expected lifespan of the hardware.
FYI, the US gov. says that computers deprecate over the course of 3 years. If you can get yours to last about 5 years you're ahead of the curve.
"Fake News: anything reported outside of my own personally chosen echo chamber"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Monday September 08 2014, @05:18PM
Give me 10^6 more computing power.....please!!
I for one wish that the APU's were more powerful. Having a powerful GPU on a bus seems silly.
I could happily find stuff for a 10Tflop CPU to do. AMD and Nvidia make cards that are around ~4 Tflops but a PITA to use.
For my desktop, as fast a cpu as you can afford, SSD main disk , spinning rust RAID6 for storage and as much memory as the box will handle. My cheap HP has 32GB but I would happily stuff in 256GB if I could....
My usage? Well molecular modelling stuff. But also, ripping a DVD takes perhaps 20 minutes. How would your view of the world look if it took 1 minute?
(Score: 4, Funny) by WillR on Monday September 08 2014, @05:39PM
I suppose that depends on how well my PC case contains plastic shrapnel, and whether I was wearing safety goggles at the time...
(Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Monday September 08 2014, @06:16PM
a few years ago a friend leant me a CD , and that is when I discovered that not all CD's were manufactured the same...
Fortunately it did not shatter but cracked first. So the drive through a wobbly because the CD did....
(Score: 1) by ramloss on Monday September 08 2014, @07:19PM
I suppose that depends on how well my PC case contains plastic shrapnel,
I saw, or rather heard this happen to my PC once with a defective CD. The drive did quite a good job at containing the plastic shrapnel at the cost of its physical integrity. Wouldn't want to risk trying that again, though.
(Score: 1) by WillR on Tuesday September 09 2014, @08:37PM
(Score: 1) by khedoros on Monday September 08 2014, @05:25PM
At this point, I could spend $150 on a new mobo, $100 on DDR4 RAM, $200 on a new CPU, and perhaps $300 for a couple of SSDs to replace my boot drives. But...why? My current machine does what I need it to do. In your case, I'm sure that you could find a nice 4-core+8-thread laptop with 16GB of RAM, a couple hundred gigs of SSD to boot from + a couple terabytes of HDD for something around $1000, give or take a couple hundred, and it would blow the pants off of what you have now. If you're going for something used, buy for the CPU. You'll likely want to replace whatever storage it comes with, and might want to bump up the RAM anyhow.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @06:31PM
What $200 CPU can use DDR4 RAM?
(Score: 2) by gman003 on Monday September 08 2014, @05:26PM
I have a habit of keeping an old desktop around, in case my other computers (usually a laptop and desktop) fail. For the last decade or so it's been an old Athlon, running OpenBSD (I never remember to update it so it's still on 3.6). 384MB RAM, a pair of 20GB hard drives and a GeForce 2 MX.
I did have to use it a few years ago, after my laptop died and my desktop decided fans were for the weak. It was usable.
OpenOffice was slow. It was usable, but often froze up for a second or two. AbiWord was a good alternative - much faster, and still had all the functionality I really needed. Pity I couldn't find a good Calc alternative.
Firefox was also slow-but-usable. It was still 3.x IIRC, so I can't judge more recent versions, but for most uses it sufficed. Youtube was out, though, and I wouldn't expect any "web apps" to be very usable.
Email worked, via Thunderbird and GMail in Firefox.
I didn't need to do any programming at the time, which may have been more difficult. I really don't want to think about doing Android development on that machine. But "common user" stuff was doable. You certainly would benefit from a faster machine, but it was sufficient for many tasks.
That said, I was very grateful when the replacement fans came in and I could go back to a relatively modern machine. (It actually wasn't that modern - 2006 - but it was massively overpowered for the time (dual xeons) and I'd upgraded the weakest parts)
(Score: 2) by buswolley on Monday September 08 2014, @05:28PM
For my research I use:
Rackform iServ R331.v4
CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2650v2, 2.6 GHz (8-Core, HT, 20MB Cache, 95W) 22nm
RAM: 128GB (8 x 16GB DDR3-1600 ECC Registered 2R DIMMs) Operating at 1600 MT/s
Management: IPMI 2.0 & KVM with Dedicated LAN - Integrated
Controller: 8 Ports 3Gb/s SAS (SCU) + 2 Ports 6Gb/s SATA & 4 Ports 3Gb/s SATA (AHCI)
Hot-Swap Drive - 1: 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 (6Gb/s, 7.2K RPM, 128MB Cache)
3.5-inch SATA
Hot-Swap Drive - 2: 4TB Seagate Constellation ES.3 (6Gb/s, 7.2K RPM, 128MB Cache)
3.5-inch SATA
Power Supply: Redundant 700W / 750W Power Supply with PMBus & I2C - 80 PLUS Gold
which is fun, but at home I have a modest Acer TimeLineX Aspire laptop..which is pretty nice...accept I'm not a fan of low profile keyboards anymore....look nice but not great to type on for a long time.
subicular junctures
(Score: 3, Interesting) by doublerot13 on Monday September 08 2014, @05:38PM
Some people just buy cheap and often. While others, like myself, build less frequently and go bigger. My current machine is 4 years old, but still has Nehalem QC, 24GB of RAM, USB3, SATAIII, SSDs and TB of HDDs...
I'm gonna use this one for a while yet. Then re-use the case with a Skylake CPU, new motherboard+DDR4 and all the same guts.[maybe a new video card too.] All my old guts will be re-purposed for a dedicated vm host in some other case.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 08 2014, @05:46PM
For a long time, my primary machine was a 2007 Mac Mini. I still use it a lot (it's my primary repository for data), but it is getting painfully slow.
When I first bought the thing, I could simultaneously play WoW, watch anime in a small window (VLC), surf the web, and run Windows XP via Parallels to scan my bills (the MacOS UI for the scanner software is just awful, as are the Win7 and newer Windows UIs).
These days, it doesn't have enough horsepower to do any one of those tasks (and WoW no longer supports the graphics), let alone all of them simultaneously.
The final straw in usability was when I bought an iPhone 5 and was forced to update to Snow Leopard because Leopard could not run a new enough iTunes to sync the phone. That's when it went from annoying to downright unusable.
I am afraid to update my iPhone to iOS 7 because I fear I will probably be required to buy a new Mac to sync the thing.
My primary machine these days is a lowendish laptop; an AMD A4 thingie I picked up on sale at Staples. Runs WoW and KSP and does well enough on the other things I want to do that it doesn't annoy me.
(Score: 2) by Alfred on Monday September 08 2014, @08:16PM
I have an ipad with iOS 7 that I sync with iTunes on snow leopard.
You may be in luck. You can do some research using mactracker and such but I think the latest iTunes will run on snow leopard.
But if you have already given up on the mini then I would take it off your hands :-)
(But first a wipe and reload may help it feel new again, yes even on macs it is a good thing.)
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday September 08 2014, @10:53PM
In other words don't invest in hardware that is tied to an operating environment that you don't control.
(Score: 4, Informative) by LoRdTAW on Monday September 08 2014, @05:57PM
What exactly is your budget that you are looking at buying used? Give us a number. Don't feel embarrassed if you think it makes you sound poor. The majority of us are in the same boat and struggling. Do you only have the laptop? Do you have at least a decent ATX case with power supply and a monitor around?
Next up:
What do you plan to do with it? You said "I am not a typical user, so I find that I could always use more "computing power"." But you never mention what is is you do on your dinosaur in terms of computing power or what you want to do. You might think your applications are not typical but how CPU and I/O intensive are they? And no, VM's are not intensive. If a VM sits idle you see almost no resources used save for the chunk of RAM set aside. A VM uses no more resources than if it was sitting on bare metal. If you are gaming or plan to then yea you want some better specs. What is intensive: high volume database, file serving, high volume web server, gaming, video editing, multi track audio editing, low latency audio recording. Basically software that opens large files and read/write from them often or continuously. Games are more CPU/GPU bound but they need to load hundreds of megs or even gigs into RAM during loading screens. Better to have a fast disk to cut down on wait times and make the experience more enjoyable (hint, hint: SSD).
My advice:
If I were not gaming and looking for a new setup then I would go with the AMD APU or better yet, wait for the new i5 Haswell and Iris Pro graphics with the embedded 128MB eDRAM. I hear it will give the AMD APU a run for its money GPU wise and wipe the floor with it CPU wise. That paired with a compact uATX motherboard and a case with room for a dedicated GPU should the need arise. If I wanted to save money but have headroom to grow I would buy a low end socket 1150 celeron or i3 CPU and wait until I had some more dough for an i5 or i7. Make sure the board has the latest 9 series chipset though. Just stuff it with 16GB+ RAM for VM stuff and decide if you really need an SSD. And even if you buy an SSD, buy a cheap high capacity mechanical for the junk that wastes valuable SSD space.
Also check out the new AMD SoC AM1 platform. 2GHz quad core APU and the motherboard can be had for less than $100. Its memory bandwidth is limited as it is single channel. So for gaming it is a no-go. Basic day to day work, media and even light VM work could be done on it (yes it has IOMMU and AMD-V). That is another option.
Used computer:
Go find a used Dell on ebay or craigslist with a quad core i5/i7, DDR3 RAM, and room for a full dual slot width and full length PCIe graphics card if the need arises. The inspiron series can be had for less than $400 with decent specs. You just need the monitor, Dell ultrasharps are nice as well as some of the HP and ASUS monitors but do your homework first. The monitor is the most important part.
The issue isn't a slow CPU. The problem is that as software evolves, so does its appetite for memory. Just opening a few tabs in Google Chrome takes up hundreds of megs of RAM. Things aren't as simple as they used to be.
That slow Athlon laptop is fast enough from a CPU perspective for day to day tasks but RAM wise you are on the very low end depending what OS and software you are running. RAM is key so don't shy away from buying 16+ gigs, especially if you want to run VM's. Depending on what OS, what you plan run on it and how many VM instances, you want minimum 16GB and perhaps even 32GB if you are running more than two Windows VM's (you are going to throw 2-4GB at them). Once you start to run out of physical RAM the OS starts to swap which is what murders performance. Sure that 5400 RPM disk might load things slower than an SSD but once it's loaded, it's loaded. You don't care any more. But if you run low on RAM and the OS hits the swap file on that 5400 RPM disk then kiss your patience goodbye as you watch the disk light go steady as it grinds the page file.
At work I was on a budget for a workstation so instead of a Dell a put together an AMD A8 system:
Quad core, 2.8 GHz
16GB of RAM
1TB 7200 RPM disk
Win 7 pro
Nothing else is that special to report on. The video is integrated and runs our basic 2D/3D CAD and CAM software just fine. I use it for quite a variety of tasks:
-Basic IT work including maintaining and testing backups, fixing day-to-day issues and testing things in VM's.
-software development: VS2010 using c#, Linux VM for embedded C, and maintaining VB6 code on a Windows XP VM.
-basic 2D/3D CAD/CAM for designing panel cutouts, control cabinet layouts and part drawings for our machinist or G code for laser cutting.
-EDA for some simulation of small analog circuits and making schematics and PCB layout (I use KiCAD and Qucs)
Everything runs pretty damn smooth with the single 1TB 7200 RPM disk, it is not much of a bottleneck as nothing is I/O intensive. And that includes running a VM or two. Originally I had 8GB in it but after running about 3 VM's at once for testing windows software I quickly needed to add another 8GB. VM's love RAM.
At home I built:
Quad core i7, Ivy Bridge, can't even remember the model number, ~3GHz.
again, 8GB upgraded to 16GB RAM
WD black 1TB - OS and regular applications.
WD Blue 1TB - movies, music, pictures and backup for my documents.
Samsung 840 256GB SSD for games
AMD graphics card, again I can't remember the GPU or even the amount of Video memory. Mid end for its day.
Win 7 ultimate
I do mostly the same thing I do on it as I do at work but throw in watch movies, listen to music and gaming. And yes, it runs Crysis pretty damn good :-) The SSD is mounted to a folder instead of its own drive. Same for the secondary HDD, mounted to a folder. Dont bother installing Windows to the SSD, it's a waste of space in my opinion. How often do you reboot so as the loading time of windows from a mechanical disk becomes an issue? I put my system to sleep and reboot maybe once a month. Turns on to desktop in seconds.
I also built a secondary PC using an AMD A10 and it has 8GB of RAM which runs Linux. I switched to running xmonad and that AMD runs Debian like a rocket ship. I used it on my little workbench for EDA/electronics stuff. Way overkill but it was cheap.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:56AM
I would like to stay within the range of $300-$400 (USD). [Though I would settle for free =) does anyone have a system they are not using and would like to donate?] As for your other questions, I also have an Asus netbook with a 1GHz Celeron processor, 1GB RAM, and a 120 GB hard disk. I do not have an ATX case with a power supply. I had a mishap a few years ago and smashed the laptop's built-in display, so I have been using a Gateway FPD2485W LCD monitor which I drive with the laptop's VGA connector. The monitor also has composite, RGB, and DVI-D (with HDCP) inputs.
Let's start off with what I currently do with my laptop (which, runs XP/Home; yes, shoot me — that's part of the reason why I want to upgrade!)
What I'd like to be able to do.
Yes, I am (painfully) aware I am RAM-limited. At the moment, I've got about 800MB of swap in use. I previously upgraded the easily-accessible RAM slot, but the other one requires pretty major disassembly, and with the broken display it is entirely likely the system would not survive the attempt. Money spent to repair the display and update the RAM would be better spent, I think, in purchasing a newer system.
I thought of upgrading the hard disk, but it's connected via IDE ATA/ATAPI using "Ultra DMA Mode 5". So no SSDs for me. Then there's the broken display issue to deal with again. Given the IDE controller and slow (5400 RPM) hard drive, I am also I/O bound (especially when it needs to swap).
It's nearly midnight, so I'll close for now. Thanks again to all who responded!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday September 10 2014, @01:14PM
Dont know if you will catch this post but:
If you are looking for donations, where do you live exactly? Shipping costs aren't too bad for a full system, I have a dual core Athlon X2 *without* RAM, I might have a SATA disk to spare, Geforce GT8800 and case but I don't think I have a power supply. So you would need DDR2 RAM and a power supply and maybe a disk. But the cost for those two parts would set you back about $200+ for older, more costly DDR2 RAM, disk and power supply. Not worth it at all. And how much more life is left in those parts I have ran for hours and hours on end? I can't provide you with RMA support like a vendor can.
$300? How about under $300, minus shipping:
Not too bad of a system with quad 2.0GHz cores and 8GB RAM + 1TB disk. The 8GB will be plenty for what you need with room to grow. And everything is modern, RAM, USB3, SATA 6Gbps, PCIe Gen 3 etc.
Plenty of power to do those tasks, in fact the little quad core is overkill :-)
You might be able to get away with a VM running on just 2GB for testing, maybe even 1GB. 8GB should be enough of RAM.
Not a problem. I have ran Linux and BSD VM's with as little as 512MB and they run just fine for basic testing and X use. All of my development Linux VM's are just 2GB and they don't even need 1GB! On my Ubuntu 12.04 32bit development VM, htop reports around 260MB mem/0MB swap while running Mate desktop and firefox displaying soylent news :-) Windows XP is a disgusting memory hog by comparison.
There is no language or IDE that won't run on this rig (well almost all). Linux has a FREE compiler and basic IDE support for all of the major open languages: Java, Ada, Go, Haskell, Fortran, COBOL, C/C++/Objective-C, D, Python, Ocaml, Lua, Erlang, LOGO, R, Ruby, C# and dozens more. Have fun!
You are pretty much set with this rig. Linux on the bare metal is quite efficient and will do whatever you want. Just be aware that Virtualbox does not run under FreeBSD yet. So stick with Linux on the bare metal for now.
(Score: 1) by martyb on Friday September 12 2014, @12:18PM
Thanks so much for the feedback! That sounded like a nice rig so I took a look at NewEgg and the comments on the mobo were very favorable except most of them mentioned that there were only two eSATA ports as being a limitation. As I would like to have this box last for a few years, I think it best I look for one with 4 or more eSATA ports. This mobo does have the advantage that it has a VGA out so I could continue to use my existing monitor until such time that I get an HDMI to DVI-D adapter.
I especially appreciate the feedback on my use cases — very helpful!
I'm pressed for time at the moment, but wanted to get back to you and thank you for the well-written and detailed reply!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Sunday September 14 2014, @09:06PM
Any time.
Yes, the AMD SoC only supports 2 SATA ports. Everything is on die so the only way to get more ports is a PCIe card. If you really want the extra ports then you could buy a PCI card when it gets to the point where you need more disks. Or spend a bit more on a
an AMD A-8 system but that will put you closer to $400 as a decent CPU and motherboard is close to $175.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday September 15 2014, @11:44AM
Thanks again for your thoughtful reply and explanations! I see no need, at first, for more than 2 SATA ports. Maybe a smallish (128 GB) SSD for speed and a 1 terabyte spinning rust drive for media, data, and the like. But, I could easily imagine in a year or two wanting to add extra external storage... Hmmm. Then again, with USB3, that may be less of a problem than I'm fearing I might run into. And, as you pointed out, I *could* get a PCIe card and add them that way. Having never had a SATA drive, I'm curious as to what your experience has been. Where/when have you found a need for more than 2 SATA devices?
Definitely food for thought. You've been so helpful - many thanks!
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday September 15 2014, @12:37PM
Personally just about every PC I have owned has had one or two *internal* disks. In my old AMD Athlon X2 desktop I had a 250GB disk and I later added a 400GB disk to expand my storage. My new i7 desktop has a 1TB disk and I later added a 250GB SSD for games. But I also bought a USB2/eSATA docking station for a 2TB "junk disk". That 2TB holds all of my backups: rat packing data for over 2 decades from old PC's, disk images, pictures, music and videos. I used to run a Linux server with 5x500GB disks in a soft raid 5 setup but the 2TB combined with Amazon S3 for offsite backup has negated its need. I have about 200GB (only the important stuff) on the S3 account and I only pay a few bucks a month to store it. If I need more storage its all USB from here on out with S3 for backups. Before the server it was a pile of five or six 80 & 120 gig ATA disks on USB which got out of hand so I built the server to consolidate everything. And my primary 1TB is about half full, most of which is VM disk images. The rest is a mix of photos, applications and other odds and ends. Most of my games are bought through Steam so my 250GB SSD is more than enough as I can simply delete the game data when I am done with that game and re-download it later if I want to play again.
For your needs two SATA ports should be enough seeing as how USB 3 is almost as fast as SATA and it gives you the option to plug in dozens of disks if needed. Do you need an SSD? How long do you spend waiting for your PC to boot or programs to load? My only reason for buying an SSD was because I game and I like fast load times. Everything else sits on spinning rust and is fast enough for me. I would save my money and hold off on the SSD until you start doing work that really needs the bandwidth.
(Score: 2) by martyb on Monday September 15 2014, @02:07PM
Do I *need* an SSD? Not really. Given that I'm currently swapping heavily to a slow (5400 RPM) ATA(!) drive, just being able to load things from a faster drive with a better comms protocol and without needing to swap is a *huge* win for me. I am most definitely I/O bound. So, a SATA 7200 RPM hard disk with a good-sized cache is probably MORE than good enough.
"How long do you spend waiting for your PC to boot or programs to load?" Resuming my normal load of programs (some background utilities/monitors, Firefox, Thunderbird, and a nuch of CMD windows) from hibernation takes about 5 minutes. I can be patient when I need to. Then again, there was a time when I had an IBM mainframe (one of two prototypes in existence in the world and their latest/greatest incarnation -- capable of supporting over 1000 simultaneous users) available to myself for an 8-hour shift several times a week for a few months. So, I know what speedy hardware feels like, too.
So, having heard so many good things about SSD speeds, there's a part of me that screams "Get it now!" Yet, given how SSDs continue to improve in the price/performance category, I'm probably better off holding out for that until later.
Thanks a bunch for the "reality check!"
Wit is intellect, dancing.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Monday September 15 2014, @03:37PM
Yup, hold off on the SSD. Like I said in an earlier post, a good 7200 RPM SATA disk is pretty darn fast.
(Score: 1) by crAckZ on Monday September 08 2014, @05:58PM
3.8 Ghz AMD quad core
12 Gb ram 1300 mhz 1.5 v
1 Tb hard drive 500GB SSD
NVidia 550TI
Gigabyte motherboard
wife uses it for facebook and editing photos
i use it for compiling software, VM, some lite video editing, gaming
mine is more than fast enough. very rarely do i push it to the max with this system. quick story on how this came to be though:
I was having a major surgery and i guess i told my brother (under the influence of great narcotics) that i wanted a new system to play games on when recovering. that apparently was code for take my debit card and have fun. and he did because he built two of them, one for him and one for me. he felt this made things "fair" when we played online games like WOT.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by shortscreen on Monday September 08 2014, @06:06PM
I've always been interested in hardware performance. Been tweaking and overclocking and benchmarking since the 386 days. Do you remember how some PCs used a timer interrupt to do DRAM refresh, and reprogramming the timer to a lower frequency (which only took an 18 byte .COM program) could free up some CPU time?
Anyway, at this point I would say that the hardware is an insignificant factor compared to software. You can pile on the extra CPU cores, deal with hundreds of watts of power consumption and heat, but still the programmers will find a way to make the same old shit you've been doing for years grind your system to a halt.
A few days ago, I was watching a streaming video website. The quality setting was 480p, the same video quality as the XVID-encoded .AVI files I use to watch on my Pentium 3 700MHz laptop years ago. Now I have a Core 2 Duo SU9600. Well, between Flash, and whatever video codec they are using now, my laptop was struggling to keep up and started to overheat. I switched to my desktop with a 2.7GHz Athlon X2. Even there, both cores were just about maxed out at times. So we have roughly a 6x increase in CPU load for the same old task. What will they come up with next?
If you want a responsive system, you just have to avoid shitty software (including websites).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by danomac on Monday September 08 2014, @06:27PM
I compile quite frequently and this workstation still is plenty fast enough for my needs. Outside of the CPU/motherboard failing I can still see using it for several years. The only thing I had to repair (two years ago, I think) was a broken power supply. This machine wasn't cheap, it was around $2500.
My laptop is an aging core2 laptop that's a bit older than my main workstation. I am debating on getting a workstation style laptop with a dock. Every once in a while the lenovo W series goes on sale, I picked up a W520 for work for $800 when the new ones were being introduced. I'll probably just time my personal purchase for when the beefier laptop lines get updated and pick up the old model.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Monday September 08 2014, @06:27PM
New computer is 1.5 years old (paid $1800 in 1/2013). It's a desktop and it's plenty fast. Apparently has 16GB ram, a 80GB flash drive and 3TB hard drive, and an intel 8 core processor (I think).
Haven't run out of memory to the best of my knowledge and rarely max out the CPU cores. Only time the CPU even breaks a sweat is when I'm transcoding a bluray, which is realistically the reason I upgraded the system to begin with.
My kids use my old system, which (I think) is an Intel Core Duo with 8GB ram and a 2TB hard drive.
The other system (which gets about as much use) is a 11/2008 Aluminum Macbook with 2GB ram and a 250GB HD. The only reason I'm thinking about replacing the macbook is that it's our only laptop and the battery life is 2 hours (and I can't bring myself to buy a new battery for a computer that old -- I'd rather have it plugged in all the time in my daughter's bedroom).
Notice I don't put much say into the actual CPUs in these machines. None of them are running CPU-intensive tasks, and are usually HD-bound. The older ones would get nice speed bumps by replacing the HDs with flash drives.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Monday September 08 2014, @06:32PM
Also have a few computers attached to the TVs. All of them have Intel Atom CPUs and have small HDs and little memory (2GB?), but realistically are bound by their nvidia or intel graphics chips since they run only a XBMC varient (openelec).
(Score: 2) by randmcnatt on Monday September 08 2014, @06:57PM
I have two identical towers I had built in 2006: 2.7Ghz AMD's, 2 GB memory, one 75GB SATA (OS and swap), one 300GB PATA. I loaded one with openSuse, the other with XP. Both were used for graphics and did (and still do) operate quite well for my needs. I would like to have more memory on the Linux box, just for the 130 comic strips I load Firefox with every morning, but so far swap is working quite well for my needs.
My daughter gave us a virused-infected dual-core Toshiba laptop, which promptly received a Linus transplant. It is great for my wife and family and grandkids, since about the only thing they do is browse the net and play on-line kids' games.
Someone else just gave me an old G4 with a wireless card and Photoshop already loaded. I think it would be perfect for the kids if I can find a place to put the monstrous thing.
The Wright brothers were not the first to fly: they were the first to land.
(Score: 2) by goodie on Monday September 08 2014, @07:07PM
Just upgraded my desktop from 2008-2009 by simply adding RAM (4gb) and an SSD (120Gb Intel). I had a big laptop that I used as a desktop replacement but it was always running and a bit hot at times with some recurring crashes over the past few weeks. So I decided to retire it and go back to a desktop that had a cheap fanless video card and 2 USB/HDMI external cards from Startech for my 3 screens. I mostly do text editing, email, browsing. Occasionally I do some database/data mining but it's not often enough that I can justify spending a buttload of money on a bleeding edge config anyway. Anyway, if you have a half decent CPU nowadays and do not do gaming or specialized stuff, increasing the RAM and moving to an SSD if the best idea. My Acer laptop has 8 Gb of RAM but a slow as crap HDD so it's next on my list of SSD upgrades...
On a side note, I've noticed that some websites, regardless of the hardware you have, are inherently slow because they're written like crap and riddled with ads and plugged into external services such as Disqus, Facebook, Twitter and shit. I try to avoid those but when I have no choice, I know I won't just pop a new tab for them... Anyway, all this to say that back in the days we used to say we'd sell 486's to browse the web at a low cost. Nowadays, it doesn't matter, you need 8 cores to go on some websites ;).
(Score: 1) by doublerot13 on Monday September 08 2014, @08:42PM
I have a t61p from ~2008ish which is still getting it done thanks to 8GB of RAM and a Samsung EVO. The SSD made a dramatic impact on usability.
It is more than enough for the everyday stuff like websurfing, youtube, and even messing around with Netbeans and Java.
Not to mention the keyboard is still straight 'buttah.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @01:44AM
If you run your own DNS, you can point the ad/spy domains at localhost. It's like a whole new internet.
(Score: 1) by doublerot13 on Tuesday September 09 2014, @02:12PM
You can also just use the good 'ole /etc/hosts or C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts.
127.0.0.1 doubleclick.net
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pmontra on Monday September 08 2014, @07:26PM
Wirth's Law is inaccurate. In the last few years (limiting to only what I use): the Linux file system got faster (ext3 to ext4), JavaScript got faster, Java got faster, Ruby got faster. I had a Core Duo laptop from 2006. It was faster last year then when I bought it.
I'm on a quad core i7-4700MQ at 2.40GHz, 16 GB RAM, 32 GB SSD + 720 GB HD. Fast than enough but not too fast. There is always something that takes ten seconds to complete that would be great if it completed in 0.1 s.
(Score: 2) by SlimmPickens on Monday September 08 2014, @09:31PM
Sure, even my phone is plenty fast enough for browsing & office (the things I spend the most time doing) but the thing is, I never seem to stop thinking of new things I want to do with computers. The laptop can only just play games though, even with the fast RAM.
Laptop: quad/HT/3.5ghz/6MB/vt-d (and more), HD3000, 16GB/1866/CL10/1.35V, 840PRO-512, 4G WWAN. This thing is a portable datacentre.
Desktop: quad/HT/3.4 GHZ (4GHZ), 8GB/1600/CL9, EVO840-512, HD-6950, RME babyface, Event TR8XL. I wish the CPU wasn't a K model, then I would have vt-d.
Server: 8-core/2.4GHz/4Mb (A1SRI-2758F), 32GB/1600/1.35V, 840PRO-512. This thing uses less power than an energy saving light bulb. It will eventually pay itself off.
Router: Mikrotik CRS125-24G-1S-2HnD-IN (I have three more Mikrotik routers) plus a 4G router for an extra access point (all my 4G devices are on a TMB share account)
Other: 4 old desktops that are under-clocked where possible. These spend most of their time either powered down or sleeping though.
These are just mine. The rest of the family have iDevices.
I've lost count of all the VM's.
(Score: 1) by dltaylor on Monday September 08 2014, @09:49PM
I rebuilt a couple of older Dell T3500s. The case is sound, the PSU only lacks a second (third, fourth) video card power connector (although they aren't necessary if you don't need gamer/CAD graphics), have slots for six DIMMs, and a decent mix of PCI and PCIe slots. The default graphics is business cheap, and there's not much RAM, but those are both personal add-ons, IMO. FWIW, the box I'm typing on came with an X5570 Xeon (quad core, 3.93 GHz), ATI FirePro GL of some sort, a couple of GBytes of RAM, Windows 7 Pro, and cost less than $400, shipped from Stallard Technologies (I do not work for them; I'm just a satisfied customer). I've buffed this one with a PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 to power the new ATI video card, Firewire 400/800 for all of my older backup units, USB3 for the newer ones, and an SCSI HBA to handle archiving all of my previous drives, a pair of Velociraptors (great kernel compile times) and 24 GBytes of RAM. This one can virtualize pretty much anything. It's cousin still has the original PSU, a less power hungry ATI video card, and 12 Gbytes of RAM. It is also a very capable virtualization machine.
Essentially, using an old server mainboard, CPU, and case/PSU, all you need to do is install RAM to suit (24 GBytes was the sweet spot when these were rebuilt) and an uprated graphics card, to keep the budget sane.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Monday September 08 2014, @10:44PM
I use a reasonable spec-ed 4GB/RAM 2.33Ghz Core 2 Duo with a 160GB HDD and a burner. It's a Dell Optiplex 755, which seem to be popular with soylentils.
I also use an Acer Aspire One ZG5 netbook with 1.6Ghz Intel Atom, 160GB HDD, and 1GB RAM.
And last but not least, I have an army of assorted Pentium 3-class machines that I use for development. They have the most 'professional' setup of any of my machines. Next to whichever one I have hooked up at the moment also sits an eMac G4 PowerPC mac with Debian PowerPC/32 bit. I get a lot of use out of that mac too. I use it for IRC and browsing and use one of the Pentium 3s for development in a standard working day.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Monday September 08 2014, @10:59PM
Which CPUs are the best to look for when needing lot's of on-chip CPU L1/L2/L3-cache? and the CPU frequency and cores is of secondary importance.
For software that uses very random accesses to memory, it's very useful.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @12:52AM
In the interest of 'national security', they have held back on advances in technology that could give EVERYONE faster computers.
Instead, they regulate cryptography and SURELY pay off/'lean on' the computer hardware manufacturers to 'drag their feet' when innovating new, better computer hardware.
Just take Intel as an example....
Back in the day, you paid extra for a math coprocesser whether it was a seperate chip or built into the CPU itself.
If you didn't want to pay extra, you could get a 'SX' CPU with the math coprocessor disabled (because the chip failed quality control tests as a 'DX').
This ploy lasted through the Celeron [wikipedia.org] era (with reduced cache or other disabled features) while Intel got into a 'Megahertz' war with rival CPU makers.
That war gave the world Intel CPUs running 3GHz+ out of the box and the overclockers sped them up from there.
To stop that, Intel made their chips un-overclockable.
With the MHz war over, it was on to the 'multicore' war with multiple CPUs in one package attached to the motherboard.
2 cores...4 cores....AND MORE!
All of the above is a 'bone' tossed to the masses to placate them by the CPU makers while the Feds/NSA use Federal laws/'national security' to keep/preserve/enjoy their competitive edge in (ultra) high performance computing. So much so that the existing supercomputers today are just tens of thousands of commodity computer motherboards, CPUs, and RAM all networked, powered, and backed by mass storage devices (i.e. hard disks) together into a cohesive whole.
(Score: 1) by mad-seumas on Tuesday September 09 2014, @01:23AM
Up until 6 months or so ago I was running an older Core2Duo (E8400 wolfdale @ 3Ghz) and 4GB of RAM (had 8 'til a stick in the 2nd pair went bad). It was fine for years but eventually it started showing its age. I shopped around and grabbed an MSI motherboard and an i7-4771 (3.5ghz, 4 cores, 4 hyperthreads) and 16GB of DDR3 for ~$500 then (big sale on the 4771 at the time). Primary OS is Windows 7 (teh games!) and I run a debian virtualbox VM to do real work in. Easy enough to fire up another VM if I need it (although I built a lab Xen server a bit ago so I don't find myself firing up as many VMs on the desktop as I used to). This thing is like night and day compared to the old Core2Duo. I was finding that the CPU and memory were starting to be a larger bottleneck than the GPU on some games (an Nvidia 550ti). The I/O speed differences, compared to the old Nvidia motherboard I had, are very noticeable as well. I just slapped a 1TB Evo SSD into it a few weeks ago and now the whole thing is like butter. Next upgrade will probably be a new video card - this one is mostly fine for the games that I have but I'd like something a little tougher than my old 550ti and the new 750ti looks to be a pretty good upgrade for where I want to be at a good price.
The next thing I want to play with on it is to install debian as the primary OS and do video card passthrough to a Xen windows VM (motherboard supposedly supports vt-d).
It's kind of fun to hop on it (in the debian VM) and a do a make -j49 (other cores spread through the house over distcc) - I can almost feel the temperature rise.
At some point I need to get a new laptop - I'm running a 2009 17" macbook pro that is really starting to slow down under the piggyness of OS X, and an older Core2Duo thinkpad with debian. At some point I'll have to shop around for a new shiny that supports debian out of the box. I'll be buggered before I pay for a new Macbook (got the last one from a job).
(Score: 1) by doublerot13 on Tuesday September 09 2014, @02:08PM
I had never heard of distcc until this comment. DO want.
(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Tuesday September 09 2014, @01:57AM
Lately I've been doing a lot of programming on a 2 Mhz MOS 8502 with 640K RAM, 128GB (yes, GB) disk, and dual monitors.
(It's amazing what you can plug up to a Commodore 128 with minimal effort. And before you ask 'why', it's a hobby. I don't have to justify it! Much, anyway.)
I also use a 2009 Amiga (800 MHz PowerPC, 1G RAM, 30G SSD) that is actually quite usable for my general farting-around-on-the-internet tasks.
I also have a 2010 Mac mini with 5 gigs of RAM - it's speedy enough, but I really want to replace the drive with an SSD and up the RAM a bit. It's my Plex server and torrent client, and it bogs down on seek-intensive drive tasks.
My PC is mostly for gaming, and is a 4 GHz AMD 6-core with 16 gigs DDR3 and a Radeon 7850 video card, with a big SSD to hold games on. I'm starting to sort of want a faster video card, but one that's enough of an upgrade from mine to be worthwhile is still too much money. Another year, perhaps.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 09 2014, @02:29AM
night and day
(Score: 1) by mgcarley on Tuesday September 09 2014, @02:58AM
You can pick up a decent off-lease HP Elitebook or Probook (or insert brand preference here) for maybe $300-400 at TigerDirect.
I normally add an SSD (and take the hard drive out to put in a 2.5" caddy which you can pick up for about $10) and up the RAM depending on who the machine is for, but the last one I purchased was about $500 all up including a 120GB SSD, 8GB of RAM and a DisplayPort to HDMI adapter and came with Windows 7 Pro.
Founder & COO, Hayai. We're in India (hayai.in) & the USA (hayaibroadband.com) // Twitter: @mgcarley
(Score: 2) by zafiro17 on Tuesday September 09 2014, @09:00AM
Given how much of what we do is on line these days, for me the processor is no longer an issue: bandwidth and memory are the bottlenecks. I used a Pentium III (Coppermine) with 128MB to do most of what I needed to do until 2008, with very few problems. Since then I've used a Core Duo with I think 2GB of RAM. Perfectly usable right up to today. I don't play complicated games or do much compiling. For everything else, I've got plenty of memory and my biggest bottleneck is the bandwidth on my wireless router (and often, by craptacular ISP). Sometimes I think if I had a decent enough network connection I could even go back to the PIII. And be more productive than a lot of my numbnuts co-workers, too.
Dad always thought laughter was the best medicine, which I guess is why several of us died of tuberculosis - Jack Handey
(Score: 1) by Rich on Tuesday September 09 2014, @03:55PM
Late in 2006, I bought the new MacBook Pro (first Core 2 Duo series). I was developing a re-compiler for a fringe architecture (DLX/MIPS-like) to x86 and was getting around 50 net MIPS out of the emulation. One day, I brought it to my customer and wanted to proudly show off that I had achieved 50 MIPS, more than the full speed of the embedded CPU emulated. The benchmark clocked in at 110 MIPS.
I investigated and eventually found out that it had to do with the battery. As the batteries of my former machines degraded rather quickly, I thought it was a good idea to store the battery with low charge in a cool place while the computer was on mains. But for customer visits, I would put the battery in. Now, the 2006 MacBook Pro has a very badly documented feature which clocks it down to 1 GHz with a missing battery.
I had been using my new computer at half of its possible speed for two years, intensely developing, and optimizing assembly code, without noticing that it was throttled down. Taught me a lesson about perceived speed.
The computer is still my main workstation, and it is still fast enough for me. It has got full RAM in it now, and a big drive, but I didn't even feel the urge to put in an SSD yet. In the meantime I also got a shiny quad i7 RMBP, but I mostly use that only as a surfpad, because I don't really like post-SL OSX. So much for preference vs. speed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 15 2014, @10:44AM
Here's my personal experience
Test subject 1:
I had an old setup running for 6 years, only powered down once a year for fan cleaning/replacement.
The purpose of this machine was mainly to serve as a sort-of NAS and IM answering machine (yeah, MSN mesenger didnt receive offline messages at the time)
The setup was Dual Pentium 2 333mhz
256mb ram
a ~10gb SCSI harddrive for the OS pulled from a raid of a SUN machine
+ a shaiteload of other HDD's nf random sizes and speeds PATA and SCSI
machine was running WinXP Pro SP2
Everything ran ok, it did it's purpose
Occasionally I would get an IM with a Youtube link and I would open it in this machine, the video obviously lost a couple of frames but was always perfectly watchable.
Until the day I was forced to update the Flash player, from that day onwards any flash content was completely unusable, the video playback dropped to about 1 FPS.
I know this machine's specs are laughable but the performance drop was pretty noticeable in this case, went from a usable state to perfectly unusable
The exact same this happened in a newer machine about 3 years later (test subject 2)
Test subject 2:
My main PC, I don't use my PC for gaming, mostly only music related stuff and the specs are fine for me
Setup is a HP 7600 SFF enterprise desktop case
Pentium 4 2.8ghz
2gb ram
random 7800rpm SATA HDD for the OS + other HDD's for extra storage
onboard Intel GMA video card
same as the above example this machine suits all of my needs, overall good performance.
Flawless video playback using dedicated videoplayers/windows-codecs as log as the videos are under 1080.
Youtube used to run flawless in full screen, until a new Flash update was forced. (Forced as in you cant view Youtube content until you upgrade the plugin)
After the Flash update, like in my previous example, flash video became almost unwatchable, performance dropped to about 5FPS playback. My only option would be to download the video and watch it on a dedicated player.
Switching to HTML5 had similar performance issues, only using Chrome had a slightly better performance
Lately the only performance drop I'm experiencing is with Firefox which seems to be getting heavier with each version, can't comment on other browsers since I only use Firefox.
Bottom point, Adobe probably has some dark deal with hardware makers to progressively cripple performance with each update to force people to upgrade their hardware.
Or probably Adobe are just crappy dev's/programmers and keep screwing it up and bloating Flash with each update.