Have people gone crazy with specs?

[Deb-fan]

You know who you are. If you are one such of the afflicted then you are well aware of this fact. Talking about theses folks with octa-core processors and 32gbs-ram on their personal computers. What are you peeps doing with these monsters? Why the need for them and do you ever even see them come remotely close to top end? Yes this is partially motivated by spec envy but mostly curiousity. Think as in all things the trend ideal is more better, higher spec better but does it ever get used, thereby justified in any practical usage scenario?

See some people's specs posted and can't help shake head. Some degree of jealousy at play surely but still shake head. Can't personally ever see need for more than 4-6gigs or a quad-core. With the way I config my os and tuning, plus some degree of browser tweaking and noscript could have 80tabs open, still be streaming a reasonable resolution vid and not top out my measily 4gigs, touch swap or melt the poor 2.17ghz dualcore on this antique laptop. So what are you people doing and why? Why I say, whyyyyyy?!

Just been considering the excess systems tend to have nowadays and wanted to kick this around and get yall's input. Also some poor guy in the Linux mint community was noting he'd just just bought a system 76 darter pro, turned around and upgraded the thing with 32gbs ddr4 and a smoking flash drive, at least a 10th gen i5 or i7 quad. Poor dude went to install latest Mint on this monster and is getting 2min boot time on it. Ouch! From an oem which part of their claim to fame and no doubt somewhat higher pricetag is being gnu/nix friendly. Me, 10yr old Inspiron 1545, 4gigs, dual-core, 7200rpm rust hdd and cold boots to working desktop in 40s. Still never really come close to topping out even this old thing. So what's the deal people? What's your deal I say?!?

[Deb-fan]

Do you ever watch YouTube (and by watch YouTube, I mean everything on the site at the same time), sit back and maniacally cackle, it's mine, all the RAM in the world is mine, mineeeee!?

[Nili]

No we haven't, we've buyed all those powerful tractors full of unlimited memory just to show how it is done tweaking exotic OS's, consoles, i3, bspwm, polybar, dwm, vim, also show you the scrots for conviction. Welcome to the absurdity

[Deb-fan]

^Lol

What do these people do, set up vm's and run every gnu/nix distro since time began at the same time?! Probably say Deb-fan's laptop is on welfare while they do it I bet! You people are sick, just sick!

[Nili]

^Lol

What do these people do, set up vm's and run every gnu/nix distro since time began at the same time?! Probably say Deb-fan's laptop is on welfare while they do it I bet! You people are sick, just sick!

Indeed, the brave ones uses all efforts via VM,'s. I have done aswell a few years ago HeHe! People Are Strange.

[NFT5]

A few years ago I bought a new car. From the factory it had 147kW and 450Nm and could accelerate 0-100km/h in 11.5 seconds. It now produces 220kW, over 700Nm and will do 0-100 in 7 seconds. Not too shabby from a 4 cylinder diesel that weighs in at 2800kg? I'm working on ways to get that time down around 5 seconds.

My desktop started life as a lowly quad core AMD Phenom II X4 955 at 3.2GHz and I've recently swapped a 6 core FX6300 for an 8 core FX8350 at 4Ghz. I've just ordered another 8GB RAM. Right now, with two Windows VMs running, plus Inkscape, Thunderbird and Firefox with only 4 tabs open, it's using 6.1GB from 8GB RAM and, I admit unusually, 1.1GB Swap. That's on a MATE desktop because, although I love Plasma, it was just too resource hungry.

A project at the moment is to set up servers for web, mail, routing, files and security, all on SBCs. I probably could do it with basic Raspberry Pis, but instead I'm looking at a stack of four, 6 core 2Ghz processors, each with 4GB RAM.

Why?

Because I want a firewall that will slam the door so hard that a hacker will get a bloody nose, I can't stand being beaten in the traffic light Grand Prix by a Hyundai and I detest waiting for my desktop to catch up or crashing because it's run out of resources.

Most of all, because I can.

[Deb-fan]

^Braggart!^ !!!

Sheesh well at least sounds like you do actually use it. Have no idea what's using what there, so just going to blame everything on windows. The ole can factor, still amusing to see how far people are taking pc's. Remember a Crunchbang user who had a water cooled heat sink in his desktop, jebuz christ, come on WTH people!?

[Head_on_a_Stick]

What are you peeps doing with these monsters?

Playing CS:GO with a triple-digit framerate

Anyway, the argument is the same as for guns & condoms:

I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it

[Deb-fan]

^LMFRIGAO!

Well said but somebody here has to admit liquid cooling of a personal computer is taking things a bit too far? Tad bit, maybe ... no?

PS, ah I've got two more windows managers to dork with, that is if you greedy pigs left any system resources for the rest of us to use.

[wizard10000]

Well said but somebody here has to admit liquid cooling of a personal computer is taking things a bit too far?

Um - no. I was watercooling my overclocked dual processor (not dual-core) P3 home PC way back in the day. Company named Koolance made entire cases built for watercooling with the radiator built into the bottom of the case. This PC also had real SCSI RAID5 with an Adaptec RAID controller three 10k rpm enterprise drives.

These days I call that intellectual masturbation - but for some, hardware is still a hobby. Nothing wrong with that

BTW, the first machine I ever overclocked was an Atari 800XL - those were clocked by line frequency and my eurospec 800XL ran at a 12% overclock using a 60Hz US power supply.

I got better, though

edit: I also had a dual-processor P2 (those were slot-load processors) using the now-classic Asus P2B-DS motherboard. Those motherboards had embedded Adaptec wide SCSI - but it wasn't a RAID controller

[Deb-fan]

Really cool Wiz,

Sounds like you were one of the pioneer's in a couple comp area's, at very least a very early adopter. Do you know the kind of carbon footprint you and the evil minions you helped spawn are responsible for, well do ya? Earth is probably 2degs hotter just thanks to you from the sound of it! Kidding Researched over clocking but never had the ballz or initiative to go beyond that with it. Now I'm too old and lazy to mess with it.

Also no point in even touching this crusty ole thing, needs a walker, not more sys specs. Ah though still kicking around getting a cheapy SSD for the poor thing. Only upgrade that 1/2 makes sense. Though hey you guys processors probably cost more than I paid for it, so in yer faces! Might take it awhile but when it gets up to speed it's very impressive to behold.

[Deb-fan]

Feel bad for that Mintite. Like the guy, seems funny and intelligent but his new purchase is an epic fail in terms of common sense. For the kind of bucks he must've laid out for that baby, some research, even contacting of customer support was surely warranted. Also establishing of a clear return policy and a live session test drive. Apparently he did these additional ram/flash drive upgrades himself. Then installed and found out his favorite gnu/nix runs like chit on it. Remember such things can sometimes void warranties?

Ah guy needs to upgrade everything, kernel, microcode, firmware, anything else related to that puppy that's latest/greatest gnu/nix hardware support in my view. Yet another reason I like buying used outside of staying broke. Though feel for the guy, buying a fararri and having it topend at 24mph can't make someone feel the warm and fuzzies.

In other totally random news remember seeing Amd going for the highest clock speed record on the tube one time. Apparently they did it but the chip got so hot during the process they were cooling it with liquid nitrogen! Intel probably took the record back shortly thereafter? Lol talk about boring viewing, went like this, blink eyes, peeps are saying yay, they did it!

[NFT5]

somebody here has to admit liquid cooling of a personal computer is taking things a bit too far? Tad bit, maybe ... no?

Not when you have a CPU like the AMD FX which runs ridiculously hot. My desktop at work has to deal with heat and dust. I considered water cooling, until I tried a Cooler Master Hyper TX3 EVO cooler. They're huge, but the FX8350 runs at 47C, while the FX6300 used to run at just over 40C. Anything else and I was up over 60C just at idle.

[Deb-fan]

Dang that bytes.

The temps on this dinosaur tend to stay in really dang good ranges according to lm-sensors. Would honestly like to know what brand of thermal paste Dell was using when they put this thing together. Ten friggin yrs and still working fine. Keep envisioning it looking like the petrified forest in there. Now that I've said/typed this, cpu explodes in a dazzling shower of sparks in 3 2, .... 1! Scared to open the case, might find a dead cat in there or summin. These old dells are tanks. Don't know if same build quality today ? Any feedback on it welcome guys. Sheesh this old 250gb Western digital hdd is 10fricken years old and no doubt lived vast majority of it's life with Windows flogging it incessantly. Still going though.

So you ended up putting a monster heatsink on that pc then? Guess should Google. Only concession this old laptop gets is I do keep it propped up so the bottom vents are somewhat clear at all times. Just keep something stuck under it to keep some breathing room.

[Deb-fan]

Such is also a reason I opt for the ondemand power governor in gnu/nix. I tune it so it'll step up freqs much sooner than it would with the defaults and stays there longer before down shifting than stock settings but majority of time the cores are staying at lowest freq until put under load. The premise of the performance governor grates on my nerves. Having cores full bore all times just seems needless.