Cartman sucks at hardware



  • I installed my new mobo yesterday, tried starting it up... shit. CPU fan is all wonky. BIOS complains it can't detect it. It starts, then stops. Then starts and keeps chugging full speed. Then, after restart, it refuses to start at all.

    Fuck it. Since the cooler's been in the service shop for a few weeks, I figure they must have fucked it up somehow. So today, I buy a new one.

    Come home. Figure out how to assemble this wonky looking thing (always a challenge for me, see the thread title). Time to plug it into the motherboard. There's the fan port... wait, does that label say "CHA FAN"?

    And what's this other port right next to the edge?

    0_1460670830277_2016-04-14 23_50_38-Clipboard.png

    Shit.

    I guess I didn't need a replacement fan after all.

    In my defense, the positioning is really strange. Why did they put the chasis fan port right were the CPU fan port usually is?



  • It's too bad you're not a FAN Xpert.


  • FoxDev

    @cartman82 said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    I guess I didn't need a replacement fan after all.

    Eh, fans are cheap. Also, quite useful for budget wind effects for amateur YouTube videos ;)



  • @cartman82 It always takes me at least 2 tries to get those CPU coolers that go through the holes in your motherboard and kind of clamp-down over the CPU correct. The instructions always leave something important out and you sit there with it all wobbling around going, "why the fuck is this so loose?" then you realize if you use CPU 3723B2 instead of CPU 3723B3 you need to install part 21761dsga2w67 at step 4 which puts a correctly-sized blank in there to make sure it's tight. But the directions never mention that, they just give you an assortment of weird alien metal pieces and you kind of just have to experimentally piece them all together.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @cartman82 said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Why did they put the chassis fan port right where the CPU fan port usually is?

    routing afterthought?

    My CPU fan headers are about the same place, though there's an extra one for a front fan or something on the other side of the memory slots.



  • @blakeyrat I had that sort of problem when I put together my current main computer. Along with figuring out the random metal bits I didn't notice my case's access hole for the back side of the CPU cooler wasn't in the right place for my motherboard, so I had to take it back out and do the whole mess on the table. It took three tries before I got the thing together and I'm lucky I didn't break something along the way.

    Thankfully the computer's been running smoothly ever since so it all worked out in the end, but it was a very annoying build.

    Oh, and the CPU fan header is close to the CPU on that motherboard, so that wasn't an issue. IIRC, the only wiring issue I had was the case's audio wire not being long enough to reach the header near the back of the motherboard with the cards installed, so the front headphone jack doesn't work.



  • @cartman82 i may have had too many Asus/asrock motherboards, but I expect to find the cpu fan on the top of the motherboard (when mounted in a standard at case). Unless I'm reading your drawing wrong, it's exactly as I expected it to be.



  • @Parody said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    @blakeyrat I had that sort of problem when I put together my current main computer. Along with figuring out the random metal bits I didn't notice my case's access hole for the back side of the CPU cooler wasn't in the right place for my motherboard, so I had to take it back out and do the whole mess on the table. It took three tries before I got the thing together and I'm lucky I didn't break something along the way.

    My favorite is forgetting to put in back side mask before I screwed in the motherboard and realizing that only after everything was already assembled and ready to go.

    @Parody said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Thankfully the computer's been running smoothly ever since so it all worked out in the end, but it was a very annoying build.

    Every build is annoying when you're not really into tinkering with hardware. I could have taken the fan out of my other PC and tried it with that, but the thought of messing with that was so daunting, it was less painful to just buy a new one.

    @swayde said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    @cartman82 i may have had too many Asus/asrock motherboards, but I expect to find the cpu fan on the top of the motherboard (when mounted in a standard at case). Unless I'm reading your drawing wrong, it's exactly as I expected it to be.

    I've had ASUS hardware before, and the cpu fan slot was always right next to the CPU. Hmm, since I went with MSI and GB for my latest builds, I guess maybe they changed it in the meantime.



  • @swayde said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    @cartman82 i may have had too many Asus/asrock motherboards, but I expect to find the cpu fan on the top of the motherboard (when mounted in a standard at case). Unless I'm reading your drawing wrong, it's exactly as I expected it to be.

    Standard AT case? Where do you get one of those these days? I don't think I've seen such a thing in the last fifteen years, maybe longer, not since ATX and the rest took over.

    Next you'll be saying you have a brand-new keyboard with a 5-pin mini-DIN plug and there's nowhere to plug it in to your motherboard.

    Or an internal-fit floppy drive. The last motherboard I bought didn't have a socket for connecting one of them, or a PATA hard disk either, and that was five years ago. How time flies when you're having fun.



  • @blakeyrat said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    @cartman82 It always takes me at least 2 tries to get those CPU coolers that go through the holes in your motherboard and kind of clamp-down over the CPU correct.

    Fuck those so much. What not just use screws for crying out loud?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Deadfast said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    screws

    Spray-on glue FTW!


  • FoxDev

    @Deadfast said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Fuck those so much. What not just use screws for crying out loud?

    as i understand it it's to avoid putting excessive stress on the motherboard PCB. i mean some of these heatsinks weigh as much as five kilos, that's a lot of torque to dissipate into fiberboard with copper traces on.

    sure it would be better to screw into the sheet metal behind the motherboard but the ATX standard doesn't put posts in the right places so you'd need a new standard for the cases and motherboards to put the posts in the right place, and then you need the standard to be adopted, and you'll still need to provide adaptors for motherboards that don't confirm to the new standard anyway.

    course if we kept the motherboard horizontal in the case a lot of these problems would go away, but then they would look ugly compared to the tall and slim towers we have these days.



  • @accalia said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    as i understand it it's to avoid putting excessive stress on the motherboard PCB. i mean some of these heatsinks weigh as much as five kilos, that's a lot of torque to dissipate into fiberboard with copper traces on.

    How does having stupid plastic rivets make any difference? In fact, I would argue that it leads to more stress since you have to use force to plug the damn things in.


  • FoxDev

    @Deadfast said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    I would argue that it leads to more stress since you have to use force to plug the damn things in.

    either you're using the plastic support mounts wrong or the manufacturers you source them from are. i've never had to use force to install that style of heatsink.

    see what you need to do is disengage the centre post in the plastig rivits (usually by pulling a knob at the top of the rivit) which releases the rivit and makes it smaller than the hole it needs to go through. then once it's in place you reengage the centre post and the rivit expands again.



  • That is terrible placement, but every system I've assembled in the past ten years or so has had the CPU fan plug "north" of the LGA socket.



  • @accalia I know how to operate it. Even with the core of the rivet removed the damn thing barely made it through the hole. I dunno, maybe it was a manufacturing error. This was the stock Intel cooler, after-market cooler using the same demented technology went in easier, though it still was harder than my current cooler which uses screws.


  • FoxDev

    @Deadfast said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    I know how to operate it.

    then it must be the manufacturer that did it wrong

    @Deadfast said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    stock Intel cooler,

    ah. there's yer problem.



  • @cartman82 It's not just you. Installing CPU heat sinks has really, really sucked for at least as long as I've been building computers (~15 years).



  • @accalia said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    @Deadfast said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    stock Intel cooler,

    ah. there's yer problem.

    Yeah, intel, pfft. What do they know about manufacturing computer hardware?


  • Garbage Person

    @accalia said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    kilos

    I don't get the five kilo heatsink. My CPU dissipates fucking 65 watts of heat. The stock cooler was a simplified version of the old Pentium 4 stock cooler (which had a copper slug in the middle. This was just aluminum). It makes basically no noise (the cooler for the 300w GPU, on the other hand....)


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    I don't get the five kilo heatsink.

    overclockers.

    the core might be rated 65 watt, but double the clock speed and you suddenly need a LOT more than 65 watts of heat dissipation.

    i use a 2 kilo one because it is efficient enough to passively cool the die most of the time meaning idle steady state the box is basically silent


  • Garbage Person

    @accalia Why bother overclocking these days? Processing hasn't been the gaming bottleneck for quite awhile. I still don't get it.


  • FoxDev

    @Weng said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Why bother overclocking these days

    for leet skizzles pointzzzzz?

    i wouldn't know. I never bother overclocking until the computer starts getting old enough that i can seriously stress the CPU when exercizing it. and honestly lately that hasn't been an issue because the mobo or other major component tends to crap out first, necessitating a complete rebuild (that will include a newer CPU)

    so yeah, i don't bother overclocking, but that's still a thing and that's still the why of the 5 kilo heatsink.



  • @cartman82 said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Every build is annoying when you're not really into tinkering with hardware.

    Or if that hardware is new to you. I'd done a lot of machine builds over the years, but that slowed down quite a bit because we weren't having friends over to play LAN games anymore. Where before we had some six computers in frequent use, now we only had two and I wasn't refreshing them that often. Also I only used stock coolers for most of the builds, but I bought a nicer one for my personal machine. Thus this was my first build with a cooler that didn't just clip onto the CPU socket.


  • area_can

    @Weng depends on the game. Also, it's nice to have some extra juice for media encoding.



  • Overclocking is just free performance. If I can take my old 3.3 GHz i5 and run it at 4.5 GHz for almost no work, why not? (I admit I probably can't tell the difference on most things)


  • FoxDev

    @mott555 said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Overclocking is just free performance.

    it does shorten the lifespan of your chip though.

    or it does if you don't have adequite cooling.

    or if you use freon and have too much cooling..... that's a thing too.



  • @accalia My processor is 5 years old and still going strong, heavily overlocked for its entire life. At this rate if it lasts 10 years instead of 20 years, that's good enough for me.


  • FoxDev

    @mott555 sounds like you've got adequite cooling then. the shorter lifespan's only an issue if you undercut (or overdo) the cooling.

    thermal shock's the killer there, nto the increased clockspeed



  • @accalia said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    overclockers.

    Why the fuck would you overclock in 2016?

    ... hell why would you have done it 7-8 years ago, during the last-gasp when it made SOME kind of rational sense.


  • FoxDev

    @blakeyrat said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Why the fuck would you overclock in 2016?

    ask someone who overclocks.

    apparently @mott555 does. you can ask him.



  • @blakeyrat said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    @accalia said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    overclockers.

    Why the fuck would you overclock in 2016?

    Dwarf Fortress... ~ zero load on the graphics card (unless you use some fancy visualizer) but tons of memory and cpu usage. the FPS goes down because your cpu is struggling to calculate the actions of hundreds of dwarves, cats, monsters, and the flow rate of water, and heat transfer...
    Overclocking the CPU could help with that.



  • @owatson said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Overclocking the CPU could help with that.

    Not nearly as much as seppuku.


  • Garbage Person

    @owatson DF is singlethreaded 32bit and therefore braindamaged until fixed.



  • @Weng said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    @owatson DF is singlethreaded 32bit and therefore braindamaged until fixed.

    I'm not sure it's even possible to make these kinds of calculations multithread... Some of the magma or water flow might be, but the creatures' actions would have tons of race conditions forcing it to do things one at a time. Anyway, having it single thread at least means I can run other things at the same time, like firefox and irssi.



  • @owatson A competent programmer could.

    But yes, it gives you plenty of time to plan your seppuku. Ensure you have a nice comfy pillow to rest your knees on.



  • @blakeyrat Mine was overclocked around 2010 or 2011 and has been ever sense. I don't think I'd mess much with overclocking on modern hardware.


  • Garbage Person

    @owatson Pathfinding can be parallellized easily, and doesn't care what other entities are doing. As can procedural generation. Actual "thing a moves to place b" is an incredibly minor part of the workload.


  • Java Dev

    @Weng I think potentially in a simulation like that what any object does in this iteration only depends on the state of the previous iteration, not on anything else that happens this iteration. So multithreading should be pretty straightforward.

    That doesn't work for real-world physics simulations of course, but may apply to DF.



  • @Weng
    Really? I was under the impression that the workload was being caused by larger and larger numbers of objects in my fortress, especially my >50000 stoneware trinkets. (for those unfamiliar, most "repeatedly create object" jobs eventually run out of resources to use if you don't mine any, but clay is infinite).



  • @PleegWat
    I'm not sure we want to copy the vast data of the game world each tick....?
    ... that might be how inanimate objects seem to increase the cpu load.


  • FoxDev

    @owatson you only need to keep one tick of history. doublebuffer it.

    10 calculate from one buffer into the other
    20 swap buffer pointers
    30 GOTO 10
    

  • Java Dev

    @owatson I have only superficial familiarity with dwarf fortress, but you probably don't need to copy all of it.



  • @owatson said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    I'm not sure we want to copy the vast data of the game world each tick....?

    Dude are you a software developer? Turn on your brain for a few seconds and answer this question:

    Does a monster in Seattle need to know what a monster in Boston is doing? Is it possible for them to interact in any way in only one game tick?

    If you answered "no" to both of these, then maybe your super-mega-brain might find a way to divide the work without passing the entire game world to each CPU.



  • @blakeyrat said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    @owatson said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    I'm not sure we want to copy the vast data of the game world each tick....?

    Dude are you a software developer? Turn on your brain for a few seconds and answer this question:

    Does a monster in Seattle need to know what a monster in Boston is doing? Is it possible for them to interact in any way in only one game tick?

    Yes they can. In particular, a dwarf will suddenly decide to abandon his task to grab a shiny that was dropped by another dwarf four floors up and across the map. So the dwarf's actions are affected instantly.

    If you answered "no" to both of these, then maybe your super-mega-brain might find a way to divide the work without passing the entire game world to each CPU.


  • FoxDev

    @owatson said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    a dwarf will suddenly decide to abandon his task to grab a shiny that was dropped by another dwarf four floors up and across the map.

    :wtf: how does the dwarf KNOW the shiny was dropped in less than a single game tick?

    i mean i agree, shiny must be mine, but i can't know instantly when one is dropped on the sixth floor when i'm only on the third floor


  • Garbage Person

    @owatson Given absolutely fuckall should be accessing vast stockpiles of vendor trash, that would be the "32bit" part and running out of memory.


  • Notification Spam Recipient

    @accalia said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    how does the dwarf KNOW the shiny was dropped in less than a single game tick?
    i mean i agree, shiny must be mine, but i can't know instantly when one is dropped on the sixth floor when i'm only on the third floor

    This is one of the benefits of a Hive Mind...

    Of course, as discussed above, there's quite a bit of overhead...



  • @owatson said in Cartman sucks at hardware:

    Yes they can. In particular, a dwarf will suddenly decide to abandon his task to grab a shiny that was dropped by another dwarf four floors up and across the map. So the dwarf's actions are affected instantly.

    Wait, dwarfs are telepathic?

    Wow, in all the chatter Ben L's shoved onto this forum about that dumb game, this has literally never come up.

    Also what's up with the kerning on Ben L's. Why does the apostrophe shove so far left? Too far, guys.



  • @accalia
    Anything you can see, you're dwarfs also know of. So the instant a miner mines out a chunk of gold ore, a dwarf will sprint down the tunnel to grab it and bring it to the ore stockpile.
    A dead cat will instantly be hauled to the butchery and skinned, the skin will instantly attract a leatherworker, etc.


Log in to reply