PC Tech Thread

I know you mentioned workstation, but what CPU-intensive applications are you running? Are you sure they'll benefit from having 6-cores?

Dunno where you are shopping but you could get a bitfenix case from amazon for £35 with all the same features as that corsair one, good quality slightly lesser known brand, decent amount of space behind the mobo tray for cables to hide and cut outs around the tray to route around.

PSU you shouldn't need modular just tuck the cables away when you build it. Been using a corsair tx650 in my machine for years now i5 2500k, 16gb ram, radeon 7950, ssd, 4x HDDs, 5 fans. You really only need to go bigger if you have chucked in 2x GPUs or gone with a really poor quality PSU. Make sure it's single rail too, lots make the mistake of getting multiple 12v rails and then they don't balance them properly and it all goes bad(common cause of noobs needing 1500w PSUs).

Out of the loop a bit on stuff since I quit the pc forums.

Thanks for the info – I'll look in to other cases and PSUs but just trying to get a rough idea.

I perhaps used the term workstation mistakenly (ie, not looking at Xeons or anything) and honestly, this thing will probably 90% be used for gaming anyway and I'm just trying to make excuses for myself. Most of the work I do is IO and memory constrained – large InDesign documents, Photoshop, Lightroom, bit of Illustrator – so fast SSDs have always been more helpful than processing power. At the office, I use an i5 iMac with integrated graphics and only 8GB ram + SSD so anything that's "good enough" for gaming will be miles faster than that.

Probably an i5 in that case to keep the costs down. i3 would also be fine, really.

Other option is just get a 13" MacBook Pro and an external GPU but that's already way more expensive than a very fast desktop.

In that case I'd suggest pairing a high end CPU with a low end GPU is a mistake. A much better balanced gaming system would be an i5 8600 and GTX 1070.

Ah, nice. That makes sense. Leaves some change left for a 960 Pro...

Hyper 212 cooler is on a good offer. https://www.scan.co.uk/products/cooler-master-hyper-212-single-tower-cpu-cooler-4-heatpipes-1x-120mm-fan-red-leds-aluminium

..

Is this as bad as it sounds? It sounds pretty bad.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/01/02/intel_cpu_design_flaw/

Surprised there’s not more chat... Seems pretty fundamental and untraceable.

Already patched on 10.13.2 but yeah, it's bad. Software fixes for hardware bugs are always going to slow stuff down.

Likewise! Since I posted that I saw a Sky News piece which said it will be much worse for servers than normal PCs but it can't help.

Thinking selfishly about my own computers I have a vastly overpowered Chromebook and a fairly overpowered Hackintosh, so I reckon I'll be OK but still annoying.

It really depends on workloads but yeah, servers will get hit hard.

AMD gonna have a good year...

http://uk.businessinsider.com/intel-ceo-krzanich-sold-shares-after-company-was-informed-of-chip-flaw-2018-1?r=US&IR=T

AMD gonna have a good year...

There was a piece on R4 new saying it affects AMD and ARM processors as well. Not so good all round.

Everyone port your stuff to SPARC!

I was listening too and they repeated several times that the issue affected Intel, ARM and AMD.

Only at the end did they quote an AMD spokesman, who said that there was practically zero chance of their chips being affected.

The one that affects AMD is the one that affects all of them and is by far the hardest to solve.

There are two vulnerabilities.

The much meatier one is specific to Intel CPUs.

The more general one (and not as dangerous but still important) affects Intel, AMD, ARM, etc.

From elsewhere:

"
Papers describing each attack:

https://meltdownattack.com/meltdown.pdf (this is the Intel specific one).

https://spectreattack.com/spectre.pdf (this is the Intel/AMD/ARM one)

From the spectre paper:

As a proof-of-concept, JavaScript code was written that, when run in the Google Chrome browser, allows JavaScript to read private memory from the process in which it runs (cf. Listing 2).
"

Think about that for a bit. Just by visiting a webpage with some dodgy JavaScript on it, it could suck out private information held in the browser (such as passwords and logins for other sites) and then exfiltrate them.

I thought Spectre was the hardest to solve?

Not really, it was Blofeld.

Yes, but Spectre is an intra-process leak, so the scope is somewhat restricted.

Meltdown is a inter-process leak (and even memory-wide leak, so inter-VM). So a non-admin process on a machine could get access to the memory of admin processes on the same machine or another VM on the same host.

(Caveat: still digesting the info about all of this. Luckily it doesn't affect my work specifically.)

All Apple devices are vulnerable too.

Sorry to be a klutz, but could someone put this into real layman's terms what the problem is, what it will do, and how best to guard against it. So I can, um, explain it better to my mum....

Think about that for a bit. Just by visiting a webpage with some dodgy
JavaScript on it, it could suck out private information held in the
browser (such as passwords and logins for other sites) and then
exfiltrate them.

Does this mean that as I don't store any passwords on my browser anyway, and wipe browser history daily, that I'm a little bit less vunerable...?