KemoKa

Technically it could, assuming the cables are beefy enough, but I wouldn't recommend it. Grab a new power supply while you're at it. if it's as old as I think it is (Sandy Bridge Xeon?) the power supply probably won't even be able to reliably deliver its rated wattage anymore.

Stores have been pumping out "Black Friday Sales" since the beginning of the month, so to me Black Friday just kind of lost all meaning, and TheVarus™ hasn't helped in-person turnout in stores, either. Though, it has made navigating the supermarket a little easier. Maybe something will come up for Cyber Monday but I doubt it. Not unless I'm being marketed a Cheap Affordable Laptop with Blazing Fast Intel Core Processors For College that isn't any faster than my 9-year-old T420.

Nope. A lot of routers don't even run on ARM, let alone x86. They're based on MIPS. Even if Windows were hypothetically ported to MIPS, it wouldn't be able to run because the resources routers have are tiny. You can have an old x86 machine run PFSense and technically you'd have a router that can run Windows, but if you wanted them running on the same machine at the same time... running PFSense in a VM with hardware passthrough is a can of worms I wouldn't want to open. But I don't think that's what you were asking.

It depends, as always, on your use case. If you're just browsing facebook or looking up pictures on instagram... Linux running on a Pentium M works fine. If you want to play The Latest Games at 4K 60fps™, you're going to need something a little bit more substantial. For me, the vast majority of CPUs released in the past 15 years are powerful enough for me to do *something* productive with if I have nothing else to work with, but it *has* to have a solid-state drive. It doesn't have to be the fastest SSD out there, but anything I use that has something resembling a SATA connector will immediately get an SSD slapped into it, and if it doesn't... I had a Motion Computing LE1700 with a Core Duo, and its drive interface was a tiny 40-pin IDE connector on a ribbon cable. So I got an IDE to mSATA adapter card. Super jank, but it was worth it. The other (mostly philosophical) stipulation I have for systems I use is that they have to not be based on the Netburst architecture. Pentium 4s, Pentium Ds, Celeron Ds... the first Core 2 Duos for desktops ran circles around the Pentium Extreme Edition 965. Netburst was such a dumpster fire that Intel had to backpedal to the Pentium III for their future processors. If I'm using a computer for general use and productivity, I prefer six cores or more.

A mechanical hard drive, AKA spinning rust is technology from the 70s and 80s. Every other part of computers throughout history has gotten exponentially faster - CPU, RAM, bus speeds, network speeds, you name it - but the performance of mechanical hard drives has only really doubled in the past 10 years, while SSDs have gotten 10x faster or more in the same span of time. HDDs are Rube Goldberg machines of neodymium, copper and little ferrite particles on a spinning platter. Very good for mass storage, but mediocre at even sequential operations, and atrocious at everything else. SSDs are worth every penny for actually using a machine and not having it be painfully slow.

the CPU is going on 4 years now. Ryzen 1600. Motherboard: B450 Steel Legend, so not all that old. Case: Fractal Arc Midi R2 - The last Arc Midi came out around 2013, so it's probably the oldest part.

I would prefer a used thinkpad as a daily driver since T420s routinely go for <$100. On the other hand, from what I've heard the Raspberry Pi 400 can be OC'd to upwards of 2GHz without any cooling modifications and still be reasonably stable, so for tinkering I think it could be pretty neat. I'm not at the point where I would consider one for a daily driver, though.

"my computer isn't working" Slaps monitor (or case, but particularly the monitor) mrw:

It's the fact that CPUs based on the Core and Zen architectures are fundamentally different and require different electrical and computational components to accompany them. It's not as simple as software or programming, it's a matter of chipsets, of power delivery layouts, having to design an entire interconnect across which the CPUs to talk to one another, because you can't just have them operating separately and you can't use QPI or Infinity Fabric because one CPU won't support the other's interconnect. Then you've got the PCIe layouts to worry about, because those differ across platforms and with Intel, even across different lines of processors... I could go on, but hopefully this wall of text gives an idea why it would be not just impossible, but impractical even if it were possible. tl;dr, for several dozen reasons, that's just not how it works

IIRC they have technically done this with DirectX12 or Vulkan testing in some of the early Ashes of the Singularity benchmarks... but that was over the PCI Express bus and it was not sanctioned by either company. But it is at least to some degree feasible. Crossing the streams with CPUs is not.

Even if it were physically possible, neither Intel nor AMD would EVER do this. It would force their different architectures to compete on the same platform, which is just heresy as far as competition goes.

It is, and it does. and it does work, if you jump through some hoops. At the moment it's just a stand for the card, but I do have plans to use it at some point.

My laptop, my work machine (A Q6600, pity me, PITY ME /s), an IBM Model M keyboard, a random chinese mouse, two empty soda bottles, two 1080p monitors and lots of paper.

Jankiest thing of all time, but if you can get the whitelist off of the wifi port, it totally works The drivers BSOD the machine if you boot it without the card installed though, so... that kinda puts a damper on the portability side of things...

Grants

These are the most interesting things I have on my desk.

This has more of a christmassy theme to it but even for generally nerdy gift ideas, it has some good ideas. Saved my bacon last year buying presents for my mother

quick back-of-the-napkin math puts total idle heat output of my stuff at about 300W, when using both machines and ALL of my monitors. That'd be a pretty lackluster spaceheater but it warms the place up eventually.

Currently my streaming computer is a dual E5-2670 workstation (because it's the only machine with which my capture card will initialize properly every time). Even at idle it kicks out a fair amount of heat. But what also helps is wearing more sweaters while doing the stream, because I'm not as comfortable in front of a camera so while talking and trying not to slip up, I get a bit hot under the collar. Warms me right up. Sometimes gets bad enough that I have to open a window and put a box fan blowing into my room The six monitors dumping 30W each into my bedroom help as well, I suppose

The 7000 series AMD cards are totally fine. It's only after that that they started doing stuff like put more heatpipes on the heatsink that could touch the chip You haven't used it yet??

Manga characters... usually... sort of. Not very good at it, and more comfortable using pencil and paper to do it, but I draw much better in the long run on a computer. But I need it as close to pen and paper as I can - coordinating my hand on the desk with the cursor on the screen is a hassle. with this, I'll be able to use protractors, set squares, rulers, templates, the lot :3

You can run a Plex Media server on a raspberry Pi. What you have there will run more streams than you could ever possibly need For storage, I lean towards HGST NAS drives. But I generally avoid using spinning rust if I can at all help it. A guilty admission of mine is that I have a fibre channel SAN with 16 seagate drives... and that's what I'll be using for my own storage server ;-;

I have a dozen Core 2 Duo Thinkpads in my desk and these things are still great little machines for running Linux. They're built like tanks, they've got magnesium frames holding up the display and the chassis. it's awesome.