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Never be the first kid on your block...
Sep. 4th, 2018 07:49 pmWith the old PC (bought five years ago) beginning to have what looks like a hardware problem, I wanted a new PC earlier this year. The old one used an AMD A8 APU which is basically a CPU with a reasonable graphics card built in. Intel have similar combined hardware but because AMD bought one of the two big players in the graphics 'biz', their versions are better.
And it's worked very well. It's fast enough to play stuff I want to play, while having low power requirements and saved three figures on a separate graphics card.
So with AMD just having released the first 'with inbuilt graphics' versions of its latest 'better than Intel, at last' Ryzen CPUs, the obvious choice was to go for one of those. As the people who made the old one have nothing like this in their range, it was a case of looking for somewhere that a) did and b) didn't insist on selling me a copy of Windows 10 that I'd never use.
That turned out to be Punch Technology. They also have a nice customising option which means I could have a PC with a case that fits where the old one fits (most are too high or, in at least one case, have stuff on the top of the case which would be inaccessible), with no hard drive (easier to buy and fit myself, having rsync'd the contents of the one in the old one), but maxing out the RAM at a price that I couldn't beat by buying the bits myself.
It arrived in June and when it works, it's lovely. But that's not for very long.
I think the problem is the word 'just' in 'just having released'. The last time I bought something that recent was the 'white PC', a home-build based around a motherboard with a Nvidia (the other graphics lot) chipset that had 'better than Intel' graphics, and it took a while before software caught up. My memory is that the then current Ubuntu wouldn't work properly until assorted driver issues were sorted and it was much the same with Windows.
Here, I don't know what Windows is like, but Ubuntu MATE has been locking up with very annoying frequency. That's 'more than zero times', but it's been up to three times a day. I can move the mouse, but clicks and keystrokes don't register. If I use some crappy 1024x768 video mode, it happens considerably less frequently, but it still happens. Sometimes, having the netbook logged in remotely looking at log files means I can see what happens - the graphics bit of the CPU gets upset but I can shutdown the machine remotely, at least to the point of flushing all pending disc writes. Other times, even that goes and it's up to fsck to repair the results.
In terms of what's going wrong, it's also very noticeable that if I press the reset button or do a rapid 'hard shutdown, restart' cycle, it is very likely not to start correctly. To me, that suggests that something isn't set up properly in the CPU by the BIOS and, if old values are left in some obscure control registers because the internal capacitance has retained enough power to avoid a genuinely cold start, it goes TITSUP.
And indeed, the CPU initialisation code has been updated since I bought it.
Unfortunately, Punch have locked the BIOS via having their logo rather than MSI's and, possibly, signing it. Normally, the logo is something I would only see once every six months or so, but it's been in my face rather a lot and the effect is that I can't install the current MSI BIOS.
We've been discussing this for a while and it's about to go back for a brain (motherboard and CPU) transplant. I've said I expect the latest BIOS, and preferably unlocked. If that doesn't work, I think it's going to be (faster) Ryzen and (faster) graphics card, but at a (bigger) cost.
As well as the irritation, all this has lead to an issue with me missing assorted emails. If a lockup happens between mail arriving and me noticing, I don't see it as new. When I restart, it's there, but it's not flagged as 'new'.
It's also meant the book I'm supposed to be writing has ground to a halt: as well as the demoralising effect of it all, one particularly bad double lockup meant a pile of vital research tabs went AWOL, including not being in what was left of the browser's history. I'm avoiding the person who's name will be on it when it's finished, and ARGH...
And it's worked very well. It's fast enough to play stuff I want to play, while having low power requirements and saved three figures on a separate graphics card.
So with AMD just having released the first 'with inbuilt graphics' versions of its latest 'better than Intel, at last' Ryzen CPUs, the obvious choice was to go for one of those. As the people who made the old one have nothing like this in their range, it was a case of looking for somewhere that a) did and b) didn't insist on selling me a copy of Windows 10 that I'd never use.
That turned out to be Punch Technology. They also have a nice customising option which means I could have a PC with a case that fits where the old one fits (most are too high or, in at least one case, have stuff on the top of the case which would be inaccessible), with no hard drive (easier to buy and fit myself, having rsync'd the contents of the one in the old one), but maxing out the RAM at a price that I couldn't beat by buying the bits myself.
It arrived in June and when it works, it's lovely. But that's not for very long.
I think the problem is the word 'just' in 'just having released'. The last time I bought something that recent was the 'white PC', a home-build based around a motherboard with a Nvidia (the other graphics lot) chipset that had 'better than Intel' graphics, and it took a while before software caught up. My memory is that the then current Ubuntu wouldn't work properly until assorted driver issues were sorted and it was much the same with Windows.
Here, I don't know what Windows is like, but Ubuntu MATE has been locking up with very annoying frequency. That's 'more than zero times', but it's been up to three times a day. I can move the mouse, but clicks and keystrokes don't register. If I use some crappy 1024x768 video mode, it happens considerably less frequently, but it still happens. Sometimes, having the netbook logged in remotely looking at log files means I can see what happens - the graphics bit of the CPU gets upset but I can shutdown the machine remotely, at least to the point of flushing all pending disc writes. Other times, even that goes and it's up to fsck to repair the results.
In terms of what's going wrong, it's also very noticeable that if I press the reset button or do a rapid 'hard shutdown, restart' cycle, it is very likely not to start correctly. To me, that suggests that something isn't set up properly in the CPU by the BIOS and, if old values are left in some obscure control registers because the internal capacitance has retained enough power to avoid a genuinely cold start, it goes TITSUP.
And indeed, the CPU initialisation code has been updated since I bought it.
Unfortunately, Punch have locked the BIOS via having their logo rather than MSI's and, possibly, signing it. Normally, the logo is something I would only see once every six months or so, but it's been in my face rather a lot and the effect is that I can't install the current MSI BIOS.
We've been discussing this for a while and it's about to go back for a brain (motherboard and CPU) transplant. I've said I expect the latest BIOS, and preferably unlocked. If that doesn't work, I think it's going to be (faster) Ryzen and (faster) graphics card, but at a (bigger) cost.
As well as the irritation, all this has lead to an issue with me missing assorted emails. If a lockup happens between mail arriving and me noticing, I don't see it as new. When I restart, it's there, but it's not flagged as 'new'.
It's also meant the book I'm supposed to be writing has ground to a halt: as well as the demoralising effect of it all, one particularly bad double lockup meant a pile of vital research tabs went AWOL, including not being in what was left of the browser's history. I'm avoiding the person who's name will be on it when it's finished, and ARGH...