Search results

From what I've been told, VIA stuff was the more stable offering for SS7, while ALi performed better. Or maybe vice-versa. SiS was the clear budget contender with their integrated graphics baked in, but they were okay too. But I can't say I've had any significant stability problems thus far...

Swapped my 486 motherboard/CPU/RAM with a friend of mine for their Super Socket 7 board/CPU/RAM. The 486 is no more, replaced by a machine running a K6-III+. This machine also replaces my Pentium III since it does well enough at both DOS and Win9x to meet my needs. Anything it can't do that the...

I actually ended up with something from RackNerd, they had a special cooperative deal with LowEndBox for a 2.5GB/3c/40GB VPS that I jumped on for I think 24 bucks a year? It's more than adequate for what I need.

Easy now, I said I try not to give them any more information than I must. I don't really get that far into it, I don't sacrifice much, I still use YouTube pretty extensively and shop more on Amazon than I do in actual brick/mortar stores. I just try to move away from the really personal services...

Yeah, I was considering repurposing another Sandy Bridge-era Optiplex for that, maybe install a RAID card and drop a few drives in it for RAID5 and use it for a home NAS while also running my website and bouncer from that, but supposedly my new ISP is way stingier about people putting stuff on...

You can disregard this last post. I ended up looking on LowEndBox for a deal and found one with RackNerd -- for 24 dingleberries a year I have a VPS with 2.5GB RAM and 2 cores on an E5-2680v2, with 40GB of space to play with. Plenty for the base usecase I had in mind, we'll see if I can make it...

A bit random, but that's what this topic's for... What VPS provider would you recommend? I don't want or need anything spectacular, though I could be persuaded to splurge a little if they offer free or cheap domain registration as a bonus. My budget is, like, $30/mo maximum, but that's if it...

I'm one of those weird folks who think Google's the devil and try not to give them any more information than I absolutely must. I admire the Chromebook for what it is, but I'm more likely to want similar hardware running actual Linux, myself.

Early Chromebooks especially from Samsung used Exynos chips anyway, and got superb battery life and performance for the day. I wondered why they went to Intel to begin with, especially when they use such low end chips easily outpaced by mid-tier Snapdragons. If anything this may actually hurt...

In a corporate environment, sure. For personal use fixing personal devices? I dunno, it comes down to how much you personally like getting sued for violations of the DMCA. Even then, it's more likely the distributors of the image will get sued before users do.

Yeah, the ET4000/W32p was their first PCI-capable chipset, though it apparently wasn't particularly fast on PCI like it was on VLB. The ET6000 was very nice for the time, but given the choice we have today, I'd take a Matrox card over an ET6000 every time. The Matrox will be faster, have more...

I hoped someone would pick up on the Red Hill reference I made. ;)

My board offers support for a 50MHz bus, but none of the cards I have will work at that speed -- even 40MHz is technically overclocking it. And in benchmarks, the DX2-66 beats the DX-50 in roughly 75% of cases, particularly CPU-bound ones, while a DX4-120 beats it in all possible scenarios --...

You end up with strange issues with older machines. In another effort to get just a little more performance out of my 486 -- I really, really just wanted to see Diablo play smoothly on it, and seeing 32-channel XM modules play smoothly would be nice as well -- I've managed to source a few PGA168...

My one flirtation with liquid cooling began and ended with a CoolerMaster MasterLiquid Lite 240. The pump was annoyingly loud and it didn't run noticeably better than the Cryorig H7 it'd replaced, once the water warmed up. Then again at the time I was cooling an overclocked 3570K that drew maybe...

Oh yes, I completely agree. nVidia's philosophy has always been and always will be to monopolize the market in whatever way they can, it's why they're trying to buy ARM. On principle I try to avoid their stuff where I can, but with my P4 as an example, the era's alternatives are always broken in...

Like I said, they're the earliest 9x drivers with explicit support for the 815E chipset that I could find, and Intel usually doesn't mess around, so I figured they'd be stable enough at least. May as well go a little newer just to be sure. The Voodoo drivers I used are the modified AmigaMerlin...

Ouch! Hope the storage is safe so hopefully it's just as simple as slapping it in another machine to keep using your install and all how you had it. I know Win9x was never the most stable codebase but I swear on my late grandfather's grave I had it working better than this at one point -- heck...

Personally I find that if a stress test makes your GPU fail then it failed the stress test. Therefore I just let OCCT fly for a few hours and then hit it with the Extreme FurMark preset for another few hours. Then I make it fold at full power for another couple hours after that.

Just to hold installs of games and such that would tangibly benefit from being on an SSD instead of my hard drive. I'm not using it in a NAS context, I should have clarified, I was just throwing my two-cents in as to if WD SSDs are any good or not. And yes, I'd agree with your summary: decent...

My m.2 SATA games SSD is a WD Blue and I've got no complaints. I chose it for price (caught a sale) and decent benchmark numbers for a SATA drive for the price. It does what I need it to but I'll be honest in that I have a tendency to install stuff and just leave it, so I don't have a ton of...

Oh yeah, I love the Moto gestures. It was the first thing I noticed on returning to a Moto phone, it just felt right. But going from one to the other, I just didn't notice all the little improvements because between the Droid Turbo and Moto Z there just weren't that many. This was when 32-bit...

I had the original Moto Z back in college and I didn't care for it all that much. It didn't do anything my Turbo couldn't do almost as well, the battery didn't last as long as the Turbo (which by this point had degraded noticably from stock, and was some four years old already), and it cost way...

Say what you will about Apple, I think they lost some originality when they ditched PowerPC back in the day. So I'm happy to see them doing something a little out of the box, even if it is just kinda tapping into the design chops of their mobile teams. ARM is very common these days but not in...

I don't mind a lower end SoC if the performance is "good enough" and the battery life holds up -- I'm used to waiting a minute for things to catch up. I'm also pretty depressingly familiar with the "Recent Apps->Clear All" dance. Then again, it's more about pricing for me as well, I just don't...

I got the phone yesterday and I'm honestly blown away in every possible good way. For a relatively budget phone it pulls no punches. I've had a couple situations where, it would be installing a system update while running youtube and that'd slow it down quite a bit, but in general use it's...

After 6 months in the trenches with an iPhone SE 2020 from AT&T (bought on promotion) I've decided to abandon carrier again as my service flat out just hasn't worked at home for the entire time I've been living down here. It works fine at work as that's a couple towns over, but screw me if I...

I'm only now getting back with a Polaris card in the wake of AMD discontinuing driver support for the very last of the Southern Islands cards. I'd sold my 480 when this mess kicked back up because I wanted to make the money I put into it back -- I overpaid at the end of the last crypto boom and...

Oh, my P4 machine is fully Win98 compatible itself. The 98 machine being a PIII is by design, the Voodoo3 is the main facet of the build and a 1GHz Coppermine PIII and 512MB of RAM is plenty for it -- it's to run late 90's Glide games using Aureal A3D sound, while the P4 is for running early-mid...

Well. The M912 kinda just stopped POSTing one day. It had been having weird issues with sound before that -- it just plain didn't work. Ironically I had more luck with the buggy-as-hell YMF719 card -- it'd at least produce a little more than garbage. I thought it might be that the ISA clock was...

Holy shit.

At least as of the leaked build you can revert that. It's probably some way to be DiFfErEnT but draw some inspiration from both macOS (the dock) and ChromeOS in that its menu IIRC works much the same way.

Hmm. In 486 news I've managed to follow this guide to install what essentially amounts to a Windows 3.11 (not for Workgroups) virtual-machine under Windows 98SE. Of course, Control Panel GPF'ing on the special mouse driver and one of the pieces of software I actually wanted to mess with...

I use Macrium Reflect myself for whole-image backups of my drive under Windows, but I mostly just use good old dd under anything else.

I actually already watch both of them! I have a great deal of interest in alternate platforms, I just kinda get ahold of them, get them set up and go "Okay, what now?" because unlike my PC excursions, I have no frame of reference for it and no attachment to it.

Another PIII build is underway. I've managed to accumulate some desirable retro hardware again -- first a Voodoo3 3000 AGP, then an Aureal Vortex 2, and now I've managed to land myself a microATX i815 board out of some IBM NetVista. Figuring out the pinout on that thing's front panel is going to...

Hmm. This gets more and more interesting the deeper I get. So the PlayStation I ended up getting and modchipping works well enough -- I have to replace the laser mech, right now all it will boot into is my burnt copy of the 240p test suite -- and I have to figure out a better solution for...

I didn't look it up but I'm pretty sure you're referring to one Stanislav Petrov, correct? The one who (correctly) assumed that if the US were to authorize a nuclear launch against the USSR, it wouldn't have just been five missiles and called the computer malfunction that said there were that...

That's perfectly acceptable for a load temp, if indeed that is a load temp. In terms of actual performance metrics on my own upgrade, I went from struggling to hit 100% in PCem emulating a mobile PMMX-300, to just about managing it on a K6-2 333 with a Voodoo2.

DPI scaling doesn't work 100% of the time, and everything's designed for 96dpi, usually, and inconsistencies in UI always bother me more than they should. It's already an exercise in frustration to use Windows as it is, with some aspects of the UI dating back to Windows/NT 3.x, some from 95/NT4...

Yeah, I ended up just PBOing it and calling it a day. It's still easily worth it. With realtime priority on both benchmarks, my Cinebench R15 score jumped massively from 1345 on the 1600AF@3.9ac to 2142. My Cinebench R20 score went from 3036 to 4921. That said, synthetic benchmarks don't tell...

Be careful setting fans to 100%. Smaller ones like the ones used on stock coolers tend to run themselves ragged over time.

Well, that's not bad at all, then. Especially for a stock cooler. Then again, I hear those are supposed to boost a single core up to 4.4? Might be something to think about for the future. I definitely wouldn't outright overclock it on the stock cooler. That said, I also hear lm-sensors can be...

I upgraded to a 27" 1440p monitor and my first impression is that everything's so small! I can't be getting old person eyes yet... I can still read it, but it's definitely going to take some getting used to. I will definitely have to wear my glasses at all times now.

just over 4GHz on the stock cooler at 80C isn't that bad. My cousin's 3600 ran worse on his stock cooler -- he only managed 4GHz at 85-90, so I set him up with a Pure Rock Slim to get those temps down and cut out that buzzsaw noise his fan was making. But then as I understand it the cooler they...

Single-fan version of the Noctua NH-D15, the D15S. Under Prime95 small FFTs torture testing my 1600AF only hits about 65C after a solid ten minutes, and then it stays there. I'm betting the 3700X doesn't do much worse -- maybe 70-75ish, it will probably draw a bit more power -- this is a...

I'd love to live close to a Micro Center but the closest one is a five-ish hour drive.

Nabbed a Trinitron TV locally for a pittance to RGB mod for consoles and such. It's a very nice set, the Sony KV27-S42, and even has a remote -- a rather battered and aged one, the original in fact. For roughly an hour's roundtrip and twenty dollars I got something that on eBay would have set me...

Remember how I said I'd grab a 3700X when I could get one for less than 170 bucks? Well -- I didn't manage that, but I did manage roughly a hundred off MSRP -- I made an offer on one that was heading to auction and nabbed it. I don't technically have it yet but nothing screamed "fake listing" so...

Walked into the Cox office and got upped to the unlimited tier for $50 extra a month. It seems pretty scummy but oh well. Plus, we managed to get in early enough into our billing period that it just got applied immediately -- I don't need to worry about overages or throttling for this month. And...