Buying a desktop computer


  • FoxDev

    @izzion said in Buying a desktop computer:

    DDR4-9001

    That must be deliberate



  • Any new computer with an Intel I3 CPU and 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard disk is good enough IMO.


  • FoxDev

    @wharrgarbl said in Buying a desktop computer:

    @RaceProUK said in Buying a desktop computer:

    NVIDIA or AMD GPU?

    Sensitive topic, people have killed over it

    literally actually.

    :-(


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @wharrgarbl said in Buying a desktop computer:

    @RaceProUK said in Buying a desktop computer:

    NVIDIA or AMD GPU?

    Sensitive topic, people have killed over it

    AMD fans presumably, since that's the only way it'd win?



  • @loopback0 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    @wharrgarbl said in Buying a desktop computer:

    @RaceProUK said in Buying a desktop computer:

    NVIDIA or AMD GPU?

    Sensitive topic, people have killed over it

    AMD fans presumably, since that's the only way it'd win?

    Wrong

    https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/22083/when-arguments-about-gpus-go-too-far/


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @wharrgarbl said in Buying a desktop computer:

    Wrong

    Oh I'm sorry I thought I was going for a cheap joke


  • FoxDev

    @wharrgarbl I was about to post this: http://www.pcgamer.com/russian-man-convicted-of-murder-after-killing-friend-over-amd-vs-nvidia-argument/

    Though tbh, I'm not that impressed with that article, given the tasteless ending:

    He is an Nvidia fan however, so might be out a little faster.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @RaceProUK said in Buying a desktop computer:

    He is an Nvidia fan however, so might be out a little faster.

    Heh.



  • @RaceProUK
    Yes, that number was chosen with malice aforethought.



  • @wharrgarbl said in Buying a desktop computer:

    Any new computer with an Intel I3 CPU and 8GB of RAM and a 500GB hard disk is good enough IMO.

    See, now that's the sort of easy answer that I wanted!

    You people with your "consider this" and "do you really need that" and "trade-offs" and all that geek talk.



  • @loopback0 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    Oh I'm sorry I thought I was going for a cheap joke

    An AMD joke right? Cause Nvidia ones aren't cheap


  • Java Dev

    All this talk is reminding me I need to think about hardware upgrades too. I've decided to wait for PCIe 4.0 to be released before getting a new main computer, however, as that is close to hitting the market afaik. My current main computer is old enough to still use both PCIe 2.0 and BIOS so it's showing its age. The big question for me, really, is if I should stay on the enthusiast segment or step down to the mainstream segment.

    So the first computer to be replaced will probably be my side computer, as both mini computers I have are too weak for my needs, as well as my old laptop that I'm currently using as it. And the question for that one is if I should stay Mac or go PC for it. The deciding factor for that would be if I am to expand my hobby programming to iOS development, which obviously requires Apple hardware. Idea if getting a new Mac is to go for an iMac at least. Comes with a screen, can have some power in it, and Apple never releases any news about the future of the Mac mini anyway.


  • Fake News

    @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    I've decided to wait for PCIe 4.0

    What kind of device would be worth the wait though?


  • Banned

    @JBert either ultra-fast GPU or ultra-fast SSD. Both would be ultra-expensive, so if you can afford them, you probably can afford to get a brand new computer right now and another one in two years.



  • @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    All this talk is reminding me I need to think about hardware upgrades too. I've decided to wait for PCIe 4.0 to be released before getting a new main computer, however, as that is close to hitting the market afaik. My current main computer is old enough to still use both PCIe 2.0 and BIOS so it's showing its age. The big question for me, really, is if I should stay on the enthusiast segment or step down to the mainstream segment.

    So the first computer to be replaced will probably be my side computer, as both mini computers I have are too weak for my needs, as well as my old laptop that I'm currently using as it. And the question for that one is if I should stay Mac or go PC for it. The deciding factor for that would be if I am to expand my hobby programming to iOS development, which obviously requires Apple hardware. Idea if getting a new Mac is to go for an iMac at least. Comes with a screen, can have some power in it, and Apple never releases any news about the future of the Mac mini anyway.

    I need to ask. What sorta thing are you doing that you need more bandwidth than what the current PCI crop can handle? All things considered, there are only a handful of things in consumer electronics that (at the moment) would really push PCI to that sort of limit. I won't expect PCI-X 4 to trickle down for at least another year if not two into server equipment then desktop.


  • Java Dev

    It's called future-proofing. Get the platform at release and the fast GPU/SSD/other when it becomes affordable!

    My original plan was actually to wait for the next enthusiast platform (which is coming later this year), which I thought would include PCIe 4.0. I am a bit unsure if that's gonna happen now, though. But I may as well wait for that to be released anyway. It will also give Ryzen time to get fully released and to mature, and maybe even info about Coffee Lake/Cannonlake. Also, I am more unsure about my future computer needs now than I was before, so...


  • Banned

    @NCommander said in Buying a desktop computer:

    I won't expect PCI-X 4 to trickle down for at least another year if not two into server equipment then desktop.

    PCI-X has been dead for almost a decade now. :pendant:


  • Banned

    @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    It's called future-proofing. Get the platform at release and the fast GPU/SSD/other when it becomes affordable!

    Sounds good on paper, but in practice, by the time you really, really need to upgrade something in your PC, you usually need to upgrade everything.

    Except for RAM. But DDR4 is already there.



  • @Atazhaia The thing is that PCI-E GPUs didn't exceed the AGP 8x bandwidth limit for years.



  • @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    Apple hardware. Idea if getting a new Mac is to go for an iMac at least. Comes with a screen, can have some power in it, and Apple never releases any news about the future of the Mac mini anyway.

    They mentioned mac mini during their recent soul baring re. mac pro. But only in terms of "it's not dead (yet)"

    If you need apple, I'd go for a laptop.




  • Java Dev

    @cartman82 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    They mentioned mac mini during their recent soul baring re. mac pro. But only in terms of "it's not dead (yet)"

    If you need apple, I'd go for a laptop.

    As long as there's no actual news about the Mac mini I consider it for all practical purposes dead. I'm not buying a 2014 SFF computer in 2017, especially not at the price they're asking.

    And the problem with Apple laptops atm is that they are going in the :doing_it_wrong: direction by removing all portsbeing brave and requiring either TB3/USB-C devices or adapters to get every standard port to be found on other laptops. Also, the axing of MagSafe in the quest to promote the One True Port makes me want to punch the designer of the MacBook Pro even harder. (I know there's still a sane model on sale, but it's an older model.) And the MacBook Air has gone the way of the Mac mini with zero news about a hardware update.

    Also, for my current needs a laptop doesn't fit. Especially since getting something better than my work laptop ends up on the expensive end of MacBooks. Therefore it makes more sense to get a non-portable Mac and then it makes most sense to go for an iMac. Although I'm going to wait at least until the announced hardware update later this year before making a decision/purchasing one.



  • @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    TB3

    Whoa, Thunderbolt still exists?

    And it works over USB connectors? Well that's not confusing to customers at all.

    Regardless of the type, having only ONE connector on a laptop is a 20 on a 0 to 10 WTF scale. Might as well replace it with a full size DB-25 parallel port.


  • Java Dev

    @anonymous234 At least TB3 uses the same connector and is compatible with USB-C, just running at a higher speed.

    Edit: At least USB-C devices can be connected to a TB3 port without issue. I don't know how a TB3 device works when connected to an USB-C port; if it just lowers the speed or stops working altogether.

    Also, I noticed Dell actually uses a TB3 port properly on their XPS laptops. You can use it to connect to a dock with ethernet, extra USB, display outputs and it will charge the laptop too, all through one cable.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    You can use it to connect to a dock with ethernet, extra USB, display outputs and it will charge the laptop too, all through one cable.

    You can do that with the new Macbook Pro, just the dock isn't made by Apple.
    They're not cheap either way though.

    The more annoying bit for me about the new Macbook Pro is that Apple make a TB2-TB3 adapter (which works both ways) but it doesn't pass the mDP signal through despite both TB2 and TB3 supporting mDP, so you can't get the adapter to continue using a VGA or HDMI adapter from the previous model.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @anonymous234 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    How much should I spend? How should I even approach the search? What should I check before buying?

    The past few times I've got a new PC, I've built it from components. It's a lot simpler to do than it used to be (I didn't need to give a blood sacrifice the last time!) and it lets you get a system tuned to what you actually want. Make sure the parts are matched so they work together but that's the main tricky bit. And remember to get a cooler for your CPU; it's too easy to overheat it otherwise, even when just installing the OS.

    I don't know the best place to find out about components, but this site seems to give a reasonable value-for-money assessment to suit many budgets. I've used them a couple of times, and been satisfied with the results.



  • @dkf said in Buying a desktop computer:

    (I didn't need to give a blood sacrifice the last time!)

    I think my current build was the first time ever that everything worked (last rig if I tried hibernating the pc would just go into a reboot loop).



  • @cartman82 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    If you dual boot, buy more SSD-s. Don't try to shove multiple OS-s on one.

    What is your reason behind that one? Apart from the obvious fact that more OS-s take more space, what's the reason with specifically putting them on different disks (rather than a larger one)?

    I never had dual-boot issues related to this specific condition (I had plenty of dual-boot issues, but due to many other things, mostly me doing stupid things...).



  • @remi said in Buying a desktop computer:

    What is your reason behind that one? Apart from the obvious fact that more OS-s take more space, what's the reason with specifically putting them on different disks (rather than a larger one)?
    I never had dual-boot issues related to this specific condition (I had plenty of dual-boot issues, but due to many other things, mostly me doing stupid things...).

    I've had a lot of problems trying to force Windows 10 and MacOS to play nice on one GPT disk.

    Each one wants to take over the BCD partition and "fix it", which screws up the bootup system. Then, there's the issue for Windows auto-creating a tiny BCD partition that's not big enough for Mac. All sorts of crap like that.

    Just split each OS into its own drive, save yourself the hassle.


  • Java Dev

    I find installing on separate drives gives a lot less headache when installing. Windows is a fan of wanting to partition the drive as it likes, so it's easiest to just give that one an empty drive and let it do its thing and give Linux another drive that can be partitioned according to Linux's needs. I did manage to get dual-boot working on a computer with a single drive, but it's more fiddly and having to manually pre-partition the drive and hope Windows wont shit all over it and then having the bootloaders coexisting nicely and everything.

    macOS and Linux was less difficult to get working on a single drive (which I had to do by necessity, due to only one drive in the laptop). The only part was having to reinstall the custom boot manager on every macOS system update, which just was a good time to get the boot manager updated at the same time, so...

    From my bad experiences of Windows installs I now also make sure to only have one hard drive connected when installing. I had a Windows install once where it wouldn't confine the install to just the drive which I said to install itself on. It spread system files across three different drives and made everything hell. Linux, by comparision, respects your wishes as to where you want your files to go and will work simply and easily without making everything into a hellstew of stupidity, like Windows does at every opportunity.



  • @remi Because most Linux distros have the habit of running iffy bash or python scripts when updating the system and borking something major. I don't want my MBR or my Partition table (or whatever the equivalent these days) to be one of those fuck ups.



  • @lucas1 Dunno, I never had that kind of issues. Mind you, I'm not saying it can never happen (nor that I have seen every possible case... I'm just a basic user...), just that it seems rare enough that I wouldn't recommend the cost of a second disk just for that. Last time I built my computer the SSD was a very expensive part of it, so I wouldn't have spent double money on it "just in case". But that was several years ago now, so things have changed.

    OTOH, if that cost is low enough, well, having more disks is (almost) always a good thing, so yeah, why not.



  • @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    From my bad experiences of Windows installs I now also make sure to only have one hard drive connected when installing. I had a Windows install once where it wouldn't confine the install to just the drive which I said to install itself on. Linux, by comparision, respects your wishes as to where you want your files to go and will work simply and easily without making everything into a hellstew of stupidity, like Windows does at every opportunity.

    I didn't know you were a comedian. Sorry but that is total bullshit. I have 5 drives, 2 in softraid (important shit on there), the other 3, 1 being Windows, 1 being Linux and the other being Movies, Games etc.

    Linux over the years has given me nothing but headaches and I won't risk it when major distros like Fedora, Ubuntu et al don't include really important stuff as default because of licensing problems because they want to keep in "Free" or in Ubuntu's case absolute shit. OpenSuse even though I told it I was using a UK keyboard decided I had a US keyboard. There is now way I am letting this stuff anywhere near writing to my MBR to update Grub.

    Windows for all it faults, if you put the grub location and write the bootsectors won't fuck with it unless you do a repair or total reinstall of Windows.



  • @remi Fair enough, I built my own distro at Uni when I had plenty of time for such things. A 240 gb ssd is about £70 these days, so if Linux is important it is probably worth getting.

    Most distros when updating the kernel will generate and run a grub config file. If they generate this wrong and run the command. POOF MBR is gone or worse the partition table is done.

    I used to run Redhat 9 / Debian distros and the whole stack on Linux is held together by duct-tape. If I wanna use a *nix these days I use MacOS or OpenBSD because I know it is a complete OS and someone upstream won't break something or fuck something up in the merge before release (Ubuntu used to be notorious for this).



  • @lucas1 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    Most distros when updating the kernel will generate and run a grub config file. If they generate this wrong and run the command. POOF MBR is gone or worse the partition table is done.

    I agree, however this specifically is not an issue I really ever had. I mean, at worse grub (or lilo before it...) would not find the Windows partition straightaway, but usually that was just a problem with grub itself and the partition table was still there and perfectly usable (and tbh, I'm not sure if having the 2 on different disks would really matter in that case? I mean, if you have 2 disks I guess the MBR of the first one must somehow reference the other one? Unless you actually go into the bios and change the boot order to choose which system to start? Come to think of it, with a properly written bios where there is a quick shortcut for it, that might be the best solution and what you had in mind?).



  • @loopback0 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    doesn't pass the mDP signal through despite both TB2 and TB3 supporting mDP, so you can't get the adapter to continue using a VGA or HDMI adapter from the previous model.

    :facepalm:



  • @remi If it writes to say /dev/sda1 (which might be the windows disk, fuck I can't remember how this partitions work now) then it can kill it.


  • Java Dev

    @lucas1 I've never had any bootloader issues like that, as the Windows and Linux bootloaders are kept on separate drives. My BIOS just starts the Linux drive as Grub automatically detects and adds the Windows bootloader to its menu. Going the opposite route would have me manually modify the Windows bootloader to add Grub and its location which is a lot more work.

    Also, how is macOS a more complete OS? It's a custom BSD dist with extra frills on top. Or is BSD a "complete OS" regardless of what version it comes in?

    Also, you should stop running Linux dists that fully promotes FOSS everything and just go with one that don't give a damn about if you're running FOSS or proprietary programs/drivers. Saves a bit of headache.



  • @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    Also, how is macOS a more complete OS? It's a custom BSD dist with extra frills on top. Or is BSD a "complete OS" regardless of what version it comes in?

    Each Linux Distro is a collection of parts. Each MacOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD release while is a collection of parts, is a very specific collection of parts that have been verified to work together properly.

    With MacOS if you are working on 10.9 if a piece of software says 10.9 is supported you can be confident said software will work. On Linux between distros that is impossible. Installing say Spotify on Linux on Fedora you might have to shortcut say mylib-<version2> to mylib-<version1> ... whereas ubuntu it would just work

    The latest version of say Fedora might be using a very different set of parts than the latest version of Ubuntu. In fact until recently Ubuntu were effectively trying to fork the community on WayLand vs Mir.



  • @Atazhaia said in Buying a desktop computer:

    Also, you should stop running Linux dists that fully promotes FOSS everything and just go with one that don't give a damn about if you're running FOSS or proprietary programs/drivers. Saves a bit of headache.

    But then you get into problems with each distro supporting some hardware outside of the kernel. If you have ever tried to deal with FGLRX back in the day when there was no open source alternative. It was a nightmare.

    This is the installation procedure on OpenSuse 9.2 to 2009ish.

    1. Install kernel headers
    2. download fglrx
    3. compile kernel module
    4. Run installation process that replaces most of your opengl libs. So unless you imaged your system, you have to do an installation again to get even mesagl back which is utter shit.
    5. kill x, do some esoteric instructions to activate and install driver.
    6. reboot
    7. hope it works.

    Now you might say that you can just get a package these days that does most of that for you, but that script is doing all of that for you.

    But the maintainer might have fucked up and you don't really know what those scripts do that are run in the .deb or rpm file. Windows at least will warn you and tell you "this could fuck everything up are you sure". MacOS it should have the drivers as the hardware permutations are limited to probably less than 40 different configurations.

    The reason why the package maintainers need to do this is because there is a stable drive ABI. Whereas say Solaris, MacOSX or Windows you can get and old driver from a previous version of the OS and it may very well work. I never had any Windows XP drivers for an old laptop of mine, but Win2000 drivers worked just fine.



  • @lucas1 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    Each MacOS, FreeBSD, OpenBSD Debian Stable release while is a collection of parts, is a very specific collection of parts that have been verified to work together properly.

    FTFM



  • @TimeBandit Yes Debian does what OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MacOS and Windows does per release i.e. proper QA.

    I should have probably made an exception for Debian and Redhat EL



  • @lucas1 said in Buying a desktop computer:

    @TimeBandit Yes Debian does what OpenBSD, FreeBSD, MacOS and Windows does per release i.e. proper QA.

    FTFY 😜



  • @TimeBandit Haven't had any major problems with Windows since Vista ... sure annoyances but not "this doesn't fucking work".


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