Zando_

As others said, power is a cost. If you use a laptop or phone and don't leave it plugged in all day, then the additional battery cycles are another cost eventually, as you'll have to get that battery replaced or suffer with shite battery life. Temps and noise are also a concern for both, running loud and hot can be a major inconvenience. There's also no great need (AFAIK) for a massive influx of folders. F@H already struggles with distributing work units during some folding events, they'll often have access to so much hardware that they don't actually have anything for it to do. ^ basically this. It's a fun thing (due to the points system/leaderboard) for computer gearheads to do. Like charity events for car or motorcycle gearheads, etc. An excuse to flex the stuff they work on in their hobby for a good cause. Not a practical thing for everyone to engage in. Though it can be practical in the winter if you have cheap power and a very power hungry computer, you can run F@H as a decent space heater under those conditions. As dedayog noted it's the opposite when it's warm out, you fight your own AC then.

Thermal paste isn't great for CPU Die -> IHS, that's typically why people delid to begin with, in order to replace the original thermal paste with liquid metal. Given that + the load the temps don't sound too crazy. A little high for that voltage, I've run soldered chips at far higher voltages and similar clocks (4.7GHz) with much lower temps, but A) solder is better than most TIM and B) they were HEDT chips with a larger IHS and CPU die, and thus a lot more surface area to get heat out through.

Yep. The only ones that were killer value for gaming was seven years ago when Ryzen did not exist, and you could get a cheap 6-8 core chip with an X chipset motherboard and easily overclock to 4.2-4.5Ghz with a competitive IPC at the time. Zen/Zen+ endangered these Xeons, Zen 2 wiped them out. EDIT: Worth noting that this is in the US market, overseas I know mainstream Ryzen/Intel chips can be much more expensive, even used, thus why these Chinese boards exist to take advantage of mass Xeon selloffs from upgrading datacenters.

Between the IHS and CPU die or between the IHS and cooler cold plate? ^^^ Also this, P95 smallFFT is no joke, it will pull some obscene numbers. You can run ASUS Realbench if you want a similarly beefy but less intense load.

What board do you have currently? 4K is not super CPU intensive, if you have a decent B550 board then just throw ~$250 at a 5700X3D and put the rest towards a new GPU (likely new PSU with it depending on what you have rn) and a nice display.

The only cases I know of with that layout are old, large ATX cases. Why not just get a compact mATX or ITX case and simply set it on its side? Lots have airflow options that would allow for this.

Oh that's a good point, hadn't considered that. Where is the max throughput stated? I can only find the throughput for the whole thing (not just the SATA bit), seems to be 6.4GB/s for the higher end chip. Wikipedia claims up to 8GB/s for the later versions. Should be an Athlon 64 system, given the nForce 3 chipsets were made for that platform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NForce3. Isn't fully compatible with Windows Vista, likely why OP appears to be on Windows XP.

That would be considered hardware RAID. It's running in the firmware for the hardware itself, not in software. It should do RAID 0 fine given that's an intentional feature of the SATA controller: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1274/8. It allows for hot spares and such as well, if you want to do hardware RAID then it seems a capable chip.

Hold CMD + I when it boots up to boot into Internet Recovery. Or CMD + R (regular recovery mode keybind, but it will boot to Internet Recovery if no OS is present). It will usually try and download the launch OS though, which can be annoying to upgrade from. On my mid-2012 MBPs that was Mac OS X Mountain Lion if I booted to Internet Recovery with no OS present.

Not loose. That's basically it. Very lightly snug. Don't need to crank em down, they just need to keep the board from flopping around. Nope. The equal-length standoffs keep the board even, the screws just hold the board to those standoffs. No need to worry about super precise torquing on the screws.

Not (usually) due to the implants. The cool tech itself isn't what makes cyberpunk settings suck to live in, it's the abuse by corporations. Implants/neon cities/flying cars are the set dressing, not the cause of the issues cyberpunk critiques. I use these at work. Have a card in my phone case (as it's flat so it fits) so I can just use my phone - which I carry everywhere anyways - to get in to work, instead of having to have another thing dangling off my keychain. I ride a motorcycle most days so I have 2 sets of keys (bike + truck) and when on the bike the keys are just dangling out in the weather due to where the ignition switch is, so I'd prefer to not have a bunch of important stuff hanging off of them. If you have a lot more RFID/NFC stuff than just a door or two at work, I see the reasoning behind getting implants. I don't have much else to ask/add other than it seems pretty cool, and I'm sorry folks are overreacting to a small, barely invasive and easily reversible procedure.

Doesn't sound like you need multiple machines to connect to the same drives (this is the main point of a Network Attached Storage device), so the main benefit would be in the separation of the machines. It's often more convenient to have one computer do one thing (your work for example) and another do different things (hold all your stuff). Adding a bunch more devices to your main PC will make it boot slower for example (as it has to initialize more devices, and if you use an HBA then the HBA itself takes a bit to come on as well). Also if for some reason you need to take the RAID array offline, you don't have to shut down your main PC to do so. The main cons would be a whole 2nd computer to administrate (though this can be very easy, once set up they require very little attention) and you'll be throttled to whatever your home LAN is. Most folks have gigabit ethernet around the house, so you'll be limited to ~125MB/s, even standard HDDs on their own are often a bit faster than that, and depending on RAID/ZFS configuration they can get much faster still.

https://foldingathome.org/diseases/ I'd assume HIV isn't a fault in protein folding.

Not an iMac, an Apple Thunderbolt Display: https://support.apple.com/th-th/112597. A USB-C to Thunderbolt 2 adapter works on a Mac because Macs have full Thunderbolt 3 or 4 capabilities over USB-C, and Thunderbolt is backwards compatible with older versions of itself. AFAIK the Thunderbolt display does not use Mini DisplayPort, it is legitimately a Thunderbolt display, thus the name and requirement of a Thunderbolt-capable Mac. It won't work on a PC that's just using regular USB via USB-C, it might work with a PC that uses Thunderbolt 3 or 4, depending on their implementation. It's Mini DisplayPort. And Thunderbolt. At the same time. Same as how USB-C Macs are running Thunderbolt 3 or 4 over that USB-C connector. They support the full features of the USB-C standard on top of Thunderbolt spec. Thunderbolt 1 and 2 were similar, but Mini DisplayPort was the chosen connector standard. Those are usually a DisplayPort to Mini DisplayPort adapter, I've used them the other way round (Mini DisplayPort -> DisplayPort) on my Thunderbolt 1/2 equipped Macs. If it uses DisplayPort over Thunderbolt for the display itself, then that may work. I'm not familiar with what all they have inside that monitor, it may insist on Thunderbolt to do anything at all.

Why not.

Hardly nonexistent if I went back to a slower GPU for the sake of a playable experience. Such are computers. I use old HEDT and I dunno if it's the many cores/higher RAM bandwidth of the platform or sheer luck, but I've dodged issues with some games that other folks had a lot of problems with (the Horizon Zero Dawn PC port being the big one, I had 0 stutter in that when many other people had the game constantly choke). ARC cards are quirky, it depends on exact settings. I forget which they were, but changing a couple settings in RDR2 is what took it from being stuck permanently at 1fps to running playably. GN could have had one setting different and that made the ARC card or drivers choke up. I don't believe the ARC is a better value if it doesn't work sometimes. I haven't ran mine in months, but I do check in on the driver updates every month-ish, Starfield is still on their list of a bunch of known issues. No mention of FO76 but they've never mentioned it before. I doubt that's been fixed either. And again 76 specifically runs so poorly that it made me feel ill. Horribly inconsistent frametimes, I've played games at low fps a bunch of times, but inconsistent/stuttery frametimes make me ill. I want to advise people to grab ARC, I like the cards and I really want Intel to become a proper competitor and hopefully help break Nvidia's stranglehold on the industry, but I don't think they're ready enough to advise spending your money on if you can only afford one GPU. Better to get one that does work, than one that might be a better value if it works.

Game compatibility is the issue, not platform (modern platforms support ARC fine). This is Intel's first dGPU so they don't have the decades of grandfathered-in bugfixes and game tweaks that Nvidia and AMD Radeon (formerly ATI) do. Some games run weird or don't work, drivers are constantly and noticeably improving, but they are still behind Nvidia and AMD. If you're a variety gamer like me, I wouldn't recommend an ARC as your only GPU. I have an A770 because I also have a 2060 Super to fall back on whenever I run into compatibility issues. I'm currently using the 2060 Super because I was playing Fallout 76 for a while, and that runs with such bad framerate and frametimes on the ARC card that it's nauseating. If you only play massively popular DX11 titles Intel specifically patches for, DX11 titles that allow the DXVK wrapper, or DX12/Vulkan titles, then it's a safer bet. I believe they're still having issues with Starfield though, and that's a DX12 title. Red Dead Redemption 2 is also a DX12/Vulkan title, and last I was using my ARC card it had issues with stutter, I found settings that ran smoothly but fire was invisible and there were some other small weird graphical quirks. TLDR: I don't advise an ARC GPU as your only card if you play a wide selection of games.

Many large companies put short-term profit above everything else. The health of their business, the quality of their product, the treatment of their workers, everything. AFAIK this is down to how they have their executive compensation packages set up, it incentivizes maximizing share value, not actually making the business better. Thus the incessant nickel and diming, removing things only to add them back at additional charge, or forcing subscriptions where they don't make sense, poor quality control/design decisions, etc. Much of this is exacerbated by well meaning but poorly written regulation. I mostly know car examples for this: Governments mandate emissions equipment but do not mandate that it be easily serviceable. Companies of course take the quickest/cheapest option, often stuffing things in hard-to-get places (the specific example I've seen is the EGR valve, modern ones are extremely reliable and simply need to be removed, cleaned, and reinstalled at certain intervals, no replacement required). So people don't service them due to the massive labor costs to disassemble half the car and get to them, so the emissions equipment fails, ruining reliability and driving up ownership costs. In the US, larger vehicles have laxer emissions requirements. This is one of the main reasons for the massive increase in size on modern pickups/SUVs. Making for a worse effect on the environment/people as they're less efficient than smaller vehicles, take more resources to build, burn through more tires, wear down the road faster, and cause worse traffic accidents. Many modern vehicles are rushed through the production lines (Ford has been shipping out trucks with sand still in the blocks from casting, or unfinished gasket mating surfaces) for the sake of maximizing profits. They also often prioritize assembly line efficiency over serviceability, leading to things like bolts being put behind frame rails, requiring either a bunch of shenanigans to remove, or multiple hours if the entire engine has to be pulled to get to it. All increasing ownership costs of the vehicles for the sake of saving a few bucks for the company. Heck even on the 2002 Mountaineer I had, they installed the radiator from the front and then placed the entire bumper assembly over it, despite there being clearance to bolt it in from inside the engine bay. Causing me and my dad to take 2 hours longer to replace the radiator because we refused to take the entire front of the vehicle off to get to it. Just little decisions like that, either made by people who have never worked on vehicles before and just didn't realize, or intentionally sacrificed in the name of production efficiency. If you check the news there's also a bunch of info about Boeing now, they seem to be rushing plane production to disastrous effect. This is true of the psychology aspect. I don't think humans are any worse than we always have been, but it is easy to feel that way when social media amplifies a lot of horrible or stupid stuff. If you run into history nerds you'll learn that we've been doing all this stuff (good and bad) for thousands of years, knowledge of it just wasn't available on a magic portal in your pocket. Economic conditions are, which is what makes everything feel like it's getting worse. Cars are more expensive, food is more expensive, rent is more expensive, interest rates are higher (though those do go up and down a lot, currently they are higher than before) etc. Makes everything feel worse when the basic stuff you need to live is more of a struggle than before. Try and be choosier with what you care about. No shame in blocking/muting stuff that brings up issues you don't have the spoons to care about currently. Or garbage content/humor that just drains you to see. Ride a motorcycle. Or find some other hobby that similarly gets you outside. I like motorcycles as there's an inherent satisfaction to operating the machines, and there's a good sense of community between bikers, I can see anyone else on a bike and 9/10 times they'll wave back when I do so to them. People often come up when I'm stopped to chat about them as well. It's a nice reminder that most people are pretty decent and we have more things in common than not. Back when I was in better shape I hiked a lot and rode mountain bikes, those are similarly good-for-the-soul activities. There's a massive mental health benefit to just being outside in fresh air. I got out of shape to begin with because my IT job has me at a desk all day, and my main hobby was video games (so thus at my desk at home again), and that coincides with my mental health decline over the past few years. There's other personal reasons for that too, but the sitting inside all the time certainly has not helped.

If you disable the card initializing, you won't be able to talk to the drives hooked into it, so... no, no real way to stop the card from POSTing while still being able to use it. Why do you have a 10-drive array for game folders to begin with btw? Running 4 high-capacity drives off internal SATA with RAID 10 or equivalent should be plenty fast and doesn't require an HBA and the accompanying wait for it to POST.

Sounds about right. Adding more things to initialize = longer boot time.

As noted, money. It works out well for the willing Apple consumer (me and my extended family). I like 'em because they just work, I recommend them to tech-illiterate family members (the type who fall for the browser freezing "call MS support" scam ads) because they cannot fuck them up much by themselves.

Oh thanks lol, I derped on the conversion from volts -> millivolts .

Set the voltage, speed, and main 4 timings printed on the stick. Leave all sub-timings on auto, let the motherboard sort them. That'll fix 90% of your problems with XMP (unless you're running RAM fast enough that your IMC just can't handle it to begin with), and upping the voltage ~200-500mV (So 1.37-1.4v if the XMP voltage is 1.35) will fix 9%. 1% will be funky issues that are hard to sort out, but they are very rare. Usually it's just a motherboard not liking the XMP profile's sub-timings, or a CPU IMC needing a little more voltage to do the job.

These: Those are all massive, demanding single-player titles. They need to use multiple cores to work, and don't suffer any negative consequence from higher latencies. There is no competitive edge to gain or lose via a few ms or ns of latency difference. The games where it matters aren't using 8 or more cores, heck I can't think of a fast-paced e-sports title that isn't well known for being single-threaded. Maybe league? I can't remember if it scales with a few cores or no. Certainly nothing that scales noticeably past 8. Lots of old titles are also single-threaded because it's simpler. And they aren't so demanding that they need to run a bunch of stuff in parallel to be playable. See the older Bethesda games. OS/game developers can do that themselves. As big/little chips or multiple CCDs have become standard we've seen both improve their handling of CPU core usage, and they will continue to do so. Ball is already rolling, stopping it would sacrifice a lot for... what gain? Again, games that will suffer from higher latencies aren't using more than 8 cores to begin with. That type of game usually only cares about single-core performance, which is decided (mostly) by IPC x Clock. Up the cores per ring/CCD -> that brings density up -> chips get hotter -> scale back voltage/current to bring temps down -> chip cannot clock as high -> lower single-core performance -> lower performance in those games.

Yes. The type of games that use over 8 cores don't suffer due to the higher latency.