Standard Def Steve wrote on 2023-05-14, 04:46:

I picked up this adorable little Lenovo desktop today. IMG_0543.jpg […]
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I picked up this adorable little Lenovo desktop today. IMG_0543.jpg

$200 CDN got me:
-i7-7700 processor
-16GB of DDR-2666
-A freakin' low-profile GTX 1650
-512GB M.2/PCIe SSD
-I was more than a little surprised to find this all running off of a 220w proprietary PSU. Crikey, how does it even manage?!

I like it. It's barely audible and obviously sips power, making it perfect for web surfing and video streaming in the workshop.
Running the world's most relevant benchmark, 3DMark 2001, this conservative little business box actually impressed the hell out of me. The CPU maintained its 4.2GHz turbo state through most of the benchmark and pelted 93,899 points. Capture.PNG

That's a hell of a deal for that system. That was a great find.

Got a bit of a line straddler, older modern thing, I'm $20 it said, buy me it said... so I brung home a Pavilion G6 laptop... HDD required, just screwed a 128GB Samsung SSD into it, but no enthusiasm for OS installs tonight. Recognises it, hardware tests in firmware like it. Turned out to have an A6-3400 in it, so no great amount of grunt, but the cooling is supposed to be alright in them so maybe able to keep it on the turbo. Seen reports they take 45W chips fine and this is a 35W... might even chance some FSB overclocking. Has the Radeon HD 6550 mobile, which is 320 core deally, so graphics ain't terrible, but ain't great either. It's a weird kinda place, maybe it's a late XP gamer, maybe it hasn't got the single core grunt. Video codec support looks good. Anyway, at least it isn't yet another P-M/Centrino class or another Core2. I think it's gonna get donkey work duty, has the advantage of being in one whole piece, not shedding parts or needing external keyboard, or cracking up. Regular island of misfit toys here for 21st century laptops 🤣 Though if wifi behaves it might be promoted to 3rd goodest, because the B960 Toshiba is a PITA. .... just reflecting a moment if for all the small bills here and there I paid out for crappy laptops over the past 3 years could have been saved and spent on a better laptop, but I think it only just comes near $100 so probably could have only got a crappy laptop that I paid more for. I think I'd have to raid the piggy bank and drop $500 for something objectively decent in modern terms, see a lot of "not bad for $200 " or $300 kind of things, but it's usually with some compromise, like flimsy elitebook style or soldered RAM or decent CPU but extra lame graphics... anyway w00t I guess, $20+$30 refurb SSD and I get something that's still fit for a lot of modern interwebbing.

Still haven't assembled my z590-a system. I did buy a i5-11400f to supplant the 22$ celeron. Gimme rime. I'll get there.

Not today, been a few months I'm sure. I snagged 2 Asus z590 Gundam mobos for 100$ each. Couldn't resist. I plan to sell 1, a very basic system. In a spray painted case I have sitting here. It's black, I want to make it white. May even attempt to put some artwork on tje side panel. Definitely put some Gundam color on the bezel. Sell that, maybe build another humble system for personal use and edification. That's after I sell a mountain of crappola I have staring at me. I sooo crave simplicity, being something of a hoarder by nature (don't you call me a whore!). The Gundam mobos are nifty and were at the rigjht price. I figure I could score another celeron. Or go for broke and get a pentium. And live like Spartan/amish/quaker. I have a few 120gb ssd's kicking around, believe me that's all I need in the immediate as primary storage. Have plenty of offline hard drives. I'm getting rod of all those that require line voltage. Oh God so sick of cables and complications.

One might say I should just get a laptop and really live simply. Have several. I feel myself drawn to a homemade box though.

Ran Lubuntu on the G6 last night, using the hardinfo system information and benchmark util, performance is hard to sum up. On some tests, slow as a PentiumD, on others faster than the i7 (1st gen). Fibbonaci FPU test it was done in 1 sec when everything else (though i7 results not included) was 5 and 6. Oddly, in cat /proc/cpuinfo I couldn't see sse3 listed, but it listed sse2 and sse4a . . . Also desktop performance feels a bit weird too, some tasks don't seem to budge it off the 300Mhz CnQ clock and it feels sluggish, some go alright and it goes to 1400, but not obviously onto the turbo freq. I guess it might improve with fiddling with the power settings, seems set way conservative.

Holy crap I have to stop with adopting the pathetic orphans... it was an ax1930 on Saturday (planned to be htpc) then today I went out on a search for a gooderer CPU for that, ended up in a thrift on my travels and there was a very clean mATX haswell system for $15. I was yeah, nah, yeah, nah, yeah, nah for 5 mins... then figured I'd keep thinking about it if I left it... guess I liked the case well enough, was looking for cheapy mATX and there's no much under $70.. so if it's all dead it be a case donor. However, it seems to have a useable motherboard Gigabyte GA-H81M-D52 which will take all haswells, so like I thought, may haswell. Apparently has a celerunt in it.

Initial thoughts are, build it up as a "loaner" gamer to kids in the fam. Better CPU, coolermaster 550W, gruntiest graphics that won't overheat it, let them do all the Fortnite, League of Legends, Rocket League kinda crap. Still pondering whether to go for best price i5 I can scrape up, or spend somewhat "real" money on an i7-4790k, put that devils onion in MY haswell rig and put the i7-4770 in this one.

Weird brand of machine, Lemul or something... kinda mid-low quality case, styled okay and standard layout, was pretty clean condition which is why it particularly appealed, had "fast enough for the time" machines before I couldn't give away due to cosmetic fugliness.

Fate is teasing me though, there was a cheaper 4790k for sale locally for ages, must have sold, but now I find a cheap Ryzen5 2600X instead, hah, why come I didn't find a run of cheap low end AM4 machines.

Fell to another temptation Benq projector, m610, very cheap didn't smell burnt, fans look pristine, shiny, not a speck of fine dust on them.... and i know right, suspiciously dirt cheap projector = pricey bulb.... I have not tried it yet, but am crossing my fingers it's actually got a lot of bulb life left because of how clean the fans are. ... it does look like the actual bulb can be got for $25 though if I want to rebuild the module, even if the whole caboodle gives you sticker shock. If it's working but at predicted EOL, I really don't care for the money I paid, it can prolly go a few movie nights before kablooey. Might be able to cram 40W of LED in there for equivalent lumen-werfing I guess.

edit: whoops, brain mangled the model number it's a Benq MP620p $1000 or so worth when new.

editII: quick fire up, IT'S ALIVE.. but I am confused.. all what I'm seeing when I look it up, seem to say the lamp timer is "count up" and when it gets within a thousand hours of death you get red warnings. I see lamp timer at 55 hours and no red warnings... does that really mean I've got nearly the whole lamp life left??? Or is it a count down, but if so, why no warnings about life expiring. Anyhoo, 50+ hours is a lot of fun, if it doesn't take me all 50 to figure the damn thing out. Also the boot splash looked fine, but then on the menu/default screen there was a yellow bar down it to the left. Cannot find any full screen photos of this screen only cropped to menu items, which it does not cross. Background is blue otherwise... Is this a stylistic element of the interface, the background has a stripe?? I am confused as to how it could fail like this otherwise, it's not an LCD in there AFAIK. micro mirror array stuffs. Anyway, if blue dropped out on a blue screen, why is it so yellow?? I know R and G mix to yellow, but it seemed kinda bright to be the amount of R+G left if not displaying blue, when whole screen blue. Again the initial splash did not have a stripe. If it's a bit glitch in the digital side I might be able to ID dodgy solder. Hmmmm more questions now than powering it up solved. Normally I'd just futz around with something until the answer was obvious, but when you are on a timer like this, you want all the info first. (Especially if it's going down 55 left, not 55 used.) Though I can believe from the "newness" looking of the thing that it only got 55 hours, maybe was in an office conference room or something, only used for quarterly reports. I am quite impressed by the image otherwise, didn't drop the lights and I could see it fine. Obviously if you do it gets brighter.

EditIII: Ah, might be a lead free solder balls issue.... https://www.projectorjunkies.com/vertical-lin … vertical-lines/ which is sorta good in that it is the type of problem I know a little about and have some tools which might effect a fix, rather than being in the dark magick DLP side.

So for fiddy bucks, locally, I can stick a i5-4670 and a HD7870 ghz edition into that Gigabyte GA-H81M-DS2 then add 8GB RAM, only got 128GB SSD spare for system, and can find 1 or 2TB storage. Will go with a 1600x900 21" monitor. Is that a somewhat balanced system for low-medium in Fortnite, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rocket League etc etc ??

Is it better with 1TB WD Blue or 2TB green?? I realise patience required, but wanna know if it's bad enough to go all M-M-Max Head-Headroom or not.

Got an i5-4570 taking a short trip this way now, and a 3570 for the Acer... cheaped out, barring luck and patience, price curve still seems a bit parabolic as you get up to the higher haswells.

There is like no place where I can buy chips. If a store front in NJ sells you anything used, it likel6 doesn't work.

Yasss, partsssss, got here real quick.. in receipt of the 3570 and 4570 now and 32GB MSATA board to stick in the weirdo J1900 atom board that I grabbed last year. Give it some of that small disk energy 🤣 that's for a boot drive, it's got 13 SATA ports. Still hunting a 15oW or under middle of the road recentish GPU, to go with the 4570... eyeballing a GTX77o .. might be a chance of a 960... IDK.. if this is a loan out rig I don't want the potentially too hot or too flaky ones.... and keep the whole system under a $100 spend, so I can maybe give it away without thinking too hard.

edit: the 7870 ghz is still "in play" but I think it's too long for the mATX case, I'm going to have to check it extra carefully before moving on it. ... power is a bit up there at 175 too.

Dumbass got hisself another headache 🤣 HP Elitebook 8640p for $10 ... should be a chunk faster than the A6 and potentially a request fulfillment of a "I need an okay laptop" from in the fam, but gotta check it out and think about whether it could use a CPU upgrade or not. It is semi rugged apparently, meets some mil spec, which I dunno if it's a rigorous one, or "needs to survive an afternoon of use by a brainless LT" or something.

Edit: it boots, battery is charging, i5 2520m confirmed, 20H2 installed... though smells piratey, which I'm not sure there was a need for with an intact 7 pro license in the bay. Very faint rattle in fan is the only obvious flaw so far, may disappear with a clean, some 4 unrecognised devices in device mangler to sort out. One is maybe the fingerprint scanner. Maybe there's a cellular modem, maybe there's a radeon hiding?? running off intel HD3000 right now. Couldn't see what Anandtech was complaining about in their review with screen then realised this one is 1366x768 not the 1600x900 which they thought was dim, contrast sucked, black sucked etc... so yay I guess, lower res screen but seems alright to me. Only four of the old gigglebites installed, needs another module, which I should have. Anyhoo, might have got my ten bucks worth, considering I've seen worse for 20 times the price.

EditII: Hmmm yah, HP only supporting up to 8.1 no 10 up drivers, so we'll see what of those play nice. Service manual sayeth it takes 45W cpu, so i7-2760QM is looking like the best upgrade target at the moment, best bang for the buck, to get that last 1 or 200 Mhz and a bit more cache is double-triple the price, so 2760 is right, which should be double the oomph of the stock i5 and also be +20% single core due to higher turbo. I might see if there's a new HSF assembly around though with giving it another 10W... bonus to upgrading this is that I have the i5 available to test in the B960 machine, which I see warnings about trying to upgrade because i3/5/7 meant to run for half hour then shut down on celeron/pentium only boards.

BitWrangler wrote on 2023-06-03, 19:42:

Dumbass got hisself another headache 🤣 HP Elitebook 8640p for $10 ... should be a chunk faster than the A6 and potentially a request fulfillment of a "I need an okay laptop" from in the fam, but gotta check it out and think about whether it could use a CPU upgrade or not. It is semi rugged apparently, meets some mil spec, which I dunno if it's a rigorous one, or "needs to survive an afternoon of use by a brainless LT" or something.

Edit: it boots, battery is charging, i5 2520m confirmed, 20H2 installed... though smells piratey, which I'm not sure there was a need for with an intact 7 pro license in the bay. Very faint rattle in fan is the only obvious flaw so far, may disappear with a clean, some 4 unrecognised devices in device mangler to sort out. One is maybe the fingerprint scanner. Maybe there's a cellular modem, maybe there's a radeon hiding?? running off intel HD3000 right now. Couldn't see what Anandtech was complaining about in their review with screen then realised this one is 1366x768 not the 1600x900 which they thought was dim, contrast sucked, black sucked etc... so yay I guess, lower res screen but seems alright to me. Only four of the old gigglebites installed, needs another module, which I should have. Anyhoo, might have got my ten bucks worth, considering I've seen worse for 20 times the price.

EditII: Hmmm yah, HP only supporting up to 8.1 no 10 up drivers, so we'll see what of those play nice. Service manual sayeth it takes 45W cpu, so i7-2760QM is looking like the best upgrade target at the moment, best bang for the buck, to get that last 1 or 200 Mhz and a bit more cache is double-triple the price, so 2760 is right, which should be double the oomph of the stock i5 and also be +20% single core due to higher turbo. I might see if there's a new HSF assembly around though with giving it another 10W... bonus to upgrading this is that I have the i5 available to test in the B960 machine, which I see warnings about trying to upgrade because i3/5/7 meant to run for half hour then shut down on celeron/pentium only boards.

Elitebook are nice, If you can, see if you can pull the fan off the bearing and give it some oil using engine oil is perfect. Give this some SSD too. New Samsung or Crucial 256GB SSD are not that expensive.

Supports i7-2640m in yours. About 50 CDN from USA sellers or less if you wait longer from china.

Well, properly maintaining them is expensive but what else?

Cheers,

Yah the more I handle this one the more I am liking it, one panel off to get at everything, awesome. Thinkpads get bent, I'm looking for business class HP elitebooks now 🤣 ... though I had the impression they spun off into practically laminated together with ULV CPUs etc, and aren't like this one.

Saw i7-2760QM confirmed compatible multiple times on HPs forums by techs and admin, so pulled the trigger on one at $48CDN shipped, which is 2.4/6MB at less than half the price of 2.5/8MB and 95% of the performance. 4 real cores, the 2640m is 2 core and doesn't seem to pull much ahead of the i5 that's in it... Gonna be a month getting here though.

any benchie is artificial, but this is what this one says...

Not many notebooks can hold up to 45w Quads and not many can take this natively with out modding the notebook in both bios and motherboard. The ones that is rated and designed for usually were found in high end 15" and 17" where heatsinks were designed for this and motherboard usually used 4 memory slot design when notebook was optioned for quad.

Be sure you can do it as I stated and reliably. I learned about this when I was on thinkpad forums more than a decade ago when I was big on thinkpads. Not anymore once I found out how terrible they were on later series. I like HP stuff better now. I had already gone through Dells before and were awful.

2640m is 2.8GHz with boost will clock higher than that on 1 core, very compatible and is 35W. Very useful on XP.

Having a need for quad is very small number of cases and is usually seen most felt in CAD, large dataset processing, and number crunching. What holds you back is GPU big time in games.

These details is the reason I never had quad core notebooks.

Cheers,

I've been looking for a decent MP3 player for a while, but they became rare and overpriced these parts of the world. Cellphones and streaming nearly drove them out of the market. Even this cost me $60. I could have bought a low-end 4" phone for this money and still have a good $20 left over for a headset. Something I almost did to use it purely as an MP3 player. I don't like having my phone on/near me when I train.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-06-12, 12:47:

I've been looking for a decent MP3 player for a while, but they became rare and overpriced these parts of the world. Cellphones and streaming nearly drove them out of the market. Even this cost me $60. I could have bought a low-end 4" phone for this money and still have a good $20 left over for a headset. Something I almost did to use it purely as an MP3 player. I don't like having my phone on/near me when I train.

IMG_20230612_131152.jpg

I use a 2012 phone with a 5000mAH battery that still lasts 10-15 days.
External SD with an endless collection of music. Weight isn't huge but still needs to be held if running (who runs anymore? 🤣).

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-06-12, 12:47:

I've been looking for a decent MP3 player for a while, but they became rare and overpriced these parts of the world. Cellphones and streaming nearly drove them out of the market. Even this cost me $60. I could have bought a low-end 4" phone for this money and still have a good $20 left over for a headset. Something I almost did to use it purely as an MP3 player. I don't like having my phone on/near me when I train.

IMG_20230612_131152.jpg

I feel you, I have one of these I used at the gym, https://www.amazon.com/RCA-RD2315-Personal-Di … g/dp/B00092M1SS though the whole gym situation is still messed up here and I got exercise machines for home now.

RandomStranger wrote on 2023-06-12, 12:47:

I've been looking for a decent MP3 player for a while, but they became rare and overpriced these parts of the world. Cellphones and streaming nearly drove them out of the market. Even this cost me $60. I could have bought a low-end 4" phone for this money and still have a good $20 left over for a headset. Something I almost did to use it purely as an MP3 player. I don't like having my phone on/near me when I train.

IMG_20230612_131152.jpg

I'm starting to really consider returning it and getting a cheap crap phone instead.

The screen is the cheapest plastic you can imagine. Looks like it'll scratch if I look at it the wrong way. Why didn't they go at least with the cheap mineral glass used on $20 Chinese watches?

It'a picky about FLAC files. It plays some without issues and returns an unsupported format error for others.

I couldn't make playlists work. It just doesn't recognize the m3u files. I tried saving playlist with VLC, QMMP, editing by hand.

Sure, I just browse from the folders menu, rename the files, added a 3 digit number prefix to the file names (001; 002...) so they will be in my desired order. Nope, it's displayed and played in the order you copied them over.

It doesn't mount automatically on Linux. I have to check the partitions (sudo parted -l) for it to appear in the file manager.

With some research I found claims it has issues with BT5.3 earbuds. It remains to be seen if the BT5.2 JBL buds I've been planning to pair it with works.

All this for a device worth $20 at most if works as intended, sold for $60 from a non-noname brand (Sandisk/Western Digital).

ZellSF wrote on 2020-05-16, 12:59:

robertmo wrote on 2020-05-16, 06:04:

4k needs at least 55" to have visible pixels
This way pixels are same size as on a 20" 1600x1200

I can see individual pixels just fine at 27", then again "visible pixels" might be some obscure criteria of yours for the appearance of pixels.

you should be able to play the game in it's native resolution without zooming it
download/file.php?id=162414&mode=view

well.. i was able to finish this game (with all the secrets) in twice lower resolution (without seeing 75% of the pixels) , but in a second play (text was not readable but it wasn't hard to know the story once you already beat the game 😉

iphone 6S? Slower but if you're patient with it. iphone 6 has touch IC issues and risky repair procedures to reball pair of touch ICs due to ease of overheating CPU on other side. iphone 7 is good but many needed 4 wire jumpers run under the edge of the audio IC then reball the IC and install back on over these jumpers, which is not big deal to do by decent microsoldering shops.

iphone 8 is best, *reliable* and getting very cheap, and bonus is wireless charging. From there you can use any of these iphones models as wifi device and load music on it and play it. Direct access by drag down to get to quick access buttons (music controls and flashlight, turn off wireless on or off. And can use third-party app to play music and audios.

Android phones is all over and software and OS deprecates quick. Best is Samsung S8 or S9. Avoid all budget phones, they break easily (board and connectors ruined from flexing because frame is not rigid.

Cheers,