General Computer Thread

Discussion in 'Science and Technology' started by Amaris, May 26, 2016.

  1. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    I found them the opposite - much easier to insert on the board and the HSF were already in place so minimal risk of screwing things up (used to be a danger of cracking your cpu if you applied a bit too much pressure when putting the heat sink on). Now it's just the risk of bending the pins on the socket (been there done that, wrote off a motherboard).
     
  2. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Pentium II's were a cheaper alternative to the Pentium Pro, the latter was an INCREDIBLY expensive chip to make because of the cache being in the same package as the chip, it had to run at the same clockspeeds as the Pentium Pro which was REALLY stretching it at that time, lots of chips had to be discarded and yields were low.

    The Socket 1 system mounted one CPU WITHOUT cache chips AND external cache chips that ran HALF the speed of the CPU on a circuit board within the cartridge, much cheaper to produce, a broken cache chip no longer had the entire chip been discarded, that is why Slot 1 became what it was, later era Pentium III's had on die cache memory and actually didn't need the catridge so they also came in socket versions, the Slot 1 was retained for a while because some motherboard manufacturers were slow to phase out Slot 1 so that is why it lingered for a while.
    As for the design itself, it was actually MARVELOUS, I have build thousands of Slot and socket machines both Intel and AMD and not one Slot 1 or Slot A system ever came back with a damaged CPU, it is a very robust design.
    Pentium 4's only came in Socket starting with Socket 423, then 478 and last but not least Socket 775.
     
    Last edited: May 11, 2017
  3. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    and if memory serves the Pro was picky about the version of Windows it ran so to get the best out of it you had to run Windows NT. Only ever sold one Pentium Pro system but can remember the client benig miffed at alwasy having to do a ctl-alt-delete to log because he was using NT.

    socket 478 was when Intel woke up to the flaws of the original design being reliant on very expensive RDRAM. Read a few things over the years that suggest, Rambus who were being RDRAM were exactly honest with their dealings.
     
  4. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Pentium Pro was geared towards 32 bit and didn't do wel on mixed mode 16/32 bit so NT it loved, 95, 98/SE it didn't like that much, it was slow on those and I'm not sure Intel ever bothered to deliver anything but the most basic drivers for those OS's

    RDRAM was a BIG failure and cost Intel a lot of money, they had to design a whole new series of chipsets to support both SDRAM (which was already too slow) and DDR1 RAM, also they had to fight a legal battle with Rambus and I think I remember that they settled it out of court again making Intel pay for it.

    As for Pentium Pro machines, they usually were high end workstations or server machines, those were usually really well build and overdesigned beasties mostly containing drool worthy performance SCSI parts.

    Pentium 4 was such a strange design, it had loooooooooooooooooooooooong instruction pipelines to make that newfangled SSE work, SSE performance of the Pentium 4 was incredible, even now I'm not sure anything can dish out SSE stuff as fast as Netburst but everything else it kinda sucked at... and they were horridly powerhungry and HOT, I've build multiprocessor Netburst Xeon's and those had huge caches which made those chips even hotter than a normal P4, the largest machine I've build those days was a 4 CPU Intel Xeon machine, it had a double row of high performance 120x120mm fans to keep the thing cool..
     
  5. Robert Maxwell

    Robert Maxwell memelord Premium Member

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    Pentium 4 was such a crazy design Intel had to abandon the architecture entirely once they topped out the clock speeds. Any faster and it generated more heat than it could dissipate.

    They had to turn to their Israeli office (I believe it was) where Pentium M had been developed, based on Pentium III. That became Intel Core.

    I remember Intel also had no intention of ever developing 64-bit chips for the desktop. It was Itanium or nothing. Then AMD decided to do it anyway, forcing their hand. :)
     
  6. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    ^Yes, you remember it correctly, Pentium M kicked the P4's arse big time while running half the clockspeed, as for AMD, yeah, they played their cards well, their 64 bit extension AND their chips were fast and breaking the 3Gb RAM barrier came at the right moment.:mallory:
     
  7. Robert Maxwell

    Robert Maxwell memelord Premium Member

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    Let's all take a moment to appreciate what a disaster Itanic turned out to be, too.
     
  8. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    Funny you should mention Itanium (or Itanic as some called it).

    Intel have announced the final iteration which will be going in high end high uptime system from HPE. Have to admit I'm surprised there's the market to justify the development cost or maybe the market's not that big but the profit margins are. Though maybe it was a comparatively cheap development as there doesn't seem to be any major hardware changes (it's a drop-in replacement for older models and only used DDR3).

    http://www.anandtech.com/show/11372/intels-itanium-takes-one-last-breath-9700-series-released

    Though you want some pretty hefty cooling, the top model with 8c/16) has a 170watt TDP and a $4600 price tag.
     
  9. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    Nooooooo I meant normal sockets where you put the cpu flat into a board, they are more convenient.
     
  10. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    I really wouldn't mind a Slot design again and have Slotkets for the various sockets that Intel keeps dishing out.. the horror.. 775, 1155, 1156, 1150, 1151, 1366, 2011 v1 v2 v3 aaaaaaaaand next up socket 2066..WTF intel? :p
    And those are just the desktop sockets, in that timespan AMD had AM2, AM2+ AM3, AM3+ and recent AM4 socket for Ryzen.
     
  11. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    My current cpu is AM3
     
  12. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    nope.

    great risk of damaging pins when if you're slightly out when you put the CPU in and the risk of damage putting the heak sink and fan on as opposed to everything in a cartridge which you just slot in.
     
  13. Robert Maxwell

    Robert Maxwell memelord Premium Member

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    Those are easy enough to avoid if you aren't clueless.
     
  14. Marc

    Marc Fleet Admiral Premium Member

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    Though to be fair some of those are Xeon sockets :) But yes Intel has been noxious with it's different sockets. Having a quick read it seems that the move from 1150 to 1151 was moving the voltage regular off the cpu and onto the motherboard. Others seem to be due to enhancements in design but at the end of the day it means more sale motherboard manufacturers which means more money for Intel from supplying the chipsets.

    With fans and heat sinks need for modern processors I'm not sure how well they would go in slot design - both in term of designing a cartridge and support mechanism and the space it would take up with the fan and heat sink (especially in this day and age where small is sexy.

    True but a slot cartridge is still quicker and easier to install.
     
  15. Santaman

    Santaman Vice Admiral Admiral

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    43 watts was the highest wattage Slot 1 chip, 46 watts for Slot 2, Indeed not too much compared to the 125-140 watts the most powerhungry desktop chips do these days, on the other hand, my main desktop machine is a 25 watt AM1 quad core which has a passive cooler, also I have a Pentium II 400 Mhz which also draws 25 watts and also has a passive cooler, its just that it has 3 cores less and the AMD chip runs at 2.05Ghz.. :biggrin:

    Slot catridge designs if you really manage to install it the wrong way than you should never go anywhere near any kind of hardware ever again...

    Intel's last chips with pins on them was the socket 478 P4 those pins were really thin and fragile and lots of chips were destroyed because there were many people who were NOT able to put them into their sockets the right way and that cost Intel a lot of money.. Intel HATES losing money, tadaa as of LGA 775 the mainboards have pins, the chips a land grid/ball grid array.. problem now lies in the hands of the mainboard manufacturers...
     
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  16. Random_Spock

    Random_Spock Vice Admiral Admiral

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    Thought I got rid of the buzzing on my laptop's speakers (been having it happen every so often lately). The update didn't work. The buzzing came back with a vengeance. I think in part due to Tumblr running hard. So now onto trying to find something else to try to stop it. It's buzzed like this and froze before. And I don't have the money to get another sound card. I had just updated it last night (speakers wise) -- they're AMD speakers, and they seemed to be doing ok.

    Only other thing I can think of is maybe it's due to my laptop running near 100 percent at times. Sometimes due to Avast.

    I checked into it possibly being an issue with the sound card, the cord, the plug, etc., and so far things seem ok.

    So now I'm frustrated as to what it could be.

    Anyone else run into a similar issue? If so, what did you do to try to fix it?
     
  17. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    Speakers buzzing sometimes is EM being picked up by the sound card or such. Maybe something as simple as a loose connection somewhere near the audio jack or on the board picking up noise.
     
  18. Amaris

    Amaris Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I just bought an EVGA 600 80+ Bronze B1 600 watt power supply. My system is currently running on a stock 180 watt power supply, and I know that I'm in the midst of a precarious balancing act every time I try to copy from one drive to another, or fire up a video game. This 600 watt supply should handle any new piece of hardware I throw at it. It will at least ease my mind that file copying and accidentally starting up a resource heavy video game won't result in the whole system shutting down.
     
  19. Gingerbread Demon

    Gingerbread Demon I love Star Trek Discovery Premium Member

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    You are lucky it hasn't shat itself sooner ...... Running a game with a power supply with such a low rating is asking for drama. I recently changed up from a 650 watt PSU to a 750 just in case I decide to get a new video card. Currently running an R9 380 4gig .

    What's your current video card if I may ask?
     
  20. Amaris

    Amaris Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    I've been saving up to get one, and yeah, I've been on pins and needles with fingers crossed the whole while. Anyhoo, my video card is a Zotac Nvidia GT 740 with 1 GB of onboard memory. I realize 1 GB is rather small, but it was an absolutely fantastic deal when I bought it. I ended up buying it for less than half of what they sold for elsewhere, and all because the box had been opened.