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22 Eargesplitten posted:I'm also not sure a USB port can push 75w. Maybe a powered USB port, but I've never seen one on a laptop. Yeah, it definitely wouldn't be an on-the-go solution if you're looking at gaming level graphics.
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May 18, 2015 16:46
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A USB Power Delivery port can deliver 100W (5A 20V).
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May 18, 2015 16:56
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Jeoh posted:A USB Power Delivery port can deliver 100W (5A 20V). Good luck getting that from most laptops.
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May 18, 2015 17:02
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The Fool posted:Good luck getting that from most laptops. Well, the idea behind an external graphics card isn't that you're using it on the go. It's kind of a like a Dock station. You want the portability of the laptop but when you need to be at a desk anyway you might as well plug in two extra monitors and an eGPU. Gaming laptops have historically been trash unless you really pay top dollar, but recent die shrinks and Nvidia's 800 series of GPUs have really opened up a lot of avenues for laptops that actually perform and don't catch fire. Depending on the manufacturer's implementation of that technology, of course.
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May 18, 2015 17:12
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Jeoh posted:A USB Power Delivery port can deliver 100W (5A 20V).
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May 18, 2015 17:14
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go3 posted:Gaming laptops have a well deserved reputation thanks to Alienware but there are some pretty nondescript models out there. Personally I'm at almost 3 years on a Sager and couldn't be happier. I would advise anyone purchasing one that you be comfortable enough to disassemble and cleans fans/heat sink periodically, especially if you own pets. A tube of NT-H1 and a can of compressed air go a long way towards longevity. Aren't sagers also back breakingly heavy with awful battery life? RyuHimora posted:Well, the idea behind an external graphics card isn't that you're using it on the go. It's kind of a like a Dock station. You want the portability of the laptop but when you need to be at a desk anyway you might as well plug in two extra monitors and an eGPU. Gaming laptops have historically been trash unless you really pay top dollar, but recent die shrinks and Nvidia's 800 series of GPUs have really opened up a lot of avenues for laptops that actually perform and don't catch fire. Depending on the manufacturer's implementation of that technology, of course. Either you put a process shrunk previous generation midrange GPU into a laptop (which will still perform fine, because if we're being real, very, very few games won't run on high at full HD on last-gen's midrange card, and it'll stay that way for about the life of the laptop), or you say "I want to game at max at 4k" and you stick with the on-die integrated graphics for when your laptop has to be a laptop and get some kind of weird external box/dock to plug it into. Or instead, you could get GPU-accelerated virt, which solves those problems. Or build a cheap workstation and let your laptop be a laptop and do the things that a laptop is good at (portability, battery life, low heat, etc) and not a "does it all device", which is sane. RyuHimora posted:Sadly, no. Thunderbolt's bus speed is 20 Gb/s with not very much overhead at all, while the best they've been able to pump down USB 3.1 is 7.2 Gb/s after an encoding change to reduce overhead. I've never seen or heard of an actual throughput test for Thunderbolt to give a fair comparison, but if we're talking external GPUs then even the theoretical 10 Gb/s of 3.1 wouldn't cut it at all. Intel graphics are much, much, much better than they used to be. They were historically (GMA950/etc) trash. They're reasonably good now. And bandwidth is far less of an issue than the unavailability of direct memory access across USB, because it's not pushing lanes the way thunderbolt does. Firewire always won that particular battle with USB, too. 10 Gb/s isn't enough either if you have to deal with protocol latency. Without thunderbolt/firewire/infiniband/etc DMA, any external box that's pushing something latency dependent is DOA.
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May 18, 2015 17:22
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I have a mid range gaming laptop (Lenovo Y50) so I can hang out in the living room with my wife rather than have to hide away in some other room. It's almost like different people prioritize things differently which leads them to make different decisions!
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May 18, 2015 17:38
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Not pissing me off: a user actually being able to help himself. I just had a user add a printer by IP with me doing nothing but giving him the IP off of Meraki.
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May 18, 2015 20:14
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evol262 posted:Intel graphics are much, much, much better than they used to be. They were historically (GMA950/etc) trash. They're reasonably good now. Once upon a time you couldn't play games at 10fps on Intel graphics. Now you can often get at least 30, sometimes more depending on the game; I've seen people get 60+ FPS on their recent laptops in CS:GO for example.
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May 18, 2015 20:34
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Yes, but CS:GO is a bad example. It has been updated a lot, but it's still the same engine that ran HL2 11 years ago, and it had a reputation for scaling well even then. I should try running some yames on my ThinkPad, but then I'd have to set up my mouse and clear desk space and at that point I'd probably just see if my desktop survived the move.
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May 18, 2015 21:21
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Wish me luck. I have a job interview tomorrow afternoon in Downtown Dallas. Hopefully  -age is forthcoming soon.
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May 18, 2015 21:50
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evol262 posted:Aren't sagers also back breakingly heavy with awful battery life? Really feeling like a Grampa in here with all this reputation talk... i got to bust out my 1982 Minnesota Northstars jersey just to fit in around here! I would disagree with you on the integrated GFX point & contend that for the most part integrated, non Nvidia or Intel cards are still pretty much junk and if you want to play video games on a laptop you have GOT to spring for a model with a big, expensive, brand-name video card in it.
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May 18, 2015 22:07
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nitrogen posted:Wish me luck. I have a job interview tomorrow afternoon in Downtown Dallas. Hopefully You are going to hate that commute but good luck just the same.
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May 18, 2015 22:29
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A3th3r posted:I would disagree with you on the integrated GFX point & contend that for the most part integrated, non Nvidia or Intel cards are still pretty much junk and if you want to play video games on a laptop you have GOT to spring for a model with a big, expensive, brand-name video card in it. I hardly play any games, but those that I do play are fine on Intel graphics. The difference between running Source games at 640x480 at low detail and still dropping frames on integrated a couple of years ago and running Unreal Engine 4 games at medium at 720p today is incredibly significant. If you want to play on Ultra at 1080 or high at 4k or whatever, by all means, get a big, expensive, brand-name video card. For casual video gaming, Intel integrated and AMD APUs are extremely passable in 2015.
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May 18, 2015 22:35
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nitrogen posted:Wish me luck. I have a job interview tomorrow afternoon in Downtown Dallas. Hopefully Good luck! If you see someone on a bike, please don't run them over, it might be me. 
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May 18, 2015 23:08
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This talk of external graphics cards is amusing to me because one of my first big 'upgrades' in PC gaming was getting the external expansion chassis for my Zenith Supersport 286 and plunking a VGA card in there so I could play games in 256 color instead of just the 4 color internal CGA. 8 bit ISA POWER!
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May 18, 2015 23:49
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bull3964 posted:This talk of external graphics cards is amusing to me because one of my first big 'upgrades' in PC gaming was getting the external expansion chassis for my Zenith Supersport 286 and plunking a VGA card in there so I could play games in 256 color instead of just the 4 color internal CGA. 8 bit ISA POWER! What the hell did this device look like?
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May 18, 2015 23:58
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Tab8715 posted:What the hell did this device look like? It was about the size and shape of a small APC UPS and had its own power connection. It connected to the laptop with a pretty thick many pinned cable. bull3964 fucked around with this message at 00:03 on May 19, 2015 |
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May 19, 2015 00:00
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One of my carriers is moving to a new back-end system and has us moving numbers over on a customer-by-customer basis. The first one we did as a test they were only able to move half the numbers due to a supposed external issue with another system. Today we had another very small test group moving and had a conference call with management at the carrier where we were assured that the previous issue would not reoccur. The move was planned to happen at 17:00. 17:15 comes and goes, nothing. 17:30, still nothing. 17:45 on the nose we receive an email from the tech responsible saying that the same thing had happened again and 75% of the numbers that were supposed to move today would instead be moving tomorrow morning some time. 17:50 I'm on the phone with the carrier and get told that the tech had just left. The rear end in a top hat failed to complete the job and left us half way between two systems, but instead of reverting to where we started, calling and asking what we'd like to do, or even waiting a reasonable period of time for a response to his email he just GTFOed. I had to help the tech I ended up talking to figure out which numbers were going where so he could fix it for us because captain dipshit didn't even document which ones did or didn't move over. edit: My boss is good friends with the owner and top management at the offending carrier, so on the plus side I do expect that this guy's going to get torn a new one for pulling that poo poo.
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May 19, 2015 00:13
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How is page 404 not just 'post not found' over and over again? e: yes I know I'm on page 404
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May 19, 2015 00:22
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kensei posted:How is page 404 not just 'post not found' over and over again? I went looking for a 404 joke but couldn't find one 
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May 19, 2015 00:37
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poo poo that makes me go "wait, what the gently caress?": Pidgin. Pidgin uses enough CPU time just sitting there doing nothing but accepting incoming jabber messages to raise my idle temps by ten whole freaking degrees. I don't like my idle temps being 53 C, even if it is 28 C outside and I'm in a third floor bedroom. What the gently caress, Pidgin?
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May 19, 2015 01:38
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RyuHimora posted:Sadly, no. Thunderbolt's bus speed is 20 Gb/s with not very much overhead at all, while the best they've been able to pump down USB 3.1 is 7.2 Gb/s after an encoding change to reduce overhead. I've never seen or heard of an actual throughput test for Thunderbolt to give a fair comparison, but if we're talking external GPUs then even the theoretical 10 Gb/s of 3.1 wouldn't cut it at all. PCIe is only 8gb/s for a PCIe 2.0 16x slot. Many people running sli are using 8x slot and still get great performance. For lower performance options http://www.evga.com/uvplus/ works pretty well. I'm surprised there isn't a slightly more powerful version with external power.
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May 19, 2015 01:38
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lampey posted:PCIe is only 8gb/s for a PCIe 2.0 16x slot. Many people running sli are using 8x slot and still get great performance. 8 GB/s, not Gb/s (Gbps). Thunderbolt's bus speed is 20 Gb/s.
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May 19, 2015 01:41
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If you do have a thunderbolt sporting laptop you can frankenstein your own external GPU eg. http://forum.techinferno.com/implementation-guides-apple/4271-2013-11-macbook-air-gtx570%404gbps-c-tbec2-pe4l-2-1b-win7-%5Bkloper%5D.html
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May 19, 2015 03:19
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Kyrosiris posted:Good luck! If you see someone on a bike, please don't run them over, it might be me.
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May 19, 2015 03:28
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I never got the point of external GPUs - it's only ever going to work at your desk anyway so why not just build an entire desktop and go for a more portable laptop? I doubt it would work out any more expensive.
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May 19, 2015 03:30
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dissss posted:I never got the point of external GPUs - it's only ever going to work at your desk anyway so why not just build an entire desktop and go for a more portable laptop? Because its easier to transport two small things than one big thing. They--like gaming laptops--are definitely a niche.
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May 19, 2015 03:46
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dissss posted:I never got the point of external GPUs - it's only ever going to work at your desk anyway so why not just build an entire desktop and go for a more portable laptop? Grapevine myself. Not far at all.
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May 19, 2015 05:22
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Sickening posted:Grapevine myself. Not far at all. Would you learn to quote I mean come on, that's it, you're paying for your own lunch
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May 19, 2015 05:25
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:You store all of your graphics cards in Grapevine? I blame it totally on the awful app. 
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May 19, 2015 05:26
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Question for you, nitrogen and madmaan - where's everyone from? I'm busy as poo poo so it's not going to be this month (closing on a house, yay), but I've got thoughts of expensing a lunch on you guys. I'm in Frisco. Basically I can throw a rock from my porch and hit the Dallas/Richardson border. I work downtown, though.
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May 19, 2015 05:34
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Kyrosiris posted:Basically I can throw a rock from my porch and hit the Dallas/Richardson border. I work downtown, though. Seriously, I've lived in a lot of places in my life, but DFW, this is home to me. The only downside to the whole thing, well, it's May 18th and my wife and I went on a walk tonight and it was hot and humid on May 18th, much less what's to come. To keep the thread on topic, poo poo that pisses me off: right now? Nothing. We're closing on a house, my wife is a thing which I can neither confirm nor deny because it's not confirmed until about 3 months in so I would never dare to hint at anything ahead of time, and my job mostly consists of exercising at home, reading at home, cleaning at home, watching TV at home, studying for certs at home, and answering like 4 emails per day because no one else seems to be able to know what I know so I'm deemed indispensable. Could stand a pay raise, guess that's pissing me off, grrrr, stupid work not paying me more.
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May 19, 2015 05:58
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Could stand a pay raise, guess that's pissing me off, grrrr, stupid work not paying me more. I had a "job" like that for six months at some point. You can make a few extra bucks replacing Smartphone/tablet screens without much effort - especially if you order your parts from China.. or you can dick around playing games. (In other news I've just discovered Skyrim. Why didn't I play this before?)
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May 19, 2015 07:17
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Kazinsal posted:poo poo that makes me go "wait, what the gently caress?": Pidgin. Pidgin uses enough CPU time just sitting there doing nothing but accepting incoming jabber messages to raise my idle temps by ten whole freaking degrees. If you clear the scroll back of all your open chats then the CPU usage drops down. I don't know what CPU actions it's performing on messages that got sent two days ago but clearing the backlog is the way to get pidgin to calm the gently caress down.
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May 19, 2015 07:28
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Oh cool, my wife and I were at the Wildflower festival on Saturday. Great area. See it's funny because it was 45 degrees today in Minneapolis, right on the other end of 35 (what I told the Microsoft support engineer when I found out he was in Dallas).
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May 19, 2015 07:47
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I do wish there were other IT jobs around here! Currently the management are in  "omg we're not going to make as gigantic a profit this year and the shareholders might have to have a smaller portion of caviar with their breakfast, everyone PANIIIIC!" mode so are clamping the wallet shut to the point of stupidity.Key general example: we just lost two excellent people from Purchasing, which is kind of an important department for a manufacturer and they were very good at negotiating prices, finding the best value sources, keeping things coming in at the right time etc. They're not being replaced, reducing the department from 3 people down to 1 part timer who is mostly working in another department now. (Comments of one upon leaving "great to know I've suddenly gone from a valued member of staff to a cost saving now that I'm going!"). They're trying to sort of absorb the department into a combination of dumping it on Accounts (for sundries etc), Stores (to now order their own materials by dealing directly with suppliers) and Sales (direct supplier-to-customer stuff etc). Talk about stubborn. They've also lost easily their best member (IMO) of the Design team. Because why pay anyone decently when you can just hire someone else when they leave  (oh wait, he's not being replaced either)Key IT/thread-related example: We've been about a year now without an IT budget. The telephone system is end of life (we're up poo poo creek if it breaks) with a plan to replace it having been suspended indefinitely, we're eBaying what scraps we can to try and raise funds for the odd thing that breaks, we're down to 1 hot spare PC and some such as the one in the meeting room are desperately due for an upgrade. The meeting room PC is like 10+ years old with Windows 7 on it. I've started calling it Methuselah and made the point before that it's embarrassing when you're trying to hold a meeting and you have to wait 5 minutes for a web browser to open while it thrashes at its ancient HDD and if only we could replace it or at least pop a cheap SSD in it.. but no, can't spend one penny.. Our boss (financial director / wallet tightener supreme) was sat in with us and got to actually witness it. It's painful. Some of the others were asking me "why don't you replace this old thing?!" so I simply told the truth that we have no budget and if anyone wants to give us £3-400 we'll be happy to replace it. Alas he just responded with "can't you just... squeeze a bit more speed out of it somehow?" followed by "can't you just use the hot spare for now?"  Maybe it's time to learn plumbing. Everyone needs plumbers.  Edit: Suggestions for "squeezing a bit more speed out" still perfectly welcome. There's nothing much on it but I'll try and at least disable some services or something... can't see it making much difference... GargleBlaster fucked around with this message at 10:18 on May 19, 2015 |
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May 19, 2015 10:06
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GargleBlaster posted:Edit: Suggestions for "squeezing a bit more speed out" still perfectly welcome. There's nothing much on it but I'll try and at least disable some services or something... can't see it making much difference... It's not going to make a difference. Let the fool realize he can't squeeze blood from a stone and get busy with playing Pass the Buck. "I'd really like to help you, but we don't have a budget for that. If you can get %boss% to find the money for it I can have it ready early next week."
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May 19, 2015 10:28
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I was under contract to Kodak at the time they declared bankruptcy, and the situation you described was almost exactly the same (minus the part about shareholders, since the stock had already tanked). In a case of supreme irony, however, the IT manager decided to start releasing some of the desktops and laptops that he'd had sitting in a storage room for two years, still in their original packing and unopened. We'd been trying to replace 10 year old computers for the previous six months, and because there had been no new budget for 18 months he wanted to hoard his little stash for emergencies. We finally convinced him that there was no way to beat old age and entropy and to just give us the drat computers. It's amazing how nice engineers become when they get a new computer out of the blue to replace the crap machine they've been hobbling along with for a couple years. Even more impressive is the sudden burst of productivity when they no longer had to wait hours for their machine to render engineering drawings. Of course, then they would ask "what the hell took you so long to get me a new machine?"
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May 19, 2015 12:30
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:my wife is a thing I hope you don't call her that where she can hear it!
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