New PC 2016

Lazybones · February 01, 2016, 12:03:23 AM

So I downgraded the BIOS to the last stable release before the BETA releases that have the skylake, prime 95 and other "FIXES" oddly enough I haven't had a freeze since!.

I should note the one feature I am most impressed with between my MB, SSD and Windows 10 is fast and ultra fast boot modes.

From powered off the system will start in as low as 2 seconds, from a full shut down it is still under 10s!

Tom · February 01, 2016, 06:54:59 AM

Yeah, those new UEFI/Intel fast boot modes are amazing. They somehow manage to make a cold/hibernate boot almost as fast as suspend to ram. It's basically a form of hibernate, but i think they tweaked it a bit.

I've seen my Linux machines get to a desktop in like 5 seconds. It still amazes me that they've managed to get cold linux boots that fast. Partially I think its all the work they put into parallelizing hardware initialization (they don't store hardware configs like windows does, so it has to go through the entire detection/init dance every single time, where as windows has the hw layout cached, and just inits). They've also been working on removing all big locks in the kernel, which speeds things up a lot as well. All I know is, I don't have time to get a drink when booting. It's up before I even notice. lol.

Speaking of new PCs, I did get a new 512GB ssd for my desktop. before I was using a 128GB and a HDD for my linux install.. Then I RECENTLY upgraded linux to a brand new Samsung EVO 256GB SSD (it was on sale! gotta love boxing week), and just picked up a sandisk 512GB ssd. I was smart and setup LVM for my root and home partitions, so all I had to do was add the new drive to the volume group, and extend the root and home partitions, run resize2fs, and everything was setup all online. Super slick.

Windows has its own SSD as well, but I may take the old linux ssd and move it to the windows install for game storage and the like. Might move windows to a dynamic disk partition setup so I can just extend C: onto the new disk.

Lazybones · February 01, 2016, 10:46:58 AM

I had to dial down the ultra fast options as I could not run any USB based boot tools without the USB keyboard enabled lol.

My board however does have a windows tool that lets you set the bios on next boot so I am tempted to set it back... It goes so fast that reboots are nothing!

Thorin · February 01, 2016, 12:52:36 PM

Part of it is the SSD, that speeds up reboot times by orders of magniute even in older Windows versions.

Now you just gotta keep it free of any start-up programs that'll drag the reboot time down.

Lazybones · February 01, 2016, 02:24:55 PM

Quote from: Thorin on February 01, 2016, 12:52:36 PM
Part of it is the SSD, that speeds up reboot times by orders of magniute even in older Windows versions.

Now you just gotta keep it free of any start-up programs that'll drag the reboot time down.

The SSD plays a big role, but the FAST and UltraFast boot modes take advantage of the fact that your OS ultimately inits nearly all peripherals and the bios doing it is redundant and slow so instead the BIOS just hands off to the OS as fast as it can.

Again if I don't want USB storage or keyboard / mouse I can have the BIOS skip them and BAM it fires right into launching windows, and as Tom pointed out Windows 10 uses a special hibernate type mode to basically dump a core system image back into RAM and show you a login screen. Then the OS starts working on those slow startup apps, which may still be slowly starting if you login quickly. They parallelized a bunch of things, you also get a report of apps that are startup slowdown offenders, the report has improved steadily since windows 7.

Ran https://novabench.com/ on my system and it seems like the major components are performing within expectations

Lazybones · February 02, 2016, 07:56:53 PM

Quote from: Tom on January 22, 2016, 08:49:10 AM
Aww, its only a 60hz monitor? Hopefully it can be overdriven.

Apparently it support 75 Hz if I use Displayport instead of HDMI... I have ordered a cable and will check it out.

Oddly NO LOCAL STORE has stock of a simple male to male NORMAL Displayport cable over 3FT.. Mini Displayport all over the place but not the standard cable.

Amazon ship from a warehouse really close to me, so with any luck I will get my order very quickly even with free shipping.

Lazybones · February 07, 2016, 08:05:14 PM

Sadly I can't push my monitor past 60 Hz at full resolution... It does work with some lower resolutions at up to 75 hz.

O well, that isn't what I purchased it for, but I was excited I might be able to push it.

Lazybones · February 17, 2016, 09:10:02 PM

Monitor died, but lucky me within the first 30 days.. NCIX did not have the same model in stock and did not have a simmilar curved one. However they did have a much bigger 34um67 on sale for the same price and let me exchange for it.

Now I DO have a 75Hz freesync monitor.. YAY

Mr. Analog · February 18, 2016, 08:01:29 AM

Awesome!

Sent from my SGH-I317M using Tapatalk

Lazybones · February 18, 2016, 08:37:02 AM

On the down side I do miss the curved display. At the wider aspect ratio and size the corners are actually further from your eye and it is noticeable.

However it is huge so I moved it further away and seems to help.

Also pro tip, if you have an AMD card and are looking at a freesysnc monitor to get it enable you will likely need to explicitly turn on freesysnc in the monitors OSD and in the video card drivers. It took me a bit of googling to figure that out.

Tom · February 18, 2016, 08:49:10 AM

I'm worried about a curved monitor as I've heard its not great for productivity. You tend to notice the curve on straight lines a lot.

Lazybones · February 18, 2016, 09:05:23 AM

I think it depends on how deep the curve was. The monitor I just had was not curved that deep. Laying flat you could probably barely get two quarters under it.

Lazybones · February 28, 2016, 01:33:52 PM

So the system freezing might be an under spec PSU.

Although reading the specs the R9 390 should only need a 600W PSU and I have little else in this build I have found several forum posts indicating the same HARD FREEZE on most PSUs under 700W.

OOPs well this will cost more to fix now

I hope this is the problem but I don't feel like pulling all those power feeds out again.

Thorin · February 28, 2016, 01:57:52 PM

Well that sucks, I hope it is indeed just the power supply, then at least it's a less-needing-to-troubleshoot fix (imagine if it was a bad diode on the card, or something, that would take forever to figure out).

Lazybones · February 28, 2016, 02:17:37 PM

Well so far the system has only hard froze in Star Citizen and Ashes of the singularity. Both of which push the video card to its max.

On the flip side I have been able to play Torchlight II for hours as well as regular desktop use without issue.

Apparently the R9 390X uses a tad more power Max than most Mid range cards. Toms Hardware has some interesting Graphs.