Stupid - Carried Away (1 Viewer)

[ToeJamSamy]

So....lately i've been taking inventory of all the machines NOT in use in the house, namely my room lol, and what needs what etc. This started because i decided to build a raspi but im still waiting for stuff in the mail, so i started looking around at all the towers nad laptops just lying around unused, wondering if i could put linux and wine on any of those to run eq better than on windows. Then theres all the h8200 USDTs we just bought 7 of, and the 3 SFF's we'd already bought, and then therere the 2 computers that havent been touched by any of this newness, the one for my druid whose hdd died and when i went to clone it (it was bad sectors) it still didnt boot right so i said fuckit and popped an 8200 SFF in there instead (thats the one i had all those lag issues with only to find it was the wifi dongle) now i'm SUPPOSED to be finishing hubby's computer- a machine i 95% built back in november and have left sitting there ever since i realized i had to rig some crap to install windows since the case cant HOLD an optical drive and we specifically bought 7Pro forr it (yes, brand new on disc somehow) and thus i have to dig out his old computer desk, find the monitor andits cables and take all that up to the attic where this is all going on, install windows and the drivers and still need to harvest his prior hdd's to stick in there for storage space. His previous machine just stopped booting one day and i knew it was psu, cpu, or mobo but didnt really want to mess with finding out which, 6 months later we ordered the parts for the one sitting mostly built in the attic. Today i go in to look at the hdds (which i still havent even looked at or located lol) i stole one of his 3 760s from the sli stack for another machine i had that just needed hdd and windows, but its a gaming machine so why not stick a vid card in too, i figure lets test things some. plug the machine in turn it on. fans turn on wicked high then back off in 2 seconds, then it comes back on after a couple seconds, and on but never any error code (it had 0 ram so it had to throw one) and it wouldnt keep power up for more than a few seconds. so i dragged another machine over that was nearby and stole its mobo and cpu power rails and stuckem to said dysfunctional machine and plugged and turned on...same deal. well i knew that psu was perfectly fine, and id already unplugged all the 760s so it wouldnt be trying ot draw too much power, so now i know its not the psu i have a 1200W psu idk what to do with lol Oh and the cae for that machine i so want ot build in some day. It has a sata docking station built into the top of it like yay i def can make use of that and skip the usb and power cable to mine- or combine the 2 for external cloning etc.

anyway, all this started with trying to vastly decrease power consumption by the 4 computers i keep running 24/7, by replacing some or most of them with lower wattage models. Now i sit here with 2 machines untouched, 1 machine that was already a SFF (though if the USDTs had come correctly id swap it- they all came with half the ram they were supposed to so we're dealing with ebay crap on that, seller doesnt wanna commmunicate in text but on phone and then wont call. dont need a call, jsut mail me 14x4gb ddr3 1333 sodimms, or pay fedex to pick up all these unopened(i opened 1 of the 7) computers sitting in my living room and give us a full refund. we'll buy somewhere else. Anyway, i repped the machine with the bad hdd with one of the SFFs we already had but not in use, then instead of replacing say my ranger's machine (probably running a phenom iix4 or 6 i forget now) with the other SFF not in use, i ADD it to the pile since we had a spare monitor we'd just ordered along with the 2 gotten to rep the 2 i couldn't turn off(or it took forever to turn them back on right) got that set up to 6box and i even played on it for like 20minutes last week, but that's it. Now ive cloned my ssd on this machine to a new ssd id jsut gotten for other purposes, and stuck it in one of the 99% complete machines to boot up. no dice so i gotta go see if the sata power rail i used was actually plugged in or not, and ill move the data cable to another port jsut in case, it is a used machien i bought for 80bucks 2 years ago from a pawn shop that was without a vid card. it had a hdd worth almost what the machine cost, its in a nice thermaltake case with thermaltake psu has an msi board with 6core amd something, and will hold 16gigs of ram. popped in one of the 3 760s and the ssd and figured off to the races..not quite. Theres also the machine that was perfectly fine except the bad hdd, and apparently a few moretowers id forgotten about, my old alienware laptop, a purple dell laptop i forgot about that needed windows and needs a battery so it jstu stays plugged in, and theres the asus touchscreen that cant seem to keep a windows 10 install running ever, and hubbys old laptop that isnt a terrible machien but has broken hinges so it needs to be stationary. I keep coming up with ways to fix and set up all these machines, thinking aobut what they can and cant do for eq etc, but wtf am i giong to do with it all? I dont need 10-11 computers do i?? And amidst all this i havent set foot in the attic or touched the hdds im supposed to take up there to finish hubby's machine. Idk what to do with all these machines im rehabbing, i mean i used todo that for a living and sellem, and i could sell these instantly to the pawnshop down the road (he buys everything imaginable) if i wanted to, but unless they needed new windows, i wont want to part with any lol. and the point of all this began with seeking out low power machines, so all the laptops SHOULD stay tbh, though ill probably sell the alienware, it still goes for about $440 but to me its not worth any more than a standard $100 laptop or USFF tower, less even. i mean it has a vid card, but the ram is laughable and i dont have any mroe ram to spread around. ram is pretty much my chokepoint on all of this stuff. im reluctant to sell it though because it does have my eqemu server on it i havent touched in a few years, but its there and built etc.

am i the only one that does this? particularly those of you with giant pc graveyards(mine is TINY now, it used to be huge) and a bug crawls up your ass and makes you fixem all then you try to decide how you could make use of them for even more eq gaming? or is it just me and i should sell all that i can lol. Oh and anyone wanna buy an alienware m11x with an emu(RoF2) server already built on it? lol. Or maybe a couple 760s. apparently even the 2gb models of these arestill selling for $230 and up on ebay, selling not just sitting there too. have a matching stack of 4 8gb ddr3 sticks of gaming ram too, nice shiny gold colored like theyve never been used, oh and that 1200w psu. I suppose it might be nice to hang onto that in case my psu dies, or the one in the machine in the attic, all the rest could just swap with any other machine around. dont think psus, especially..7year old ones even 1200W thermaltakes are worth much. less than 16gigs of ddr3 anyway.

 

[an_image]

So....lately i've been taking inventory of all the machines NOT in use in the house, namely my room lol, and what needs what etc. This started because i decided to build a raspi but im still waiting for stuff in the mail, so i started looking around at all the towers nad laptops just lying around unused, wondering if i could put linux and wine on any of those to run eq better than on windows. Then theres all the h8200 USDTs we just bought 7 of, and the 3 SFF's we'd already bought, and then therere the 2 computers that havent been touched by any of this newness, the one for my druid whose hdd died and when i went to clone it (it was bad sectors) it still didnt boot right so i said fuckit and popped an 8200 SFF in there instead (thats the one i had all those lag issues with only to find it was the wifi dongle) now i'm SUPPOSED to be finishing hubby's computer- a machine i 95% built back in november and have left sitting there ever since i realized i had to rig some crap to install windows since the case cant HOLD an optical drive and we specifically bought 7Pro forr it (yes, brand new on disc somehow) and thus i have to dig out his old computer desk, find the monitor andits cables and take all that up to the attic where this is all going on, install windows and the drivers and still need to harvest his prior hdd's to stick in there for storage space. His previous machine just stopped booting one day and i knew it was psu, cpu, or mobo but didnt really want to mess with finding out which, 6 months later we ordered the parts for the one sitting mostly built in the attic. Today i go in to look at the hdds (which i still havent even looked at or located lol) i stole one of his 3 760s from the sli stack for another machine i had that just needed hdd and windows, but its a gaming machine so why not stick a vid card in too, i figure lets test things some. plug the machine in turn it on. fans turn on wicked high then back off in 2 seconds, then it comes back on after a couple seconds, and on but never any error code (it had 0 ram so it had to throw one) and it wouldnt keep power up for more than a few seconds. so i dragged another machine over that was nearby and stole its mobo and cpu power rails and stuckem to said dysfunctional machine and plugged and turned on...same deal. well i knew that psu was perfectly fine, and id already unplugged all the 760s so it wouldnt be trying ot draw too much power, so now i know its not the psu i have a 1200W psu idk what to do with lol Oh and the cae for that machine i so want ot build in some day. It has a sata docking station built into the top of it like yay i def can make use of that and skip the usb and power cable to mine- or combine the 2 for external cloning etc.

anyway, all this started with trying to vastly decrease power consumption by the 4 computers i keep running 24/7, by replacing some or most of them with lower wattage models. Now i sit here with 2 machines untouched, 1 machine that was already a SFF (though if the USDTs had come correctly id swap it- they all came with half the ram they were supposed to so we're dealing with ebay crap on that, seller doesnt wanna commmunicate in text but on phone and then wont call. dont need a call, jsut mail me 14x4gb ddr3 1333 sodimms, or pay fedex to pick up all these unopened(i opened 1 of the 7) computers sitting in my living room and give us a full refund. we'll buy somewhere else. Anyway, i repped the machine with the bad hdd with one of the SFFs we already had but not in use, then instead of replacing say my ranger's machine (probably running a phenom iix4 or 6 i forget now) with the other SFF not in use, i ADD it to the pile since we had a spare monitor we'd just ordered along with the 2 gotten to rep the 2 i couldn't turn off(or it took forever to turn them back on right) got that set up to 6box and i even played on it for like 20minutes last week, but that's it. Now ive cloned my ssd on this machine to a new ssd id jsut gotten for other purposes, and stuck it in one of the 99% complete machines to boot up. no dice so i gotta go see if the sata power rail i used was actually plugged in or not, and ill move the data cable to another port jsut in case, it is a used machien i bought for 80bucks 2 years ago from a pawn shop that was without a vid card. it had a hdd worth almost what the machine cost, its in a nice thermaltake case with thermaltake psu has an msi board with 6core amd something, and will hold 16gigs of ram. popped in one of the 3 760s and the ssd and figured off to the races..not quite. Theres also the machine that was perfectly fine except the bad hdd, and apparently a few moretowers id forgotten about, my old alienware laptop, a purple dell laptop i forgot about that needed windows and needs a battery so it jstu stays plugged in, and theres the asus touchscreen that cant seem to keep a windows 10 install running ever, and hubbys old laptop that isnt a terrible machien but has broken hinges so it needs to be stationary. I keep coming up with ways to fix and set up all these machines, thinking aobut what they can and cant do for eq etc, but wtf am i giong to do with it all? I dont need 10-11 computers do i?? And amidst all this i havent set foot in the attic or touched the hdds im supposed to take up there to finish hubby's machine. Idk what to do with all these machines im rehabbing, i mean i used todo that for a living and sellem, and i could sell these instantly to the pawnshop down the road (he buys everything imaginable) if i wanted to, but unless they needed new windows, i wont want to part with any lol. and the point of all this began with seeking out low power machines, so all the laptops SHOULD stay tbh, though ill probably sell the alienware, it still goes for about $440 but to me its not worth any more than a standard $100 laptop or USFF tower, less even. i mean it has a vid card, but the ram is laughable and i dont have any mroe ram to spread around. ram is pretty much my chokepoint on all of this stuff. im reluctant to sell it though because it does have my eqemu server on it i havent touched in a few years, but its there and built etc.

am i the only one that does this? particularly those of you with giant pc graveyards(mine is TINY now, it used to be huge) and a bug crawls up your ass and makes you fixem all then you try to decide how you could make use of them for even more eq gaming? or is it just me and i should sell all that i can lol. Oh and anyone wanna buy an alienware m11x with an emu(RoF2) server already built on it? lol. Or maybe a couple 760s. apparently even the 2gb models of these arestill selling for $230 and up on ebay, selling not just sitting there too. have a matching stack of 4 8gb ddr3 sticks of gaming ram too, nice shiny gold colored like theyve never been used, oh and that 1200w psu. I suppose it might be nice to hang onto that in case my psu dies, or the one in the machine in the attic, all the rest could just swap with any other machine around. dont think psus, especially..7year old ones even 1200W thermaltakes are worth much. less than 16gigs of ddr3 anyway.

Not at all, i'm sitting in from of 4 laptops atm...thinking the same thing...lol

 

[ToeJamSamy]

I'm in the process of trying to bring down my power consumption, but I'm at an impasse: I have a machine I could use for my main rig no, with less than half the power consumption of my beast(and then some, the beast has like a dozen hdds) but what do I do with said beast after? Not getting rid of it that's certainly, or stripping for parts, but if I don't need it for my biggest power hungry task, i.e. my main EQ machine with actual box accounts and high graphics, when do I turn it on? I mean it's be silly to use it just for videos and browsing lol, I could do THAT with the pi zero coming in the mail, but if the intent is to decrease power, and the heat from said power, then there's no reason for it except to house all the hdds in it lol, and half it's hdds are external anyway.

Machine was built almost exactly 5 yrs ago, just over 2grand in parts, but all those parts are worth as much or more than when I bought them because of this electronics supply shortage crap. All but 2 of the hdds were separate acquisitions so that's not a large part of it. The hdds have gone down considerably actually, but the other parts are up. Don't wanna get rid of it though, maybe I just need to make it use less power. Last night I shut off 3 of the external drives and that made a big difference in fan noise and load time even. Those were on a big high power hub I got with individual power buttons for each port. For whatever reason the rest are plugged straight into the machine still so I can't just hit a button for those, gotta unplug stuff. The biggest power draws over time for me are less EQ on that machine though, and more browser tabs. Had to greatly pare those down and I still have like 100 open. My phones a lot worse though, probably 500+ tabs on this thing easy, and the browser crashes daily for it lol.

I don't have mega powered vid card, it's good but it's single, not sli, and I'm pretty sure was powered by a single rail but I could be senile on that part. 32gigs of ram, not dropping any of that, a tiny SSD for Windows, EQ, and me, and 5tb for everything else. Most programs got installed on one of the 3 partitions on that one though the rest of it is mostly downloads and music, so that can't go anywhere for power either, unless I wanna invest in another decent sized ssd, clone the partition with the installed programs on it, and swap driveletters so they all work right, but I'm not looking to invest lol. Time or money of that amount kinda defeats the purpose - saving on electricity. I mean even my beast at fullbore with CPU and RAM both about maxed(my browser can put both at 100% after a few hours it's that bad lol) the machines still not drawing THAT much juice, and we pay 20cents a kwh. Say the ram and CPU maxed out add 200w from idle, that's a dollar a day if running full throttle the entire time and that's just asking for hardware failure. With extraneous hdds disconnected, very little draw on the vid card because -EQ- and some self-restraint on the browser, I don't think I'm gonna bring that machine to a lower average consumption than the 6core most likely 125w CPU, 16gigs ram, gtx760 that uses 14 pins for power, and single ssd, doing the same things. Can't remember off hand if current CPU is a 95w but I'm pretty sure it is, plus it's much more powerful than the phenom ii in the other, so the phenom would be pushed harder, having half the ram would make that pushed harder as well, so my thought is that the high-powered machine is just as efficient, or better, as the lower powered older machine freshly refurbished, as long as I stop the electricity hogging habits in the first place. Back before we finally got real internet the only way anyone watched TV or movies was streaming off my machine, so EQ or not, it was on 24/7, plus that's where all the drives came from+redundancy. But unless by special request, I keep all those externals disconnected, and maybe pop out a couple internals(at least 2 could come out, and they can be removed without opening the case even) and be more vigilant about closing tabs I really don't need open instead of bookmarking them lol, I should be just as efficient on the beast as on what's basically my previous beast beefed up, no?