Lee despairs of ever receiving enough Nvidia RTX 3000 and AMD Ryzen 5000 chips, before breathing new life into a 12-year-old PC.
Lee despairs of ever receiving enough Nvidia RTX 3000 and AMD Ryzen 5000 chips, before breathing new life into a 12-year-old PC
At the end of 2020, Nvidia and AMD unleashed some exquisite hardware. Nvidia’s RTX 3000 range of GPUs brought unthinkable levels of performance into the home, while AMD launched the third iteration of Ryzen in under 18 months. For system builders and upgraders, this is the moment we live for. The prospect of balancing budgets and technology to create machines that deliver the latest wizardry into people’s homes.
Well, that is what’s meant to happen: instead, last December, a chronic shortage of components scuppered Christmas retail for me and other system builders. The shelves had been cleared of certain CPUs and you had more chance of receiving a written apology from Donald Trump than getting your hands on these products. Once the low volumes of new GPUs vanished, the previous generations followed until the only option most wholesalers had available was an Nvidia GT 720. Although the design of this card echoes back to 2014, it can still throw an Excel sheet around, but anything other than basic gaming is beyond its powers.
As a small retail shop, we’re not big enough to deal with manufacturers directly so we rely on trade-only wholesalers to supply our parts. They have direct communication channels to the producers, but no solid explanation was forthcoming about the sudden shortfall.
The most popular theory, as far as Nvidia was concerned, was that it had turned off production of the RTX 2000 Series in November. Usually there’s a phase-in/out handover, but the brilliance of the new product made this hard. Benchmarks have shown that the flagship RTX 2080 Super is knocked into a cocked hat by the “basic” RTX 3060, so it’s understandable that there’s no reason to keep pushing out the old model, especially when AMD is so price-keen on its comparable RX6000s. Whatever the truth, an availability hole appeared during the sell-through shuffle.
Manufacturers rationed their stock so wholesalers had to decide which of their thousands of customers were to receive one of the three cards that had arrived. To compound this, the price of Bitcoin rocketed at the beginning of this year; not to levels that would have given John McAfee neckache (see pcpro.link/320bit), but enough to make cryptocurrency mining popular again. I won’t attempt to explain mining except to say that some miners use specific types of PCs (aka a rig) utilising the phenomenal power of multiple GPUs. The endgame is to resolve a mathematical algorithm that mystically generates enough cash for the miner to pay their astronomical electricity bill whilst retaining sufficient change for a small box of cornflakes. A decent rig is expensive to assemble and I’ve reached the conclusion that, as a reliable source of income, it sits somewhere between panning for gold and betting on the Grand National. Pushing my scepticism aside, you can clearly see why quality GPUs are scalp targets by crypto-gamblers.
The undead machine
Whilst some people have resources to blow vast amounts of money on graphics cards, there are those who 2020 financially ravaged: they need to extract the maximum out of existing products.
Just after Christmas, a family arrived clutching a working Dell Inspiron 530, which had been dusted down for homeschooling and needed Office 365 installing. The moment I clapped eyes on the unit, I knew this wouldn’t be straightforward. The Dell service sticker on this unit gives its date of birth as 4 January 2009, and 12 years is a long time in computing. When Dell made this tower, Gordon Brown was prime minister and Bitcoin was a day old.
This is a Windows Vista PC with a 300GB SATA hard drive, 2GB of DDR2 memory and a Pentium E620 CPU. That it still chugs along is remarkable. We spoke at length about its age and the cost of upgrades, but the reality was that the budget wouldn’t cover a new PC. After lengthy discussions, they also dismissed a more powerful refurb PC. Most humans have the capacity to develop emotional attachment to inanimate objects.
BBC One’s The Repair Shop exemplifies this phenomenon and shows that, for some, it’s a battered teddy bear or a broken wristwatch; others have a box of electronics as the focal point of memories, people or life events of genuine significance. The Dell is staying.
I agreed to try the machine with an SSD to gauge the performance, and it really surprised me – even with 2GB
“Usually there’s a phase-in/out handover, but the brilliance of the product made this hard”
of RAM – but the sting in the tail was that the motherboard’s Ethernet port wouldn’t work. Luckily, I had a PCI Ethernet card kicking about that needed a suitable home, so I swapped it for the dial-up modem (yes, it had that too!) and it was back online.
There will be those of you spluttering at your pages that this was the wrong decision, that it’s ridiculous to splurge cash on parts for such an antique. On a different day,
I’d absolutely agree with you. One suggestion that I made was to use Neverware CloudReady, which is the nearest thing you’ll get to building your own Chromebook, but the family wanted Windows. Vista to Windows 10 isn’t a free upgrade, so we sold them a Home licence.
This isn’t an uncommon reaction to Chrome OS. I’ve mentioned before that Chromebooks are a tough sell, particularly to those lacking a bit of technical experience who have a “better the devil you know” attitude. The common perception – rightly or wrongly – is that Microsoft is a more trustworthy brand, and buyers have concerns about how much data would be sucked out of their Chromebook. I try to balance these Google-sceptic opinions by asking if they use Facebook from within Windows, but I’m not seeking to score points; I’m trying to sell people the right laptops for the job.
The ghost machine
The component crisis added additional pressure to our business when our shop’s workhorse machine decided to take early retirement at the beginning of February. We call this one the “Ghost Machine” because when we first built it in 2003, it ran Norton Ghost for us to clone and image customers’ drives. In the past, it has been kitted out with Zip drives, IDE caddies and FireWire to reflect the connectivity trends of the day. The current rendition uses an ageing AMD A10-7850K, 16GB of DDR3 memory, a 128GB SSD boot drive and a 2TB RAID array for short-term storage. It’s connected to various USB docks and loaded with software for imaging, data recovery, partition shifting and other tools that keep the till ringing. Improving the speed of device connectivity was the priority for the next version of the machine.
PC upgrades are nothing more complicated than building a bridge between what you have and what you want whilst avoiding bankruptcy. I went for the ASRock B550 Pro4 motherboard as it has enough SATA ports for the RAID array, plenty of RAM slots and a USB 3.2 backbone, giving me a clutch of confusingly named Gen 1 and Gen 2s in both A and C sizes. The motherboard also allows for PCIe 4 so I matched it to a Samsung Evo 980 Pro SSD to make the most of the purchase. Unfortunately, there were things on my shopping list that were out of stock. I wanted a Ryzen 5000 Series CPU and an Nvidia RTX GPU, but the wholesalers just laughed. The new unit is currently running with a GTX 1030 but thanks to a nameless account manager (thanks “C”), I snaffled a Ryzen 7 3800X, which provides a notable boost over the venerable A10. To show just how notable, I’ve run up some numbers for you.
Cinebench R23 is a popular benchmarking tool and it’s a free download from the Windows store. The old Ghost scored 1,120 points in the multicore test, which puts it firmly alongside an Etch A Sketch in terms of performance and was unsurprisingly overshadowed by the new Ghost’s score of 12,114 points. However, to avoid embroiling PC Pro in an emissions-style scandal over random benchmarks, I put the machines through two other tests using real-world scenarios.
The first involved cloning a 5,400rpm SATA hard drive to a SATA SSD using AOMEI BackUpper Professional. For clarity, the drive had around 90GB of data and the old Ghost cloned it in 40mins 16secs. The new Ghost rattled through in 24mins 13secs and although the USB upgrades are a vast improvement, it’s not the tantalising “10x” increase dangled by Cinebench. Part of this gain is down to the new StarTech 10Gbits/sec USB dock ( pcpro.link/320star), which allows new Ghost to maximise its
USB infrastructure.
Our second test required raw performance to make an image of the same drive using the same software. The old Ghost spat out the file in 45mins 15secs, whereas the new
Ghost breezed by in 15mins 39secs, giving the type of increase that I’d planned. What I want to underline is the oft-forgotten jewel of desktop systems: flexibility. Although the Ghost hasn’t yet enjoyed a Ryzen
5000 chip, the upgrade is still a vast improvement. Desktops are longterm projects that ebb and flow between simple additions such as a drop of RAM or major surgery like our Ghost project. Always focus on the use case of the PC during your upgrade cycles and you won’t go far wrong. Now, can we talk about plumbers?
The plumb ridiculous
My daughters have developed a fascination for Super Mario and his chums, which took an unexpected technical twist over Christmas.
Last season’s “must-have” in our house was Lego Mario. The Danish plastic brick purveyors have licensed the character from Nintendo to create a range of Lego packs that click together to form analogue versions of the video game. I was eager to see my daughters’ imagination fire up as they built their own levels, constructed obstacles and monsters and had some time away from technology. My youngest then asked if I could fit the batteries. It turns out that Lego Mario is a Bluetooth-enabled device that contains an accelerometer, gyroscope and light sensors that shine out to detect barcodes placed around the circuit. To play with the Lego set, we needed to download the app to an iPad and then pair Mario so the scoring would clock up. Playtime was still a good ten minutes away as Lego
Mario’s firmware required an update. Lego? Firmware? I quit!
“Focus on the use case of the PC during your upgrade cycles and you won’t go far wrong”