Apr 10
I ended part I of this ongoing Ryzen system diary on something of a cliffhanger: the PC had suddenly stopped booting. I’ve been away from the AMD fold for years when it comes to actual system building, so blaming the Ryzen system for the boot issue was my first reaction. I shrugged that immediate, admittedly …
Apr 20
Eric and I discuss in detail the desktop PC in 2016. CPUs remain mostly in a status quo, while GPUs look to substantially evolve this year. I make some general recommendations: Abandon full-size ATX motherboards, unless you really dream of triple graphics cards Forget dual-core CPUs Build small SSDs all the way Efficiency is a …
Apr 11
Choosing the right PC processor lies at the intersection of what you need, what you can afford, what you want to accomplish, and your self image. The focus here is on desktop processors — in particular, desktop systems you plan on building youreself. Since laptop CPUs ship inside complete systems, that’s a topic for another …
Feb 02
I voluntarily cut the memory bandwidth in my production PC in half. My recently replaced production system consisted of a Core-i7-5930K Haswell Extreme processor and 32GB of DDR4 DRAM running at 2133MHz effective, installed onto a Gigabyte X99-UD5-WiFi motherboard. That translates to a peak memory bandwidth of 68GB per second. The processor clocked at a …
Feb 07
The State of the PC: 2017
The personal computer evolution seems to be slowing. Apple seems to be ignoring high-end customers, 2-in-1 designs are proliferating, and the desktop PC stagnates. On the OS side, MacOS seems to be stagnating and Windows continues to be overly intrusive. What’s going to happen to the PC going forward? Eric, David, and I discuss happenings …
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