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PC Construction

I do not BELEEEVE it (to quote 4291). I have a cast-off 19" 1440x900 VGA monitor knocking around which I thought would serve for the time being... but the graphics card has a D-sub 15 female, and so does the monitor, but my cable is male to female!!!

I will have a gender bender somewhere...... but where?

Too tired.
 
Black Hole said:
but the graphics card has a D-sub 15 female, and so does the monitor, but my cable is male to female!!!
Click to expand...
After the days/weeks of careful planning and selection, Murphy will still, always, find a way to bring an expensive project to a grinding halt with an "I should have seen that coming" tripwire :confused:
 
I've twigged it (now I've had some sleep): the cable I recovered from an old system is a VGA extension lead and therefore m-f. What I need is a VGA lead (m-m). The old system had a small monitor with a fixed VGA lead, which needed an extension to get it from the desk to where the system unit was located (and a wireless desktop).

The point here is that I wanted to get something (anything) up and running, however crudely set up, and only buying the core components that I can't supply (temporarily) from stock. Hence I already had an optical drive (M-Disk, bought a while ago with the new PC in mind but occasionally used on my notebook via a USB-SATA), HDD (2TB Barracuda donated by a friend who seems to regard these things as disposable when upgrading - actually I have four ready for a 4TB mirror RAID - you could call this freecycling), mouse, thought I had a PS/2 keyboard and USB adapter (until I discovered I had lent it out), and I recently intercepted a 19" 1440x900 VGA monitor (minus cables) and speaker set just before they went to the tip (right place at the right time).

If I had taken a bit more time before pressing the "buy" button and collected together the ancillaries to check I had what I thought I had, I wouldn't have had any surprises and could have included any necessary bits and bobs in the order (or ordered separately - probably eBay) - but so what; in this case I can get around it by running HDMI into a TV (it just means if I want the TV on as well I have to throw it to the PJ - or vice versa).

I have a big beige tower case knocking about (my self-build 486), but I'm pretty sure it won't meet my needs for the new system.
 
Black Hole said:
They're disks. They're free. What's not to like?
Click to expand...
Never look a gift horse in the mouth was fine in the days where if it turned out to be useless you could just eat it, but with the cost of a vet these days (or even just disposing of the body) I tend to think very hard about how free a free thing really is :)
 
I thought I had been explicit:
Black Hole said:
(2TB Barracuda donated by a friend who seems to regard these things as disposable when upgrading - actually I have four ready for a 4TB mirror RAID - you could call this freecycling)
Click to expand...
...but in any case, they're not going to work hard in my hands - OK, I fitted a larger drive in my notebook, but the old drive still works and so does the new one, and I can't say I was careful with my choice. These Barracudas haven't done much so far either.
 
Does it matter? As long as it's mirrored (and no other decision has been made).

The mobo has RAID capability, but only 0, 1, and 10. My "plan" is a separate RAID NAS (although it could be built into the main system tower as a separate entity within).
 
I've given it a "hard" job for benchmarking. If you want to compare your systems try this (yes, I know there are standard benchmarks, but most of them seem to involve Windows - I will try a Linux benchmark score at some point):

1. Fire up Mint Linux (even with a Windows PC, this can be done as a live boot from DVD without affecting the contented of your hard drive).

2. Menu >> Administration >> Software Manager, search for "fraqtive" and install it (Internet connection required).

3. Menu >> Education >> Fraqtive

4. Properties >> Parameters:
View Position X = -0.73758536126168
View Position Y = -0.16875336295633
Zoom Factor = 10^3.56
(There's nothing special about these settings, it's just a "pretty" region in the Mandelbrot image I happened to select, but these parameters need to be used for repeatable results. They can be saved as a bookmark.)
​
5. Click Generate Series (top left):
Image Resolution Width = 1920
Image Resolution Height = 1080
Max out the Calculation Depth, Detail Level, Image Anti-Aliasing, and Multi-Sampling sliders/buttons
​
6. Click OK, then select a file location and name (or just accept the defaults).​

The program will now proceed to generate 100 .png files showing a succession of zooms from the overall Mandelbrot finishing at the parameters selected at step 4... very slowly. You may want to adjust the screensaver and power management settings so that the screen never blanks (Menu >> Preferences). The first screenshot below shows step 5.

Fraqtive uses all CPU resources available, as can be monitored using Menu >> Administration >> System Monitor >> Resources (second screen shot - 12 threads running at 100% :)).

The system "score" can be worked out from the time-stamps on the files produced, taking the creation time of the first .png as the datum and producing a graph of successive file creation times (so to get any measure at all you need to have created at least two of the sequence of files - so far my Celeron notebook has crashed before it got to two). Overnight, ZEN has only got about half way through the 100 (it looks like the computations get more difficult at higher zoom levels). I haven't worked out how to monitor the CPU temperature yet, but the fan is only ticking over and the system does not appear to be hot (this may change if I try overclocking it!).

Footnote: The Mandelbrot Set is mathematical entity defined by a simple formula which defines a region on the complex plane which has a fractal boundary. This means that the border between points that are inside the set and points that are not has infinite complexity, and reveals new detail at every level of magnification. Graphics based on the Mandelbrot Set generally colour the Set itself black, but just outside the Set there are points which are "not quite" inside, and these can be variously coloured (according to how close they get to the mathematical criterion for being in the Set - the closer they are, the longer it takes to work out that they are not) to produce very striking images. Generating these images is purely mathematical, but the calculation per pixel is computationally intensive - hence its usefulness as a benchmark of raw computing power.

IMG_2607.jpg

IMG_2608.jpg
 
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It seems to me that this test is just a burn in on the processor. As the cores are all maxed out they are the bottleneck and you aren't testing the limits of memory speed (which you were talking about earlier) or other parts of the system. (I know you aren't bothered about graphics.)
 
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