Hello fellow lemmings!

Cross posted from pcmasterrace and techsupport

I am in need of some advice on how to expand my workstation.

I currently have 2 monitors and 2 laptops with 1 docking station that I switch back and forth between (I do have a second Bluetooth mouse that I connect to the laptop that is not currently connected to the docking station, if I need to).

I would like to have 4 monitors by the upcoming tax season. Also, I would like the option to expand to a total of 3 laptops within a couple years.

I have looked into KVM switches and the only one that I can find for 4 monitors and 2 computers is upwards of $800. Is there a KVM switch out there for 4 monitors and 3 computers, or is this just a pipedream?

What other solutions should I consider? When I expand to 3 computers in the upcoming years, would having 2 workstations be cheaper/more efficient?

Hi community!
I'm in the process of building a new office PC for:

• tenths of firefox tabs open some with Microsoft 365 Excel
• some VMs because I will be installing Debian on the host, but in the office we use some Microsoft software and because, since I install, uninstall, create a lot of mess, I like to be able to go back to old snapshots or format and reinstall Windows without impacting my day to day job.

I'm still undecided about the CPU: AMD 9950x, 9700x or 7950x, but where I' completely blind is the motherboard. What I would like:

• more than 2 PCIe slots to:
  • install a PCI USB card to pass the whole controller to a VM
  • install an extra NIC
  • I want to be able to install a graphic card in future if needed
• more than 4 USB-A ports
• more than 1 USB-C port
• a well known and reliable brand

Do you have any suggestion even for an SSD (probably 4TB, in the 2-300€ range, maybe even something more) and RAM (64GB)?

Thanks!

AMD today made public their RDNA 3.5 instruction set architecture (ISA) programming guide for these updated RDNA3 graphics found within new Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" APUs thus far.

I recently bought an external PCIe enclosure so I could make use of a specific PCIe device in an editing setup. One of the nice things about this particular enclosure is that it also happens to come with an m.2 slot for NVME drives as well.

Usually when I edit with my home set up, I'm provided with the storage by the client, and even if not, at the very least, video media, plus backups takes up a lot of room and NVME drives are expensive so I'd usually opt for something cheaper as the actual location for the footage and assets. I figured then that it might be take advantage of an NVME drive of a smaller, more affordable capacity and use it just as a location for video render cache that I just clear after every project wraps. The high speeds of these drives seems like it would be a good fit for this purpose.

However I've heard that SSDs, including NVME are famously short lived and have particularly short life spans in terms of number of write operations. Is that still the case and would the constant writing and clearing of relatively small video files actually be kind of the worst use of one of these drives?

I’m looking to leverage the Thunderbolt port on my desktop to get more USB ports.

Looking around and most Thunderbolt hubs are for laptops and have hdmi and Ethernet and such that I don’t really want.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a simple hub?

Some Type-a and c ports world be lovely.

(I am a noob. I have many misconceptions. I am willing to listen however, so please be kind)

I wonder if:

• a mini PC might be a good thing to lug around (instead of a laptop)
• nice also because it is much cheaper than a laptop (due to different design constraints)
• but whom to trust? Beelink and Minisforum come up in HackerNews discussions, but I have trust issues

My question: which (mini) PC manufacturers are kind, reliable, trustworthy?

My trust issues are:

• I find it difficult to believe that I am buying anything of quality whether or not I am not paying a lot (briefly I had a period of hope where I thought that perhaps paying more in general would be a good thing as far as quality is concerned, and that hypothesis did not hold up)

• I find it difficult to believe that most products created in China/Asia-more-generally are built with kindness in mind (kindness for the worker, kindness for the consumer, kindness for everything in between): e.g. see the plethora of absolute shit that floods Amazon, Temu, etc.)

The second point, on China, deserves clarification:

• I only mention China specifically because computer hardware in general is designed and produced there, and when mini PCs are concerned, most manufacturers are based in China: e.g. Beelink and Minisforum

• it is not an issue of worker skill or product quality: I know I can get excellent goods that are worth far more than what they actually sell for (e.g. Chi-fi earbuds!), and that almost everything is made in Asia

• I work for a company that produces goods in China, and "we" ""make"" (I make nothing) good stuff! Part of our edge comes from comes from the fact that my company's owner is Chinese and puts in a lot of care into working with factories that are kind (to their workers: clothing manufacturers are often shit to women and pay them less, because misogyny is a thing everywhere)

they wouldn't have to put in this care if it wasn't a problem to begin with

• my trust issue is ultimately due to: I think most persons working in the production chain for most goods that western consumers consume are unhappy, regardless of where they live (e.g. from the people who do the final delivery to our doorstep, to the people who initially mine the raw materials)

• most of this anger is well-justified: e.g. my government and companies operating out of my country are in general, callous, but especially when it comes to Asians and Africans; some of this anger is due to how convenient it is for local leaders to make the "other" a problem, as a distraction

• anyway, getting distracted, but my point is that: if a product I buy is being made by unhappy people, then I am going to be cursed for using it: it will be full of toxic chemicals they had to endure while making it, it will be full of their spite they have for me not paying enough for their hard work, etc. the list goes ever on

(Sorry for this insanity.)

Hi, my laptop got fried because of getting caught in the rain :(

I got a gaming laptop for work a few years ago, because appearantly the CPU AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX was about the best thing to be found for updating some ridiculously complicated excel power query circusses at work, according to the internet back then (i think I found that info on pc master race on reddit before the reddit-api-fall), and finding those CPU's in business laptops was rather difficult at the time. They were right, this CPU handled the queries like a walk in the park.

Is the AMD Ryzen 9 6900H* still a very good CPU for this kind of thing, or should I put in a lot more time investigating again, is there better cost-efficiency available now in other CPU?

Sorry if this is not a right place for this question. I'm usually not really a hardware guy. Just need a CPU that handles this Excel shit as fast as possible, preferably without locking up the entire machine and without being as noisy as an F16 getting ready for lift off. On "regular" work laptops with i5 or i7, these files can take literally over an hour to update.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vb8AB8bsQSk

My understanding between TB4 and TB3 is that they're essentially the same, it's just that the standard of TB4 essentially mandates that the device must do all that TB3 maybe could do. Minimum bandwidth is increased and I think I read something about power delivery minimums as well. This eGPU chassis I bought came with it's own TB4 cable, which is actually the first Thunderbolt cable I've seen that specifically says "4" on it.

I assume the reason they supplied this is because, given what it does, an eGPU chassis is going to need to support some pretty bandwidth for a GPU. In my case though, I'm actually using this chassis not for a balls to the wall kick ass Graphics card, but actually to allow me to attach an old and very humble i/o card from Blackmagic. It's currently working just fine for that purpose.

Thing is, the supplied TB4 cable is pretty short and the chassis along with the ATX power supply mounted on it makes for a pretty hefty desk-space consuming setup. I'd like to move the whole setup somewhere fairly far off from the laptop to save me some precious desk space. I looked up 2m thunderbolt 4 cables which I understand is the longest distance you can get for TB4 and still maintain bandwidth and while it's not too bad, the prices are high for a cable. It occurs to me though that since I'm barely using a fraction of the available bandwidth anyway, could I use other, cheaper, long cables. USB4 comes up a lot in my search for 2m TB4 cables for example. (although they are mostly from AliExpress so don't know how good an idea it is to buy from them). If the chassis has TB4 controllers in it, as does the laptop to which it's attached, can one just put a USB4 cable between them? Are they physically different?

For that matter, since my bandwidth needs are so tiny, could I just find cheaper, longer TB3 cables?

I don't know my terminology very well. I just bought this eGPU enclosure. It also comes with an m.2 slot I suspect that's probably what this 4 pin power slot is for.

I have a spare ATX PSU to power this thing with and it's not modular, the cables come out of the PSU box in a big messy bundle and there's no where to detach or attach cables. There's lots of different connectors that come out of this bundle but alas no square arrangement of 2 rows of 2 pins as needed by this chassis.

There are however 2 such connectors that are kind of joined together through a little plastic catch, but in a manner where you can slide them apart. It's clearly intended that you can be able to separate these if you want to, but them being attached to each other in the first place has me a little worried.

The cable from which they each branch has TKG written on it and each of the connectors has L and R printed on it respectively. If I separate them, I can definitely fit one in to the slot, but is there any reason one shouldn't do this?

UPDATE: It works!! Initially the chassis wouldn't power on but I discovered that if I simply don't plug in the 4 pin slot at all then it does. I'm pretty sure that slot is for powering an m.2 drive if you have one and that was one of the things that made me decide to buy this particular chassis so it doesn't look great but I'm hoping that if I actually had an m.2 drive to test it with, that plugging in that PSU connector to the 4 pin slot would work, but at the moment, when there is no such drive connected, the entire chassis doesn't power on. Even better still, the blackmagic card works!! This is great because the manufacturer actually responded to my email asking if it would work too late and I had already ordered it and they said it wouldn't work so the fact that it does is a big relief. Word of advice for anyone testing this with standard computer monitors instead of proper reference monitors like me, it might say "out of range" or similar on your monitor for a lot of standard video frame rates, but for testing purposes, I was able to get it to work at 60p. No good for a real project, but hopefully with a real reference monitor that wouldn't be an issue.

I occasionally do some paid editing work in my home suite. I use a MBP and I just use whatever storage I have left on external drives or buy new ones as the project budget permits. Most of the time, my work is done on-site using a production company's facilities so it's not a big time operation here at home.

I also like to download and watch video over my wifi to to TV or my phone in other rooms of the house (don't typically move the laptop much). I tend to use the laptop's internal drive for that.

I'm beginning to outgrow my storage for both purposes, but only just. I could continue as I am for quite some time, deleting media at home after I watch it, and buying physically fairly small drives to put away in cupboards for work. However, I'm thinking I could fix both storage needs for a very long time by spending a bit bigger (but not MUCH), and getting a proper RAID. My mind immediately went to NAS, but it occurs to me that, that mightn't necessarily be the most cost effective or efficient way to go given the limited scope of my needs.

My home network is very slow consumer equipment, and I have no ethernet infrastructure at all. I thought I could maybe just hook the NAS up to the laptop via ethernet but then at that point, isn't that just DAS with the extra complications of networking? Would I need a switch between the 2? My home streaming is just done over wifi, since everything is compressed media anyway.

If I buy a decent thunderbolt DAS RAID and expose it to the wifi network via the laptop, would the costs stack up in terms of power consumption and wear and tear of the expensive lappy (given it'd be powered on nearly constantly)? Are there NAS devices that I can directly attach to the lappy for editing, but leave on and connected to wifi for home streaming? Would it need any additional networking equipment in that use case? Can I run jellyfin on it? I feel like a NAS doesn't make sense but would like help puzzling this out.

Last Wednesday was the review embargo for the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Zen 5 desktop processors that proved to be very exciting for Linux workloads from developers to creators to AVX-512 embracing AI and HPC workloads. Today the review embargo lifts on the Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X and as expected given the prior 6-core/8-core tests: these new chips are wild! The Ryzen 9 9900X and Ryzen 9 9950X are fabulous processors for those engaging in heavy real-world Linux workloads with excellent performance uplift and stunning power efficiency.

I have been very much enjoying my time testing out AMD's Zen 5 wares from the Ryzen AI 300 series to the Ryzen 9000 series. The Ryzen 5 9600X / Ryzen 7 9700X were great for whetting my appetite while awaiting the Ryzen 9 9900 series. I had been very much enjoying them to the extent I was rather surprised myself last week when hearing of some reviewers not finding much excitement out of these new Zen 5 processors but typically those just looking at Windows gaming performance or running only a few canned/synthetic benchmarks. Following the Ryzen 5 9600X and Ryzen 7 9700X Linux testing when the Ryzen 9 9900X/9950X arrived, they were put immediately to my gauntlet of hundreds of Linux benchmarks and indeed living up to expectations.

Will AMD release a Ryzen 9000 processor analogous to the Ryzen 9 7900? Non x variant.

Samy Kamkar's latest at Defcon.

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