Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by unethical_ban on Monday August 07, 2023 @11:33AM (#37035881)

I switched to Intel with Haswell, 4570k I believe. Broke my heart going back to Intel.

I started building computers around 2005, and AMD was the shit. I got caught up in knowing all the spec differences between CPU lines, overclocking potential, and so on. One of my first motherboards was a DFI LANPARTY and there must have been about 70 ways to tweak RAM timing. I've never seen anything like it in modern mobos.

Anyway, K10 or Bulldozer or whatever it was called by AMD was a flop, and Intel just kicked ass. I kept that Haswell probably longer than any other CPU I've used - About 5 years as my primary gaming CPU, before getting a Ryzen 1700.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by whalesalad on Monday August 07, 2023 @11:38AM (#37035933)

Dawg. The DFI LanParty was my dream board! Always wanted one. I had a piece of crap socket 754 Soltek board instead… but it was purple which was cool.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by ethbr0 on Monday August 07, 2023 @11:47AM (#37036054)

It's a decent proxy for peak utility when enthusiast motherboards last came without lights. Miss those days.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by whalesalad on Monday August 07, 2023 @11:49AM (#37036071)

All my new ASUS boards fortunately have a stealth mode that defeats all onboard RGB. Unfortunately my gaming pc still looks like the SF pride parade because the dimm’s are RGB. My latest workstation though just has regular ripjaw’s so it’s nice and stealthy.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by jonhohle on Monday August 07, 2023 @12:23PM (#37036587)

I’ve never understood the idea of RGB DIMMs. Can they be configured to show useful information about the stick (access, writes, parity errors, bus speed) or is it just for show?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by whalesalad on Monday August 07, 2023 @12:34PM (#37036774)

Just for show and requires software to configure. Fortunately tools like openRGB exist but I’d prefer off by default or a physical switch. That was a nice element of a resent ASRock Taichi card I picked up - it has a physical switch to turn off RGB.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by scns on Monday August 07, 2023 @10:31PM (#37043770)

AsRock offers the Taichi Lite mobos without RGB and ~30$ cheaper IIRC.

[edit] https://www.anandtech.com/show/18891/asrock-unveils-z790-and...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by Const-me on Monday August 07, 2023 @12:44PM (#37036956)

I have a theory that hardware vendors are making Christmas tree-inspired products trying to segment the market between gamers and professionals.

Gaming hardware is typically pretty good in terms of performance/dollar. However, similar computers without all these LEDs marketed as workstations are more profitable for the manufacturers.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by justsomehnguy on Monday August 07, 2023 @04:32PM (#37040566)

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040409-00/?p=39...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by unethical_ban on Monday August 07, 2023 @01:33PM (#37037731)

Just for show. I like some white LEDs in the case, and so I have some acrylic artwork mounted on the PCI bracket under the GPU and lighted RAM.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by wtallis on Monday August 07, 2023 @01:34PM (#37037743)

> parity errors

I have some bad news for you...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by causality0 on Monday August 07, 2023 @03:53PM (#37040051)

I miss when cases looked really cool and advanced instead of the modern "it's a glass cube with rainbow lights" look. Still think the Cooler Master Cosmos II is the best-looking PC case ever made.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by zitterbewegung on Monday August 07, 2023 @12:52PM (#37037102)

Modern motherboards are configured so that RAM optimization is done automatically but you can still do it manually.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by bobbob1921 on Monday August 07, 2023 @01:27PM (#37037635)

DFI LANPARTY !! What a motherboard! I still remember it’s physical buttons for reset, and power on and off, which were entirely new at the time (and super useful Btw)

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Sandy Bridge: Setting Intel’s Modern Foundation by formerly_proven on Monday August 07, 2023 @01:54PM (#37038047)

Manually adjusting timings is somewhat obsolete since the introduction of XMP, but you can still set all the subtimings on modern boards, most people just don't bother (although the gains can be not insignificant, especially if the XMP profile is poor). It's still dozens of parameters.

[ Parent | on HN ]