General computer talk/advice

Ah, probably a shorted transistor or voltage reg.

 

You can only SLI with the same graphics card that you currently have. So if you have a GTX950, the only other card it can SLI with is another GTX950. The only other options for dual GPU is having two different cards and using them together is for :

• CUDA/OpenCL, in GPU compute based applications like Blender this will give you a really hefty boost in render times, however it will do nothing to make games run faster.
• PhysX. Which should never be your reason for having two separate GPU's because it offers basically no performance increase in the very few games that support it.
• Extra ports. You can use the lesser card to add a couple extra monitors to your computer.

 

It's... it's so sexy



HHHHHHNNNNGGGGGG

 

I'm not Jealous... not jealous at all... I don't know how I could possibly be any less jealous...

 

It's not mine, unfortunately.

Would be nice to have one, though. That one card alone has more power than both of my R9 380's combined.

 

stock nvidia cards are literally the ugliest

weirdo

 

I am slightly salted, welp then the GTX950 is staying with my damaged mobo because well, I will just replace it (both gpu and mobo) the other parts I will buy later on
It is good to know what the purpose of having two cards would be

 

Is this ok for GPU mining?

 

Sure. You're making a killing off that.

 

For the past while I have generally accepted that my computer in its current setup was 99.98% stable. As in, it gets booted up on a morning and runs totally stable until it gets turned off at the end of the day. However on some days (maybe 2-3 times a week) it will completely lock up, always within the last hour of me using the computer before I pack up for a day (perhaps 1 or 2 outliers over the course of a year). As such the crashes haven't really been a big deal, more of a message telling me to go to bed, which is probably a good thing xD.

However, today it crashed, but I still had a couple things I needed to do so I rebooted it, then it crashed again within 20 mins. Which is highly unusual, it also caused me enough irritation to finally do something about it.

For all this time I have been pretty certain it is the overclock that has been causing the issues (3.3Ghz CPU running at 4.4Ghz with the voltage turned as low as I could get away with), I still don't have the data to prove if it was or not, time and experimentation will tell I guess. For now I have bumped up the CPU target voltage by 0.05v (3.375 -> 3.38) and called it a day, will see if it still crashes.

But what I did find out is that my CPU runs way cooler at full load than I thought it did. I was under the impression that it usually ran at around 75c full load. Was also impressed at how instantly it dropped back down to near idle temps when I stopped the stress testing. Seems the CPU cooler and thermal compound that came free with it (Cheap White OEM stuff in clear plastic sachet) are still doing a fairly good job even after over 6 years of fairly heavy use.

Ambient temps are 25c

--- Post updated ---
Managed to find a picture of the thermal paste that came with the CPU. Strangely Akasa doesn't show pictures of it anywhere in any of their promo material xD


Image Source: http://www.hardwareoverclock.com/Akasa_Venom_Prozessor_Kuehler-2.htm

Its the salad cream of Thermal paste
--- Post updated ---
Decided to do a passmark test to see if the CPU can still hold its weight.

Turns out it is only around 5% slower than a current gen I5 7600k at stock clocks... I guess the overclocked 6 year old 2500k still has some life left in it then.

 

So, I went to a goodwill today. They gave me a deal for a some computers. I got 2 dell desktops for $8.99. One was a newer Windows 7 desktop, the other was an old Windows 2000 machine. I put a hard drive in the Win7 dell, got it running, and well what do you know. It was more powerful than I thought.


The Windows 2000 machine wasn't half bad for the time either. It had 512 MB of ram and a Pentium 4.

 

I am genuinely impressed......maybe I should start buying all the computers at goodwill......

 

I think I just got lucky.

 

I would love to see the insides of it see what it is like

 

Throw a decent ($150) card in there, and it's probably more powerful than my rig! For 10% the price.

 

Probably?

It's Ivy-Bridge. That thing's a GTX 980 and an SSD away from being a freaking monster. My props to him, fantastic find!

 

inside the dell

there was also this AMD card which I have no idea what it is. It doesn't look like it would be very powerful though, just based on the size.

I took it out because the card needed a non-vga connection. time to go get another monitor.

 

What does the case look like?

 

nothing really special, just a black dell case.

 

My school had the same ones i think even the same ones sadly i wasnt at the school anymore when they got rid of it then i would have tried to get one