Reviews – Simonpreston.net

Ryzen 5900X: One last hurrah for AM4.

Disclaimer: I actually wrote this post back around October 2022, so things are already pretty out of date. The CPU is still going strongly, at least. :)

I’ve been looking at building a new system, lately. My current one is certainly no slouch, and it was also treated to an AMD Radeon 6800, summer of 2021. Mainly so I could play Microsoft Flight Sim 2020 at high resolutions, with the settings mostly turned up. (Yes, the card was expensive. No, I don’t regret the purchase). This system was originally built back in early 2018. In that time, I upgraded the CPU from a Ryzen 1700 to 3800X and was very impressed with the results.

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Noctua NH-D15: Silencing the Ryzen.

A couple of months ago, when I installed the Ryzen 3800X in to my desktop, I noted that, whilst the provided stock cooling was decent, it did have a tendency to get noisy under load. Far noiser than the cooler provided with the Ryzen 1700. It also isn’t all that great at keeping the processor cool; easily reaching the upper limit of 95 degrees celsius, the moment it needed some grunt. I do like a quiet system, so decided I may as well get an aftermarket cooler sooner, rather than later.

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PC upgrade time. Ryzen R7 1700 to R7 3800X.

There’s a lot happening in the AMD world. Some of the third generation Ryzen chips have just received a slightly faster sibling, in the form of the XT models, and Zen 3, in the form of the desktop Ryzen 4000 CPU’s (don’t get me started on the mobile chip model designation convention) can’t be too far away, with the expected release to be towards the latter of 2020. I’ve been umming and arring about what my next upgrade was going to be but when Amazon cut the price of the 3800x to £280, albeit temporarily, the decision become much easier.

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Solwise Aztech AV2 1200 Homeplugs

What do you do when you need internet to another room of your house, and wireless doesn’t cut the mustard? Whilst my first preference would be to cable up the building with ethernet ports in every room, that’s sometimes just not practical. Perhaps you’re renting or simply don’t have the time/budget. Whilst wireless is convenient, I’m still not a fan of my data flying through the air. Upload speeds tend to be very poor as well. Plus, if you have thick walls, it can difficult to get a signal even if you’re in the next room. Random drop outs can occur. Very helpful, if you’re running some homeserver on the network. Here’s where homeplugs come in. They offer the security and reliability of ethernet, whilst being rather convenient in that you don’t need to hack your way through the house. Sure they also come with their own caveats – they are no way near as fast as dedicated cabling, and performance varies in different scenarios – but they’re simple to get up and running.

So I bought a Raspberry Pi 3

Despite my earlier article, where I mentioned my Raspberry Pi 1 was gathering dust for years, I decided to get myself a v3 version. Simple reason being this will let me use it as a machine to muck about with, as the v1 is now doing various tasks on the network. It’s not a good idea to mucking about with something that is heavily involved in your eco-system, until you’re ready to deploy it properly. Much better to have a ‘dev’ box for testing things out on. Besides, I got one of those ‘itches’ I needed to scratch. And the last time I got one of those, I ended up buying a new graphics card. So this isn’t too bad a purchase, in the grand scheme of things.

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