Tag Archives: laptop

A flood of build reports is coming!

Posted on by
4

I’m a bit embarrassed to have let rsts11 drift most of the year. For what it’s worth, I’ve dug out some project machines, and I may have acquired one or four in the last couple of months, so I’m planning to bring you some build logs and reports to entertain and edify you heading into the holidays.

From a ThinkStation M920x one-liter tiny PC that can take a 40 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, to a HP Z6 G4 workstation that a vendor recently called a “real chonker,” I have some fun stuff to review for you. And I’m finally making use of some RTX 3000-series GPUs that have been useless for crypto mining for years.

Wherever possible, I’ll help you find the bits to build or upgrade your own, but in most of these cases (heh) I started with a machine at least partly built up. Check your local marketplaces to see what people are building and selling locally, and you may find an interesting configuration you hadn’t thought of.

Below are teasers of three of the machines I’ll be working on. The Machinist system was purchased locally, while the other two were from eBay.

An HP Z6 G4 workstation, supporting first and second gen Xeon Scalable processors and up to 768GB of DDR4 memory. It shares something in common with Dell’s T5800 and some other Precision workstations from my past. Ketchup is not used as thermal paste, and the dust bunnies were blown out into the wild..
An upgrade to a quirky Machinist X99 PR9 system in a red custom case – E5-2695v4, and a current complement of 128GB DDR4 registered RAM. One downside to used PCs is they can sometimes come with bonus fragrances.
My third BOXX workstation, with the ASrock Z390 Taichi, an i7-9700K due for upgrade to my first i9 processor, custom liquid cooling, and some likely memory upgrades.
Continue reading →

Lowered Expectations – How Low Can Your Laptop Go?

Posted on by
Reply

[An Interop Aside: I visited with a couple of vendors at Interop who are sending some gear for me to explore. I’m holding off on their coverage until that happens, although another summary post may be forthcoming.]

I’m a big laptop fan. Afficionado, not cooler, mind you. It’s a problem, especially since my recent rebuild acquisitions and components are blocking the fireplace at the moment.

There’s been a disturbing trend over the last couple of years, whereby laptop manufacturers decide to move more toward the netbook specifications for memory (and often storage), rather than to the state of the art for the current generation of laptop processors. I was commiserating with my friend John Obeto about this recently.

For a couple of months now, you’ve been able to order a Dell Precision 7000-series laptop with 64GB of RAM. That’s twice as much as many desktops can handle today. And even if you don’t have room for four DIMM slots in your laptop design, DDR4 16GB SODIMMs are very affordable and readily available even at retail. So there’s really no reason for a 13″ or larger laptop to have an 8GB limit.

But it is the way of the world, for most lightweight laptops these days. Even Dell’s remarkable XPS 13 9343 maxed at 8GB – the 9350 model this year has a 16GB option but it’s online order only (and in the $2000 range as I recall). Continue reading →