I swear, it isn't for KSP. Well, mostly not. Okay, partly not...

[Zeiss Ikon]

11 hours ago, invision said:

if you upgrade the videocard to a 1050ti youd have a decent gaming rig.

You might be right -- but my darned car payment says that isn't going to happen.

[Harry Rhodan]

12 hours ago, Zeiss Ikon said:

Not to mention I needed at least one PCI slot, else I'd have had to buy another SCSI card (for my scanner), and the "latest and greatest" motherboards that accept top-end Intel CPUs seem to be dumping PCI in favor of multiple x1 and x16 slots (some of the latter which run slower than x16 speed, despite x16 connectors).

There are a few AM4 boards with 2 PCI slots from Asus, MSI or Biostar. But yeah, looking for motherboards is the most frustrating part of building a new machine.

[invision]

did you build that pc yet?

[RizzoTheRat]

I keep being tempted to upgrade my PC, there's some quite decent package deals around for Ryzen 5 with memory and motherboard, throw in a reasonable graphics card I can get up to a pretty reasonable spec for about £500.

However I'm working away at the moment so have my KSP folder on Dropbox so it automatically sync's with my laptop.  I'm actually impressed how well my little i5 with HD620 graphics actually copes with KSP, although I miss my 22" monitor when I'm playing on my 13" laptop, but there's no point me upgrading the PC and installing more mods if the laptop won't be able to cope.

[invision]

12 minutes ago, RizzoTheRat said:

I keep being tempted to upgrade my PC, there's some quite decent package deals around for Ryzen 5 with memory and motherboard, throw in a reasonable graphics card I can get up to a pretty reasonable spec for about £500.

However I'm working away at the moment so have my KSP folder on Dropbox so it automatically sync's with my laptop.  I'm actually impressed how well my little i5 with HD620 graphics actually copes with KSP, although I miss my 22" monitor when I'm playing on my 13" laptop, but there's no point me upgrading the PC and installing more mods if the laptop won't be able to cope.

i wouldnt build a pc right now, the prices of graphics cards are through the roof and it would be silly to pay 450.00 for a 225.00 card.

i bought a gtx 1080 1 week before christmas for 520.00 and now that same card is 900.00+

this effects all modern graphics cards 

[Harry Rhodan]

34 minutes ago, invision said:

this effects all modern graphics cards 

But it's much worse at the top. The lower end cards like the GTX 1050 ti are not that interesting to the miners.

[Freshmeat]

The beauty of FrankenPC's is that you can spread out the upgrade cost. Invested in new MB+CPU+RAM  last week, going to get a new GPU in a couple of months, and eventually a couple of additional RAM blocks (and a new SSD before that. My HD caught a short circuit and took my SSD with it )

[soulsource]

On 9.1.2018 at 9:39 PM, Not Sure said:

Dwarf fortress can have FPS problems? 

Yep, most savegames get abandoned due to what players call "FPS death". In the Dwarf Fortress case FPS does not denote graphics frames, but simulation steps per second. Over time savegames tend to get more and more complex (mostly because the player creates a large number of items, more dwarfs move in, animals breed,...), causing the game to run slower and slower, until at some point it stops being fun, as the player has to wait longer for tasks to be fulfilled...

Dwarf Fortress is not only CPU-bound though. Another limiting factor is memory speed, as the game needs to access more memory every frame than what fits into the CPU cache. On my new Ryzen machine the CPU does not even clock to XFR frequencies when playing Dwarf Fortress, as it spends a lot of time waiting for data from RAM...

[Archgeek]

On 2/4/2018 at 4:37 PM, soulsource said:

Dwarf Fortress is not only CPU-bound though. Another limiting factor is memory speed, as the game needs to access more memory every frame than what fits into the CPU cache. On my new Ryzen machine the CPU does not even clock to XFR frequencies when playing Dwarf Fortress, as it spends a lot of time waiting for data from RAM...

HEH, 'looks like Tarn Adams wasn't able to thwart the tyrany of the storage hierarchy.  Still, at least it's only waiting for RAM chunks and not paging out to disk.  Sure, some of the more absurd PCIe SSDs run at nearly RAM speed, but imagine having your sim frames wait on a spinning disk HDD, especially if the page isn't on the same track as the last...  Computers don't do a lot of things slower than moving that read/write arm, save for optical disk and network interactions.  I wouldn't be suprised if the OS caught the game waiting for I/O in such a state and scheduled another process for the core it was using.

[RizzoTheRat]

On ‎21‎/‎01‎/‎2018 at 2:32 PM, Freshmeat said:

The beauty of FrankenPC's is that you can spread out the upgrade cost. Invested in new MB+CPU+RAM  last week, going to get a new GPU in a couple of months, and eventually a couple of additional RAM blocks (and a new SSD before that. My HD caught a short circuit and took my SSD with it )

Yeah, that's always been my intention but I usually end up doing motherboard, processor, memory and graphics together as I leave it so long between upgrades that it's all pretty obsolete by the time I upgrade.  My PC started as a 486 DX2-66.  I think the power cable is original.

[Freshmeat]

@RizzoTheRat Of my DX2-50, nothing remains. My Honeywell keyboard held out the longest time, but while DIN->PS2 was possible, DIN->PS2->USB was a bit to cumbersome. The reason for my upgrade was actually that my wife needed to replace her i5-650, and since I play the most CPU-heavy games, she took my i5-4670k and I got an i7-8700K . My daughter got an Gtx970 from my brother-in-law when he bought an Gtx1080  in the autumn. and I got her RX280 because my HD6990 was crapping out with lockups of a couple of seconds on certain instructions. However the RX280 has occasional loss of signal, blinking the entire screen at random intervals. So I follow the bitcoin value, and hope that miners decide that it new investments cannot repay themselves and Nvidia lowers prices again. Gtx-1060 6GB is at just above €350 now, and I can pay that in a month or two and live with hiccups for now. Had the RX280 worked flawlessly, it would have served it purpose for another couple of years, but alas.

[invision]

3 hours ago, Freshmeat said:

@RizzoTheRat Of my DX2-50, nothing remains. My Honeywell keyboard held out the longest time, but while DIN->PS2 was possible, DIN->PS2->USB was a bit to cumbersome. The reason for my upgrade was actually that my wife needed to replace her i5-650, and since I play the most CPU-heavy games, she took my i5-4670k and I got an i7-8700K . My daughter got an Gtx970 from my brother-in-law when he bought an Gtx1080  in the autumn. and I got her RX280 because my HD6990 was crapping out with lockups of a couple of seconds on certain instructions. However the RX280 has occasional loss of signal, blinking the entire screen at random intervals. So I follow the bitcoin value, and hope that miners decide that it new investments cannot repay themselves and Nvidia lowers prices again. Gtx-1060 6GB is at just above €350 now, and I can pay that in a month or two and live with hiccups for now. Had the RX280 worked flawlessly, it would have served it purpose for another couple of years, but alas.

this sounds like a bad driver or overheating.

replace the AMD driver, maybe try older drivers.

download MSI after burner and install it, run a graphics bench mark and see what the temp is.

my older 7970 would set itself on fire it left to its own thing, i have MSI after burner spin the fans sooner and faster then the card would do stock. the card would reach 90c and still only have fan speed 20% 

try those and see what happens, the fan speed curve can be found in the options of afterburner , then untick auto fan speed so MSI now controls it

[Zeiss Ikon]

On 1/19/2018 at 9:01 AM, invision said:

did you build that pc yet?

@invision Not yet -- vacation is next week, I'll build it Sunday or Monday.

Mine is a Franken-PC, too -- I've continuously upgraded from my Laser 286, purchased in 1990.  Been through 286, 386, 486SX, 486DX, a forgotten string of Pentium generations, AMD a couple times.  Seen Windows 3, 3.1, 95, 98, XP, and then jumped to Linux (MEPIS 11, then Kubuntu 14.04).  Still got the original 1.44 MB 3.5" and 1.2 MB 5 1/4" floppy drives, though they aren't hooked up (last motherboard didn't have a floppy connector) and I doubt they'd work if I could find a diskette to put in them (too full of dust).

[wumpus]

I've been watching the Etherium ticker, waiting for a crash.  The whole reason that the GPU market is out of whack is that etherium miners need GPUs (bitcoin miners use ASICs, but etherium needs the memory bandwidth such that it is only cost effective to use GPUs).  Judging by the recent price drop, I wouldn't be surprised if there are a lot of idle rigs out there, waiting for the price to justify the electricity.  Once that appears  permanent, expect the GPU market to slowly regain sanity (and hopefully low prices on underclocked boards on the used market).

(etherium ticker [I think I have the right one, I don't mine/trade the stuff]):https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/ethereum/