Power and thermal performance of fanless Pentium J5005 PC
Not so long ago I tested a fanless Pentium J5005 motherboard. I did some basic power usage testing but that was done with a powerful ATX power supply. In this article I want to test power usage more precisely with a DC/ATX power adapter. Alongside it I want to test if there will be any thermal throttling when running the system under heavy load in a typical small mini ITX case. How a 10W TDP CPU will perform in those categories?
Wire wrapping tool for electronics prototyping with reliable connections
Breadboards allow for quick prototyping of electronic circuits, yet they don't offer reliable connections, especially those that will last in less friendly that desk conditions. We can solder the circuit on an universal PCB but that requires time and makes any fixes quite hard to implement. Fortunately there is a in-between solution called wire wrapping.
In this article I'll showcase a simple tool for wire wrapping - an very old technique of wrapping wires on electronic components. More reliable than DuPont connectors and a breadboard yet quick and easy to wrap or unwrap.
Grounding and electrostatic discharge protection of a problematic PC system
When winter comes or when someone watches The Verge PC build reaction video the topic of ESD protection and electrostatic discharge sees a surge in interest. People working with electronics or even more precautious PC builders do use various tools and safety measures to avoid damaging electronics via electrostatic discharges. Consumers of electronic devices don't care that much and often just rely that the device maker made the device to handle both electrostatic discharges as well as various electric faults that may occur.
In this article I'll go over basics of grounding, electrical bonding, electrostatic discharge and how that caused problems to my PC. Treat it as a template for checking or improving your own electrical wiring.
Testing old 16 core Opteron 6386 SE on a Jingsha X89 motherboard
For server market both AMD and Intel offer dedicated groups of products. Intel has Xeons processors, AMD had Opterons and now Epyc. One of AMD past family of server Opteron processors used a G34 socket and offered up to 16 cores and an option to have up to four CPUs on one motherboard for a total of 64 processor cores.
In this article I'll test the top of the line 16-core Opteron 6386 SE on a rather recently released Chinese G34 motherboard. How does 16-cores from 2012 compares to 12-16 core Threadrippers in 2019? Can it even beat latest quad core CPUs?
Risers and adapters for non-standard GPU connection
You get a graphics card and you connect it to a PCIe slot on the motherboard. That's the most common way but not the only one. In some cases you may want to mount the GPU away from the motherboard – to showcase it, to improve cooling, to power it directly from the power supply and not via motherboard PCIe slot, or when you have a nettop or a laptop with mPCIe, M.2 NVMe or ExpressCard slot and you want to be able to connect a GPU at all. In such cases extension cables called risers, various boards and eGPU adapters come to play. Some special computer cases also. Let's have a look at those options.
Design and capabilities of multi-CPU computers
There are tasks like video rendering that can take many hours on a good CPU. The final total time needed depends on the CPU performance - how many cores it has, what frequency it runs at, what is it IPC and so on. Many tasks can use multiple cores of a CPU to finish the job faster while the CPU can only have a finite amount of cores due to size or design limits. To overcome this problem servers and workstations just use more than one processor in one system. It adds complexity but provides much more cores for the task to run on. Lets check how multi-CPU systems work and how you can play with one yourself by using an old cheap workstation motherboard.
Threadripper 1920X and Vega 64 all water AiO build and benchmarks
From time to time a time for changes comes and it pulls some money out of the wallet. To end 2018 with more FPS and compute power I decided to build a new PC based on 12 core Threadripper 1920X and RX Vega 64 - both with water cooling and in a compact case.
Testing two cheap portable monitors
It's not a problem to buy a monitor. If you need 1080p, 4K 16:9 or ultrawide 21:9 - everything is easily available. But there is also a niche called portable monitors with small diagonals of 11,6" to 17,4", often powered from a laptop to which they can be connected to. In this article I'll review two Chinese monitors of such type - 11,6" and 13,3" cheap displays.
Testing fanless Pentium J5005 + GTX 1050 Ti PC
Around four years ago I was testing a Celeron J1900 CPU. Today I will be testing latest successor - Pentium J5005 CPU. Both are a quad core low power 10W TDP CPUs intended for very compact and basic PCs. Let's find out how much performance improvement did happened over those four years. Will a 10W passively cooled CPU combines with a passively cooled GTX 1050 Ti be to run some games? Lets find out.
In this article I will test and go through a fanless PC based on ASRock J5005-ITX board and Palit GTX 1050 Ti - a fanless, passively cooled components creating a zero-noise PC. Plus some Vega 64 results for comparison.
Astrophotography - hobby with nice views and lots of hardware
Next day and another PC hardware benchmark, product rumor or new CPU specifications, not to mention some OS updates and so forth. But there is PC technology and software that can see and study places where no man has gone before. I would want to showcase to you astrophotography in a hobby form factor. 10 nm may be a cool thing, but 628 743 036 kilometers definitely has more mystery to it.