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Spacetraindriver

By Spacetraindriver
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monstah

monstah

Posted
Posted

I've left, for reasons. These last few days, tho, I've been lurking back, for reasons.

The former reasons are personal. I've half-stated them on the forum before leaving, but they go deeper and some of it still lingers. 

The latter reasons... are out of the scope of this forum to discuss, but if you know the kind of person that I am, and if you know where I am, you can figure it out yourself. But, because of them, my life is in a really dark place right now. And, so, I've been browsing here and reminiscing.

And I've just come across this:

On 10/30/2018 at 12:18 AM, The_Cat_In_Space said:

Right now this website is the only place that I feel safe and welcome, with nice, friendly people to talk to, away from the madness of the outside world.

And it hits a heavy note, because I'm a grown man, and I don't feel safe. I'm terrified for my life, and for my friends'. But, it also hit a light note, because it reminded me of all the people here. And of how this is a nice, warm place to be (even tho, at the time of my leaving, things were... agitated).

I've just had a quick chat with one of my buddies from here, and again, thanks, man. I needed that.

I mean, it's not like I'm alone. I've got friends, a loving wife. I'm lucky that my family hasn't broken apart. We've talked about... things. It's just like.... we're all alone together, you know? And I think I needed this contact with someone who isn't here, who can see things from the outside, who could give me some fresh air. 

 

I don't know whether I'll be a regular forum user again, of if I'll just lurk around, but know this: I've been here, and your love healed me a bit.

 

@The_Cat_In_Space, bullying is a horrible thing. I wish you the best of luck in dealing with it. I'm so happy to hear you feel safe here, makes me proud of my former moderator days, my colleagues who're still at it, the community as a whole, and of what we've built here. Isn't this a nice place?

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sturmhauke

sturmhauke

Posted
Posted

I'm newish around here, and have mostly been sticking to gameplay-related threads. But I get the need to escape from the horrors of the world. Hell, it's a large part of the reason why I'm here too, even if I haven't mentioned it before.

The only advice I have is to pick your battles and survive. There are times to fight, and there times to endure and escape.

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YNM

YNM

Posted
Posted (edited)
On 10/31/2018 at 8:22 AM, tater said:

my current iMac started having some hardware issues after ~7.5 years

Lucky of you.

On 10/31/2018 at 9:27 AM, tater said:

Not low noise, NO noise. No fan, not even the sound of a HD.

No fan + heat + time = melting dust = shortage = dead mac.

I'd rather have a bulky PC anytime, as long as I can actually access all the innards without undoing a crazy amount of glue and then gluing it back.

Edited by YNM
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tater

tater

Posted
Posted (edited)
16 minutes ago, YNM said:

Lucky of you.

No fan + heat + time = melting dust = shortage = dead mac.

I'd rather have a bulky PC anytime, as long as I can actually access all the innards without undoing a crazy amount of glue and then gluing it back.

Except my Mac has lasted 7 years+. The hardware issue is in fact a bad solder joint on the GPU. I just bought a (used) replacement machine for a few hundred bucks, and then I will take this iMac apart, and send the graphics card off to have the chip reseated (there's a guy in Sand Diego who will do it for $100, else I can try baking it in my oven, myself, that apparently sometimes works).

That's literally all that is wrong with it. It's a ~3 GHz i7 machine, 1 TB SSD, so while not a serious gaming rig, it does family photos, and KSP just fine. I use the PC for other games.

There is no gluing on the iMac, actually. It's easy to mess with inside except for the fact that it's as tightly integrated as a phone, lol. They jam a lot into that tiny case (it's a lot like working on a laptop in that regard).

 

Edited by tater
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YNM

YNM

Posted
Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, tater said:

The hardware issue is in fact a bad solder joint on the GPU.

Yeah.

You're having the cylindrical thing I figure ?

EDIT : Seems like yours came before it, so it's probably not as bad. But their recent ones are just... well.

Edited by YNM
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richfiles

richfiles

Posted
Posted (edited)
3 hours ago, tater said:

I will take this iMac apart, and send the graphics card off to have the chip reseated

You NEED to look up Louis Rossmann and you need to ask this "guy in San Diego" exactly what he plans to do to your hardware.

The second you said you would "reflow" the GPU in an oven, I knew you'd fallen for that idiotic fake "repair" garbage that's permeated youtube and shoddy repair shops for over a decade now. This is definitely a thing I'll happily complain about, to spread the word and help people avoid unnecessary costs for fake repairs!
It's an illusion... It's fake... It doesn't work... You can sometimes temporarily get a machine working, but re-failure is inevitable.

Schematic-diagram-of-flip-chip-BGA-packa

The reason that these failures happen in the first place is due to thermal expansion related stresses. Unfortunately, the reason so many Macs end up with these failures, is Apple makes these dumb machines to run 80-90°C... You turn it on, you turn it off, you turn it on, you turn it off... One day, you turn it on and it never turns on, or it glitches. It's because Apple's horrible thermal regulation results in massive thermal expansion and contraction that actually causes long term harm. It's like bending a paperclip back and forth... Even doing it a little, day after day... Now make that paperclip a tiny metal film (the metal pad of the 1st level interconnection) on a silicon chip (the "die") or a metal trace on a chip interposer (the packaging substrate). These small metal pads (this is what Louis is referring to when he says "bumps"), with a ball of solder bonded to it... That's the weak point! It's not the solder that generally cracks... The chip is what's failing! Solid lump of metal vs thin metal film bonded to a silicon wafer as fragile as glass... Guess which is cracking first! It's mortifying that Apple thinks 80-90°C are even remotely acceptable temps! You have to understand that as someone who has worked in electronics for years, if I built a circuit that had a semiconductor reach 90°C, my first instinct is "Something went wrong". I consider 90°C to be a sign of damage or fault. Not normal operating temperature, like Apple does! :0.0:

As for the "repair", your conventional oven barely even reaches the necessary temperature to melt most alloys of lead-free solder without going nearly to full on broil, and many repair guides screw that up  anyway, with temps that will NEVER melt any solder. EVER!!! Just... Seriously... A low melting point lead free solder doesn't even begin to flow till around +217°C, and some alloys don't reflow till 240°C. An oven at 400°F is only at 204°C. What you are doing is causing thermal expansion that can put enough mechanical expansion forces on the pads the solder balls bond to to reestablish a temporary contact. It. Will. Not. Last.

It's a technique that might be useful to make a device run long enough to copy data off of it. It's not a technique that is even remotely reliable for long term operation.

You say you want a silent computer.. Well then, build it! Throw on a nice high end Coolermaster to even better, a Noctua cooler with some ultra quiet low RPM fans, and an SSD. It'll be super silent AND not run at 90°C!

*EDIT*
=== For an example, I run a Quad i7 3770K. Stock speed is 3.5 GHz, and Stock Turbo is 3.9GHZ. Mine is overclocked. I run 3.9GHz at normal speeds, and 4.1 in Turbo. I have a Noctua NH-D14 cooler with a pair of Noctua fans (one 140mm, and the other 120mm). I run Folding@Home 24/7, unless I am doing video encoding. It means my CPU is at 90-100% usage 24/7. In summer, my CPU temps are 65°C, and in winter, they can be in the low to mid 50s. Average temps, when I regulate room temps constantly is 60-63°C... That's at 100% CPU usage. My system IS NOISY... But not cause of the fans... It's noisy cause I have 8 hard drives spinning, +28TB of spinning platter storage is NOISY. If I could have 28TB of SSDs, I'd be a happy, happy nerd... But I'd be in debt to my eyeballs... So hard drives it is. For you, low noise Noctua fans and an SSD would mean silence. You'd likely need to put your ear on the machine to hear it. ===
*END EDIT*

I run Mac OS, as I prefer it for everyday computer use, but I haven't bought Apple hardware since 2008, and I've long since given up on their shoddy, awful products! I BUILT my own Mac from PC parts, and it's still a real beast, despite being 5 years old! I want to upgrade soon, and when I do, It'll be another Hackintosh. If Apple goes to proprietary CPUs, like is often rumored, then I will finally give up on the Mac as my platform of choice, and switch to a linux platform as my primary. I will be sad that day... It'll be the day Apple truly dies to me. They haven't made a good computer since 2010, when they created the 2010 Mac Pro. Nothing since then, and many things before then were abominable, thermal monstrosities.

Anyway, here's Linus Tech Tips video on the proper repair technique. I'm not gonna link Louis's original videos here on the forum... Cause the man has an incredible mouth on him, and I don't wanna link something that might be considered NSFW for strong language. 

If you wanna see the original videos, search for the following titles:
"Reballing flip chip GPUs is B******T - the truth about dead laptop GPUs & repairing them."
"Reflowing dead flip chip GPUs is STILL BS!(yes, regardless of what YouTube tells you)"
"Followup to (Reflowing dead flip chip GPUs is STILL BS!(yes, regardless of what YouTube tells you))"

If you don't mind strong language, I HIGHLY recommend watching all three, and then follow up with the Linus video.

Edited by richfiles
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tater

tater

Posted
Posted (edited)
10 hours ago, YNM said:

You're having the cylindrical thing I figure ?

Nah, it's just an iMac. The cylinders (Mac Pro) are like 3 grand + (without a monitor), I'm not completely insane ;)

 

Edited by tater
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tater

tater

Posted
Posted (edited)

@richfiles I've considered building a hackintosh... Regarding the gpu issue, as soon as a new machine arrives I won't be needing the old one anyway. Better might be to try to find a new card if I want to rehabilitate the Mac. I'll likely just sell/scrap it. Thanks for the info, it was something I stumbled upon when I started looking for information on the graphics glitches I started having.

While I agree on the high operating temps completely, that home machine has managed to survive for over 7 years before the failure started (it's a mid-2010 i7 iMac, maxed out). I'm honestly surprised I've had it this long, but it was still working (even if I was wishing for more horsepower on it entirely for heavily modded KSP, lol, since it was fine for all home uses (mostly photography, I have >50k pictures on it).

Downstairs, I'm fine with a fan running, but in the little den room upstairs, any fan would annoy me (I can hear the low-speed fans in my sorta quiet PC pretty clearly).

(BTW, watched that vid you posted just now: the guy I was talking about was supposedly repairing them with a machine like the one shown in the video you posted, he had a video showing it. It was not baking in an oven. Regardless, my goal is a new machine at some point, and I already bought a temporary replacement machine, so I'm unlikely to throw more money at my old machine, anyway)

 

EDIT: I've actually been considering a Mini since the new ones are not that bad... except that for what I want to do I'd then have to buy an eGPU---which is not really a bad thing, except possibly on the noise front. I'd get the ability to easily upgrade my GPU, which would be cool. Really, such a box could also have a drive bay...

Edited by tater
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YNM

YNM

Posted
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26 minutes ago, tater said:

new machine

yet another one of the things ? be warned with newer stuff, even more 'bird'-y.

It's possible that because you live in a dry place, and the dust are more likely to be minerals and not organic materials, your machine lasted longer.

26 minutes ago, tater said:

the guy I was talking about was supposedly repairing them with a machine like the one shown in the video you posted, he had a video showing it.

Depends on the condition, you might have to replace the chip as well, so I'd say get yourself to see the thing itself so you know exactly what needs to be done.

Edited by YNM
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tater

tater

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, YNM said:

yet another one of the things ? be warned with newer stuff, even more 'bird'-y.

Meh, It's fine. I don't expect a computer to last longer than I typically own a car. Generally by "last" I don't mean it should fail, I am thinking more about it becoming too slow to make using it pleasant.

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YNM

YNM

Posted
Posted
1 minute ago, tater said:

I don't expect a computer to last longer than I typically own a car.

Under proper care they might last indefinitely.

Also, what do you consider 'normal' for car use ? 5 yrs ?

My general ROT for tech stuff is minimum 3 years, but so far I haven't had a machine that really truly fell apart all to the core after that time.

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tater

tater

Posted
Posted

My PCs end up being totally replaced (often incrementally) every 4-5 years. I add memory, update graphics cards, I had to replace a power supply on one. I don't keep those as brand new machines, either. The iMac in question had literally never been turned off for 7+ years before it had a problem with the exception of me pulling the old HDD, and replacing it with an SSD.

This is straying from complaints...

A daily complaint I have is people on their phones while driving. It used to be bad enough when they were holding them to their heads to talk, now I can see the person in front of me in their mirrors: Looking down.... looking at the road. Repeat. A guy this morning was looking down about 2/3 of the time. If I had magical powers, people that did this would safely reach their destination, get inside and seated, then drop dead.

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YNM

YNM

Posted
Posted
Just now, tater said:

My PCs end up being totally replaced (often incrementally) every 4-5 years.

Yeah, it's more with keeping up with time rather than things going broken.

1 minute ago, tater said:

now I can see the person in front of me in their mirrors: Looking down.... looking at the road. Repeat. A guy this morning was looking down about 2/3 of the time.

Maybe he's calibrating the automatic driver with the actual road. XD

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richfiles

richfiles

Posted
Posted (edited)
23 hours ago, tater said:

The iMac in question had literally never been turned off for 7+ years before it had a problem with the exception of me pulling the old HDD, and replacing it with an SSD.

There's your answer. By not powering down all the time, you limited the extent of the cool portion of the thermal expansion and contraction cycle. At best you went from idle temps to 100% CPU temps, so it was less of a range. This reduced the thermal expansion stresses, prolonging your machine. My own machine would go for months powered on, only shutting down for maintenance, crashes, or power outages. I bet I restarted only four times in the first year and half. Most crashes were recoverable with Activity Monitor or sometimes some creative fiddling with the terminal, so as long as the Kernel hadn't crashed.

This is one reason I never shut down... Longevity. By running my computer at a consistently stay able temperature, it'll inevitably last longer than if I turned it on and off all the time. Running Folding@Home keeps my CPU maxed out, so it even stays at a consistent temp, and my cooler is two flipping radiators extending off my CPU, so it stays at a comfortable temp all year round, as I said, usually centered on 59-63°C! :D

New doesn't always mean great though... My motherboard, expensive as it was, was a terrible product. I called Gigabyte out on my Amazon review, and told them their power regulation was trash, and that their "PowIR" digital regulators were problematic at best. I had issues with power supply compatibility. No joke... The board worked fine on smaller single rail supplies, and VERY well regulated dual rail power supplies, but on any dual rail supply where the rail loading wasn't balanced to a high enough degree of precision, the mobo would trip a power fault condition and shut down without even POSTing! It was the most absurd issue I've ever seen in a computer in all my life... Gigabyte managed to make a motherboard INCOMPATIBLE with a wide variety of IN SPEC high end power supplies, but fine with cheap supplies (single rail). It was such an absurdly convoluted problem that some people still don't belive it, even though here are proof videos on youtube demonstrating how this board is incompatible with perfectly good power supplies! My ragging on them was unfortunately vindicated, as the CPU aux power input regulation actually DID fail on my motherboard! It managed to wait till year 4 to do this, so it was well out of warranty, and the cost of repair was better than having to upgrade Mobo, CPU, and RAM all at once (though I wanted to SOOOOO bad! :sticktongue: )

I put up with that bad power supply for a while, but replaced it when a power surge destroyed my old PSU as well as the power supply in my TiVo. My shows were coming on, so I rushed rebuilding the TiVo power supply in a mere 45 minutes! I got it up and running, then did a proper rebuild with ideal parts once I'd ordered the stuff to actually do it properly. :confused:
Fortunately, I HAD a power supply on hand and used it. It works far better now.

https://www.tonymacx86.com is probably the best resource I've found for building a Hackintosh, if you wanna dive in.

Edited by richfiles
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tater

tater

Posted
Posted (edited)
21 minutes ago, razark said:

Let's compromise.  Get rid of the "spring forward", but we keep the "fall back".

I'd prefer the opposite, frankly. It's gonna be dark and cold at 7am, regardless, I'd rather have a non-zero chance of some light in the afternoon when it's warmer. :)

Of course at my house the sun doesn't rise until after 8am anyway (mountain in the way).

To be clear: I'm talking about keeping DST vs ST, not moving the clock forward every year.

Edited by tater
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Geonovast

Geonovast

Posted
Posted
13 minutes ago, razark said:

Let's compromise.  Get rid of the "spring forward", but we keep the "fall back".

Ugh.  I went off on my mom once for that joke.

It would be way, way worse to just keep one of them.

Falling back screws up my sleep schedule just as much as springing forward.  It's an outdated, pointless practice and we need to stop doing it completely.

In 12 years the day would be completely inverted...

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