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I'm also all for U.2, but it's frankly a bit of a pain to wrap my head around. The connectors are basically SAS, but the protocol isn't SAS and thus you can't just use any old SAS backplane with U.2. Some SAS HBAs are actually tri-mode and support U.2 NVMe drives alongside the expected SAS and...

Huh, didn't know that about Direct3D 7 and prior. I think I didn't actively notice with the usual Unreal Engine 1 titles (mostly Unreal 1, UT'99, Deus Ex, the well-supported ones) because they have modernized Direct3D 10/11 renderers, which clearly support 4K because I've actually done it...

X299 - not quite the expected C621 server/workstation chipset for that socket, no official RDIMM support. You definitely need UDIMMs. Intel's market segmentation is such a pain with that, gotta have a Xeon and a supported chipset together if you want to even think about cheap RDIMMs and LRDIMMs...

So let's look this up real quick: 16 GB DDR4-2400 ECC UDIMM, Hynix AFR chips? Alas, I can't help with that. All my spare ECC DDR4 happens to be 32 GB RDIMMs - need a server or workstation platform for those. Also, you can get 32 GB DDR4-3200 DDR4 ECC UDIMMs nowadays, though you're looking at...

ECC is something we'd probably have a lot more general understanding of if Intel didn't specifically market-segment it out of the reach of casual computer users. I suppose enabling it on consumer Core i5s and i7s with a W680 motherboard (as opposed to needing a Xeon CPU and a workstation...

Dan_D summed up all the technical issues with trying to synchronize multiple GPUs today, so that's why you don't really see SLI/CrossFire anymore. That doesn't necessarily make multiple GPUs in one computer useless, though, because if you're willing to set up a hypervisor and a few virtual...

Believe it or not, really old graphics cards from the '90s used to have VRAM SIMMs or other upgrade modules, but that practice died out pretty quickly. Good luck finding VRAM SIMMs now! Part of the problem with today's GPUs is similar to what laptops are experiencing with DDR5 and the need for...

As with any hardware, it's all about what you're trying to play, at what settings you want. Love high resolutions and framerate? Don't be surprised if you have to dial down some other in-game settings to keep the framerates up. In turn, you'll have no problem running some old game like Unreal...

I actually bought/traded for 768 GB worth of DDR4 RDIMMs packed in a Lenovo x3650 M5, and since said server has now bricked itself, I'm contemplating a move to another dual LGA2011-3 system with 24 DIMM slots just so I can keep all of that RAM, never mind that the CPUs get trounced by modern...

I've contemplated EPYC builds, but the used parts pricing makes my Threadripper 1950X/X399 setup look cheap, or for that matter, any Haswell/Broadwell-EP dual-LGA2011-3 platform. Can't really justify it when even the Naples (Zen 1) stuff is so pricey, and yet so architecturally behind current...

Well, that Lenovo x3650 M5 decided that it wanted to brick itself out of the blue. IMM2 hangs on trying to get through U-Boot, and without the IMM2 BMC fully booted up, the actual server will hang on "System initializing" forever while ramping the fans up to eardrum-offensive levels. The...

While technically not an ESXi lab (in fact, I migrated from ESXi 5.5.0 to 6.7.0u3, then Proxmox VE at work because nobody wanted to eat the insane cost for new ESXi licenses and our aging HPE Gen8 servers wouldn't have been on the HCL anyway), I'm starting to get hit by the homelab bug pretty...

There's never really been anything truly future-proof over the decades of computing that I've witnessed; the most you can hope for is not unwittingly buying in at the wrong time, just before a major technology gets released, and buying into a platform with unusually long legs. Case in point: my...

As I understand, dual-actuator HDDs are already on the market - with currently existing SATA 6 Gbps/SAS 12 Gbps interfaces, at that, though as I understand it, the SATA ones are especially janky since they can't just present two LUNs like the SAS ones do. (Each actuator is, effectively, a...

As I understand it, Windows actually has never been Microsoft's big money maker - that would be MS Office, as it has been for literal decades, and given how deep my employer is into Office/Microsoft 365 and Teams right now, amongst countless others, I see no reason for that to change any time...

The day Windows decides to no longer permit local, offline installs is the day I stop updating major Windows versions and really put my Linux/BSD migration plans into motion, then ruthlessly sandbox that final version of Windows into a VM. Anti-cheat and DRM systems that don't like VMs can suck...

It's nice to see a re-review down the line that takes updated drivers into account, but as usual, no VR re-benchmarks, which is one of the big reasons I traded my RX 7900 XTX for an RTX 4080 to begin with. (The other reason being that damn vapor chamber defect at launch.) In DCS and NMS back in...

Autonomous driving would definitely be incentive to have all the processing power possible, though I don't foresee myself having such a vehicle any time soon, both for cost reasons and generally preferring to be the one in control of where I'm going. My current GX 470 is about as electrically...

There shouldn't be more than one router on a home network anyway, outside of crazy homelab setups with multiple L3 switches on different subnets. Remember that a typical consumer/residental "router" is also a gateway to the WAN/Internet at large, a firewall to keep bad actors out of your...

Hypervisor users (ESXi, Hyper-V, Proxmox, etc.) are going to love these things. Think about it - a lot of servers in production use are still running Haswell-EP, if not older, and people are running homelabs with hardware of that vintage, myself included. These are for light workloads that...

I stand corrected, then. First post had "Due to its elaborate liquid cooling solution, the card is still 3.5 slots thick" as an article excerpt, the author didn't fact-check, and I didn't immediately perceive the bracket that would've hinted for me to do my own fact-checking. In that case, I...

The vast majority of vehicles are already liquid-cooled, so I can kinda see the logic in this, but I seriously have to ask why they need so much processing power that just having a passively-cooled ECU wouldn't suffice. Note that I have far more concern about reliability in vehicles, and I have...

Asus already has the most unreasonably overpriced GPUs of all the AIBs, and now they're unveiling a halo model of a GPU that most people already can't afford? I can only imagine the profit margins... Also, 3.5 slots thick on a liquid-cooled GPU is a fail. Let's face it - if you're buying a card...

For a mainstream desktop of the sort I'd game on, I'm not touching any pre-built - it's custom or die, baby! I live within driving distance of two Micro Center stores, and you better believe I take advantage of that for most, if not all, of my custom build parts. For a server? You're pretty...

I recently bumped up a coworker's personal MacBook Pro (roughly 2011-2012 vintage) from 4 GB to 8 GB with some freebie DDR3 SO-DIMMs scored on a recent trip, because there was no way Catalina was going to be tolerable on a system with that little RAM and a spinning rust hard drive. (I had...

Had an mce [Hardware Error] log in the middle of a multi-TB copy off of an external USB 3.0 HDD into my server's zpool; while admittedly annoying in that it halted the copy midway, it at least warned me that something wasn't right. Having ECC has already paid off just for that alone, and if...

Tempting, as someone who already has Lighthouse base stations from a Valve Index full kit, but not quite tempting enough without a first-hand demo to see how clearly it can show me those DCS cockpits. Did you ever manage to get past the damn Turbo Tunnel? I never did, so imagine my face when I...

I think that at the time X399 and first-gen Threadripper was released, there were only 16 GB DDR4 UDIMMs at max, so the most that anyone could actually test and verify with on release was 128 GB and it was advertised as such. Later testing with 32 GB UDIMMs from users suggest that 256 GB is...

I'm not the only one seeing the parallels here with what Oracle did to everything Sun Microsystems made, right? Take a popular software tech that's mostly free to use (Java then, Unity now), suddenly tack on all kinds of fees when those devs are entrenched in that tech because of how convenient...

I can't quite get away with that for my main 12700K/RTX 4080 box; Alder Lake steamrolls Haswell-EP in sheer performance, the RTX 4080 won't even fit inside due to the massive heatsink, and VR is so latency-sensitive that even the abstraction of a VM might just add to undesirable performance...

My main i7-12700K/Z690 setup runs 64 GB of unbuffered, non-ECC DDR4, but mostly because it's cheap, it's fast, and Intel withholds ECC support from non-W680 chipsets anyway - a chipset that Micro Center doesn't even sell a single motherboard bearing, to my knowledge. The plan to go ECC was on...

I was planning to outfit my Threadripper 1950X build with 256 GB of unbuffered ECC DDR4 soon. Turns out I got a Lenovo x3650 M5 server with a whopping 768 GB of registered DDR4 for less than the former plan would've cost - more RAM than I really know what to do with right now, especially on a...

"The company further wrote that the servers were running on the same system as its backup, causing the same issue there, so the company couldn't make a switch." This strikes me as a failure of engineering right there, and I'd be curious as to exactly what went wrong so everyone else can avoid...

The fact that they're targeting Unreal Engine specifically is something I find especially insulting, because Unreal Tournament wouldn't have been what it was without all the custom content - UnrealEd was an option on every install, small mods like mutators and maps were automatically downloaded...

Yeah, it's the XL for a reason, though it's actually smaller than my old Corsair Obsidian 800D in every dimension except width. Much of that is likely due to not having 5.25" bays, so they can cut down the depth while still having plenty of room inside. If anything, I'm kinda used to stonking...

Like all those HP Z2 G4 and G9 SFFs I handle at work, which have pretty decent CPUs in them (i7-8700 and i7-12700 respectively) but ship with rather weak sauce Quadro P620 or T1000 cards at most? Those things are literally just one half-decent GPU away from being respectable gaming or 3D...

Depending on what she does in Linux, I can actually understand her not wanting to upgrade. For casual computer usage, you might as well stay current with Linux distros, including new kernels, but then you run into weird hardware edge cases where things break when you least expect it. Case in...

That is some insane profit margin, and if they're actually getting it from companies with deep pockets for GPU compute, I can't really blame them. NVIDIA now really reminds me of where SiliconGraphics was in the early-mid '90s, the one company that everyone had eyes on for when you needed the...

Tell that to my employer; not only do they want our rental computer fleet still on Windows 10 because all the changed menus and such will probably piss off the techs setting them up at the trade shows they're rented to, but we still have some in-house database software still running on a Windows...

I've been tempted by LG's C-series OLED HDTVs for a while now, but I've been concerned about the burn-in risks for something that's mostly going to be used as a giant computer monitor. That's the only thing really holding me back from OLED at the moment. The wait for MicroLED is a grueling one...