Marginal OEM Power Supply

Bill Davidsen wrote:

Maybe when you pay for installed upgrades, you pay for an upgraded power
supply. Since the memory was added to this box with no further testing,
it's easy to imagine that boxes might be shipped with upgrades such that
the power supply is often marginal or inadequate.

Anybody have any insight?

Except for gamer machines, vendors expect the cover to stay on.

Nonsense. Any PC must be expected to have memory and/or PCI cards
added.

Robert Myers wrote:

If I had to finger a culprit here, I'd point at the business schools,
which seem to be so detached from reality that they actually think that
anything that looks good on a spreadsheet is a good business practice.
That anyone ever would have admired Dell just boggles my mind,

I don't know... There's worse. I remember years ago having to fight
to get a Dell over a Compaq that was $1,500 more despite being far
inferior (e.g. 486 vs. P90), not to mention that, IMO, desktop Compaqs
were, and still are, garbage.

"You get what you pay for", I heard, always from people who had *zero*
clue about computers.

I've had great success with generic hardware.

Robert Myers wrote:
On Jun 22, 4:31 pm, Bill Davidsen wrote:

Glad you like it, I have been thinking of a 930 for a KVM server, drop in 12GB
of RAM and 4TB of cheap disk and put all the boring little 512m servers on Earth
on it.

Everything now goes through this 64-bit Windows desktop, including a
virtual 64-bit Fedora 13 and a virtual 32-bit Windows XP Professional,
with a Cygwin X-server handling graphical output from other Linux
boxes. The virtualized machines, both Windows and Linux running
simultaneously, are at least as snappy as Windows and Linux running on
E8200 and E8400 Core 2 Duo. I wish someone made affordable 4Gb DDR3
non-ECC, since memory is the only thing that is ever remotely in short
supply. The virtualized XP Professional will allow me to decommission
a separate box running XP just to support a handful of legacy XP
programs.

That's one of the reasons I'm looking at an i7-930 and Asus m/b for a hosting
system, I can get to 12GB with cheap memory. On the other hand, the i7-875
unlocked is cheap and allows o/c by use of multiplier. But no cheap memory
there, need 4GB parts. I'm tempted to build a host machine with Xeons and ECC
memory, slightly more reliable and all, but I think slower.

Lots of ways to go, each with a drawback. :-(

chrisv wrote:
Bill Davidsen wrote:

Maybe when you pay for installed upgrades, you pay for an upgraded power
supply. Since the memory was added to this box with no further testing,
it's easy to imagine that boxes might be shipped with upgrades such that
the power supply is often marginal or inadequate.

Anybody have any insight?
Except for gamer machines, vendors expect the cover to stay on.

Nonsense. Any PC must be expected to have memory and/or PCI cards
added.

Could you note the source of that opinion? Some where a major vendor said that?
For both cost and power efficiency reasons vendors seem to sell machines where
anything more than a memory upgrade puts it out of power. Add a disk, marginal,
hope you can power on spun down to avoid surge. And that 200w super gaming video
card? Not on the machines intended to let a casual user get on the net, or a
clerical worker do data entry or update a few things using the system as a terminal.

Seriously, I see stuff with 300w, even 250w power supplies, and as shipped they
have 50w of headroom if the voltage stays up. Honest, lots of vendorsmaking
them, and they work fine when used as intended.

On Jul 9, 6:56*pm, Bill Davidsen wrote:


That's one of the reasons I'm looking at an i7-930 and Asus m/b for a hosting
system, I can get to 12GB with cheap memory. On the other hand, the i7-875
unlocked is cheap and allows o/c by use of multiplier. But no cheap memory
there, need 4GB parts. I'm tempted to build a host machine with Xeons and ECC
memory, slightly more reliable and all, but I think slower.

Lots of ways to go, each with a drawback. :-(

I was just as happy that the i-7 920 slipped through the oddities of
Intel's market segmentation strategies. When the chip had just come
out, I saw a geek buying the parts to build a computer for a chess
competition. Who else buys machines with these chips? I can use the
memory bandwidth, but, for most, the triple channel arrangement is
overkill. All you really want is the extra memory slots. Just glad
to have it, wish 4GB sticks weren't so expensive.

Robert.

Robert Myers wrote:
On Jul 9, 6:56 pm, Bill Davidsen wrote:

That's one of the reasons I'm looking at an i7-930 and Asus m/b for a hosting
system, I can get to 12GB with cheap memory. On the other hand, the i7-875
unlocked is cheap and allows o/c by use of multiplier. But no cheap memory
there, need 4GB parts. I'm tempted to build a host machine with Xeons and ECC
memory, slightly more reliable and all, but I think slower.

Lots of ways to go, each with a drawback. :-(

I was just as happy that the i-7 920 slipped through the oddities of
Intel's market segmentation strategies. When the chip had just come
out, I saw a geek buying the parts to build a computer for a chess
competition. Who else buys machines with these chips? I can use the
memory bandwidth, but, for most, the triple channel arrangement is
overkill. All you really want is the extra memory slots. Just glad
to have it, wish 4GB sticks weren't so expensive.

It's relative, Newegg has a sale on three channel memory, ddr3 1600, 12GB/$500.
I can remember not having 12GB of disk, so that's not all that expensive. They
have the i7-930 and Asus board for $500 also, TB drives for $68, I paid millions
for that kind of capacity "back when." ;-)

But the memory isn't that crazy, I was thinking that for $1k I could move from
one old core2-6600 w/ 4GB to enough to make the VMs dance a little faster.

On Jul 10, 3:47*pm, Bill Davidsen wrote:

But the memory isn't that crazy, I was thinking that for $1k I could move from
one old core2-6600 w/ 4GB to enough to make the VMs dance a little faster..

I haven't gushed about a chip since the 130nm Tualatin. Mostly, I've
wondered why the chip couldn't deliver what I expected.

Core i7-920 is an exception. Virtualization works well enough so
that, except for Linux and the sound card, I don't notice that I'm
using a virtual machine, which is noticeably faster than a 3GHz
Pentium 4 for Linux. Windows XP on Windows Vista even makes the sound
card transparent. I'm using all vmware, so I don't know how other
solutions might work. I haven't yet succeeded in overloading it.

I'll admit, I've become so cynical about computers and software that
just seeing a gnome-terminal pop when I ask for it seems like a
miracle, never mind that it's on a virtual box. Admittedly, the core
2 duo E8xx almost seem like overkill for a single user, but I haven't
tried to virtualize anything on them (yet).

Robert.

Bill Davidsen wrote:

chrisv wrote:

Bill Davidsen wrote:

Except for gamer machines, vendors expect the cover to stay on.

Nonsense. Any PC must be expected to have memory and/or PCI cards
added.

Could you note the source of that opinion?

Err, that's why the slots are there.

Your foolishness regarding 200W video cards does not disprove my
point.

The usual memory and/or PCI card addition is handled just fine in
almost every situation.

The default memory configuration for this machine was two sticks. A third stick was added to this three-channel machine as an "upgrade." techzpod download mobdro