Taking the plunge with a new PC

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Buying a new PC was once a fairly simple shop-and-buy process. There wasn’t much to consider beyond memory and drive capacity — and maybe an upgraded
[See the full post at: Taking the plunge with a new PC]

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Kaj4strom, Elly

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Tracey Capen wrote:

Buying a new PC was once a fairly simple shop-and-buy process.

Buying a new PC is still a fairly simple shop-and-buy process.

Set your budget
Set your usage type (gaming, office, browsing, video/audio editing..)
Get the best CPU, GPU, max RAM, max SSD.. for your set budget and usage.

Simple.

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And don’t forget to overprovision. Don’t fall into the trap of making your new PC just barely good enough to do what you do the first day you get it. You WILL find more to do with it. The operating system WILL become more bloated, and there’s little you can do about it.

Sure, it’s tempting to minimize purchase cost, but what about the ongoing cost of frustration or time lost repeatedly having to clean a nearly full drive or down time because of failures. Also, beyond speed and capacity, this is actually still a realm where paying more can buy you more quality.

I’ve personally built a successful business and career by finding new technical things I could accomplish because I bought workstations that were far more powerful than what I knew I needed. Imagine not having to worry about changing computers for 5 or more years. It’s possible.

Think of buying a good, powerful machine as an investment in your computing future.

-Noel

10 users thanked author for this post.

Elly, LH, cmptrgy, SueW, Cybertooth, geekdom, jburk07, CyGuy, rc primak, satrow

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Problem with Optane (unless you use their very expensive full drive instead of the accelerator drive that you used, Fred), is that it only works with Intel Motherboards and now I refuse to use Intel due to their complete idiocy of designing back door that finally hackers have figured out a way to exploit.  Just glad I have an AMD system.   Like you, my 2014 ASUS is starting to show it’s age, but I think I can milk a few more years out of it (though it’s show some slowness  mainly with mouse reaction that I cannot figure out why).   Thinking about just upgrading my HD to an SSD.  Did so for my 89 year old friend last fall and his boot time from cold went from minutes to literally 14 seconds (that’s to desktop wallpaper screen; no joke).    Mine still really takes 1.5 minutes to be useable unless I wake from hibernate (disabled that for my friend since the boards I read say that can be detrimental to the SSD) which then take around 35 seconds (Still twice as long as the cold boot that an SSD would do).    Regardless, I’m cheap so likely I’ll just tolerate the idiosyncrasies of my PC until it dies.   lol

 

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Hey AMD has StoreMI  shipped with its latest Ryzen 2000 CPU series and their MBs(400 series Motherboard chipsets) and StoreMI is an actual Tiered Storage middleware solution and not just some disk caching solution. And as far as Intel’s Optane/XPoint Intel-MB based solution being restricted to Intel’s CPU/MB platform ecosystem just wait for Micron’s QuantX XPoint solutions which will be based on XPoint version 2 IP. That StoreMI is also going to be available for AMD 500 series MBs(Chipsets) that will support AMD’s new Zen-2 micro-architecture based Ryzen 3000 series Desktop processors.

But you can still purchase an M.2 Intel XPoint drive and incorporate that into your StoreMI tiered storage hierarchy and that’s one solution also.

That Intel proprietary XPoint Intel MB only solution is a not going to net Intel wide adoption of Optane in the same manner as Intel’s Thunderbolt IP did not get wide adoption restricted to Intel only CPU/MB ecosystem offerings.  But now Intel has opened up its Tunderbolt 3 specification to the USB-IF as part of the USB-IF’s USB 4 standard that will include TB3 along with all the other USB legacy standards/protocols.

Micron should start to compete with Intel in the XPoint market once XPoint version 2 arrives and Intel and Micron will be going their own separate ways after XPoint-2 arrives . Intel MB’s with that Optane accelerator technology being restricted to only Intel’s specific CPU/MB SKUs does not limit any M.2 Optane/XPoint  drives from being of use to AMD users via that StoreMI but Intel’s proprietary MB/Optane acceleration solution is non standard currently unless Intel gets some open industry standards body to adopt its Proprietary Optane/MB acceleration IP as part of an open industry standard.

AMD’s/AMD’s Motherboards have no problem working with any M.2 SSD drives as those drives have to follow the M.2 industry standards and work accordingly(XPiont or NAND based) but XPoint is really not going to gain wide acceptance until there is a second source XPoint supplier in the market place to provide competition and assurances to any OEM that there will be more than one supplier of XPoint related products. So Micron is supposed to be bringing its  QuantX/XPoint competition soon(late 2019) if Micron does not keep pushing its release dates further into the future.

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[tom341]

My take on this is why pay a premium in price for something that emulates an SSD When the price of a SATA 3 SSD is affordable  unless you need above 2tb  but for most people optane is no more than a gimmick I self  built my current PC , and would never buy new a pre built desktop PC ,

As for these intel exploits if you are running a good internet security, multi layered product , these are automatically mitigated if configured correctly

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by tom341.

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Noel Carboni

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[tom341]

tom341 wrote:

My take on this is why pay a premium in price for something that emulates an SSD When the price of a SATA 3 SSD is affordable  unless you need above 2tb  but for most people optane is no more than a gimmick I self  built my current PC , and would never buy new a pre built desktop PC ,

As for these intel exploits if you are running a good internet security, multi layered product , these are automatically mitigated if configured correctly

• This reply was modified 6 years ago by tom341.

Mitgated at the expense of performance, Tom.  I rather have a bit better performance and not worry about someone hacking into my PC at the processor core level.  

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lylejk wrote:

Mitgated at the expense of performance

With the security SW that is use, I see no noticeable hit in performance, So that probably will vary on the choice of security solution you chose, But the 2018  o/s patches for intel cpu’s and the bios patches did cause a drop in performance apparently, I don’t actually know because i didn’t install those patches  my o/s is only patched upto DEC17 and it is very stable , It’s like using xmp enabled or not  can you notice the difference? unless you are benchmarking

Mod edit: Please quote only the relevant bits.

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lylejk wrote:

I refuse to use Intel due to their complete idiocy of designing back door that finally hackers have figured out a way to exploit.

Gruss said it was “easier than Spectre” but “more difficult than Meltdown” to exploit

From: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/14/zombieload-flaw-intel-processors/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer_us=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_cs=bHXrMB_ysd_34qmhFWtKOA

So not really a problem then.

cheers, Paul

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