M.Laz

Concerning furniture, my wife and I have decided that for certain things, we need to find woodworkers and order directly to them. Our current issue is a dining room set we thought was reasonably high end but it's not holding up and we believe we could have gone to a woodworker for something we know would be well built for not too much more. The media cabinet in this video seems like the build quality is on par with the not quite Ikea flat pack stuff you get from other big box stores. Maybe some smart designers can add channels for air that can also help keep noise away from users, add pockets for things like fan controllers, and integrate other electronics for improving the experience. Some cool accessories to go with it might be retractable cords for charging, maybe something like a drag chain or other cable guide that can work for the drawers, and other things to help with cable management beyond what LTT is working on. This video also makes me want to get back to creating a custom fan controller that speaks MQTTI figure I could have something built with some defaults and can store updated user provided ones in non-volatile storage but it could also integrate with things like Node-Red or Home Assistant to better take things like room ambient temperatures into account and allow for more external control such as via a smartphone. Maybe that's going a bit over the top in the home automation realm though. And this video also makes we wonder about using the ESP32 as the foundation for a universal remote system to fill the void by Logitech when they discontinued the Harmony system. Getting the software right for a project like that would be a fair bit of effort though.

Can you guys look into a video on firmware security? I see you guys have made contact with Zach Bobroff at AMI from the recent Techquickie video. He's a good contact for this topic. On the Intel side, you might consider seeing if Brian Richardson is willing to speak with LMG if he is still involved in firmware security or if he can direct you to other people at Intel. Between them, they might also help you identify people at other major tech companies like Microsoft and AMD who can help build a bigger picture. What would probably be of most benefit to LTT viewers would be understanding SecureBoot, what types of security it provides, how OSes work with SecureBoot, how Trusted Computing and TPMs fit into the picture, and then perhaps how proprietary solutions like those from Intel and AMD try to fill in the gap. If someone there is really ambitious, I think some additional background on how consumes can help drive security without giving up software and hardware freedom. Some people from the OSS community might be good for that but it may be a challenge to find people willing to work with tech companies with what we have today rather than rely on their own bespoke solutions.

One thing I liked on the servers that I saw a similar feature on is that it logged power over time without any additional test equipment connected to the system. So you could see the impact of changing or adding hardware like hard drives, PCIe cards, or even just running a different mix of workloads. Fans could even factor into that, but then, this was a server As a consumer, I was thinking it could give me input on tweaks to make a system more efficient (funny because I've gone with an Intel 10th gen chip which are not the most efficient). Beyond that, it could give me some insight into my system usage and power bills. If there is Linux software for them, then there might be some other possibilities when paired with a RasPi like more reliable data logging that doesn't impact the host. But I don't know if this is possible.

Thanks for the info, I'll do some hunting on Monday and see what I can find.

I'm looking for a PSU for my new build and I was trying to look into a PSU that allows for power monitoring. After working with some server gear that can do something similar, I thought it might be interesting to look for something similar for my personal system. But it seems like there isn't much new out there that I can find. Was this really a gimmick that is dead now, or is it just that I'm not looking for the right thing? I want to do a bit more research on these before I pull the trigger on a PSU and this is one of the avenues I wanted to check into.

Do you have a recommendation for the CPU that supports DDR5, will have good midrange performance and costs about $250? If not, the extra cash is just spent on 'future proofing' which I've tried to do enough times in the past to decide I can't be bothered chasing the while whale named "future proof" now.

I think many of you have presented enough options for me to look over, burt I don't think there are any huge gaps in what I was looking into (I think I mentioned that I was concerned that ignoring 11th gen core would be a mistake but that doesn't seem to be the case, the pricing is still too high). Can we stop the flaming, alpha nerding, and fanboying? It's really not adding to the discussion of what can be purchased near my somewhat arbitrary price point and will offer solid performance for the next few years with the additional consideration that the CPU, mainboard, and RAM will all be switched out to take advantage of the innovations we are just starting to see coming to fruition right now.

That's my point. I just don't think it makes financial sense to be an early adopter and I've been a PC enthusiast long enough that I'm not up to chase the idea of 'future proofing' at this point. Right now, I think going with something second hand and last gen (or even 2 gens old in Intel's case) and saving as much money with plans to do a CPU/mainboard/RAM upgrade in a few years when the tech is more mature and what I'm putting together now starts to chug. DDR5 has a lot of potential for sure, but potential isn't in my budget.

I'm a little convened about its power consumption, but you make a good point about undervolting. I'd like to see if I can come on closer to $500 but considering my current rig is an opportunistic build that is reminiscent of a season of Scrapyard Wars, I can't complain about prices too much since it's been quite a while since I've paid to build something entirely new. Part of my reason for posting here is hoping to find some hidden gems. I was wondering if the largely negative reviews of the 11th gen Intel Core CPUs might have devalued them in the second hand market but a quick look doesn't support that hypothesis. At this point, I have a couple 10th gen Core CPUs that look nice and price will be the deciding factor if I go that route. I'm also trying to do a more serious read over Ryzen 3000 series to see how things look there. But the generational compatibility and the semiconductor fab capacity shortage both seemed to be keeping prices of AMD's CPUs pretty high even on the second hand market which may tank that plan. The upgrade after this will probably be after DDR5 is established so no matter what, and upgrade is likely to require a new board unless the performance promises for it don't pan out.

I hear you. I'm an old fart in computer terms and recall a few sockets that got more than a couple generations of upgrades . When they started moving things on die is when things really went downhill. For Intel, there was a ray of hope with QPI and the one generation they had what was called an IOH (tylersburg was that chip's codename IIRC). But Intel's games with PCIe lanes killed that (I have to wonder if part of the reason Intel kept Thunderbolt around was they thought it might lead to a solution for this). Their antics have pretty much killed hope for drop in upgrades. But then, their mediocre showing for nearly the past decade has meant an old system stays relevant for longer.

I've recently gotten a new 30 series GPU and it's time to build a new system as nothing I currently have can be carried forward. I'm starting with the CPU as the rest of the build really stems from that. I'm open with used CPUs for this build. What I have to spend seems to put me in mid-tier 10th gen Core or midrange Ryzen 3000 series territory, does this sound right? The reviews of 11th gen Core were underwhelming, does this mean there might be some deals there I'm overlooking Are there any specific models that would be good to zero in on? The reviews of 11th gen Core were underwhelming, does this mean there might be some deals there I'm overlooking? I'd like the build to be somewhat efficient, is there a clear advantage to AMI or Intel over this? I expect to upgrade in a couple years now that competition in the CPU space means we are actually starting to see more than incremental improvements each generation, and DDR5 has just hit the scene. So I'm trying to budget this with an upgrade planned in that timeframe.

Edited for clarifying budget Budget (including currency): ~$600USD (there is wiggle room) Country: USA Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: No Man's Sky, Mass Effect Legendary Edition, Doom Eternal, Forza Horizon 5, Minecraft, retro console emulation, then anything newer I've skipped over Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): GeForce 3070 TI founders edition, a pair of 1080P monitors (one high refresh rate), 1tb SATA SSD. Basically I'm building a brand new gaming PC. Almost nothing is usable from my current system is built around a pair of Intel Xeon E5-2667 v2 processors on a Supermicro X9DR3-F in a Supermicro super chassis running a P6000 as its GPU. I was able to land a 3070 TI founders' edition at MSRP so I now have a reason to build something that can put the GPU to use. My current thinking is to pick the CPU and the rest should be a lot easier to figure out. With Alder Lake having just launched I'm hoping that will mean some deals for other CPUs. Looking at the Alder Lake reviews, I don't think it makes a ton of sense to go that route. The power consumption is high, DDR5 needs more time to really show its capabilities, and outside of Windows 11, the e-cores don't seem to be a huge benefit I'd like to focus on efficiency while being able to handle the AAA tiles released over the past few years, and being able to jump to 1440p once monitor prices start to recover (I might try to use the 4K TV at home if I can compete with my wife and child for time ). I figure there will be a mainboard and CPU swap a few years down the line when I eventually do want to jump to DDR5. Hopefully the 3070ti will still be effective at that time. I'm just starting the check out the i9 10900K, the I7 10700KF, the R7 5800x and the R7 3800x. What else should I be looking into?

Pop over to reddit.com/r/egpu or egou.io. There is definitely interest out there. With the chip shortage, it's making a lot more sense to try and extend the capabilities of a laptop rather than trying to build a dedicated gaming PC. It's still nice, but that niche is bigger than it used to be. There are so many questions about performance like what cards are optimal for the limited PCIe bandwidth, what titles will be problematic (because they are PCIe bandwidth heavy), etc. It should be possible to test various types of GPU connections with different cards to build the definitive reference for those interested in eGPUs. But it would take a LOT of hardware to accomplish this.

I honestly don't see LTT doing a comprehensive eGPU video based on their previous videos. The problem is that there is an inverse relationship between tech reviewers interested in eGPUs and those that have the hardware and software to do comprehensive testing.

I'm interested in eGPUs and the recetn LTT video on weird motherboards got me thinking about if there is an article or video with a deep dive on GPU vs eGPU performance. Ideally, there would be a test done on a board that supports a mobile CPU, has a TB3 or TB4 port, and has a PCIex16 slot. The test would have data on the range of Turing, Ampere, RDNA, RDNA 2 cards. I'd like to see data for the card connected at x16, optionally connected at x4 to that same slot, and connected as an eGPU. I haven't found anything this extensive yet, is there such a video or article out there? It would be a pretty big undertaking and for a product that's still pretty niche, I would not be surprised to find that no one has decided to commit the resources for something this extensive. What I hope the data would show is that the GPU 'sweet spot' is for someone whose upgrade path is an eGPU. Does it make any sense to get something like a 3080 or 6800xt for an eGPU if there are n plans to transfer it to a desktop in the future? Does AMD or Nvidia have an advantage over the other in the eGPU space? It would also be good to have that kind of date for someone planning to get a specific notebook and assume they can just throw an eGPU at it and expect to game to better understand if they should consider an alternative.

Thanks, that did it. I misread the option. I lost track of the details trying to figure out the other options. I did a conservative 140w boost and do see at least one core briefly hitting the 4GHZ mark and temps are still under control. This system isn't power efficient but you've let me see about eeking out a bit more performance to where I can hopefully wait out the CPU, mainboard, and RAM price hikes.

I started with hyperthreading enabled, I disabled it because the resource sharing can lower the performance of the cores. In my case, disabling it boosted by CPU score in timespy by around 500 points.

Main specs: MB: Supermicro X9DR3-f CPU: 2x Xeon E5-2673 v2s Ram: 128gb pc3-14900 I'll try and keep this short. I'm not seeing any of my cores turbo over the base CPU's speed. I gathered some graph data from 3dMark's Timespy benchmark. One image is from the results screen, others are created from data logged with hwinfo64 while running the benchmark. Thermals don't seem to be an issue. I don't think these old CPUs can report their power use but the BMC can log power use at the PSU and the peak draw reported from my benchmarking timeframe is 466 watts. The PSU is rated at 920w. I've attached a bunch of pictures, not all the info may be relevant. They do make this post looks a bit long, sorry for the information overload. It may be that the jank level is just too high (the majority of these parts were recovered from e-waste sources I had a while back). If that's the case, I'll accept that. But I don't want to give up without a fight so I'm hoping some experts here might be able to help. My goal is to get through the chip shortages and see about putting something new-ish together when MSRPs hopefully have meaning again.

My gaming machine is a janky, scrapyard ways type of machine built from an old server. The heart of the machine are 2 Xeon E5-2673 v2 running on a Supermicro X9DR3/i-f and 4 sticks of 4Rx4 PC3-14900 running at 1866mhz. As such, I don't know if this really is the right place to ask for help (but trying to ask for help in a server forum seems like it would be an equally bad fit). As LTT has pointed out many times in the past, gaming on hardware like this is not the best idea, but in the current market, it seems I need to nurse it along for a little while longer. I'm being a bit dramatic. At 1080p and with a decent Pascal based GPU I get 150-ish FPS in Doom Eternal. The other main game I'm playing when I get time is No Man's Sky which is what has really prompted me to ask for help. The issue is that, when I'm flying, things pop in when I've nearly on top of them and the game pauses when transitioning between things like a planet and space. I've messed with in game graphics settings, moved the game to a single SSD rather than the RAID I use for my Steam games, and I tried changing a config that allows the game to use more cores. What I've observed is that a couple cores are fully utilized. I assume one of those runs the main thread that is truing to fetch the assets from disk and RAM for rendering. I have been messing around with my RAM config trying to see if there is performance to be had by turning off RAS features and see if there are any other options that might unlock a little more performance. One thing I noticed after running Time Spy is that it reports my CPU(s) running at 3.3GHz for the entre test with the temps at about 40 C This seems like something I should follow up on, maybe 3D mark isn't that great with dial socket systems (and it seems to have trouble recognizing the CPUs) . But assuming the data is valid, is there a good place to get solid info on getting the CPU and RAM settings to where I can eek out a bit more gaming performance for something as weird and janky as I'm running?

The mainboard is a SuperMicro X9DR3/i-f running 2 Xeon E5 2673 v2 CPUs and it's all in a Sumermicro server chassis. I have 4 4Rx4 PC3-14900 DIMMs in the system. The main HD is a Sandisk 1TB SATA drive. The GPU is a P6000 (pure, dumb luck on finding that for e-ewaste prices). The main gaming monitor is a XB252q. As many an LTT video has shown, gaming on server hardware is really quirky and not power efficient. The rig plays Doom Eternal pretty well, I generally stay around 150 FPS at 1080p. But then, Doom Eternal is so well optimized that it's not hard for an older system to run. No Man's Sky is where my rig is really struggling now, mostly with object pop in, or when transitioning from a planet to space. My storage should be fast enough, the RAID array I have in the system right now benchmarked at about 50% faster than a typical M.2 SSD (I have forgotten the exact numbers, I only noted that I'm getting better than typical SSD speeds). I've toyed with the idea of running the game from a RAM disk to see what happens too. But I think the issue has to deal with the CPUs' single threaded performance. While the game does use separate threads to load assets, and the number of threads can be tweaked via modding some config files, it looks like the threading model is still pretty dependent on the performance of a single thread so throwing more cores at the issue hasn't helped. There may be some tweaks that can give me some more life. In a round of benchmarks I did recently to see if some RAM tweaks helped thing at all, I notices my CPUs were seemingly locked to 3.3GHz and none of the cores were boosting. And it's really hard to determine the impact of various BIOS settings on performance. There's not a ton of info out there and even less of it discusses the impact of settings on things like gaming.

Budget (including currency): Not firm, $500 USD is my super optimistic target, I think $800 might be more likely, and I can probably talk my wife into going as high as $1000 USD. Obviously keeping the price as low as possible is better which is why I'm open to second hand parts. Country: USA Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Mostly gaming, No Man's Sky and Doom Eternal are what I'm currently playing and running at 1080p on a high refresh rate monitor. The remastered Mass Effect trilogy is next on my list. Work will be Arduino coding Other details See below. edit: System specs are as follows ('m still kinda cagey about providing details as most of the parts were destined for e-waste and I happened to be in the right place at the right time to recover these parts) CPU: 2x E5-2673 v2 Mainboard: X9DR3/i-f RAM: 4x 4Rx4 PC3-14900 (128GB, makes Chrome almost happy) HSF: 2x NH-u12DX i4 GPU Quadro p6000 boot drive: Sandisk 1TB SSD (will edit when I boot the system tonight to try a new round of tweaks) Storage/Steam disk: SAS RAID (will update with performance numbers later after a benchmark) Monitor: XB252Q (The jank is strong with this system) I haven't built a true gaming machine in a while. My current build build is very 'scrapyard wars' style built from the carcass of an old server that has 2 3.3 GHZ 8 core Ivy Bridge CPUs. I'm running a Pascal based Quadro in that. The only things I expect to save are a 1TB SATA SSD, the GPU, and maybe an additional SATA drive. I don't think the NH-u12DX i4 is usable on a more recent CPU but if I could, that would save some cash. I also replaced the server case fans with some quieter 80mm ones but those are almost certainly too small to use in a new system. I want to move to 1440p high refresh rate gaming sometime after putting this system together, upgrading the GPU when/if the supply issues get resolved, and after financially recovering from all that. Seeing as what I need is almost a complete system I'm trying to see if I can save some money by going second hand. My first thought is to go with a Zen 2 CPU and a board that can handle a Zen 3 CPU but I'll bet that upgrade path has kept those mainboards off the market. Are the better bargains out there for Intel stuff (seeing as they generally support maybe 2 different chip families on their MBs)? With DDR5 not being a thing yet, is it foolish to explore the second hand market for RAM? I'm concerned about second hand cases and power supplies since it seems like it might be hard to get ones that haven't been abused. Along those lines, it seems like an air cooler is the safer option to get second had (assuming I can't use one of my Noctuas in the new build). Am I far off the mark? Is there a good guide out there for helping figure out what boards and CPUs from the last generation offer the best bang for the buck? What is the collective wisdom on parts that should be ordered new vs ones that are OK to get used?

@RexDomi Sorry I haven't been on for a few days to help. It looks like you have the issue sorted through

Glad to hear you got it worked out! Maybe LTT can do an in depth tutorial on NVMe RAID since it seems to be a challenging thing to get working.

It looks like you have a RAID configured. My guess is that the RAID driver/option ROM has control of the drive and that's why it's not showing up under the NVMe configuration menu. With only a single drive, you may want to consider disabling RAID support. I don't have any personal experience with NVMe RAIDs but I've heard they can be very frustrating. I believe there are some additional restrictions which aren't well documented for getting Windows to install and boot on an NVMe RAID device. I won't be much help with sorting all that out. If you just want to get up and running, and RAID isn't that important to you, I think the option to disable it is in the advanced menu (sorry I can't be specific, Asus's manual isn't great). I won't be able to give you any more replies until tomorrow as I've stayed up too late now. But I hope someone else will reply and help you get on the right track if my input isn't helpful.

I'm trying to find a program that seems to be causing CPU spikes that results in temperature spikes that is giving a laptop I'm using trouble. I'm using hwinfo64 to monitor the CPU's temp and what I'll see is the CPU temp maximum set to a high value in times I'm away from the computer so I have no idea what process is using the CPU and causing the temp spikes being recorded by hwinfo. All the guides I've seen on this subject assume the spike happens either while I'm at the computer anc can catch it with monitoring tools, or that I know the process already and can set up some data logging. Have I missed something in those articles on programs like perfmon? Is there a user friendly monitoring program that can help me find out what's going on while I'm away from my computer?