Computerus

[Thad]

...god dammit.

[beatbandito]

It took me a minute to notice the issue with the cropping.

[Grath]

Time to bust out the dremel tool.

[Thad]

It took me a minute to notice the issue with the cropping.

Trust me, it was a lot harder to notice before I cropped it.

[Grath]

This is why I usually just went lazy and did the stock CPU cooler until the most recent build, when I specifically got a nice roomy case and a 360mm closed loop water cooler.

[Thad]

Yeah, for the new one I'm just going stock. (Course, stock is the AMD Wraith Stealth, which seems to be pretty solid on its own.) I really should have just stuck with the stock cooler on the i3, too; even if it is a K, it's not exactly a high-performance machine.

Anyway. Got the HTPC rebuilt to the point of...booting to an error screen that tells me the drive with my /home partition on it isn't working. But that's enough for tonight; I'll open it up tomorrow, check some connections, and hopefully that'll be all it takes.

The Silverstone HTPC case is pretty impressive, though I've got some quibbles here and there, mostly about how it allocates space. The part of the spec sheet that says it can hold eight 3.5" drives and a full-length graphics card really should say it can hold eight 3.5" drives or a full-length graphics card. Which is fine, y'know, I don't need all those bays filled, but it would have been nice to know which bays not to use before I screwed all those drives in.

Its definition of external 5.25" bays needs an asterisk, too. I mean, the bays are five and a quarter inches across, but the cutouts in the front aren't tall enough for the front of a drive to fit in; they're designed for you to stick an optical drive behind the opening and have it spit out its tray when you press the eject button. So if you, say, spent $30 on a 5.25"-size USB panel because the damn thing only has two front USB ports, well, you might be a little miffed that you can't fucking use it in this case.

(It won't go to waste; I'm building a computer for my dad, too, and it's in an old case with no front USB ports. So I'll just put it in that.)

Also annoyed to learn that it didn't come with the mounting hardware. And the product page says to put a tray under it before screwing it into the rack, and...okay, so if I need a shelf under it to support the weight...why in fuck's name would I want to screw it into the cage in the first damn place, instead of just setting it on the shelf? Just for the fun and excitement of grabbing a drill every time I want to open it up?

[Thad]

What's that you say? They make their own USB/card reader hub that fits in the bay, only it doesn't have nearly as many ports as the Rosewill model I bought and it costs twice as much? Well who could have seen that coming?

[Thad]

I think I could mount it in the cage. All the weight is in the front, so I think it's probably suitable for 2-post hanging. And regular ears should be fine; I don't need those silly handle ones (which are decorative, not functional; it's not the kind of case where you can pull on the front and it slides out).

[Thad]

Useful fact I will definitely forget by the next time I have to do this:
Those 8-pin CPU power connectors aren't actually impossible to run through the holes in the case. They separate into two 4-pin connectors.

[Thad]

New computer is built. Seems pretty fast!

And now I've got a bunch of hardware strewn about that I have to put away. More than when I started, and I'm still moving into the house.

[Thad]

New computer's working well; the nice thing about Linux is being able to copy your home directory straight across and expect things to work more-or-less the same.

Haven't really put it through its paces as far as gaming yet. Tested Cemu under WINE running Yoshi's Woolly World; it stuttered as it loaded textures but that seems like something that would probably clear up as I played. Haven't been able to get BotW to work so far; it looks like I'm running the European version. I think I have a copy of the US version around here somewhere. (I've got it on disc but there's something wrong with the disc, so I can't just rip a clean copy that way.)

I haven't done anything to configure my graphics card; the wonderful thing about the state of Linux and AMD these days is it works out of the box. I'm not 100% sure whether VRR is working, but I ran the benchmark on Shadow of the Tomb Raider, didn't notice any tearing (and only one brief stutter), and the lowest the framerate got was 82fps (at 1080p, "highest" preset). Not sure how much difference the new CPU makes with the same old graphics card, but it can't hurt.

Mostly though the only game I've been playing is Yakuza: Like a Dragon, streamed from my PS4, which of course does not benefit from my hardware upgrade in any way whatsoever.

Desktop seems maybe a little zippier. I haven't had to restart Firefox due to 100% CPU use yet. Chromium's sputtered a bit here and there.

Annoyed to learn I can't really use the front USB/SD reader on this machine, either (at least, not with the USB3 slots working) because this MB has a newer USB3 header. I guess I should look into that and whether it's worth fucking around and buying a bay that works with it. Some USB-C ports would be nice, at least hypothetically; I don't have anything that actually uses C-to-C except my phone, but presumably that'll change at some point in the next few years.

Not sure what the fuck the HDD light cable on the case is supposed to do, because the case does not have an HDD light, only a power light. (And rather a hideous bright blue one. I connected it to the HDD pins instead of the power ones, so that I don't have a solid, hideous bright blue light all the time.) And I guess cases don't have PC speakers anymore. So I ordered one, because if I hadn't had a PC speaker on the old computer, I wouldn't have known I was getting POST errors.

But it's a nice case, if a little heavy, and I'm glad I found something to do with it after taking my HTPC out of it. I like the new HTPC case, too (I damn well better, for $200) despite my gripes about its front ports. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to try mounting it directly or just keep it on a shelf; it's sitting on a shelf for now. And now that I've freed up some vertical space, I'm thinking about what else I can stick in there; I think a shelf with a USB hub for charging controllers wouldn't be remiss. Maybe another drawer for stashing other controllers. I certainly have a hell of a lot of them.

[Mazian]

Not sure what the fuck the HDD light cable on the case is supposed to do, because the case does not have an HDD light, only a power light. (And rather a hideous bright blue one. I connected it to the HDD pins instead of the power ones, so that I don't have a solid, hideous bright blue light all the time.)

Something I've seen on a few cases, including mine, is that they use a single bi-color LED, so it'll (for example) light the same LED red when there's drive activity, or purple when both are on at once. I ended up unplugging my HDD LED pins for a different reason: my case sits in my peripheral vision, and there was serious chromatic aberration on those two colors when seen side-on through my glasses, like they were separate indicators sitting two millimeters apart. Somehow incredibly distracting.

As for the brightness, check the underside of your case for an intensity slider.

[Thad]

I think I misremembered. There are two LEDs, both blue; one's on the front of the case and the other's around the power button. I disconnected the power light because it was too bright. There doesn't appear to be a slider.

It's not too bad the way it is; not enough to fuck around with going in and replacing LEDs. (Especially not the one around the power button; that looks pretty hard to get to.)

[mharr]

Having acquired an old HP Z230 server I had a look at the current roster of remote desktop options so it could be used in headless mode. (Stuck with TightVNC, all the new stuff was proprietary nonsense reliant on remote account login.)

During that I discovered moonlight-stream.org, an open source project that's reverse engineered Nvidia's game streaming tech and built clients for basically everything with a screen, so that's an interesting alternative for an 'external' graphics card. Put a GeForce equipped server in the basement and use it remotely via any old TV box or cheapo laptop. Probably going to build our home setup around that while watching to see what happens with Valve's plans. (Still not sold on that control layout, but the Deck is looking like an absurdly powerful per-dollar machine even if it spends its whole life docked in desktop pc mode.)

[Brantly B.]

Moonlight works great, did play large swaths of Bloodstained on the big screen with it running on an RPi.

[Thad]

Ars ran an article recently called Exploding power supplies are now the worst thing about the Newegg Shuffle. Lots of folks in the comments have reported issues buying from NewEgg since its buyout a couple of years back.

Personally, I haven't had any problems buying from NewEgg as yet, but I've definitely noticed a change, that sensation of walking through a minefield you get in the modern "everybody's trying to be Alibaba" world of online shopping.

There are some recommendations in the comments for alternate places to buy computer components -- Best Buy seems to have a much more positive reputation than it used to, and B&H Photo and Microcenter are also popular choices. I also saw a recommendation for Ant Online, which I'd never heard of.

Generally those options cost more than Amazon or NewEgg and their selection's not as good, and nobody else's search feature is as granular as NewEgg's, but it sounds like they've got better QC. (And of course PC Part Picker remains a good choice for showing you who's got what for how much.)

As for power supplies, I'm seeing a lot of recommendations for SeaSonic. I'm also seeing a number of recommendations for Corsair, but some commenters suggest that Corsair's higher-end PSUs are rebranded SeaSonics, and their lower-end ones may not be as reliable. Someone also mentions EVGA as a brand that puts its logo on other manufacturers' PSUs and therefore has variable quality. One commenter recommends Delta Electronics and CWT as good brands.

[Brantly B.]

that sensation of walking through a minefield you get in the modern "everybody's trying to be Alibaba" world of online shopping.

This is what would have driven me almost completely back to brick-and-mortar if not for the other modern "everybody's as paranoid as a military base" world of offline shopping.

I have a Raidmax 850AE that hasn't exploded or anything in the last 4 and a half years, even after that initial half year of trying to run an overclocked i9 and two 1080 Tis off of it. That's enough time for a company's build quality to fall apart completely, but take it for what it's worth.

[Mongrel]

Admittedly it's only been a couple months, but I'm still very happy with the Super Flower Leadex III I got.

[Thad]

Printer hasn't worked since I reinstalled Manjaro.

It's on the network; the IP responds to pings. The built-in KDE installer sees it and will let me install it, but if I install it that way it gives an error as soon as I try to print anything. The HP installer doesn't see it at all, even if I hook it up directly to my computer with a USB cable.

Anyway yadda yadda it turns out HP's file listing compatible printers listed it as "hp_laserjet_professional_p_1102w" and the ID string the printer uses is actually "hp_laserjet_professional_p1102w".

And God I can relate to this mistake so fucking hard, God only knows how many hours of my life I've lost to tracking down a missing comma or quote or semicolon, but there really should be some kind of regression testing that stops this kind of thing from getting out to production, HP.

[Thad]

I haven't done anything to configure my graphics card; the wonderful thing about the state of Linux and AMD these days is it works out of the box. I'm not 100% sure whether VRR is working

It wasn't; it turns out that required creating a 4-line text file and then adding another line to it.

Which, y'know, isn't quite ideal -- this is the sort of thing that should be enabled automatically if supported, and toggled with a simple checkbox in the settings panel -- but it's pretty fucking hard to complain compared to what editing xorg.conf (or XF86Config before it) used to be like in the bad old days.

Remember that time I bought an ATI card and then ended up selling it to Kazz because I just couldn't get the damn thing to work in Linux? Now if you try to use an AMD card under Linux, the result is "works great but you may have to do some minor text editing to enable some of the advanced features."