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Random thought: Do they still make AGP graphics cards, and are they still of decent quality for modern gaming? I have an older computer (about 4 years) that (once I clear the malware off the HD) I might want to update a little bit. (It's a dual-core Intel with 2 gigs of RAM, IIRC, and a 750-gig HD...)
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I know I saw some at MicroCenter here when I went with someone to get them a cheap video card for their media center PC (we were looking for a PCIe card, so I don't remember specifics). I think they might even still make motherboards that take them.
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A quick google search suggests that hdmi to vga converters do exist, but it looks like you've really gotta watch exactly what you're getting, since most seem to have various arcane caveats as to what they'll do and what they won't do.
-Morgan.
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All the "low profile" graphics cards I've seen while looking, and for that matter all the micro-ATX motherboards with an AM3/AM3+ socket, have a d-sub video output built in, as well as the HDMI and DVI - probably because the gfx chipsets are from two or three years ago, when Vegeaeasaurus was still commonly found stomping around, shaking the earth with the weight of their mighty cathode ray tubes.
I didn't see any AGP cards, of any stripe.
I would also like to scream over inadequate default cooling fans.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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That's why the aftermarket makes exist. Arctic Cooling have this a passive system for modernish cards or this for the latest. Of cause some user assembly is required with each item.
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Granted that it only matters if paying the danegeld to Microsoft, but there is one very good reason to get a good processor straight off: changing it later counts as a new installation and has to be activated like a new computer.
I return to circle around this hateful notion because the thought of doing a bare metal install of linux with no guru backup as my first major dealing with it is menacing with spikes of driver conflict. I circle back again, to a cheap refurb with a new mobo and cpu, but know the
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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installed system on the hdd would have a fit if it booted at all, and at that point it's not really effective anyway since all the other components are subpar secondhanders as well.
RE Cooling, I know there are 3p ones, it just pisses me off that AMD still ships cpus with coolers that will see you in overheat shut down if you go over 85-90% cpu load for more than short spikes. Thermaltake makes one rated for up to 95w cpus that sells for $10, why can't AMD ship the 1-6 core chips with that?
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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Quote:ClassicDrogn wrote:
RE Cooling, I know there are 3p ones, it just pisses me off that AMD still ships cpus with coolers that will see you in overheat shut down if you go over 85-90% cpu load for more than short spikes. Thermaltake makes one rated for up to 95w cpus that sells for $10, why can't AMD ship the 1-6 core chips with that?
Because people who will run it to that load are in the minority, and I'm not talking 40% here. So from a bean counting manufacturing standpoint, it makes no sense to fit a cooler that can allow it to take that load for anything other than short spikes.
I wasn't saying it was right, just that's where it comes from.
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CD you could give this ( http://www.evga.com/articles/00778/) competition a try
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Thanks for the tip, Rod, even if it is a long shot. As you may guess from the length of this post, there is news.
The general situation here is... not yet bad, but not good. Loans from Bank of Family are not in the immediate future, so no build-it-myself brring the contest. That's bad.
I'm obviously on something more capable than the PSPotato, so that's good.
It's the $200 Acer Chromebook. That's bad. It's a 1.1ghz 32bit system, and there's nothing you can do about that despite being based on 64bit hardware. It also has a whopping 16gb SSD and 2gb RAM, which you can't do anything about without voiding the warranty, so not for three months at least even to pop in the lappie's RAM.
You can ditch Google Spyware Suite for everything but playing Flash stuff, by installing an Ubuntu chroot with crouton. That's good, it means I can run real software.
Performance is in the neighborhood of the seven year old tablet I was using for a while this time last year, until it fried its graphics chipset. That's bad, very bad. I can barely work with 12k faces in Blender, for example, before the FPS dips into single digits when trying to rotate the view around the model. Rendering animations bigger than a playing card is right out.
I was also able to get an external enclosure for the deceased computer's hard drive, so I have all the files I'd been working on and so on, and my music library. That's very, very good. Losing that work was SERIOUSLY stressing me out - the optical drive had cut out January 2011 or so, so there wasn't any way to do meaningful backups.
It has no optical drive. That's technically bad, but I'm used to it. An external drive isn't very expensive, but... yeah.
The screen gets up to 1600ish x 1100ish resolution, which is good... ish. It's pretty small, though, so that makes text tiny and certain interface elements (like the single-pixel border to resize windows) bastardly hard to line up, even with a mouse. Hitting them with the touchpad would be murder.
The keyboard is mushy, and there's no way to turn the touchpad off with an external mouse connected, so I keep nudging it with my thumb or palm and tapping outside - or worse, in the middle of, above the line I'm working on - the text box when typing. That's bad.
It's an Acer. I said it already, but it bears repeating: that's bad.
I got my full set of tools installed in only twice the time as it would take on a Mac or a Windows machine, which is good considering that it is a new OS I'm interacting with.
While not completely impenetrable, working in the command line when it's completely unfamiliar and a stripped-down system to fit the limited hardware and missing many of the things the web references tell you to do, is somewhat baffling. I havfen't yet screwed anything up so badly that I had to turn off Developer Mode and let Chrome OS erase the foreign code and start over, at least. That's good.
I don't have to deal with the PSPotato for anything but playing games, unless I want to. That's very, very good.
Still, overall, it evens out to being a regrettable purchase, softened by having learning the new OS as a distraction, the fact that it's small and cute if underpowered and elegantly designed to do a few basic tasks without fuss or large expenditure of resources, like the original Volkswagon Beetle, and the ability to get things done even though they happen slowly. It's going to itch at the back of my mind every time I use the damn thing that I could have had a real computer, but...
Pretty much, I'm making myself consider it as a replacement for my old PDA, to have a favorable comparison in mind. THe screen is six times bigger, much brighter, and has a somewhat higher dpi, it has RAM instead of a partition on the flash memory (still only 16gb of that, though) and runs about two orders of magnitude faster, with many more software options even without the Linux install (technically, there's probably a version for ARM3 mobile devices too, though hardly practical) and while it won't fit in a pocket it's no bigger or heavier than a decent hardcover, and thinner than many. It doesn't have a CF card reader, but I have a USB one and there's an SD slot. In 2008 I would have jumped on it in a heartbeat!
Gah, I need to get to sleep, to much puzzling the past coule days, my puzzler is sore. Apologies to Dragonflight and the Chrono Racer crew who stop in here too, but I'm too wiped out to even check there tonight. Tomorrow, after I wake up, I swear, now that I have this thing kicked into a useable shape.
I'm still going to hope things somehow turn around enough to make getting the parts I picked out and building a more capable machine. If that does happen, I'll most likely trade this to my father (reverted to fuddleproof pure ChromeOS) as part of the deal - the SD slot will fit the card from his camera, and otherwise he's pretty much the target demographic every way around in terms of the things he wants to use a computer for, on those occasions he wants to use a computer at all.
I think any of us can attest that the things a person wants to do on the computer increases the more time they have to fool around on the internet, though.
So anyway, that's the status update, melancholy as it is.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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Well, just look at it as a step forward!  Maybe it's not the PC you'd like to have, but you can build toward that in the future.
One thing you could try is what I did a few years back. Pick up separate pieces, and stock them in a cabinet until you have enough parts to build the machine with. I did that for about four months. It was driving me batty for a while, knowing I had all those parts for a much more modern machine, but couldn't actually use them until I had enough to make the thing run. But still, when I finally had enough parts, it was a joy to assemble and configure.
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Yeah, sometimes you just have to stopgap, as much as it can hurt to do so and have to put off the big upgrade you really need in the process.
I've done some recent casual looking with an eye towards replacing my desktop machine here (my laptop is faster than it by a margin and a half). It doesn't look like I'll be able to assemble a machine worth the effort for under $400, partly because I don't want to put together something that's rather "bare bones" if I'm going to that amount of effort.
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Yeah. that's pretty much what I found, since most of the critical components (CPU, mobo, hdd, psu or psu w/case, cpu cooler) are around $50-60 for something a couple years behind modern, and stepping back to 5yrs behind is what I ended up doing. Buying them one part at a time doesn't sound like a really practical idea, though, given how things aree always slipping to a lower price point as he latest and greatest displaces them, and ones that have reached the bottom end of profitability like what I'm looking at are taken out of production.
There'll always be something better in six months, so better to put the money in jam jars labeled by component and stack those in the cabinet, I'd say. The only real exception I'd make there is on a case, if there's one that serves the purpose and you also really like the look of, because a box is a box but fashions come and go.
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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Well, the best way to do that, I found, was to buy the components whose value isn't as dependent on current dollar value. Hard drives, graphics card, and even motherboard can be obtained fairly inexpensively, and their cost value won't fluctuate much over the purchase period. The expensive stuff is usually the memory and the CPU, with the CPU being the last one. Just make sure, if you follow this method, that you get a CPU which will work with the motherboard. One option would be to get a mobo which runs a somewhat more advanced CPU (on the high end) than you can afford, and see if it is affordable by the time you're ready to build the unit.
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Hard drive, case, optical drive (if you even bother), power supply, and maybe RAM. Those are the ones you can really pre-buy.
GPU... well, you could go either way on that. Yearly models, and all that.
If I were doing it, I'd wait on the CPU and mobo, and buy them both as a pair.
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That's really why I say it's better to build up a kitty and spend it when you cn afford the lot at one go - aside from probably saving money on shipping. I start with the heart of themachine, CPU, then find a mobo that's compatible, a cooler that will keep it frosty, a size of RAM/HDD that I can live with and afford, GPU the same, then look at the power required and add 25-30% for a PSU, then tack on things like a purty case, optical drive, extra fans, etc. Buying the CPU/mobo LAST is like putting the locomotive at the back of the train, so to speak.
I am, in general, pretty good about not taking money OUT of the jam jar for incidental expenses once it's been put in though, so that process may not work so well for other people. Powers know it's about the only way in which I manage to exercise any willpower on self-restraint.
- dNN
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"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
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