Dabombinable

Go with Vega 56, its faster than than the 1660ti and the 8GB of vRAM will be useful in newer games:
https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/radeon-rx-vega-56.c2993

 
Performance rankings from this year:
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html

Admit it, Linus dropped it.

Admitedly the PC which I built for my brother (he only had to buy the PSU) does do quite well with an RX 580 and an i7 3770S. And that's with a 128GB boot SSD and games on a 2TB HDD.

He had my old GTX 1070, but complained about stability. So I gave the 1070 to a friend in exchange for his RX 580 (ex mining). Friend's PC no longer has coil whine+runs games better, and my brother's PC is now fully stable. My friend also has my old i7 4790K however, and I replaced that with the 3700X because it was holding the 1070 back in some games.

DOS 6.22 With Soundblaster drivers, CD-ROM drivers, the Roland MT-32 emulator working and a mouse.
 
Glad i put the extra time in to it

 
I'm using CTMOUSE.EXE

That'd have been using one expensive controller. The best I ever managed was 3x 250GB Samsung 250GB 5400RPM HDD in RAID 0 on my Abit VP6. Would have been the full 4x250GB if 1 drive (not using Samsung DRAM) hadn't been DOA. Didn't know much about benchmarking HDD back then, and they later ended up in OG Xbox (another one died a few years ago as well 😞).

I've got 2x 200GB SATA 7200.7 that were run in RAID 0 in the PC they originally came from. 1 has SMART errors however and they run both hot and loud (seeks are very "crunchy" due to being the SATA models). Which is why I don't use them in my Barton PC build anymore (250GB 5400RPM laptop HDD from 2008 is so much quieter+faster).

I'm a little surprised this crusty fella is still running. Might hold the record for the longest-lasting 7200.7 drive on the planet - the drive itself is close to 20 years old with close to 12 years of flying hours, and still no SMART errors. 
One of my favorite sounding drives too. Makes a nice purr on the randoms.

The poisonous mindset that makes ppl into a smombie. No you dont have to be available at all times, no you dont have to reach anyone at anytime and instantly, and this is especially true for kids in 99.9% of the time. There is always a tomorrow and there is always a game they can play at home when for whatever reason they cant go outside.
Never had a phone as a kid until i got into middle school (even then it was some cheap basic one) and still survived and still had friends. And i mean real friends who help in trouble instead of running.

It's not a perfect law. Like I said, the age verification is pretty rough. But I am for banning them from voice chat. I have permanent hearing damage from squeakers yelling in my ears.

Summary
Florida Govenor Ron DeSantis passed a new law banning people under the age of 14 from using social media with the reasoning that it is heavily addictive and the young people don't understand what they are getting into. 
This legislation, called HB 3, is the same legislation that is requiring age verification for sexually explicit websites. 
 
Quotes
My thoughts
I think all of this new legislation has the right heart and people under 14 100% should NOT be on social media. There are so many scammers and child predators that are just waiting for kids like these to fall for their schemes. 
That said, I think the age verification is a TERRIBLE idea. Not because verifying age is bad in order to get on these websites, but it 100% could get hacked. 
 
Sources
 https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/25/tech/florida-social-media-law-age/index.html
https://apnews.com/article/florida-social-media-ban-desantis-fd07f61e167bd9109a83cd7355b5f164 

man, just looking at that sony is making my back hurt...
 
I do not miss CRT tech.  AT ALL.

It was basically a race to "who can pick it up first". Someone else got there before me.... but their car was too small

It can be done, but it will be jank-as-hell™
 
Use one of these....
 
And one of these....
 
And fianlly, one of these....
 
That should get your drive powered, and cabled internally. Like I said. Jank.

Gather around children! I finally got myself a 286 machine!
 
https://imgur.com/gallery/m3a2tMY
 
well, it started life as a 286 anyway.  
 
Nothing quite as sexy as a monolithic beige tower with a power switch that makes so much noise, you would think you broke a finger.

Brought along an old friend while traveling for a few days. 
Excuse the poor quality photos, my phone camera is truly horrendous.

This was the first 'retro' system I picked up three years or so ago. Had a rather bad CPU but a decent Gigabyte motherboard and RAM, so I stuck with it. Bought an Athlon 64 x2 6000+ for it 2 years back and that chip is quite the beast.

It ran a GeForce 6800 for most of its time with me until recently, when I acquired a new-old-stock Quadro FX 1800. It's still very surreal seeing a card of this era still pristinely shiny and free of dust and scratches. 
 

GPU still has under 24 hours of use but that's about to change tomorrow.
 

I've got sticks ranging from EDO all the way up to DDR4 with some of everything inbetween.
I also have a drawer full of DDR sticks, from the crappy to excellent ones I've got some of almost anything you can think of concerning DDR itself. 
Same goes for DDR3 as well.
For DDR2:  I didn't really bother with any DDR2 based systems but did eventually grab a couple sets of that too.

Speaking of Socket A, this is an example of what I was (And still) doing today with it all.
Yes, that an entry I did a few years ago with that chip and it is a legit XP-M 3000 chip. Got lucky when I found it and snapped it up but quick with the rarity of this chip model.
https://hwbot.org/submission/4243078_bones_superpi___1m_athlon_xp_m_3000_(barton)_35sec_625ms

by these figures nvidia has a monopoly on GPU's, intel has a monopoly on CPU's, and lays has a monopoly on potato chips.

I was doing this on later socket A cpu. There was cutted gap by AMD so pencil trick does not work. You had to fill gap with cyanoacrylate glue and then connect contacts with conductive lacquer. I think that I still have in garage Athlon 2000XP with unlocked multiplier and enabled laptop functionality for better power management.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

(heads up:  this post is a pointless rambling personal odyssey of nostalgia, dont read on if you have anything better to do)  

Ive been building my PC's since the late 90's. Back when you needed to use jumpers to tweak the fsb a tiny bit things and pins were sharper than exacto knives (bloody hand prints all over the beige boxes)  but THEN I got an Athlon 700... with dipswitches! 
 
...Sure UEFI was a "nice" change from bios BUT not needing to account for the cost of tetanus shot to the build cost was next level.   
 
Anyway, prior to my Athlon 700 overclocking was too daunting to try. Now we still did't have UEFI or Ryzen Master so we had to buy a special tool called a "#2 Pencil"

Step 1) get a #2 pencil. 
Step 2) draw 4 little lines on the cpu
Step 3) ...nope, no step 3. Your CPU runs 35% faster now. 
 
I was a little worried about temps, and the whole reason I'm writting this is because I found my old Athlon heatsink. 
At 950mhz my 700mhz would idle at 50° and hit 70C° under, I was too stupid to look up if that was good or bad. Seemed bad.  So I bought a 75cent 80mm to 50mm fan adapter. And the most powerful 80mm fan I could get for $2. 
Replaced the dinky but silent 50mm 9cfm fan with a 45db 50cfm fan which ran at full speed 24/7, this was the loudest DC fan I ever owned, but then stick it on squat plastic funnel and it can drown out a lawn mower.   (again... I was very stupid). But Gaming or idle didn't matter. the CPU stayed <45° always. 

Ive bought a dozen heat sink since the AMD 700. Every single time I but a new heatsink I try to upgrade the fan and it's never been worth the effort, yet I still keep doing it.

TLDR: Today's "Aha moment": 23year ago I got my cpu temps to drop 25° buy spending <$3. Apparently, I've been chasing that first high for my entire adult life. 

The "new" Athlon 700 fan vs (i believe) oem fan 
 

New Fan + Adapter + Oem Athlon 700 heatsink. 
 
note #1: those neon pink zipties were the first zip ties I ever owned.
note #2: 10 years ago I used that fan to dry spackle, hence the splatter of spackle on it
note #3: by the time I owned a quad core I decided to see how long the Athlon 700 would survive with no heatsink... it kept shutting down but I was able to kill it in an afternoon. 


The end  =P

I don't think the people who say "DSLR killer" mean that smartphones are better than DSLRs. I think they are saying smartphones have gotten good enough that the use cases for a DSLR, for most people, is gone. 
 
I have a DSLR that I used to use a lot. Then when I got my galaxy S10 and found myself using the DSLR less and less. The phone was good enough, and far more convenient. 
 
I used my S10 exclusively on my trip to Japan. Could my DSLR have taken better pictures? Absolutely, but carrying it around would have made the trip worse because it would have been more of a hassle. The benefit didn't outweigh the drawback in my use case. 
 
You have to judge things in their entirety. When two competing products have strengths and weaknesses you can't stare yourself blind on a single factor. 
For the average person, is it worth spending the money to buy a DSLR, then carry that around instead of just using their phone's camera? 
Sales of digital cameras dropping by about 90% since 2010 indicates to me that people are satisfied enough with their smartphones. 
 
Also, something causing sales of X drop 90% is in my opinion a pretty good definition of an "X killer". 
If Samsung released a phone tomorrow that caused iPhone sales to drop 90% then I'd call that an "iPhone killer" too. 

Umm that literally makes Glassdoor a pointless product. Wonder if some large company was getting bad reviews and wanted to pressure Glassdoor? Maybe everyone should drop a review for Glassdoor on their site.

Actually...I really should just for shits and giggles try my GF6600GT on it. I have to pull the 300W PSU from my old AthlonXP build but it should work. Never actually going to be permanent as I have need for the PSU and card in their current builds.

If I ever figure out what went wrong with my "FX5500", it'd make a great frankenstein card. Only the pads where components are installed have solder, because it was made that cheaply. Also means that the ground plane should be fairly small, and not soak up most of the soldering iron's heat.

Actually...I really should just for shits and giggles try my GF6600GT on it. I have to pull the 300W PSU from my old AthlonXP build but it should work. Never actually going to be permanent as I have need for the PSU and card in their current builds.

If I ever figure out what went wrong with my "FX5500", it'd make a great frankenstein card. Only the pads where components are installed have solder, because it was made that cheaply. Also means that the ground plane should be fairly small, and not soak up most of the soldering iron's heat.

Eh, some AGP cards even had external power be it from a power brick (Ok just Voodoo I think) or from one or two Molex (Nvidia for sure, my 6800U). No reason you can't kapton tape over the power delivery fingers and just solder a connector onto the card somewhere to the power and ground planes on that voltage and supply it externally. Sure it would be a frankenstein hack job but it ought to work.

Dinky little test setup for Frog.  Everything works so far.  not got as far as installing soundcard drivers yet (i can't find my AWE32 driver disc at the mo) but the two CD drives work, the two floppies work and the compact flash to IDE 'thingy' works and boots.  Had to fdisk /mbr to get it to boot from the CF card but it does work.  Isn't dos driver installation fun 🙂 I've pulled out the USB card for now just while I'm mucking around in dos 6.  I'm still looking for a decent size CF card for a Windows 98 install