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Building my childhood dream PC

fabiensanglard.net

81–86 of 86 posts

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#81
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are a handful of professional uses for a workstation that are hard to beat with a laptop. If you're compiling code, you generally want as much concurrency as you can get, as well as great single core speed when the task parallelism runs out. There aren't really any laptops with high core counts, and even when you have something with horsepower, you run into thermal limits. You can try and make do with remoting…

All of these can be done much better on the cloud (I can spawn as big of a machine as my pocket can afford). And with today’s tooling (vs code & jetbrains remote development) you don’t even notice that you develop on a remote machine and not your local. So the desktop developer market is for those who are not willing to use cloud. And this is a very small minority. (FYI I am not endorsing cloud over local development…

Indeed I use such a machine in my day job. 64 slow Epyc cores, presumably power efficient. But even on that machine, builds are slower than they could be, and distributed builds are the way.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#82
post #38

Even though it's off-topic, my favourite case in a build by the same guy. Nowadays it would work with just a Ryzen 9700X: https://fabiensanglard.net/the_beautiful_machine/index.html [Edit] Maybe not completly off-topic since it would be my dream PC.

oh man i saw this case years ago and have tried to find it multiple times to no avail; amazing!

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#83
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's done it since 2020. Intel was planning to, but walked it back. It dramatically increases performance, and allows vendors to sell you RAM at 8x the market price, and requires you to replace your entire computer to upgrade it, thereby inducing you to overspend on RAM from the outset so that you don't have to spend even more to replace the entire system later. There's literally no reason for shareholders not to…

> allows vendors to sell you RAM at 8x the market price, and requires you to replace your entire computer to upgrade it, Good luck then. Some of us build our own computers to be upgreadable.

Same, but about ten years after the last modular RAM computers go on the market, you and I are both going to have a Problem.

Incidentally, this is why I bought a hot air rework station and a heater. Won't help me if they blow an efuse on the package to permanently set the RAM spec, or use part pairing For Your Security And Protection, but maybe they won't all be that evil.

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#84
post #58
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much of my PhD thesis was/is done traveling in places with poor, poor Internet. Currently on my laptop in rural Calabria, where I pull a blazing fast 60 kbps, sometimes. Would be very irritating waiting for the compiler/theorem prover to go brr, remotely… I can hardly edit a Google doc out here! This doesn’t contradict your minority point, but it really does make me appreciate local-first.

CS thesis that requires traveling, tell us more! What's the topic? :)

I work on verifying compiler optimization passes, mainly using weird category theory, so the traveling is mostly orthogonal!

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#85
post #8

oh man, what a trip down memory lane. i started building PCs in college with 386/486s and last year rebuilt my silly custom loop watercooled workstation. :) and yes: the supplied pc docs back then >>>>>>>> supplied pc docs today

Were they 80486 or i486 8) SX or DX? My first "PC" was a Sinclair ZX80. I got my soldering iron out. Much later on (1986ish) my Dad bought a Commodore 64, unfortunately he plugged the power lead into the video socket, when me and my brother arrived home for Chrimbo. Dad got it repaired and it served us very well for several years. I still have that C64 and it was repaired again a few years ago (re-capped). It now has…

the pc as purchased in 1992 had a i486DX2-66... after a few years, that case received numerous upgrades -- moar ram, moar disk, various amd and cryix 5x86/6x86 cpus over time. trade shows in the 90s were just full innovation and cheap, performant hardware!

Re: Building my childhood dream PC

#86
post #42
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I bought this case a couple of years ago after this article was linked here. I love it. It's beautifully engineered. Top quality. It sits at the corner of my desk proudly silent. I'm likely about to upgrade the pc within but the case will remain a strong feature of my desk.

Do you use it as a gaming PC (or for other high GPU load activities)? And if so, what's your take on noise under load? Edit: I guess this is a senseless question if the case really only uses passive cooling. I was assuming there would still be fans somewhere. I despise my current PC's fan noise and I'm always on the lookout for a quieter solution.

A 3050 6GB would work too.
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