Desktop Computers

Borzak

Borzak

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Haven't done anything to a computer in quite a while. I have a AM4 motherboard and about the last of the AM4 CPU that is going to come out so in an effort to prolong it since I am not using it anywhere near the cutting edge I ordered some DDR4 ram to install while it was relatively cheap and still plentiful new. Put in 64gb 3600 DDR4 for <$100. More than enough. I'll probably get around to replacing it when they move on to AM6 motherboards probably.
 
Lanx

Lanx

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Borzak said:
Haven't done anything to a computer in quite a while. I have a AM4 motherboard and about the last of the AM4 CPU that is going to come out so in an effort to prolong it since I am not using it anywhere near the cutting edge I ordered some DDR4 ram to install while it was relatively cheap and still plentiful new. Put in 64gb 3600 DDR4 for <$100. More than enough. I'll probably get around to replacing it when they move on to AM6 motherboards probably.
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if you have a newer chipset like x570 or b450/550, you can upgrade to a x3d chip
 
slippery

slippery

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Mist said:
guy I been building pcs since they were made of raw sheet metal and the instructions were written on fortune cookies straight from taiwan
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Honestly the best thing I ever did in high school was take tech classes, one of which we did a bunch of computer building. Back in the time in which basically no one actually had a computer
 
Daidraco

Daidraco

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Kajiimagi said:
I'll just have to live with not being as manly as you dude.
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Mist is full of shit as usual. Especially when acting like older computer's were more complicated than today's variants. :rolleyes: (Whatever you say, Grandpa.)

Those connectors are incredibly easy to slide in backwards, cause the force required to do so is minimal at best / less than what it takes to socket Ram. In a well thought out design, you wouldnt be able to even put the wrong side into the other fan's socket. Something as simple as Circle goes in Circle, Square goes in Square, preschool design, would have been better.
 
Daidraco

Daidraco

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Mist said:
How many jumpers do you have to set to get your PC to boot these days?
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What, are you going to talk about Slave and Master settings on an HDD next? Is that really your claim to fame for building a PC? As if going back to the time when Gateway was still a brand is meaningful when trying to justify that you walked up hill, both ways, in 15 feet of snow.
 
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Mist

Mist

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Daidraco said:
What, are you going to talk about Slave and Master settings on an HDD next? Is that really your claim to fame for building a PC? As if going back to the time when Gateway was still a brand is meaningful when trying to justify that you walked up hill, both ways, in 15 feet of snow.
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Memory speeds and overclocking was also done via jumpers back then.
 
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Janx

Janx

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Mist said:
guy I been building pcs since they were made of raw sheet metal and the instructions were written on fortune cookies straight from taiwan
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Hands looking like they went through a meat grinder when you were done. Ah the good 'ol days.
 
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LiquidDeath

LiquidDeath

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Janx said:
Hands looking like they went through a meat grinder when you were done. Ah the good 'ol days.
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The fucking worst was when you felt your fingers slide along a piece of the case (looking at you, hard drive enclosures) you didn't even see. They were so fucking sharp that you knew you were about to start bleeding everywhere, but you had time to pull your hand back and look at the white cut as the blood just starts welling up.
 
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Mist

Mist

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Oh, and the other thing. If you fucked up your CPU cooling or voltage the things literally burnt up like toast. There was no thermal throttling or voltage protection.
 
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Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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LiquidDeath said:
The fucking worst was when you felt your fingers slide along a piece of the case (looking at you, hard drive enclosures) you didn't even see. They were so fucking sharp that you knew you were about to start bleeding everywhere, but you had time to pull your hand back and look at the white cut as the blood just starts welling up.
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blood for the blood god!
 
Jovec

Jovec

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Computers today are easier to build, although they do have more parts to deal with (GPU power, multiple fans, RGB, etc). But it terms of technical knowledge, I think you needed a bit more in the past. Setting jumpers was a thing. 5 1/4 external bays were a thing (CD/DVD, ZIP/tape drives). IRQ conflicts was a thing (you had to plan out where to put your expansion cards). Expansion cards were a thing (personally I've used sound cards, midi daughter cards, dial-up modems, add-in network cards, RAID cards, SCSI controllers). Serial ports, parallel ports and game ports for joysticks (these were eventually added to many sound cards). When was the last time you were buying a video card based on its 2D performance? How many floppy disks was your OS install on?

And then there is the software side...I probably rebooted older computers more times a day trying to tweak a few extra KB of free memory (himem.sys anyone?) than I reboot now in a year.

I think there is a decent amount to consider if you are building a system today to go "all out", but it's very hard to build a system that just won't work at all today, especially with all of the online resources - The two "gotchas" might be RAM type (DDR4 vs DDR5) and platform (AND vs Intel), but a bit of reading and/or using a system builder site will solve that.
 
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Kajiimagi

Kajiimagi

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Jovec said:
Computers today are easier to build, although they do have more parts to deal with (GPU power, multiple fans, RGB, etc). But it terms of technical knowledge, I think you needed a bit more in the past. Setting jumpers was a thing. 5 1/4 external bays were a thing (CD/DVD, ZIP/tape drives). IRQ conflicts was a thing (you had to plan out where to put your expansion cards). Expansion cards were a thing (personally I've used sound cards, midi daughter cards, dial-up modems, add-in network cards, RAID cards, SCSI controllers). Serial ports, parallel ports and game ports for joysticks (these were eventually added to many sound cards). When was the last time you were buying a video card based on its 2D performance? How many floppy disks was your OS install on?

And then there is the software side...I probably rebooted older computers more times a day trying to tweak a few extra KB of free memory (himem.sys anyone?) that I reboot now in a year.

I think there is a decent amount to consider if you are building a system today to go "all out", but it's very hard to build a system that just won't work at all today, especially with all of the online resources - The two "gotchas" might be RAM type (DDR4 vs DDR5) and platform (AND vs Intel), but a bit of reading and/or using a system builder site will solve that.
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Yes I don't miss having to map out IRQ's/COMs. Of course Mist can do them in his head while running uphill in the snow but I had to write them down.
When AMD came out with the 1st Ghz CPU I decided I could build everyone a PC since I'd been upgrading mine for years. Talk about blood sacrifice.
 
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Jovec

Jovec

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Kajiimagi said:
Yes I don't miss having to map out IRQ's/COMs. Of course Mist can do them in his head while running uphill in the snow but I had to write them down.
When AMD came out with the 1st Ghz CPU I decided I could build everyone a PC since I'd been upgrading mine for years. Talk about blood sacrifice.
Click to expand...

My first 1GHz computer was dual 500MHz 1-core Celeron CPUs on a Abit BP6 dual socket board that skirted around Intel's restrictions.
 
Lanx

Lanx

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Janx said:
Hands looking like they went through a meat grinder when you were done. Ah the good 'ol days.
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case panels w/ screws, what an invention...

03bmOl8eBV4DmWgft4j5kbQ-24.fit_lim.size_1050x.jpg


for 30years... really, the best way to enclose a pc case was to have a u shaped piece of heavy steel, not sheet metal, but it was made that way so you can stack your 200lb monitor on top of it
 
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Lambourne

Lambourne

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Lanx said:
case panels w/ screws, what an invention...

03bmOl8eBV4DmWgft4j5kbQ-24.fit_lim.size_1050x.jpg


for 30years... really, the best way to enclose a pc case was to have a u shaped piece of heavy steel, not sheet metal, but it was made that way so you can stack your 200lb monitor on top of it
Click to expand...

Not to mention having to constantly swap floppies around so putting it below the desk wasn't really an option. Anyway, lovely sheet metal corners there, 8/10 bleeding potential. Also look how that flatcable is optimally positioned for the back of your hand to scrape across the back of the other expansion card when you finally manage to wiggle it free. 9/10 cheese grater points
 
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Borzak

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
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Lanx said:
if you have a newer chipset like x570 or b450/550, you can upgrade to a x3d chip
Click to expand...

I do and have thought about it. But I'm not a huge gamer. But I do get gigantic drawings someone sends me that I need to pull out just the layer I need to get it down from multi multi gigabytes in size to just afew megabytes if that much. People are lazy, I know that's probably not a surprise.

I'll be super old guy in the thread. I got a commodore vic 20 and then in 1982 the brother of my dads boss bought him a new IBM PC and it was given to me as someone they didn't know what it was for. So I had free reign to use it for whatever and the only reason they had it was because the brother of his boss that died an almost billionaire from his computer industry venture capatalism gave them a computer and told them it was the future. He retired from Texas Instruments with umpteen patents related to transistors and then got a wall street partner and he had setup the clean room and get funding for Compaq. They created their bios with his funding and won the lawsuit from IBM which ushered in the "compatible" era. He was from Baton Rouge and lived in Dallas. His brother owned a fab shop outside Baton Rouge. I worked there right out of high school and the saying was "Doesn't matter what we bid or miss, owners brother will cut a check", and often did.

I dicked with it all the time, I got a modem and got the only one I could affford at age 10. A 110 baud converted teletype modem, yes you can read faster than 110 caud. A year or two later I was given a 5mb hard drive then I was onto something lol.
 
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