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^ I think the Crucial MX500 is mid-performance, the Samsung is the highest, and the WD and Intel fall in between. The Adata is the lowest performance, but only for very intense workloads. For basic office productivity, all of these drives are fine. If you do multimedia editing or something like that...

WD Blue 3D NAND, Samsung 860 EVO, Crucial MX500, Intel 545s, Adata SU800 are some plain, solid, drives to consider. They all got good reviews. The Sandisk Ultra 3D NAND is a rebranded WD Blue 3D NAND, so it's good. Make sure you only get an SSD with DRAM. All the drives I listed have DRAM. I think b...

Hmm, if the BIOS says the multiplier is 9, but it's stuck to 6 in Windows, then I wonder if the problem is in Windows. As I mentioned, try Linux. But also, check if the power settings in Windows are correct. I know you said it's set to "High Performance," but maybe something messed up the ...

Reset your BIOS to factory. Use HWiNFO64 to check temps, fan speeds, etc. Get some compressed air and clean your tower out. And maybe the thermal paste is getting old? If your temps are high, try reinstalling the heatsink with new paste. Try running a stress test in Linux to see if the issue is OS. ...

Oh, one thing just occurred to me: you should probably get a new PSU. First, those pops you are hearing could be coming from the PSU. And even if they aren't, the old PSU is getting old, and it probably isn't as good at delivering clean power as it was when it was new. Either that PSU is dying, or i...

I'm glad I helped! The one downside is that even though the Ryzen 3xxx has PCIe 4.0, on an old motherboard (X470, B450), only the graphics card slot will be 4.0. To use the rest of the 4.0 channels from the Ryzen 3xxx, yoi need whatever new motherboard chipset will come out. Of course, if you went w...

Update: So the MSI B450 Tomahawk says this about its latest BIOS update: "Support new upcoming AMD cpu." So you should be good. My suggestion, then, is that instead of getting a Ryzen 7 2700X, you get a Ryzen 3 2200G for $200 less and wait for Ryzen 3xxx to come out. And then, with that Ry...

I'd wait for Ryzen 3xxx to come out. Some rumors are still saying there might be a Ryzen 3900 with 16 cores. With 16 cores, you should really be able to multitask (game + stream) without worries. At the very least, the release of Ryzen 3xxx should cause prices of Ryzen 2xxx to fall. If you absolutel...

Run some typical software/games with coretemp visible and see what the "slack" in your system is. For me in an air-conditioned office at 24C, my CPU is at 35C idle, but full load puts it on 61C within a couple of seconds, at which point it sort of stabilises but with a gradual ramp up to ...

I'm interested in seeing results too. I value reliability over performance (as long as it doesn't cost too much performance), so if a graphite pad can get longer longevity and reduced degradation and reduced odds of mis-application, at only a degree or two higher, then I'd strongly consider using a ...

Oh, okay, I didn't realize that mSATA-to-PATA adapters existed. Cool! Now that you mention it, it makes sense, but I just didn't think of it. I was imagining you using one of these kinds of adapters, and I couldn't figure out how you did it in a laptop: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=sata+to+pata&re...

I'm really curious: how did you get an SSD in that laptop? The ThinkPad 380 is from 1997, so Pentium II era. So it must have Parallel ATA/66, right? How did you get an SSD to work with the PATA interface? Online, I can find some PATA/IDE-SATA adapters, but I'm surprised you were able to fit it in th...

I'd be hesitant to reuse the old PSU. A lot of people on these forums have weird, mysterious problems that often get traced back to an old PSU they reused. A dying PSU might appear to be working, but if its power delivery is beginning to fail, it can cause random, mysterious system crashes. Moreover...

I second Airmantharp. The market for brand-new desktops with multiple GPUs is almost non-existent, and what does exist is very expensive and niche, so the market for used desktops is going to be even closer to non-existent. You're looking for a red polka-dotted needle in a blue striped haystack. If ...

People here are saying that when they use a PCIe x1 riser instead of a true x16 slot for folding, they experience a 10-20 percent performance drop. But that's per GPU. So if you can find a mining rig with (say) 10 GPUs, then you'll get the performance of 10 GPUs minus 20%, which comes out to 8 GPUs....

Whether a mining rig will be good for folding will depend on whether folding has high bandwidth requirements. Typically, a mining rig has many PCIe x1 slots that are connected by a set of risers to x16 graphics cards, but with only x1 bandwidth. So each graphics card gets only 1/16 the bandwidth it ...

Need to buy a Video Card) Has no onboard Graphics . . . Not sure if it is worth buying a video card for system #1 and run pfsense or freenas on it. If you don't think you'd be using the graphics very often, how about a 2D USB-HDMI graphics adapter? See here . They're only about $50, so it would be ...

Okay, now I am astounded. I just ran what's called a "synthetic control" on both the Google Compute Xeon 48 core / 96 thread and my 8 core Ryzen 7 2700X. The synthetic control method is an actual method I use in real-life, so it is 100% realistic. In fact, I was interested in the Google Co...

Let's look at some benchmarks. I'll use GeekBench4 since that's multithreaded and it's easy to find scores. The Intel Q4400 gets around 5000 in GeekBench4 Multi-Core. See here . The Pentium G5400 gets around 7,000 to 8,000, here . So yes, that's an upgrade. I couldn't find a Ryzen 3 2200 on GeekBenc...

My suspicion is that you'll want at least as many cores. Plus, thanks to the Ryzen revolution, cores are cheap. Look at a cheap 4 core Ryzen.

A Pentium G5400 is $80 on Newegg. A quad core Ryzen 3 2200G is $95. Plus you get Integrated Vega graphics with that.

Also, if the Google Compute + 48 core Xeon is only 6 times faster than my 4 core Core i7, then it's only equivalent to a 24 core Core i7. So I might just have to buy my own 32 core ThreadRipper someday. (Or whatever the equivalent of a 32 core ThreadRipper will be in the future.)

I just ran another benchmark, this one from 7zip. I am in my office, so my computer here is a 4-core Core i7-7700 @ 3.60 GHz. with Windows 10. Instructions: (1) Windows: https://www.7-cpu.com/utils.html --> download 7bench1400.7z --> extract ---> execute "7zr64.exe b" in cmd.exe (2) Linux:...

So I've thought about buying a ThreadRipper, but in the meantime, I thought I'd try out the Google Compute Engine, which lets you operate a cloud VM from Google's servers. (Recently, Google announced that the record for calculating digits of pi had been broken using the Google Compute Engine.) So I ...

Check disk usage in Task Manager and see if either disk is being constantly accessed. You can also get more detailed information from a system information monitor. For example, I use HWiNFO64, and for each drive, it shows me: Drive Temperature Drive Remaining Life Drive Failure (y/n) Drive Warning (...

I'm not a cabling expert, but solid core sounds weird. Ethernet typically uses twisted pair. Early Ethernet used coaxial, and some exotic Ethernet uses fiber optic. So I'm not sure what a solid core Ethernet cable is supposed to be, unless it's a legacy coaxial cable. Anyway, the first thing I'd wor...

I'm glad the problem appears to be fixed, and I hope it stays that way! I'm curious if you'd be willing to try something to indulge my curiosity. Now that you know the Mushkin drive was bad, I'd like to see the results of benchmarks and diagnostics. I don't have any bad drives in my possession, so I...

As roncat said, something worse is afoot. Drivers don't just disappear. Furthermore, Windows always has sufficient drivers to at least get a system working. When you first install Windows, but before you install manufacturer drivers, the system still works well enough to at least get on the internet...

I second what Meerkt said about booting to a Linux USB and backing up your data to an external drive. Another option is to get a cheap SSD and replace your laptop's drive with it. Put your laptop's original SSD into a USB enclosure. Then, install Windows to the cheap SSD you just installed in your l...

For example, I'm comparing an ASRock X470 Taichi to an ASRock Fatal1ty B450 Gaming K4. The X470 has 8 SATA (6 chipset, 2 third-party) while the B450 has only 6 SATA (4 chipset, 2 third-party). The X470 has 8 USB (six 3.1 Gen1, one 3.1 Gen2 Type-C, one 3.1 Gen2 Type-A) while the B450 also has 8 USB b...

The B450 and X470 are very similar. The only differences I am aware of are: --- The X470 supports SLI, allowing two PCIe x16 (physical) slots to operate at x8 (electrically) so that you can have two graphics cards, and --- The X470 has more USB and SATA. So if you want to have dual graphics cards, y...