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I've decided that, unlike others; I'm not really a collector. I don't really have a collection. It's more like the U.S. Air Force's boneyard, or the Navy's "mothball fleet". Much of what I have are either the actual items that I had and used, or a specimen that I picked up later so I can kind of commemorate the original. What am I talking about and what started me down this dusty trail?
Ikea's ubiquitous "Lack" floating wall-shelves. They range from $10 to $20 depending on length and are so common, there's a whole sub-culture built around "hacks" people do with them. Me? I just use them to put my old technology stuff on..... along with a few pictures and nic-nacs......, but mostly...... it's old tech. And now that I have a kind-of, sort-of man-cave; I've put up a few of these and have a place to put old tech that mean something to me.
Although, I just generally love technology, I blame becoming infected by the "collection" disease on this.... the IBM ThinkPad 701c. One of these, was my very first laptop and I loved pretty much everything about it. So, a few years ago, I went out and bought one to represent the original that I owned and used for several years before moving on. So, am I a ThinkPad collector? Not quite. Although I'll admit to having several which are for display only, I only have ones that are especially significant to me..... like the 701c. I also have an X20 (complete with X2 Ultrabase) and both a 760CD (complete with Dock) as well as an A31p (complete with Dock). The last two, partially because they were used on the Space Shuttle and/or the International Space Station.
Oh.... and I like docks too.
I also have the IBM WorkPad C505 which was the pinnacle of 6 different organizers I personally used during the height of the PDA era during the 90's. And there's the ThinkPad Tablet (1st version running Android); my very first tablet. Uh, I have the matching dock as well, and of course the charging cradle for the WorkPad.
I can definitely claim that I'm not really a true "collector" or I'd have the Palm Pilot Professional and Handspring Edge (both of which I own and used) in my little menagerie. Of course, if you follow that logic, I'd also have the following ThinkPads (600e, 600x, T20, T21p, T22p, T23p, T30, T40, T41p, T42p, T43p, X30, X31, X300, X301, X1, A21, A22, A30, A31, A31p, T430s, T530) in the collection as well.
..... but...... it's not a collection..... Next time, the other non- collection.
This has been my life the last month. As of this weekend, you can add my son's broken arm to the auto accidents. He literally fell out of a tree (tree house) and broken his humorus just below the ball. Clean break, but it was completely offset and needed two pins to hold it all back in place! He'll be "sidelined" for 2 months. So, to stem the tide of craziness in my life, on to my the progress of my slow-moving workstation build.
There is in fact progress: I bought a Gigabyte (you were expecting something else?), GA-X99 Gaming 5p motherboard. It's a pretty high-end board in a high-end category, so yeah, it's nice. They currently sell on Newegg for just south of $400. I bought it for $90 shipped because it has some dinged up socket pins that need fixing. It's a calculated risk, but I've got my fingers crossed and have some time to be patient with it. In case you were wondering, I have in fact successfully straightened socket pins and the machine that was built out of it is still in operation a year later. I'm not going to get into a full on review here since there are some excellent ones already out there on this specific board, but I'll highlight some things that I specifically targeted that took me to this particular model.
I'm a bit of an audiophile, so the special audio section on this board was "a thing" for me. It's not only isolated on the board, but the components are very much in line with clean sound reproduction, down to the replaceable OpAmp and Burr-Brown DAC. This was the single reason why I went with the "Gaming 5p" vs the various other X99 board by Gigabyte.
The other big deal is the M.2 sockets that will allow me to use the latest and fastest interface out there for the primary boot drive. But that's only half the equation.....
In the M.2 world (roughly speaking), there are 3 types of drives. One is represented by the Sandisk X400 in the top image. You can in fact, get it in either a regular 2.5" SATA3, or the M.2 2280 form-factor, but they both run at the SATA3 speed which is maxed at 600MB/s. The only advantage of using this drive vs. a regular 2.5" drive is that it can be mounted on the board-mounted socket vs. a drive-bay requiring both a power and data cable. Then there's the next level of M.2 drives as represented by the Intel 600p. It does actually use the PCIe interface vs. SATA3 and has a read speed over 1000MB/s faster than the X400. That's a lot, but it's a cheap drive and it's write speed at 560MB/s isn't any better than SATA3 and in fact is actually slower than the X400!!! Yes, on your boot drive, you read way more than you write, but still.... that's really a half-measure, so why do it. Then there's this......
It's the Plextor M6e in the M.2 2280 package with, and without the PCIe card adapter. It's a full on PCIe interface with a throughput far in excess of SATA3. Those of you that have been looking into these things might have already seen that it's a 2 year old drive and that it's nowhere near as fast as the current crop of NVMe drives which represent the third group, such as the Samsung 850/860 drives and Plextor's own M8, but neither does it cost as much either. Yes, right now, the 512Gb capacity is $700 on Newegg, but I got mine for less than $120 shipped. These, like anything else are subject to "early adopters" who buy high, and keep on doing so, then sell off for pennies-on-the-dollar when something new comes along.
So, at this stage, I've got two of the four "new" pieces I need to buy to move on to the new workstation. It's going to get quite a bit harder and more expensive after this with the DDR4 ram and an i7 Haswell-E or Broadwell-E processor. The memory is going to cost me another $100 to $125, the CPU...... ah...... something along the lines of $300 for the "low-end", 5820K which is a mere Hex-Core clocked at 3.3Ghz. There's some growth potential here though; which is like a baseball scout saying that a skinny, lanky 6'6" 17 year-old lefty who throws in the high 80's has some projectability! The LGA-2011 v3, right now has processors that start with the 5820K at 6 cores and end with the ten-core 6950X. The chipset gives you 8 sockets for a max of 64Gb of RAM. The higher end processors have 40 data lanes, so you can put 4 graphics cards in it running at full tilt. I should be able to get some years out of they system.
Which brings me to this. Remember when I gambled on the "next-gen" monitor...... a 28" 4K ThinkVision Pro2840m for $126 being run by the GTX 770? Yeah, the original problem with it going into power-save came back. It detects but mostly refuses to fire up. So, I had to go to my backup plan (always have a backup plan), which was to call on the 2 more years of warranty left on this monitor and send it back to Lenovo for repair.
We had a wreck. More correctly; we had two wrecks. One was in Washington D.C. where someone rear-ended our rental, so it was not really an issue. However, the one the week we got back was kind of a "big deal". For one, it caused an injury to my wife's thumb which required surgery, and secondly, it totaled the Honda.... our much beloved, 40mpg, 2008 Civic Hybrid. May it rest in peace.
I've come to the conclusion that I hate car shopping!!! That's weird for me since I used to love it. That should be obvious for a person who's owned a VW GTI, a Honda CRX, an Audi 90 and even a BMW M5, but now...... I absolutely detested the experience! It's not that I've lost the touch, I haven't. I was able to identify a good price, good mileage, on a good car.... That wasn't the issue. It's the circumstances, that's the problem.
I'm a man with a ball and chain! Let me start from the beginning:
- We got the insurance part squared away and they paid out about what we were expecting, $4400.
- It was decided that we'd just spend that amount on a car and no more since we're paying on the "new" Tahoe still for 3 more years. So the logical thing is to get something that'll bridge the gap, then get another vehicle after the truck is paid off, at which time, my son will be about driving age and will need a car. So we were really shopping for him.... 3 years ahead of time!
- We liked the Civic and the kind of gas mileage that it got. It makes a good pairing with the rather large SUV, that's the other vehicle.
- We're still a family of four, with rapidly growing kids, so 2-door cars or trucks were "out".
- It needed to fit my wife's list of needs and avoid her dislikes (read prejudices). That would include anything boxy, wagon, minivan, weird brands (sorry Subaru or anything European), or "cheap", which leaves Honda and Toyota. Neither one of us are Nissan fans and the rental, which was a Nissan Versa reinforced our opinions.
So, a Honda or Toyota of similar year as our '08 Civic with less than 150,000 miles was on my list. Oh yeah, we both dislike my father-in-law's Camry, so....... Accord, or Civic. She decided the Accord was too big, which...... led us right back to where we were 6 years ago when we bought the Civic. A Civic!
You know; Craigslist is a wonderful thing, and I've been able to find all manner of useful stuff on it over the years. And this occasion was no different. I was able to find 2006 to 2010 Civics by the dozen. I will have to say that "Salvage Titled" cars and the "Coupe" version were a pain in my behind, but overall, it wasn't too bad.
The problem was that, although I could find cars I wanted..... at a good price, they'd sell before I could get off of work to go and look at them! This happened with about 5 different vehicles, and DFW is a big place, so just getting over to them was a problem as well.
...... but yesterday, we scored! We finally got a a 2006 Civic with 94,000 miles on it before it sold. So we bought it. Does it have warts? Ah..... it's a 10+ year old car..... enough said. But it will work. Pretty much everything important works on it. It has the regular gas engine, which is something that I liked. Not that I was unhappy with the Hybrid (the gas mileage was great), but there's a reason they only warranty those batteries for 100 to 150K miles. The replacements for them run between $2000 and 4000. We already ran across a 2006 Prius with a bad one. Research showed replacements from Toyota was a cool $3960..... ouch! They were asking $4000 for that car so the battery replacement would have doubled the price. We paid $3950 for the Civic with less than 100,000 miles on it. Those engines routinely run to well over 200K. There should be enough life left in this car for 3 years with mom and then more with the boy. Good thing I listened to my wife and saved the expensive Weathertech mats out of the old Civic. Maybe she was telling me something.....
It's this thing's fault, and I'm sticking by my story! You might remember a month or so ago, I came across an nVidia GeForce GTX 770 on the local Craigslist listed for $100 or so dollars. I offered $75, thinking that I'd be happy to pay $85/90 for it, but the guy took the offer. Who am I to look a gift-horse in the mouth (although I do teach about the Battle of Troy)! I installed it. It runs great and is way more video card than my the old Radeon HD 7850. And as I've said any number of times in the past, (being a non-gamer), I don't need much in the way of GPU power. However, it was a good opportunity and I took it.
While looking into what this card would do and my options for connecting my 4 monitors, I began to examine my current video interface set up. It's been awhile, so I'll walk through it for you to set a baseline. I have 4 monitors running as a standard. I've had at least 3 for some years going back to when we lived in Lubbock and worked in IT. It allowed my to keep an eye on how the servers were running while doing other things as well.
At the time, I was using an 17.3" SGI 1600SW LCD which was pretty exotic at the time. Yes: in fact it is the one, more accurately, the ones depicted being used by the Hugh Jackman "hacker" character in the 2001 movie Swordfish. It was my main monitor that worked with a couple of 19"/20" Apple Displays running Trinitron tubes on either side. For 2001-3, that was a pretty high-end setup. I sold and gave away that rig when we moved to the DFW area, but would rebuild it after picking up an unusual (normal for me) an Acer version of their Ferrari line F20 display.
Imagine this monitor, but with all the red parts being silver and no Ferrari badge (of course). I don't even think it was sold in the US. It was 20" and I used a number of other unremarkable panels on the side(s) for some time. As things progress, I started getting more picky with LCD panels and wanted to get into an IPS type screen.
That's when I picked this up, the IBM ThinkVision L200p. In it's day, it was "the big dog" of LCD monitors and was very expensive. When I bought it, it was out-of-date and just being pushed out the door. I actually picked it up locally for $13! The guy advertised it on CL as a 17" and I thought it would go on the side of the 20" Acer quite well. But, once I got a taste of using this IPS panel, the Acer found itself being sold!
Then I found one of these, an ThinkVision L220x for about $100 shipped. It uses an S-PVA panel and is fantastic. Just as sharp as the L200p, but brighter. Not very long later, I found another one on Craigslist for $50 and jumped all over it.
That's when I progress from the above setup with, 1 L220x, 1 L200p, and a 19" Westinghouse TV to 2 L220x, replacing the tv with 2 19" L1940pwd panels. Oh yeah, that little display you see on the lower left was my ThinkPad Tablet connected via USB and used as a touch display. I rarely used it this way, but just wanted to see if it would work. So that's been the state of affairs with the display end of my computing rig for quite some time. I ran 2 Radeon graphics cards to drive these 4 displays and was quite happy. Right up until that trouble-maker GTX 770 came along and started me thinking!
Well..... that's actually, not quite right. I was playing around with the GTX 750 Ti that I had upgraded my son's gaming PC to when I decided to see if it would drive the 55" Sony TV at it's native 4K resolution. Whattayaknow! It did it! I wouldn't play games that way, but it worked. This started me thinking..... if that thing will do 4K, what about that new GTX 770?
You know; that thinking business can get you into some trouble.... I started looking into 4K computer monitors and even looking at 4K TVs as computer monitors. What I found was that the small (24") ones made everything so tiny at 3840 x 2160 that you couldn't see a darned thing. Although, the new inexpensive 27"/28" panels had come out, they were still $700 or so! Looking at used ones, I found that the big boys (Dell, HP, Lenovo) had, had some out for a few years and they could be found used, but still in the $400+ range, until I stumbled onto this:
A ThinkVision Pro2840m, 28" TN panel. Yes, it's NOT IPS, but those guys are still well over $1000, so no $1K for 4K for me. There was one on eBay that was listed at about $200 with a "best offer", so I offered $150. Oh, by the way, the guy said that it displayed the image as a tiny little thing at the top and it would go into "power save" mode and not come out. I suspected that issue to be user error with a GPU that wouldn't support the resolution or a cable that wasn't DP1.2 compliant. He came back to me at $165, but I never could get him to tell me how they tested it; so I let it pass. The following week, I saw it listed again, but this time at $150. I was busy getting ready and then going off to Washing DC on our family Spring Break trip, so I didn't do anything about it then either. When I came back, that monitor was again relisted, but this time at $126 (including shipping). I figured, "what the heck", I could risk it!
The box arrived yesterday. In between running errands and going to look for an new car (I'll discuss this later), I connected it. It detected and ran all on it's very own. I set it up with the 20" L200p on the right, and the 2 22" L220x on the left and ran it for several hours during which, it was amazing to have that amount of real estate (3840 x 2160, 1920 x 1200, 1920 x 1200, 1600 x 1200)! It is showing some issues with going into power save and not coming out, but I think that can be resolved, on top of which, I believe it's still under warranty.
OK. The "rescue machine" is pretty much ready to go. So let me do a quick post so we can tie a bow on it. Since you've already seen most of the parts going into the machine in the last post; this one will mostly be rationale with just a little bit about the final parts.
The last piece got added this weekend and I put it all together to check function. I've been looking into graphics cards for the better part of the last month...... really 2 months. It started with me replacing the GTX 650 with a GTX 750 (more performance, less power draw) in my son's gaming rig. Then I replaced the Radeon HD 7850 in my workstation with a GTX 770, then went right into looking at cards for this cheap gaming build for the friend's son. In the last post, I had discussed the possibility and merits of nVidia's "10 Series". But that was before I found a 660 Ti FTW Signature 2 for $60 on Craigslist. That pretty much completes the build right around $400 total. Is using this 660 better than the 1050... that's a close call. Is it a better deal than the 1060.... absolutely! I'm not crazy. He'll be playing for months at only slightly lower performance instead of saving up, the additional $150-200 it'll take to buy the alternative. Play vs. No Play? I'd call that better; hand's down!
So..... am I satisfied? Should I be? Well..... yeah, I'd say so. Here's why. The basic components have a few rounds left in them. The high-end AM3+ socketed board can take processor upgrades through the latest AMD hex and octo-core processors. The RAM can be bumped all the way up to 32Gb. The SSD is big enough to use for some time and there's expansion well beyond what's in this box. As an enthusiast board, there's lots of over-clocking potential. The SSD is pretty snappy and should be good for a few years. The 660 is a great card for the money invested and will allow game-play at medium to high detail at well over 30-35 fps on current titles. For the games this kid plays, he'll go between 50-75 fps! The best pieces are the case/PSU combo which is good enough to go several builds down the road. At the end of the day, $400 just isn't very much money for the capabilities of this machine. It will be a good starting point for it's new owner.
I've discussed new projects before. I've even talked about the rebuilding of the "Blackbird" (or any number of others) workstation before. But typically, I'm pretty far along in the process before I start writing about it. So this is a little bit different.
This time, it's more like this,.... in the drawing stages. So far, I've used the network identifier of "Blackbird" on my primary workstation with 2 different chassis. The first, being in a Cooler Master Centurion 590 which held a Core 2 Duo/Quad generation machine, then on to the Cooler Master Cosmos II which holds the current "Ivy Bridge" generation. Some of you might remember that I didn't have any intention of changing cases, until the lack of space behind the motherboard tray shorted out the new board/heatsink combo. This time, I well and truly have zero intention of building in a new case since the Cosmos II is still the "800 pound gorilla" of computer cases and will hold anything up through EATX boards and 13 drives! No, this time, it'll be completely about the guts.
In the previous versions, I skipped 3 generations before pulling the trigger. Part of that had to do with me being able to move from a "Wolfdale" Core 2 Duo to a "Yorkfield" Core 2 Quad. In the current board, I've been able to go from the original low powered ("S" Spec) i5 to a regular power i7 of the generation. These LGA1155 processors have been so solid that I was able to go another 3 generations now before I even started my planning this next build. Not that I'm complaining about my current hyper-threaded i7-3770 cpu; I just think that enough of the peripherals have moved on to faster interfaces that it's time to think about it.
What I've been chewing on is this. A move to the more professional/workstation oriented LGA2011-v3 and X99 chipset. These exist on true workstation boards and not just "enthusiast" ones like the "Z" chipsets. Why? Actually, what I do with my machine is more oriented in that direction vs. overclocking and having lots of PCIe lanes for video associated with gaming. These boards also tend to come with M.2 sockets onboard so I can move on to the new faster NVMe SSDs for primary OS and application storage. They also tend to have 8 RAM sockets vs. 4 so I can start out with lower density memory that's cheaper and allow me to upgrade without pulling modules in the future. Anything I expect to carry over to the new system?
I've already said, I'm keeping the Cosmos II, but I'm also going to expect to keep my current data storage drives. They are 2, 1.5Tb, 7200rpm Hitachi Deskstars. Some of the finest and most reliable that they ever made. My plan is to put them in a "mirrored" RAID and use them as protected online data storage. On that front, I'll probably also keep the 2 optical drives (one DVD+RW, one Blu-Ray), but will probably replace the 500Gb Toshiba "scratch drive" with either a bigger one, or an SSD. Of course, the modular 650watt, Seasonic M12II will stay unless something blows up. Changes (apart from the MB/CPU/RAM)?
Yup; this non-gamer bought something from Team-Green..... a GeForce GTX 770 Reference card. Reason? It's a pretty decent upgrade from the Radeon HD 7850 that was my main graphics card, but mostly because I got it for $75..... really. Alert to all you frugal gamers out there who didn't already know this, but the "10 Series" cards from nVidia has had people dropping perfectly adequate "9", "7", and "6" series cards like nothings I've ever seen before. You throw in AMD's RX cards it's looking like Berlin in 1945. There's just a lot of really nice cards floating around out there. I'm also keeping an eye out for a GTX 750 (non-Ti version), to replace the HD 7750 in the computer as well which run my number 3 and 4 monitors. Some of you might have detected that there's something fishy going on here, since 22" monitors (even 4 of them, although 2 aren't that big) don't need this much power to run. You're right. I'm looking seriously at moving to 4K, so I'll need something along the lines of the 770 to run that. I'm not talking 4K gaming mind you, but just 4K, so I think the 770 will be fine for that. Then the 750, which needs no power other than what the bus provides can handle the two 22", 1920 x 1200 which will move to the side.
So, that's it in a nut-shell. It'll probably take a while before I pull the MB and do the actual up grade, but that's be basics of the plan anyway.
