So there were 5 traces damaged further away from the chipset, and then 2 damaged right next to it. The very first thing that happened today was the two traces I got on last night came off, stuck to the soldering iron working on a 3rd trace. I just removed everything and started over from scratch. Worked my way from the inside out. Got a better method going with some masking tape to hold the wire mostly in place, and using the precision tweezers literally right next to the iron to hold things still while it made a good contact between the wire and trace.
I was so nervous turning it on for the first time my wife couldn't believe how much I was shaking.
Currently getting Win2K very slowly installed on it. Then drivers, 3DMark test, and maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Quake 3. It currently has a Geforce 4600 in it.
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Red Raevynbecause I only take Bubble BathsRegistered Userregular
I was looking at 3070s on Newegg today and the ti was like $950. Is it Newegg marking them up or is it the manufacturer marking up MSRP?
"Yes." I guess it depends on whether you're looking at reference or third party. I just look at best buy for comparison. The Nvidia card is $600 there, but the others go all the way up to $999.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Well done! Repairing traces is a gigantic pain in the ass. I’m impressed you managed it.
Sounds like a B550 board? If so you should be fine putting an SSD in the PCIE4 M.2 slot. It’s controlled by the CPU rather than the motherboard chipset, but this is the entire point if the B550 chipset - to give you a PCIE4 M.2 slot and video card slot controlled by the CPU without needing a full PCIE4 X570 chipset.
I think you need a 5000 series Ryzen CPU though for PCIE4 to work in those slots, otherwise they’re PCIE3. I think.
my cpu newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/p/N82E16819113567 has 24 4.0 lanes.
my X570 board newegg.com/msi-mpg-x570-gaming-plus/p/N82E16813144262 needs 4 4.0 lanes.
my m.2 drive newegg.com/gigabyte-aorus-1tb/p/N82E16820009012 needs 4 4.0 lanes.
my gpu 3070 is on 16(x) lane 4.0 slot.
New question, is it ok if i just swamp the drive and it will boot fine?
Or do I have to go into bios and change the boot drive over to the new slot?
So there were 5 traces damaged further away from the chipset, and then 2 damaged right next to it. The very first thing that happened today was the two traces I got on last night came off, stuck to the soldering iron working on a 3rd trace. I just removed everything and started over from scratch. Worked my way from the inside out. Got a better method going with some masking tape to hold the wire mostly in place, and using the precision tweezers literally right next to the iron to hold things still while it made a good contact between the wire and trace.
I was so nervous turning it on for the first time my wife couldn't believe how much I was shaking.
Currently getting Win2K very slowly installed on it. Then drivers, 3DMark test, and maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Quake 3. It currently has a Geforce 4600 in it.
You are a very clever boy who deserves a treat!
Seriously, I am hugely impressed. That was an amazing piece of work.
I threw an ancient 2GB sd card into the IDE to SD card adapter I use for retro builds. Makes imaging and restoring the drives a cakewalk. The adapter, not the specific sd card I used. It was so old, it took 2 hours to install Win2K on it last night. Then when I tried to just clone that installation over to a better card after it got to a good stopping point, the BIOS couldn't boot off the clone. Installing Plop Boot Manager to attempt to rescue the situation failed. Plop loaded just fine. But it still couldn't boot off the cloned volume. Oh well. Now I know not to do that again.
Starting from scratch this morning, the whole process took about 30 minutes to an hour. Everything seemed dandy. Then installing all the nForce drivers, specifically the GART driver, caused the screen to corrupt. I know the traces I repaired had to do with the graphics card, so perhaps the repair isn't 100%. But uninstalling that specific driver fixed things right up. There is also the fact that the chipset clearly had a fan fail at some point, so it could be slightly cooked. There is also the fact that when I got the card, most of major caps were leaking, including one by the chipset. So who knows!
The middle audio line-out on the mobo does not appear to work? But they are universal ports configurable in software, so I used the line-in port as a line out and my headphones work great. I have no idea if that was me, or a cap which is dead but visually fine, or what. But I've worked around it for now.
It complained that the DirectX 9.0c installation wasn't a valid windows executable. Return to Castle Wolfenstein ran fine, as did the DirectX 9.0b tests I ran. So I'm not sure that nforce GART driver was strictly necessary. I have a vague recollect at the time of people saying not to even bother installing nforce drivers because they hurt more than they helped? Was that ever a real thing?
I tried running 3DMark03, but it complained it couldn't initialized DX, presumably because it needs 9c. I installed the unofficial SP5.1 which I thought had DX9c included, but it didn't. Eventually found an old copy of the DX9c redist from Feb2010 that was compatible with Win2K. That got me past that error, but then it can't seem to properly install some Futuremark System Info dll. Probably a Win2K thing. So I gave up on that and installed 3DMark2001 instead. It runs just fine.
I'm going to consider this a resounding success. Going to give the board a good cleaning, then put some solder mask on the repair, and call it a job well done. Not bad for my first go. Feel a lot better about recapping that far more expensive and hard to come by Super Socket 7 board that means a lot more to me.
Any cpu fan cooler recommendations for my 3700x? (My funds are very low btw)
Would that $25 be quiet! PURE ROCK SLIM 2 work?
Saw a couple sources metion it having awful thermals. (but still better then stock cooler/cheapo brands)
Any cpu fan cooler recommendations for my 3700x? (My funds are very low btw)
Would that $25 be quiet! PURE ROCK SLIM 2 work?
Saw a couple sources metion it having awful thermals. (but still better then stock cooler/cheapo brands)
Do you have the stock cooler? I'm pretty sure the stock cooler for that chip was the Wraith Prism, which should be a decent cooler considering its only a 65W chip. I'd spend that money somewhere else, like for better memory.
But assuming you don't have the original cooler, that one looks like it would work. Might be a pain to install, and bad thermals could be anything from "I forgot to remove the plastic" or "I forgot the thermal paste" to a warped base on the cooler.
Steam - Synthetic Violence | XBOX Live - Cannonfuse | PSN - CastleBravo | Twitch - SoggybiscuitPA
Any cpu fan cooler recommendations for my 3700x? (My funds are very low btw)
Would that $25 be quiet! PURE ROCK SLIM 2 work?
Saw a couple sources metion it having awful thermals. (but still better then stock cooler/cheapo brands)
Do you have the stock cooler? I'm pretty sure the stock cooler for that chip was the Wraith Prism, which should be a decent cooler considering its only a 65W chip. I'd spend that money somewhere else, like for better memory.
But assuming you don't have the original cooler, that one looks like it would work. Might be a pain to install, and bad thermals could be anything from "I forgot to remove the plastic" or "I forgot the thermal paste" to a warped base on the cooler.
I have to upgrade, because the limited fan options at cyberpowerpc yielded this:
Cooler Master A71C CPU Air Cooler
it has a very small contact, so like 30% of the cpu is actually not being cooled!
I'll order a be quiet or Noctua very very soon, that has a full contact, to save my cpu.
So there were 5 traces damaged further away from the chipset, and then 2 damaged right next to it. The very first thing that happened today was the two traces I got on last night came off, stuck to the soldering iron working on a 3rd trace. I just removed everything and started over from scratch. Worked my way from the inside out. Got a better method going with some masking tape to hold the wire mostly in place, and using the precision tweezers literally right next to the iron to hold things still while it made a good contact between the wire and trace.
I was so nervous turning it on for the first time my wife couldn't believe how much I was shaking.
Currently getting Win2K very slowly installed on it. Then drivers, 3DMark test, and maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Quake 3. It currently has a Geforce 4600 in it.
Hell, that is some impressive wire work there. Great job and I bet your wife can't close her eyes to get away from your beaming.
Update:
Swapped my nvme m.2 from chipset (3.0) slot to cpu (4.0) slot, and it booted fine.
Now to test if it is properly configured.... maybe through bios I guess.
(like if there is a toggle or something, yes all my components will yield the 4.0 speed, just unsure if it works out of the box)
Now to decide on what cpu cooler to buy and order. I never put on a cooler+paste before, and never removed a cooler+paste before, little worried with my shaking hands.
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3cl1ps3I will build a labyrinth to house the cheeseRegistered Userregular
So there were 5 traces damaged further away from the chipset, and then 2 damaged right next to it. The very first thing that happened today was the two traces I got on last night came off, stuck to the soldering iron working on a 3rd trace. I just removed everything and started over from scratch. Worked my way from the inside out. Got a better method going with some masking tape to hold the wire mostly in place, and using the precision tweezers literally right next to the iron to hold things still while it made a good contact between the wire and trace.
I was so nervous turning it on for the first time my wife couldn't believe how much I was shaking.
Currently getting Win2K very slowly installed on it. Then drivers, 3DMark test, and maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Quake 3. It currently has a Geforce 4600 in it.
Like to chime in repairing something like this and taking the time to learn and do it is no small feat.
You should be proud of this because it is a skilled and difficult thing to pull off.
I would honestly consider a long write up on it on Instructables or something and then include that on my CV.
Update:
Swapped my nvme m.2 from chipset (3.0) slot to cpu (4.0) slot, and it booted fine.
Now to test if it is properly configured.... maybe through bios I guess.
(like if there is a toggle or something, yes all my components will yield the 4.0 speed, just unsure if it works out of the box)
Now to decide on what cpu cooler to buy and order. I never put on a cooler+paste before, and never removed a cooler+paste before, little worried with my shaking hands.
@gBAZ - How much are you looking to spend? $50 gets you a Scythe Mugen 5 Rev B, which is the most effortless/user-friendly cooler I've ever installed (they even include the weird long screwdriver to install it). I have one currently on my 3700X and it does a great job.
So there were 5 traces damaged further away from the chipset, and then 2 damaged right next to it. The very first thing that happened today was the two traces I got on last night came off, stuck to the soldering iron working on a 3rd trace. I just removed everything and started over from scratch. Worked my way from the inside out. Got a better method going with some masking tape to hold the wire mostly in place, and using the precision tweezers literally right next to the iron to hold things still while it made a good contact between the wire and trace.
I was so nervous turning it on for the first time my wife couldn't believe how much I was shaking.
Currently getting Win2K very slowly installed on it. Then drivers, 3DMark test, and maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Quake 3. It currently has a Geforce 4600 in it.
Like to chime in repairing something like this and taking the time to learn and do it is no small feat.
You should be proud of this because it is a skilled and difficult thing to pull off.
I would honestly consider a long write up on it on Instructables or something and then include that on my CV.
Yeah.... learning to do it...
So, here is the thing. I've been soldering, oh, maybe 2 weeks? I tried to climb a ladder of projects to prepare myself for this. But I'm sure I did tons of things wrong. I'm shocked it yielded any positive results at all. All I did was study youtube videos, have an approximate notion of how soldering is supposed to work, and dive into the deep end with both feet, confident I could figure it out along the way.
I'll be more confident going "I fixed a motherboard and you can too!" when I'm not damaging the traces I had to repair prying off a heatsink with a screwdriver. :P I went in there like a bull in a china shop, with this being a scrapable practice project. Which was probably the correct mentality to have.
But because tinkering is more fun than playing games, I've not attached an old SATA SSD I never got working with my other retro rig, and am installing XP on that. Used this guide to get the SATA drivers loaded without a floppy drive. So far so good! Gonna see if I can get proper 3DMark03/05 results now. Maybe try the super fancy ram @Bullhead sent me, since that never worked in the other retro rig either. Could have been a compatibility thing.
Edit: Telling WinXP to do a full format of a 1TB drive was a mistake. Turning that off for the night and running memtest on Bullhead's donated ram from last year. So far it seems to be much happier in this motherboard versus the last. If things keep going this well, I might rebuild my Doom 3 machine around it.
I half expect them to have a team of folks who show up at your house to white-glove deliver the upgrade kit and present it on a tray made of thin marble.
Looks like Asus is just done with their Dual line of 3060Tis and 3070s. Vendors with waitlists and/or watchlists have been sending out “tough shit, order cancelled” emails this week. (Well, at least Bottom Line Telecom and B&H Photo are.)
I half expect them to have a team of folks who show up at your house to white-glove deliver the upgrade kit and present it on a tray made of thin marble.
tan and beige marble
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
I don't think this was mentioned, but in Nvidia's earnings report this week they are now warning that they don't expect GPU supply issues to be resolved for "the majority of 2022"
So I think I'm giving up on PC gaming, except for the Steam Deck.
Managed to make it to the front of the line in the AMD queue, but 6800xt's were completely gone.
They're just... not making very many of the good RDNA2s at all. They could be selling 10 or 20 times as many as they're moving right now (eg: by selling one to me!) but they're just making more dollars per square millimeter of precious 7nm etched silicon with their CPUs. And it's not a small opportunity cost, either.
Even in the consumer space, AMD have to decide to pass on selling 6 Ryzen 5800xs or 3 5950Xs for every 6800XT they ship. About $2400 or so at retail price. That's a lot of revenue to turn down for a "$650" GPU.
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OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
Managed to make it to the front of the line in the AMD queue, but 6800xt's were completely gone.
They're just... not making very many of the good RDNA2s at all. They could be selling 10 or 20 times as many as they're moving right now (eg: by selling one to me!) but they're just making more dollars per square millimeter of precious 7nm etched silicon with their CPUs. And it's not a small opportunity cost, either.
Even in the consumer space, AMD have to decide to pass on selling 6 Ryzen 5800xs or 3 5950Xs for every 6800XT they ship. About $2400 or so at retail price. That's a lot of revenue to turn down for a "$650" GPU.
Wow. The economics there mean they want to ship just enough that they're still in the game for the next gen because ye gods that's a lot of revenue if they can repurpose it to CPUs.
yeah, and I mean, AMD would absolutely make more of everything and sell more of everything if there was fab capacity, there just... isn't. Intel and Nvidia are in similar, but different boats (since neither of them make both CPU and GPU like AMD). AMD also has the added thing that they make the APU that goes in every Playstation and Xbox, and more consoles sell than video cards by a wide margin. so there's also that.
And yes, in general the dies for higher end parts are larger than lower end. So the physical die of say, the RTX 3080 Ti is larger than the die for the 3060. but the 3080 Ti will have a higher profit margin than the 3060 (assuming MSRP), so there's a balance of making more of the smaller, cheaper, more popular part, or making fewer of the larger parts but making more money per part.
OrcaAlso known as EspressosaurusWrexRegistered Userregular
With the CPUs though, AMD can sell as many dang 5900X and 5950X parts as they can put out, so they've got to be production limited there. And is supply still constrained for the 5800X? I assume those parts could either be routed to the 5800X or the 5950X.
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Red Raevynbecause I only take Bubble BathsRegistered Userregular
Managed to make it to the front of the line in the AMD queue, but 6800xt's were completely gone.
They're just... not making very many of the good RDNA2s at all. They could be selling 10 or 20 times as many as they're moving right now (eg: by selling one to me!) but they're just making more dollars per square millimeter of precious 7nm etched silicon with their CPUs. And it's not a small opportunity cost, either.
Even in the consumer space, AMD have to decide to pass on selling 6 Ryzen 5800xs or 3 5950Xs for every 6800XT they ship. About $2400 or so at retail price. That's a lot of revenue to turn down for a "$650" GPU.
That's an interesting comparison of area, but is it actually true that it's a choice? I'd expect it to be completely different production facilities that are either set up for the CPU or GPU, especially given all that I've learned about how difficult it is to spool anything up in that arena. But maybe it's less about the configuration than having dibs on the facility (and just saying change our reservation from this to that) - I don't know but I'd love to learn more.
Managed to make it to the front of the line in the AMD queue, but 6800xt's were completely gone.
They're just... not making very many of the good RDNA2s at all. They could be selling 10 or 20 times as many as they're moving right now (eg: by selling one to me!) but they're just making more dollars per square millimeter of precious 7nm etched silicon with their CPUs. And it's not a small opportunity cost, either.
Even in the consumer space, AMD have to decide to pass on selling 6 Ryzen 5800xs or 3 5950Xs for every 6800XT they ship. About $2400 or so at retail price. That's a lot of revenue to turn down for a "$650" GPU.
That's an interesting comparison of area, but is it actually true that it's a choice? I'd expect it to be completely different production facilities that are either set up for the CPU or GPU, especially given all that I've learned about how difficult it is to spool anything up in that arena. But maybe it's less about the configuration than having dibs on the facility (and just saying change our reservation from this to that) - I don't know but I'd love to learn more.
RDNA2 and Zen3 are both fabbed for AMD by tSMC on their 7nm process. As are the Xbox and Playstation APUs, which by all accounts have been eating a huge portion of their wafer allocation. There are other considerations - there's the IMC for Zen; there's GDDR6 for video cards - but they all tilt the balance even further to AMD producing CPUs instead of GPUs. As said above, they're producing just enough to keep a presence in the video card market against the time when Xbox/PS5 demand dies back and allows them to produce more of the really profitable SKUs. But as that production capacity frees up, they'll divert the lion's share to the far more profitable lines, and right now that's not even consumer CPUs but the Epyc server CPUs, and after that, server/AI GPUs, both of which command huge margins. Unfortunately, the consumer GPU market is AMD's 5th most profitable line, and it's going to be constrained until TSMC open the new fabs they have planned.
Managed to make it to the front of the line in the AMD queue, but 6800xt's were completely gone.
They're just... not making very many of the good RDNA2s at all. They could be selling 10 or 20 times as many as they're moving right now (eg: by selling one to me!) but they're just making more dollars per square millimeter of precious 7nm etched silicon with their CPUs. And it's not a small opportunity cost, either.
Even in the consumer space, AMD have to decide to pass on selling 6 Ryzen 5800xs or 3 5950Xs for every 6800XT they ship. About $2400 or so at retail price. That's a lot of revenue to turn down for a "$650" GPU.
That's an interesting comparison of area, but is it actually true that it's a choice? I'd expect it to be completely different production facilities that are either set up for the CPU or GPU, especially given all that I've learned about how difficult it is to spool anything up in that arena. But maybe it's less about the configuration than having dibs on the facility (and just saying change our reservation from this to that) - I don't know but I'd love to learn more.
Yep, they do have to allocate production in a facility. AMD is actually the best example as both their current Ryzen 5xxx CPU's and RDNA2 GPU's are built on 7nm process nodes. So if you have a TSMC facility, it has a fixed number of wafer starts at 7nm. AMD can allocate the capacity it's purchased how it wants, but it is limited by the number of 7nm nodes there are. And when you have a bunch of Ryzen Desktop CPU's, Ryzen mobile CPU's, GPU's, Xbox processors, Playstation Processors, and EPYC datacenter CPU's.... that capacity goes fast.
In a way, calling the issues we are experiencing a "shortage" isn't even the right term. There is more fab production capacity today than at any time in the history of making microprocessors. It is the demand that's off the charg.
I could use some advice on a PC build. I'm looking at doing a Mini-ITX build, and based my selections mostly off of logicalincrements.com and the Tom's Hardware review of the case. Beyond that I don't know too much about the part selection, ie whether what I've chosen is a good choice and if there are other options to consider at either higher or lower price points. This would be for software development and gaming. The GPU is one I already have from last year when prices weren't quite so insane.
Posts
https://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc/comments/p59674/does_my_pc_get_enough_sleep/
That still seems like a pretty solid increase, even if PCIE3 is fast enough.
Edit: Found this video, which I think makes your point far better.
Steam: pazython
After:
The results?
So there were 5 traces damaged further away from the chipset, and then 2 damaged right next to it. The very first thing that happened today was the two traces I got on last night came off, stuck to the soldering iron working on a 3rd trace. I just removed everything and started over from scratch. Worked my way from the inside out. Got a better method going with some masking tape to hold the wire mostly in place, and using the precision tweezers literally right next to the iron to hold things still while it made a good contact between the wire and trace.
I was so nervous turning it on for the first time my wife couldn't believe how much I was shaking.
Currently getting Win2K very slowly installed on it. Then drivers, 3DMark test, and maybe Return to Castle Wolfenstein or Quake 3. It currently has a Geforce 4600 in it.
"Yes." I guess it depends on whether you're looking at reference or third party. I just look at best buy for comparison. The Nvidia card is $600 there, but the others go all the way up to $999.
Absolute king
my cpu newegg.com/amd-ryzen-7-3700x/p/N82E16819113567 has 24 4.0 lanes.
my X570 board newegg.com/msi-mpg-x570-gaming-plus/p/N82E16813144262 needs 4 4.0 lanes.
my m.2 drive newegg.com/gigabyte-aorus-1tb/p/N82E16820009012 needs 4 4.0 lanes.
my gpu 3070 is on 16(x) lane 4.0 slot.
New question, is it ok if i just swamp the drive and it will boot fine?
Or do I have to go into bios and change the boot drive over to the new slot?
You are a very clever boy who deserves a treat!
Seriously, I am hugely impressed. That was an amazing piece of work.
I threw an ancient 2GB sd card into the IDE to SD card adapter I use for retro builds. Makes imaging and restoring the drives a cakewalk. The adapter, not the specific sd card I used. It was so old, it took 2 hours to install Win2K on it last night. Then when I tried to just clone that installation over to a better card after it got to a good stopping point, the BIOS couldn't boot off the clone. Installing Plop Boot Manager to attempt to rescue the situation failed. Plop loaded just fine. But it still couldn't boot off the cloned volume. Oh well. Now I know not to do that again.
Starting from scratch this morning, the whole process took about 30 minutes to an hour. Everything seemed dandy. Then installing all the nForce drivers, specifically the GART driver, caused the screen to corrupt. I know the traces I repaired had to do with the graphics card, so perhaps the repair isn't 100%. But uninstalling that specific driver fixed things right up. There is also the fact that the chipset clearly had a fan fail at some point, so it could be slightly cooked. There is also the fact that when I got the card, most of major caps were leaking, including one by the chipset. So who knows!
The middle audio line-out on the mobo does not appear to work? But they are universal ports configurable in software, so I used the line-in port as a line out and my headphones work great. I have no idea if that was me, or a cap which is dead but visually fine, or what. But I've worked around it for now.
It complained that the DirectX 9.0c installation wasn't a valid windows executable. Return to Castle Wolfenstein ran fine, as did the DirectX 9.0b tests I ran. So I'm not sure that nforce GART driver was strictly necessary. I have a vague recollect at the time of people saying not to even bother installing nforce drivers because they hurt more than they helped? Was that ever a real thing?
I tried running 3DMark03, but it complained it couldn't initialized DX, presumably because it needs 9c. I installed the unofficial SP5.1 which I thought had DX9c included, but it didn't. Eventually found an old copy of the DX9c redist from Feb2010 that was compatible with Win2K. That got me past that error, but then it can't seem to properly install some Futuremark System Info dll. Probably a Win2K thing. So I gave up on that and installed 3DMark2001 instead. It runs just fine.
I'm going to consider this a resounding success. Going to give the board a good cleaning, then put some solder mask on the repair, and call it a job well done. Not bad for my first go. Feel a lot better about recapping that far more expensive and hard to come by Super Socket 7 board that means a lot more to me.
Would that $25 be quiet! PURE ROCK SLIM 2 work?
Saw a couple sources metion it having awful thermals. (but still better then stock cooler/cheapo brands)
Do you have the stock cooler? I'm pretty sure the stock cooler for that chip was the Wraith Prism, which should be a decent cooler considering its only a 65W chip. I'd spend that money somewhere else, like for better memory.
But assuming you don't have the original cooler, that one looks like it would work. Might be a pain to install, and bad thermals could be anything from "I forgot to remove the plastic" or "I forgot the thermal paste" to a warped base on the cooler.
I have to upgrade, because the limited fan options at cyberpowerpc yielded this:
Cooler Master A71C CPU Air Cooler
it has a very small contact, so like 30% of the cpu is actually not being cooled!
I'll order a be quiet or Noctua very very soon, that has a full contact, to save my cpu.
Hell, that is some impressive wire work there. Great job and I bet your wife can't close her eyes to get away from your beaming.
Steam: betsuni7
Swapped my nvme m.2 from chipset (3.0) slot to cpu (4.0) slot, and it booted fine.
Now to test if it is properly configured.... maybe through bios I guess.
(like if there is a toggle or something, yes all my components will yield the 4.0 speed, just unsure if it works out of the box)
Now to decide on what cpu cooler to buy and order. I never put on a cooler+paste before, and never removed a cooler+paste before, little worried with my shaking hands.
Gigabyte looked at NZXT's dustup with GN and thought "hold my beer"
Like to chime in repairing something like this and taking the time to learn and do it is no small feat.
You should be proud of this because it is a skilled and difficult thing to pull off.
I would honestly consider a long write up on it on Instructables or something and then include that on my CV.
@gBAZ - How much are you looking to spend? $50 gets you a Scythe Mugen 5 Rev B, which is the most effortless/user-friendly cooler I've ever installed (they even include the weird long screwdriver to install it). I have one currently on my 3700X and it does a great job.
Yeah.... learning to do it...
So, here is the thing. I've been soldering, oh, maybe 2 weeks? I tried to climb a ladder of projects to prepare myself for this. But I'm sure I did tons of things wrong. I'm shocked it yielded any positive results at all. All I did was study youtube videos, have an approximate notion of how soldering is supposed to work, and dive into the deep end with both feet, confident I could figure it out along the way.
I'll be more confident going "I fixed a motherboard and you can too!" when I'm not damaging the traces I had to repair prying off a heatsink with a screwdriver. :P I went in there like a bull in a china shop, with this being a scrapable practice project. Which was probably the correct mentality to have.
But because tinkering is more fun than playing games, I've not attached an old SATA SSD I never got working with my other retro rig, and am installing XP on that. Used this guide to get the SATA drivers loaded without a floppy drive. So far so good! Gonna see if I can get proper 3DMark03/05 results now. Maybe try the super fancy ram @Bullhead sent me, since that never worked in the other retro rig either. Could have been a compatibility thing.
Edit: Telling WinXP to do a full format of a 1TB drive was a mistake. Turning that off for the night and running memtest on Bullhead's donated ram from last year. So far it seems to be much happier in this motherboard versus the last. If things keep going this well, I might rebuild my Doom 3 machine around it.
I half expect them to have a team of folks who show up at your house to white-glove deliver the upgrade kit and present it on a tray made of thin marble.
tan and beige marble
Surprised the box doesn't highlight NoScope Protection.
Hm, yes, this will do.
So I think I'm giving up on PC gaming, except for the Steam Deck.
They're just... not making very many of the good RDNA2s at all. They could be selling 10 or 20 times as many as they're moving right now (eg: by selling one to me!) but they're just making more dollars per square millimeter of precious 7nm etched silicon with their CPUs. And it's not a small opportunity cost, either.
6800XT: 520mm^2
Zen3 chiplet: 84mm^2
Even in the consumer space, AMD have to decide to pass on selling 6 Ryzen 5800xs or 3 5950Xs for every 6800XT they ship. About $2400 or so at retail price. That's a lot of revenue to turn down for a "$650" GPU.
Wow. The economics there mean they want to ship just enough that they're still in the game for the next gen because ye gods that's a lot of revenue if they can repurpose it to CPUs.
And yes, in general the dies for higher end parts are larger than lower end. So the physical die of say, the RTX 3080 Ti is larger than the die for the 3060. but the 3080 Ti will have a higher profit margin than the 3060 (assuming MSRP), so there's a balance of making more of the smaller, cheaper, more popular part, or making fewer of the larger parts but making more money per part.
RDNA2 and Zen3 are both fabbed for AMD by tSMC on their 7nm process. As are the Xbox and Playstation APUs, which by all accounts have been eating a huge portion of their wafer allocation. There are other considerations - there's the IMC for Zen; there's GDDR6 for video cards - but they all tilt the balance even further to AMD producing CPUs instead of GPUs. As said above, they're producing just enough to keep a presence in the video card market against the time when Xbox/PS5 demand dies back and allows them to produce more of the really profitable SKUs. But as that production capacity frees up, they'll divert the lion's share to the far more profitable lines, and right now that's not even consumer CPUs but the Epyc server CPUs, and after that, server/AI GPUs, both of which command huge margins. Unfortunately, the consumer GPU market is AMD's 5th most profitable line, and it's going to be constrained until TSMC open the new fabs they have planned.
Yep, they do have to allocate production in a facility. AMD is actually the best example as both their current Ryzen 5xxx CPU's and RDNA2 GPU's are built on 7nm process nodes. So if you have a TSMC facility, it has a fixed number of wafer starts at 7nm. AMD can allocate the capacity it's purchased how it wants, but it is limited by the number of 7nm nodes there are. And when you have a bunch of Ryzen Desktop CPU's, Ryzen mobile CPU's, GPU's, Xbox processors, Playstation Processors, and EPYC datacenter CPU's.... that capacity goes fast.
In a way, calling the issues we are experiencing a "shortage" isn't even the right term. There is more fab production capacity today than at any time in the history of making microprocessors. It is the demand that's off the charg.
And they are gone. Now to bite my nails until I see the shipping confirmation, then switch to shitting my pants until it's in my hands.
I could use some advice on a PC build. I'm looking at doing a Mini-ITX build, and based my selections mostly off of logicalincrements.com and the Tom's Hardware review of the case. Beyond that I don't know too much about the part selection, ie whether what I've chosen is a good choice and if there are other options to consider at either higher or lower price points. This would be for software development and gaming. The GPU is one I already have from last year when prices weren't quite so insane.
PCPartPicker Part List
CPU: Intel Core i5-11600K 3.9 GHz 6-Core Processor ($259.99 @ Newegg)
CPU Cooler: Cooler Master MasterLiquid ML120R RGB 66.7 CFM Liquid CPU Cooler ($109.99 @ Amazon)
Motherboard: ASRock Z590 Phantom Gaming-ITX/TB4 Mini ITX LGA1200 Motherboard ($230.00 @ Amazon)
Memory: G.Skill Ripjaws V 64 GB (2 x 32 GB) DDR4-3600 CL18 Memory ($289.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Crucial P2 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive ($104.99 @ Amazon)
Video Card: EVGA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 6 GB SC ULTRA GAMING Video Card (Purchased For $0.00)
Case: Phanteks EVOLV SHIFT 2 AIR Mini ITX Tower Case ($99.99 @ Amazon)
Power Supply: Corsair SF 750 W 80+ Platinum Certified Fully Modular SFX Power Supply ($182.38 @ Amazon)
Total: $1277.33
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2021-08-20 17:31 EDT-0400
Thanks for any advice!