Raspberry Pi5 versus other cheap Intel based boxes for general computing

Post by Jan Panteltje
What somone learned when he replaced a cheap Pi 5 PC with a no-name Amazon mini desktop
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/what-i-learned-when-i-replaced-my-cheap-pi-5-pc-with-a-no-name-amazon-mini-desktop/
All that said, I post this from a Pi4 8GB, it is sometimes really slow,
but I like and use the GPIO port.

I was quite surprised how sprightly my Pi 5 was. I opted for 8GB more
expensive entirely passive cooling so that it can be used as an
entertainment streaming system when not being used for other things.
(whole thing cost about £120 and is the size of a bar of soap)

In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
comes with it. I haven't found the Debian environment too tiresome
despite being a Windows user with a smidgeon of Ubuntu and Android.

I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).

I was tempted by an N100 based toy PC at Xmas but managed to resist.

--
Martin Brown

Jan Panteltje

2024-04-03 10:23:23 UTC

On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100) it happened Martin Brown

What someone learned when he replaced a cheap Pi 5 PC with a no-name Amazon mini desktop
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/what-i-learned-when-i-replaced-my-cheap-pi-5-pc-with-a-no-name-amazon-mini-desktop/
All that said, I post this from a Pi4 8GB, it is sometimes really slow,
but I like and use the GPIO port.

Yep, only passive cooling in this Pi 4 8 GB
on this GPIO now my IR camera module.
But I do have an 8 port Sitecom USB hub and a 4 TB Toshiba harddisk connected.
On the USB hub a rtl-sdr stick I can use as spectrum analyzer, or stereo radio receiver, or AIS ship traffic receiver,
or follow airplane traffic with dump1090 (made that draw on a map from a server I wrote running on a very old Raspberry
Loading Image...

https://panteltje.nl/panteltje/xgpspc/index.html

I have an other Pi 4 4 GB, it is in a metal case with a fan, also has a USB hub and 4 TB harddisk, and records security cams and radiation and what not
is not net connected to the net and WiFi is disabled (dos not work anyways in a metal case).
Proved to be extremely reliable over the years.
All Raspberries (several more here) are on UPS.
That helps o prevent reboots / restarts as mains dips seem to be the normal here.

Post by Martin Brown
In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
comes with it.

Yes, that was nice too.
Linux has Octave too for math, some more.

Post by Martin Brown
I haven't found the Debian environment too tiresome
despite being a Windows user with a smidgeon of Ubuntu and Android.

Have not used MS windows for many years now, Debian is OK,
I did modify Debian on all my Raspberries to have xfm as file manager and fvwm as window manager,
gives me 9 virtual screens, most run a terminal, one chromium browser (dumped firefox a few weeks back when it started behaving suspicious),
in one window alsamixer, and some windows with music notes, some other GUI utilities such as my media player, xosview to see what is loading things, etc etc.

Post by Martin Brown
I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).

My laptop now > 10 years old now runs Ubuntu.
At least everything works, put a Huawei 4 G stick in it and internet all over Europe.
This Raspberry has the Huawei 4 G stick in it now so I am online in a flash with one click
and offline after that with one click so no hacking and a dynamic IP address to make hacking even more problematic.

Did you have a P4 before the Pi5? If so what's the main difference in experience?

Post by Martin Brown
I was tempted by an N100 based toy PC at Xmas but managed to resist.

Yea, we will see were it goes...

Just typing all this in 'joe' text editor with ispell as spell checker in the NewsFleX Usenet reader I wrote now ported to Raspberry..
that port needs some work, as the libforms library was ehh well, maybe I should write my own graphical library.
I did sort of for some other application I wrote, like that xgpspc thing.
The annoying thing about all those new 'versions' is that you need to re-write your stuff all the time as the libs change, some times not for the better.
My 20 year old PC upstairs still runs xfree and the old audio system (before Alsa), and works still perfectly with my satellite stuff.
Is an AMD 486.

Martin Brown

2024-04-03 14:43:14 UTC

Post by Jan Panteltje
On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100) it happened Martin Brown

Post by Martin Brown
In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
comes with it.

Yes, that was nice too.
Linux has Octave too for math, some more.

I generally use Maxima and most recently Julia for its arbitrary
precision mathematics, but there are few things that they can't do.

Post by Martin Brown
I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).

My laptop now > 10 years old now runs Ubuntu.
At least everything works, put a Huawei 4 G stick in it and internet all over Europe.
This Raspberry has the Huawei 4 G stick in it now so I am online in a flash with one click
and offline after that with one click so no hacking and a dynamic IP address to make hacking even more problematic.
Did you have a P4 before the Pi5? If so what's the main difference in experience?

I had an original Raspberry Pi way back with composite video out but
never really found something it could do well enough to be interesting.
I found cheaper STM32 development boards more to my liking. YMMV

The Pi5 is quite a big step up from there! Even came with working GCC
compiler configured in the standard distribution which was nice.

Post by Martin Brown
I was tempted by an N100 based toy PC at Xmas but managed to resist.

Yea, we will see were it goes...

N100 looks quite capable. My only concern is the whiny fans on these
very small enclosures. Fan noise increases rapidly with rpm and tiny
fans don't move much air. SFF is as small as I like to go.

Post by Jan Panteltje
My 20 year old PC upstairs still runs xfree and the old audio system (before Alsa), and works still perfectly with my satellite stuff.
Is an AMD 486.

I haven't got much left that is quite that old. One machine from 2003
that is kept mainly because it has a real parallel port needed for some
bitbanging programmers that I still very occasionally need to use.

My spellchequer today wants to turn you into Panatella must be all the
food over the Easter Holidays that's affecting it!

--
Martin Brown

Jan Panteltje

2024-04-03 15:35:48 UTC

On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Apr 2024 15:43:14 +0100) it happened Martin Brown

Post by Jan Panteltje
On a sunny day (Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100) it happened Martin Brown

Post by Martin Brown
In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
comes with it.

Yes, that was nice too.
Linux has Octave too for math, some more.

I generally use Maxima and most recently Julia for its arbitrary
precision mathematics, but there are few things that they can't do.

Post by Martin Brown
I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).

My laptop now > 10 years old now runs Ubuntu.
At least everything works, put a Huawei 4 G stick in it and internet all over Europe.
This Raspberry has the Huawei 4 G stick in it now so I am online in a flash with one click
and offline after that with one click so no hacking and a dynamic IP address to make hacking even more problematic.
Did you have a P4 before the Pi5? If so what's the main difference in experience?

I had an original Raspberry Pi way back with composite video out but
never really found something it could do well enough to be interesting.
I found cheaper STM32 development boards more to my liking. YMMV
The Pi5 is quite a big step up from there! Even came with working GCC
compiler configured in the standard distribution which was nice.

Post by Martin Brown
I was tempted by an N100 based toy PC at Xmas but managed to resist.

Yea, we will see were it goes...

N100 looks quite capable. My only concern is the whiny fans on these
very small enclosures. Fan noise increases rapidly with rpm and tiny
fans don't move much air. SFF is as small as I like to go.

Post by Jan Panteltje
My 20 year old PC upstairs still runs xfree and the old audio system (before Alsa), and works still perfectly with my
satellite stuff.
Is an AMD 486.

I haven't got much left that is quite that old. One machine from 2003
that is kept mainly because it has a real parallel port needed for some
bitbanging programmers that I still very occasionally need to use.
My spellchequer today wants to turn you into Panatella must be all the
food over the Easter Holidays that's affecting it!

Yes spellshakers are great!
I moved ispell from UK English to US English a while back, caused fewer problems on Usenet.
My oldest Raspi runs a Linux from Feb 2013 says uname -a
Bought it 07-03-2013, been running 24/7 since then.
Think I once changed SDcard..
All Raspi SDcards are backuped to magnetic media, some to Blu-ray optical disc.

From dvd-list.txt that now lists the contents of 1000 optical disks I keep in a big alu box:
Loading Image...

disk 927
BD-R-25
Platinum 4x inkjet printable
LG BH10LS38
ext2 filesystem
Raspberry debian 8 GB SDcard image with librtlsdr, xforms, fftw3, xpsa, dump1090
Risc OS image
Original debian image
Method:
dd if=/dev/zero bs=1000000000 count=25 > bluray.iso
mke2fs bluray.iso
mount -o loop=/dev/loop0 bluray.iso /mnt/loop
cp ... /mnt/loop/
# stay below about 22.3 GB
du /mnt/loop
umount /dev/loop0
growisofs -speed=4 -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd=bluray.iso
# l /mnt/loop
total 13882600
drwx------ 2 root root 16384 Feb 2 17:55 lost+found/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1939865600 Feb 9 04:44 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 159063 Mar 6 13:56 Raspberry-Pi-R2.0-Schematics-Issue2.2_027.pdf
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 109401 Mar 6 13:59 RPi_Low-level_peripherals.html
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 6 13:59 RPi_Low-level_peripherals_files/
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 229735 Mar 6 14:01 bcm2835-1.22.tar.gz
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 102683388 Mar 8 15:27 riscos-2012-11-01-RC6.zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42 Mar 8 15:30 sha1sum_riscos-2012-11-01-RC6.zip.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 42 Mar 10 13:26 sha1_sum_rasbian_zip
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41 Mar 10 13:41 sha1sum_2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1590 Mar 10 16:17 how_to_raspberry.txt~
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 1590 Mar 10 16:17 how_to_raspberry.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 8193572864 Mar 10 17:16 raspberry_with_rtlsdr_xpsa.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3965190144 Mar 10 17:36 media_4GB_sdcard.img
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41 Mar 10 17:38 sha1sum_raspberry_with_rtlsdr_xpsa.img.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 41 Mar 10 17:39 sha1sum_media_4GB_sdcard.img

I do not trust SSDs that much, harddisks seem to last forever unless you drop those (I did once and lost code and music I wrote).
The CD box goes down in time to the first burnable CDs..
If you keep the CDs you burned in the dark they last a very long time, decennia, like with
cameras, exposure time * light intensity .. burn a CD and set it in the sun on a bookshelf and it has read errors in a few hours.
But with TB harddisks the size of a soap box ..

This about 4 TB harddisk is connected to the Pi 4 8 GB I am posting this with:
/dev/sda2 3844510712 2677846596 971303452 74% /mnt/sda2
/dev/sda2 on /mnt/sda2 type ext4 (rw,relatime)
Many of the other stuff here is on reiserfs, hope they are not so stupid (Linux) to drop support for that,
may as well drop Linux and write my own OS then.
Did write a multitasker for Z80 once...
I try to avoid OSes as much as possible, often no filesystem is needed at all to control stuff like with micro controllers.

Don Y

2024-04-03 16:09:42 UTC

N100 looks quite capable. My only concern is the whiny fans on these very small
enclosures. Fan noise increases rapidly with rpm and tiny fans don't move much
air. SFF is as small as I like to go.

Yeah, I have a few i7 NUCs that are just sitting around looking for a use.
Too small for the amount of power they can dissipate. And, I know that
installing a disk would only make things worse.

But, USFFs can be good for single tasks (i.e., as appliances). Using
an SSD (or PXE-boot) usually eliminates the need for a fan.

Post by Jan Panteltje
My 20 year old PC upstairs still runs xfree and the old audio system (before
Alsa), and works still perfectly with my satellite stuff.
Is an AMD 486.

I keep an older laptop with parallel/serial and FLOPPY for similar reasons.
And, a Compaq Portable 386 w/expansion chassis for a full length coprocessor
that I (rarely!) need to access (ISA bus).

My spellchequer today wants to turn you into Panatella must be all the food
over the Easter Holidays that's affecting it!

john larkin

2024-04-03 17:37:16 UTC

On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100, Martin Brown

I was quite surprised how sprightly my Pi 5 was. I opted for 8GB more
expensive entirely passive cooling so that it can be used as an
entertainment streaming system when not being used for other things.
(whole thing cost about £120 and is the size of a bar of soap)
In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
comes with it. I haven't found the Debian environment too tiresome
despite being a Windows user with a smidgeon of Ubuntu and Android.
I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).

Can it run LT Spice? I spend too much time running Spice.

My new big-box Windows machines, monster CPU and lots of ram and SSDs,
are disappointing because they only run sims about 2x as fast as my
old Win7 machines.

Martin Brown

2024-04-04 09:02:06 UTC

Post by john larkin
On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100, Martin Brown

I was quite surprised how sprightly my Pi 5 was. I opted for 8GB more
expensive entirely passive cooling so that it can be used as an
entertainment streaming system when not being used for other things.
(whole thing cost about £120 and is the size of a bar of soap)
In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
comes with it. I haven't found the Debian environment too tiresome
despite being a Windows user with a smidgeon of Ubuntu and Android.
I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).

Can it run LT Spice? I spend too much time running Spice.

I haven't tried it on LT Spice but it seems to be able to run any
floating point code that will compile on it so I don't see why not. It
can also drive full QD displays natively at MPEG playback video speeds.

The main weakness as default built is that if you are careless about how
you use it you can run out of wear cycles on the sD holding the OS and
swap file! I know someone who did just that...

Post by john larkin
My new big-box Windows machines, monster CPU and lots of ram and SSDs,
are disappointing because they only run sims about 2x as fast as my
old Win7 machines.

I decided when I had to replace mine that an i5-12600 was about the peak
of performance/price that was a significant improvement over the 3770. I
don't like paying through the nose for the fastest possible CPUs.

We have sort of hit a point where CPU improvements especially for single
threaded code have hit an insurmountable bottleneck. There is a sweet
spot for the amount of ram and fast disk. If you put it onto a UPS and
enable all go faster options for the SSD cache write through (risking
potential data loss if power is ever lost) you may get some improvement.
You would have to decide if the speed gain is worth it to you.

If you check LT Spice on various CPUs I think you will find it
correlates closely with ram speed and single thread performance on CPU
related benchmarks (obviously with a bias towards floating point code).

If you are prepared to risk data loss then another option is using a
RAID0 array of identical disks will get you another factor of 2 or 3 if
the system is mainly disk bandwidth limited (and it may be if extensive
logging of data is occurring during a simulation).

--
Martin Brown

Don Y

2024-04-04 14:06:41 UTC

I've found that surplus server-class machines are the best price-performance
point. Businesses dump them "regularly". But, consumers typically don't want
them (size) and cost to ship (eBay). I just picked up a T340, T320, T420
and T<something> for a *total* outlay of $15. 96GB ECC RAM per CPU (some dual,
some single). 500G boot SSDs (too small to be useful for me). Dual 10G NIC
on top of internal NIC. Redundant 750W power supplies. I installed eight 4T
drives in each and use them as ESXi servers and NASs.

Thankfully, the days of noisy fans are behind us!

We have sort of hit a point where CPU improvements especially for single
threaded code have hit an insurmountable bottleneck. There is a sweet spot for
the amount of ram and fast disk.

Yes. Managing your *time* is now the key to productivity. If you're the type
that sits and waits for <something> to finish, you will find yourself waiting,
increasingly! Thankfully it's not as bad as being able to turn the crank just
*twice* in an 8-hour shift...

If you put it onto a UPS and enable all go
faster options for the SSD cache write through (risking potential data loss if
power is ever lost) you may get some improvement. You would have to decide if
the speed gain is worth it to you.
If you check LT Spice on various CPUs I think you will find it correlates
closely with ram speed and single thread performance on CPU related benchmarks
(obviously with a bias towards floating point code).
If you are prepared to risk data loss then another option is using a RAID0
array of identical disks will get you another factor of 2 or 3 if the system is
mainly disk bandwidth limited (and it may be if extensive logging of data is
occurring during a simulation).

You can opt for RAID10/50/60 to give you a bit more peace of mind (assuming
you have a hardware RAID controller). Or, just plan on a "do over" if
something craps the bed. ECC RAM for damn near any significant amount of it!

Or, gobs of RAM configured as a RAMdisk (most modern OSs will effectively do
this for you as a side-effect of their buffering strategies)

But, the biggest win is not using the machine to naively do things when a bit
of planning and common sense would suffice.

John Larkin

2024-04-04 15:11:24 UTC

On Thu, 4 Apr 2024 10:02:06 +0100, Martin Brown

Post by john larkin
On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 10:24:00 +0100, Martin Brown

I was quite surprised how sprightly my Pi 5 was. I opted for 8GB more
expensive entirely passive cooling so that it can be used as an
entertainment streaming system when not being used for other things.
(whole thing cost about £120 and is the size of a bar of soap)
In part I got it for the portability and free Mathematica license that
comes with it. I haven't found the Debian environment too tiresome
despite being a Windows user with a smidgeon of Ubuntu and Android.
I reckon its performance single tasking isn't far off the venerable
i7-3770 from a decade or so back (and still pretty capable today).

Can it run LT Spice? I spend too much time running Spice.

I haven't tried it on LT Spice but it seems to be able to run any
floating point code that will compile on it so I don't see why not. It
can also drive full QD displays natively at MPEG playback video speeds.
The main weakness as default built is that if you are careless about how
you use it you can run out of wear cycles on the sD holding the OS and
swap file! I know someone who did just that...

Post by john larkin
My new big-box Windows machines, monster CPU and lots of ram and SSDs,
are disappointing because they only run sims about 2x as fast as my
old Win7 machines.

Most of us have way more compute power than we need. A pokey old
laptop will show a movie just fine. About the only compute-limited
things left are games and Spice.

Well, Spice is sort of a game too.

Post by Martin Brown
If you check LT Spice on various CPUs I think you will find it
correlates closely with ram speed and single thread performance on CPU
related benchmarks (obviously with a bias towards floating point code).

Enabling more cores doesn't help much. What does seriously help -
sometimes 20:1 - is relaxing some of the sim parameters. I do that
until something obviously breaks, then back off a little.

Martin Brown

2024-04-05 08:26:52 UTC

Post by John Larkin
On Thu, 4 Apr 2024 10:02:06 +0100, Martin Brown

Post by Martin Brown
We have sort of hit a point where CPU improvements especially for single
threaded code have hit an insurmountable bottleneck. There is a sweet
spot for the amount of ram and fast disk. If you put it onto a UPS and
enable all go faster options for the SSD cache write through (risking
potential data loss if power is ever lost) you may get some improvement.
You would have to decide if the speed gain is worth it to you.

Most of us have way more compute power than we need. A pokey old
laptop will show a movie just fine. About the only compute-limited
things left are games and Spice.

Playing back an MPEG video is essentially trivial load on any modern
machine. Video editing, rendering video content and editing large images
is still compute intensive.

Normal office work barely taxes even the most puny hardware.

Post by John Larkin
Well, Spice is sort of a game too.

In the sense that it is a simulation of reality.

Enabling more cores doesn't help much. What does seriously help -
sometimes 20:1 - is relaxing some of the sim parameters. I do that
until something obviously breaks, then back off a little.

There might be an advantage in going to 2 or 3 cores for some problems
depending on how smart its use of additional cores actually is but after
that you run into memory and/or disk bandwidth problems pretty quickly.

Obviously relaxing the error bounds will speed things up but you have to
be careful. LT Spice is deliberately conservative in its choice of
parameters so that the solver mostly stays inside a numerically stable
simulation (unless you provoke it with a nasty network singularity).

It is even worse for chess problems where the extra cores can easily end
up doing work deep down the tree that will *never* be needed because it
will be pruned by a higher level algorithm at some stage.

--
Martin Brown

Don

2024-04-03 14:21:05 UTC

FWIW, my *nix Desktops consist of cheap, refurbished, small form PCs,
stuffed with SSDs.

The STM GPIO interface typically provides a digital interface to my
electronic circuits. BSD RPis are used as intrinsic IDE hosts while
Blue and Black Pills are accessed via a STLink.

Danke,

--
Don, KB7RPU, https://www.qsl.net/kb7rpu
There was a young lady named Bright Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day In a relative way And returned on the previous night.

Don Y

2024-04-03 16:01:31 UTC

Post by Don
FWIW, my *nix Desktops consist of cheap, refurbished, small form PCs,
stuffed with SSDs.

I use USFFs (Optiplex FX160's) and diskless workstations (e.g., HP t610)
for small appliances. For example, one by each TV to act as a network
media server for that TV. An FX160 handles all of my core network
services (name, time, print, font, TFTP, etc.).

They're nice because they use so little power (~12W), are fanless and
yet capable enough that I can build new kernels or userlands on them
without having to power on a bigger machine.

The trick is NOT to run Windows on anything "underpowered".

Post by Don
The STM GPIO interface typically provides a digital interface to my
electronic circuits. BSD RPis are used as intrinsic IDE hosts while
Blue and Black Pills are accessed via a STLink.

John Larkin

2024-04-03 14:57:34 UTC

Considering how important a computer is to our professional and
personal lives, why do people go to great effort to save a few
dollars?

If a cheap PC fails, it will take days of your time, or more likely
weeks, to recover.

Jeroen Belleman

2024-04-03 15:38:29 UTC

Considering how important a computer is to our professional and
personal lives, why do people go to great effort to save a few
dollars?
If a cheap PC fails, it will take days of your time, or more likely
weeks, to recover.

If an expensive one fails, it takes just a much.

Jeroen Belleman

John Larkin

2024-04-03 15:54:51 UTC

On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 17:38:29 +0200, Jeroen Belleman

Post by Jeroen Belleman

Considering how important a computer is to our professional and
personal lives, why do people go to great effort to save a few
dollars?
If a cheap PC fails, it will take days of your time, or more likely
weeks, to recover.

If an expensive one fails, it takes just a much.
Jeroen Belleman

Presumably it fails less often. Cheap electrolytics, cheap fans,
under-cooled parts will fail.

I just bought four new identical tower PCs, for work, home, cabin, and
a spare. Once my main box was set up, we cloned the SS drives to the
other three. So if my work PC dies, I have three others available.

They have identical monitors too, so my desktop won't go crazy if the
video resolution changes. I hate when that happens.

Martin Brown

2024-04-04 09:19:06 UTC

Post by John Larkin
On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 17:38:29 +0200, Jeroen Belleman

Post by Jeroen Belleman

Considering how important a computer is to our professional and
personal lives, why do people go to great effort to save a few
dollars?
If a cheap PC fails, it will take days of your time, or more likely
weeks, to recover.

If an expensive one fails, it takes just a much.

It is sometimes worth paying a premium to have a machine that is fast
enough for your immediate project needs (even if cheaper ones are more
easily available). You pay quite a high premium for that last bit of
performance when it is still very new.

Post by Jeroen Belleman
Jeroen Belleman

Presumably it fails less often. Cheap electrolytics, cheap fans,
under-cooled parts will fail.

Some of the best designed PCs are from the gaming community suppliers.
If you remove the graphics card entirely the main CPU graphics system is
more than good enough for all 2D design and some 3D rendering work.

They perform incredibly well and have huge slow fans so under ordinary
heavy loads they remain very quiet. Ones intended for corporate office
workers tend to have inadequate power supplies and small noisy fans
reflecting their typical workload and noisy environment.

Post by John Larkin
I just bought four new identical tower PCs, for work, home, cabin, and
a spare. Once my main box was set up, we cloned the SS drives to the
other three. So if my work PC dies, I have three others available.

Your choice but owning several machines of the same vintage leaves you
exposed to any glitches in the new machines or their OS's. MS has been
known to brick portables on Win10/11 from time to time - not fun at all.

Post by John Larkin
They have identical monitors too, so my desktop won't go crazy if the
video resolution changes. I hate when that happens.

That is a bit OCD.

--
Martin Brown

Don Y

2024-04-04 14:27:31 UTC

But the graphics card often has value in the applications you might run
on the box!

They perform incredibly well and have huge slow fans so under ordinary heavy
loads they remain very quiet. Ones intended for corporate office workers tend
to have inadequate power supplies and small noisy fans reflecting their typical
workload and noisy environment.

Office- and consumer-class machines are intended for grunt work and
ease of replacement. You'll likely not find a desktop from a corporate
setting that is worth it's weight in *paper*.

Your choice but owning several machines of the same vintage leaves you exposed
to any glitches in the new machines or their OS's. MS has been known to brick
portables on Win10/11 from time to time - not fun at all.

That's an argument for avoiding MS, regardless of hardware choice! :>

OTOH, you know exactly which problems you are likely to encounter on
each, instead of having to track the quirks of each. I've always planned on
duplicates (computers, printers, scanners, monitors, etc.) for my own use.
It's nice to be able to move to another seat and know that nothing
has changed (other than the seat!).

It also is a diagnostic tool expedient. I "lost" a disk (back when 4G drives
were $1K) from an OS upgrade, once. Frowned ("these things happen") but
was able to install the identical "backup" disk in its place. And, lost
THAT, too! ("no, THAT never happens!"). So, now I know the OS upgrade
dragged something into the mix that didn't belong there (thankfully,
had another backup on MO media so I was able to recover both drives
after rolling back the OS to its earlier state).

Likewise, had a problem rendering some 3D CAD models (back in the days of
AutoCAD's "Advanced Modeling Extension"). Being able to reproduce the problem
on a second (identical) machine made me damn sure that it was an AutoCAD
bug (it was).

[I had bought my licenses at a discount on the condition of "no support"
so the rep was irate when I came to him with the problem: "I'm not asking
you to hold my hand. I'm asking you to send this model to the folks at
Autodesk and see what they have to say about THEIR problem!"]

Now, the only real issues are monitors crapping out and keyboards
needing to be cleaned (so, I keep an ample supply of both on hand).
Being able to swap out monitors when one dies while in use (do they
ever die when NOT in use?) is a big win as it's hard to remember what
was on the screen just before it died, otherwise!

John Larkin

2024-04-04 15:14:04 UTC

On Thu, 4 Apr 2024 10:19:06 +0100, Martin Brown

Post by John Larkin
On Wed, 3 Apr 2024 17:38:29 +0200, Jeroen Belleman

Post by Jeroen Belleman

Considering how important a computer is to our professional and
personal lives, why do people go to great effort to save a few
dollars?
If a cheap PC fails, it will take days of your time, or more likely
weeks, to recover.

If an expensive one fails, it takes just a much.

Post by Jeroen Belleman
Jeroen Belleman

Presumably it fails less often. Cheap electrolytics, cheap fans,
under-cooled parts will fail.

Some of the best designed PCs are from the gaming community suppliers.
If you remove the graphics card entirely the main CPU graphics system is
more than good enough for all 2D design and some 3D rendering work.
They perform incredibly well and have huge slow fans so under ordinary
heavy loads they remain very quiet. Ones intended for corporate office
workers tend to have inadequate power supplies and small noisy fans
reflecting their typical workload and noisy environment.

Post by John Larkin
They have identical monitors too, so my desktop won't go crazy if the
video resolution changes. I hate when that happens.

That is a bit OCD.

And that is a bit rude.

Don Y

2024-04-03 15:56:42 UTC

Post by Jeroen Belleman
If an expensive one fails, it takes just a much.

Having spares is an easy solution. I have 6 identical workstations
and three spare power supplies for them (as they are an atypical
design).

So far, not even a disk failure (touch wood) -- which would be trivial
to guard against (with another copy of the disk)!

Wanderer

2024-04-03 16:58:09 UTC

I'm interested in putting the internet on a separate computer and switching the monitor, keyboard and mouse with a switch box. How well would it work for something like that? How well does it handle the internet?

Don Y

2024-04-03 16:37:45 UTC

Post by Wanderer
I'm interested in putting the internet on a separate computer and switching
the monitor, keyboard and mouse with a switch box. How well would it work
for something like that? How well does it handle the internet?

We don't route any of the "other" computers/appliances in the house; just
this one (and a laptop for ecommerce). *This* computer obviously has its
own keyboard/monitor/mouse as it is physically distant from the rest of
our kit.

You need to get accustomed to sneakernet as there invariably are things
that want to move from the routed to unrouted networks. (and, have to use
discipline to ensure you don't move the wrong thing(s) to the wrong
places!)

I used KVMs in the past and found varying results. Some would get confused
if one of the computers was powered off. Some wouldn't handle sharing the
audio. etc.

[I have a touchpanel that is shared among four machines -- but, they are
intended to be headless so the display is only needed when something isn't
"as expected" (why hasn't this machine booted?)]

In the office, I run a set of three monitors for each pair of (physically
adjacent) workstations. I use the "input select" switches on the monitors
to determine which video source to display on THAT monitor (remember, three
monitors available for each workstation).

I tend to locate workstations with similar purposes on the same set of
monitors so I can switch one (or two) monitors over to the "other"
workstation and see displays side-by-side. (I can also do this with
by opening a VNC connection to the "other" workstation).

But, I don't share keyboards/mice! So, I have to discipline myself to
know which keyboard to type on based on where I want the keystrokes to go.
This is usually acceptable as I most often am using "the other" display
just as a reference. E.g., looking at a schematic while writing a
driver for that interface.

[VNC is the preferred solution when you have to *interact* with both
workstations as you can control the focus for a single keyboard/mouse
implicitly. But, that also requires both machines to be on the
same network! And, complicates things like photorealistic animations.]

Martin Brown

2024-04-03 17:11:02 UTC

Post by Wanderer

All that said, I post this from a Pi4 8GB, it is sometimes really slow,

Post by Wanderer

Post by Jan Panteltje
but I like and use the GPIO port.

I'm interested in putting the internet on a separate computer and
switching the monitor, keyboard and mouse with a switch box. How well
would it work for something like that? How well does it handle the
internet?

My Raspi sits on the HDMI input of my main system monitor. I have
separate keyboards for each machine (my choice) and a KVM too.

Any modern TV will do to use it.

--
Martin Brown

Jan Panteltje

2024-04-04 06:14:45 UTC