Aftermath of the Upgrade - Desktop 2.0

-
It's actually Desktop 3.0 - 1.0 being a Pentium Dual Core with 2GB RAM on an Intel motherboard - don't even remember the model. But it had an AGP port and I remember adding a NVidia MX4000 GPU to that. And it was a decent machine. After few years it got donated to nearby school. So good EoL. Desktop 2.0 is not sitting in a corner - waiting for memory prices to come down so that I can finally return it's old 2666MHz 16GB sticks and maybe return the old-ass Zebronics SSD too. It would probably go for 12-15K, and then maybe if I manage to get a nice high-end GPU, then I would combine this junk with the RTX 3050 and sell it for 40k. Would work out. Or just sell the parts one by one. Whatever.
Anyway back to the Desktop 3.0, the desktop is quite good at 2-tasking as long as those tasks are consuming different storage media. The CPU runs well, memory is slow-ass being 2666MHz. And yes I did pay 7k for a 8GB 3000MHz module but it does not matter since dual-channel is still better than 333MHz ram speed. Just for gags, I asked Gemini AI about which RAM I should pair with AMD Ryzen 5 5600 and it said to get 3600 MHz RAM, and yes that is as bad as DDR5. So might as well spend an arm and a leg and get AM5 and everything else. No!
Anyway, coming back to the performance, it's good. The CPU is running well. Cabinet is airy and things are cool, and even the RTX3050 GPU is running well. Wiring the damn thing was a pain in the ass, and it took half-a-day to figure out optimal cable routing etc and then got to disassemble it twice because the mainboard took 6 screws, and another time because the RGB lighting won't work.
Well the RGB - or rather poverty spec RGB lighting, just blinks on various settings. Maybe I'll spend some amount and just get a bunch of true RGB fans. Anyway right now it seems okay.
The storage is limiting but then all these are used low perf disks and they don't really matter. Another couple of years and we can get a 2TB Samsung SSD for an arm. The OS installation could have been challenging but Windows did not even bother with license related prompts - asked me to login to Microsoft account and then it installed all the drivers. Had to grab some from MSI wesbsite and then it was all good. Getting Ubuntu did not work well, because turns out secure boot related issues meant no more MBR. But then I figured out F11 gets us multi-boot options.
So all good on that front. 
Alright so what next? A nice 27Inch OLED and the Eris Pro 5 is en queue. Cheers!!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Morning Quotes

-
Image
Source: www.brainyquote.com   I may be drunk, Miss, but in the morning I will be sober and you will still be ugly. Winston Churchill   Prayer is the key of the morning and the bolt of the evening. Mohandas Gandhi   I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning. Benjamin Franklin  
Read more

QCalendarWidget CSS Stylesheeting

-
Recently I had to implement a calendar for a TouchScreen application. I resorted to css to modify the calendar widget's appearance so that it would be more accessible. Following is the code that enabled me to get a proper calendar. calendar->setStyleSheet("QMenu { font-size:20px; width: 300px; left: 20px; }"     "QToolButton {icon-size: 48px, 48px; font: 20px; height: 70px; width: 100px; }"     "QAbstractItemView {selection-background-color: rgb(255, 174, 0);}"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator{ width: 50px;}"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator:pressed,"     "QToolButton::menu-indicator:open{ top:10px; left: 10px;}"     "QTableView { font: 30px; }"     "QSpinBox { width: 100px; font: 20px;}"     "QSpinBox::up-button { width:40px;}"     "QSpinBox::down-button { width:40px;}");
Read more

Qt global thread pool max thread count

-
Recently I encountered that some threads are not launching in our application using QConcurrentRun. If you launched the same worker function over QThread it was working.   So digging into this gave us this problem with defaults for Qt's global threadpool. Basically Qt sets global threadpool's max thread count to the no of cores you have on your processor. We were easily running out of the default four max threads. So we upped the count to 32 using following function:  QThreadPool::globalInstance()->setMaxThreadCount(32); We set this at start of the program in main. Things have been fine since then!
Read more