A potato is me/cheap user experience upgrades

[classicdrogn]

As expected but sooner than hoped, my HDD has indeed cacked it, so I'm going to be largely offline until the new parts I emergency-ordered with a loan from Bank of Fam arrive, hopefully sometime around the weekend. Do not be alarmed, the situation is otherwise normal as much as that applies to any of us at the moment.

On the plus side, as long as everything works (it's all new parts, even if I'll be building in a Gateway 310X case originally built like a nuclear bunker to contain the world-shattering power of a Pentium 4!) it should be a fairly good machine - Ryzen 5 3600 w/32Gb RAM on an ASRock B450M/ac motherboard with integrated wifi, an 8Gb Sapphire PULSE Radeon RX580 graphics card ("horribly outdated" at two or three years old, but anything better is around $400-500 and far out of my budget, plus I'm upgrading from a Smelleron laptop's Intel HD 3000 integrated graphics, so yeah. At least it supports Vulkan and OpenGL 4.5) plus 256Gb NVMe M.2 and SATA III SSDs so I can have the OS on one and the other for the swap/page file, and a 2Tb HDD for mass storage. (Or possibly partition the SSD into halves and put 'doze on one so I can set the M.2 up as primary boot drive with Linux and not have to futz about mashing ESC or DEL or whichever key to tell it to go to GRUB every time, since 'doze always wants to be the default.)

In the meantime, I'm booting from my Ubuntu 18.04 live USB and have noother storage, which means basically no swap since that drive is only 4Gb to begin with. That in turn means going to, say, YouTube will crash the browser when it runs out of RAM and has no swap file space. For now the HDD still appears as a read-only disk if mounted, but I'm not eager to test it until and unless I at least have a USB hub so I can put an external HDD in as well as the Live USB to try to rescue some of the data.

As for distros... I've been thinking of going with either MX-Linux or Manjaro this time, rather than Xubuntu. Maybe Pop!, but if I'm switching off Ubuntu I figure I might as well really switch from Ubuntu rather than just migrating to a different flavor. Anyone here played with those enough to have a meaningful opinion?

My primary use aside from incidental do-it-on-anything word processing and web browsing is Blender & GIMP and a desire to work with Godot Engine game development, and a little LMMS audio for sound effects and hopefully original music. All of those are common enough that they should also work seamlessly wherever. The only gaming I've done any time recently is failing to play Morrowind for more than a few minutes at a time while giving armor and weapon mods a cursory look, so that's not really a consideration, just the overall user experience WRT stability, ease of use, and shiny coolness. (There was a video on YouTube I watched earlier today that wa the king of shiny coolness... despite being from 2010. I think the title was something like "KDE + Compiz Fusion + Cairo dock" and it was basically just making the UI dance while playing "the egg travels" from some dinosaur movie soundtrack.

"ubuntu 3D Desktop Cube (KDE, Compiz Fusion, CairoDock" by Philip J. Bugsington appears to be the right one, though I can only judge by the cover image on Google since as I said there's no actually visiting YouTube at the moment. It's silly and completely superficial, but still so cool.

[Jinx999]

Got a new PC a couple of months ago as various problems with the ond one. Didn't assemble it myself, but did pick the parts. Except I'd have gone for 3200MHz memory if I'd been picking up the parts myself, the suppliuer only had that in insanely expensive. Very similar to your picks.

Asus TUF B450M-PLUS GAMING Motherboard
AMD Wraith Spire Stock CPU Cooler
AMD Ryzen 5 3600 CPU, 6 Cores, 4.2GHz
16GB DDR4 3000MHz Memory (2 x 8GB Sticks)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Super 6GB Graphics Card
500GB Samsung 970 EVO PLUS M.2 PCIe Solid State Drive
Seagate 6TB BarraCuda 5900RPM Hard Disk
24x DVD-RW Drive
Corsair RM650x 80 PLUS Gold 650W PSU

[classicdrogn]

The 3600 (not so much 3600X) is pretty much the peak of the price-for-performance graph at the moment, maybe slightly on the performance side with the 1600AF as tippedy top, since it's within a few dollars of half the price for a 15% difference in clock speed, basically a 2600 with a different label - to the point that they deliver benchmark results within 1-2% of each other, even. I almost went with one of those and fully populating the RAM slots with 16Gb sticks, but getting another SSD to use for swap space was much cheaper and very little should need to hit the swap file in the first place even with "only" 32Gb on a system that's not something like a web server handling hundreds or thousands of connections at once. Maybe running filters on huge image files in GIMP or if glTF export wasn't fixed in Blender 2.82; the demo video I saw of that in 2.81 had 16Gb on the system and had to turn their virtual memory up to 32Gb to output a file with large image maps.

Gah, I'm really anxious over having this go well, though I know intellectually that it's really rare for new parts not to just snap together and work. I haven't built a PC since 1999 and have pretty much only dealt with laptops since then, mostly at second or third hand, which obviously all come prebuilt. It's a big outlay all at once for parts that so far only exist as playing-card-size preview images on a web page.

[classicdrogn]

Half the parts arrived yesterday, enough to tell that the Gateway case I had wanted and planned to use to build in will not work. Most of the rest arrive tomorrow, enough to assemble them lose for a bench test and then spend a week having fits while I wait for the new case to arrive. (It would be fine, except the front panel design and wiing are such that I can't cut more ventilation into it the way I need to for a system with approximately ten times the Total Dissipated Power to remove as heat - the P4 had a 60mm fan on top of its cute little heatsink, but that's the only fan in the case and even the perforations where you could mount aftrmarket ones fore and aft were only 80mm. I'd ordered one of those to work together with the power supply fan (which the stock 200w didn't even have) for the back and planned to cut the front spot up to 120mm for an intake fan, but the wiring is in the way and the plastic front bezel that holds the power button is a lot less amenable to being trimmed down to not obstruct that area even if the metal was gone than I'd thought from looking at it without disassembling everything.

This too is Malsumis.

I'm not going to rule out assembling the key components in that case and zip-tying the fans in position to blow on them with the side off though. I'm already really annoyed with the limitations of being a potato.

[classicdrogn]

I am quite happy to report that - potato skin temporary case with HORRIBLE cooling and only the NVMe drive installed aside - Velocirapture is up and running, mostly with a standard "you snap everything together, it works" assembly experience. The one exception so far is that Manjaro didn't install a Date & Time settings control panel, and somehow got the date wrong in the initial clock synch from the internet so ant HTTP operation failed due to it breaking the security certificate checks.

Watching the twelve CPU load graph bars playing in the dock widget at the bottom of the screen is quite satisfying, even if I don't dare try anything too stressful for the system until the new case arrives next week - idle temps are high 30s C with the side off but quickly shoot up to around 50 if I put it on, still at idle. I'm really annoyed about not being able to get good a cooling solution with this Gateway 310X chassis, it's got such a nice build quality otherwise, and I count the lack of luser window or fairy lights as decidedly positive features. It'll probably take me a week to get everything set up the way I want it for software now, but that's part of the fun too - and since it's Linux, that part doesn't call for any more financial outlay. Only tonight did I remember that an Nvidia gpu would have allowed for CUDA accelerated rendering in Blender, but I'm not going to quibble over that at this point.

[classicdrogn]

It's still so amazing to me just how much of a difference in speed there is, even for things I wouldn't expect like web browsing. As long as the network spee is semi-decent page that's just text like GameFAQs or FFn et cetera is just click and it's there, faster than it would take to load and render something saved to my own computer before. Really chose well naming this one Velocirapture after my speedster character.

If you're not on a machine with an SSD for the operating system, I'd kick that up to the top of your upgrade list for sheer overall quality of life improvements. It won't shave off more than a small fraction of computation or graphics heavy tasks like a new CPU or GPU, but anything that needs to hit your swap file or libraries/DLLs will see great improvements, along with the time from flipping the switch to being booted and ready to use or to load up software. Just be aware that SSDs need a lot of free space on them for best performance and to keep them from burning through their write-cycle lifetime and plan accordingly in your disk usage - spinning rust still wins hands down at dollars per megabyte for media files or big modern games' massive collections of high resolution texture maps.

[classicdrogn]

And in a bit of late-breaking news on the computer front, I got a mechanical keyboard (basically the cheapest 104-key model from Redragon, but the backlight LEDs are plain white and you can turn the unicorn vomit along either side off) and a Kensington Orbit trackball, and both of those are living up to the HID-enthusiast hype. I'd used a trackball before circa the early 90s but the scroll ring on the new one is really nice for working in 3D software or on long web pages because you can just stick a fingertip on it and go around and around if you want, and on Manjaro Linux with XFCE and kernel 5.6.10-3 it works with L+R for middle click right out of the box. Even on the older Ubuntu 18.04LTS XFCE system I set up for my father last year all the physical controls work as expected right away, with no messing around in config files or even a GUI settings manager. I did turn the pointer speed down, though, because you can just keep spinning a trackball when a mouse would run out of space and it gives better fine control that way.

Inspired by Lynn's posts here about her projects I'd had some vague thoughts of getting one of those DIY arcade cabinet trackballs that have PS/2 and USB output right from the wiring harness and adding mouse button switches of my own with latches like an old typewriter's caps lock for click-and-hold (the mechanism for this would have been simple but quite elegant, I might still make a 3d model just for fun) but I'm satisfied enough with the Kensington even lacking click-and--hold functionality, which I think the scroll ring more than makes up for in normal use. I'm still getting used to where the buttons actually are on it, but like it quite a bit so far.

The keyboard, though, that's the big scoop. Like I said, it's basically the cheapest backlit mechanical one I could find that still had a number pad, but I really, really like this thing. It's got cherry MX blue "equivalent" switch bodies with some kind of optical sensor for the actual switch operation, but the clicky is real and the feel is verra nize. It also came with two each extra blue, brown, red, and black switch bodies, I guess to let you get a feel for which switch you like best, though arriving after you've bought it seems a little pointless for that. The brown ones are much quieter but almost as clicky feeling, which is as designed and what various other reviewers said but very hard to judge without trying them for yourself - I would say that if you've never used a mechanical keyboard, browns will give you just as many fingergasms while being much less of a sonic shock./ The red and black switches just moosh silently like a normal membrane or rubber dome keyboard, so while reputed to give superior positive action for fast-twitch gaming I don't see a point to them for my purposes. I would have liked to try green switches too, supposedly the stiffer-sprung black to blue switches' red, but those were not included. Honestly though, I've seen like one keyboard being offered with browns, a few red, and all the rest blue, until you get up to the $100 price point rather than the cheap-out stuff I was looking at. Sadly, I'm no better as typist on it than I was before and the taller keys are even throwing that off a little having just switched, but that much is to be expected.

As for the lighting effects, I looked at them but honestly the only one I'm even considering using instead of always-on is the one that turns the back light off for each key when you hit them and then fades it back in, as everything else either spends most of the time off and therefore defeats the point of having them backlit in the first place, to see the damn things in low light or high glare conditions, or has an obnoxious amount of blinking and motion going on, distracting me from actually doing whatever I've got going on the computer. Even if the one that turns them on in an expanding ripple outward from the key you just pressed does look really cool when you're just pushing one key at a time to demonstrate it.

The images on Amazon have the glow artificially exaggerated, I think, which made it look obnoxious to me, but even at the brightest setting it's not glaring, and the leak between keys is actually quite minimal, unlike the neon outlines the pictures left me dreading. You can also change the unicorn vomit side lights to the various solid colors if you don't just want them off entirely. Turned down to the lowest setting the key caps are still easily readable even in direct light (which is not so much the case with them off entirely due to the translucent plastic used for them unless the ambient light is photography-studio bright) and more of a gentle glow than a source of ambient illumination in darker conditions. The nominally white ones I got are also more of a cream than the hash blue-white that was shown, as well, which is probably entirely attributable to that translucent plastic again - what little does bleed around the edges is much bluer as you'd expect of white LEDs.

It's worth a note that this thing weighs more than my chromebook, but I also count that a positive - the metal frame and thick plastic shell that gives it that heft means it's rock solid without a trace of flex or springing in the body of the keyboard to throw off the feel, whether it's on a desk or just sitting on your lap, and combined with the rubber feet it sticks to a desk like it was nailed down. The cord is not detachable, but at least on this model it does have a nylon weave outer cover for a nice feel and reduced tangling. Plus if I'm lugging it along somewhere and suddenly need an improvised weapon, it'll probably do the trick while being much less suspicious before and after the fact than just happening to have a hiking stick with me, or as Camwyn once suggested in her blog a giant dildo

Like an SSD for your OS install, a mechanical keyboard is now on my short list for cheap things you can add to an existing computer to drastically improve the daily-driver user experience, in other words, and the trackball gets a strong honorable mention. I am very impressed with these Human Interface Device peripherals.

[classicdrogn]

Oh, and since I seem to have mutated the topic to cheap/simple upgrades with a disproportionate user experience effect, feel free to chime in if you have a suggestion along those lines. I've edited the thread and last couple post titles to reflect that change too.

[LynnInDenver]

So the next cheap upgrade I recommend is an adjustable monitor stand that bolts to the VESA bolt pattern on the back of the screen.

I literally have not used an out of the box monitor footing for years now. Admittedly, part of that is because I like to flip monitors to portrait for certain tasks (although lately I've had two screens fixed portrait with the center primary in landscape). Adjustable monitor stands will let you set the height, sometimes will hold two screens, offer a smaller foot on the desk (and some will let you run a bolt through the desk to reduce it even further), and otherwise let you get that screen exactly where you want it.

[classicdrogn]

Hm, well, I did specifically get a graphics card with two HDMI outputs, two DisplayPort, and... I forget what the fifth is. Meh, I think the little side table I have for a monitor stand* has too small a footprint to be stable with a second monitor on it, even just another 24" stacked vertically. Honestly I should probably get a real monitor with a higher refresh rate and lower response time than the cheap Insignia branded 60hz 1080p TV I currently use. Ideally I think I'd get one that that was big enough to have the current screen in portrait on one side of it, for tool palettes and whatnot while I put the main working window on a big, high quality screen. One that could roughly match the size and 1920 long resolution on its short edge would not be cheap, however.



*my computer station is actually assembled around an armchair rather than at a desk as such, with tables at either side for the mouse/trackball and laptop or now the mini-tower lying on its side since I couldn't find a horizontal, "desktop" style case that wasn't Mini-ITX and/or too short and/or shallow for the GPU I'd already ordered when planning to fit things into the salvaged Gateway case I originally intended to use

[LynnInDenver]

Yeah, my last computer was actually a Mini-ITX type. But the case it was in, a Silverstone SG08 (it was built by someone else and then sold to me) was actually capable of fitting most full-size graphics cards. It's actually downstairs in the virtual pinball cabinet now.

Most "desktop" horizontal cases tend to come in preassembled office versions, where you're only getting them as refurbs when the leases are up.

[classicdrogn]

I do actually like the Antec P5 Ultimate Silent case I ended up using - it's got nice solid construction for the most parts, and sound baffle fabric on the inner faces of the (metal! No luser window here!) sides and front door, and a plain white ring that combines power indicator and flashing brighter for disk activity is the only light on the whole thing, so no unicorn vomit either. I did need to drill out about 2/3 of the fake molded plastic intake grilles on the sides of the plastic front bezel and then fix the magnets that hold the door closed when the skinchy plastic tabs holding them broke while cleaning up from that. The thumbscrews to keep the panels on are just nylon, too, but that's also minor and if it really bothered me replacements are something like $5 for a fifty pack. It doesn't have front panel USB 3 so that connector on my mobo is sitting unused, and no feet on the side (though the ones provided to stand it upright are nice sturdy screwed-on metal cylinders with EVA foam pads on the bottom, not just rubber dots stuck on with a layer of cellotape adhesive) but those are really my only gripes about it. It does have somewhat limited cooling support, with one 120mm at the back and one 140 or two more 120s front, but even so and using the stock AMD cooler my CPU temperature is sitting at 75c right now, having been pinned at 100% for hours by Folding@Home. Not super cool as that sort of thing goes, but not bad at all. The Smelleron laptop I was using before the HDD crapped out would idle at 65c and get perilously close to 100c under prolonged load.

Oh, I realized I never mentioned the model of keyboard I got - it's a Redragon K592, in the "dark brown" keycap color with most of them being a near-black barely discernible from the frame in the eshop images and modifier keys in a lighter tone - the other, at least on Amazon, being "brown," with those reversed. They'd match a Noctua theme if that's your thing, but I suspect they were so cheap due to being an unpopular color scheme. I like it though, it's chocolate colored.

[LynnInDenver]

Yeah, my new build I do have a single USB3 port and two USB2 ports on the front (cheap Cooler Master case, so I have watercooling options if I want 'em). Since i wasn't planning on adding anything in the external 3.5" bay, I bought a USB3 card and an insert for that bay so that I have two extra USB3 ports on the front. I pulled the slim laptop style DVD/bluRay unit from the old MiniITX, and bought a simple IcyDock cradle to adapt it to the 5.25 bay.

My keyboard is actually an old IBM Model M. When I bought the motherboard, I didn't realize that PS2 ports were again a thing for gaming motherboards, so I could at least stop using the USB adapter. The keyboard will likely outlive me, and like yours, it would make a handy weapon if I really needed it to be.