The extension cable they used to include in box with the computers, it has the third pin for the charger brick connector which is wired to ground

There's zero chance that the DC ground in the laptop is tied to earth ground in the charger: they use LLC resonant converters and flyback converters (depending on vintage) - an earth ground tie would defeat the purpose of these isolated topologies.

However it’s wired up the fact is the electric buzzing feeling goes away if you use a grounded extension cable instead of two pin.

No they isolate L and N not PE.

The panda were wonderful, and based off a headphone I loved to bits in the Oppo PM-3.

If Corsair still own the design, they could simply reimplement the original earcups/hinge mechanism from the Oppo as it was super solid.

That won’t work for the home hobbyist 2.4KW of GPU alone plus a 350W threadripper pro with enough PCIe lanes to feed them. You’re looking at close to twice the average US household electricity circuit’s capacity just to run the machine under load.

A cluster of 4 Apple’s M3 ultra Mac studios by comparisons will consume near 1100W under load.

I mean if a hobbyist can run a welder or cnc machine in their home workshop...

It has a HDMI port and its USB-C ports also support display out. But I believe most who buy it intend to use it headless. The machine runs Ubuntu 24.04 and has a slightly customised Gnome (green accents and an nvidia logo in GDM) as its desktop.

Fortnite is 9 years old this year. Epic brought in biblical amounts of money from just this one property over this time. Where and how did they spend this money?

Let's see...

- Millions spent rushing out huge amounts of Fortnite content at a breakneck pace

- Millions spent organizing, designing and marketing 5 new Fortnite collabs every week

- Millions spent trying to wrangle Fortnite's spaghetti codebase as it crumbles under more than a decade of tech debt

- Millions spent trying and failing to keep the content pipeline flowing at a constant speed despite the tech debt

- Millions spent developing a failed Roblox competitor inside Fortnite

- Millions spent paying people to create awful AI generated games in their failed Roblox competitor

- Millions spent developing their own "metaverse" of brand-focused modes that nobody plays in their failed Roblox competitor

- Millions spent developing a failed Steam competitor

- Millions spent paying off developers to release their games exclusively on their failed Steam competitor

- Millions spent giving away free games every week on their failed Steam competitor

- Millions spent lining executives' pockets

It's really not hard to see where all that money is going.

Tangentially related, that screenshot of Screamer 2 caught me off guard completely, I loved that game to death, and I feel I was the only one of my friends to have played it. Tremendous handling model and superb music.

I loved it, though from that era I liked Fatal Racing the most.

Surprisingly the original developers Milestone are doing a reboot/reimagining of the series which is out this week.

Funny, I saw the news about the new game just before I saw this article. I didn't know it was a reboot at all, I'd never heard of the originals. It looks cool.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2814990/Screamer/

Strix Halo’s unified setup is pretty cool. In systems with 128GB of memory, in BIOS set the dedicated GPU memory to the smallest permitted and the Drivers will use the whole main memory pool appropriately in Linux and Windows

Does this work on the open source amdgpu drivers ?

I've been a bit too busy to turn mine on for a while.

The OSS AMDGPU drivers by default allocate a fixed percentage of system RAM for GTT (up to 75%), they do not automatically use the entire system memory. You can override this with the kernel options I posted in my original comment, but as I mentioned, there are some serious negative consequences. You also may need to disable IOMMU or use PT mode. Personally I have had a lot of crashes as a result of this stuff, so I went back to the defaults and just don't run big models.

The biggest factor of whether AMD GPUs on Linux are a PITA or not is ROCm. Strix Halo is supported in ROCm 6.x, so it should be supported on most platforms (I haven't tested it tho). ROCm 7.x is supposed to be better but not all apps support it yet.

AMD, if you're reading this, please hire more SWEs. Nvidia will continue to dominate until you beat them at software.

I’ve had no issues running GPT-OSS 120b with decent performance on the machine (HP Zbook Ultra G1a). Running on Bluefin/Universal Blue and Windows.

The difference between DDR4 and 5 is quite substantial. I have a fully loaded Cascade Lake Mac Pro - 6 channels of DDR4-2933 gets me to about 120GB/s or 960Gb/s. PCIe 3.0 is a major Achilles heel of what would be a capable workstation system with modern nvidia GPUs precisely for the reason you document.

When did nvidia drop PNY as ODM for their reference cards? I recall my A5000 (now 2 Gen old) was made by PNY.

As far as I know, the current lineup is PNY still makes the workstation cards, possibly also the x16 server cards, but Foxconn is doing the Blackwell SBCs and MXMs, and those SBCs are a pretty big chunk of Nvidia's income right now. I also believe they have moved to Foxconn for the Founders Edition consumer cards.

Also, with the FEs, their partners are disallowed from making their own FEs, even if they make their own PCB from scratch and not based on any existing Nvidia design. Doesn't matter who makes the FE, it immediately puts partners at a great disadvantage if they can't make one too.

To my recollection on the machines that shipped with Lion (circa 2011) you’ll want to set up a protective MBR with the appropriate drive dimensions on the GPT, to get it to install windows like with boot camp.

To my recollection on machines with discrete GPUs this is what triggers the appropriate hardware configuration (BIOS boot, disabling the internal GPU and switching the MUX to only route via the AMD card)

But I do recall getting the internal GPU working with this trick https://github.com/0xbb/apple_set_os.efi

Thank you very much for that! That might explain why one of the macbooks I installed Windows on seemed to have laggy screensavers, whereas the others (Air) seemed to work just fine.

I installed the MacOS Lion installer from a memory stick to the internal SSD (partition 1), Mac OS Lion itself to partition 2 (minimal size) and Win7 to partition 3 via Bootcamp, and it works well, aside from laggy screensavers on one of them, and losing around 10GB to the Mac Lion installer partition 1 (I don't know if there's a way to force it to install MacOS to 1x partition, rather than 2x, while fully offline)