Re: Building computer
On 10/2/2013 9:42 AM, Rhiamom wrote:
>
>> On Oct 2, 2013, at 4:59 AM, Stan Hoeppner <stan@hardwarefreak.com> wrote
>>
>> This is the limiting factor. And this is why I implore people to buy
>> the fastest dual core and forgo the quad, six, eight core models. And
>> in fact, for non gamer daily use, I recommend the single core AMD
>> Sempron, because a dual core is wasted with Firefox, Thunderbird, Flash,
>> Adobe Reader, etc.
>>
>> I failed to make a convincing case before you purchased Catherine. But
>> at least you'll now be armed with this information when you make your
>> next purchase. Financially it's not a huge deal, maybe $50 more in this
>> case, 10% of the system price, for the quad core. But two cores will
>> forever be wasted, and that $50 could have gone toward the discrete GPU
>> you need.
>
> I never suggested you were not correct about the CPU. I observed the lack
> of utilization of multiple cores on my first dual-core machine in 2006. I got
> The Haswell for the speed, lower power consumption, and presumably less
> heat generation. And possible resale value later on.
>>
>>
>> This was my mistake for not asking point blank early in the thread what
>> res you were running instead of making assumptions based on your retired
>> status. If I had asked more questions up front we could have avoided
>> the contention. For that I apologize.
>
> No apology needed. You did in fact peg my age correctly; I will be 61 next
> month. And I too have known people who run less than the native resolution
> to make the fonts bigger. When I get to that point, though, I will simply increase
> the font size so I don't get jaggies and blurry letters. Right now my eyes need
> the sharpness of the image, not a size increase.
I'm lucky so far. In my early 40s and never needed glasses. Though I
have noticed recently I must hold fine print further away to read it,
such as product warning labels, the two paragraphs of exclusions on the
phone/cable teaser rate flyers, etc. No issues with native res yet,
thankfully.
>> You would be correct if the number you're looking at reflected
>> application memory usage. But it doesn't. On any of the modern
>> operating systems one must damn near be a computer scientist to see the
>> actual memory usage. The 5.22GB, this is on Debian, yes? The system
>> monitor? This reports process and cache memory usage. The buffer/cache
>> will literally eat nearly all available memory all the time on Linux,
>> then free some when an application process needs it. I've never used
>> OSX but it's probably similar in its desktop reporting tool.
>
> This was in OS X. The memory use would be similar in Debian, I assume. About
A Wheezy desktop install isn't going to eat nearly as much RAM as
desktop OSX, as there are far fewer service daemons loaded at startup.
> a quarter of the used memory was "inactive" which I assume was the cache. Still
I'd guess that quarter is what has been paged to disk, not the cache.
If you had no applications running, just the desktop and background
processes, that shouldn't eat anywhere near 3.5GB. I'd think the cache
is in what's left, not in the "inactive".
> too close for comfort for me, as WoW was not running, nor ventrilo, and WoW
> does background downloads of the almost-weekly patches while you play, so even
> more processes.
>
>> This will really throw you for a loop. Open a shell window and execute
>>
>> ~$ sudo echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
>>
>> Wait a few seconds and see what happens to that 5.22GB number. Then
>> report back what you find. You can do this while playing WOW as well.
>> That number will drop like a rock and WOW will keep on going, because
>> the memory you're freeing with that command is cache. And again, Linux
>> will eat nearly all RAM for cache if the system is up long enough.
>
> It is the nature of *nix to gobble up memory, yes. It will use what is there
> whether it needs it or not.
Yes, the memory is used for block caching. The reason this is done is
because the cost to drop cached lines is minimal when the memory is
needed by an active process. So instead of "wasting" memory, Linux in
particular, caches just about every block.
> But my Debian box has not arrived yet, so I can't
> run that command there. I could try it in terminal on my iMac, and it would
> probably work.
This won't work on OSX. The /proc/sys/vm/ parameters in Linux are
unique to Linux.
>>> I do thank you for the advice pertaining to a 384 bit bus and a gig more
>>> video ram than I was planning to get. That is advice that I will be
>>> following.
>>
>> You're welcome. Keep in mind that at 2560x1440 the 7950/7970 may still
>> not be fast enough for full detail in WOW with GPU settings on high.
>> The extra GB of VRAM won't get utilized but you need the memory
>> bandwidth of a 384bit bus. Nobody sells, AFAICT, a 2GB model using
>> these GPUs.
>>
>> I can't tell you where the setting resides, or if you have to edit
>> xorg.conf, but you will want to use double buffering, not triple
>> buffering. You'll also want to disable full screen antialiasing (FSAA)
>> and anisotropic filtering, or set them to very low values such as 2x or
>> 4x, or play with the settings until you strike the right balance. They
>> are variable from off to 16x. These are driver settings for the GPU.
>> They affect the image quality by smoothing the pixels of straight lines
>> and the edges of objects in the scene, i.e. removing "jaggies", such as
>> on the ears or dangling hair of characters, the tip of arrows sticking
>> out of a quiver, etc.
>
> Oddly enough, these are also WoW in-game settings. The Mac section of the
> WoW forum has specific advice on how to set those for every model of Mac
> that can run the game.
Yes, some software allows one to set these directly within the
application. The GPU driver software usually has options to honor app
settings or allow one to override the app settings, or set hard values
for applications that don't support a GPU feature.
>> You may be able to tweak these on the MAC to get acceptable smoothness
>> from your 6970 as well. GPUs are infinitely tweakable to balance speed
>> against image quality.
>
> I usually have acceptable smoothness, but I might need to tweak my settings a
> bit more. I was getting lag and jerkiness in the newest raid. I strongly suspect it
> was my husband giving a piano lesson via Skype while I was in the raid, though.
Heheh, yeah, that could do it. So could simply clicking on a few MB PDF
file. I think I mentioned way back in the thread that in game lag is
usually network related, not GPU, no RAM.
If your broadband router has QOS features, many newer models do, you
should be able to program it to give priority to game traffic. That
would prevent the lag and stutter due to Skype or any other traffic.
It's usually pretty easy to setup, if it supports it. Shoot me the
make/model# and I'll tell you if it does, and if so I'll point you to
the instructions.
--
Stan
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