Curious Pineapple

I do enjoy living in this "nanny state" country as it is often called. 14 days statutory right to return a product for any reason and the retailer can't refuse (with a few exceptions that are not relevant here). As long as it's undamaged and in original packaging. I could even buy a car and return it after a week because I've changed my mind.

I've been having issues with it too, couldn't join a party but could start one just fine.

Nothing too modern, a pair of X5670's for my Z800 workstation to replace the pair of X5570's. No real need for them but gaming with 13% CPU usage is nice. Sits at around 1% usage just browing

What's the ambient temperature like?

They make a few grand on these machines, knocking off a few hundred is no biggie for them. Could always use it as a display model, then sell as ex-display later on.

I've got a few Xeon machines I was thinking of using for this very purpose. Not exactly the fastest available but a damn sight quicker than a laptop or lower end desktop machine.

If I crashed a brand new car into my wall, I'd expect to be greeted by a very happy service head at the dealer when I turn up with the thing and a blank cheque and say fix it.

I did point out that the T2 has been the cause of USB 2 audio hardware dropping out and causing audio glitches, which is fact. What this pleb can't understand is why I mentioned repair of automotive electronics and programming flash memory being timing critical. I have a Dell workstation with a few security settings in the BIOS that are off by default, but once enabled they are perminant. That's how it should be, off by default but if you need them, then they should be perminantly enabled. The PS4 has a similar setup to the T2, the Southbridge is actually an ARM microprocessor which prevents PCI devices from accessing system memory through DMA and keeps the hardware in check (put simply). The PS4 can now install linux onto a flash drive through it's web browser, that's how secure locking down the PCI express bus was.

My 3g works fine, after I rolled back the OS. Got the week of battery life back too

Then you know that for every minute of render time for one CPU, the other saves a second, which is a minute every hour. Over thousands of hours, that adds up to a massive time saving. Testing without optimizations only gives a comparison if you will also render without optimizations. You could buy an i9 over a TR because it performed better, but find out that the TR is 2% faster when optimized. Kind of like the FX scenario, it performed fantastic with optimized software, but dog slow with generic or intel compiler options.

Not really, if you buy a 20 grand machine, you're probably not one to be buying too good to be true bargain components from China. If you start running busses through another component it can introduce latency and timing issues, like it has with the USB audio devices. Not an issue for bulk transfer but where timing is critical, like audio or programming/flashing microcontrollers or flash chips, you can get corruption. For a microcontroller that just means a bad checksum and you try again, if you're repairing automotive control units for example, it may restart on upload and cause a failure. Except it is possible to reflash GPU's with Apple's firmware. It is possible to replace BGA components, you can do it with reletively inexpensive equipment. The concern is not what happens now, but how long is it before even removable parts are tied to the machine? Microsoft did it with the Xbox 360, the optical drives were tied to the board to prevent swapping out and playing copies of games. Not really an issue in a games console and a repair service was offered rather than just selling the customer a new machine.

I'd say the other way round is better. CPU X may render in 3 seconds, and CPU Y in 5, but CPU X has done it in 60% of the time. It'd be like a bus and a car competing to see who can get the most people from one place to another in an hour. If you stuff 10 people into the car, and 10 people into the bus, the only differences will be the acceleration (assuming keeping to speed limit). That could possibly compare to better handling of an instruction that the application uses. If you then load the bus up and allow the car to travel at it's top speed, you have a more accurate comparison. That would be more like comparing a TR 3970x to an i9-10900x. The TR may have slightly weaker per core performance, but if you can optimize the task for 64 threads, you'll steam ahead. The car may do double the speed of the bus, but the bus can carry 10 times the passengers.

The daft ones will run back to their safe spaces when big decisions need to be made.

Yes they are, Wish and ALiExpress are full of fake parts. Reflashed GPU's, re-lidded CPU's, totally fake CPU's, graphics cards that fry mainboards. There are countless fake SSD's and flash memory products out there. If there's money to be made, people will do it. Enlighten me, why does my G5 Power Mac require a custom flashed graphics card? Does it give some magical performance over the reference software? Does it sprout unicorns? Does it use voodoo to double the AGP bandwidth? Or is it to sell an off the shelf card with a heavy markup and leave consumers no choice but to go back to Apple for a replacement or upgrade? Of course, when Apple deemed that machine EOL, they won't bother releasing any newer GPU's for the system even if your usage is GPU bound and the rest of the system is perfectly capable of coping. You need to buy a new machine as you've already invested into the Apple ecosystem. That's what pisses people off, not increased security or whole drive encryption. Let's not mention that the T2 is responsible for audio devices becoming unreliable

But you can only drive the sports car on approved roads and the wheel bearings are half the cost of the car for a set, which are only available from the manufacturer who won't sell them to anyone else.

Combine the 2 and you can't change the OS on the machine, nor can you run the OS on anything else.

I've been having a power off then back on issue for a while. At first I had to disable hyperthreading, then after a while it started resetting again. Disabled 2 cores and enabled HT, worked fine for a while, then had to disable HT and drop down to 1 core per CPU. It wouldn't get through POSTing without a power cycle. New PSU in and all works fine. That PSU is now on an almost identical machine just with slightly slower CPU's and it POST's just fine with 4 cores and HT enabled on dual CPU.

Won't be long before you need to swear allegance to the mighty glowing Apple once a day otherwise the machine will just self terminate.

Facebook could easily develop an open source OS that has built in spyware, they're not going to give away the source for their platform applications are they? It's all well and good offering the source code, but most people (those that don't really give a shit what they share online) won't care they that can compile code themselves after inspecting it line by line. They'll just click the download installer button. Doesn't take a lot to offer the source code, and a compiled version which contains their own applications and drivers which could be doing anything.

When Apple treats customers properly, offers repairs and spare parts, stops locking down hardware and software and gives up on the making key parts such as storage irreplacible, then they will deserve the same treatment as other manufacturers. I have no problem getting parts for my older Dell and HP machines, but I just paid way too much for a graphics card that's 14 years old just to test a Power Mac. It's not special, it's not magical, it's just an old piece of shit with custom firmware. Even making the RAM a custom removable module would be a step up from soldering it down to the board. They're as bad as software locks in products like oscilloscopes. The same hardware sold for a few hundred, or a few thousand, the only difference is the software.

It's fine for gaming too at 1080p.

And you proved my point, if BMW refused to supply parts like Apple does, then people would be scrapping cars due to a single connector, or hacking something else into a wiring harness and potentially causing a serious risk. Refusal to supply or in some cases even repair will lead to a demand for stolen, fake, faulty and potentially dangerous parts.

BMW order enough connectors from Amp/Tyco to have tooling tweaked, meaning that they're effectively a custom part. The difference between this and Apple is that I can walk into a BMW dealer, ask for an injector harness and be sold one. BMW won't refuse and instead offer me a new car, or a "refurbished" one. Of course, 2 days earlier the "refurb" was another customers car that couldn't be fixed either.

I meant due to age, I have 10 year old workstations and a 10 year old Laptop, nothing wrong with any of them and if anything fails, I can just replace it.

If Apple didn't prevent 3rd party manufacturers from supplying quality parts there would be no issue. If BMW prevented Bosch from supplying custom air flow sensors to the public, then the only options would be unreliable knock-offs. If they coded batteries to the car and replacement was a dealer only job, then people will spring up offering to clone or even open up the battery and jamming the control board in something else.