Technology Tales

Upheaval and miniaturisation

4^th March 2025

The ongoing AI boom got me refreshing my computer assets. One was a hefty upgrade to my main workstation, still powered by Linux. Along the way, I learned a few lessons:

• Processing with LLM's only works on a graphics card when everything can remain within its onboard memory. It is all too easy to revert to system memory and CPU usage, given the amount of memory you get on consumer graphics cards. That applies even with the latest and greatest from Nvidia, when the main use case is for gaming. Things become prohibitively expensive when you go on from there.
• Even with water cooling, keeping a top of the range CPU cool and its fans running quietly remains a challenge, more so than when I last went for a major upgrade. It takes time for things to settle down.
• My Iiyama monitor now feels flaky with input from the latest technology. This is enough to make me look for a replacement, and it is waking up from dormancy that is the real issue. While it was always slow, plugging out from mains electricity and then back in again is a hack that is needed all too often.
• KVM switches may need upgrading to work with the latest graphical input. The monitor may have been a culprit with the problems that I was getting, yet things were smoother once I replaced the unit that I had been using with another that is more modern.
• AMD Ryzen 9 chips now have onboard graphics, a boon when things are not proceeding too well with a dedicated graphics card. Even though this was not the case when the last major upgrade happened, there were no issues like what I faced this time around.
• Having LED's on a motherboard to tell what might be stopping system startup is invaluable. This helped in July 2021 and averted confusion this time around as well. While only four of them were on offer, knowing which of CPU, DRAM, GPU or system boot needs attention is a big help.
• Optical drives are not needed any longer. Booting off a USB drive was enough to get Linux Mint installed, once I got the image loaded on there properly. Rufus got used, and I needed to select the low-level writing option before things proceeded as I had hoped.

Just like 2021, the 2025 upgrade cycle needed a few weeks for everything to settle down. The previous cycle was more challenging, and this was not just because of an accompanying heatwave. The latest one was not so bedevilled.

Given the above, one might be tempted to go for a less arduous path, like my acquisition of an iMac last year for another place that I own. After all, a Mac Mini packs in quite a lot of power, and it is not the only miniature option. Now that I have one, I have moved image processing off the workstation and onto it. The images are stored on the Linux machine and edited on the Mac, which has plenty of memory and storage of its own. There is also an M4 chip, so processing power is not lacking either.

It could have been used for work affairs, yet I acquired a Geekom A8 for just that. Though seeking work as I write this, my being an incorporated freelancer means that having a dedicated machine that uses my main monitor has its advantages. Virtualisation can allow drift from business affairs to business matters, that is not so easy when a separate machine is involved. There is no shortage of power either with an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS and Radeon 780M Graphics on board. Add in 32 GB of memory and 2 TB of storage and all is commodious. It can be surprising what a small package can do.

The Iiyama's travails also pop up with these smaller machines, less so on the Geekom than with the Mac. The latter needs the HDMI cable to be removed and reinserted after a delay to sort out things. Maybe that new monitor may not be such an off the wall idea after all.

Still able to build PC systems

25^th October 2009

This weekend has been something of a success for me on the PC hardware front. Earlier this year, a series of mishaps rendered my former main home PC unusable; it was a power failure that finished it off for good. My remedy was a rebuild using my then usual recipe of a Gigabyte motherboard, AMD CPU and crucial memory. However, assembling the said pieces never returned the thing to life and I ended up in no man's land for a while, dependent on and my backup machine and laptop. That wouldn't have been so bad but for the need for accessing data from the old behemoth's hard drives, but an external drive housing set that in order. Nevertheless, there is something unfinished about work with machines having a series of external drives hanging off them. That appearance of disarray was set to rights by the arrival of a bare-bones system from Novatech in July, with any assembly work restricted to the kitchen table. There was a certain pleasure in seeing a system come to life after my developing a fear that I had lost all of my PC building prowess.

That restoration of order still left finding out why those components bought earlier in the year didn't work together well enough to give me a screen display on start-up. Having electronics testing equipment and the knowledge of its correct use would make any troubleshooting far easier, but I haven't got these. While there is a place near to me where I could go for this, you are left wondering what might be said to a PC build gone wrong. Of course, the last thing that you want to be doing is embarking on a series of purchases that do not resolve the problem, especially in the current economic climate.

One thing to suspect when all doesn't turn out as hoped is the motherboard and, for whatever reason, I always suspect it last. It now looks as if that needs to change after I discovered that it was the Gigabyte motherboard that was at fault. Whether it was faulty from the outset or it came a cropper with a rogue power supply or careless with static protection is something that I'll never know. An Asus motherboard did go rogue on me in the past, and it might be that it ruined CPU's and even a hard drive before I laid it to rest. Its eventual replacement put a stop to a year of computing misfortune and kick-started my reliance on Gigabyte. While that faith is under question now, the 2009 computing hardware mishap seems to be behind me and any PC rebuilds will be done on tables and motherboards will be suspected earlier when anything goes awry.

Returning to the present, my acquisition of an ASRock K10N78 and subsequent building activities has brought a new system using an AMD Phenom X4 CPU and 4 GB of memory into use. In fact, I am writing these very words using the thing. It's all in a new TrendSonic case too (placing an elderly behemoth into retirement) and with a SATA hard drive and DVD writer. Since the new motherboard has onboard audio and graphics, external cards are not needed unless you are an audiophile and/or a gamer; for the record, I am neither. Those additional facilities make for easier building and fault-finding should the undesirable happen.

The new box is running the release candidate of Ubuntu 9.10, which seems to be working without a hitch too. Since earlier builds of 9.10 broke in their VirtualBox VM, you should understand the level of concern that this aroused in my mind; the last thing that you want to be doing is reinstalling an operating system because its booting capability breaks every other day. Thankfully, the RC seems to have none of these rough edges, so I can upgrade the Novatech box, still my main machine and likely to remain so for now, with peace of mind when the time comes.