Saturday, January 21

Geek

Daily News Stuff 21 January 2023

Blarrgle Edition

Top Story



Tech News

  • Why are Radeon 6000 cards suddenly exploding?  Because all the affected cards are second-hand from a crypto miner and were horribly abused and stored in a vat of nitroglycerin.  (Tom's Hardware)

    Well, the last part might not be technically correct, but they were abused for mining cryptocurrencies and then abused again by being stored at the bottom of a swamp:
    These catastrophically damaged GPUs show that, even though they worked fine initially, the effects of humidity that had gotten deep into the products caused the silicon to crack during / after their first rigorous session under load.
    Don't buy second-hand graphics cards.  An entire second-hand computer, sure, just wipe the operating system and you're probably good to go.  But buying second-hand graphics cards right now is like ordering badgers off eBay: Even if you actually get a badger you're likely to regret it.


  • Currently available graphics cards ranked by value.  (Tom's Hardware)

    So what should you get?  Well, unless you're spending someone else's money probably not a current generation graphics card.  Excepting the new Intel models - which are looking rather better now than they did at launch - the best ranking for any of the current generation is 27th.

    If you don't care about ray tracing then a Radeon card between the 6600 and 6750 XT is a good bet, with pricing ranging $235 to $400.  While a 4070 Ti (27th) twice as fast as a 6600 (1st), it's also nearly four times the price.


  • Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8cx Gen 4 chip for PCs might not suck.  (WCCFTech)

    Actually it very likely won't suck because after the disappointment of Gen 1 and Gen 2 (which was exactly the same chip as Gen 1), Gen 3 finally delivered a worthwhile Windows-on-Arm platform.

    The new Gen 4 is expected to support up to 64GB of LPDDR5X RAM.  Gen 3 supports 32GB of LPDDR4X - enough to be useful and double the current iMac - and is available in a $600 developer kit from Microsoft if for some reason you're interested.

    Which would actually be a reasonable price compared to the Mac Mini if Windows-on-Arm had the level of support of MacOS-on-Arm.  It does not.


  • The TSA No Fly List has been leaked yet again.  (Daily Dot)

    Not by the government itself this time around, but by airline CommuteAir (who?) who left the CSV sitting on a test server exposed to the internet.


Disclaimer: The road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the road has gone
And I must follow if I can.
Pursuing it with eager feet
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet
And whither then?  I DON'T KNOW I CAN'T READ.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:42 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 572 words, total size 5 kb.

Posted by: Jennie at Saturday, January 21 2023 10:39 PM (Db2k/)

2 Can't remember if I mentioned this previously or not but my company recently got me a new laptop.  A decent one, but 11th gen instead of the 12th gen I wanted.  Then, when I was about to go out for supper, I found another box they hadn't told me to expect.  What was it?  A TB4 dock.
For a laptop that doesn't have TB.

Posted by: Rick C at Sunday, January 22 2023 02:23 AM (BMUHC)

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Apple pies are delicious. But never mind apple pies. What colour is a green orange?




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