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Intel 540s worth it at $380

Intel usually has a pretty good reputation, but the 540 is so new at this point that we really don't know how it will stand up. Personally I'd aim for a slightly older design. MX200 1Tb maybe?
- pitz
- Post #3
- Jun 20, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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Why aren't there more ITX cases?

That segment is increasingly served by NUCs. DVD drives have been mostly phased out at this point. Most people don't need a second hard drive. Gamers usually want something bigger. So where does ITX really fit anymore?
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- Post #6
- Jun 19, 2016
- Forum: Cases & Cooling
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What to expect for ATX 3.0 PSUs?

-12V has been gone for ages. A supply I bought in 2005 didn't have it. I'm pretty sure PCI didn't need it either. The only real "use" for it was RS-232 serial ports, and those have have had charge-pump-based MAX232's or similar available for the past 20 years. BJT TTL logic required bipolar...
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- Post #9
- Jun 19, 2016
- Forum: Power Supplies
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery

Some of us work with computers in embedded applications, and its a lot of labour and troubleshooting, at an unwanted time. I can change the batteries with ease in my home computer. But what about a computer used for digital signage that's mounted 25 feet in the air? Or various applications in...
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- Post #35
- Jun 17, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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In which country were the following CPU's made ? All in China ?

delete
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- Post #7
- Jun 17, 2016
- Forum: CPUs and Overclocking
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why is read and write so slow for 4k files?

Basically you can think of a SSD as being a filesystem which abstracts itself to the outside world as a block device. When doing many small I/O operations, there is considerable filesystem overhead involved with allocation, lock operations, etc. These scale up with random I/O to an extent...
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- Post #7
- Jun 14, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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Hard Drive that keeps going

Seagate 320gb PATA, ~70,000 hours Seagate 500gb PATA ~75,000 hours Hitachi 2TB 7k2000 ~57,000 hours I run everything in RAID-1, so basically I don't care how old drives get. They run until they die.
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- Post #8
- Jun 1, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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Broadwell-E 10 Core Costs $1723

And you are directly privy to the agreements under which such CPU's are provided to Intel's customers? You've seen the (probably highly confidential) agreement between HP and Intel? Unless you have, just what position are you really in to comment on this? I understand perfectly that some ES...
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- Post #206
- Jun 1, 2016
- Forum: CPUs and Overclocking
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What brand of ssd to use or???

Practically any 240gb SSD will do just fine. On a machine that old, subtle performance differences aren't all that likely to even be noticed between the fastest SATA models, and slightly less fast ones. Crucial MX200, Samsung 850 Pro or Evo, etc., are some fairly popular models. For...
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- Post #12
- Jun 1, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery

If the battery's not completely dead, it will indicate. If the battery is completely dead, bye-bye settings, and many boards won't even boot. This is the behavior I'd like to see changed, so that the UEFI firmware (or BIOS), through an option ROM, can contact a NTP server and set the date...
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- Post #24
- May 29, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery

I was actually thinking along the lines of a manufacturing plant which may have a few hundred PC's scattered about for control, monitoring, surveillance, inspection, etc. PC's that, once installed, should run for many years without maintenance. If there's a power loss, 6 years down the...
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- Post #23
- May 29, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery

Those could be made persistent in Flash, for example. Over-rideable back to defaults with jumpers. I have no issues with keeping the RTC, but why not make the battery optional? So those of us who don't want a RTC don't have to suffer having to perform maintenance on it?
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- Post #19
- May 29, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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Hi, Planning to buy used desktop computer, need a suggestion

A very capable machine. Only "gotcha" I can think of is that you won't be using 4K displays with the onboard video unless you use an additional video card. If you were to purchase the next generation, "Haswell", you would be able to attach 4K displays to the Intel embedded video.
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- Post #5
- May 29, 2016
- Forum: Computer Building
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Crucial MX300

This thread is making me glad I put in an order for some MX200's. The Samsung 840 / 840 Evo were fairly hyped drives straight out of the gate too, yet look at how they turned out in the real world. There's something to be said about being conservative with one's SSD choices. Especially if...
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- Post #40
- May 28, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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SSD vs HDD

I agree with your sentiment and you're mostly correct. However, lots and lots of people (even engineers) misinterpret what MTBF really means. MTBF is only valid over a manufacturer's specified "service life" (ie: 5 years for enterprise HDDs). MTBF is only valid over very large populations of...
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- Post #8
- May 28, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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dual 4K capable GPU

delete
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- Post #2
- May 24, 2016
- Forum: AMD
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Now that we have 10Gbit/sec USB 3.1 Gen 2, why not 10GbE?

In a nutshell, the physical media interfaces (ie: PHYS) are still pretty pricey. And not fully standardized. The Ethernet control chips are starting to come into the range where passive cooling is very realistic for most applications with die shrinks and process improvements. But until...
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- Post #2
- May 5, 2016
- Forum: Networking
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pfsense on laptop?

You really don't need dual NICs for a pfsense (or similar) gateway. A single NIC configured with VLANs is good enough (and this is how most of the dd-wrt devices actually work -- its a single NIC to their SoC, and then they have a Ethernet switching ASIC that understands VLANs). IMHO, go...
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- Post #22
- May 5, 2016
- Forum: Networking
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Need help backing up data from drive that constantly hangs from bad sectors.

ddrescue with the "map" file works awesome for things like this. It'll read what it can first-pass, and then it will try to read the bad blocks. Run it long enough, and eventually you'll have an image file that has everything except a small number of dead areas. I "recovered" nearly...
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- Post #27
- Apr 23, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery

I am talking about both server and client PCs. Client PCs, especially, as they tend to be more geographically dispersed. Not really, especially in this era of people getting 5-10 years out of their desktops routinely. Just because the 'average' battery lifespan is 7-8 years doesn't mean...
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- Post #10
- Apr 23, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery
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- Post #8
- Apr 23, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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Intel planning for thousands of job cuts, internal sources say

Caucasian US citizen males, of course. By far the most expensive part of their workforce. The really good stuff at Intel hasn't even been designed in the US for a long time now. Most of the engineering in Intel's modern CPU and chipset products happens at their Haifa complex. Having...
- pitz
- Post #172
- Apr 23, 2016
- Forum: CPUs and Overclocking
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery

The every 6 years (which actually becomes 3-4 years in some cases) is a problem on machines which are in datacenters or even office PCs. Computers are lasting a lot longer these days, and a $2 battery can easily cost $100-$200 for a service call + lost productivity. I have no problem with...
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- Post #6
- Apr 23, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery

The UEFI can include a module to connect to a ntp server. Not a big deal to implement.
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- Post #5
- Apr 23, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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Which cheap 120GB/240GB SSD?

The Intel 520 / 330 240gb SSDs are pretty battle-proven and are a dime a dozen for ~$50-ish on eBay. Used, yes, but 25nm so cycles should not be a problem.
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- Post #17
- Apr 19, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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SSD Problem (and maybe buying a new one)

Overpartitioning? Not only is that unnecessary, but it might actually be more harmful than good. After all, the SSD and the filesystem should work to spread the load on the drive out as much as possible. If you start imposing artificial limitations on "the system", efficiency is most likely...
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- Post #8
- Apr 19, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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Eliminating "CMOS" battery

Seems to me that the "CMOS" battery for real-time clock and for storage of settings is an unnecessary part of the BOM on computers. After all, it would be relatively trivial to write UEFI code to retrieve time from the Internet from various public clock servers. Or even use-configurable ones...
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- Thread
- Apr 18, 2016
- Replies: 39
- Forum: Motherboards
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I accidentally knocked motherboard resistor

You'd need the schematic of the board to be sure, but resistors are often used in digital systems to pull up certain inputs, to ensure a certain state upon power cycling (ie: as a RC circuit) or to limit current. They are also used to terminate transmission lines/buses to minimize/eliminate...
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- Post #4
- Apr 17, 2016
- Forum: Motherboards
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Final Decisions on Mini Build

I don't think I'd do the 1Tb Samsung 840 Evo. Should be able to find a 20nm MLC drive, or even upgrade to the Samsung 850 Evo (which has 3D TLC) in that price range.
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- Post #4
- Apr 17, 2016
- Forum: Computer Building
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PC Client shipments in free fall Q1.

The SSD has been extremely disruptive. For years, Intel was able to sell themselves as the "core" of the computer, "the" component (CPU) that made everything go faster. They even spent billions on advertising campaigns along those lines, with dancing bunnies and annoying twinkle music trying...
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- Post #158
- Apr 17, 2016
- Forum: CPUs and Overclocking
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Not fully resettable hardware

A basic covenant of working with computers over the past 20-40 years is that, upon formatting the storage in its entirety, and wiping out NVRAM with a provided jumper, shorting appropriate pins, or depriving battery backup power for a specified period sufficient to drain the NVRAM's settings...
- pitz
- Thread
- Apr 17, 2016
- Replies: 0
- Forum: Motherboards
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How to make Dell laptop recovery disks?

Do you have the machine still intact? If so, take the disk, boot it up on Linux with a boot stick or attach it to a machine, and execute the following command (with cwd = somewhere you can store the image) dd if=/dev/sdX of=New_Dell_Laptop_Image.img bs=1M count=500 (ie: copy the first 500...
- pitz
- Post #2
- Apr 5, 2016
- Forum: Laptops
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256GB SSD or 500GB SSHD

HDDs in any way, shape, or form, don't belong in laptops these days. SSDs have not only dramatic performance advantages, but also significantly lower power consumption and reliability. Don't know the specifics involved here, but sometimes its a better deal ordering a laptop with the...
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- Post #16
- Apr 5, 2016
- Forum: Laptops
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Would it really matter to buy a high performance SSD compared to a mediocre SSD?

I'd rather buy an older, albeit more mature designs, than the latest/greatest. SSDs are dirt cheap. Being a manufacturers' beta tester isn't my "job". Even on SSDs that were thought of being rock-solid, there's been bugs discovered. ie: the queued TRIM problems which caused such to be...
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- Post #26
- Apr 2, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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Advice to change hard drive with errors! To Clone or not?

My personal preference would be to use ddrescue with a map file. This way, as much of the drive can be read as possible. It might only be a very small section that has failed. I had a drive die in a Windows XP machine, and approximately 25 megabytes out of a 200gb drive ended up being...
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- Post #4
- Mar 28, 2016
- Forum: Computer Building
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Custom Engineered Motherboards

Even most of the custom motherboards that are spun for Google/Facebook, are merely existing designs, with extraneous components omitted (ie: no need for sound DACs or a full compliment of unpopulated PCI-E slots for machines that will sit on racks in the datacentre!). So no, custom...
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- Post #13
- Mar 25, 2016
- Forum: Ask a Technical Professional
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Discussion ITT: We predict how low the price floor on 120GB/128GB SSD drops

I guess the question is how long does the discrete SATA form factor last for drives that small? Certainly the cost of production for a mSATA / M.2 (PCI-E) SSD is less than that of the full-blown 2.5" 7mm SATA form factor. And there are interposers available if someone wants to convert a mSATA...
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- Post #15
- Mar 25, 2016
- Forum: Memory and Storage
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Laptop without numeric 10-key keypad .....PLEASE!!!

Count me in as a guy frustrated with the lack of ~15" laptops with both a pointing stick (ie: that eraser-like thing) + no number pad. The number pad is just a bad fad. Seriously, who uses those things?
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- Post #14
- Mar 15, 2016
- Forum: Laptops
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Holy ****. Xeon E5-2670s from decommissioned Facebook servers selling for $70 on EBay

Is the newer gear much better? Or has FB merely decided to change hardware strategy?
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- Post #4
- Feb 23, 2016
- Forum: CPUs and Overclocking
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Holy crap, "old" Sandy Bridge CPUs are still expensive as hell!

Yeah its kind of crazy. I bought an i7-2600 for $269 Canadian pretty much 5 years ago to the day, which, translated to US dollars today, is $196. I could almost sell on eBay, in USD$, for a little less than that amount.
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- Post #40
- Feb 23, 2016
- Forum: CPUs and Overclocking

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