💬 OT 💻 Post your computer setup

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Cisco 5548s are out there man and yet cheaper than $300. They're SFP and you're probably talking glass or twinax if you want to do 10 gig with them though. I bought one and some FEXes for that kinda dough.

They are way too freaking noisy, I don't want that in my environment.

Even if I punt the fans in my Server to max speed, it never exceeds 55db, and because all of the fans are 120mm, its doesn't carry like a crazy fast 40mm fan does.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

Can't blame you there I'd be curious to see how much you're slamming a 1 gig link though tbh. The shitty part about LACP and gig links is you can run them to the server but they don't do anything if you're running a single data stream.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Can't blame you there I'd be curious to see how much you're slamming a 1 gig link though tbh. The shitty part about LACP and gig links is you can run them to the server but they don't do anything if you're running a single data stream.

That’s why the server has dual 10gig. I really only need a single connection. But my arrays can saturate it. My m1 mini has the 10gig Ethernet built in.

I had 1 direct connection from the server to the mini, and another to the regular network. I’d regularly hit 1100MB/s transferring Blu-ray mkvs.

And I have 3x 4tb gen 4 ssds in a Raidz1 config for the VM zvols. Combined with the 256gb of RAM it is capable of some crazy IOPS. Internally I’ve seen upwards of 17GB/S sequential transfer rates inside the VMs.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Looks like I'm not gonna be playing games for while. . I am RMA'ing my Kraken X53 AIO because it just isn't cooling right. I've had the problem for a while, but been putting it off.

But, basically, I've got high idle temps, and under any kind of load (hell, even MOVING the windows around) will cause it to spike rapidly. Hit it with a synthetic test and its INSTANT 90°C. The coolant temps don't match the load, its like its not getting flow to the radiator.

So, I think its one of two things.
Possibility #1: The cold plate is warped, and I'm not getting good thermal conductivity from the CPU to the Block.
Possibility #2: The pump is not actually pumping.

Based on how fast CPU temp spikes, I think it's the cold plate being warped. I've tried:
Cleaning and reapplying thermal paste
Making sure no air bubbles were stuck in block
Blowing out the radiator to ensure its not clogged
checking CPU voltage to ensure its not somehow set way higher than normal...etc.

This is a 3 minute load from cold boot with a synthetic CPU test to hit 100% usage. The graph starts from cold boot. Notice the huge spike at the beginning, that's just the processes loading after MSI Afterburner starts. I don't have any custom overclocking set, just using AMD's PBO settings, nothing spectacular.

But under load it instantly spikes to 89°, and the coolant loop started the run at 29°, and finished at 34°. Its like very little, to no heat is getting transferred into the coolant loop.

I hope they RMA this thing fast, I am stuck without a gaming PC until they replace it.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

How does your contact patch look in the grease? I had a cooler back in the Athlon XP days where it didn't cool right for a long time. As it turns out I had "U" shape scorched into the grease at one point because the socket was pushing the heat sink up and I had to file the clearance down for it to fit correctly.

Also, are you getting hot and cold if you feel the tubes? There should be a delta there, and I'd think it pretty clear cut what it was.

 

[Fish]

Damn. That sucks. I can happen to any cooler, but I just don’t feel there is any real significant boost to using an AIO vs a good tower cooler in a full size case.

Now if you were building something in a small case, you have my attention.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Damn. That sucks. I can happen to any cooler, but I just don’t feel there is any real significant boost to using an AIO vs a good tower cooler in a full size case.

Now if you were building something in a small case, you have my attention.

My case is pretty small, great airflow, but overall I'm limited by cooler height. I have considered switching to the Noctua NH-D12L, which will allow me to fit under the max tower height, which is about 150mm.

However, unless the next round of GPU's shrink, my case is maxed out in terms of GPU length of about 290mm, and I'm limited to a 2 slot width. Which means that a RTX 4080 won't fit, too long and too wide. So my next upgrade may have me looking at a different case.

So, for now, since the RMA option is free, I'm gonna try that, I'm not disappointed with the AIO's cooling ability when it was working, I had CPU idle temps around 2-3° above ambient, and even a sustained, maximum load like Handbrake Transcoding, the highest it ever reached was about 83°C after hours of heat soak. But during normal gaming it stayed cool as a cucumber and I would consistently get all core overclocks of around 4.7-4.8ghz.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Well, on a not broken front, I have completed my setup of the full microsoft dev environment for Azure AD + MDM Intune + SCCM Co-Management.

I have a MS Developer license now which grants me a full Microsoft 365 E5 license with an Azure P2 subscription.

Basically, I have Azure, Azure AD, Intune MDM, Office 365, SCCM/MECM and all the goodies for 25 people. I also get 25 licenses for Office 365, including 1TB OneDrive accounts, MS Teams hosting...etc.

Its pretty damned cool. I can add my windows laptop to this and use Autopilot to install all the apps on a fresh wipe just by installing windows, it will join to my Azure AD + Hybrid join to my on-prem domain and install the SCCM client.

All the things I need to ensure I have all the skills for modern jobs in my industry.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

This morning, needed to calc the time between two dates. Remembered that yeah, there are websites that do this, but there is also Powershell command on windows, very easy to use called "New-Timespan".

 New-TimeSpan -Start mm/day/year -end mm/dd/year

PS C:\Users\third> New-TimeSpan -Start 6/13/1976 -End ([datetime]::Now)


Days              : 17257
Hours             : 10
Minutes           : 20
Seconds           : 0
Milliseconds      : 348
Ticks             : 14910420003483064
TotalDays         : 17257.4305595869
TotalHours        : 414178.333430085
TotalMinutes      : 24850700.0058051
TotalSeconds      : 1491042000.34831
TotalMilliseconds : 1491042000348.31

 

[Mr_Roboto]

Powershell would certainly be on my "nice skills to have" list. I wish I did.

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Powershell would certainly be on my "nice skills to have" list. I wish I did.

So useful if you manage any kind of Windows environment. Not so useful for Linux/MacOS, but you can install Powershell 7.x on those devices, its just the cmdlet compatibility is not great.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

So useful if you manage any kind of Windows environment. Not so useful for Linux/MacOS, but you can install Powershell 7.x on those devices, its just the cmdlet compatibility is not great.

I have the misfortune of currently being in that position. It's culture shock for sure, there's certain shit about it I find rather annoying. I'm dipping my toes into GP, file services, DFS etc. I miss the basic utilities Linux has to deal with things like parsing logs or migration of data. I did a series of file server migrations and consolidations and I'm shocked they went as well as they did.

 

[IDAFC21]

So my laptop has developed a rather annoying issue. The top of the screen starts flickering, and eventually a bunch of "ghost" lines show up and then whatever image is on the screen at the time basically "freezes" up the screen. The computer itself is not locking up, its still active behind the frozen image but the only way to clear it is to basically put the laptop into rest mode for a second so the screen shuts off. When it comes back on, even it was only "frozen" for a few seconds, a ghost image of whatever was on the screen at the time is kinda burned into the screen, but, its not really burn in because it does clear up after a little bit.

I've updated every driver in this system and everything is up to date, ran virus/spyware/malware scans and everything is clean. In fact I ran malwarebytes for the first time since I bought this laptop in 2019 and it came up with NOTHING . It's also seemingly random so I can't really tie it to any process or program. Sometimes its good for a couple hours, but sometimes it happens every 5 frickin minutes. I'm also starting to think it may not be driver/software related because I have noticed it happening in the bios, and even as the computer is restarting and on the login screen before I even get into windows. I'm starting to think the screen just may be dying for whatever reason, which, if thats the case.......god damnit.

I shall now demonstrate:

Here you can see some of the flickering while im in the bios

Here it is at the startup screen in full on locked up mode. The computer itself isnt frozen, you can see the mouse moving behind it, but the screen image is just frozen there

And here you can see once I got into windows the time and date from the startup screen still "ghosted" into the screen, which like I said really isn't "burn in" and does clear up after a few minutes

Really not sure whats going on here, but I'm kinda thinking the screen itself just might be fucked........

 

[Thirdgen89GTA]

Probably a failure ribbon cable, or the lcd panel itself. You can try reseating the connections but it’s probably failing hardware

 

[IDAFC21]

I'm also thinking hardware unfortunately, but, thats a good suggestion. Lets rip this thing open!

 

[IDAFC21]

Only big ribbon I found was this one. Not sure if thats it, but I took it out and reseated it anyways

And just went thru and made sure every other tiny ribbon and connector was seated and secured. Took the ram out, blew everything out, reseated the ram and just made sure nothing else was loose. Also apparently a couple of the plastic posts that hold the brass receivers for the screws to screw the case back on had broken at some point and were just loose , so I've superglued those back on and am just waiting for those to set before I close everything back up and find out that its probably done completely fuck all to solve my problem

 

[IDAFC21]

Welp.




NOPE.


Even worse now. Took about 3 minutes when I booted up for the screen to freak out. And then it kept happening immediately every time I'd try and turn the screen off and back on.

Bout ready to throw this thing in the trash now.

 

[Mr_Roboto]

Did you run memtest86 on it?

 

[IDAFC21]

fuck is that

 

[SpeedSpeak2me]

You're welcome for me being of no help whatsoever.

 

[IDAFC21]

Watched a vid on how to take the screen out of this thing. Turns out THIS is actually the screen cable

Looks I can get a new screen for this thing for around $60-70, which isn't too bad really. But before I do that, and since I'm sitting here watching F1 w/ nothing else to do, and since this shit don't work right now anyways I figured fuck it! Took everything apart and got the screen out, cleaned up and reseated the connectors on the MB and the back of the screen, and now I just need to get it back together. I also remembered I had an old 500GB samsung 840 evo SSD lying around from my old desktop setup that I"m not doing anything with, so I tossed that into its slot as well, since the 230GB or whatever it is nvme that's in this thing is nearly full. So IF I get this thing back up and running again, at least that'll be taken care of


Stay tuned for my next post: "EVERYTHING IS FUCKED NOW!"

 

[SpeedSpeak2me]

since I'm sitting here watching F1 w/ nothing else to do

I am shocked, SHOCKED you don’t have a LEGO kit in a box that needs assembly.

 

[IDAFC21]

Oh I have several That WOULD have been the plan today if I didn't have to dick around with this laptop


Its back together and the screen is on!! So thats a win in itself Lets see how long it takes to fuck itself up now.

 

[IDAFC21]

PROBABLY shouldn't be saying anything, just gonna put this in spoiler tags so the computer cant read it

Spoiler

But the laptop has been on for several hours now, and I haven't even noticed a flicker

DONT TELL ANYONE!!

 

[Jimbo]

It’ll just burn the house down tonight, nbd.