Root Access

Journeyman Geek

00:34

hm, that's wierd

backups are failing for one of my systems

Michael Frank

01:52

Heh... news article came out about a Google self driving car and a Delphi self driving car "almost colliding".

Turns out they both just decided to change into the same lane at the same time... then both aborted like they should have.

Journeyman Geek

03:28

Never let the facts get in the way of a good headline ;p

Bob

03:45

@allquixotic Entry level Nikon is D3xxx

(I'm using a D3200. Very much entry-level.)

Gotta agree with @DragonLord, though. Unless you want to invest a fair bit of time and maybe money into it, don't bother with a DSLR.

They're not really designed for point-and-shoot.

Journeyman Geek

yay. Got paid. Almost ready to pull the trigger on my new monitor :)

HackToHell

04:13

yay, I'm thinking of buying a SSD from the internship money

or an external hard disk

Nick

@Bob I have an 18.2 Megapixel SONY DSC-HX200V. It's a cheap average man's camera. Takes shots in jpg. Lense can't be changed. Tons of useless features :D

@HackToHell Which is better really? Those tiny SD cards claiming 500GB storage or external HDDs?

Journeyman Geek

04:30

Depends on what you need ;p

Nick

@JourneymanGeek To store lots of nature documentaries (around 200GB worth)

Nick

04:44

HDDs are what people use but I feel micro SSDs could be a heck of a lot more convenient. I just don't know if they're trustworthy in the long run.

Bob

05:04

@Nick HDDs fail. SSDs fail. Everything fails.

If you care about your data, keep backup copies.

If you really care about your data, keep offsite backup copies.

Never ever think any given storage medium is more reliable than another.

Treat all of them as fragile and prone to failure.

@Nick Video storage typically goes on HDDs simply for the lower $/GB.

Videos don't need particularly high throughput, nor do they require a lot of random seeking.

@allquixotic How did you order your extra IPs on OVH?

Journeyman Geek

05:36

@Nick: ~~SD cards~~ SSDs for speed, external drives for convenience, internal drives for space. SD cards for ... donno phones, tablets and netbooks.

Bob

Oh, if you're talking SD cards, avoid them if you care about your data at all (use them for e.g. transferring data from cameras, but not for storage).

Journeyman Geek

Multiple copies of everything for reliability
;p

...

Nick

06:06

@Bob Excuse me, I was under the impression SD and SSD were the same solid state technology. My bad.

Bob

@Nick They both use NAND flash, but are typically different implementations.

A single NAND chip on even a 64 GB SSD can be bigger than an entire SD card.

Not to mention an SSD controller is far more complex.

Better wear levelling, more reserved blocks, etc., etc..

And an SSD has much higher thermal capacity and better heat dissipation - SD cards can't cope with heat as well as an SSD can.

A lot of SD cards are also very cheaply manufactured. Doesn't help longevity any.

Nick

@Bob I really wish these guys didn't have the limited shelf life they have.

Bob

@Nick ...shelf life? O_O

An SSD is not a carton of milk!

Nick

My gramps had a bunch of old audio cassettes. Like really expensive ones from back in the day.

Journeyman Geek

@Nick: If it matters, its backed up, in multiple ;p

Nick

06:09

None of them work now. So, yes, data storage devices to me are like a carton of milk except this milk can be preserved simply by changing containers once in a while.

Bob

@Nick Ah, that. I forgot the term for it, but I don't think it's shelf life :P

The old tapes were rather bad, though. Same with floppies.

HDDs tend to fare better. Better magnetic shielding, for example.

SSDs... enterprise SSDs don't last long. They're designed to be powered at all times. Consumer SSDs... I don't know if anyone's really tested one for an extended period of time, but they do last a while.

Eventually the charge in NAND flash will leak, I suppose. Or maybe not.

Nick

@Bob Whatever the terminology, limited lifespan and diseases due to old age. The same human probled copy pasted to technology. Data Death.

Bob

Optical disks... the organic dyes used in CD-Rs and DVD+/-Rs fades after a while.

But a pressed (or maybe etched) optical disk can conceivably last forever (or however long the plastic and metal lasts, which could be millennia).

@Nick Don't base your opinion off old audio cassettes. Completely different technology.

They're vaguely related to HDDs in that they're both magnetic, but apart from that they share little resemblence.

Nick

@JourneymanGeek Hardcopy backup sealed in those mint edition plastic covers. Best backup when available :D

Bob

The magnetic data-recording layer is a completely different design/composition. The read/write heads never touch it. The recording protocol is different too.

Journeyman Geek

06:17

Paper disintegrates over time.

Bob

@Nick Unless you have papyrus or something... or an etched stone... paper actually degrades quite quickly. As do most inks (dyes).

Journeyman Geek

;p

Bob

Again, pressed/etched optical disks might last the longest for high-density storage if you can actually read it in 500 years.

Low-density, go for etched stone sealed with multiple layers of lacquer.

Nick

@Bob Theoretically. How about practically. What if I want to send a message 10k years into the future. What should I use?

Bob

Voyager Golden Record

The Voyager Golden Records are phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched in 1977. They contain sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and are intended for any intelligent extraterrestrial life form, or for future humans, who may find them. The Voyager spacecraft is not heading toward any particular star, but Voyager 1 will be within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, currently in the constellation Camelopardalis, in about 40,000 years. As the probes are extremely small compared to the vastness of interstellar space...

Journeyman Geek

06:19

HUGE letters engraved deep in stone.
Even then, language changes.

Bob

Assuming they have access to the same language and reading machines (e.g. CD drives), physically deforming metal (as pressed CDs/DVDs do) is one of the best ways, and very high density too.

Given the right metal and no physical abrasion, they'll last basically forever.

Without that assumption? Well, keep your message short and do something big.

Who knows, maybe Stonehenge is a giant message.

Hieroglyphs in the pyramids have lasted millennia.

You'll probably get more information onto a single DVD than all the pyramids combined, though.

Low-density is easier to preserve and far easier to read.

Nick

@Bob No, stonehenge was a decoration to the superhenge.

Journeyman Geek

Density cost and reliability, pick 2 ;p

HackToHell

09:48

Is there anyway to compress the results of a SQL query when querying a remote server ?

Using SQL server 2012 and SQL management studio

Nick

10:05

@HackToHell Maybe this is helpful.

10

Q: Is data retrieved from SQL Server compressed for transmission?

Is data retrieved from Microsoft SQL Server compressed? If this is controlled by the connection string, is there any simple way to tell if any particular app is using it? I'm examining analysis tools, and the volume of data can take minutes to transmit over our network. I'm wondering whether I s...

Even if it isn't, it's the community where you should ask :D

HackToHell

Arrgh no straightforward solution

Pulling from a client, can't ask them nithing

Journeyman Geek

10:30

I seem to recall its optional

Default is yes.

Nick

@JourneymanGeek $3 x 10^{20}$ years! That's how long new Optical (nanostructured glass) data storage can last at room temperature. [src]

Journeyman Geek

In theory. And you'd need to know how to read it.

Psycogeek

3D convergant laser crystal storage? I think it doesnt last if you drop it :-)

There was someone working on that like 10 years ago, even if say the reader writer would cost $1500 if it was huge data capable and fully long term storage it would be worth it.

Nick

@JourneymanGeek You're right. It's hard to imagine aliens listening to Chuck Berry from those Voyager disks. Sure, they might even have put the listening device with it too but still, they'd have to figure out how to use it (For that, they'd need to figure out the instructions). I'm pretty sure the future us would be aliens to present us.

Journeyman Geek

Its a phonograph tho

Psycogeek

10:44

Do aliens have ears ? I donno

Journeyman Geek

precisely

Nick

@Psycogeek Your ears are as likely to have aliens.

@JourneymanGeek Imagine dropping the voyager's contents into a very undeveloped African camp site. It's very unlikely that those things will be used as intended.

Journeyman Geek

Hand a LD to a teenager and... they wouldn't know what to do with it too

Nick

@Bob Well, how big exactly? I'm limited to only 28 gigaparsecs in this universe.

@Bob Well, the Egyptians were quite famous for their mummification. It's not that surprising that whatever dyes they used preserved their hieroglyphs to this day.

@Bob It took me a while to understand the bigger the better mindset in data storage. Now I get it.

@JourneymanGeek Silent Comic strips then. Mhh?

Bob

11:02

@Nick Not dyes. Hieroglyphs are carved into stone.

Nick

@Bob Ah. Then it must have something to do with how they closed up their pyramids.

I think I should consult some comic book collectors to see how they seal up their precious material.

@JourneymanGeek Maybe if the paper is vacuum packaged or similar, it could last for a while.

@Psycogeek Apple would sure be interested in that technology. Don't you think? XD

Oliver Salzburg

12:36

wat

Bob

shrug they forgot to auto-uninstall :P

(it was probably intentional... probably)

Oliver Salzburg

I was instructed to download 8 and the 8.1 "update"

Bob

... ... ... wat

Oliver Salzburg

So I just installed 8 and am now trying to install the update

Bob

...who told you that

Oliver Salzburg

12:38

The ArcServe Bootkit for Bare Metal Recovery Assistant

Bob

...:S

@JourneymanGeek Went to Dymocks today. Asked if they had Pilot converters. Was told they don't stock Pilot because their boss thinks it won't sell well :P

They have quite a range of other brands, though.

Oliver Salzburg

Oh, you want to recover one of your servers? No problem, just create a bootkit first. Oh, by the way, you'll need to download 5 gigs worth of AIKs first!

> No, this actually makes it easier! It just seems like it's totally retarded

Kinda weird. I went to the same MSDN download pages on 2 machines. On my workstation, I downloaded the downloader for the ADKs

On another, remote machine, it downloaded the ADK installer

Maybe the "update" will work on the remote machine

HackToHell

@JourneymanGeek It is compressed ayayz

19gb file was compressed to 4 gb

Bob

@OliverSalzburg "downloaded the downloader" just sounds wrong

4

Oliver Salzburg

12:53

@Bob It is wrong >:(

You download an application that downloads the installer for the ADK. Then you can run that installer and select which components to install

The other installer, on the remote machine, let me select the components first, then just downloaded and installed those

I'm not even going to try to understand it

Well, now the 8.1 is installed. yay

Oliver Salzburg

13:42

Ugh

Nick

@OliverSalzburg Damn this dogma. What happened to the user-friendly experience.

Oliver Salzburg

@Nick It is generally assumed in this chat room, that shit like that only keeps happening to me

Nick

@OliverSalzburg Shit happens to a lot of people. Not everyone openly speaks of it. (what a stinky world it would be if everyone did)

Oliver Salzburg

So, I want to bare-metal recover a physical machine that has 2TB of storage. I can't restore it as a VM, because ArcServe UDP can only do that for backups of virtual machines...

And I can't bare-metal recover it to this host I have, because it doesn't have 2 TB storage available

Nick

Point is, bigshots get away with slipping in cheap/idiotic items because users don't take the the time to document and report the idiocy. (Demand the airfreshners! Demand them now!)

Oliver Salzburg

13:55

Even though only like 8% of that storage was used

Nick

14:09

@OliverSalzburg Sounds like you have your work cut out for you.

Bob

@allquixotic ...half the OVH interface is french :P

Nick

@OliverSalzburg That doesn't matter. If buying the required space is possible, go for that.

allquixotic

@Bob under IPs, you have to click one of the buttons in the topright corner

Bob

@allquixotic Yea, done now.

Gave me an error the first time

> This action requires verification or cannot currently be validated. Please contact your local support team.

Did you get that?

Journeyman Geek

lol

its the same as with online

Bob

14:18

Hm. I have two choices. kingston.com/datasheets/dt100g3_us.pdf or kingston.com/datasheets/DTSE9g2_en.pdf

Any opinions?

(First will be 32 GB, second will be 16 GB. First costs more but ignore that for now. Will be used for UEFI boot partition, so mostly untouched.)

allquixotic

@Bob I think so. I don't remember how it was fixed. I don't think you can do it while a USB stick is on order

I put in a ticket about it tho and it ended up being resolved

Bob

@allquixotic Lodged support ticket with justification.

allquixotic

oh, right, you have to give a "justification" for why you need IPs

Bob

I don't know if that was actually necessary, but didn't hurt.

Just from services I'm already running, if I remove the NAT (and I really want to) that's something like 10. Plus the stuff I'm planning pushes it to 16+

allquixotic

yeah, it's required now with RIPE

but then again, RIPE has about a couple thousand IPs left :P

Bob

14:23

@allquixotic There's probably thousands sitting unused from the original A/B-class allocations...

Also, I really do need to bring down a couple of VPSes I still have. That'll end up freeing about half the IPs I just ordered :P

(Granted, to other companies that'll hold onto them...)

Journeyman Geek

lol

allquixotic

@Bob my company has an /8 :P

chances that they use it all? very low.

Journeyman Geek

@Bob: We need to all move to ipv6 ;p

Bob

@allquixotic I'd guess they use something like a /16, max.

Restricting allocations is all well and good, but if it comes to reclaiming allocated (and unused) IPs they'd get far more from the big companies (and universities).

allquixotic

List of assigned /8 IPv4 address blocks

Some large /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses, the former Class A network blocks, are assigned in whole to single organizations or related groups of organizations, either by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), or a regional Internet registry. Each /8 block contains 16,777,216 addresses. As IPv4 address exhaustion has advanced to its final stages, some organizations, such as Stanford University, formerly using 36.0.0.0/8, have returned their allocated blocks to assist in the delay of the exhaustion date. == List of... ==

> 20.0.0.0/8

that's "us" :|

I can see IBM and HP both using a lot of 9-net and 15-net respectively

4-net is probably pretty full with L3

Bob

14:31

@allquixotic What a nice generic name.

allquixotic

Halliburton? 34-net? wtf? an oil company doesn't need that many IPs

> Merck has entered into a private sale with Amazon.com for some of their IP address space.[2] They unnumbered 48 /16s as of 01/2012, an additional 16 /16s as of 05/2013, and an additional 16 /16s as of 11/2013 leaving them with about 70% of their original /8.

Bob

Ok, if they gave every employee their own /32, then they'd use a bit over one /16. Maybe two. Certainly not 256 of them.

allquixotic

how long until we sell off some /16s to Amazon? :P

I bet they're willing to pay thousands per IP

consider how much money an IP can make them in a year

on an m3.medium it's ridiculous

Journeyman Geek

lol

Bob

@allquixotic Private sale of IPs leaves a bad taste.

allquixotic

14:33

@Bob whyso?

you know what's especially scary? the number of /8s that the DoD owns

why does it need that many? don't they know about NAT?

Journeyman Geek

I think they got em early

and well, no one really wants to get rid of em

Bob

ouch

spent... ~$250 over the last day on the new server

Nick

I really don't understand range blocks. What is this /8 and /16 of IP that you speak of.

Bob

Classless Inter-Domain Routing

Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR, pronunciation: /ˈsaɪ.dr/ or /ˈsi.dr/) is a method for allocating IP addresses and routing Internet Protocol packets. The Internet Engineering Task Force introduced CIDR in 1993 to replace the previous addressing architecture of classful network design in the Internet. Its goal was to slow the growth of routing tables on routers across the Internet, and to help slow the rapid exhaustion of IPv4 addresses. IP addresses are described as consisting of two groups of bits in the address: the most significant bits are the network address (or network prefix or network...

Nick

14:51

@Bob CIDR seems interesting :D Yay, I'm learning.

Subnetting. Another rabbit hole for me to jump into.

** Nick jumps in **

Journeyman Geek

My hardware fund's hit a grand

can decide on his new monitor whenever ;p

Bob

15:06

@allquixotic Ordered the flash drive. I hope it works.

HackToHell

15:24

Blah Azure's network speed sucks

And if you get a A series vm you get a goddamn Operton

getting just 1.7 MBps between two machines in the same data centre

allquixotic

@HackToHell blame Hyper-V, aka the most inefficient VM platform in the world

HackToHell

It's that bad with networking ?

Bob

@allquixotic It's actually not that bad. Depending on what you're doing and what OSes you're running.

HackToHell

Doesn't seem to be that bad in benchmarks

allquixotic

well maybe you're hitting some saturation condition, but in my experience it was pretty terrible

Amazon chose Xen for one reason only: because it has the lowest overhead of any (full hypervised) alternative. They did a ridiculous amount of research to reach that conclusion. It was a momentous decision that would impact their infrastructure and offerings for years. Of course they would have looked at Hyper-V very, very closely.

Highest density per server = either containers (if you can manage them and make it secure enough), or Xen (if you can't)

HackToHell

15:34

Well Hyper-V was given a overhaul with the release of Windows 8, and Amazon probably didn't look into it afterwards

Cloning a part of a 230GB sql server db

fun fun

Bob

Now waiting for OVH to give me the IPs and put the flash drive in :P

allquixotic

the funny part is that Citrix's benchmarks show XenServer is the fastest; Microsoft's benchmarks show Hyper-V is fastest; Red Hat's benchmarks show RHEV (KVM) is fastest; and VMware's benchmarks show ESXi is fastest.

Bob

I'll probably have to do the actual setup tomorrow.

Current goal: get deb on ZFS installed and running

HackToHell

@allquixotic lol what

allquixotic

I'd consider any benchmark in this space that was published by any of the vendors (or any company that is in any way ancilliarily related to the vendor) to be extremely suspect

Bob

15:41

Next goal: get lxd up and running

@allquixotic It really depends on the workload.

HackToHell

lxd, like in lxc ?

allquixotic

@HackToHell lxc is not the same as lxd.

Bob

I'd expect all major vendors to be fairly close with raw CPU performance without contention.

Once you introduce funny things like OSes, drivers, paravirt, network access, contention, disk access, etc....

Yea.

I would not be surprised at all (and IIRC this was shown to be the case at some point a few years ago) if Hyper-V was far faster with a full Windows stack.

allquixotic

lxc is a loose set of tools built up around a bunch of mostly-unrelated Linux kernel features that each assist in isolating various parts of the system into namespaces, cgroups, etc

lxd takes that set of tools and makes it much tighter, to create properly isolated guests with (hopefully) no security gaps allowing guests to get host access

you can do what lxd does without lxd, and without the lxc userspace tools, even, but it's ridiculously complex

the default mode of operation for raw lxc (with or without the lxc userspace tools) is for there to be plenty of ways for partially isolated processes to run some command and get access to the host in some way, whether it be networking, address spaces, process lists, user lists, filesystem, permissions, etc

the default mode of operation for lxd, out of the box, is that guests are isolated the same way OpenVZ guests, VMware guests, etc. are

HackToHell

Ahh okay, so lxd is secure lxc

Will that mean it's going to loose performance cause it's going to gain a overhead for isolating the vms.

> All of this work is aimed at giving you the full experience of virtual machines, the full security of a hypervisor, but much, much faster. Without all that virtualization overhead, you get the full underlying performance of your host environment. On bare metal, these containers are just as fast as the native OS on bare metal. In the cloud, you are getting subdivided machines without getting sub-par performance.

ubuntu.com/cloud/tools/lxd

allquixotic

15:54

@HackToHell No. It's still not a hypervisor. The overhead of isolating containers is still way lower than the overhead of running a kernel on top of another kernel, and virtual hardware on top of physical hardware.

Past benchmarks of OpenVZ have observed overhead on the order of 0.1% - 1% for kernel-heavy code, and 0.0% overhead for code that runs entirely in userspace (for example, just a lot of maths running on the CPU).

Worst case overhead for the best hypervisors is much higher, and best case overhead is worse than 0%.

Also, with hypervised guests, it's mandatory that you run a filesystem on top of another filesystem. So you have nested filesystems. That necessarily adds significant I/O overhead. It gets pretty ridiculous if you have two complex filesystems nested, like ntfs on ntfs, or btrfs on btrfs.

With containers, you can (and many do) use just one filesystem, and the kernel's isolation features to completely hide any filesystem access to paths that aren't assigned to the guest (and those appear starting at the root, /).

Ismael Miguel

Greetings

Sorry to interrupt your chat

I just need to ask something really quick

Is it on-topic to ask which one of 2 parts to choose for my computer?

Bob

@allquixotic Filesystem isolation is relatively easy (heck, chroot or systemd-nspawn...). It's when you get into syscalls, network access, etc., that things get iffy.

@IsmaelMiguel Not on main. You can ask it in here.

Ismael Miguel

@Bob Well, are you familiarized with AMD GPUs?

Bob

On main any hardware purchase questions and answers must necessarily be very generic to be allowed. Otherwise it tends to become useless in a few months.

@IsmaelMiguel I think @allquixotic is. But you can just go ahead and ask and anyone who sees it will answer.

Ismael Miguel

Sadly, this one is VERY specific

allquixotic

16:05

@IsmaelMiguel worst case, we can use our google-fu

don't ask to ask; just ask -- if nobody knows, oh well... if we do know, or know how to find out, then we can help

if you talk about asking it just wastes everyones' time

Ismael Miguel

@allquixotic I just wanted to know if it was on-topic or not

allquixotic

for this chat? definitely yes! but don't ask it on the main SuperUser site

Ismael Miguel

If not, I would look an alternative root

Now, to the question:

(googling a bit, sorry)

I have an Sapphire Radeon HD 6870 1600SP, from 2012

But it is borrowed, so, I need a decent GPU

Since my budget is REALLY short, I was looking into an R7 instead of an R9.

allquixotic

borrowed? you're planning to give it back to someone?

Ismael Miguel

And I found an ASUS Radeon R7 260X

Yeah, and get a new one for me

allquixotic

16:10

are you looking to maintain the same level of performance? if so, a current-generation R7 could definitely be the answer... but if you want more performance than the 6870, you may have to look at an R9

Ismael Miguel

here's the comparisson on GPUboss: gpuboss.com/gpus/Radeon-HD-6870-1600SP-vs-ASUS-Radeon-R7-260X

I can't afford an R9

I just want a cheap replacement to play TERA

But, seriously, I think the benchmarks aren't accurate

allquixotic

does the 6870 play TERA just fine?

Ismael Miguel

Yeah, 0-300 fps

With all settings on maximum

allquixotic

videocardbenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=22&cmp[]=2701

Ismael Miguel

No joke

allquixotic

16:12

looks like the R7 260X is an upgrade

Ismael Miguel

Still, the RAM bus is only 128-bits

While the other is 256-bits

Yes, the GPU has a worst clock

allquixotic

that doesn't mean very much in practice

Ismael Miguel

Still, it looks a bit skewed

I have a Sapphire HD 5770 SuperOverclocked (900Mhz) which has a worst performance than that 6870

It is clocked at 900MHz

(great, repeating myself)

allquixotic

the R7 360 is retailing for $109 instead of the $139 of the R7 260X, and it's basically the same chip - same number of transistors, etc, just rebranded to be more competitive

Ismael Miguel

I live in Europe, Portugal

allquixotic

16:15

still, the prices are lower

Ismael Miguel

$109 means an online purchase

Without credit card

Bob

@IsmaelMiguel Don't worry about clock speeds in isolation.

Ismael Miguel

It's impossible

Bob

The clock speeds only really make sense when you take into account the architecture.

Ismael Miguel

@Bob I'm worried about the clock speed and the bus width

Bob

16:16

@IsmaelMiguel The only numbers you should care about are the benchmarks. And even then take them with a grain of salt - they won't accurately represent all games.

allquixotic

@IsmaelMiguel they're not comparable -- the 6870 is from the previous generation architecture, which is less efficient core per core and clock per clock than GCN

Ismael Miguel

The benchmarks tell that R7 is better

allquixotic

the HD7000 series ushered in a completely new microarchitecture that is a significant departure from what went before, so the raw numbers of the specs are not comparable at all

@IsmaelMiguel and it is

you're upgrading from VLIW5 (the last pre-GCN architecture) to GCN 1.1

it's like going from a Pentium 4 to a Core i7

Ismael Miguel

But, the specifications say that the 6870 is better

Bob

@IsmaelMiguel Have you considered purchasing an older card second-hand? It might be cheaper.

Ismael Miguel

16:18

2,880 GFLOPS vs 2,129 GFLOPS

134.4 GB/s vs 104 GB/s bandwidth

@Bob Yes, but I need to know if the r7 is REALLY better

allquixotic

@IsmaelMiguel it may be capable of that in raw compute power, but bottlenecks in the architecture, scheduler, drivers, etc. are going to make it a slower card than a GCN 1.1 part.

Ismael Miguel

@allquixotic Bottleneck won't be missing on my pc

Bob

@IsmaelMiguel Keep in mind that games rarely use the full FLOPS power of a GPU.

allquixotic

@IsmaelMiguel It has nothing to do with your PC. I'm talking about bottlenecks within the design of the card itself.

Ismael Miguel

I have a code2quad [email protected] +15% overclock

Bob

16:19

It'll matter more for certain heavily-optimised scientific applications, really.

Though, I'm admittedly unfamiliar with TERA.

allquixotic

eww, so you're using DDR2, pre-QPI, almost definitely not PCIe 3.0...

yeah, that rig is sorely in need of an upgrade, but you definitely won't see any graphics performance decrease by upping to an R7 260X.

HackToHell

@allquixotic ah yes, the I/O gains will be massice

allquixotic

you won't even be taking advantage of the full performance of the R7 260X (or any newer card, for that matter) because your motherboard doesn't support PCIe 3.0, and games benefit hugely from modern advances in IPC and single-thread performance that modern CPUs provide, and DDR3 memory bandwidth...

your bottleneck could be anywhere, it might not matter how slow the GPU is if your game is pegging on memory bandwidth or something

Bob

@IsmaelMiguel If you don't mind second-hand, you could even get a copy of your current card for probably under 75 USD shipped to Portugal: ebay.com/itm/Radeon-HD-6870-/… ebay.com/itm/…

allquixotic

You'll be fine with a current-gen, cheap card running an MMO from 2011. It's an early UE3 title. If you get any frame drops, I'd be inclined to blame it on I/O, memory bandwidth, or CPU perf.

MMOs tend to be lower-spec anyway, it's not like we're talking about a AAA 3d shooter like Mass Effect.

Even that would run fine on a 260X.

Bob

16:27

I'll just throw this into the mix: ebay.com/itm/…

(I'm currently using a 560. Works well for every game I've thrown at it, though admittedly haven't tried ultra settings. That Ti benchmarks higher than the R7 by about 15%)

Ismael Miguel

@Bob I can't buy from ebay

Bob

@IsmaelMiguel Huh? Any reason not?

Ismael Miguel

@allquixotic Actually, I'm using DDR3, but the CPU limits the RAM to 1066MHz

Bob

You could look at more local sites, I suppose. Most countries have some kind of trading site (craigslist, gumtree, etc.)

Ismael Miguel

@Bob I don't have credit card, paypal account and ebay account, and don't have someone who can buy for me

Bob

16:29

if you really want cheap and don't mind second-hand or older-gen, that's probably your best bet

Ismael Miguel

I don't mind older cards (I would be a happy man with an HD6990)

Bob

@IsmaelMiguel I think Paypal counts as a bank in the EU..? Along with all the regulations. And you can use your bank account (linked to PP) to pay.

Ismael Miguel

I don't have any information about that.

Bob

Anyway, just throwing that out as an option.

Up to you if you want to try or not.

Ismael Miguel

I know, and it is a good one

But, I can buy the r7 for 113€

Brand-new

Directly from the supplier

Bob

16:32

Mhm. I can't say that the R7 is definitely better than what you're using, but I can say it most likely is, and really can't be much worse (if it's even worse at all, probably not).

If that's something you can easily acquire locally, and the price is acceptable, there's no reason to not go for it.

Ismael Miguel

Considering the hardware I have, do you recommend anything else? (Besides getting an I7)?

Bob

Don't spend too much time on what-ifs. If it works well enough, and you're happy with it, leave it there :)

Ismael Miguel

An NVIDIA card or something?

Bob

@IsmaelMiguel That's up to you, but generally AMD is better (performance per price) when on a budget.

@IsmaelMiguel Unfortunately, any real upgrade would be pretty much an entirely new machine.

Ismael Miguel

Not really

I can still use the RAM, Sound Card and the SSD and HDD

Bob

16:35

If you're looking for small boosts, you might get away with a bit more RAM or an SSD here or there. But anything else would be a new CPU in a new socket on a new motherboard.

Ismael Miguel

Not to mention the case

I already have an SSD

Not the best one, but pretty fast

Kingston v300

Bob

> Please note that our technical teams will intervene on your server <redacted> in 15 minutes in order to carry out the following intervention:

USB key add

@allquixotic ^

Fingers crossed :)

allquixotic

heh i got the same email

then 27h of silence

Bob

:(

Well... I'm waiting. They were due to start ~5 mins ago.

allquixotic

16:50

Q: How many French-Canadians does it take to put a USB stick in a USB slot?
A: 6. One to plug it in and find it's broken, one to manage that guy, one to be the tech support guy who answers complaints/tickets from the customer, one to manage that guy, one to get fired after he emails the vendor of their portal software with the problem they're having, and one who manages that guy.

Bob

lol

allquixotic

I wonder if it's much of a culture shock for French people to come to French Canada and find their native tongue and cuisine bastardized from centuries of living abroad

(I can't tell the difference myself, but native French speakers say Canadian French is very different)

there is a significant difference between Mexican Spanish and Spain-Spanish and I can tell the difference there

remember, OVH originated in France, and came to Beauharnois, Canada later

I wish I could use my dedi for proxying/VPNing from work, but in order to keep it under the radar, I have to use a generic looking domain name (whatever the default AWS domains reverse DNS to), and an IP within the AWS cloud, which they'd never block because they dunno if some reputable company is hosting their stuff on EC2 or whatever

so I pay for a Spot Instance on EC2 in Virginia - lower latency and very cheap per month

it's been up for months; that's how stable the prices are :P

Canadian Luke

I remember hearing that as well

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