I wrote a RAM test for my system, and had to diagnose quite a few badly soldered boards. I leave the soldering to the specialists, though. All but one still does not understand how I can read "Resolder pin 14 from chip J11" or "Clean short between pins 8 and 9 on chip J14" from such a list.
This is actually a new build I just made with a Libreboot motherboard. I'm trying to turn it into a gaming computer, it ran GTA V at 70-80FPS, all high settings, at 1440p. It was working flawlessly, and for some reason now its not I suppose due to the RAM.
But even with this RAM, in the beginning it was working just fine until yesterday I started noticing more stuttering. Vulkan shaders might be interfering, but I did enable them to process in the background and to save the cache but nope, still stuttering.
I was hoping to do a benchmark video for people tonight but I'll have to wait until later next week.
Well that's really not a surprise since it is old hardware. I would go for something newer as that machine is a space heater. You can pickup used mini PCs or workstations with newer CPUs in them.
Well, this build is specifically for gaming with Libreboot so due to the limitations with the motherboard I'm stuck using the Xeon processor. Its not bad tbh runs everything well.
Assuming you're in the northern hemisphere: For this winter it's fine. It'll gently heat your home while you game like it's 1999. No worries 😁
However, once it starts to warm up you'll want to send that motherboard+RAM+CPU to your local HAZMAT trash pickup/facility and get something newer. Might I suggest a nice 2020-ish desktop CPU? With a motherboard that supports Coreboot, of course!
...and get yourself a nice Nvidia (sadly, because AMD and Intel are still far behind) GPU with at least 12GB of VRAM so you can have fun with the open source AI stuff (it's a blast!). The more VRAM the better though so if you can pick up a 4060 Ti with 16GB cheap this spring that'll be your best budget buy (endless uncensored fun) 👍
Seriously: If you haven't got the hardware to run Stable Diffusion locally you're missing out! It's as fun and addicting as a really good game. Running it on some cloud service isn't the same because at best they'll be running stuff that's weeks or months out of date (which is like a million years in AI time) and they don't give you the same level of control/possibilities that you get when running your own stuff locally (run whatever models/LoRAs you want, whatever extensions you want, generating images without having to worry about overbearing censorship because it is that bad on public AI services--paid or not!).
Your logic isn't sound, it's being "old hardware" doesn't necessarily mean it's reliability is degraded. Not on these time scales anyways.
Quality solid state hardware can continue operating as intended for many decades without degradation.
We really need to get on top of this sort of ewaste/consumerism centered thinking with better education and awareness to the actual reliability of hardware that wasn't built with planned obsolescence.
Nah that thing is using power like a space heater. The dude above is right, a mini pc for 180 bucks is faster and the power efficiency is not even comparable. Sometimes old stuff is like that; outdated and obsolete.
Well the RAM is bad so it apparently didn't last to long. Admittedly it can from eBay but the problem is older hardware is that it pulls extra power and is clunky.
It might be different if we were talking about something lower grade with a lower TDP but this hardware pulls a lot can can be defeated performance wise by a newer CPU that's only a few years old.
Yeah, it's not like making your life harder is going to kill Amazon, though. My lesbian co-worker and lesbian sister eat chik-fil-a sometimes for the same reason.
silicon power has had very good prices at azn for 8gb ddr3 dimms for awhile now. cheaper than what i've found anywhere else, even for used stuff or ebay when i've checked there. have several desktops here maxed-out on ram (16 or 32gb) from those.
I remember testing ram by compiling the Linux kernel. It was so resource intensive that it tended to use every block of memory, so if I was getting weird crashes or something I would just run a kernel build and see if I needed better diagnostics.
I found out about 2 months ago I had a dead stick because of my Arch install. I kept having data integrity problems and thought my NVMe was dying. And then the other drive was having the same issues. I had reinstalled Arch so many times during this that I memorized ALL the steps from start to end. I really wish I had tested RAM earlier, but was so determined to believe it was the drives.