Hello everyone,
I had the idea to look at tech again.
I’m not in danger of going for any serious PC upgrades any time soon, although I did acquire a nVME solid state device disc drive that caused me a little bit of grief. If you remember back a couple of posts, my desktop PC has the following disc drives lurking inside :
It boots off a 500GB SATA m2 SSD, which works very nicely. It just doesn’t have the space for games like Starfield and now Forza Motorsport which each take 120GB. Yep. Chonky.
There’s a smaller SSD in there as well but I don’t use that one any more, just haven’t removed it.
I have two active conventional hard discs, an older 1.5TB drive and a newer 3TB drive. That’s where the games and the multitude of memes go. It’s actually a bit of an accident that they’re both active, I copied the contents over but forgot to update the linking of one of the drive partitions.
(A partition is where you split up the drive into sections. It used to be handy in older times, not so useful now, plus it’s how you would split up Windows and Linux installations)
And then there’s the 2TB fast SSD hanging out the back of the machine inside a USB enclosure. It works much better for Starfield, which is much more playable on that drive. It’s still got issues but not nearly as many as if you try and play it on a conventional hard disc. What’s the issue there ?
These will be results taken last month. That first one is for my 3TB conventional drive. The things to look at there are the 158ish for the SEQ1M (sequential access?). That’s how quickly the machine is pulling the data off the drive. The IOPS is for Input/Output Operations Per Second, giving 166 on reads and 423 on writes. The RND4K is the time in microseconds it takes the drive to start doing its thing. The read is higher on almost 6000 microseconds, the write is quicker at 2356 microseconds. I think the difference there is because on a read, the drive has to find exactly what you want. On a write, it’s just looking for spare space. It doesn’t care what’s in the empty space.
Those are the numbers for my older SSD, which is installed in the correct slot in the motherboard. It’s a SATA disc, which is why the numbers for Read (516) and Write (442) aren’t particularly high. Where all SSDs shine is in the IOPS, where it’s doing almost 10,000 reads per second and 16,646 writes per second. It’s taking 103 microseconds to find everything you want. That’s important if all of your information is either spread into many little files or if you need to find just the right bit of information. Starfield is crippled when it comes to the voice acting, it needs that fast to find thing in order to do voices without massive pauses.
And last one, that’s the results for my nVME SSD that’s currently in an external USB enclosure. It’s doing fairly ok in that box to be honest. It’s seriously crippled by the USB interface (it’s not the fast one) but the 234 microseconds for the Random Read is still exceptional compared to the old style hard disc. The 40MB/s read and write is showing where everything is limited by the cable it’s squeezing the data through. I suspect the data flooding the cable is also why the Random Input/Output Operations Per Second is only around the 4000s as well.
I’ll be curious to see how the new drive does when it’s installed in a widget that’ll let it go full speed. That’ll arrive tomorrow for installation in the evening after I finish up work.
As for curiosity, I did a check on PC prices again last night. But instead of looking at similar devices to what’s in Meltdown, I looked at the Intel options instead. What I noticed surprised me a fair bit but it backed up something I noticed with the AMD machines.
(Jargon busting – there are two competing computer processor makers at the moment, they cost about the same but I went with AMD because they are apparently technically superior now, that’ll vary over time)
The surprise comes from the hardware makers moving on really quickly from older technology. Meltdown is based on a 4 year old Ryzen 5 3600 processor that fits into a X570 chipset motherboard. What’s a chipset ?
What are we looking at there ? The green blob is the processor and the chipset’s job is to martial all of the data going around the system. To the left, we have 3 orange blobs talking directly to the processor. That’s for PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) Express lanes that couple the processor to the graphics card. There’s a huge amount of data going through that link. There’s also huge amount of data going to hard discs and USB devices. The chipset comes in over to the right, it handles everything else like your keyboard, mouse and any controllers. It also gives access for the other drives in the system or in the olden days, things like dvd decoder cards or sound cards. Oh ! Chipset is how the sound chips in the system connect up.
Each type of processor has a specific set of chipsets designed for it, usually a good one and a budget one. The good one for my Ryzen 5 3600 third generation of that type is the X570 chipset. I could put a newer 5th gen Ryzen 5 5600 processor in there if I wished to. But … there are only 3 of those listed on Scan today. That means the manufacturers have effectively put it in the bin for the newer model.
It’s the same with Intel, there are only two of the older Socket 1200 Z590 boards available (ok there are more but they are double the price). There are 64 (sixty four) of the current Socket 1700 boards available.
So yeah, the old systems have gone in the bin even though the processors for them are still very available.
It was a curious and a little bit eye opening check realising that yesterday. What does it mean though ? Firstly, you have to be really careful about what you buy. Going for that slightly older 2 year old Socket 1200 cpu will give a massive problem in finding something for it to fit into. It’s been put in the bin for the 13th gen Socket 1700 chips released in October last year.
That’s a fun one for anyone thinking about obsolescence by the way … I might know some of them :-D.
Secondly … if you don’t care about obsolescence issues, then it can mean that it’s a PERFECT time to buy. The processor in my one year old laptop is an 11th gen laptop chip. Acer could well have been giving the big discounts because they needed to dump the stock while they thought they could.
So that’s the lesson I picked up … keep an eye on the market, sometimes opportunities come up because the people who make stuff are shifting from one product to the next and they want to dump the old stuff. Meltdown got put together when it did because AMD had just come out with a very superior product. The Dwagonsong laptop was bought because product change had led to huge discounts.
Quite. I think that’s enough for me for today, back to watching Billietrixx (Twitchy link) while she’s still on and then I’m somewhat grinding through the first book in the Silo series. I’m not quite sure what to make of that, the pacing feels off compared to the other books I’ve been enjoying far more. It feels hugely padded with a lot of character introspection which I don’t think exactly adds much.
We’ll see. Good night everyone, enjoy your books, your music (Dire Straits Making Movies track now – Expresso Love) and the rest of your evening.
And there’s a thought … (adds Dire Straits Alchemy to the wish list)
PS Forgot the feedback thing … The Novotel from Sheffield started badgering me for feedback … so they got feedback. It wasn’t the feedback they wanted. (TLDR – got nickel and dimed on extra charges, go with the competition instead)