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.
Idea for future WoW leveling and world design
There was some talk on future of levels and leveling in World of Warcraft during Blizzcon as well as some ideas and comments from WoW content creators like Thete or Preach. Taking the opportunity I want to show my idea on how leveling and in bigger picture expansions could look like. Looking to hearing your opinions too!
Right angle 90 degree ATX adapter
Cable management is usually a quite important element of a custom made PC - wherever for good looks or for best airflow or thermal performance. There are custom cables, cases with very good cable management design solutions but usually there is something that may stand out among the cables - arched ATX motherboard power cable. If the bundle of cables won't be flexible enough the arch will be quite big. Solution - right angle (or 90 degree) ATX connector-adapter.
Showcasing my planetary Dall Kirkham telescope
Solar System imaging on high resolution requires very good setup in order to get good images. The optics, mechanical design, atmospheric conditions - all of that has to line up. I used a 14" Celestron SCT and I had some problems with thermal lag or lowered UV/Blue image quality due to spherochomatism and spherical aberration. I solved them by replacing my SCT with a 14" planetary Dall Kirkham telescope.
Are cheap low power x86 CPUs an alternative to higher end makers ARM boards?
Single board computers with ARM chips are flooding hackers/makers market. More and more models are released but they are getting stuck in a state of limited I/O support and limited software and drivers support when compared to what current x86 Intel and AMD platforms can provide. So let us check if cheap low power x86 CPUs can perform similarly or better while solving problems of most ARM SoC by offering more interfaces and better hardware support.