pio

Again, I'm no networking expert..... I am using an Asus B85M-G CSM/SI motherboard with an i5 4590T 35w quad core, which I was led to believe is Devil's Canyon. I figured if it is on 24/7, lower wattage is better. I also figured since people quite literally run routers on Atom based systems, an i5 of any generation is probably more than enough. I have your "standard home network" for the most part. Couple of streaming boxes, a couple computers, couple phones. The basics. Using a VPN now too though. My system under heavy network traffic load sees like 10% load. I'm barely using 1GB of RAM out of my 8 I think. And I'm using like 2-3GB of storage if that. 99% of the time, the system just sits there. My NAS sees a lot worse loads than the router does, that's for sure. My advice of a non expert? Go for something with decent performance in the last decade, but something as low power as you're willing to go (without sacrificing performance). It is an always on device afterall. 4490T's are still cheap, about the price of a 4770 non K. No HT......but do you really need HT for a router replacement when consumer routers run on what, ARM processors? If there's any special instruction sets needed, I couldn't tell you that one. You said you have an i3 right? Try it out! Your i3 you already have is free and at least its lower power than the i7 4790. Not being one of those energy conservative types by any means, but a router isn't exactly a place that needs a huge overclocked i7 / i9 / Ryzen. Look forward to your build regardless! EDIT: Forgot to mention too, my networking needs aren't necessarily the same as the next person's (obviously). I'm perfectly fine on 10/100/1000 for my router since the router doesn't necessarily need to affect the rest of the local network.

Update: Side panel of the replacement rosewill case just returned from the metal shop. Still no word on plastic working for the cheiftec. I might have to find another cheiftec dragon or something. Anyway, here's the new updated side panel. Paint is coming next! Waiting for a day when it's not snowing ash. -_- EDIT: On the note of updates. I decided to do another thing. I was able to use my FX rig to an advantage this evening. Had this old MSI RX 580 8GB Armor OC card laying around that I bricked over a year ago with a bad BIOS flash. Never had a system on hand with enough space, PCIe slots, and a big enough PSU to try to flash it again. I did think about using onboard GPU, but unfortunately my Ryzen 3600 lacks one. So finally, this evening, I put in my old GT310 "just because it works" card in the top PCIe slot. Put this RX 580 in the second slot with power hooked up. Booted to DOS, bam....after 4 failed flashes finally found the right BIOS for the card! Now that I found the right BIOS to the card, I flashed my slightly better overclock to it (1400 / 2050) with better fan profile (70*C instead of 75*C target temp). So now, the card runs 1400 / 2050, its alive, and benchmarks exactly the same as every other 580 in the house now! Here's a picture of the card in my FX system now.

On the FX rig? I can, yeah. I'm kind of in between at the moment, got the Phenom II x6 going last night so was working on getting it stable.

So far, here's what I've done.....ALMOST successfully. 1) Flashed the 7970 to the older F41 BIOS available directly from Gigabyte. The newer F3 BIOS (and leaked F8 BIOS) didn't want to POST in the 890FX. 2) The above F41 BIOS made the card unstable with 3D, BUT....it works in the 890FX. 3) Flashed the 890FX from BIOS 2.00 to 2.01 beta. Seems to work? Hasn't been very stable since the flash, but could be the GPU BIOS. 4) Switched 7970 BIOS switch to #2 once 890FX was flashed. It POST'ed. Never did get it to boot again. Note: After the 890FX BIOS flash, the BIOS was then UEFI instead of old school. Might be the bootup issue? 5) I'm now installing Win10 (again) using UEFI. F2 (stock) BIOS on the 7970 and latest beta 2.01 BIOS on the board. Seems to be working now. The card is 3D stable in the 990FX Sabertooth again using stock F2 BIOS on the card, whereas it wasn't on the F41 there either. It POST'd and installed Windows on the 890FX now. Maybe, just maybe it'll work??? EDIT: It's working. The 890FX now has the 7970 installed, 3D is working. So yeah, needed to update the motherboard's BIOS to a beta. Kind of a PITA since the 7970 is the card I bought for the rig. Stress testing the OC's now.

I remember this being an issue for people with LGA 1155 back in the day originally, but I don't recall hearing about people having this problem with AMD boards. Anybody know where I can start looking to fix this problem of my ASRock 890FX Deluxe5 (BIOS 2.00) not POST'ing with a Gigabyte Windforce HD7970 Rev 2.1? The board works fine, attempts to boot up just fine with a GeForce GT310 installed. The card works fine, I just pulled it a few days ago from my 990FX / FX 8350 rig. If the card is installed alone in the 890FX board, I just get an "error code 97" on the little display on the bottom of the board, and no picture at all, and no POST beep. It's got to be a BIOS issue, but there's no later BIOS's for the board that address anything like this. And I can't seem to find any GOOD results for the Windforce v2.1 being flashed to a different BIOS either.

Yeah, eyefinity will be about my only hope with the 290x and Linux. Same with windows. Native res isn't required but it'd be nice to have 3840x1080. I'll play around with it more later, I'm sure eyefinity is possible on Linux. Still working out the bugs in windows now that I know it's a card limitation. EDIT: Got the Thuban rig built this evening, and having issues with THAT one too, more serious issues. *Grumbles. The 7970 absolutely will not POST in this board. Tried every PCIe slot, and even tried a GT310 installed as primary GPU and using the 7970 as secondary. It just will not POST at all with the 7970 even present. Tried swapping the BIOS switch around too. I'll make a thread in the GPU section about it. Maybe somebody else has had this problem. I'll update with pictures once its functional. Not any good taking beauty shots when the insides are a mess right now.

I did figure out its not a Linux specific issue, its a 290x issue apparently. It won't run at native res in Windows either with my Ultrawide. I ended up having to run 7680x2160 in eyefinity with the latest drivers in Windows. I figured the 290x would be new enough to work out of the box with this screen. Latest Windows drivers do not allow you to customize the eyefinity resolution, so whatever it picks up, is what you get apparently. I'll be trying older drivers today, this res isn't going to work for gaming at all with an FX / 290x lol. And my screen is 5120x1440 anyway, was hoping for just simple 3840x1080 actually on it lol. So apparently, I'll need to figure out how to force the right resolution, in eyefinity, for Linux to work.

Agreed completely. A good SSD setup will get just about ANY rig made in the last 15 ish years (or longer) "usable" daily. Gaming just needs whatever GPU you need for your resolution and games, and I'd say at least a "good" quad core to be happy with "most" games. Obviously there's exceptions to those rules, but good general "minimum" requirements anyway. On that note too, my own FX rig apparently is NOT going Linux and neither am I. Apparently I cannot get 5120x1440 to work in Linux, something about the EDID not reporting correctly or something, I dunno. Linux terminal confuses me coming from a DOS / Windows background. So that kinda sucks. Was looking forward to swapping my main rig to Linux Mint or Kubuntu. Tried using the xandr (spelling?) tweaks to add in the resolution and refresh rate, but didn't seem to matter what I did, screen was garbled at any 32:9 resolution.

Bump, really fixed OP's wording.

I mean I way overpaid for most of this junk..... But yeah, I'd pair it with any modern mid-range card or past gen high end card like an RX 580, R9 290x, GTX 1660Ti or whatever is equal, 1070Ti, or even an old 980Ti. The more VRAM the better these days of course. Find a deal on a used 1080 / 1080Ti even, and I'll bet it'll do just fine. Maybe a tad bottlenecked, but I'll bet you'd see an increase. 8 threads is 8 threads, these (later) FX CPU's compared almost identically to Ivy Bridge back in the day. Still absolutely usable and enjoyable today on a budget. Other than BeamNG.drive (which is HIGHLY CPU heavy with AI spawned), I legitimately cannot tell a lick of difference between this FX rig and my sig rig in games. General usability....meh, my NVME is obviously snappier than RAID0 BX500's, but its a close race. EDIT: I missed the "he's not going to be doing heavy gaming". Yeah, it'll do great.

So per the request of UltraMega, I went ahead and ran some benchmarks on this old FX 8 core / R9 290x. Unsurprisingly, it does better than my sig rig in games since the test bench is 1080p. I mean seriously, I'm amazed at how good RDR2 and Crysis Remastered look, just WOW. Definitely means I need to save up $2000 ish for a 6900XT now. Anyway, enough chit chat, onto the results! Apologies for double posting. Trying to keep actual information separated from conversations. Screenshots and CPU benchmarks (Cinebench / 3dMark): But then of course, I couldn't stop at just basic benchmarking. I had to show you guys how well it plays games too!!! I only ran 2, but they're the highest possible graphics / most extreme on a system games I had installed on here. Don't believe me? Check out the results for yourself!!! Games benchmarks: Sorry for not doing other games. I mean, these 2 alone absolutely blew me away with their performance as it was. Overall, this FX rig is definitely a keeper though.

I'll run Cinebench on her tonight. I can do a couple 3dmark runs too, not sure which ones I have but I can do that before I linux swap it. Games, I'd run, but really there's not much to say. I was playing RDR2 on it last night at 1080p / dead center preset settings. Cyberpunk was playing smoothly on low I think it was? (My Ryzen rig's settings at 1080p). I already knew BeamNG.drive played fine on it on High / 1080p seeing as how it was doing medium with the 7970 installed. And yes, it has been pretty bad up here. WA State is also on fire, yet again. 2 days ago on my drive home it looked like it was snowing. -_- Of course, per the usual lately in our state, we're being told one reason why but its actually another reason all together as to why these fires are happening. Yay. At least this year, the bigger fires were started by lightning. Too much dry fuel in our forests the last couple years. That's what happens after 10 years of no logging. If the forests aren't managed, they burn easy.

I've been using the Intel i350T4 in most of my rigs, I'm nowhere near setup for anything past gig speeds anyway. The i350T2 I'd imagine would be nearly identical as well if you needed something cheap and solid with just 2 ports. I chose a 4 port just in case. I used these in my NAS and VM box too, although I really probably did need 10g NIC's there, but whatever. It works. For the OPNsense box, you're going to want to plug that into a switch or something else anyway for the added ports for your LAN. More than likely anyway. I mean, you CAN use it as a full on router, even wireless. However that's going to need a bigger enclosure, and more PCIe NIC's, and its even more setup and troubleshooting on it later. By all means, try it out if you want to. Just my experience as an end user switching from commercial grade routers. I'm happy with mine just as a very intelligent gateway, firewall, dhcp, and vpn. And in that instance, all that's really needed is equal or faster than your ISP for the NIC's. 1 in / 1 out is all that's "required", but you can assign them to so many things its ridiculous. If you plan to be any advanced at all in your network, you might want to start off with a 4 port NIC. I'm using 3 ports, and the headaches are real (but wow its powerful). I only recommend mine because they were cheap, they're gig speed capable, they were cheap, and they work great in everything. Also, fair note, I'm by no means intelligent with networking gear. I make junk work, that's my specialty.

Anything in particular I should run on it before I put Mint on there for testing? I've got quite a few games on there with Win10 right now already. Debating on going Linux on my main rig for a while now, and this FX rig performs closely enough....might as well give it a try there first. EDIT: Also, I've submitted a request to return the Radeon 9800XT since I bought it less than 30 days ago. Really bummed out about that one, especially since I left the seller a good rating already because I was so excited for it. Le sigh. Let's see if he accepts the return or not. It gives a display, but its artifacting even on BIOS, and on desktop its completely unusable due to it. I guess I could try to bake it, but for $175 of paypal credit's money......I think he can take the return. It was, actually, advertised as a fully functional card. If I was actually taking a gamble on it, 1, I wouldn't have paid $175 for it, and 2, I wouldn't have found a listing that said in working condition.

Double or triple post. My apologies. This update is kind of entirely different than the previous ones. I unboxed my first Socket A rig this evening. EVERYTHING WORKS!!!! Got a test bench going on with the box it came in. Board, CPU, and RAM boot up to BIOS. It recognizes the IDE HDD I had laying around. Even both the Radeon 9800XT and X1950 Pro seem to be working (thus far). The 9800XT does seem to be having some artifacting at certain resolutions though. Not sure what's going on with that yet. I'll be getting these going soon enough. I do really need to get busy on that busted front panel before I can build this one though. This Socket A setup (with the Radeon 9800XT) is intended to be going into that Chieftec Dragon case. Not sure what all add on cards I want to use with it yet. Definitely a sound card and wifi card. Not sure either about OS drive either, as IDE drives are incredibly slow, even for this rig. Either way, enjoy some unboxing and test bench pics of my first Socket A re-build of the 2020's.

Alright guys, after going through THREE R9 290x's, maybe even 4, I've lost count now.....I present to you all....... "Bulldrowser"! Specs: Asus 990FX Sabertooth FX 8350 @ 4.8GHz / NB and HT Link at 2.6GHz Coolermaster 240mm AIO with Arctic push / pull fans 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3-1866 @ 875MHz (DDR3-1750), 9-10-9-28-1T eVGA 700BQ PSU Sapphire R9 290x Intel AX200 wifi + BT Era appropriate Corsair case (unknown model) Zip tied extra fans (total of 6x Rosewill red LED fans and 4x Arctic P12's) Asus DVDRW SATA drive 2x Crucial BX500 240GB SSD RAID0 (480GB) 2x Toshiba 3TB 7200RPM SATA HDD RAID0 (6TB) (Yes the rad is sagging, no I don't care.... I need push / pull and that's the only way it fits) The goals of THIS rig was Windows 8 / 8.1 era stuff. However since its pretty close in performance to my main rig gaming wise, I might go ahead and try out Linux on it and see if I can survive daily on Linux with it for now. It's most definitely a heater, I can feel HOT heat coming out of that case with it idling. Greenies in my state can suck it (still sore about that new stupid law against gaming PC's being banned). I'm not going to bother with any benchmarks (unless asked for). It's an FX 8 core at 4.8GHz. We've all seen it. Again, happy to comply if anyone asks though.

Finally, someone that knows how to package pc parts! Unboxing and hopefully final fx rig pictures incoming tonight. Also, I got an old school package today. I don't know if I can try it out or not. Anyone know the psu requirements of a socket a Athlon 1.1ghz and a Radeon 9800xt (or x1950 but I don't think it'll work in a 4x)? EDIT: Added some unboxing pictures for your enjoyment.

I laugh, but yes.....

Another teaser. Side panel is headed to the metal shop tomorrow.

They're available on the egg, limit one per customer. Just got the email myself today. Tempted to do a 5600G mini ITX build now for the TV.

I was actually looking for one similar to that believe it or not. My first case (on OCN) was very similar as well, Apevia branded, with blue cathodes down the front. I still have pictures of it somewhere. EDIT: Found one. Front panel was different (had a glass DOOR instead of just plexi front panel), but its the same exact chassis. Of course, there's my OLD Chieftec Dragon that I had back in the day. Man what I'd do to get that same EXACT build back. Dual Pentium 3 1.1GHz chips overclocked to 1.5GHz and 2GB SDRAM (overclocked to 150MHz) is what was in that Dragon. It doesn't fit my plans at all, but a "dual core" Pentium 3 setup was freaking awesome back then!

Oh yeah!!! I forgot to upload the teaser of what arrived today! Case is intended for the Socket A / AthlonXP / Radeon X1950 build I'm slowly getting parts for. This was some Kingwin case from 2004, don't know the model number. Only thing I'm short for the Phenom II build (once everything arrives) is a storage drive. So that one will be done soon too. Going to try getting the Thuban built up first since I have everything except a drive. Then it'll be Socket A time!!! Still need to get with BWG to see if he was being srs about fixing that front panel for me. Otherwise, there's a local plastics company that'll do it. Just don't know their fee yet.

I've just accepted the fact that my RX580's will have to make due for the foreseeable future. I'd be happy enough if RX5700's were available at a decent price, or even Vega's. I can only dream about the 6900XT at this point, double MSRP.......*grumbles. Yeah nope. I'll wait and buy a used one at 1/4 MSRP. Till then, RX 580's it is. I don't participate in price hikes (other than second hand). Assuming the 6600XT would actually launch and be available at MSRP, its really not in a bad position. Not a card I'd be interested in, but definitely a good spot for one. The 5600XT's were kind of tempting too, so I'm sure this one will be as well.

I dunno, could've been. That was years ago. On OCN we were playing FEAR through till like 2007 / 2008 when COD4 kinda took over most of us lol.