Friday 11 August 2017

THE GAS TO FEAR

Ooh.

How bloody odd?! Sorry I thought I had posted on here my latest ... purchases. Of which there are several lots..

Well .. I bought a car .. I think I put that in my last post?

Yes .. I did check butt I forgot whether it was there or not .. yes in a mere few seconds.

That is because I probably have not explained in a while that I have a disability condition that causes short term memory loss among a great many other things.

Anyway ..

So yeah I bought a car and people could think .. yeah OK, not that hard to buy a car?

Yeah it is this car when it is cash and when you have lost your no claims bonus and not had a way of bringing in any kind of wage for several years. And yes I do have a dozen blogs but this really takes around 5 years to even get a small first payment out of and it is a ew weeks away form reaching that 5 year milestone. or the very first blog.

So how about some more items?

Well I had this plan to improve my blogs by quite a factor and to do this I needed certain ... tools from a number of fields.

After the first initial and biggest purchase .. some weird psychological fear set in?! Weird. Bcome panicky, lol.

One of those is digital photography ..

Say maybe a short list of ..

  • Sony A99 II DSLT Camera
  • Sony G Series 70-200mm f2.8
  • Sony Zeiss 24-70mm f2.8
  • Sony 1.4x Teleconverter
  • LowePro Whistler Backpack
  • LowePro Toploader
  • Hoya Circular Polarizer
  • Carbon Tripod
  • Benro Gimbal
  • . some other stuff lol

I watched a hell of a lot of YouTube videos the past three months!

I noticed that fanboyism is just as bad in cameras as it is in computing tech, gaming tech and everything else and i is shocking at how narrow minded and sometimes stupid people are.

I am sure hey are just a bunch of angry 12 year olds just going through their changes?

Yeah the Sony A99 Mark II was chosen because of is smaller size, original wanted Nikon D810, its 42 mega pixel count, its speed of autofocus, the high praise the lenses get, its ease of use (this was more hopeful than anything else) and its price. A £3,000 it did a lot of things I wanted it to do better than Canons and Nikon double its price!

I am also not what you would call a one trick pony ..

  • Wildlife Photography from tiny insects to far away birds and even night time animals
  • Landscape photography
  • Astrophotgraphy
The things I d not do is weddings and portraits .. bu I might get asked?

I have other lists too ..

  • AMD Ryzen Threadripper
  • AMD Vega 
  • M2 Drives
  • Gigabyte Motherboard .. probably
  • Phantek Case
  • Loads of other shit

Then there are wanted lists I have not actualy compiled yet and am unsure about ..

  • Reflector Telescope probably by Celestron, maybe by Meade?
  • Camera Drone and either a DJI Mavic Pro or Yuneec Typhoon H
Wishful thinking?

Yeah I had a bunch of stuff I thought would happen over a year ago. This one was .. different .. and tee fact that I showed a video of my new car in my last post should have made people think "Oh crap .. maybe this time it has worked out?!"

Yeeeaaahhh about those failed expectations? The crazy thing about expectations is that as well as failing to happen at they can also just be really .. really .. late!

All pie in the sky and wishful thinking?

Here .. try a few videos ..








Hmm wanna see some video taken with the Sony A99 II and using the Sony G 70-200mm f2.8 lens?





Friday 28 July 2017

THE LONG PAUSE

I have had a serious issue going on for seven months now.

It should have not gone on this long but it did.

There was delay after delay and I am not even sure why, with most if not all of them.

As I stated on my corruption blog .. it will mean some big changes when it occurs and will mean that I can buy a shed load of things that are for professionals, like camera equipment.

But before I could buy anything else I needed something that would help me acquire these other tools, of which there is a long list.

Of course one of the other issues I have had is that I use my mountain bike for a lot of work and .. well the weather has been dreadful for me and my health condition. My condition does not like it when it is hot and humid and it was exactly that of late.

Well .. that is until it turned to rain and last night I could heard this horrendous and loud noise and I thought 'That sounds like really, really heavy rain but that kind of rain I have not witnessed before!'

I got up and looked out my window and I think many local Indian people could be forgiven for thinking they had been teleported back to India in he middle of a monsoon!

Anyway yeah so I needed the bike and as has been the case for years now .. if it is really hot, raining or even just a wind stronger than 10mph then getting anything done wildlife wise, or anything else for that matter .. is impossible!

But ..

.. not anymore!

As I stated previously .. many tools to come! Lol! Hmm .. Threadripper?!



Monday 5 June 2017

THE WAR FOR THE WAGES

I burst out laughing ... at that. It is not even mine but someone put it in a comment on one of Gamer Meld's recent video about the 18 Core Intel HEDT chip they announced.

In the comment he simply said "Walletripper v Threadripper" and he might as well as added 'Sideripper' because I thought my sides were going to burst open I laughed that hard!

Heh, jokes aside I had watched a couple of things on CPU stuff tonight and engaged in a long conversation with an Apple fanatic.

It was funny when he put all these new expanded cores in Threadripper and ... Walletripper, hehe, down to Apple! I stopped in the conversation and went ... "Errr what?!"

No, son. Just no.

He put all these things down to Apple because he had just watched an announcement that Apple were introducing new Power Mac Pros, or whatever they are called, with up to 18 core Intel chips that start, not 18 core, at $5,000!

I said "No, son. Apple do not make CPUs so this has nothing to do with them ... look? I was going to build an AMD PC Rig when Ryzen came out but I was not that bothered that I couldn't because I believed strongly that they would announce 10 and 12 core Ryzens a few months later. They have. I also stated that Ryzen was far better than they were stating and that 95% of tech journalists proved in a matter of days that they do not know what they are talking about. Hang on? Did I not tell you 6 months ago that this was going to happen? I told you that there was going to be an explosion in power and core count along with artificial intelligence in 2017?"

I then remembered that when I told him this he simply would not have it.

Now we have this announcement, he gets excited and thinks it is all thanks to Apple?! Jesus!

I then explained that AMD announced a new platform for HEDT and that they announced not only 10 and 12 core CPUs but also 14 and 16 core ones for this platform too.

I then explained that Intel reacted like they had shat themselves in a way, that would make Stewie Griffin proud, and that what has happened is that Intel rushed to Apple and said ... "Oh you know those server CPUs we would not let anyone have for less than a telephone number? DO you want them now at a cut down cost?!" and that this was purely to stop AMD approaching Apple of vice-versa.

I had a mate that thought Apple created the smartphone. That they invented the WIMP system and when I pointed out that they did not has answered "Oh I suppose your going to say Microsoft invented it?!" to which I smiled and said "Well, no. It was Rank Xerox actually". Before you wonder my friend was not aware it was known as a WIMP system, though technically ... I am not sure Apples iOS can be classified as a WIMP? Is it not all about icons? Lol.

If you do not know WIMP simply stands for ... not not that skinny scrawny bloke in the corner, it stands for Windows, Menus, Icons and Pointers. See?

That leads me onto the two videos I saw ...

One stated that Intel's 18 core chip that they announced wont be available until next year, 2018? Umm, what? Apple will have it in their system in December? Ooooh!

The other one stated that Ryzen has had yet another update and that now the games that performed badly, this time Rise of the Tomb Raider, got a massive speed boost of like 30%.

Ugh, told yah!

You cannot claim that something is slow or too slow when other figures show that it is more than capable. The end.

AdoredTV showed in a very clear and easy to understand way that Ryzen was in fact fast and that the ... umm Tech reviewers had totally missed that and that everyone and his brother wanted the slow numbers of a badly coded game to the the best case scenario when it clearly wasn't.

So now and if your dumb enough to be brand loyal all those brand loyal Intel fanboys are getting this Basin Falls platform that will be known as X299 and get up to 18 cores .. though it seemingly is becoming rapidly debatable when it comes to when this will actually take place?

Also Intel has become .. animated .. or just orally so, lol. But the way they are talking seems to strongly point to the fact that they are going to pull their thumbs out of their arses and I hope they end up feeling this in a strong way to the point it is almost painful. Then maybe in future they wont keep ripping people of for tiny increments in speed? Though in all honesty they used to do this many years ago in the days of the 286, 386 and 486 chips so ... it is not likely.

Which reminds me ..

'Walletripper'?! So funny, lol.

Oh wait? I do not think I was supposed to mention that I will be building a Ryzen based PC? I am sure I was supposed to only hint at a big change and not state what it was?

Oh wait? Did I say 'What it was'? Sorry the 'it' in that sentence is so very much an understatement it simply ain't true!

LOL!

Now where exactly is Whitehaven?

Hmm I wonder when I will start seeing people rip into these so called PC tech journalists because they went and bought an Intel CPU with only four cores and now realise it is going to be too slow before very long?

Hmm probably with most of them I will have to wait until their PC's actually physically slow down and that is when they realise, go back to these tech journalists and rip them one in the comments sections?

LOL.

Sunday 7 May 2017

CPU-Z RHYMES WITH 'DEAD'

I am sort of reeling in shock and confusion right now.

I spotted a video by RedGamingTech on YouTube, who I often watch and so get them in my recommended feed a fair bit. This one said something about the people who create the CPU-Z benchmark making changes where the AMD Ryzen scores go down.

I thought this bizarre and ... well in benchmark software changes the numbers should always ... ALWAYS go up.

You see this is the natural course of things ...

Benchmarks show you what a particular microprocessor can do and every single time a new architecture comes out the existing benchmark software is ... ALWAYS un-optimised.

ALWAYS.

See my use of the word 'ALWAYS'?

So I naturally thought that there must be a bug they discovered and the figures being produced are not accurate? I normally just glance over CPU-Z results anyway and I cannot recall a time, does not mean that I did not, when I took a lot of notice of that particular benchmark.

So imagine my confusion, how I did not burst out laughing I do not know, when the guys that create CPU-Z actually said that the AMD Ryzen performs particular tasks very efficiently and that these do not translate into real world scenarios?! WHAT?!?! Are you fucking serious?!?!


Umm ... yeah ... that is why everyone tests a suite of games along with Cinebench and a raft of other benchmarking suites.

Ooh boy. Some are catching onto this very quickly though not realising the obvious truth from this latest debacle.

Benchmarking is supposed to show us what a processor can do and therefore give us an idea how well it will perform further down the road. If it does not do this then what is the point of it? If they all failed to do this then you would only really be interested in the frames per second of a list of games.

I am reluctant to start stating that anyone is conspiring with one company or another to be biased but this is so brain-dead a move as to look extremely biased where you cannot come by any other conclusion than they 'are' conspiring.

Or perhaps the people that created CPU-Z in the first place have all but gone and it is now created, updated and run by complete idiots?

I am also now thinking that the honest Intel chip owners must be reading this or hearing this news and saying "Waaaaaait a minute?!"

Re they now going to take out all the other stuff too now which does not fit into the 'real world'? There is a big list to go through and double check from your MMX to whatever was implemented by Intel lately that may or may not be used?

Do you know what rhymes with 'Z'? Dead. Dead rhymes with 'Z'.

Take a gander at the comments section of the RedGamingTech video below ...


Wednesday 12 April 2017

A FAILED UNITY

Well ... this one is a surprise.

The firm Canonical has announced its ending it's work on the Unity project. Unity was basically a GUI, Graphical User Interface, for Ubuntu what is an Operating System which is built on Linux ... which is kinda ... a version, free one, of Unix.

Confused?

Yeah well that's probably why it failed.

And did I say I was surprised?

Yeah, I was only surprised by the fact this was reported on in the BBC News app!

I had a little try of Unity and Ubuntu on a laptop and I was not impressed. It was also overheating my laptop which was shutting itself down.

I ... published an article or piece somewhere criticising Unity and Ubuntu and basically got rid my some idiot fanboys that I was a newbie and did not know what I was talking about.

Funny then that we fast a forward a few years and not only is there this announcement that its ending, in part, but that there is also a mention of difficulties with laptops.

Funny, no one who criticised me mentioned that there was a long running issue getting it to work on laptops.

I was criticised for trying to run it on an AMD Radeon as apparently they didn't work so well as they did not have an open system when it cage to drivers. I stated that this only made things even worse! I pointed out that there are not one but TWO companies producing graphics cards and that you would think that was something with warning people about?!

No ... all I heard and read was how fantastic the OS was, easy to install and worked great. Umm ... no.

What my critics failed to know, as is often the case with fanboys in anything that are obviously brain dead, is that I have a BSc Single Honours Degree in Applied Computing.

They also failed to realise I'm somewhat older than your average teenager by more years than I care to admit.

But what this does mean is I had a Binatone Pong gaming system, Atari 2600, Commodore VIC-20, Commodore Amiga and my first PC was a Pentium 2.

I also built one of the first SLI rigs with an Athlon64 and two Before 6800GT's. Or was it 8800? I forget. It was around a month or so before CustomPC did an article on it and his difficult it was. 

Umm ... no it wasn't. Well ... except for the fact it didn't occur to me that I had to install the GPU driver twice!!

No, nor did they know that I set up my PC to dual boot with various operating systems which included Linux RedHat 4.5, I think it was, back around 1998. Now that was a pain in the arse. Considering attending lectures and assignments to complete it took me two days to get it working. One lecturer I was friendly with said I would not get it working. The look on his face when I told him that I had got Windows and RedHat dual booting but that it did take two days.

One again, like the damned SLI setup it never occurred to me they might use different file formats and to achieve this you had to use specific partitions a certain way and think about the boot sector.
Yeah but if you've played around with something for five minutes you get the right to accuse everyone else of being thick newbies if you don't praise the thing you love.

Hey?! At least in this case it's something that is free they have not paid through the nose for.
The reason I tried it again is like I said with RedHat all those years ago, Linux needs to go a long way before it will become relevant. That was because back then they said it would overtake Windows eventually. "Not anytime soon out won't" I said to this remark.

The funny thing is I see people saying that when I run down the operating system.

On the one hand they said it was better than Windows and would overtake it in its market share.
But they also said it was an operating system for people who liked to 'tinker'. Errr no.

Those two things don't go together and of you just want to get things done you can't have something you need to keep buggering about with.

It also needs to be bloody intuitive for it to ever come close to the number of installs Windows has.
The funny thing is something else that also runs on a Unix, is it actually Linux as I forget, core gets launched and does overtake Windows to boot ...

Android.

Boy I would have hated being Mark Shuttlecock or worse still, anyone who had been working on Linux for like well over ten years. To watch Android just get launched and then rocket upwards.
Funny thing is I'm not a fan of Android either and it seems to have developed faults and bad habits as it is supposed to get better.

I really wouldn't want an Android desktop computer! Nor, even, a laptop.

Maybe one day someone might actually being out a version of Linux where I know I could give up Windows entirely?


I just hope that wait is not as long as my last one from RedHat 4.5 to Ubuntu 14.6, I think it was, Pangolin ... that one?
Maybe if Canonical had just concentrated on desktops and laptops we might have already gotten one?
Oddly I never liked the look of many of the other Linux distros, Mint probably being about the best outside of Unity.

I might build a PC to run Linux on later this year and I'll look into the GUI's then to see what's on offer.

I guess I can stop searching for that Ubuntu Phone now?

I saw this on the BBC and thought you should see it: Ubuntu ends Unity software unification project - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-39490848

Tuesday 4 April 2017

THE PLOT THICKENS .. THEN TWISTS AND TURNS

Well .. it seems that since its launch the number of videos about AMD's Ryzen CPU, which was crazy before launch, ,has actually increased in frequency.

I guess I should have seen that coming with new technology, architecture and lithography?!

However it has actually had more subjects attached to it than even I could have dreamed up. I was also encouraged to make this video after, not one but, two new subject areas concerning Ryzen cropped up.

First off was an extremely interesting rumour that stated that part of the issue of Ryzen's performance, though it was not an issue in my mind, had something to do with nVidia cards and more precisely nVidia's driver. Despite my complete lack of concern about performance in existing games, being a new architecture and NOT optimised for in any way, this particular issue is a problem. Because it will affect the performance of future games if not addressed.

Now this makes things quite interesting and what should take place is that when AMD's Vega becomes available the performance should increase. Well unless nVidia resolves the driver issue in the meantime.

Of course this problem was compounded by the lack of a high end graphics card from AMD which is why everyone will have to wait until either AMD RX Vega is launched or nVidia fixes their drivers, whichever comes first. As nVidia would now realise that they will lose a shed tonne of sales for everyone buying Ryzen I would imagine they will fix the issue pretty quick.

From now on, those that do theiur research like me and many others, everyone that is about to or planning a Ryzen build, like me, will either buy an AMD RX 480 and then an RX Vega when launched. Or they could purchase two RX 480's or wait a few days for the RX 580 and buy one or two of those or wait until May and just get the RX Vega.

As for the sudden jump from RX 480 to RX 580 .. I am not sure I agree with that AMD. I am not sure because .. well the RX 580 has not been out or its performance fully tested and out there in the wild. Yet.

The RX 580 is reported to be a refined Polaris chip so an improved RX 480. What I find, as do many others, odd about this is .. how much of a refinement and improvement did they get to justify calling it an RX 580? For me it would have to be damn close to the nVidia Geforce 1070 to be called an RX 480. I mean after all, leaving aside models ending in 'X' which was obviously never going to happen, you still have the '590' as well as 'Vega'.

In other words now announcing the RX 580 suggests to me that the RX 590 and the RX VEGA would be better than the Geforce 1070 and 1080 respectively...and are there not two Vegas coming out? So if the RX 590 is a cut down Vega I am wondering if there will be a huge gap in performance between the RX 580 and the RX 590? Bit weird.

The other thing that has cropped up is the re-emergence of the Ryzen Pro name. In that recent post I did with the leaked list of a head spinning 17 models of Ryzen I first called the list a pile of crap. But then later I gave it some thought and realised that the chances are that the Ryzen Pro models with be mobile parts.

Well the name has cropped back up and I still believe they will be mobile parts. I mean the desktop line up looks pretty tied up to me and introducing more models will just make everything confusing to many.

Blimey. This comes literally mere days after something no one expected with the leak and now almost confirmed rumour that AMD plans on doing a high end desktop platform, HEDT, and planning a 16 core processor followed by a leak of a 12 core processor!

Bloody hell. Along with improvements to be made we did expect, plus one that evaporated with Windows scheduling, plus some we did not expect, nVidia driver, faster RAM improving performance and now with these two Ryzen rumours and launches Ryzen is going to be talked about for a fair old while yet.

AMD has managed to raise the talk about Ryzen pre-launch and still managing to do this post launch in a way that, in my memory, has been better than anything they did in the past. Maybe this was part of their planned marketing strategy? If so ... well they are now looking to have outdone themselves here?

A common complaint among tech enthusiasts is AMD's marketing and claiming that their difficulty is most people do know Intel but do not know AMD. Well Ryzen has been heavily talked about for the last year or two that has increased to a peak lately and likely to stay in that peak for at least one year?

In other words recently almost all everyone has talked about it Ryzen and we cannot predict precisely when it will end. Now considering that there is also the Ryzen based APU's yet to come, the launches of the Pro models and these 12 and 16 core models over the next 6 months or so I would imagine that before everyone has even stopped talking about that engineering samples of the next Zen core will be doing the rounds and it may well continue on?

Hence why I said 'at least one year'.

I was planning to build a new rig based on Ryzen and Vega at the end of May or sometime in June but now I am like 'Oooh wait a minute ... 12 cores? Maybe I should wait and see the benchmarks on that?!' Lol. Well you have the final clock frequencies to consider as well as improvements and optimisations between now and then?

To those that said that 2017 was going to be a great year for PC tech mostly said it just about the launch of the known Ryzen CPUs, Vega GPUs and nVidia's 1080Ti.

Now I am wondering how many are sitting at their monitors frozen in place with their eyes wide and their chins resting on the floor with a pool of dribble gradually increasing its radius? Lol.

You do know water and electronics don't mix, right? Lol.

We do not know, fully at any rate, exactly what nVidia and Intel is going to do, launch or indeed leak this year either!

Wednesday 29 March 2017

THE HEAT IS RYZEN

I just got something of a surprise when I looked at my YouTube recommended videos.

I look at a lot of different videos and so much so that some things I look at regularly seem to fall off the radar and do not get recommended any more, until I physically go and look at more videos of a particular channel.

Now a very good example of this was one that I noticed fell off my radar and as I am big on various areas of science, one channel, or guy, that I watch has a PhD in science and worked in nuclear reactor plants. He calls himself Thunderf00t, though I always refer to him in other blogs as 'The Man With The Loud Feet'.

I have been waiting patiently for the latest AMD Ryzen CPUs to come out and things were even better than I thought.

The only things is that ... umm some channels that I watch to do with computer tech acted completely differently to what I expected them to. Some even changed their ... personality?! In fact I found some downright odd and even a little creepy if I am honest.

Oddly three of these I had started watching only recently seem to all be in the same part of the world and the other side of it to me in the UK.

These guys seem to be acting and talking like there was some ... agenda. I really do not like all the fanboy talk from either side of claims of being shills or in the payroll of this company or that ... I really do detest it.

HOWEVER ...

If a gun was pointed at my head and I was told to come up with names that are most likely ... got a hidden agenda or even shills ... there are three names I would put forward. They are not the ones I thought I would be putting forward 6 months ago.

I saw many comments about Linus and JayzTwoCents and statements about them being shills or biased but that never crossed my mind and wondered if this would become obvious when Ryzen was released. It was not.

However there was one other not in the part of the world of the previous three I mentioned and is in fact in the US and I did think a great deal of. This guy also seem to have an odd and negative tone in his reviews of Ryzen and then there was that ... umm trouble.

Joker Productions correctly pointed something out, a video I personally watched and thought his discovery very interesting, and the next thing I know so much mud was being slung all over the place that I could barely see any light from my monitor.

Well feck me sideways if I do not go to who I think to be the best tech guy on the Internet, I just hope he does not hate me being English with him being a Scot, also gets attacked from these same three people?!

What the FUCK is going on?

Two guys I never thought for one second having any agendas at all and one coming across interesting things, Joker, and one having excellent methods for reviewing CPU and GPU tech, AdoredTV.

The really bizarre thing is one of these guys did one of those ... oooh feck I forget what you call it, but joint liove chat streaming ... thing-a-ma-bob! The other funny thing is that I have this knack for getting a ... feel for what someone's true personality is like and ... well let me say that there was someone that I did not look the look of.

I remember thinking that I did not like the feel for this guy and would not trust him if I met him or was to do anything with him. Well I wouldn't in the first place to be honest. Sorry ... did not like the look of him and ... well I am well known for being pretty spot on with these kinds of feelings.

Let us just say that I have a unique knack for getting these feels on people and with the use of various hidden microphones and cameras I have managed to do ... things that if told you simply would not believe.

I have a blog about it and though it is mainly on corruption within all of the UK's public services, or at least all of the big ones, I have worked ... with a few others to that you simply would not believe.

I have also done this with a number of rather large retail chains too.

Oh and I have never ... EVER lost.

Ergo I am pretty confident in my abilities and I have not divulged anything I have been working on for the last two years but when I do ... let us just say that it will cause a number of big waves.

So then back on track ... I go to see a video uploaded by AdoredTV and as he continues to talk he explains that there has been a bit of bother ... over his research and methodologies.

He then shows a number of things being said and there are the familiar names of people that have started to sound somewhat ... odd to me of late.

AdoredTV then explains how he just let it go, that he seem to have upset someone and now become a target for them and let it go, even explaining himself too. All from that part of the world and all the ones I have been suspect of, of late.

But then a different guy I also sometimes watch gets involved too. This was Bitwit and I was surprised he got involved.

Now there are some egos becoming big, heated and over-inflated that are behaving just like some fanboys and I am going to say this ...

In my view professionals are just that. Scientific professionals are included when I say that being these people does not mean that we know everything. What we are, however, are people that can understand scientific things and work out our numbers to get to the logical conclusion or the truth. It does not mean that we know it all and nor does it imply that we are infallible. Part of being a professional and/or scientist is to accept when you have failed and when you are wrong and then working out why, correcting your methodologies and getting to the truth.

But ...

It seems to me that there are a great many people that have appeared on YouTube that have sounded like they know what they are doing, or just had the cash flashing around long enough to build a number of tasty enthusiast PC rigs that have built up a huge following.

I have slowly realised and a number have stood out that are not actually all that they make themselves out to be. They have shown that they clearly lack an understanding of how things work in the computing world.

Others have stood out to show that they do understand this and that things can change with time and especially so with brand new tech. This is something that many have not realised and even after weeks has still not occurred to them.

Ergo they have been giving extremely bad advice.

According to them both major gaming consoles cannot play games, or rather you cannot play games on!

Bad. Wrong. Stupid.

Now I do not know whether or not they are trying to fit a narrative wrongly adopted by their fanboy base or they are just naive or just plain stupid?

Of the dozens of people I have listened to over the last few years there is one guy that stands head and shoulders above the rest for not only doing the CORRECT research but doing the research that not a single other tech reviewer has thought of doing. Not one!

That man is AdoredTV.

So you could imagine the look I must have had on my face as he explains he has now become a target of other YouTubers and when I get to the comment where he states something was said and that is where it went too far and he made the video I was watching.

My lower jaw must have now been in the region of my patella?!

I bet if any of those three guys I mentioned have been reading this they are googling 'patella' right about now? Lol.

What utter dumb-arses.

One did a video that Linus had already done and ... well I could not give a flying feck who did what and when ... but I found it odd that he had to state "I didn't copy Linus ... honest!" Yeeewww, give me a bucket ... SOMEONE?!

Lol.

After all those times when they rant off about fanboys in their own comments section they go and turn into fanboys themselves and do the same childish tricks!

If I could talk to AdoredTV ... well I did look for an email but as I have NEVER been compelled to email anyone on YouTube, not really keen on commenting either, I did not know where, if there are any, the button for emailing someone is. Oops ... I digress ...

If I could talk to AdoredTV I would tell him to ignore it. If people are happy to go and be misinformed ... let them. You can lead horses to water and all that jazz.

The people that you are probably better off with are the more inquisitive ones and not fanboys of this company or that company.

I see this fanboyism disease spreads everywhere and from computing tech, with nVidia, Intel and AMD to even movies, like Marvel and DC.

It is most certainly a disease that is spreading. but have no fear of being afflicted by said disease as ...

... I have noticed it is only contracted by half-wits.

You just know that there has to be a day when 'Fanboyism' gets added to the Oxford English Dictionary and I cannot wait to get a huge amount of laughter and joy at reading their description of the word.

I think if and when it does appear the description just might cause said disease to disappear ... overnight?

LMAO!

Oh crap?!

Nearly forgot ...

12 and 16 core Ryzens, I expected but, this early ... are you effing kidding me?!

DROOOOOOOL!!

I would drool over a 12 core Intel too ... but then have a coronary over the price tag and ... well let us just say that I have a number of health problems, morons on YouTube did not stop to consider but hell, I have been in and out of hospital with ... chest problems that has some a little ... concerned and I have to be monitored for 48 hours sooooo ... yeaaaah looking at Intel pricing is not a good idea right now!

LMAO!

EDIT:

There has been a lot of tech within chips that have come out that I have not become familiar with and I will need to before very long ... but I will say this ...

 One microprocessor having a higher clock speed is not an indication of a faster processor.

Nor is the IPC, or Instructions Per Clock.

A chip with the lower clock speed could still be faster overall than the one with a faster clock speed.

Another thing is that in this instance ... yes Intel still has a higher IPC, or so I keep reading ... but that does not tell the whole story either, perhaps, as ...

You also have the extra threading and from what I keep hearing Ryzen's Simultaneous Multi Threading works better then Intel's Hyper Threading. This will also confuse things further ... just as this umm Fabric thingey scaling with faster RAM.

I have ALWAYS STATED that if a benchmarking program gives an impressive result then it is impressive ... feck all this real world bullshit.

If a core can process something damn fast if it is coded the right way then it processes something damn fast and that is the end of it. If something else does not then it is down to the software being used and I doubt anything has been coded with Ryzen's architecture in mind, it IS brand new after all.

Now if it turns out that it just so happens that Ryzen does not work that will on a game title loved b you and you only want 160 fps then sure ... go buy a quad Intel.

However I feel pretty certain that anyone buying a quad core today might start to regret it in as little as 12 months to 18 months. If your someone that does not upgrade for 4 or 5 years this will become an issue for you.

Yeah you can up the CPU cores with Intel but I am pretty sure this means a new motherboard too? Hey?! but maybe by then the six and eight core Intel's might be a sensible price? Who knows?

Monday 27 March 2017

MY FOREHEAD HURTS - RYZEN

OK then ...

Many, many people still making idiot mistakes, still quoting stuff like they know what they are talking about and still quoting crap that is simply not the case at all. All the cues are there already but for some reason people are blind to them.

Let us take one simple comment I saw on Tom's Hardware in the Ryzen 1700X review I have seen over and over again elsewhere ...

Some people have correctly stated that more cores will be needed in gaming in the future while naysayers without the intellect have stated that this will be years away ... if ever?!

If ever ... I just love some of these statements.

Games are coded based on what the mainstream is .. not the top end so sorry to all those that base, ,and even buy, everything on the top end. It is just simple economics.

Everyone has been purchasing Intel 4 core CPU's, that may or may not be hyper-threaded, and have done for years and simply because 6 and 8 core CPUs were not worth it if you were just gaming.

Right now two things are happening and the first is that the 8 core Ryzen's have been selling ... a lot. You also cannot base things on what your bloody friends do or say ... gaming is a global thing. The second thing is that more and more gamers are streaming and so much so that even Google and YouTube are trying to cater for those that want to stream there games.

That is two very good reasons for the Ryzen 7's and games being coded for more than four cores already and before I get to the next and best reason of all...

Every single rumour out there, forgetting the fact that gaming consoles already use 8 cores, is stating that the up and coming XBox Scorpio is going to use Ryzen cores as well as a Vega GPU.

That was Ryzen cores.

Did no one notice how quick game developers came out and said that they were both excited and working with Ryzen in mind? Did no one realise why this was?

Yeah ... when consoles are on their way they already have games being coded for them, which is why there is always a few titles available at launch. The Nintendo Switch not withstanding. Which only had two ... or one and a quarter from the sounds of it?

The XBox Scorpio is supposed to be coming out this year, 2017, and before the end of the year and we are already a few months into this year. Games do not get coded in a few months, not even indie bloody titles, lol.

Which likely means that games are already well into development for Ryzen.

Though none of this matters to myself personally.

I do not build a PC to play games on with three year old titles in mind and nor have I ever and nor will I ever do this. I really do not see how anyone does ... unless they are these die hard fanboys for old titles that just keep on playing them, not matter what.

The only game in recent memory that had me play through it far more than any other is Alien Isolation. Played through that around 6 times and the next closest title to that was three times and Call Of Juarez Gunslinger. The first was over atmosphere and the latter because playing it on its hardest setting, no cross-hairs at all, was a fun challenge. So fun I did it twice, lol.

As much as I loved, ,and completed, games like Skyrim, Fallouts, Dragon Age Inquisition and The Witcher 3 ... I have never been tempted to play them again. With the exception of Deus Ex Human Revolution that was far shorter than those others so did not mind going through it two, might have been three, times.

But I will get excited about the future RPG's along with other titles ... if they look good though of late that looking good a year or so before launch has not amounted to much. Despite all the raving about nVidia's latest GPUs, pre 1080 and 1070.

If things go according to plan I am building a Ryzen PC with a Vega card in a couple of months time when Vega is released. This might now get pushed back a little because of the news that a 12 and 16 core Ryzen might be coming. Something I thought would happen if I am honest but as there was absolutely no talk about this, or foresight, ,from any of the tech professionals I thought it was not going to happen.

I should know better than to ignore my instincts based on what tech journalists are or are not talking about!

Whether I go this route for more than 8 physical cores I am not sure right now. It would all rather depend somewhat on clockspeeds as well as RAM speed scaling, as is being noted with Ryzen 7.

Despite the whiners as well as those speaking about things they do not have the intellect to speak of I for one am very happy with what AMD have released. Because for the next 3 to 5 years things are going to be extremely interesting. Not 'might be' but 'will be'.

I thought it would be good to get on the AM4 platform as the next iterations of Ryzen should be pretty good. New node and new architecture alone are two areas where things will improve.

In all honesty the only negative point right now is the dual core RAM and the PCI-E lanes, though I am not entirely sure this is an issue. AS unlike so many armchair experts I cannot see into the future and am not sure whether those PCI-E lanes of 16x will be swamped by the next generation of cards?

Dual channel RAM is not really an issue as long as its frequency keeps increasing but will it get to a point whereby it cannot be increased? Which means to feed data faster you have no choice but to go quad channel, at which point you need a new motherboard.

But if a new motherboard is not need until, say, Zen 4, for arguments sake, and this is 3 years or more away then ... it is a non issue.

Oh I also find it hilarious that every single person that states that Ryzen is NOT a gaming CPU, even the ones trying to make excuses for it. Really?! I mean, REALLY?!

I wonder if they then go and play games on an XBox or a Playstation at 30 frames per second after hitting that return button and stating that Ryzen is not a gaming CPU because 140 frames and not 180 frames per second.

Now if I was a dedicated console owner I would get pretty irate at all these snobs going on about differences of ten or even twenty frames per second when there close to or above 100 frames per second by a fair old margin.

In fact I am amazed that console owners have not ripped into these people just yet.

I also mentioned about optimisations of current and slightly older games in a recent post on AMD's Ryzen? Yeah ... do not really care about that either ... unless it happens to be a game that I will go back to AND it is getting less than 40fps minimum.

Why?! Unless you are MMO'ing and doing it for money ... just, WHY?!

I also find it hilarious that everyone is scrambling to get Ryzen 5's performance metrics from Ryzen 7's, lol. Really?!

Oh dear.

You might get it right, you have a 50/50 chance, or you might get it wrong but you have no way of knowing. That is NOT, however, what some of them are stating. The are stating that they have tested by switching off cores and stating this is what will happen. I do not know and I do not care as outside of going for a 6 core Ryzen I have no interest.

I am aware, however, that there is no way of knowing how the cores will overclock and no way of knowing how the shared cache memory will make a difference. Will there be more cache memory available to cores because the other cores that would otherwise share this memory are no there? Or would it be that it remains the same depending on how cores are switched off, or failed in the production process? Who knows? I presently do not and I am damn sure no one else does.

Buuut ... if they get it right and there is no difference watch how all of them that predicted no change will crow about it, which will likely lead to irate people telling them to feck off and go and design CPU's as they are obviously engineers? Lol.

I get so annoyed when I read some of the comments. Hands over my face with my uttering "Oooh for the love of God, man!" Lol.

I am doing something I find funny ... I am going to hold off buying a laptop until they come out with Ryzen APU's. I do not bloody know why? Lol.

Well I have always been aware that despite all the crap everyone talks about then CPUs come out they fail to see that ... if something is faster in just one single thing then anything else that is slower comes down to a software issue.

Sorry but that's it and that's all.

If it was a hardware issue then it would show in every single thing tested and I imagine that, without bothering to go back and check, this would be the case with AMD's previous bulldozers. Not quite as bad as everyone made out but clearly slower in everything ... CLOCK FOR CLOCK.

This is not the case with Ryzen and so things are very, very different.

Yet I have very literally and a long time ago lost count of the number of remarks like "AMD has failed again" and "It is bulldozer all over again". Oooh boy, oh boy.

There is an old saying ... you cannot see the wood for the trees.

If you want to remain blind then go and be blind. Do NOT go around on the Internet trying to blind others because .. the Internet is NOT forgiving and it may come back to bite you in the arse?

EDIT: Oh and some so called tech journalists and reviewers might want to seriously change their tone too ... because what I hear a lot is "Oooh Ryzen was supposed to be sooo good at gaming and it is SOOOO NOOOT!"

Your giving out the wrong impression, maybe intentionally without having to actually state it, when that is simply NOT the case at all.

I for one never expected ANY Ryzen CPU to beat out the fastest Intel CPU on any level ... but it has or come close on all of them.

I expected 35% improvement but hoped they, AMD, were being honest when they stated a 40% improvement and we got over 50% improvement. It has worked out better than I had hoped so I actually find all of the negativity somewhat surprising, if I am perfectly honest.

Sunday 19 March 2017

YET ANOTHER RUINED FAVOURITE

Jesus.

Funny how you see small things and changes you know are going to lead to much bigger problems but that no one takes any notice.

I have seen many things I do not like pop up in the gaming industry as well as a recent trend regarding politics .. no I cannot call it politics as it is nothing more than sheer madness because lame brained and twisted individuals have now been discovered to be groups, mainly with an identity crisis they want to force upon others, that seems to be affecting everything.

I think that corporations, I can think of two that consist of Disney and now possible Electronic Arts, have gotten scared?

It is like when there are protests and there are 50,000 to 100,000 and all the tabloids and TV news go on about how large it is. Yeah well it could be 200,000 or more but even here in the UK that is a tiny fraction of the entire population.

This does not seem to occur to some organisations and corporations though who seem to get spooked internally on some level that they might lose money. Or maybe they blindly and foolishly think they see a way of making more money. Because they do not see that 200,000 or even 500,000 do not in any way represent the majority. Especially within certain industries.

You have an established audience and you sell to that audience and if there are changes they do not like you do not then persist with these changes and then go and make even greater changes in the same direction.

Unfortunately in some areas the addiction is far too great for people to resist and therefore vote or give out clear messages via their wallets.

Also unfortunate is that in these instances less and less is taken notice of until one day it all goes off with a bang and everyone stands around scratching their heads wondering what happened.

My head has hurt very much so from all the facepalms I have given myself in the different areas I cover, mainly gaming and corruption and failures of the public service sectors.

Jesus Christ I could do a much better job standing on my head while fast asleep!

Still ... I then get forced to watch my predictions unfold in an almost slow-motion type fashion and wonder if I should be so heavily invested any more? Or indeed hold off investing into areas I previously loved. Sometimes said investments can be ... steep.

Now the latest thing I have been hearing about on YouTube that forced me to type out this post is this debacle involving Mass Effect Andromeda and to be honest this has taken me by surprise, even if I am not entirely sure of the facts.

There are also some things I find a little amusing in all this and I will start off with this one on the fact that character modelling in Mass Effect Andromeda is complained to look like it was created, in part, in 2007.

Yeah well I recently did a couple of posts about what you need hardware wise for gaming, calling the majority out to be idiots in their statements about all you need is four cores and looking smug and saying ... well I told you so.

I have lost count of the number of games that have launched and not been anywhere near as good as people thought that they would or that their special previews actually showed. Watchdogs, The Division, The Witcher 3, Dragon Age Inquisition and now Mass Effect Andromeda with no doubt others I am forgetting. Any title that is a subject of this post is another personal favourite that is Deus Ex in the Mankind Divided title.

Everyone has waxed lyrical about the last two generations of nVidia cards while at the same time complaining about how computer games have not advance very much.

The simple fact is that until 8 core CPUs are more widespread and AMD have Vega out to drive down nVidias prices your simply not going to get much.

There is a reason that the 'but can it run Crysis' line has become a thing. Because not much has come out to the able to run it that well and how long ago did Crysis 3 get launched? Bearing in mind this was a game that likely caused the software developers a great deal because nothing was launched that could run it for in inordinate amount of time.

Like those people that call others peasants because they wont go out and spend £700 plus on a GPU or a CPU ... yeah and while they do not do that, which is most of them, you are stuck with overkill until all that you splashed out for has become mainstream. It is just how it works folks.

But Mass Effect has more issues it turns out than just looking up to date graphically? There are some really dodgy animations and some bleak story telling? Sorry I thought this was a Bioware game?

Ugh.

Games seem to be constantly being eroded on several fronts ... and I have to ask myself what bloody idiots are in the gaming industry today? Micro-transactions, watered down graphics, RPG's missing the 'R' component. Well for some that is. Pre-order crap and splitting the games into a 70/30 fashion and having the gall to call it downloadable content.

Yup ... ever since the Internet was widely picked up by the masses the companies have queued up to take advantage of this. You should have heard the things I said when Half-Life 2 and Steam first arrived on the scene ... W ... T ... F!! Lol.

Now they do not even have to provide working games any longer before taking your hard earned cash from your wallets.

Fifteen years ago I stated to many and even to government that the Internet should be looked at to keep in check from a whole raft of abuses. Nahhh ... as per usual everyone wants to wait until the proverbial horse has bolted, a shit-fest has been left behind that is doggedly hard to correct and take way more time and cost way more money .. if it can be done at all.

Of course you get the bloody nutters and idiots, like the Zelda fans attacking Jim Sterling over his Zelda Breath of the Wild review. Now Electronic Arts staff are being attacked over the latest Mass Effect. I do not condone attacks like this ... well any threats at any rate. Especially from queues of idiots so fast to add 2 and 2 together and come up with 5 before even thinking things through.

As for Electronic Arts and any other major games labels making millions or billions for sitting with their thumbs up their backsides ... yeah, sorry but you should have seen this coming ten years ago.

You have pushed and pushed and pushed and taken the piss out of your customers and there was always going to be a point where there would be a big backlash. Take no notice of the small backlashes and you inevitably will end up with a big one.

Then there are the fools that want to defend them and talk about the time taken to create a game when most of them are built upon engines that were created by someone else.

Added to the fact that items in game, like buildings and stuff, are largely re-usable but with different textures applied.

I mean think about it ... you do all these 3D models today ... different textures and suddenly you have what looks like a different building entirely. You cannot always do it and yes you would need to some tweaks and adjustments for things like vehicles.

Except how many buildings have been modelled over the years and how many tweaks would they need?

How many types of guns are there?

How many types of human body are there? Yes OK, faces is different and the variations seemingly endless ... except in games they are not even that varied in many titles.

Still you do not threaten or attack people ... yes I get that you waited a long time for your favourite title to have its next instalment released. Yes when it comes out it is a big fuck fest and its frustrating but do you really think that you griping or threatening is going to make them go away and rebuild it from the ground up?

The other thing that concerns me is with these software developers names and just something else to be abused. Yeah I had high regard for Bethesda and Bioware along with Eidos and others but at the end of the day I ask myself how many of the same teams are still present after 5 to 10 years?

Computer gaming has become a perfect example of brand naming gone to shit because story-line writers, animators, game mechanics coders and others have all buggered off elsewhere. At no other time in the history of computer games has this become more evident than it has recently with the titles Mass Effect, Deus Ex, Fallout, Dragon Age and even Call of Duty. That latter one coming from someone that played the first two Call of Duty titles when they were launched. Battlefield now resembles Call of Duty more than Call of Duty does!

Every company grows to a point where both it and its shareholders believe they have a right to be bringing in vast sums of money for doing fuck all but sit with their overly wide butts in their leather clad boardroom chairs. I know I have been in one! Pivotal Games to be precise who I have now not heard of in bloody years!

So I find myself thinking if I want to do this any longer because God only knows how bad things are going to be in just a couple of years time?!

Wednesday 8 March 2017

SEVERAL TYPES OF DUST

I was watching a very sensible video by JayzTwoCents about Ryzen and I remembered something I saw a lot.

I saw repeated many times an attack on AMD fans by Intel fans and it normally went something like or similar to the following...

Before Ryzen launched ...

AMD Fanboys: Ryzen is going to smash Intel in gaming

After Ryzen launched ...

AMD Fanboys: Oh it still smashes Intel because it beats it in everything but gaming

Although the actual quotes were normally a lot more insulting than that.

This was annoying to remember this, unlike PC's I do have memory problems, lol. No, literally, lol. Anyway ...

They are crowing about these statements before even the first lot of four types of dust settle on the AMD AM4 and Ryzen launch. However let us look at the facts shall we?

Yeah ... AMD only quoted for a very long time that they were aiming for and confident they would achieve a 40% improvement in IPC (Instructions Per Clock). Oh and by the way ... another things I have remembered is everyone goes on about clock speed when talking about instructions per clock.

NO!

It is instructions PER clock. Now if you want to come up with your term of instructions per SECOND then you might have an argument. Dumb-arses. If IPC is identical or very near to each other then it will come down to clock speed. But clock speed has absolutely nothing at all to do with IPC.

Now that is out of the way back to that 40%.

Now for around two years this is what I saw some very prominent Intel fanboys state on all kinds of tech sites ...

Before Ryzen launched ...

Prominent Intel Fanboy: Nope, it is all bullshit. I am telling you [insert lots of technical terms here] is the reason why they are talking bullshit. It wont match Iv Bridge, let alone Haswell.

Hmm did I ever tell you my surname is Haswell, if that is not a reason to be an Intel fan I do not know what is. But I am a tech fan. After being a tech fan a price fan comes second to that. Anything else is beyond common sense and damn right bloody stupid.

After Ryzen launched ...

Intel Fanboys left as the prominent ones disappeared or changed their long term usernames: Oh Ryzen is a failure because despite it being better at everything for half the price or even less it is only getting 120 frames per second instead of 140 frames per second in this benchmark and only getting 200 frames per second in this benchmark instead of 220.

Oh .. my .. God.

That is not even taking into consideration that they are telling everyone that you cannot use this chip for gaming for something your eyes cannot even come close to detecting but promoting a four core chip for ... well it must be future games only.

Yeah there is not a game that you simply cannot play, or even notice a difference, on Ryzen so they must be talking about the games of the future?

Yeah we have gone from ever faster single core processors to dual core, to three core, to four core, to six core, to eight core and to ten core. Forgetting that they have gone up way higher than that in the server market, now to 32 core and 64 thread with Ryzen.

So how about games?

Yeah well they used ever faster cores, then eventually dual core, and dual GPU in some instances of course, then four core and now we are seeing a few six core and eight core uses.

But no ... according to Intel fanboys it is not going to progress any further from now on ... cos Intel. Well you were kind of right but ... cos Intel prices which only ever went up.

The funny thing is as I watched the JayzTwoCents video I could not help but think about all the accusations towards him being an Intel fanboy and shill?

In all honesty despite concentrating on nVidia and Intel it never crossed my mind that he was a paid shill. In fact that never crossed my mind with anyone. Well it did only with Ryzen but then I realised that these people are not as good with tech as they like to think they are and they like to sound.

If people are going to be naive over their brand fanboyism then let them. They are the only ones that are going to lose with face and finances in the long run.

I am certain that the smarter ones will make the correct choices and time will only prove that while all the others follow the prominent fanboys I mentioned earlier and disappear completely or change their names so they wont get called idiots.

Unfortunately I can think of two tech guys that cannot do that.

And this is where experience, especially long term, counts.

When AMD claimed to be targeting a 40% rise I actually thought they would beat this and reach 45% from everything I was reading? I got that wrong as they were and have been hitting 50% and over.

Unfortunately many of the morons of the future allowed recent history to influence their gamble on bragging rights.

Ooooh dear.


Tuesday 7 March 2017

SOME FURTHER RYZEN POINTS

I have been reading more and more comments in a very sensible video by Scotsman AdoredTV, nice to see someone actually making some sense.

In the comments I see many people claiming that optimisation because ..... well, bulldozer. I have also seen a lot of comments about how people want to know what is the best to buy right now, not for the future?!

Really?! I mean, REALLY?!

Jesus Christ ... please refrain from being noticed/public in these places as your only going to end up being 'butt-hurt' as everyone likes to call it. God help console buyers when they are first launched as there is never that much out and you have to buy these things with the hope that plenty of stuff comes out over the next few years.

Sorry but your an idiot if you buy a new system purely for games that have already been released, I have NEVER done this in the thirty plus years I have been into computer games!

Now let us clear up something else that ... well, many that are just making themselves sound like idiots are claiming...

Ryzen is not only not bulldozer but you could not get further away form this if you tried. It goes back to the olld way of processing, using simultaneous multi-threading like Intel chips...

Except ... from what is now coming out from a few Linux guys AMD's SMT is actually looking, and is claimed to be, far better than Intel's hyper-threading.

Now if this is the case that SMT is better than HT I can tell you here and now that this could make any optimisations extremely interesting.

One guy also complained about how everything is down to AMD to optimise? Umm..no.

AMD can help in the optimisation process but it is Microsoft with the Windows scheduler, motherboard manufacturers with BIOS updates and game developers with patches that will do most of the work. AMD can do a little tweaking, yes for sure.

Now another list ...


  1. AMD need to work in improving Ryzen, no ifs or buts about it
  2. Motherboard manufacturers the same as above
  3. Game developers have expressed their excitement as things can finally move on now with 8 cores and 16 threads being taken up quickly so they will
  4. Microsoft simply has to ... end of story ... or lose more people to Linux for starters
AMD had to have a success on its hands with Ryzen due to the last 5 to 10 years, another factor missed by many.

Now AdoredTV showed something I was not aware of and that over time the bulldozer CPUs actually improved to the point of beating the i5-2500K, or was it 2600K? This actually really surprised me.

In the beginning it was all about how crap the bulldozer was ... when now it is shown that it was nowhere near as bad as everyone made out. I use a steamroller APU currently with Kaveri.

You simply CANNOT call out a microchip of any kind being crap purely because of a software issue and that's it and that's all.

Yes you can blame the manufacturer's software/drivers and all other things but not a CPU if it is capable but has not been realised due to this reason or that reason. The end.

The fact is that Ryzen is not bulldozer anyway and unlike bulldozer, Ryzen has a lot less ground to make up and in far, far fewer areas than bulldozer ever did. Once again another factor that seems to be missed by a great many armchair experts that love to throw around terminologies that make them sound like they know what they are talking about.

Oddly enough on that point one of the reviewers that surprised me with their tone and negativity is now getting a lot of flack over the same review of Ryzen that disappointed me, and that is Gamers Nexus.

Steve Burke had impressed me in recent times and I fully expected him of all people to list out all of the things that I have here and in my last two posts on Ryzen. But he did not.

Instead and like a whole bunch of others he promoted an Intel CPU that has barely got any faster than the chip it was meant to replace. Added to this it is still only using four cores which seems to have been this way for like forever.

I am not one to think that people are paid shills, the thought never crosses my mind, but a great many so called tech reviewers have not done themselves a lot of favours. Also to those attacking people that say this stuff ... well, its what they thought ... the end. Get over it and stop crying for God's sake!

Anyway if you want to be educated some more about whether Rzen is good or bad, a hint it is in no way bad, I suggest you listen to the crazy Scotsman who does a lot of research over periods of time ...


Monday 6 March 2017

THE NINTENDO SWITCHED

I may have not bought into many technologies, like consoles for instance, but I've always been interested in reading about the tech.

The closest I came to a console was owning a Sony PSP when it first came out.

When I first read and then saw pictures of Nintendo's Switch portable device I was first impressed. This was when I thought that there was hardware built into the dock so that it could play on a TV. 

Then I was disappointed and shaking me head in confusion. I mean we have had a resolution fiasco concerning the PS4 and namely the XBox One, now the PS4 Pro and perhaps this year's XBox Scorpio too?

Considering this resolution fiasco with large consoles I was then wondering what voodoo magic was going on with the Nintendo Switch?

Well ... I'm joking really as I realised that this portable device simply could not process 1080p graphics so just have been a lower resolution for both the portable display and TV.

I honestly thought the entire idea stupid. But then I did think there might be enough people naive enough to buy them, mainly kids.

So you can imagine my surprise when tech reviewer after tech reviewer we salivating over this tablet PC. Yeah ... grown adults drooling over a tablet PC, like they have not seen a tablet PC before.
Then I saw a report that states there have been a number of problems.

The first is an issue with dead pixels and dark areas of the screen that customers have contacted Nintendo about who have stated these are not faults.

Well at least I know why you haven't heard much from Nintendo as it seems they have been in cryosleep since about 2005! That's roughly around the last time I heard about dead pixels.

The one I'm waiting for, scratched screens placing a portable device in a pointless dock.

Oh did I say pointless?!

Oh well it turns out that when the device is in its dock and you pay games on a TV the frame rates are terrible, 30 frames per second can drop to 20 frames per second.

Now ... remember there are a number of people running around the internet claiming that AMD's Ryzen CPU is no good for gaming because your getting 120 frames per second instead of 140 frames per second?

Umm ... if your reading this and we one of those arguing that Ryzen is not a having chip? You had better not be an owner or plan on ever being an owner of a Nintendo Switch. Because of I find out I'll rip you a new one you will never live down.

Worse still ... you had better not be a tech reviewer that whinged that true gamers demands frames in the hundreds per second and own a Nintendo Switch performing a whole one tenth of that for 300 odd quid.

Oh and when you but your 20 frames per second gaming device ... don't use it near wi-fi routers, wi-fi printers, wi-fi headphones, Bluetooth headphones, Bluetooth headsets, Bluetooth speakers (it gets better), microwave ovens and (better still ... wait for it ...) fucking aquariums. Yes I said aquariums as it seems the wireless controllers are all shit too.

Hmm does this include the Elite Delusional controller that sells for the price of a pretty good professional keyboards at £70?!

My good God ... the idiots that have spent £70 on a controller when they have already paid £300 on a seriously underpowered tablet PC and the crowing about it in their YouTube videos?!

Really?!

Is that sort of accepted premiums you pay on hardware just to play a Zelda title?

If the answer to this is yes then ... my God, what magical tomfoolery goes on with these Zelda games? I mean I always saw the attraction for kids ... to a degree.

Tell you what ... slap a sequel to Alien Isolation on that puppy, make it longer and with less issues and I'll effing buy one!

Actually, no. Just give me a sequel to Alien Isolation on PC. Lol.

I've never played a game through even close to add many times as I have Alien Isolation. Considering I'm one that scratches their head at how people can play a title through more than once. Twice is the most ... I played that Alien Isolation through on normal, then three times on hard ... you get an achievement for doing it on hard, again for doing it twice I think. Nightmare was OK until a point I couldn't get beyond without ... something or other I could not collect and had used up.

Bloody LOVE that game!

Loved Fallouts, mmm except 4, and Elder Scrolls but outside of New Vegas, twice, never played one more than once.

Only two other games I've played through more than once ... Call Of Juarez Gunslinger and Deus Ex Human Revolution.

God help those naive people who purchased Nintendo Switches. I was honestly interested in what they was working on. When I first saw the leaks I thought it was a very bad and very faked leak. No way someone would release a gaming tablet, as I thought nVidia tried that already?

Oh ... I owned a Shield Tablet. Crap! Never again.

I saw one tech reviewer using one on a YouTube video and gun crowing on about how he loves it. It was the newer model to mine and I came to two possible conclusions that he said what he did ...
1 The second model is way, way better and more powerful than the first?!

2 He has not owned it long enough?!

Oh there is a third possibility of course and that involves money. Something that too many people are quick to claim about many reviewers that I am not. But if the follow up to Shield is anything like the first? Sorry but that was an extremely frustrating experience, slow to a fucking crawl after 6 months old and spent as much time being repaired as I spent using the effing thing.

#Facepalm

I would rather pluck out my own eyes with two rusty spoons than ever go through that again even if it was effing given to me!

Yeah companies can send me tablet PC's and Nintendo Switches and I would happily give them away in competitions are take them down to a cancer ward for children as I would let them have them and get some sort of joy or of them. If it is at all possible that is?

God knows what in going to be reading next? Oh did read about some screens getting scratched easily?

Yeesh!

THE RYZEN REALITIES

Well it came a bit quicker than I thought it would.

A sensible set of benchmarks of AMD's Ryzen chips by Australian channel Hardware Unboxed has been uploaded.

In this video and in any set of benchmarks it is important to noted when a CPU, or GPU for that matter, does well...

If your doing very well in half the titles and not doing well in the other half you simply have to take it that it is a software issue. This means that improvements can come, though in rare instances might not be possible, from optimisations.

So as the Ryzen is a new tech, optimisations are obviously needed and bios updates obviously needed we can list a number of things you can expect over the next few months.

Now I am going to list a number of things that will take place over the next few months and the very first is Windows optimisations to their scheduler.

It has been discovered, shown factually by Joker's video, that Windows is seeing the extra threads as actual cores. There is a bit of a kerfuffle their when it comes to using cache memory. The extre simultaneous threads do not have their own so I am going with the fact here that their are some mistakes going on with loading data to cache memory. A number of people have highlighted this fact and kudos to them for spotting that. May or may not have been helped by Joker's video?


  1. Windows Scheduler Updates
  2. BIOS Update
  3. Game Updates
  4. Lithography (Node) Maturing
  5. And the one that supposed Game and Tech reviewers missed is that FUTURE GAMES will not only be coded with Ryzen in mind but with far more cores utilised as, as of right now, the number of 8 core processors used by gamers (smart gamers) is increasing and probably exponentially over the next 6 months!!

As for some things being reported by the likes of Salazar Studio and going on in the comments there are threats being made. Even some to Gamer Nexus.

Not cool and stupid.

Yeah OK, despite his normally sounding very understanding of technology, and this is where you can get into hot water here, that Steve Burke from Gamer's Nexus did miss a few things which in all honesty surprised me.

I did not automatically think he was being paid off by Intel, as some or many have stated is their belief. I just realised that there were things he did not ... let us say 'see'.

Here is an example ... someone once said to me after I built my last computer rig, simple budget affair, that a friend into PC's told him that building a PC was easy. I said "Anything is easy if you know how to do it" to which he thought about it and said "Well, that's true".

If you know how to chuck around technical info you sound like you know what you are talking about but does not necessarily mean that you do. You can also over analyse things too and end up in a situation where you cannot see the wood for the trees. This can and will be made worse by rushing to get your videos out of the door.

In these situations the best thing to do is to do follow up videos once you have had a chance to do some more thinking, testing and research.

If you do not it does not help your cause if suddenly 300 odd software houses come out and say shit that makes you look or sound even more like you do not know what you are talking about.

Sometimes getting to the right conclusion takes time and not just in computing either.

Also there is this issues of telling people to wait until the games come out optimised for a chip of some kind .. no, just no. It does not work like that. Do you tell people to not buy Playstations or XBoxes until all the games come out?

With cheap 8 and 6 core multithreaded processors you need enough of them out there for PC games to move forwards. Telling people to carry on buying four core processors will only stagnate games coding .... after all can you run Crysis yet?!



EDIT: It has not gone unnoticed that a row might be about to brew up between two famous tech reviewers and I was surprised at the things stated by one about the other ... this was even more of a shock when I suddenly remembered these two doing a video together some months ago.

You simply cannot go around calling out others on what they do not know about tech, or what you think are mistakes, when you yourself have not even seen or quoted the reasons why things are playing out the way that they are.

People do make mistakes and yet someone was called out by someone else, even stating he should not be reviewing tech, when he himself did not fully understand what was going on. Weird and hypocritical to be honest.

As for the video itself ... I mentioned it in my last post and in all honesty I did not concentrate on every number being shown in the testing. I did not really care to be honest, especially  on the Intel side. What caught my attention was the low percentages that Ryzen cores and threads were being utilised. That was the only metric I needed ... well of course in relation to the Intel CPU's cores and threads of course.

This pointed out to me straight away that something was going awry on a software level and since I spotted that many have stated about Windows Scheduling and upon hearing that my brain just said "Of course, you dumb-arse" referring to myself not realising this when I saw the numbers.

I have admittedly been out of all this a long time and have only been back in it ... lightly.

Though I did do a BSs Applied Computing (software) Degree and was into hardware in a big way and spent four years talking about that with other students.

I built an Athlon 64x2 right, I think it was, and with two Geforce 6800GT's in SLI with a Raid 0 array of two WD Raptors long before Custom PC Magazine (spit) did an article on it.

I also dual booted Windows and Linux (RedHat 4.5 I think) long before I built that rig. I remember one lecturer I was friendly with telling me that dual booting was hard and would take me a week to work out and that I should not do it because I was studying. Took me 48 hours.

EDIT:

Warning!

Anyone getting the Gigabyte Aorus X370 motherboard be very careful using G Skills RAM, the one with the fancy RGB lighting.

A dutch guy built a new rig and one RAM stick died. He got ahold of another set and the next morning another set died ... just a warning, Corsair kits seem to be fine ...


Saturday 4 March 2017

THE RYZEN REVIEWS

Bizarre.

I have been waiting for the independent reviewers to review Ryzen and I watched as many as I could and I become a little confused. Suspicious at times too.

I .. I .. I just do not know what is going on? Lol.

There was one guy I used to like watching videos of and he was unusually negative about Ryzen when there was no need to be. Considering what was realistically expected of the processor.

For instance I never expected Ryzen to beat Intel's fastest IPC processor.

But the reviews from almost everyone had them react as if they was disappointed that they did not and almost like it was another AMD failure?! WHAT?! REALLY?!

Everyone was complaining that the gaming performance was lower than one or two Intel CPU's by a few frames per second?! Really?

Before I go onto anything else concerning the benchmarks and reviews I am going to point out the elephant in the room here when it turned out that while running games and despite having to read the fucking numbers to see that Intel was faster ... there was a visible stuttering going on, i.e. something you can actually fucking see, with the Intel rigs with a number of reviewers where it did not occur at all with the Ryzen rigs!

These stuttering issues were pointed out by a couple, glazed over by several others and even not mentioned at all by some others?! WHAT?!

Is that how up their arses most reviewers have got that the only thing that matters is the numbers? SO much so that visual imperfections you can see are not bothered about? So what was the asynchronous gaming fuss all about then?

Jesus Christ.

I am not bothered by the benchmarks in any way. It is only in gaming the results are a bit off and even then only in some titles. That's it and that's all.

However ... there should be one thing that should be pointed out and that is that this technology is first of all new, as is the chipset along with the motherboards...

There will be inevitable changes to the motherboards and drivers as always and you do not know whether or not games in the past year will get patches, like Bethesda stuff after the teaming up with AMD announcement. Not that it is needed that much.

Then there is the Ram issue and not working that well with 3000 MHz or faster. Something else that will no doubt be improved.

These results are not miles back from Intel like the Bulldozer family, it is a lot closer.

Also the lithography is new too and this will no doubt go through some improvements in time, before we even get to Ryzen Plus, or whatever they will call the next version of Zen.

Plus they keep going on about true gamers and keep on about only needing four cores ... no, just NO!

The only reason only four cores have been programmed for is that up until now anything more than four has been a tiny percentage of the market, due to the price of the 6 core and 8 core Intel processors. This is something that should have come down to mainstream level several years ago now, but odd how you do not hear anyone complaining about that?

So if I buy and build a Ryzen rig now, I wont just yet, I will know that it would run everything butter smooth without stutter and that going forward things will only get better. A true gamer thinks about what games are going to be released over the next few years and in this area it is not a concern as most, if not all, games will be coded with Ryzen in mind. You may well ask how?

Well now 6 and 8 core processors are going to be mainstream and I believe that a hell of a lot of them are going to be sold throughout 2017 and I think that the game developers have known this for awhile as have the motherboard manufacturers. Which is why we are getting the Intel treatment when it comes to motherboards now.

The fact that the three eight core processors are selling like hotcakes you can pretty well be assured that the 6 core Ryzen's will sell just as well if not better. Maybe even the 4c/8t Ryzen's too?

Bearing in mind but by the time the 6 cores are released some, if not all, issues may well have been ironed out on the Ryzen side of things.

This is the most narrow minded things majorly missed by a whole list of game tech reviewers some of which like to sound like they are really, really smart. Yeah ... .sorry but you missed the part that many things in games and software have been held back due to a tiny market share of 6 and 8 core CPU's which AMD with Ryzen is now going to change moving forwards.

Yeah, sorry but your part and parcel of the stagnation process that has gone on for years now but at least with Bulldozer, as much fun of it as you can make, that was a technical error in design. Those things happen and you are not designers and therefore could not have designed something better. You would not be reviewers if you could.

Hardware Canucks is one of only a few that has impressed me with their reviews of late.

Another thing I have noticed is a bunch of videos going up crybabying to crybabys that themselves do not understand what is going on, or what happens often with new tech. Especially when you do not have the resources of Intel. Things take time to sort themselves out and settle down to any form of normality. I imagine this would take 6 months to a whole year.

So some reviewers have done some patronising videos and even the titles of some have been patronising. Yeeaaah that does not look very good. It shows you do not like criticism and do not like being called out as wrong. Yeah they may well be crying at you like babies but you have to ignore them ... it is the Internet and YouTube ... it is the nature of the beast.

There are plenty of people that like to think themselves as wise and intelligent and use big words but then start crying over stuff they are wrong about, or just vanish altogether at times, or even resort to name calling. Yeah that sounds really mature. Tip, if they do not sound mature do not interact or react.

Of course there is also the fact that there will no doubt be faster Ryzens and if I build a rig then I am on the AM4 platform and if and when a faster Ryzen comes out, Ryzen or Ryzen Plus, I can just slot it in.

I was intitially thinking about the Ryzen 7 1800X but now thinking about a Ryzen 7 1700X or 1700 and just waiting to see if something faster comes out and switching that one for the 1700 model. Ryzen 9 anyone? Ryzen 1900X anyone? Ryzen Plus anyone? You see where I am going with this?

Also you have 8 cores in the first Ryzens so why not a model later with 10 cores? Intel has one so I am sure AMD have thought about it.

Every single reark I have seen about Ryzen being a fail by someone commenting I want to reply and tell them what narrow minded idiots they are and they have no fucking clue what they are talking about and should leave things to the grown ups. But I do not.

I know that by the end of 2017 even the stupid and pointless brand haters on the hate AMD side are going to thank their lucky stars Ryzen came out. If they ended up getting the i7-6900K they really wanted for half the price it was 6 months or so previous. The same applies to other models. But the truth is that as I spent years following tech things got more powerful as well as cheaper and at the end of the day things only progresses as this increase in power dropped into the mainstream. That has not really been happening for a number of years. To the point that Intel's latest Kaby Lake was in fact a bitter disappointment but not one of the reviewers was a negative about that as much as they have been about Ryzen.

That latter point just ... well, boggles the mind! "Oh Kaby Lake does not give you much of an improvement over Sky Lake to "Oh God, Ryzen's gaming benchmarks are really disappointing!"

I for one am both pleased and relieved that AMD has come back with Ryzen. In more ways than one and no I am not one of those idiots that will tell you that all you need is four cores, even if you ARE just fucking gaming .. unless you only intend to play old and out of date games only over the next couple of years.

If 6 and 8 core Ryzens sell like effing bucket loads over the next 6 months you can bet your life that games that utilise more than four cores will follow, if they are not in development already. Because once there are millions of them out there the developers will code their games to appeal to these millions of users. Tens of millions of users? Hundreds of millions of users?

As for games using four cores only ... yeah like these things are only computers ... it is not like they are capable of multi-tasking or heaven forbid you might want to be actually doing something while your gaming? Sheesh.

So Ryzen is out ... well, partially and now I wait to see how things change in that area and also waiting for RX Vega, as it seems to be called now, and see how that plays out.

EDIT: Oh and is it not funny how Cinebench benchmarks and other synthetic benchmarks suddenly become null and void over night? Lol. How long have they crowed about all these benchmark suites?

EDIT: I now note that many reviewers are uploading videos explaining their use os lower resolutions with Ryzen and about things coming back to haunt users further down the road ..

But ... is this not the point of all the benchmarking suites? They show what can be achieved with Ryzen so if they sudden do not then why do you use them in your benchmarking if only gaming frame rates matter?

No ... sorry, many have clearly got up to big subscriber numbers by clearly sounding like they know what they are talking about but in actual fact do not.

The evidence of this is already out there as many games developers have come out and stated very clearly how excited they are by Ryzen's appearance and a large part of that will be the rapid take up and increase in core numbers in mainstream gamers. Well at least those that do not have blinkers on or listen to YouTubers that sound like they know what they are talking about but as I stated clearly do not.

Remarkably they are using what happened with bulldozer to defend their opinions? WHAT?!

Oh dear.

#Facepalm!

If they did not show how little they understand things before they certainly do now.

I was excited at the idea of bulldozer and the design decisions sounded like a good idea but inevitably were not. This did not mean, as I have long since stated on here, that you could not play games on it because you did and I do. Admittedly my system will not be good enough going forward and is not with a few titles already. Except I am not prepared to turn down the graphics setting so waiting for my next system before I play them and/or buy them.

Zen and Bulldozer are two completely different animals altogether and to claim that you are saying what you are over Ryzen because of bulldozer is clearly a fail.

It is obvious that it being far too easy these days to build a PC has had its drawbakcs where tech reviewers are concerned as many now think they can just state things, probably due to their over-inflated numbers, and all is correct.

Also by their own logic you should go and buy one of those dual core Core i3-7350K processors to game and nothing else. In fact another view of their argument is that the only Intel CPU worth buying is the Core i7-7700K as everything else, including every other Intel CPU is crap. Lol.

Jesus, you really cannot make this stuff up.

Another give away with their knowledge base is when they state they turned to everyone else either in conversation and their benchmarks. Really?

#Facepalm

So every game developer that has stated they are excited for Ryzen have all got it wrong while all the reviewers having conflabs to fine out why, so obviously do not know, have got it right?

Yeaaah I think not.

EDIT:

One of the best videos regarding what the Ryzen was and was not doing was by Joker Productions, good old Joker, not sure what game he is using, GTA V or Mafia 3 I am not really sure as I have not played either ...

.. but he shows the loads on every core and was hitting 180 frames per second, good God what a faiure, but interestingly was not far from the Intel Core i7-7700K and even more interestingly was the loads on the cores.

Intels was going between 80% and 100% in the game at the start while the Ryzen 7 1700 (non-x) was only hitting around 40% to 50%.

Now THAT is interesting.

Sometime after 3 minutes in he runs through a benchmark, sorry not sure which one, and the loads were half for the AMD Ryzen than they were for the Intel chip..

Later in the video he benchmarks The Witcher 3 and a couple of cores on the Ryzen CPU actually hit 0% a few times!



Not a fanoby, if AMD's RX Vega is not faster than nVidia's 1080 then I will but a 1080Ti ... sorry just had to wash my mouth out with soap as I actually realised I typed I would buy an nVidia 1080Ti ... ooh wait a minute just while I grab that soap again! Lol.