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I wish I could give a recommendation on what to try, but I've not bought a discrete video card in 7 years now. I've only purchased an Intel J1900 board in the last couple years and it works fine. It is completely fanless system. |
I built two J1900 boxes. One drives a ELISA plate reader and the other is on the desk of a colleague. The colleague's unit is a ASROCK board and the one in the lab is a BIOSTAR. both work fine but the asrock is by far the nicest unit.
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Of course it is a given that "power and heat goes hand-in-hand" and it is also true that it is rather silly to own a 1000 hp muscle car to use for simple urban commute. However if you commonly need to do long hauls with lots of cargo it's ridiculous to buy a Geo Metro for that. Apologies for car analogies but they do apply and we all can relate. Similarly if you replace a 6 cylinder 200hp engine with a 400hp V8 you're flirting with disaster if you don't also replace/upgrade the radiator.
Back to the world of computers as engines it is possible to get by for a time "running in the red zone" but know that you are depending mostly on luck. 60C = 140F which is the human threshold of pain. Most will pull quickly away by 130F but just about everyone but severely disturbed masochists will not immediately draw back from anything over 60C/140F. Certainly silicon doesn't feel pain and can happily operate above that level but consider there is a reason that Crays are cooled with liquid nitrogen and most large server farms are liquid cooled. In Ham Radio it is an old cliche that "a dollar's worth of antenna is worth 10 dollars of amplifier" and likewise mission critical computing recognizes that a dollar in cooling is worth much more in hardware not to mention the cost of inaccuracy or downtime. This is especially true if any mechanical devices still exist in your PC such as hard drives and optical drives. The very best fans one can buy generally cost under $40 USD and very good smaller ones can cost as low as 10 bucks. They draw very little current since electric motors are one of the most efficient engines in existence. The cost/benefit ratio is extremely favorable. Professional Gamblers aren't really gamblers. They're just really good at risk assessment. True Gamblers are more often than not Losers. You might be lucky but just know that if you have some agenda that doesn't include risk reduction you're playing against The House. Knowing the risks and planning accordingly is never unwise. |
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Now on the other hand, I have seen one Nvidia device once (15+ years ago), that some one had issues with their machine freezing in games. Passive cooling was probably more common on the real cheap stuff back then. Well, I took a look at the card and found about the oddest heat sinks I'd ever seen. So because that seemed so suspect, I put a fan on it, ran the game, and then no more problem... |
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Everybody here has been a huge help. An enjoyable thread! I learned a bit too, which is always nice. :)
I think I decided on a board: ASUS Z170-K LGA 1151. Has 2 PS/2 ports, 6 SATA III ports, 2 standard PCI slots, and DVI-D, HDMI, VGA. Yeah, I forgot in my original post that I have a PCI capture card. That PCI slot requirement eliminated many boards. For another $20 I could go with an i5-6500, but I am going with an i5-6400 Skylake 2.7 GHz with Intel HD Graphics 530. Might seem somewhat "low end" spec wise, but will be oodles faster than the current rig and will be nicer on the electric bill. I am increasing RAM to 16 GB in case I start running more than two VMs concurrently. The quad core will help with that too. The budget AMD APUs were tempting. After more research I got the feeling I would prefer more CPU muscle for VMs and compiling. Curiously, the WD hard drive in my current system is SATA III but the mobo is SATA II. I will see a faster hard drive response too. :D (SSDs are a topic for another thread!) |
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Hey, if I'm lying, you'll be happy. :) |
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:) Anything to be gained (or lost) by going with the newer Intel 270 chip set? |
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I finally got my new ASUS Z170-K motherboard installed. :D
The previous ASUS M3N78-EM motherboard is now in the LAN server. For some oddball reason, network traffic to client systems now seems snappier from the server. Same drives, same 1 Gbps. Another 4 GB of RAM, so perhaps more disk caching is the difference. The SATA III drives now finally run at full SATA III speeds. I'm running the EFI in legacy mode. I have no motivation to reformat the hard drives with an EFI partition. :) The new on-board HD Graphics 530 is much faster than the previous on-board NVidia 8300. Having two more cores in the CPU is nice. Should make a noticeable change with VMs. A few things I have not resolved. 1) I seem unable to get any fan or temperature sensor info. The UEFI seems to already control fan speed, thus I don't know that I am missing anything other than not having a nice conky display. Any ideas how to get lm-sensors and pwmconfig working on this motherboard? (After surfing the web for info I tried loading the nct6775 module. No change in the sensors-detect output.) Is this a problem with 14.2 and the 4.4 kernel? I tried a recent LiveSlak ISO with a 4.9 kernel and fared no better. sensors command output: Code:
asus-isa-0000 2) Not a bug or nuisance, but I do not see any Tux logos when I boot. Same hard drives. Same Slackware 14.2 64-bit. Would have been nice to see 4 Tuxes. :) 3) Is there a way to save and restore the UEFI config? flashrom? I haven't thought about this kind of thing in years, but the CMOS battery that came with motherboard failed me twice. Replaced, but the loss of configs meant doing everything from scratch. I did not notice anything in the UEFI interface to save/restore, but I can't see the end of my nose either. Otherwise I am quite happy with the nex board. Thanks to all for the help! |
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Oh, and to be picky: s/UEFI/firmware/. Your firmware is UEFI-able, but you are using it in Legacy aka BIOS mode using its compatibility support module aka CSM. |
Regarding the sensors, I discovered the nct6775 module does work, but the acpi_enforce_resources=lax boot option is needed. I haven't decided whether tinkering with fan speeds is worth the bother -- the system is silent and the Asus Q-Fan feature seems to handle fan speeds almost exactly like pwmconfig.
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For the three people who might be interested, or less, a summary of installing and configuring the new motherboard.
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