Discussion Processors and the Melancholy Hours

[jnjnilson6]

What are the most melancholy hours for you in terms of computing?

Would they stretch back to the mellow light-induced evenings enlightened by 386/486 CPUs? Would that be the Pentium era?
Do you still remember vividly particular games and times: like when the sunlight sank deeply over sharpened forest verdure and the exquisiteness of portrayal fell stunningly into the mind like a thousands frames of spinning light whilst traversing the forests in Crysis? Or going a lot into the past - the sturdy choir of DOS games lacking voluptuousness and vivaciousness yet retaining a breathless and vivid strength within intemperate color and mindful visage?

Those hours, intangible and fleeting, resurrected through memory in shards of paler color, while the CPU trudged gaudily on and the monitor expressed with fineness beautiful unventured worlds... The past stretching crystalline behind billions of calculations and within minutes eternally etched out within warm memories on warm evenings like the echo of a distant dream.

Thank you!

 

[kanewolf]

What are the most melancholy hours for you in terms of computing?

Would they stretch back to the mellow light-induced evenings enlightened by 386/486 CPUs? Would that be the Pentium era?
Do you still remember vividly particular games and times: like when the sunlight sank deeply over sharpened forest verdure and the exquisiteness of portrayal fell stunningly into the mind like a thousands frames of spinning light whilst traversing the forests in Crysis? Or going a lot into the past - the sturdy choir of DOS games lacking voluptuousness and vivaciousness yet retaining a breathless and vivid strength within intemperate color and mindful visage?

Those hours, intangible and fleeting, resurrected through memory in shards of paler color, while the CPU trudged gaudily on and the monitor expressed with fineness beautiful unventured worlds... The past stretching crystalline behind billions of calculations and within minutes eternally etched out within warm memories on warm evenings like the echo of a distant dream.

Thank you!

AMD FX9590 time.

 

[COLGeek]

AMD FX9590 time.

A truly awful CPU.

 

[jnjnilson6]

A truly awful CPU.

Well, still... Sometimes even awful hardware brings out the most poignant memories. Has to do, perhaps, more with the melancholy of reminiscence and the inexorable past than with the hardware. Temptingly thinking of a more opalescent world when we were younger and those gaudy nights wasting time ceaselessly immersed in breathless action...

What did you think was bad about it? About that time I had an i7-3770K and really enjoyed it. The 9590 doesn't seem that much slower than it.

 

[Eximo]

Well, still... Sometimes even awful hardware brings out the most poignant memories. Has to do, perhaps, more with the melancholy of reminiscence and the inexorable past than with the hardware. Temptingly thinking of a more opalescent world when we were younger and those gaudy nights wasting time ceaselessly immersed in breathless action...

What did you think was bad about it? About that time I had an i7-3770K and really enjoyed it. The 9590 doesn't seem that much slower than it.

Aside from the cooling requirements and potential board failure having to provide that much power? Whereas you had a neat like 77W 3770k that could do the same job, and then some when it came to gaming?

FX9590 was 70W at idle, and the numbers vary, but up to 370W off of a 220W TDP.

We take that amount of power for granted now, but it was quite a silly amount at the time.

 

[COLGeek]

Well, still... Sometimes even awful hardware brings out the most poignant memories. Has to do, perhaps, more with the melancholy of reminiscence and the inexorable past than with the hardware. Temptingly thinking of a more opalescent world when we were younger and those gaudy nights wasting time ceaselessly immersed in breathless action...

What did you think was bad about it? About that time I had an i7-3770K and really enjoyed it. The 9590 doesn't seem that much slower than it.

It wasn't a matter of slower. It was a heat and power disaster. Underclocking to FX-8350 levels was often the only way to get the 9000-series to be stable.

Personally, I've never had a melancholy PC experience from one of my systems. The Mrs. though took us through the Netbook and separate Windows ME phases, and those were trying times.

I have more than 5 decades of computing experience, but didn't own my first PC until 1988.

 

[jnjnilson6]

It wasn't a matter of slower. It was a heat and power disaster. Underclocking to FX-8350 levels was often the only way to get the 9000-series to be stable.

Personally, I've never had a melancholy PC experience from one of my systems. The Mrs. though took us through the Netbook and separate Windows ME phases, and those were trying times.

I have more than 5 decades of computing experience, but didn't own my first PC until 1988.

Thank you! That's a wonderful bit of information.

Do you remember the price / specs of that first machine in 1988? What software (OS and programs) did you mostly run on it? Those timeless memories of the past drift along the byways of the mind forever... Every 10 years or so there's a bouleversement of perception and the past seems infinitely more beautiful and desirable - saturated vividly and immemorial within the specter of devoured memories.

 

[Eximo]

There were times when my system couldn't handle what I wanted it to do, but I would generally upgrade when that would happen which made it a fun time. Been a while since I let my computer get behind the times though.

 

[jnjnilson6]

There were times when my system couldn't handle what I wanted it to do, but I would generally upgrade when that would happen which made it a fun time. Been a while since I let my computer get behind the times though.

I wonder how long our i7s would last; the i7-12700KF being yours and the i7-12700H - mine, respectively.

I'd say 5 years strongly and thereafter, perhaps, up to 7 years with a little push. For web browsing and office work that time span should almost last indefinitely. You can still do those things well on Core 2 Duos / Extremes from 2006 if equipped with an SSD and enough RAM.

 

[Eximo]

I plan to pick up 14700k at some point. I have two Z690 boards, so 12700kf will just move down to replace my i3-12100F when it gets tired.

I retired my 7700k a bit prematurely in December, so almost exactly 7 years. It was still getting the job done for light gaming, but I swapped it for my i9-10900F just to give my brother/nephew some more processing power. They also got my old GTX 1080, so pretty decent machine for gaming.

Been about a year now, but the 4770k I was using for general browsing was about 10 years old and still doing well. I even had it underclocked to 3Ghz. I would say most quad cores are enough to last out through the decade at least.

 

[Order 66]

A truly awful CPU.

What made it so bad? I would've been 7 when it was released.

 

[kanewolf]

What made it so bad? I would've been 7 when it was released.

Read post #5 and #6.

 

[Order 66]

Read post #5 and #6.

I can't believe that. I mean 70W at idle, that's about 50W less than my 7700x uses at full load. Oh, and 370W at full load, The threadripper 7990wx has a tdp of 350W, while it has 12x the number of cores and 24x the number of threads. My most melancholy CPU experience was trying to play Roblox on my piddly Celeron n3350 laptop at 3fps.

 

[USAFRet]

I can't believe that.

Believe it.
The 9590 was a disaster. A dumpster fire waiting to happen.

Often, they needed to be undervolted and -clocked, just to get it to run stably.
And needed a top end motherboard ($$$) to support it.

 

[Eximo]

Only set of CPUs to ship with an included water cooler I believe.
Launch price for the FX9590 was $1000. FX 8350 was $200 and could be overclocked into FX-9370 territory relatively easily. And the 3770k was basically just better all around. And you could jump over to HEDT and spend $1000 on a vastly superior CPU from Intel.

There was a time people would see the 8* cores and the high frequency and think this must be the best CPU. So when they started getting discounted, extremely, you had people pairing them up with barely capable motherboards and then complaining about it. Even the late model FX-8350, the non-crazy flagship, was only on par with AMD's previous 6-core Phenom II. The entire series was easily skippable until Ryzen came out.

Then there was the whole core count thing. Because of the architecture of the CPU core pairs shared an ALU, so they weren't entirely independent. Software wasn't really written with them in mind so they often underperformed Intel quad cores of the time. Very few circumstances where they were worth it.

 

[COLGeek]

Thank you! That's a wonderful bit of information.

Do you remember the price / specs of that first machine in 1988? What software (OS and programs) did you mostly run on it? Those timeless memories of the past drift along the byways of the mind forever... Every 10 years or so there's a bouleversement of perception and the past seems infinitely more beautiful and desirable - saturated vividly and immemorial within the specter of devoured memories.

I don't recall the price. It was running the current version of DOS at the time. It included a truly crappy menu style application to run included utilities. All got removed.

I purchased from the PX in Nuremberg Germany along with a Star dot matrix printer. Games included a version of an earlier Ultima.

I used a great deal for work, using an old defunct government office suite called Enable.

I borrowed from the office as we were just getting Zenith PCs, where I was an artillery battalion S4 at the time.

 

[DSzymborski]

I definitely don't miss the constantly posts about the FX-9590 here that involved someone deciding it was a great idea to get one on inappropriate hardware, resulting in them being utterly confused why it wasn't working properly. What an awful CPU.

 

[Order 66]

I definitely don't miss the constantly posts about the FX-9590 here that involved someone deciding it was a great idea to get one on inappropriate hardware, resulting in them being utterly confused why it wasn't working properly. What an awful CPU.

Are you talking, pairing the CPU ($1000+ msrp) with a $100 motherboard levels of headaches?

 

[stonecarver]

What are the most melancholy hours for you in terms of computing?

I really didn't have time even know my off work hours were always messing with computers. But in 2001 that changed and I had just put together in 2003 an AMD 3200xp CPU machine with a ATI 9200 GPU.

I remember we were having a crazy heat wave summer that year and the coolest place in the house was the garage at night. I set up out there and with the cool night air at 2am played Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb and later Farcry. When we hit winter still out in garage to play Doom 3 lights out cold night air in the spooky garage really put you in the game. By than I had the Nvidia 5700 Ultra but short lived and got a Nvidia 6800GT.

Prices motherboard and CPU was a Fry's weekly special maybe $ 100-150
5700 Ultra about $480
6800 GT just over $ 500.

Those nights rolled into the sun coming up while gaming to wait for night again. We were hitting 115F to 118F that year.

 

[Eximo]

Are you talking, pairing the CPU ($1000+ msrp) with a $100 motherboard levels of headaches?

Pretty much, but by then the price for the CPU dropped hugely, and the tray version got out without an included cooler.

The motherboards that could actually handle the power output did not get cheaper. Most were built with 125W in mind, not 220W.

 

[DSzymborski]

Are you talking, pairing the CPU ($1000+ msrp) with a $100 motherboard levels of headaches?

That, plus the cooling and the power supply.

With motherboards, there were already a lot of AM3+ motherboards that were unsuitable for 125W CPUs as companies were, unfortunately, extremely aggressive at listing support for them. The budget motherboards were largely retrofit AM3 motherboards that did not have the proper power delivery to handle 125W CPUs. And then people would throw in the 220W ones. 125W CPUs were already sending lots of budget motherboards to early graves and this accelerated the process.

Also, these were very hard to keep cool; many people did not follow AMD's instruction that a high-end liquid cooler was necessary.

These also fared really poorly with cheap PSUs. The 9590 was basically just an FX-8350 with the beejesus clocked out if it, and AMD did a not-so-good job at actually binning these chips. When you're talking extreme overclocks, issues like voltage regulation become much more crucial, and a lot of people tried to run the 9590 on their junk-tier PSUs.

 

[Order 66]

That, plus the cooling and the power supply.

With motherboards, there were already a lot of AM3+ motherboards that were unsuitable for 125W CPUs as companies were, unfortunately, extremely aggressive at listing support for them. The budget motherboards were largely retrofit AM3 motherboards that did not have the proper power delivery to handle 125W CPUs. And then people would throw in the 220W ones. 125W CPUs were already sending lots of budget motherboards to early graves and this accelerated the process.

Also, these were very hard to keep cool; many people did not follow AMD's instruction that a high-end liquid cooler was necessary.

These also fared really poorly with cheap PSUs. The 9590 was basically just an FX-8350 with the beejesus clocked out if it, and AMD did a not-so-good job at actually binning these chips. When you're talking extreme overclocks, issues like voltage regulation become much more crucial, and a lot of people tried to run the 9590 on their junk-tier PSUs.

I find it hilarious that these people apparently couldn't be bothered to do a quick Google search to find out the supported tdp of their motherboard and the tdp of the CPU they were going to get. I guess it must have been a different time then. Maybe I'm misunderstanding as well. I don't understand how someone would look at a $100 motherboard and think that it's fine after spending $1k on a CPU.

 

[Eximo]

I find it hilarious that these people apparently couldn't be bothered to do a quick Google search to find out the supported tdp of their motherboard and the tdp of the CPU they were going to get. I guess it must have been a different time then. Maybe I'm misunderstanding as well. I don't understand how someone would look at a $100 motherboard and think that it's fine after spending $1k on a CPU.

The people who bought it at $1000 were enthusiasts.

The average person we are talking about saw 5Ghz 8-core when Intel was selling 4Ghz quad cores and just bought it for like $250. Then shoved it in any motherboard that was compatible. Average people also tend to cheap out on PSUs. It was the perfect storm of a bad system.

Or people who upgraded from FX6100 and FX6300 chips (95W) to these monsters.

 

[DSzymborski]

I find it hilarious that these people apparently couldn't be bothered to do a quick Google search to find out the supported tdp of their motherboard and the tdp of the CPU they were going to get. I guess it must have been a different time then. Maybe I'm misunderstanding as well. I don't understand how someone would look at a $100 motherboard and think that it's fine after spending $1k on a CPU.

You've been hanging around here long enough and seen enough that you've seen that people mostly can't be bothered to do basic research!

 

[COLGeek]

You've been hanging around here long enough and seen enough that you've seen that people mostly can't be bothered to do basic research!

Learning and researching takes effort, something that many simply don't do. That is the topic of another thread altogether.

Get off my grass!