jimm_eh

Modern boards yes, but classic IBM Model M's and F's and similar have held up.

I like being my own tech support, configurator and sysadmin. Even if I'm not particularly skilled at any of those tasks, when there is a problem I'm always on call and my availability is 100%. And the service warranty never expires. I also couldn't do Houdini/Redshift on a console. 85% of my builds are work machines. Before the game box I built in January, the prior box was assembled in 2012 from parts on super sale as posted on slickdeals (which was *the* place for deal alerts in 2012). I've only had my own builds since 1988, with one exception - a 1996 Pentium Pro built by a friend for a screaming good deal.

Most of it, I'd say (at least as far as the CPU side goes). Intel sort of leveled off after Sandy Bridge and coasted until Zen finally forced its hand. I just retired a 2012-built 3770k setup (with OC to 4.2GHz) in January, that was "enough" for a VERY long time (with GPU upgrades from a 460 to 660, 760 (4GB), 970 and finally 1080). Being originally built as a workstation, it had 32GB from the start. It only started to seem a bit long in the tooth by 8th gen when Zen's arrival finally freed consumer chips from Intel's 4c8t holding pen, and even then, my games didn't start noticing or wanting more CPU/cores for a while after that (in part because I wasn't playing big AAA titles).

Those look like huge Beyblades.

Pretty much *all* consumer grade UPS units using lead-acid batteries should be understood as "momentary". For your situation, I'd suggest splitting up the load to keep costs down - get a dedicated unit for your big machine, and a separate cheaper unit for everything else. That's the setup I have - a 1500VA/1500W rackmount unit for my big workstation, which can pull as much as 1300W under full load, and a more traditional tower unit 1500VA/900W for everything else, including router, switches, servers and emergency illumination. These are each on separate 15A circuits. It works great for having time for a clean shutdown, but are not meant to keep me online for a whole workday. For that, I've been pondering adding my own secondary stage akin to your whole-house setup, but just for my office - basically a big lithium unit with an inverter, that I manually switch to when the power drops so I can keep working for longer outages. This way the UPS's only carry the load for a few seconds while I'm switching over.

I'm in the 96ppi camp. 24" 1080p 32" 1440p 43"+ for 4k (my current main setup) Wall size 8k But I'm an old guy, I'm not bothered by seeing pixels. Probably because I am just used to the low PPI from the CRT's I used to use, or I'm just getting close to "large print" age. Or both. Whatever. #getoffmylawn

This was fun for me to see. I didn't know Ultimatte was still a thing - back in the 00's when I worked in Los Angeles, it was the dominant keyer (thankfully I work in VFX and stay well away from anything to do with pulling keys, myself.) I wonder how long it will be before AI-based keying tools supplant it, though.

@Queen Chrysalis Thank you so much for taking the time. Among other things, you've confirmed that PcPartPicker has a Canadian-specific option I can use (easy to recognize because of all the parts with no prices because they aren't carried here ) I'm in BC, so a run for the border would be in Washington rather than Minnesota. I have been to the Microcenter there, back in 2003 when I took a freelance gig in town. In any case, I'll definitely use your lists as a starting point, though it'll be a bit later than I was planning on account of having done my taxes this weekend and owing enough to temporarily clobber my budget

Budget (including currency): I'd like to top out at $2500 CAD, but if I can get under $2k with little loss of comparative performance, I'd be interested. Country: Canada (but near the border) Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Pure gaming. No VR, and I have a workstation for productivity. Current game is primarily Minecraft, but I'd like the headroom to check out some more recent AAA titles as well. I don't game online, it's single-player only for me. Display is 4k but I can tolerate 1080p, and >60fps isn't a priority. Other details: The machine being retired is an 11 year old OC'd 3770K (4.2GHz) with 1080 GPU, so there's lots of upside room. It's all about the box, I already have the display, mouse, KB etc. I'd consider used parts, but warranties are preferred. Mobo just needs to be reliable, won't need much by way of features. Things I'd like to have, but am willing to skip if the cost differential is big enough: Mini ITX and/or all-white "icebox" RGB bling build. Not interested in OC (this time), and would prefer air cooling (though I realize this would likely keep me out of the smaller miniITX cases).. 32GB RAM should cover it (stability favored over bleeding edge performance). In keeping with trying to hit the price/performance sweet spot, current thoughts for CPU/GPU combo are: 5800X3D (to leverage cheaper DDR4 and performance/watt) 4070ti or comparable AMD, but last-gen like a 3080-90 or AMD 6xxx series would be OK for the right deal . thanks for the input!

3 generations old, no raytracing, used GPU's are plentiful, not much crypto demand. 1080tis got down to the $400 range in 2020 right before the second crypto boom blew 3000 series prices into the stratosphere. When that mania was at its height, I was amazed to see them get all the way back to their MSRP ($700 and up) after 4 years and 2 generations. I was tempted to sell my two 1080ti's into that market, it would mean I'd gotten 4 years of service out of them for "free". I still have them though. One's the display I'm typing on now and the others' in my VR build. With luck you got a good deal on a good card.

Progressive Peripherals 68040 Zeus board for the Amiga 2000. Yes, I'm likely the oldest to post on this thread so far. If "PC" is restricted to DOS/Windows, then I'd have to say my first one, a Pentium Pro 180MHz. That CPU rendered enough of my demo reel to launch my current VFX career. Honorable mentions: DPS Personal Animation Recorder ISA (that's how I recorded the PPro 180's output to VHS) Athlon 1.4gHz (from the last time AMD was king of the hill) Nvidia GTX 460 1GB graphics card (ran that thing for four years) Core 2 quad Q6600 - got that box for free in lieu of overtime on a gig in 2007. Couldn't believe how fast Intel went from 2 to 4 cores. The two 1080tis I ran Redshift on from 2017 to 2020. Those things rocked, and still see duty in other machines now despite being replaced by 3090's for work.

Isn't there a control for distinguishing between packets that are "new" vs. packets that are part of an already established connection/relationship? e.g. if I block inbound packets from WAN to LAN, but one of my devices has sent outbound packets to a site initiating a connection, then responses from that external source are permitted? I could have sworn I'd seen something about that in one of my older firewall rules (maybe the Edgerouter X), but my current Opnsense box does not seem to have anything like that. I'm curious because at one point I was trying to block a range of IP addresses on my LAN from accessing anything on the WAN port, and yet pings were going through anyway. (I eventually just went to a "default block all" setup and then allowed the internet-permitted IP range of local machines full access, which worked.)

Years ago, hard drives suddenly went from 2MB to 8MB onboard cache after a very long time of being stuck at 2MB. Of course the HDD companies pitched it as an upgrade, but my suspicion was that this happened not from HDD customer demand, but because the other 99% of the memory market had moved on to larger sizes and the memory companies just stopped making anything that small. Gigabit is similar, except that the customer base that **isn't** demanding the extra speed has been the 99% of the market. So it isn't likely that supply-side factors are going to force the upgrade here. Perhaps if greater-than-gigabit broadband becomes common enough to induce sufficient numbers of end users to start picking up 2.5gbe parts, then the shift will happen. I strongly suspect that at least the 2.5Gbe parts today are already close to gigabit parts for cost and power consumption.

I have a Phanteks Enthoo 719 which is two-system capable, though I got it for maximum room and airflow for a Threadripper 3970X/ dual 3090 VFX workstation.

Are you talking about rechargeable AA or AAA type cells (NiMH, nickel metal hydride)? There's a possibility that the controller is (badly) designed to consider the batteries dead at 1.2V. That's relatively pooped out for alkalines (though not completely), but is just getting started for NiMH cells (and NiCad, nickel cadmiums, as well). If so, your cells are fine, but won't run the controller well. Try running a set of fresh alkalines to make sure the controller works, then use a meter like in TetraSky's video to check the voltage on them once the controller quits. If they voltage of each cell is around 1.2V or more when "empty", the controller won't like rechargeables.