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Storage is cool
Nice! Are you travelling further south (or east/west for that matter 
) or staying in the area?
) or staying in the area?
Something Random
- Thread starter ddrueding
- Start date
ddrueding
Fixture
Did Venice and then Riva del Garda, now on the way back north. Fun fact, at 235km/h (limited due to winter tires required in Germany before Easter) the car sucks down over 450Wh/km. I'm averaging less than 200km per charge. The car tells me this is "40.2% more consumption than expected"
jtr1962
Storage? I am Storage!
I'm honestly surprised it's not more than that. 450Wh/km * 235km/h = 105.75kW = 142HP. That seems like a fairly low amount of power to maintain 235km/h.
Driving at high-speed train speeds sounds like a lot of fun.
Driving at high-speed train speeds sounds like a lot of fun.
ddrueding
Fixture
Under acceleration I can get it above 600kW, and it accelerates into the speed limiter quite hard. The cross sectional area is pretty small, and it is a slippery bastard, so 150hp feels about right.
At those speeds control is a bit...opportunistic. There are opportunities to control the car, a few times a second, probably 20% of the time on average. You certainly have to be on your game.
First time I've ever been passed on a derestricted Autobahn was yesterday. 1980s SAAB 900 Turbo Convertible. I kept up for quite a while, but 215kph in the twistie bits was more than my winter tires were up for. She was damn fast.
At those speeds control is a bit...opportunistic. There are opportunities to control the car, a few times a second, probably 20% of the time on average. You certainly have to be on your game.
First time I've ever been passed on a derestricted Autobahn was yesterday. 1980s SAAB 900 Turbo Convertible. I kept up for quite a while, but 215kph in the twistie bits was more than my winter tires were up for. She was damn fast.
fb
Storage is cool
150 hp is really efficient. And I am somewhat jealous of you and living in Denmark. I have ~1100-1200 km to drive before I reach the continent.
Venice is really nice, haven't been to Lago di Garda, Verona is probably the closest. Italy in general is fantastic with the food and everything.
Venice is really nice, haven't been to Lago di Garda, Verona is probably the closest. Italy in general is fantastic with the food and everything.
sedrosken
Florida Man
Pope Francis has passed, having made it to one more Easter. I'm sure it's no small relief after fighting for his life pretty much for all of the month previous.
Can't wait for the hateful bigots to somehow use this as justification for their hatred, saying that God struck him down for his tolerance or some other such. No Kyle, he was just 88 years old and got sick. Frankly 88 in a world leader position is a much better lifespan than I'd expect. I'm not religious by any means, but he kept his teachings much more relevant to things Jesus actually was supposed to have said in his holy book than a lot of others I've seen. The fact that so many other world leaders had public squabbles with him because he called them out on their BS made me respect him a hell of a lot more than I have most any other religious figure.
Whoever they pick to replace him will have pretty big shoes to fill. I just hope it doesn't end up being some reactionary ultra-conservative theocrat that undoes every good deed Francis ever did. But in 2025, I'm quickly learning to keep my mouth shut about what I hope for as often the complete opposite occurs.
Can't wait for the hateful bigots to somehow use this as justification for their hatred, saying that God struck him down for his tolerance or some other such. No Kyle, he was just 88 years old and got sick. Frankly 88 in a world leader position is a much better lifespan than I'd expect. I'm not religious by any means, but he kept his teachings much more relevant to things Jesus actually was supposed to have said in his holy book than a lot of others I've seen. The fact that so many other world leaders had public squabbles with him because he called them out on their BS made me respect him a hell of a lot more than I have most any other religious figure.
Whoever they pick to replace him will have pretty big shoes to fill. I just hope it doesn't end up being some reactionary ultra-conservative theocrat that undoes every good deed Francis ever did. But in 2025, I'm quickly learning to keep my mouth shut about what I hope for as often the complete opposite occurs.
sedrosken
Florida Man
So, I wound up with a Precision 7750 off of a friend whose company was liquidating inventory after upgrading their fleet. No storage, asset info was scrubbed, the useless battery was removed so it could go in a plane, so on and so forth. I ended up chucking the 2TB I bought for my 840g8 and a spare 512GB drive I had into it, as it's got 4 NVMe slots as mentioned in another thread. I also ended up replacing the battery for a used one with "good" life remaining so it can survive sleeps between being plugged into the wall and so I could flash the latest firmware -- it was at 1.6 and jumped directly to 1.38.
It's a bit of a chonkster. Model denotes it as a 17 inch laptop but I have it on good authority that the display is actually 17.3" and there's a healthy half inch of bezel at the sides and top, and a full inch at the bottom. I'd call this an 18 or even 18.5" laptop in actuality. It got slightly shipping damaged but I repaired the worst of it. One corner is missing the retaining nut in the body that the captive screw would screw into, and the right side of the cooler has some manky looking bending on the fins that I mostly straightened out, but it runs fine.
The keyboard is broadly fine though it does seem to miss the odd keypress and that's starting to get annoying, though the full numpad is very useful and you can rebind the calculator keys in the registry. Touchpad bizarrely has actual buttons at the bottom instead of the whole touchpad being one big button, and more bizarrely still it has a dedicated middle click button. It does support gestures, as it is a modern touchpad otherwise. I would eventually like to replace the display with a 120Hz panel, but I'm in no hurry as that both involves spending money and a deeply involved disassembly process I'd rather avoid.
It has a 10th gen i7, a 10850H, and a Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB of VRAM which from what I can tell is basically the laptop equivalent of a 2080 Super. It's a couple hundred points off from my main with the 3060 12GB in Time Spy, but it doesn't have to drive as high resolution a display (1080p vs 1440p) and not at as fast a refresh (60 vs 120) so overall this either outperforms or comes very close to outperforming my main in half the wattage.
It was a bit of a heroic process to unlock the voltage controls on this -- decompiling the firmware, looking for the offsets to change to toggle CFG Lock and Overclocking Lock off, and finally booting into a special tool to toggle said variables in hex -- but I seem to have settled in at around a -175mV undervolt, which I'm told is pretty good for 10th gen. It doesn't run any cooler or consume any less power -- for that, I had to configure power limits, and I typically keep PL1 at 50W with PL2 at 70W for a maximum 40sec turbo -- but it does sustain higher turbo clocks for longer, in my burn-in testing in OCCT with the PLs set to 90/110 it wasn't wanting to draw anything over 80 and ran at ~84C to sustain 3.6GHz all core in AVX2, which again I'm told is pretty good for 10th gen. In games it tends to sustain around 4.2 all core fine enough. I have a PROCHOT offset of 10C as I really don't feel comfortable with the idea of riding 100C on anything.
I'm more or less replacing my daily use of my main with this as it's both more convenient to use in the living room and more power efficient. Under load, my main can draw 300-400W easily, and my main isn't particularly power hungry. This on the other hand has a hard cap of 240W from the brick it's got, and in practice I don't think I've ever seen sustained draw go past 150W.
It's a bit of a chonkster. Model denotes it as a 17 inch laptop but I have it on good authority that the display is actually 17.3" and there's a healthy half inch of bezel at the sides and top, and a full inch at the bottom. I'd call this an 18 or even 18.5" laptop in actuality. It got slightly shipping damaged but I repaired the worst of it. One corner is missing the retaining nut in the body that the captive screw would screw into, and the right side of the cooler has some manky looking bending on the fins that I mostly straightened out, but it runs fine.
The keyboard is broadly fine though it does seem to miss the odd keypress and that's starting to get annoying, though the full numpad is very useful and you can rebind the calculator keys in the registry. Touchpad bizarrely has actual buttons at the bottom instead of the whole touchpad being one big button, and more bizarrely still it has a dedicated middle click button. It does support gestures, as it is a modern touchpad otherwise. I would eventually like to replace the display with a 120Hz panel, but I'm in no hurry as that both involves spending money and a deeply involved disassembly process I'd rather avoid.
It has a 10th gen i7, a 10850H, and a Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB of VRAM which from what I can tell is basically the laptop equivalent of a 2080 Super. It's a couple hundred points off from my main with the 3060 12GB in Time Spy, but it doesn't have to drive as high resolution a display (1080p vs 1440p) and not at as fast a refresh (60 vs 120) so overall this either outperforms or comes very close to outperforming my main in half the wattage.
It was a bit of a heroic process to unlock the voltage controls on this -- decompiling the firmware, looking for the offsets to change to toggle CFG Lock and Overclocking Lock off, and finally booting into a special tool to toggle said variables in hex -- but I seem to have settled in at around a -175mV undervolt, which I'm told is pretty good for 10th gen. It doesn't run any cooler or consume any less power -- for that, I had to configure power limits, and I typically keep PL1 at 50W with PL2 at 70W for a maximum 40sec turbo -- but it does sustain higher turbo clocks for longer, in my burn-in testing in OCCT with the PLs set to 90/110 it wasn't wanting to draw anything over 80 and ran at ~84C to sustain 3.6GHz all core in AVX2, which again I'm told is pretty good for 10th gen. In games it tends to sustain around 4.2 all core fine enough. I have a PROCHOT offset of 10C as I really don't feel comfortable with the idea of riding 100C on anything.
I'm more or less replacing my daily use of my main with this as it's both more convenient to use in the living room and more power efficient. Under load, my main can draw 300-400W easily, and my main isn't particularly power hungry. This on the other hand has a hard cap of 240W from the brick it's got, and in practice I don't think I've ever seen sustained draw go past 150W.
ddrueding
Fixture
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
As I understand it, the big reasons they picked a South American pope were to shore up the rapidly declining base of South American Catholics plus finding someone with absolutely no connection to the internal sex abuse scandals that were present for more or less the entirety of Benedict's time in office. I'd expect that they'll pick a conservative European once again, now that the bone has been thrown to the non-European faithful and given the prevailing political winds worldwide.
Which probably means that all the somewhat-less-hateful rhetoric Francis offered is about to go up in smoke.
It's interesting to note that MANY protestant denominations are also undergoing internal schisms. The Methodist Church in the US for example has fractured over the same basic question of whether how much misogyny and homophobia should be part of doctrine, with some churches choosing to join a regressive faith conference based on principles most frequently practiced in Africa rather than the progressive ones common to the United Methodist Conference. IIRC Episcopalians have a similar doctrinal split over many of the same issues, which is extra weird for an almost-Roman-Catholic church with King Charles as its head. You'd think the guy who has expressed a desire to be reincarnated as a sanitary napkin would be willing to speak up to clarify the correct amount of acceptable homophobia for congregants of the good ol' CoE.
One thing I would absolutely recommend for anyone willing to give up valuable Sunday sleep-in time is a visit to a Unitarian-Universalist church service. They don't ask you to believe anything. The couple times I performed in one, I really enjoyed the combination of moral philosophy and widely varied readings from non-Biblical texts. Their hymnal includes things like Labor Union Protest songs and Buddhist poetry. It's a very different experience from getting a 90 minute rant about how women wearing pants is an affront to God and Baby Jesus, which is ALSO something I've experienced in a Christian church.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
The new season of Andor seems awfully pointed in our current political climate. Can't imagine why.
sedrosken
Florida Man
Now for another project box that you haven't been told about yet -- I have a nearly mint IBM T42. Dothan core Pentium M @ 1.7GHz, mobility Radeon 9600 64MB, 2GB DDR-333. I'm currently imaging the 128GB SSD I originally put in it over to a 256 and expanding the partition. There's not even any slack in the hinges, the rubberized coating on the lid hasn't returned to the primordial ooze all these coatings eventually do yet... I really like this thing, even as much as it tries to make me hate it. I've swapped the CMOS and running batteries, and it's good for about two and half hours, which for generic cells on a twenty year old laptop, isn't bad.
The CPU is middling but not slow enough for me to try to track down a Pentium M 765, which at 2.1GHz is the apex of what this machine can take, as it can't take the later 533 bus Pentium M chips that are more common. The DDR-333 is an artifact of the chipset -- it's even stuck in single channel for the same reason. The T43 fixes this, but its video is PCIe based instead of AGP, so one can't run Windows 9x on a T43 very easily like they can the T42. Not that that's especially relevant for me, as it's running XP SP3.
The video is the mobility Radeon 9600 as mentioned, and honestly, I kind of wish I had the 9000 instead. It'd have the same amount of VRAM, be about as fast in general use, and be much less inclined to do early BGA shenanigans and desolder itself from the board for getting too hot. The 64 meg 9600 I believe is on a 32-bit memory bus too, so it's really not as good a performer as it initially sounds. I can't run pretty much any game at the panel's native 1400x1050 resolution, another thing I wish it didn't have -- the 1050p panel is 50Hz, and is right at the cusp of being inscrutable to my eyes without any scaling. Since swapping the screen is so relatively easy on this model I may yet track down a 1024x768 LCD that'd be more appropriate.
I upgraded the WLAN card from the original Intel 2200BG to a TP-Link card based on the Atheros 5416 (that, under Windows XP, claims to instead be an Atheros 5008 for some reason). I gained real WPA2 support and wireless N, so it wasn't for nothing by any means. The annoying part was that I didn't know the 1802 error I was expecting for using a non-whitelisted card would prevent me from even entering the BIOS, much less booting, so the no-1802 utility had to be run without the WLAN card in at all. That was a re-disassembly full of annoyance and swearing.
I just had to replace the entire CPU cooler because the original has the fan riveted to the heatsink, and the bearing isn't accessible, so when the fan finally started buzzing loudly, I had to swap the whole stupid thing. 20 screws to get the keyboard and palmrest out by the way, and another 4 to get the screen hinges out. How did we ever classify these as being easy to service? I guess everything else must have just been significantly worse.
I was pleasantly surprised that it seems to have gigabit ethernet provided by an Intel chip, a nice bonus for a laptop but I suppose an expected one given the price point this was at and the market segment it targetted. Even cooler is the fact that it has a PXE boot ROM, so I didn't have to write a CD just to boot into GParted to clone my drive and expand the partition, just had to use the PXE server I already keep running locally. And it'll natively boot from USB, too, which isn't amazingly common on machines of that time. If you'll recall, I originally set up the PXE server to get my Latitude C400 to boot from USB using the Plop bootloader as it didn't have an optical drive or floppy.
The CPU is middling but not slow enough for me to try to track down a Pentium M 765, which at 2.1GHz is the apex of what this machine can take, as it can't take the later 533 bus Pentium M chips that are more common. The DDR-333 is an artifact of the chipset -- it's even stuck in single channel for the same reason. The T43 fixes this, but its video is PCIe based instead of AGP, so one can't run Windows 9x on a T43 very easily like they can the T42. Not that that's especially relevant for me, as it's running XP SP3.
The video is the mobility Radeon 9600 as mentioned, and honestly, I kind of wish I had the 9000 instead. It'd have the same amount of VRAM, be about as fast in general use, and be much less inclined to do early BGA shenanigans and desolder itself from the board for getting too hot. The 64 meg 9600 I believe is on a 32-bit memory bus too, so it's really not as good a performer as it initially sounds. I can't run pretty much any game at the panel's native 1400x1050 resolution, another thing I wish it didn't have -- the 1050p panel is 50Hz, and is right at the cusp of being inscrutable to my eyes without any scaling. Since swapping the screen is so relatively easy on this model I may yet track down a 1024x768 LCD that'd be more appropriate.
I upgraded the WLAN card from the original Intel 2200BG to a TP-Link card based on the Atheros 5416 (that, under Windows XP, claims to instead be an Atheros 5008 for some reason). I gained real WPA2 support and wireless N, so it wasn't for nothing by any means. The annoying part was that I didn't know the 1802 error I was expecting for using a non-whitelisted card would prevent me from even entering the BIOS, much less booting, so the no-1802 utility had to be run without the WLAN card in at all. That was a re-disassembly full of annoyance and swearing.
I just had to replace the entire CPU cooler because the original has the fan riveted to the heatsink, and the bearing isn't accessible, so when the fan finally started buzzing loudly, I had to swap the whole stupid thing. 20 screws to get the keyboard and palmrest out by the way, and another 4 to get the screen hinges out. How did we ever classify these as being easy to service? I guess everything else must have just been significantly worse.
I was pleasantly surprised that it seems to have gigabit ethernet provided by an Intel chip, a nice bonus for a laptop but I suppose an expected one given the price point this was at and the market segment it targetted. Even cooler is the fact that it has a PXE boot ROM, so I didn't have to write a CD just to boot into GParted to clone my drive and expand the partition, just had to use the PXE server I already keep running locally. And it'll natively boot from USB, too, which isn't amazingly common on machines of that time. If you'll recall, I originally set up the PXE server to get my Latitude C400 to boot from USB using the Plop bootloader as it didn't have an optical drive or floppy.
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Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
I'm pretty sure that even the T6x notebooks still had socketed CPUs and I kinda-sorta remember being able to boot USB drives on a T22 or 23, IBM engineered the SHIT out of those Thinkpads.
At varying points in time, Thinkpads have had some oddball configuration issues. One of my favorites was that cloned drives would only be bootable if the new drive was cloned in the primary drive bay of the system. I could not say it worked that way but it was a mild headache for years.
Some newer Thinkpads also have wifi/bluetooth vendor locks so the internal slot only works with Intel cards. That's not a problem for me but it has definitely been a hassle for other people.
My T420 has four places to plug in a drive and is thus one of my favorite tech tools, to the point that I keep it in my car. I have a USB 3 Expresscard for it and best/most hilarious of all, an Expresscard to PCIe x4 adapter I found on AliExpress. It's at least a decade older than Oculink but it worked well enough to get a GTX 970 running as an eGPU. I can't think of a more versatile notebook in terms of ports and storage options.
At varying points in time, Thinkpads have had some oddball configuration issues. One of my favorites was that cloned drives would only be bootable if the new drive was cloned in the primary drive bay of the system. I could not say it worked that way but it was a mild headache for years.
Some newer Thinkpads also have wifi/bluetooth vendor locks so the internal slot only works with Intel cards. That's not a problem for me but it has definitely been a hassle for other people.
My T420 has four places to plug in a drive and is thus one of my favorite tech tools, to the point that I keep it in my car. I have a USB 3 Expresscard for it and best/most hilarious of all, an Expresscard to PCIe x4 adapter I found on AliExpress. It's at least a decade older than Oculink but it worked well enough to get a GTX 970 running as an eGPU. I can't think of a more versatile notebook in terms of ports and storage options.
sedrosken
Florida Man
I just remembered I actually underclocked the GPU using ATiTool in another bid to make sure it doesn’t kill itself. It’s too memory bandwidth starved to make use of a 316MHz core clock anyway. I have it clocked at 225MHz on the core and 200MHz on the RAM, and it performs about as well — which really says a lot about how horribly a 32 bit memory bus holds back one of these GPUs.
It’ll technically run the original Oblivion as it’s got Shader Model 2, but not at anything above 640x480 low unless you really love the ultra cinematic feel of 10fps indoors. I ran Test Drive Unlimited more as a torture test than anything. Outrun 2006, as always, surprises me with the class of hardware it’s satisfied with, and Morrowind, predictably, runs kind of like crap like it does on everything.
It’ll technically run the original Oblivion as it’s got Shader Model 2, but not at anything above 640x480 low unless you really love the ultra cinematic feel of 10fps indoors. I ran Test Drive Unlimited more as a torture test than anything. Outrun 2006, as always, surprises me with the class of hardware it’s satisfied with, and Morrowind, predictably, runs kind of like crap like it does on everything.
Mercutio
Fatwah on Western Digital
AliExpress deliveries either come USPS or else some random Asian dude just pulls up in a car with my stuff.
I've never, ever, ever had a shipping problem with AliExpress.
I get an Amazon package stolen five or six times a year, albeit not always from my place. Most recently, a box full of surface mount raceways for running network cables, which I'm sure was exactly what the porch pirates were hoping to find.
I am indeed proposing that Amazon switch to "random Asian guy in a Volkswagen"-deliveries.
I've never, ever, ever had a shipping problem with AliExpress.
I get an Amazon package stolen five or six times a year, albeit not always from my place. Most recently, a box full of surface mount raceways for running network cables, which I'm sure was exactly what the porch pirates were hoping to find.
I am indeed proposing that Amazon switch to "random Asian guy in a Volkswagen"-deliveries.