Subj : Re: USB port issue -follo To : Barry Martin From : Ky Moffet Date : Mon May 18 2020 13:47:00 BARRY MARTIN wrote: > Hi Ky! > KM> Yeah... not thrilled with Asus, but a bunch of 'em have followed > KM> me home, so.... > > Free/cheap is good! Not necessarily the best, which is why the 'good'! > Excellent, in fact. Some have been good, but the problem with companies that cater to gamers is that everyone gets to beta-test hardware. Gamers have a hard-on for AMD, so those are usually worse. The best one lately was Fireball (as it got dubbed) ... Silver II's new board and CPU (Asus P9X79 LE and i7 3.7GHz) were an Xmas gift from a friend, but was thinking I'd have to swap its CPU for a Xeon so it could steal RAM from the PowerEdge... then got a good deal on some faster RAM, so now I had this spare Xeon CPU I'd picked up for cheap, going to waste. Socket2011 so not common stuff. So was at the recycle yard and on the dead pile there's a random LGA2011 board. Begged it off 'em, took it home, populated it... it's not dead. It's from a Thinkstation S30 (I =think= the board is actually a Tyan), meaning it has the server-like habit of playing dead for a couple minutes after power-up while it inventories its body parts, and someone wasn't patient enough. Happy birthday to me. :D So, what OS shall I put on it? :D > KM> I suppose some "hard drive fails" might also be southbridge. > > So never assume what isn't working is due to what the obvious seems to > be. Yeah... frex, when old Silver's USB was failing, it looked like it was the external hub that failed... but nope, that's still perfectly good. > > KM> Yeah, the stock AMD heatsinks are junk. I replaced the stock > KM> aluminum HSF on Westworld with an Adaptec-branded solid copper > KM> HSF, and CPU temp dropped significantly. > > To me it would seem (ah! there's the problem!) AMD would want to approve > an appropriate heatsink and fan. Could see two levels: Version A for AMD doesn't care for two reasons: general corner cutting, and the expectation that the gamer market will replace the CPU cooler with some custom solution anyway. But then when the same board and CPU wind up in a commercial system**, it still has the crappy stock heatsink. ** As they usually do, once they're no longer bleeding edge, that being where all the real money is. > 95W CPUs with up to four cores and Version B for 125W CPUs and up to > eight cores so their CPU doesn't overheat and shut down -- seems like > that would give AMD a bad reputation: "but I used what they told me to > use!". See above.... But occurs to me that may be why this tale of two essentially identical boards, both AMD: Westworld (Clone): Asus M2N68-AM Plus Paint It Black (Compaq) Asus M2N68-AM Only difference is that the Compaq BIOS is locked so you can't overclock it, and can't upgrade the CPU. Gee, I wonder why that might be?? (I always forget I have Paint It Black, possibly because it runs Vista.) > AMD seems to have a not-so-stellar reputation! OTOH Intel has also had > a few screw-ups, notably the "2 + 2 = 5 for vary large values of 2" > table error. Everyone has bugs. But when they still published errata, AMD's list was 3x longer than Intel's. And that was when they were still using Intel's codebase, so they were capable of messing up what wasn't already broken. > KM> Westworld's CPU is supposedly faster than any quadcore. In Real > KM> Life it's about 40% slower. AMD does not impress, repeatedly. > > Apparently they have a very good Public Relations Department! Marketed to gamers, and optimized for gaming benchmarks. Gaming is a specialized environment, not the Real World. And gamers are LOUD, so it's great free marketing. Also, gamers tend to immediately assume any problem is due to their overclocking or to game bugs... and dismiss bugs that came with the hardware. But by damn if it has enough bling, they'll buy it! As a friend puts it, gamers ruin everything. > What was 'funny' is I did not hear a fan revving up. Maybe on a scale > of one to ten a three but I expect a slight change when doing something > CPU-intensive. At 180øF I'd expect the fan to be in full-throttle Holy > Mode. No !! > Why it's so dark out?! The light all prismed away! þ RNET 2.10U: ILink: Techware BBS þ Hollywood, Ca þ www.techware2k.com --- QScan/PCB v1.20a / 01-0462 * Origin: ILink: CFBBS | cfbbs.no-ip.com | 856-933-7096 (454:1/1) .