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My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

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Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#91

Post by jrootabega »

jeroenhd wrote: post #88
jrootabega wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe my perceptions are out of date, but cleartype, while technically allowing higher font dpi, had a rainbow/screen door effect that stood out like a sore thumb for many of us.

The effect depends on the screen technology you use. Windows guesses the pixel layout, but you can tweak ClearType to fit your screen better. You can open a wizard that takes you through six steps and asks you to select the rectangle with the best text (out of six rectangles) to tweak it to your liking. When the subpixels don't align, ClearType can be ugly as hell, but for me the default guesses always worked out.

On displays with high enough resolution/dpi, maybe. But isn't it just inevitable that if there are red subpixels on one side of your text, and blue on the other, that it would be noticeable?

OK, I played around with it and I was able to make it more and less noticeable depending on which boxes I picked. Guess I'll never know if that was possible when I first started noticing it 20 years ago, with worse monitors and better eyeballs :(

Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#92

Post by seiferteric »

reacharavindh wrote: post #77

I have similar but not so extreme inclinations towards fan noise. I settled to build my desktop with a simple NZXT case, intel 8th gen CPU running Arch Linux with CPU governor set to Performance. The pSU is an ATX power supply that is rated for 750W, while I could barely get to half that with full load(which means PSU’s fans almost never need to spin up). The CPU is cooled by an oversized NH D-15 Noctua air cooler wi…

Undervolting/power limiting could work well as well. The latest gen CPUs apparently get like 95% of their performance when limited to only like 1/3 of the max power.

Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#93

Post by otikik »

BrotherBisquick wrote: post #55
frou_dh wrote: post #18

Something I've learned from discussing computer hardware informally online over the years is that people have vastly different standards for what it means for fans to be "silent" in use. So much so that it's hardly worth discussing, because someone will insist that such and such fan or actively-cooled device is silent, and then you buy it and it sounds like crap. I suspect it's "Cloth Ears" in many cases.

This happens with eyeballs as well as ears. Witness people who don't notice screen tearing in X11, or people who don't mind (or even prefer!) Windows font rendering.

I confess I am somewhat impervious to bad kerning myself. I thought about fixing that (there's online exercises that one can take) but then I realized that there's potentially so much bad kerning out there I would be making my life more miserable for no reason.

Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#94

Post by kitsunesoba »

kriops wrote: post #83
BrotherBisquick wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This happens with eyeballs as well as ears. Witness people who don't notice screen tearing in X11, or people who don't mind (or even prefer!) Windows font rendering.

Windows font rendering is fine as long as you don't use scaling, right?

In my observations it’s the reverse. Windows font rendering looks ok to me (if a bit “off”) on my laptop with 1.5x UI scale, but underwhelming at 1.x. At 1.x fonts look badly kerned and a bit misshapen, and that cleans itself up quite a bit at 1.x and beyond.

macOS and Linux rendering looking better to me regardless of render scale. Good kerning and no beating font glyphs into odd shapes to fit a pixel grid on screens with pixel density high enough that it isn’t necessary (we’re not running 1024x768 LCDs any more).

Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#95

Post by vel0city »

jeroenhd wrote: post #88
jrootabega wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe my perceptions are out of date, but cleartype, while technically allowing higher font dpi, had a rainbow/screen door effect that stood out like a sore thumb for many of us.

The effect depends on the screen technology you use. Windows guesses the pixel layout, but you can tweak ClearType to fit your screen better. You can open a wizard that takes you through six steps and asks you to select the rectangle with the best text (out of six rectangles) to tweak it to your liking. When the subpixels don't align, ClearType can be ugly as hell, but for me the default guesses always worked out.

I wonder if virtualization software messing with how ClearType assumes subpixel layouts could cause a lot of the dislike for ClearType in the Mac crowd, as many Mac users possibly predominately handled Windows in things like Parallels? I don't have any knowledge about how ClearType behaves in software like Parallels so I could be entirely off-base with that idea.

The only time I had dislike for ClearType was when I'd rotate a monitor from landscape to portrait. This makes sense, since the subpixel layout is then wrong. So, I'd usually just redo the ClearType settings when rotated and use the monitor in that orientation for a while instead of constantly switching.

Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#97

Post by LoveMortuus »

favadi wrote: post #68
joshspankit wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or people who argued that “the eye can’t see more than 60fps”

Or people who argued that "4k is pointless, you can't see the different with 2k anw".

I think even for phones anything above 1080p, is kinda pointless. Just a drain on the battery.

Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#98

Post by Firther »

BrotherBisquick wrote: post #55
frou_dh wrote: post #18

Something I've learned from discussing computer hardware informally online over the years is that people have vastly different standards for what it means for fans to be "silent" in use. So much so that it's hardly worth discussing, because someone will insist that such and such fan or actively-cooled device is silent, and then you buy it and it sounds like crap. I suspect it's "Cloth Ears" in many cases.

This happens with eyeballs as well as ears. Witness people who don't notice screen tearing in X11, or people who don't mind (or even prefer!) Windows font rendering.

Screen tearing in X11 is a tricky one since there's a dozen ways to deal with it and 10 times more ways for it to go wrong, which is just enough uncertainty that you can never be sure if it's supposed to be that way. I know I've spent hours trying to deal with screen tearing by fiddling with desktop compositors that are supposed to prevent tearing out of the box only to fall back to the trusty AMDGPU/Radeon TearFree setting which has always just worked for me.

Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#99

Post by hedora »

BrotherBisquick wrote: post #55
frou_dh wrote: post #18

Something I've learned from discussing computer hardware informally online over the years is that people have vastly different standards for what it means for fans to be "silent" in use. So much so that it's hardly worth discussing, because someone will insist that such and such fan or actively-cooled device is silent, and then you buy it and it sounds like crap. I suspect it's "Cloth Ears" in many cases.

This happens with eyeballs as well as ears. Witness people who don't notice screen tearing in X11, or people who don't mind (or even prefer!) Windows font rendering.

There are driver options to remove screen tearing in X11. (At least for Intel, Nvidia and AMD cards).

Also, font rendering has gotten worse under Linux in recent years (due to fractional scaling).

I should probably just switch to a BSD that doesn't include Wayland support before it is too late. That'd fix my desktop's incessant pulseaudio and systemd screwups too...

Re: My Fanless OpenBSD Desktop (2021)

#100

Post by sidewndr46 »

Doesn't using a single DIMM for memory really kill the performance? I thought basically all Intel & AMD CPUs have two channels of memory controllers. So for optimal bandwidth on the memory you need to use a multiple of two memory sticks.
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