Dabombinable

It'll probably come back around once the over-reliance on CUDA for AI swings back towards dedicated NPU logic.
 
Like the problem overall is that there three must-have features (CUDA for AI, Tensor cores for RT, DLSS upscaling) and without equal parts on the AMD part, you basically are picking the "loser card" if you don't pick Nvidia.
 
This also applies to Intel.
 
Like we're not at a point any more where you can get away with the lowest tier parts and play a game at 480p. Most games using Unreal simply require enough compute power to run 1080p high, or you don't run it at all. Like there are some cinematic-quality games being put out that just make high end GPU's grind to a halt.
 

"Oh man, I wish I could buy an underclocked HD 2900 XT with as much VRAM as a GTX 680"
After all, Who wouldn't?
Luckily, FireGL v8650 is here to save us. Quite a good-looking card with its wireframe silkscreen on the blower and the red accents along the heatsink frame.

First card to pack 2GB of memory, and AFAIK still holds the record (and probably always will) for the highest number of individual VRAM chips on one 3D accelerator die. 

Not through clever trickery nor through ingenuity - no, they just stuffed thirty-two GDDR4 chips onto the same 512-bit memory bus as the HD 2900 XT. This makes the card perform notably worse than the HD 2900XT it shares a die with because each chip is only granted 16 bits of bandwidth, versus where the HD2900XT's 16 chips each get 32 bits of bus width. 
 
I am eager to play with this a little more.

Business cards/trade show giveaways people can put in their wallet.
 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bootable_business_card
 

 

I think you all will appreciate what I found in a flea market: The worst shaped CDs on the planet.

Of course I said "Ugh! That's horrible! Who the hell would buy that!" then proceeded to purchase both spindles. So now I have close to a hundred of these.

Because the actual writeable circumference is so tiny, each disc holds less than 6 minutes of audio or about 54mb.

There is a very good reason that optical media is round. Because if you make it a rectangle, it just doesn't work well. 
I can't imagine what these possibly would have been for. A neat way to release singles, perhaps? But no slot loading drive can play mini CDs to start out with, so making it rectangular won't help. 

Mmmh, brand new ribbons for a 40 year old machine ❤️
 

 

VID_20240422_211905.mp4    

Escape from Tarkov is self-published. Battlestate Games is both the developer and publisher. You can't blame publisher interference for this.

I looked up the PCB and all the replacement vendors mentioned that I would've had to swap the BIOS IC anyway. Since the board was pretty much useless the way it was, I tried soldering the wires from a sacrificial USB chord I had lying around directly to the PCB. The data pads were completely beyond repair, at least for my skill level, so I had to go for the traces. In fact, you can tell that I had to bypass that one surface mount components (I'm guessing it's a resistor) because I couldn't attach it from the port side and just hoped that it works. I'm terrible at soldering and I probably also don't have a soldering iron suited to working with small stuff like this, but I managed to wrangle the wires in place for the connection to stick and get all the data off of the drive successfully after securing it all with a bit of hot glue.
 

 

 

Bigwig: "Hey Avocado, I got this external hard drive. Someone brushed past it and dropped it off a table while it was plugged in. Think you can fix it? It's got some data on it that I need."
Me: "Maybe, depending on the drive I may have an adapter, if the drive itself has the typical SATA interface."
Samsung: "Hold my beer"

 
Yep, that's a broken off USB port that's soldered directly to the PCB of the harddrive. And this is why I keep telling people to ask me first before they go out and buy this stuff, because I would've told them to just buy an internal drive and stick it in an enclosure. But no, bigwigs need to just go out and buy whatever. And of course, the data on it is nowhere on the corporate network, because people still insist on bringing their shit on physical media and never back up anything. So yeah, time to buy a replacement PCB and pray to any deity willing to listen that there are no other security or lockout measures that prevent simple swapping.

Well, when you do a full-disk image, it takes forever. 
 
A simple amount of text is much quicker. 
 
And a black sharpie is quicker still.  And that's why light scribe was little more than a novelty. 

Might as well post this here, too - gave LightScribe a shot, pretty impressed with the results.

I still install all of my OSes from DVDs, since every one of my laptops is old awesome enough to have an optical drive. I much prefer having a stack of DVDs and pulling out the one I want instead of writing an ISO to a flash drive every time I need to install one of the eight OSes I might need. Labeling these discs with a nice graphic will help me find them faster.
These few I created with the LightScribe Template Labeler, which nicely curves the text around the radius of the spindle. These did not turn out quite as nicely as the scan of the Windows 7 disc, but they are certainly still more interesting than a typical DVD.

Shows a nice progress indicator as you're printing - you'll be tapping your foot for a while, each disc takes 30-40mins on highest contrast setting.

The difference between Normal and Enhanced contrast is quite visible on images with dark backgrounds.

Neat seeing the data track which is read by the additional sensor in LightScribe drives. This is, in essence, a barcode wrapped around the spindle, and it communicates LightScribe-exclusive information to the drive. This track is on the top side of the disc, not the data side, so it is read when the media is placed face-down for laser inscription. This additional sensor LightScribe drives have seems to be very simple - I believe it is just an infrared emitter and receiver placed right next to each other. Seems quite logical - inexpensive to implement in the drive, but can still read a barcode just fine. I would think the reflective lines are "1s" and the non-reflective are "0s", and the pattern on the disc just stores a very simple piece of data - probably just an integer - that is read by the software to determine the disc type.

It's slow, impractical, and the disks are expensive - but the results are quite cool.

There's a deep rabbit hole you can get into that all starts at DMS-59. Look into it a little more and you'll start finding cables like this:

 
Some cards actually used two DMS-59 connectors and two graphics dies on the same board for four display outputs on the same card - EG. NVS 440.
FireMV 2400 took a similar approach, but with a far superior connector. Four displays on a low profile card was unheard of at this time
Nvidia finally one-upped them all with the NVS 420. Low profile, two graphics chips, and a single video connector that breaks out into FOUR DVI ports. This card is the source of the aforementioned wacky cable.
 

So confirmed? YouTubers destroying companies
 
 

@ViciousRaptor
I'd have gone for a founders edition cooler, mainly the one from the 980ti:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-gtx-980-ti.c2724
Same GPU (just cut down) and the same PCB.
 
My Inno3D GTX 1070 actually has effectively the same solution you are attempting from the factory - reference PCB with a cooler designed by them attatched. As soon as the fan providing most of the air over the memory started failing I started to see artifacts and the card locked up. Misarranging the fans on the heatsink has the same effect, so I wouldn't recommend it.

Oh, and make sure you get the $300 multi-meter, so it won't look out of place next to the $300 soldering iron. 
 
^.^

Finally have a working SS7 board - can see if I killed my old K6-2 500 with the mosfet short, and test my 72pin SIMM.
Had to swap the cooler or the board wouldn't fit. And the Medalist finally died after years of bad sector warnings so that was also replaced, and the Fireball's performance is on point.
Board appears to have great performance as well despite the 8bit TAG (128MB cacheable RAM). Will be getting a K6-3+ of some clock speed (Jan's patched BIOS and 2V support means perfect compatibility).

Purely compatibility reasons. yes, zen4 can run everything zen 2 can, but not at the same timings for all commands. Its supposed to be a ps5 still, not a ps6. Compatablilty when making a pro version of a console is the number one priority. 

IMO the only thing I personally want out of the ps5 pro is HDR10+ and Dolby HDR support. 

 
  
there is a user accessable m.2 slot that you can put in more storage. It has no proprietary lock like the xbox has. 

It doesn't impress me. It creates maybe passable flavor-text/music you might hear in a shopping district inside a video game, but it doesn't sound real. It sounds like an AM Radio.
 
This is the problem with most "music" and "voice" AI, is that taken separately (See RVC) you can make a perfect clone of another song because all the AI does is "autotune" the voice B from the original voice A, but you use the same backing audio. All you've done is made a cover using the source voice, which to me isn't a "cover", it's akin to "nightcore"'ing a song where you just speed it up 50% and have done nothing else to it.
 
I'm not sure what the underlying process is for Udio because I've honestly just picked half a dozen different songs to check the genre adhere'dness but it seems like everything was washed with a noise filter that ranges from "radio" to "phonograph". I'd say most of these don't sound like what they claim to, and the ones that do, sound like they're inside a bathroom or hallway or down the street, or something.
 
They all lack "professional sound" mixing feel to it. If this was 1960, you could probably get away with it on LP or tape. 
 
Thinking about it for a minute, I believe I know what they did. They likely used commercial music as training data from different periods, because that would explain the incoherent levels of noise. The AI doesn't understand the "hiss" of a LP isn't part of the music.
 

Little Coppermine ITX board is up and running in Windows 98 SE.
VIA VT8604 chipset, S3 ProSavage AGP integrated graphics, and of course, Celeron 1000.

I'd forgotten how massive of a difference a good hard drive makes on Windows 98. This 5-platter Hitachi Deskstar ATA is so much snappier than the CompactFlash card in my Compaq Win98 laptop, it's unreal. It almost consistently tops out the ATA interface with its sequential reads/writes.

Finally have a working SS7 board - can see if I killed my old K6-2 500 with the mosfet short, and test my 72pin SIMM.
Had to swap the cooler or the board wouldn't fit. And the Medalist finally died after years of bad sector warnings so that was also replaced, and the Fireball's performance is on point.
Board appears to have great performance as well despite the 8bit TAG (128MB cacheable RAM). Will be getting a K6-3+ of some clock speed (Jan's patched BIOS and 2V support means perfect compatibility).

You can get a standard MLCC capacitor in a 0602 package up to 330uF
 
you can also get super small, super caps too.  https://www.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Seiko-Semiconductors/CPH3225A?qs=3etwrb1wR%2BhUOph6lAO7eg%3D%3D
 
They 100% have enough power to save the dram cache to the flash before the caps fully discharge.

Well done everybody!!

She lives!
Wouldn't boot with the original RAM, which had corrosion along the slot. Replaced it with another 133mhz stick while I left the original to soak in an alcohol bath.
Also unplugged (probably forever) the system's two incredibly bothersome fans. On the Core 2 Duo unit I replaced the small axial CPU fan with an 80mm radial set on top of the heatsink, will probably do the same here. Cools the CPU just as well but almost silently, and provides enough intake of its own so as not to need another noisy system intake fan.

HDD still works! The system software runs on Red Hat Linux. It boots for a little while then performs a soft reboot after around 30 seconds. The Core 2 Duo unit did this one too; I am not sure why. Probably why both of them ended up for sale in thrift stores. 

These units are awesome but they reinforce my belief that computers should not be forced into places they do not belong, because look what happens! Your $2,000 piece of rack gear is now useless because someone pulled the wrong plug and Linux got corrupted. 
 
EDIT: Got the OS booting properly!
It has a pretty ballin' GUI, seems to run a real desktop environment. I thought it would just be CLI. 
After the GUI loads, an ancient Firefox version opens and loads into a cached website for the Public Radio Satellite System's FTP server management site. It seems at some point this unit was run as a satellite fileserver. Rad.

Utter BULL SHIT. If you ask me. All these greedy companies are doing is giving me a reason to NOT buy their product.

Well to add onto this, Turions have very bizarre compatibility problems.
It seems that support for older chips is removed from newer BIOSes.
With a Core 2 Duo, there are older chipsets that don't support newer chips, but I've never had an older chip not be supported on a newer chipset as long as it fits in the socket.
Turion 64 is not this way at all. A non-Ultra chip won't work in a machine designed for the Ultra chips, and the only difference is the clockspeed. A machine built for the later 2ghz non-Ultra models also will not accept the early 1.6ghz models built on a larger process node. 
I still find it really funny that AMD branded their Turion chips above the blazing fast speed of...... two whole gigahertz!!!! as "ULTRA" chips, and considering that a 2.1ghz "ULTRA!!!!!" performs like a 1.6ghz Core 2 Duo while consuming almost triple the power... 
 
EDIT: They ALSO do not modulate their clocks whatsoever, it seems. Unlike a Core 2 Duo, where a 2400mhz chip can run at any speed between 200 and 2400mhz, a comparable Turion chip has two speeds: 2400mhz, and off.
 

It is so funny how old computers sometimes refuse to work for no explicable reason whatsoever.

Picked up a lovely rare Artist Edition Pavilion DV6 a few weeks ago - 2.4ghz Turion Ultra, ATi HD 3200, 4GB DDR2. 
Instant WHEA error in any Windows version - whether booting from an installer CD or HDD with OS on it.
I had tried a good deal of solutions, was on the verge of buying a new motherboard.
As a last resort, I swapped the DV6's Turion CPU with the 2.1ghz Turion Ultra from my DV4 Special Edition. 
 
Not only did the CPU swap fix the WHEA error, but the 2.4ghz CPU which caused the error in the first place works flawlessly in the other laptop.
The two boards use the exact same socket, northbridge, and southbridge. The CPUs have the same FSB speed and cache. There is not a single reason under the sun that a CPU would POST but be unstable in one, yet a near identical CPU would resolve this issue, while the original CPU works fine in a different machine. I would understand if I'd put this CPU in after-the-fact, but the 2.4ghz chip has been in there since 2008!