Snakecharmed

Send it! You know, I wouldn't mind seeing a comparison of how my old Athlon Thunderbird would have done. I had a 1.33 GHz chip overclocked to 1.46 GHz though. When the numbers are in single digits already, I'm not sure how meaningful the results from older CPUs will be unless CPU-Z has precision down to more decimal places if the value is low enough. We'll find out it we can get a CPU that will register <1.0 on the benchmark.

I present the ThinkPad T43, the last model made by IBM before Lenovo took ownership of the brand in 2005. Here are the mainboard and memory specs too for anyone who wants to take a trip down slow memory lane. Intel Pentium M Processor 760 2M Cache 2.00A GHz 533 MHz FSB Product Specifications ARK.INTEL.COM quick reference guide including specifications, features, pricing, compatibility, design documentation, ordering codes, spec codes and... TDP listed as 27 watts according to Intel.

It took a few times reading this thread for the light bulb to turn on, but this post gave me the motivation to put a dinosaur I've been meaning to put on eBay through a benchmark test first before I finally list the damn thing. First, I need to see if I can power it on...stay tuned later this week.

Sort order, shouldn't my laptop be #14 by overall score?

I'm not sure why CPU-Z is showing Brand ID instead of Max TDP, but I think it's because CPU-Z doesn't know what to do with that field for this CPU. The Max TDP is something that AMD allows laptop manufacturers to configure on the 4800H. https://www.notebookcheck.net/AMD-Ryzen-7-4800H-Laptop-Processor-Benchmarks-and-Specs.449893.0.html Here's the reading in HWiNFO64. I'm fine with it being listed as 54 since reviewers have consistently benchmarked the 4800H in this laptop higher than other 4800H laptops. I'm sure Eluktronics maxed it out since it's the coolest and fastest gaming 4800H laptop on the market.

I'll gladly take the top spot for a Zen 2 Ryzen 7 and #2 overall Ryzen 7...by using a laptop chip!

There needs to be some more thoughtful effort put into electric cars, which is what you're beginning to see now from other car manufacturers. Tesla's a bad example for anything other than creating the initial push, because their execution in terms of the actual vehicles themselves has been crap. They're a technology marketing company that has been making things up as they go along with respect to manufacturing. The cars are soulless, poorly assembled, and lazily designed. Never has a car that goes 0-60 in less than 3 seconds been so uninspiring. Their level 2 autonomous driving solution should never have been called "Autopilot" because of the implication to the customer, but it's par for the course for X Æ A-12 Sr. to create chaos and let other people actually educate the masses and clean up his messes. People like to draw parallels between Tesla and Apple, but Tesla's closer to Bose home theater speakers or Beats headphones. Tesla ptiches products like Apple but what they actually deliver is closer to Packard Bell or eMachines. In other words, I would trust Sony with a creating an electric car more than I trust a company as reckless as Tesla.

Looks like the Intel Core i7 from that generation could possibly only have two cores. Is it a Core i7-6820HQ (4-core) or Core i7-6600U (2-core)? You would be better off with 16GB RAM, but at least the HP 650 G2 has removable dual-channel RAM, so you can upgrade it if you want. Overall though, it's an older laptop. Even though it's M.2, it looks like the SSD may be SATA-based and not NVMe. I think there should be far better laptop deals out there unless this one is crazy cheap. If it's a dual-core i7 though, hard pass. I forgot how bad the mobile i7 CPUs could be in the Before Ryzen times. The i7-6600U is slower than the i3-6100 I put in my parents' desktop.

Good point on the RAM. It's like I forget sometimes that I have 32GB on my Ryzen 7 4800H laptop now and I got 16GB years ago on my ThinkPad with a Sandy Bridge Core i7-2860QM. He'll definitely want at least 16GB for Photoshop/Illustrator and IDE software.

Not knowing what the laptop market is like in Egypt, I'd at least try for the following specs if possible: CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 or 7 4000 or 5000 series GPU: Who cares RAM: 8-16GB DDR4 removable dual-channel Storage: 512GB NVMe SSD Screen: 15.6" IPS, 1080p+, 300+ nits, 72% NTSC/100% sRGB Those specs are closer to US$1000 though, maybe $900. Compared to what I listed in my previous post which were basically sub-$700 laptops, the screen is what's going to bump that price up the most, followed by removable memory. A 1440p resolution screen would be nice for the Adobe software because designing sucks on 1080p, but 1440p is pretty much premium laptop territory so that's more of a wish list item. Personally, I'd rather have a more color accurate screen than 1440p on a laptop.

I also have good experiences with EaseUS software. I used to use EaseUS Todo Backup Free to clone, but it looks like they took that away from the 2022 free version and made it a paid feature. An old version of the software should still have the cloning feature though. Looks like Macrium Reflect Free that UltraMega linked does the same thing now with cloning and partition upsizing.

I tried to keep it as low as possible since $500 is not easy to stay under for a laptop without making major compromises. https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/models/laptops/swift3amd https://www.amazon.com/Acer-Octa-Core-Graphics-Fingerprint-SF314-42-R9YN/dp/B086KKKT15 https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/models/laptops/swift3 https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0866PQXKH The downside to the Acer Swift 3 is that the RAM is soldered. With the Intel models, you have the option for a physically smaller 13.5" but higher resolution 3:2 ratio 2256x1504 (and maybe more color accurate?) screen, but you're stuck with a quad-core Core i5 to stay under $700. With the AMD models, you can get either six or eight cores, but they all have 14" 1080p screens. Then after a Google search on the Swift 3 AMD, I saw a link to a YouTube video recommending the Lenovo IdeaPad 5 over it instead. Well, as it turns out, here's a better deal for a little over $500 in the Lenovo outlet. The RAM is still soldered though. The only thing I don't like about this particular IdeaPad 5 model by looking at the specs is the screen. 45% NTSC is pretty awful, but I believe the Swift 3 AMD has a lousy screen too, and there's going to be compromises at this end of the price spectrum. https://www.lenovo.com/us/en/outletus/laptops/ideapad/ideapad-s500-series/IdeaPad-5-15ARE05/p/88IPS501393 If used or refurbished laptops are on the table, that opens up many more possibilities. Here's that Swift 3 Intel from the first Amazon link above, albeit with a smaller SSD, from the Acer recertified store. https://acerrecertified.com/acer-swift-3-13-5-laptop-intel-core-i5-1035g4-1-1ghz-8gb-ram-256gb-ssd-windows-10-home-sf313-52-526m/ Personally, for web development, I'd rather have a six or eight core Ryzen 4000 or 5000 CPU over an Intel Ice Lake or newer CPU that has fewer cores for the same price, but the compromise will almost certainly come with the screen. You can always connect an external monitor though. You can't upgrade a laptop CPU as easily. Just don't get a Ryzen 3000 mobile anything. Those were terrible. In 2020, a lot of ODMs put the Ryzen 4000 CPUs in a second-rate chassis. That's less likely to happen now because ODMs spec out their chassis a year in advance and they didn't expect Ryzen 4000 to be such a massive success back in 2019, but even now, Intel laptops tend to have more or better peripheral specs/features (e.g. screen, ports) than the same model with a Ryzen CPU.

Monitors with speakers are still very common. A monitor with a webcam is harder to find but they are out there. https://www.amazon.com/monitor-webcam/s?k=monitor+with+webcam

I'm also reconsidering whether I really want to wait for DDR5 supply to stabilize and performance to reach the levels it should reach. I'm now considering going with Zen 3D V-Cache and DDR4 since Zen 4 for Ryzen is realistically going to be a 2023 product at the earliest in terms of mass availability and I'm sure we'll still have supply issues with DDR5 then too.

If the content isn't updated, the column becomes wasted real estate. I think the third column should either be threads for updated site content beyond podcasts such as new product reviews, or most recent new threads forum-wide. There's a disconnect between new content on ExtremeHW.net and the forums, and nobody's using the comments section of the product review articles. I think the comments section of the article should be a feed of a corresponding forum thread like how it's done on Tom's Hardware. That would also drive forum participation as well, although if nobody is commenting on the reviews now, I doubt there will be significant improvement in new forum activity originating from product review readers. However, there would be a tangible benefit the other way around so forum members can directly comment on the product reviews and drive the activity in the product review articles. It would also increase forum activity because each review would generate a new forum thread. I don't get the sense that forum members notice new product reviews on ExtremeHW.net currently. I know I've been conditioned to ignore the carousel banner at the top of the forums because it looks like ad space (which, technically, it is) and the text usually has very poor contrast with the photo, so I end up not paying attention to it altogether.

I say this as an audio enthusiast: Audiophiles are insane.

I was thinking more along the lines of this:

That's one thing that irritates me about the Windows team. Do they not do any user testing, and if they do, do they ignore the feedback and results? The complete idiocy that has been discovered since its release (Ryzen L3 cache, convoluted right-click menus, Start menu Pinned vs. Recommended balance and not collapsing Recommended if hidden, kicking the Android app integration can down the road, etc.) wouldn't be acceptable on my software development team. These clowns have not only mastered how to crater the UX but also expose the whole operation for its amateur SDLC. But congrats on re-rounding window corners after implicitly acknowledging Metro design as a failure and providing a centered taskbar that nobody really asked for but was overhyped in lieu of actual UX achievements. Personally, I don't even care that much about whatever stupid busywork they do to the UI as long as the shortcut keys still work. I'm going to Rainmeter the whole damn thing anyway. They need to fix the damn UX so people stop feeling like they have to fight the OS to do what they want. This is the third major release in a row where Control Panel and Settings coexist. I sort of praised Windows 11 when it first came out, mostly for cleaning up the Start menu at first glance and improving multi-monitor support. However, now that users are actually getting their hands on it and finding out that barely any thought was put into it, it's hard to comprehend how a high-profile product team can present themselves so incompetently to the general public in 2021.

Most importantly, it works the best for sorting lines of plain text and filenames.

Maybe Intel should inform their idiot marketing department of this as well.

I dabbled with Chinese stocks a couple of years ago, mainly BABA, which I held for for an up-and-down cycle over two years and eventually sold for a $30 loss in 2020. I also got roped into the meme trading nature of HUYA and IQ back in 2018 and lost nearly $3000 on those. All garbage. Of course, with how the political climate has changed regarding China since then, I basically treat Chinese stocks as if they don't exist these days.

Those early 3D accelerator days were a wild time with that many competing chipset manufacturers. At various times I was pulling for Matrox, Nvidia, ATI, 3dfx, and even PowerVR and wishing I could afford some of those cards that were coming out at the time. When I think back on the video cards I've owned, I always bought them asynchronously from the rest of my system build, and I went through a period where I was cycling through ATI cards like I had nothing better to do with my money. Used GPUs were cheap back then though. Matrox Millennium (OEM) - Not a 3D card, but one of the first times in PC history people paid attention to their video card; I have no idea what the hell was in the 386SX box I had before this Pentium machine (Did I own a RIVA TNT here? Something had to be paired with my overclocked Celeron 366 build in 1999 and I don't remember it being the Millennium.) Nvidia GeForce 2 GTS ATI Radeon 9500 - The first time I bought a card only to upgrade it shortly thereafter. I also can't confirm that I actually ever got this card, but I remember the softmod to turn it into a 9700 and I thought I might have done this. Or maybe I got some variant of the 9600. I really don't remember. Hercules 3D Prophet 9700 Pro - Also bought an Arctic Cooling GPU cooler to go with this card; card later had an unrelated memory chip failure ATI Radeon X800 Pro - I honestly don't know what I was doing here because I got the X850 Pro two days later ATI Radeon X850 Pro - How did both this card and the X800 Pro cost me only $40 each? Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 - I forget the AIB partner, returned because it was depicted as having an aftermarket cooler and I got the crappy stock Nvidia blower instead PNY GeForce GTX 560 - Returned another for the same reason EVGA GeForce GTX 560 - This is where I more or less started favoring EVGA's custom PCB and cooling designs Zotac GeForce GTX 760 PowerColor Radeon HD 7790 - I never even used this card; I originally got it for an eGPU dock before learning that AMD cards were sub-optimal for eGPU usage for some reason EVGA GeForce GTX 980 - Used for less than a year before upgrading EVGA GeForce GTX 980 Ti EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti - Used for a little over a month up until last month before realizing it didn't support HDMI 2.1 EVGA GeForce RTX 3060 Ti Every card I ever bought was pre-owned except the Millennium, first two 560s, 760, HD 7790, and 3060 Ti.

It's funny, I made that edit to my post following a random thought after you replied and now I just might refer to Elon as X Æ A-12 Sr. more often. At one point, I made a cursory effort of trying to be an investor with personal ethics and justifying my picks that way, but that didn't last. I actually sold a small portion of my current NVDA holding for SOXL when the news came out that Nvidia was bullying Hardware Unboxed. SOXL has been pretty nice, but it's a triple-leveraged ETF that's gained 75% since February, while NVDA's gained 133% since then. If I had left NVDA alone, I think it might have become my top holding by portfolio percentage instead of ENPH. I think the only personal investing ethics I still have are that I just don't like X Æ A-12 Sr., and truthfully, my avoidance of TSLA is mostly because the stock is so ridiculously overvalued that I'm not sure I could ever just get on the bandwagon without concerns. That and I still kind of hate their cars. As for AMD, I think that was a perfect storm. Bulldozer was so bad, Ryzen was so good, and Su has been a fantastic leader for the company. They were kind of a meme stock before those were a thing, but unlike contemporary meme stocks, the case for AMD was fundamentally justified and aided by a confluence of positive developments.

Very true. The difference for me is that I no longer lament those missed opportunities because I figured out my path and am happy with it now. The stock that got me interested in investing was the AMD turnaround in Lisa Su's early years at the helm. I also can't say that I haven't benefited from massive gains as well when my portfolio's big hitters are ENPH, NVDA, and PYPL. I missed numerous opportunities to get into TSLA for instance, but I never liked the idea of investing in a company that at one point was so volatile that some dumbass tweets from X Æ A-12 Sr. could send it flying in either direction.

I have a paltry amount of crypto in a wallet but it's increased 6X since I first opened it. The problem is that I only put about $20 worth of Bitcoin in there. I feel like I could take a shotgun approach to crypto though. Not enough to hurt losing it all, but far better odds of getting something meaningful by spreading $100-1000 each into a few different cryptocurrencies versus playing the lottery. It's all just a hindsight daydreaming exercise though, not too different from daydreaming about winning the lottery. If I had tossed even $10 in SHIB at the beginning of the year, never mind the fact that I didn't even know it existed then, I would be set for a couple of lifetimes if I could find a way to liquidate the gains as well as have the guts to hold the entire time. I'm content with my plans to retire before 50, which is still way far ahead of most people. My problem, which I still have a few years to figure out, is how and whether I plan to change my investment strategy when I reach that magic number for my total assets. I got into stock investing in 2017 with a hyper-aggressive growth strategy because I was upset with my salary and not getting a raise at my job at the time, as well as not investing my extra money beyond the Roth IRA annual limit back when I opened one well over a decade ago. If I did, I could be retired right now. I think back to when a coworker from my first job introduced me to opening a Roth IRA. He's about my age and told me then he planned to retire at 40. I didn't completely believe him then. Now I realize he easily could have pulled it off and I should reach out to him in the coming years to see if he did. I now make over 50% more per year with my current job than I did at the one I was unhappy with in 2017 and my aggressive "catch-up" strategy has worked so well that I don't want to change anything now, even though I know the last several years have been nothing like the broader history of the stock market.