Snakecharmed

Interesting, I didn't even know about that CPU's existence, and now I'm sad that I missed the deal because a 7950X is exactly what I had in mind. My mind wasn't on PC components at all over Black Friday, but now I'm beginning to pivot back because of speculation about incoming tariffs. Anyone else foresee a spending spree for themselves over the holidays? 7950X and 96 GB DDR5-6000+ is what I'm currently planning.

Intel Announces Retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger :: Intel Corporation (INTC) WWW.INTC.COM "Retired" Can't say I'm surprised. He talked a bigger game than what he could deliver (which feels like part of the job description for working at Intel nowadays), and he presided over some major blunders recently in both product and corporate, but Intel still remains lost without a clear direction. As for the immediate short term, interim co-CEOs with backgrounds in finance and marketing. Yeah, that will go over well.

So more mediocre-at-best parts will be flooding the market then. NZXT's reputation has taken a hit for some time now in the case market (in part because of how they handled the fire issue), and Corsair quality seemingly has taken a dip with their increasingly disappointing portfolio of cases, cooling solutions, and sloppy/overpriced/underperforming custom-built Origin PC systems. All I have from Corsair in my current build is their older 2018 version RM850x PSU which has a quieter fan than the newer version. Hardware-as-a-service is the worst consumer idea to come along since—and the obvious evolution of—Aaron's and Rent-A-Center in the retail world. I'm glad NZXT is getting called out for this garbage, as if car manufacturers locking mechanical features behind a subscription paywall wasn't bad enough on one end of the absurdity spectrum, and insane payday loan interest rates on the other.

Well then, it looks like by extension most of my criticism for FC1 would have been intended for Crytek, and what still holds are the gameplay experience quirks that knock down good-to-great visual design and generally good writing down a peg with mediocre mechanics and execution. By all standards, AC1 wasn't a bad game; I've played, stuck with, and regretted playing far worse. The problem was that I picked up MGS4 and then Red Dead Redemption before I had a chance to finish it, and after all that, diving into haystacks for the umpteenth time wasn't going to get me back into the game. I guess the series got better with subsequent games, but if you fail to nail it on the first attempt, retaining a player base becomes a far more difficult endeavor. I haven't played anything made by Ubisoft in a long time. What I don't find so easy to dismiss from afar are their anti-consumer business practices that have generated significant controversy in recent years, though I have similar if not stronger criticisms for ATVI—namely Blizzard, leader of my most hated game developers list—for the crap they actually do (or don't do) in their games.

I remember how BS the Far Cry 1 AI was. I was "hiding" in brush that apparently only existed for client-side rendering because the enemy sent over a half dozen mercenaries in a beeline at me from 500m away firing assault rifles with marksman precision after I took out a mercenary with a single round from a sniper rifle. The AI was so nonsensical that a 5-year-old could script more realistic combat strategy and logistics. After the garbage experience that was Far Cry, I was done with that series and any Ubisoft games that involved guns, which essentially meant that I played about a third of the way through the first Assassin's Creed and got bored with that or something—partly due to the repetition—because I never went back around to finish it. Granted, the game that pulled me away from AC was Metal Gear Solid 4, and AC wasn't going to compete with that. About the only thing I can say that Ubisoft did well is that Rabbids were the precursor to Minions. I'll even say their storywriters are generally pretty good from the select few games I've tried out of their catalog. As far as game development, leave that to studios that know how to make games that don't include glaring, immersion-breaking idiosyncrasies.

I had small business owners tell me about how Kudzu and Yelp did the exact same thing before Google took over the reviews space. This isn't behavior specific to Google. This is about them leveraging the ubiquity of their brand and entering markets occupied by other unloved incumbents and doing the exact same thing. The problem is, there isn't likely to be a successor because who is bigger than Google that wants to invest the resources to compete with them as well as overcome the fact that most users have an active Google session in their browser cookies?

I got the M18 pruning chainsaw and an HO 6.0 battery to go with it recently. The HO 6.0 battery doesn't get that much use since I have a pair of CP 2.0 batteries for my hammer drill and impact wrench, so I'm just finding new tools to go with the 6.0. Project Farm on YouTube got me interested in a handheld vacuum using M18s to replace my ancient B&D Dustbuster vacuum that I never use anymore due to its low suction power. I have a couple of great corded vacuums, but have needed a solid cordless one for quite some time now. The nice thing is that the M18 batteries charge very quickly and the battery packs, being the size that they are, can dissipate heat much better than a compact battery inside the chassis of the tool can.

The first place my mind goes now with battery powered tools is whether there's a version that uses Milwaukee M18 batteries. Of course there is. Amazon.com WWW.AMAZON.COM

While the average absolute difference column is technically correct, I wonder if removing the word "absolute" in the column header and just putting minus signs in front of the percentage values would be more intuitive to the viewer. Whether the flagship baseline is 100% or 0%, a worse performer should not show a numerically higher value.

Great work. I think we all intuitively knew that -80 cards have been getting pushed further downmarket (performance-wise, because they're still insane price-wise) compared to the generation's flagship, but to see it quantified like this really hammers it home. The upsetting part is that there's nothing to fill the widening gap between the -90 and -80, so the only option is to get a used -90 from the previous generation.

For ad blocking, I've found uBlock Origin to be better than any browser's built-in blocker. On the Gecko (Firefox) side, I've read good things about Floorp for UI customization and Zen for being the most lightweight (with the caveat that it strictly uses vertical tabs). I might give Floorp a spin to potentially replace Waterfox. Librewolf is the most popular privacy-oriented Firefox fork and it also comes with uBlock Origin built-in. However, all the other privacy-conscious features in Librewolf may cause some websites to break. I tried Basilisk and Pale Moon a few years ago, and I had issues with both of them missing some functionality that I couldn't use either as a primary browser, but maybe that's changed. What I also remember is that their rendering engine was forked from Gecko so they were more prone to CSS rendering quirks on select websites. On the Chromium side, Vivaldi was refactored last year to run much faster and as someone who has been using it since before the refactor, it's a noticeable improvement. It's the fastest of my three browsers now. However, it's also feature-rich in terms of UI customization options. You don't have to configure any of it, but there's a lot you can customize in terms of tab positioning, tab grouping, tab tiling (split screen view), sidebars, etc. I've also used Brave for a few years now, and while it was a big improvement over Chrome on my work laptop at my previous job, it's never been more than a private browsing tool for my personal use, and it's slower than it used to be. Combined with the loading speed enhancements to Vivaldi, Brave got pushed back to third place in my pecking order. It seems that all they keep doing for feature updates is enhancing their crypto wallet/token features. Even though it's by all means a more decent product than Chrome these days, I've never taken Edge seriously because as a former web designer, I'm still salty about Internet Explorer's reign of terror on the web and don't care for Microsoft's business practices around their browsers in general. Finally, I tried Opera a few years ago before I settled on Vivaldi as my Chromium-based browser. It wasn't anything remarkable. I didn't know at the time that the team that was responsible for the old pre-Chromium Opera moved to Vivaldi.

What is it that you're looking for in a browser? Most Chromium-based browsers really only fundamentally share the Blink rendering engine which is necessary because the web has begun to turn back toward browser-specific coding like the Internet Explorer days. Beyond that, the browser will leverage the extensions/add-ons ecosystem of either Chrome or Firefox. I daily drive Waterfox (heavily customized with userChrome customizations) and Vivaldi, and using either is nothing like stock Firefox and Chrome respectively.

As a Waterfox, Vivaldi, and Brave user, good. Chrome sucks in general and the web is unusable without uBO.

I started putting this together in my post in the recent purchase thread, but I decided to move it here. I've benchmarked my storage devices, including HDDs, SSDs, and SD cards since 2015 (and RAM since 2011) in CrystalDiskMark and saved the screenshots of the results. This is basically comparing higher-end HDDs, SSDs, and RAM disks from 2011 to now. The CrystalDiskMark tests changed from the older to the newer versions, so the only test results that are directly comparable are sequential reads and writes (first row). I recently installed an 18 TB Seagate IronWolf Pro HDD for my main storage drive with the following results: They aren't SSDs, but large capacity hard drives still perform respectably for storing lots of data. Just don't ever boot from them so you avoid the massive performance penalties for random reads. Mid-200s for sequential isn't bad for a non-system load. I remember back around 2010, hard drives would top out at around 110 MB/s sequential and the WD Raptors would top out at around 150-160. This was my oldest HDD benchmark in CrystalDiskMark on my 1.5 TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 from 2015: When I built my Sandy Bridge system in 2011, I was one of the earlier adopters of SSDs as boot drives. It was still relatively new at the time that there was an SSD users club thread on OCN. Personally, I thought it was ridiculous that anyone could still defend HDDs as boot drives even back then, as if it was just okay that it took 3+ minutes for their PC to go from POST to a usable Windows desktop after the HDD stopped thrashing. There were some fervent holdouts though. To me, it wasn't even about storage capacity/cost ratio because I've had multiple drives in my system for almost as long as I can remember. It was about a life-changing experience as far as using PCs were concerned. This was my first SSD, a 128 GB Crucial m4: Curiously enough, I never benched my current primary SSD until now, 1.5 years after installing it. This is the 1 TB WD_BLACK SN850X PCIe 4.0 x4 SSD benched right now under partial write loads because I don't really care about having a clean benchmark for this post. The read performance is pretty much on target (7300 MB/s) and even under load, the writes aren't exceedingly far from the rated sequential write performance (6300 MB/s): I've also used RAM disks since the Sandy Bridge build as well, mostly for Photoshop scratch disks and temporary manual file copies of junk files I don't intend to keep. I started with Dataram RAMDisk on 16 GB Corsair Vengeance LP DDR3-1600 in 2011: Changing the software from Dataram RAMDisk to SoftPerfect RAM Disk made a massive improvement with the exact same RAM. At this point, I increased my RAM disk size from 4 to 8 GB to serve as a before/after comparison of upgrading from 16 GB Corsair Vengeance to 32 GB Crucial Ballistix (both DDR3-1600 kits performed similarly). Anyway, this is my last benchmark of the Corsair in 2014 using SoftPerfect instead of Dataram: And my current 64 GB G.Skill Trident Z5 Neo DDR5-6000 with SoftPerfect last year:

I should have taken a picture like last time. Looks like it's been a little over a year since I went from 12 to 14 TB, but I upgraded my hard drive from a 14 TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro to an 18 TB Seagate IronWolf Pro that I got for $160 factory recertified and then applied a $10 coupon to bring it down to $150. I do a fair amount of photo/video editing and usually keep the raw source files because I can. I also keep the old drive as a physical backup dating back to the drive swap date and have it around until I buy the next drive. I secure erase and sell off any older drives, so I have a 10 TB and a 12 TB drive that I'll be selling off soon. This is my first IronWolf Pro drive and it's surprisingly quiet. I was worried about it approaching Seagate Exos or HGST Ultrastar noise levels, but it's perfectly acceptable at arm's length away from my ear, no louder than the BarraCuda Pro at idle, and even quieter at seek. I also needed to buy a new USB-SATA dock because my old dock apparently maxes out at 16 TB because it would not read the new 18 TB drive at all. With the new dock, I somehow managed to not fully seat the USB 3.0 cable into the port on the motherboard back panel, so the entire file copy was done over USB 2.0 fallback. What should have been an approximately 11-12 hour operation took 70 hours. This is how the new drive performs over SATA. USB 3.0 via the dock measured similarly after I properly reseated the cable. It maxed out at 40 MB/s sequential with the loose cable.