Mon Jun 01, 2015 5:02 pm
I was getting weird, sporadic instability in Windows 8.1 Pro x64, usually tied to I/O. A PCIe wireless NIC that worked flawlessly in the box sitting next to the server installed uneventfully in the server, I started a Steam download on the server, server hard locks. Repeat procedure, same thing. Moved card to a different PCIe slot, suddenly everything worked fine. Intermittent hard locks in other things, nearly always tied to I/O. I suspect - sad trombone - it was some nitwitted issue with the IOMMU, as installing the latest AMD platform drivers installed some kind of NULL driver to apparently disable it, and the problem went away. And I could have disabled it in the UEFI/BIOS, but why was it creating instability in the first place?
It's mostly the feeling that I'm dealing with an aging, moribund platform feeding a hot-running and underperforming CPU. A TDP calculator estimated that undervolting the 4100 got it down to around 75 watts, which is fine - lovely, really - but there's no IGP, so I tossed in a Matrox M9120* to handle graphics duty while pulling as little power as possible. And that's workable, but I'm not a starving undergrad any more. Piecemealing ad hoc solutions wasn't really fun when I had the time to futz with them, and as a man in grad school with a full-time job and two young children, I really don't enjoy this kind of troubleshooting much now. If I can free up a little cash, replace what's here with an elegant solution, and let it sip electricity while delivering more oomph under load, there's real value there.
* Yes, really, found it on eBay for a song and grabbed it.
Last edited by
Concupiscence on Tue Jun 02, 2015 9:41 am, edited 2 times in total.
Science: Core i9 7940x, 64 gigs RAM, Vega FE, Xubuntu 20.04
Work: Ryzen 5 3600, 32 gigs RAM, Radeon RX 580, Win10 Pro
Tinker: Core i5 2400, 8 gigs RAM, Radeon R9 280x, Xubuntu 20.04 + MS-DOS 7.10
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