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Three-Phase posted:Why on earth would it do that? CPUs have extremely dynamic power demand -- lots of very narrow spikes well above the rated thermal design power, which is a long-term (1s window or more) characterization of average power use rather than instantaneous. As you probably know, in a DC power system this is dealt with by putting energy storage elements (bypass capacitors) close to the point of load, essentially filtering the narrow spikes so the PSU doesn't see them. It happens that low internal resistance batteries (like most lithium chemistries) are good at filtering spikes too. Using the battery as part of the overall power filtering scheme saves weight and cost and possibly improves efficiency too -- and not just in the laptop itself, but in the AC-to-DC power brick, which doesn't have to be overengineered quite so much. The downside is that without a battery, the system can't operate at close to its full power rating any more because those spikes will now droop the DC bus voltage enough to cause logic errors. In a well designed laptop with this kind of optimization, the system's power controller throttles the CPU back to keep power way below full so that spikes won't cause enough droop to crash software. Computer's slow, but at least it works. (e: and yes it's also true that some systems may have the ability to sustain more power draw than the brick can supply, but power filtering is the reason why even lower power laptops without big power hungry GPUs may do this) You don't need an extremely healthy battery for this to work normally, even ones that are shot to the point of lasting only a half hour (or whatever) should still be fine. The trouble is that lots of not-healthy batteries stop being recognized by the system at all, and then the power controller will throttle. BobHoward fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Nov 2, 2014 |
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Nov 2, 2014 21:09
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BobHoward posted:CPUs have extremely dynamic power demand -- lots of very narrow spikes well above the rated thermal design power, which is a long-term (1s window or more) characterization of average power use rather than instantaneous. As you probably know, in a DC power system this is dealt with by putting energy storage elements (bypass capacitors) close to the point of load, essentially filtering the narrow spikes so the PSU doesn't see them. Thank you very much for that. I knew that laptop sans battery could cause CPU throttling, but I never knew why. Your post managed to fill that gap of knowledge.
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Nov 3, 2014 00:50
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So, I finally bought AppleCare for my 13-inch rMBP, paid $174+tax at B&H, ran home, typed in the code, and bam, covered until December 2016.
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Nov 3, 2014 18:58
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Rescheduling hardware failure to jan 2017.
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Nov 3, 2014 19:47
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Ha it'd be nice if you could schedule your downtime.
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Nov 3, 2014 20:32
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Binary Badger posted:Ha it'd be nice if you could schedule your downtime. Any time we do, some manager comes along at the last minute to stop it. Ugh.
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Nov 3, 2014 20:37
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So with the mid-2014 refresh 15" rMBPs now available, is the 200 MHz difference between the late 2013 (2.3 GHz base, 3.5 turbo for $1989) and the mid-2014 (2.5 ghz base, 3.7 turbo at $2099) worth it for $110 more if I'd mostly be using it for some CAD/2D modeling and gaming (Blizzard games mostly)? I'm thinking it wouldn't but $110 isn't that much...
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Nov 4, 2014 00:29
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IIRC blizzard games are cpu-bound so it seems like it would.
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Nov 4, 2014 00:32
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wdarkk posted:IIRC blizzard games are cpu-bound so it seems like it would. Blizzard games also run on a voodoo2.
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Nov 4, 2014 02:53
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Dr. Tim Whatley posted:Blizzard games also run on a voodoo2. Maybe he wants to turn shadows up to medium.
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Nov 4, 2014 03:00
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wdarkk posted:Maybe he wants to turn shadows up to medium. Hmmmm, gonna need a octocore for that.
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Nov 4, 2014 03:09
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WoW ran well on my now-deceased mid-2014 15" rMBP with the discrete nvidia card. I did have to run it at half resolution (no loving way it was going to run well at the full retina res) but it looked just fine. HotS and Hearthstone and everything aren't even close to being a problem. SC2 ran fine back when I played it on my 2011 MBP, but it was BTOed to the tits. Unfortunately they all run much better under Windows. Oh, and about my dead rMBP... I want to go to Apple Store and get a quote before filing a claim with insurance, but there are literally no appointments available in the next week in my city. Guy at the store was like, "come here on a weekday before we open, we MIGHT be able to slot you in..." I'm like "dude, I *work*." He just shrugs. He said if the mainboard is fried, I'm looking at something like 500 for the top case and 600 or 700 for the mainboard, and that's if that's all that's wrong with it. The $1k deductible is looking pretty nice right now. But ehhhh, insurance claim.... Pivo fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 03:12
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Made the mistake of viewing my photographs on a retina 5K iMac. Now I just have to sell the trashcan.
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Nov 4, 2014 18:46
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Ha, another bitten by the Retina bug! I say this as an rMBP owner who starts to furiously squint whenever I'm not in front of a Retina display. Why not the Fusion drive? Cool avatar, man.
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Nov 4, 2014 19:11
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My next laptop is gonna be retina that kinda worries me I'm gonna hate my old iMac after I get it.
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Nov 4, 2014 19:13
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Personally, while I absolutely adore my 13" rMBP, switching to other screens doesn't bother me at all. It might have something to do that it lives 90% of its life connected to a Thunderbolt Dock and a 27" iMac is the primary display for it, though.
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Nov 4, 2014 19:28
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Binary Badger posted:Why not the Fusion drive? Because Fusion drives and all other hybrid drives are nowhere near as fast as a true SSD. It's just a regular hard drive with a giant cache.
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Nov 4, 2014 20:34
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Housh posted:My next laptop is gonna be retina that kinda worries me I'm gonna hate my old iMac after I get it. Yeah I'm still using mine until I get everything transferred to the rMBP and it's insanely ugly and unbearable.
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Nov 4, 2014 20:38
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Lolcano Eruption posted:Because Fusion drives and all other hybrid drives are nowhere near as fast as a true SSD. It's just a regular hard drive with a giant cache. Pure SSD is obviously preferable if you can swing it, but Fusion drives feel quite a bit faster than a regular hard drive in actual use.
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Nov 4, 2014 20:39
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Dr. Tim Whatley posted:Yeah I'm still using mine until I get everything transferred to the rMBP and it's insanely ugly and unbearable. Maybe I should be happy that my iMac died several months before I got my rMBP. That way my memories of its beautiful display remain intact. edit: And here comes a stupid question: I've never used a laptop as desktop machine before, and I'm curious about heat management. I don't play a lot of games on my rMBP, but after 15 minutes of playing a game like Divinity: Original Sin the fans kicked in and never really stopped until I shut down the game an hour later. Do I have to worry about the heat? Or is it normal and the computer will handle it just fine. Jack's Flow fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 20:46
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^^^ As long as you're not doing whatever makes the fans go 24/7 you should be fine. I've been sticking with Netflix ever since they dropped Silverlight in favor of straight HTML5 as I never hear the fans now.Lolcano Eruption posted:Because Fusion drives and all other hybrid drives are nowhere near as fast as a true SSD. It's just a regular hard drive with a giant cache. It was more of a question to Yeast directly. Binary Badger fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Nov 4, 2014 |
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Nov 4, 2014 21:05
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Yeah, Netflix and NBA League Pass run super smooth without any fan action. I've read stuff about "cooling pads" and got worried for a minute, but I guess that's more for people who buy gaming laptops or whatever. Thanks for the answer.
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Nov 4, 2014 21:11
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Jack's Flow posted:Yeah, Netflix and NBA League Pass run super smooth without any fan action. I've read stuff about "cooling pads" and got worried for a minute, but I guess that's more for people who buy gaming laptops or whatever. Thanks for the answer. For what it's worth, I use a cooling pad with my aging mid-2009 MBP. That era machine in general just kind of ran warm and firing up anything even semi-modern on it of course kicks the fans in. The heat management under Windows 7 is also kind of all-or-nothing as far as ramping up the fans goes, and some of the places I've lived in the last 5 years have been pretty unforgiving environments for electronics. Think 5th story, non-air conditioned, garret apartments in the Central European summer, routine daytime temperatures hovering around 85F indoors. When I was traveling more the pad was pretty necessary sometimes if I was going to do any kind of game playing at all in my spare time, otherwise I'd get temperature-related shutdowns. These days I still use it mostly out of habit. The one I've got angles the machine nicely for typing at a desk which I've found helps a lot with wrist strain. Like most work station setup a lot of it just comes down to individual needs and preference. This is the one I use now, and I've had it for about 4 years. I had a cheaper one before it but something happened to it - I forget what. Regardless, they're reasonably durable, can be had cheaply enough, and if you find yourself in a situation where heat (or even just non-stop internal fan use) is a concern they work reasonably well.
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Nov 4, 2014 21:46
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Lolcano Eruption posted:Because Fusion drives and all other hybrid drives are nowhere near as fast as a true SSD. It's just a regular hard drive with a giant cache. If the cache is large enough to hold the operating system and all the apps you use... what's the difference?
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Nov 4, 2014 22:13
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smackfu posted:If the cache is large enough to hold the operating system and all the apps you use... what's the difference?
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Nov 4, 2014 22:15
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Binary Badger posted:Ha, another bitten by the Retina bug! I say this as an rMBP owner who starts to furiously squint whenever I'm not in front of a Retina display. I had the 1Tb flash on the Mac Pro. I use the machine for Lightroom & PS, handling 36mp raw libraries of a 20-30k images at a time. This way I can load client catalogues and work on them directly at a good speed. I have a Thunderbolt Drobo for archiving, and I tried working off it with the Mac Pro, but the speed / IO hit was really, really noticeable, even with the mSata SSD cache active. Also, I can't really be in a position where the spindle drive dies and I can't physically use the machine for X days, and the SSD is simple more reliable. That's maybe a little anecdotal though.
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Nov 4, 2014 23:08
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Yeah my use case is very similar (video) and all my drives are either SSD or a Thunderbolt RAID. There's really no reason for me to have single spinning drives except for 2nd backups.
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Nov 4, 2014 23:12
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Cyrano4747 posted:For what it's worth, I use a cooling pad with my aging mid-2009 MBP. That era machine in general just kind of ran warm and firing up anything even semi-modern on it of course kicks the fans in. The heat management under Windows 7 is also kind of all-or-nothing as far as ramping up the fans goes, and some of the places I've lived in the last 5 years have been pretty unforgiving environments for electronics. Think 5th story, non-air conditioned, garret apartments in the Central European summer, routine daytime temperatures hovering around 85F indoors. When I was traveling more the pad was pretty necessary sometimes if I was going to do any kind of game playing at all in my spare time, otherwise I'd get temperature-related shutdowns. Alright, thanks for the clarification. Outside temperature shouldn't be a problem. January, June, November — it doesn't really matter, the temperature in this room rarely rises above 65F. Jack's Flow fucked around with this message at 00:05 on Nov 5, 2014 |
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Nov 5, 2014 00:01
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Semi-trivial news: Apple gets granted a patent for what is essentially a Wiimote. Guess they're still tinkering with AppleTV..
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Nov 5, 2014 00:22
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Pivo posted:WoW ran well on my now-deceased mid-2014 15" rMBP with the discrete nvidia card. I did have to run it at half resolution (no loving way it was going to run well at the full retina res) but it looked just fine. Gonna piggyback off this to note that, under Windows, my 13" 2014 rMBP runs TF2 with most settings set to high at native res at ~40-50 FPS (there's the occasional dip to ~20, but never at a time that's caused an issue), which is pretty damned impressive. Actually, what's really impressive is that I'm playing a twitchy FPS on a machine that has integrated graphics, is about a half inch thick, and is running both the OS and game off of an external USB drive and getting results roughly on par with the (admittedly inexpensive) full tower gaming PC I had three years ago. That's loving unbelievable to me. Oh and I get a fantastic connection/ping on wireless, something I never would have thought possible (though I'm not sure if that's the result of the wireless card, my kickass new AC router, or both). Living in the future loving rocks.
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Nov 5, 2014 07:20
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Yeast posted:Made the mistake of viewing my photographs on a retina 5K iMac. I'm getting my retina iMac in today. I got the apparently unusual i5/8GB/3TB/M295X combination. I haven't been this excited to get a computer since I got my very first computer. What is the best way to copy over my ~1.5TB of files from my PC? Cat 6 cable (would I need a crossover cable?) from my PC to my iMac and let the migration assistant do it, or just copy over the basic settings using the migration assistant and hook up my PC hard drive to the iMac via a USB3 enclosure? Would I need a crossover cable?
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Nov 5, 2014 13:31
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pyrotek posted:Would I need a crossover cable?
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Nov 5, 2014 15:09
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I just ordered a new battery from OWC for my black Macbook 1,1. So stoked!!
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Nov 5, 2014 23:39
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Does anyone have any idea why a Macbook hard drive would suddenly be full and open up new space when files are deleted? It's my parent's computer and it's disk is full with over 122gb filled that isn't any kind of media. I couldn't find any large files that weren't movies and can't figure it out. This problem started recently.
Spacebump fucked around with this message at 02:01 on Nov 6, 2014 |
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Nov 6, 2014 01:58
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Local snapshots perhaps? Go to the Apple menu-About this Mac and I think it shows if space is taken up by backups, otherwise mystery space would be under "other" (just like on iOS  ). Grand Perspective or whatever drive visualization thing should help you find that stuff if it's still a mystery.
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Nov 6, 2014 02:12
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I discovered the other day that my CrashPlan log file was over 32 GB. Do they use that?
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Nov 6, 2014 02:16
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Spacebump posted:Does anyone have any idea why a Macbook hard drive would suddenly be full and open up new space when files are deleted? It's my parent's computer and it's disk is full with over 122gb filled that isn't any kind of media. I couldn't find any large files that weren't movies and can't figure it out. This problem started recently. Did you have a look at their hard drive with Disk Inventory X? On top of giving you a graphical representation of the drive (so you can see big files easily) it'll also color code them by file type. If there's a program on their computer creating junk files of the same type, it'll be fairly obvious and then you can figure out what program is doing it by searching the filenames/locations/etc. Though by the sound of it (since files are auto deleting) it's likely some log file gone horribly wrong.
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Nov 6, 2014 03:06
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Housh posted:I just ordered a new battery from OWC for my black Macbook 1,1. So stoked!! Wow dude. Props for making an 8 year old computer work for you.
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Nov 6, 2014 04:20
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fleshweasel posted:Wow dude. Props for making an 8 year old computer work for you. I have a 1,1 White MacBook that I keep around because back in high school I made some lovely GarageBand tracks that heavily relied on loops and built in instruments and they won't import into current versions of Garageband because those things are missing. I don't want to lose them forever, therefore my MacBook has a valued place in my closet for those occasions once every couple of years when I want to tool around with old poo poo I did. (I tried adding the loops and instruments to the current version of GarageBand and while the loops added okay the instruments did not (it would load every single sample one at a time for an instrument every time I launched the project and then ran really really slowly))
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Nov 6, 2014 04:47
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Lord above I may finally update my iMac 2010 with a lavish christmas gift from my Wife of a iMac 5k 27". (Fingers crossed, anyway.) 
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Nov 6, 2014 06:17
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