Oh I see. 500 lbs. was the mass of the gel, not the mass of the test subject.
Something Random
- Thread starter ddrueding
- Start date
Oh I see. 500 lbs. was the mass of the gel, not the mass of the test subject.
ddrueding
Fixture
When the largest EC2 instance isn't enough....this is going to stay pegged on this process for 40 hours+
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
What is it doing?
ddrueding
Fixture
Photogrammetry. Specifically, running the program PhotoScan by Agisoft against ~300 18MP images to create a 3D model of several acres of complex terrain including several buildings and other objects. More specifically, creating a dense cloud of several million points.
ddrueding
Fixture
timwhit
Hairy Aussie
Is that you in the lower right flying the drone?
ddrueding
Fixture
Yup. That is pretty much the whole property, not a convenient place to stay out of frame.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
If you have windows on the north-eastern side of the house, they are pretty much useless with the wood fence being so close. Nice panel arrangement. Is there a reason why the panels are disposed horizontally instead of vertically? Are they more efficient like that? It would have also fit vertically (2 panels high).
Also, doesn't people usually put their solar panels on the front side of the house, despite not being the most sun-facing side, so they can blind their neighbors and hence advertised their green engagement?
Nice grass. I would have thought that the years of drought would have been fatal, despite the wetter weather in your area since last Fall.
Also, doesn't people usually put their solar panels on the front side of the house, despite not being the most sun-facing side, so they can blind their neighbors and hence advertised their green engagement?
Nice grass. I would have thought that the years of drought would have been fatal, despite the wetter weather in your area since last Fall.
ddrueding
Fixture
The windows in the top-left quadrant of this picture (that would be west) are only the bathrooms and have privacy glass. Good thing, or they would see the storage shed and heatpump exchanger.
The panels need to be a minimum distance from the sides and top of each roof plane to prevent lift from wind. Two panels vertically wouldn't have fit this constraint. Another reason for using SolarCity (instead of installing myself): typically the warranty on panels is void if mounted horizontally due to the rail systems commonly used. These guys don't use rails and the warranty is valid.
The grass took a lot of effort to keep alive. 12 different zones for the sprinklers, each with buried moisture probes combined with solar radiation, humidity, and wind speed data plus internet based forecasting. Each zone ran for the minimum required time to keep the grass alive (not pretty, just alive). Now that we've been getting an inch of rain a week for the last couple months the grass is bouncing back without additional water.
The panels need to be a minimum distance from the sides and top of each roof plane to prevent lift from wind. Two panels vertically wouldn't have fit this constraint. Another reason for using SolarCity (instead of installing myself): typically the warranty on panels is void if mounted horizontally due to the rail systems commonly used. These guys don't use rails and the warranty is valid.
The grass took a lot of effort to keep alive. 12 different zones for the sprinklers, each with buried moisture probes combined with solar radiation, humidity, and wind speed data plus internet based forecasting. Each zone ran for the minimum required time to keep the grass alive (not pretty, just alive). Now that we've been getting an inch of rain a week for the last couple months the grass is bouncing back without additional water.
CougTek
Hairy Aussie
I thought the shot was taken in late afternoon, not sometime in the morning.
ddrueding
Fixture
That picture was taken at about 10:30 in the morning, and is facing north-northwest. The house itself is on a 45-degree angle, with the road going from NW to SE and the house built squared to it.
ddrueding
Fixture
Just a follow-up to this. Turns out EC2 can give you pretty respectable GPU machines, and the program I'm using is OpenCL accelerated. What took 46 hours with CPUs will take 6 with GPUs.
Specs for the machine:
Stereodude
Not really a
Thankfully no.Anybody ever have the non Hopkins lymphoma? Several employees and former seem to be getting it lately.
Stereodude
Not really a
I got hit with Microcenter's odd CPU buying policy today. :skepo: The sales guy told me I could only buy one CPU and wouldn't sell me both CPUs I wanted (two different models). I challenged him a bit and said the website would let me buy both (I could add both to my cart for in store reservation and check out). He went to check and came back and said their policy is one CPU per customer per month. Their flyer says, "Limit 1 per household at this price.". The website says, "...When an item is limited, the number of items you’ll be able to purchase cannot exceed the quantity limitation, whether you choose in-store pickup or shipping. This limit encompasses all orders placed under the same customer name, credit card number and/or shipping or billing address. If the stated limit is exceeded, your order will be adjusted or cancelled so that all customers have an equal chance to purchase these amazing deals." Both of those make it seem per CPU model, not one total CPU. :scratch:
Oh well...
FWIW, he basically told me on the down low that I could come back tomorrow or a even a few hours later today and get the other CPU, but he'd get fired if he sold me both at once. I did a reservation for in store pickup on the 2nd CPU via their website before I left, but I had to get back to work and couldn't wait for it to be ready for pickup.
ddrueding
Fixture
Yup. I used to buy one and get right back in line to buy the next. Same cashier, still doesn't care. Just can't be on the same receipt.
sedrosken
Florida Man
If anyone here has any socket AM2 CPUs could they send me a PM? I'm in somewhat desperate need of an upgrade.
I really don't recall if my AMD X2 4600+ is AM2 or not. I suspect it isn't, but if it is, what can I help with?
ddrueding
Fixture
AM2 or AM2+?
sedrosken
Florida Man
Regular old AM2, otherwise I have an AM2+ capable Athlon II x4 630 chip I could use. I just need something that you can spare, this 4400+ is glacially slow, much slower in comparison to even the Athlon II X2 230 I put together from scrap for my uncle. Part of that has to do with it being of a newer architecture I suspect, and the use of DDR3 rather than slow DDR2. Honestly with the reputation eMachines has for being cheap I wouldn't be surprised if I'd have to have a whole new board to use an original run Phenom or something similar. But I know that I, in theory at least, SHOULD be able to go up to something like a 6000+ at the highest end.
It's not unstable at all, in fact it's the best aged eMachines I've ever seen or used, and my dad was not gentle on it in its infancy. It's just ridiculously slow is all. If I thought putting in an SSD would make it appreciably better, I'd have it out of my laptop in a heartbeat. I'm actually pretty tolerant of load times, it's how quick (or not) it is when the stuff is loaded that has me bothered. I put up with the Pentium 4 because I was expecting that to be slow, but this has no real excuse, or at least it doesn't in my mind. Perhaps I just need to manage my expectations?
It's not really the amount of RAM I have that's the real issue at heart either, I keep track of how much I'm using and am careful to use swap space as infrequently as possible. More would be nice, but it's not essential right now.
It's not unstable at all, in fact it's the best aged eMachines I've ever seen or used, and my dad was not gentle on it in its infancy. It's just ridiculously slow is all. If I thought putting in an SSD would make it appreciably better, I'd have it out of my laptop in a heartbeat. I'm actually pretty tolerant of load times, it's how quick (or not) it is when the stuff is loaded that has me bothered. I put up with the Pentium 4 because I was expecting that to be slow, but this has no real excuse, or at least it doesn't in my mind. Perhaps I just need to manage my expectations?
It's not really the amount of RAM I have that's the real issue at heart either, I keep track of how much I'm using and am careful to use swap space as infrequently as possible. More would be nice, but it's not essential right now.
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Stereodude
Not really a
Getting a few hundred extra MHz is only going to make a slight improvement. What OS are you running? How much RAM? How old is the install?
sedrosken
Florida Man
A barely 3-week-old install of Xubuntu 64-bit. I have 2 GB of DDR2-667 RAM. I know going from a 4400+ to a 4600+ or so is only going to do a little bit, but isn't there a much bigger gap between the 4400+ and something on the order of the mid 5000+ models? Or am I placing too much weight on the speed of the processor, and not enough on the motherboard itself?
As I said before, the amount of RAM isn't the issue, I watch my RAM usage like a hawk and act accordingly. I ran my Inspiron 530 with this much RAM for nearly 6 years, I had to learn how to manage my usage. I rarely have more than 250ish MB in swap and barely have 3/4s of my physical RAM filled. More RAM would be nice but really would only let me run more things at a time, not immediately increase my machine's speed.
And also as I said before, the load times are adequate. It's just that everything seems rather sluggish once it is loaded.
My video card isn't great but it is adequate for what I use it for. Being a Radeon HD 4650, it's among the earliest Radeons capable of on-GPU MP4 video playback acceleration, and I'm pretty sure that's why YouTube doesn't completely bring my computer to its knees as it did the Pentium 4. CPUBoss has this particular model of Athlon 64 X2 being roughly on par with or exceeding the performance of one of the Core2-based Pentium Dual-Cores, in particular I compared it to the E2200 I used for several years.
Again, perhaps I just need to manage my expectations as I needed to for the Pentium 4? After all, when you aren't expecting much it's easy to be pleasantly surprised.
As I said before, the amount of RAM isn't the issue, I watch my RAM usage like a hawk and act accordingly. I ran my Inspiron 530 with this much RAM for nearly 6 years, I had to learn how to manage my usage. I rarely have more than 250ish MB in swap and barely have 3/4s of my physical RAM filled. More RAM would be nice but really would only let me run more things at a time, not immediately increase my machine's speed.
And also as I said before, the load times are adequate. It's just that everything seems rather sluggish once it is loaded.
My video card isn't great but it is adequate for what I use it for. Being a Radeon HD 4650, it's among the earliest Radeons capable of on-GPU MP4 video playback acceleration, and I'm pretty sure that's why YouTube doesn't completely bring my computer to its knees as it did the Pentium 4. CPUBoss has this particular model of Athlon 64 X2 being roughly on par with or exceeding the performance of one of the Core2-based Pentium Dual-Cores, in particular I compared it to the E2200 I used for several years.
Again, perhaps I just need to manage my expectations as I needed to for the Pentium 4? After all, when you aren't expecting much it's easy to be pleasantly surprised.
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Stereodude
Not really a
So, then what do you mean by glacially slow?
BTW, how do you know your eMachines will support any of these faster CPUs?
BTW, how do you know your eMachines will support any of these faster CPUs?
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Stereodude
Not really a
I went back after work and picked up the 2nd CPU. It was waiting for me at the pickup desk. I paid & left. No one said anything.
sedrosken
Florida Man
It's... well, it's much slower than I was expecting from any sort of dual-core machine. Honestly, this feels slower than a Pentium D, and almost as bad as one of the old dual-core Atoms. I'd compare the two but I don't have any suitable motherboards for my Pentium D 820 CPU.
As for how I know the motherboard will take any faster CPUs, I honestly don't. I can't reliably find real motherboard info, so I'm reduced to going by the chipset, which is an nForce 430 by my understanding of the technical literature surrounding the machine. I can't find anything concrete about the machine itself taking upgraded CPUs, except for the odd forum post where someone chronicles their successful upgrade of one. Probably not the best thing to do but I won't know for absolute certain until I try, I think. Perhaps I'm better off grinning and bearing it until I can get ahold of something better. Alas, if only this were an AM2+ board, my Athlon II x4 630 chip is looking rather stupid and lonely sitting in a little box in my parts bin.
EDIT: I actually did find some board literature. Here. It doesn't go into specifics of what exactly it supports as far as CPUs go, but I think it's reasonable to assume that it would at least operate with faster Athlon 64 X2s in place, isn't it? Or am I completely wrong here?
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ddrueding
Fixture
I doubt you're pregnant.
Stereodude
Not really a
You never know for sure with Lunar...
Stereodude
Not really a
Slower at what?
It's hard to say. If they didn't offer the CPU in a configuration from eMachines, I wouldn't bet on it being supported. It might be, it might not be. It also might not have enough current capability or a power supply capable of feeding a faster chip that uses more power.
You're 17. You can get yourself a part time job, save some money from that job, and buy yourself a decent computer. A nice i3, 8gB DDR3, a decent motherboard, and a good ~250gB SSD shouldn't cost you more than about $350.
sedrosken
Florida Man
It just feels rather sluggish in general. I can't really put it into words, it makes me feel like the whole thing is... bloated.
You're probably right about the board. It seems rather hit-or-miss. I don't want to get something only to have it not work correctly or at all.
You make a fair point about the job though. As soon as I have my permit, that's what I'm going to do. I'm hoping to save the money up until the middle of this year and put together something that will last me a good five years or so.
So, this is the system where my 4600+ is running on. It has been sitting in my spare bedroom for way more than a year doing nothing. Do you want any of it (aside from the hard drives...they're staying)? I'm pretty sure I have another unused AM2 gigabyte motherboard in my basement doing nothing you can have that too.
NAS system:
CPU: AMD X2 4600+ (Windsor)
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-M57SLI-S4 Motherboard
Memory: 2x 1GB Corsair XMS DDR2 800 (4-4-4-12)
Memory: 2x 2GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800 (4-4-4-12)
Power: PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750 Quad
Case: COOLER MASTER Centurion 590 (black)
IcyDock: 2x – MB455SPF-B 5 in 3 SATA Internal Raid Back-plane
Storage: 8x Samsung 1.5TB 5400 RPM EcoGreen F2 HD154UI
2 x Dell Perc 6i RAID Controller with battery backup
4x SFF 8484 SAS to SATA Cables
2x PC Bracket back plates that fit the Perc 6i into a standard slot in a case.
2x Scythe 40mm chipset fan (for Perc 6i)
sedrosken
Florida Man
If I took one of the boards, I'd have to have the case to go with it. I have no full ATX cases at the ready, though I have a couple mATX cases. The chip I wont need, because the board supposedly supports AM3/AM2+ chips (with the caveat that the system bus speed downgrades from HT3.0(5200MT/s) to HT1.0(2000MT/s). Basically, it will run the chip's hypertransport bus as fast as it possibly can for AM2. I have an Athlon II x4 thats sitting in a box and looking rather lonely and stupid just sitting there.
I may yet try to put that on this board, just to see what will happen. Worst case scenario, it blows up, but what's more likely to happen is that it just won't POST, and resumes working properly with the 4400+ back in. I should have updated my BIOS before moving to Linux, that might have made this a bit easier.
Don't worry too much about it. If I get the other chip working on this board, I'm just going to use that until I put together the new box in June or July. I'm graduating this year, too -- my family is big enough that all together I will probably have some sort of graduation gift. Could put that towards it too, but I'm more likely to put that in savings and keep it around in case I need it for something important when I'm living in the dorms at college.
Even if I don't get the chip working with this board, I'll probably just grin and bear it until I can get the new machine as well -- I completely forgot about this when I made the original request, stupidly enough. I feel like I've made a bit of an idiot of myself.
I may yet try to put that on this board, just to see what will happen. Worst case scenario, it blows up, but what's more likely to happen is that it just won't POST, and resumes working properly with the 4400+ back in. I should have updated my BIOS before moving to Linux, that might have made this a bit easier.
Don't worry too much about it. If I get the other chip working on this board, I'm just going to use that until I put together the new box in June or July. I'm graduating this year, too -- my family is big enough that all together I will probably have some sort of graduation gift. Could put that towards it too, but I'm more likely to put that in savings and keep it around in case I need it for something important when I'm living in the dorms at college.
Even if I don't get the chip working with this board, I'll probably just grin and bear it until I can get the new machine as well -- I completely forgot about this when I made the original request, stupidly enough. I feel like I've made a bit of an idiot of myself.
Stereodude
Not really a
Why does it have 2 PERC 6i cards? With only 8 HDDs you only need 1. Or did it used to have more than 8 HDDs?
I'm interested in the two IcyDock MB455SPF-B 5 in 3 SATA Internal Raid Backplanes if you're looking to get rid of them.
Stereodude
Not really a
I'm still not sure I understand exactly. I used Windows 8.1 on a Celeron 2557U with 8GB of DDR3-1600 and a 250gB Micron BX100 mSATA SSD and it was quick and responsive. I gave the system to my parents to use as their primary computer. Sure, I wouldn't want to use it for any CPU intensive tasks like x264 encoding or the like, but for surfing the web and what not it was just as usable and snappy as any of the i7 or i5 systems I have.
You're running what is supposed be a light weight OS (unless Ubuntu sucks that badly, which wouldn't really surprise me given my already extremely dismal opinion of it) on a CPU of similar processing power. It shouldn't be sluggish.
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I originally planned to run 12-16 drives but never got around to making it work so I kept the extra Perc as a backup. It's sat idle for the most part except when I upgrade firmware.
Sure, I don't plan on using the IcyDock bays any more so if you want them let me know. They worked fine for me and weren't too noisy but that's subjective.
Stereodude
Not really a
I have a few extra 5i and 6i's lying around. I have two of the 6i's in use, and have at least one spare. All of my 5i's are out of use except for one which is in an infrequently used system. I have two of the M5016's. I will probably pick up a 3rd. My backup server is going to need a capacity upgrade too using the 2nd card, and I'll want to have a spare card in case one dies.
Sure, shoot me a PM with what you want for them.
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You can have the case too but that'll be a little more of a pain to ship. I also have an AMD FD8350FRHKBOX FX-8350 FX-Series which is way, way faster than all the rest along with two motherboards that'll support it (but I'm not looking to give that away for free unfortunately). I'm clearly not worries about this at all since it sits idle in my spare room.
ddrueding
Fixture
Cases are not mandatory. Only one of my last dozen PCs ever ended up in a case.
Stereodude
Not really a
So that covers what, all the systems you've built in the last 6 months? :rofl:
ddrueding
Fixture
So maybe more than a dozen . It's been three years since two of my machines were in cases. The only reason I used a case for this one was to better secure the water tubes.
. It's been three years since two of my machines were in cases. The only reason I used a case for this one was to better secure the water tubes.