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03-23-2022, 02:47 PM
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#21
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Mar 2018
Posts: 3,474
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cobra9777
I've always built my own desktop PCs. I have a triple 2K monitor set-up in my office. So a laptop is not really an option. But my latest desktop is a refurb. It's a 3 year-old Dell Optiplex 5050 Tower, with a 14nm i7-7700 running at 3.6Ghz (up to 4.2). It shipped with 16GB RAM, which I might expand to 32GB at some point.
It's got integrated graphics, but it's the Intel HD 630, which supports 3 monitors at 4K UHD. So I can upgrade my monitors at some point when 4Ks come down a bit in price. There's space for a separate graphics card, but it would require a bigger power supply, which might be hard to fit in this case. Unless you're a serious gamer, I think the 630 graphics are more than adequate.
It shipped with a SATA 512GB SSD, which I kept for backup storage. But I added a 1TB M.2 SSD, which is roughly 5X faster than the SATA SSD. I also added an older 2TB HDD from my prior desktop. So tons of storage.
Another fun fact, this is the first PC that gets a full Gigabit up and down on our FiOS Gigabit service. Prior desktop got ~400/600. So that's been a nice upgrade as well.
The PC was $529 on Newegg and the M.2 SSD was $99 on Amazon. So, all-in cost was $630 for a pretty powerful machine IMHO.
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Nicely done.
__________________
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
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03-23-2022, 03:21 PM
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#22
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: On a hill in the Pine Barrens
Posts: 9,682
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Quote:
Originally Posted by albireo13
Well, running Task Manager I see my CPU pegged at 100% when I run sims. Typically it idles at 30 - 50%.
My Memory mostly utilized.
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Whether old PC, new workstation, or build, you should identify the specific software you're using.
I don't know what SIMS is, but it could be online software for federal contractors, for example. In that case you could be using an enterprise backend. All of the money thrown at a PC won't make it faster. The actual server could be over-loaded, etc. In the office, on the LAN, everything is tolerable. If you're remote, though, there are more layers of connection.
OTH it could be a locally-installed environment, and if the software can take advantage of local resources, then it may be recommended to use even more than what you have available.
There could also be required configuration of the program to optimize everything.
The ideal situation is to have such software run in the fastest, first-available RAM. That's your memory sticks. Other cache memory on the board can also come into play. Then you have the impact of graphics processor(s) making calculations to display results.
Of course only by using such software in time does one come to realize how different hardware and OS can be.
Or you could just buy something and see it it performs better.
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03-23-2022, 06:11 PM
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#23
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Full time employment: Posting here.
Join Date: Sep 2017
Posts: 816
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Qs Laptop
This is a good idea. However, while most brokerage houses offer solo traditional 401k plans not all allow solo Roth 401k's.
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The solo 401K is a great idea except we are using my contract income to cover some big expenses which have come up. Better than dipping into my nest egg.
__________________
“Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
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03-23-2022, 06:16 PM
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#24
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Full time employment: Posting here.
Join Date: Sep 2017
Posts: 816
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By sims I mean simulation runs. I am using LTSpice, and other circuit simulation SW to simulate circuity designs. Some circuits are fairly large, with high node counts, and my laptop bogs down.
__________________
“Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
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03-23-2022, 06:18 PM
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#25
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Full time employment: Posting here.
Join Date: Sep 2017
Posts: 816
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Cobra9777
I've always built my own desktop PCs. I have a triple 2K monitor set-up in my office. So a laptop is not really an option. But my latest desktop is a refurb. It's a 3 year-old Dell Optiplex 5050 Tower, with a 14nm i7-7700 running at 3.6Ghz (up to 4.2). It shipped with 16GB RAM, which I might expand to 32GB at some point.
It's got integrated graphics, but it's the Intel HD 630, which supports 3 monitors at 4K UHD. So I can upgrade my monitors at some point when 4Ks come down a bit in price. There's space for a separate graphics card, but it would require a bigger power supply, which might be hard to fit in this case. Unless you're a serious gamer, I think the 630 graphics are more than adequate.
It shipped with a SATA 512GB SSD, which I kept for backup storage. But I added a 1TB M.2 SSD, which is roughly 5X faster than the SATA SSD. I also added an older 2TB HDD from my prior desktop. So tons of storage.
Another fun fact, this is the first PC that gets a full Gigabit up and down on our FiOS Gigabit service. Prior desktop got ~400/600. So that's been a nice upgrade as well.
The PC was $529 on Newegg and the M.2 SSD was $99 on Amazon. So, all-in cost was $630 for a pretty powerful machine IMHO.
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Wow. That is a great solution. Congrats.
__________________
“Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
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03-23-2022, 11:18 PM
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#26
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: Spending the Kids Inheritance and living in Chicago
Posts: 17,008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Qs Laptop
This is a good idea. However, while most brokerage houses offer solo traditional 401k plans not all allow solo Roth 401k's.
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Might have to phone around, I know Vanguard offered it as I got mine there.
__________________
Fortune favors the prepared mind. ... Louis Pasteur
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03-24-2022, 07:05 AM
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#28
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Dec 2016
Location: DC area
Posts: 2,479
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunset
Might have to phone around, I know Vanguard offered it as I got mine there.
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Yes, Vanguard i401(k) includes a Roth option.
__________________
FI and Semi-ER March 24, 2017
Consulting to stay engaged
"All models are wrong, some are useful." - George Box
“There is always a well-known solution to every human problem: neat, plausible, and wrong.” - H.L. Mencken
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03-24-2022, 09:16 AM
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#29
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Mar 2018
Posts: 3,474
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunset
Might have to phone around, I know Vanguard offered it as I got mine there.
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The bulk of my investments are at Fidelity. They do not have a Roth 401k option. I also have an account at TD Ameritrade. They do offer a Roth 401k plan so I started one with them.
__________________
Age is a very high price to pay for maturity.
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03-26-2022, 06:45 AM
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#30
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Full time employment: Posting here.
Join Date: Sep 2017
Posts: 816
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I have optimized my simulation runs and it helps. Still, I want a beefier machine with more than 12GB RAM. With multiple apps open, and multiple windows, my laptop does bog down.
__________________
“Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
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03-26-2022, 07:19 AM
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#31
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 35,712
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Ah, this thread reminded me of the time I did consulting work at home and was able to write off the PCs I bought to do the work. Since then, I hardly used the desktop PCs anymore, and they are now way obsolete.
For his design work, the OP needs lots of CPU power and mucho RAM. Fancy graphics cards for game animation do nothing for him. A laptop is usually limited in the RAM size, though there are some with 32GB.
Modern CPUs are so fast, it's crazy. I just bought a small 14" laptop for portability. It comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600U 6-core CPU clocking at 15385 on CPU Mark V10.
The OP's laptop comes with an i7-1065G7, I think. It clocks at 8840 on CPU Mark V10.
Here are some more numbers.
i7-7700: 8910
Ryzen 9 5900x: 39475
__________________
"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man" -- Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
"Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities" - Voltaire (1694-1778)
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03-26-2022, 08:31 AM
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#32
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: SoCal, Lausanne
Posts: 4,408
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It's not just CPUs that are fast (I have a Ryzen 9 5900X on a HP Omen 30L series) but also modern GPUs are amazing. I have a NVIDIA RTX 3070 TI with great hardware video encoding and decoding speed. My desktop boots up Windows in under 5 seconds. Also the cooling systems for CPUs and GPUs have become significantly better.
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03-26-2022, 04:02 PM
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#33
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Dec 2008
Location: On a hill in the Pine Barrens
Posts: 9,682
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Pretty sure GPUs play a significant part of the computing, not just the display. For example, GPUs are found in mining rigs.
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03-26-2022, 04:13 PM
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#34
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Jul 2014
Location: Spending the Kids Inheritance and living in Chicago
Posts: 17,008
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Quote:
Originally Posted by NW-Bound
Ah, this thread reminded me of the time I did consulting work at home and was able to write off the PCs I bought to do the work. Since then, I hardly used the desktop PCs anymore, and they are now way obsolete.
For his design work, the OP needs lots of CPU power and mucho RAM. Fancy graphics cards for game animation do nothing for him. A laptop is usually limited in the RAM size, though there are some with 32GB.
Modern CPUs are so fast, it's crazy. I just bought a small 14" laptop for portability. It comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600U 6-core CPU clocking at 15385 on CPU Mark V10.
The OP's laptop comes with an i7-1065G7, I think. It clocks at 8840 on CPU Mark V10.
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+1
Ram is cheap these days, I'd be looking at a desktop starting with 32 Gig of ram and up-gradable to at least 64 Gig. Make sure the 32 Gig does not fill all the slots, so there is no waste if step up to 64 Gig.
And pick a fast SSD, etc..
__________________
Fortune favors the prepared mind. ... Louis Pasteur
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03-26-2022, 06:44 PM
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#35
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Feb 2014
Posts: 3,054
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I think most of these things are overkill. You might shave a second off a file load or something. Not that having a state of the art system isn't nice, but the cost / reward ratio is hard to justify unless you have a specific use case that really requires it.
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03-26-2022, 08:39 PM
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#36
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 35,712
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Quote:
Originally Posted by target2019
Pretty sure GPUs play a significant part of the computing, not just the display. For example, GPUs are found in mining rigs.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jim584672
I think most of these things are overkill. You might shave a second off a file load or something. Not that having a state of the art system isn't nice, but the cost / reward ratio is hard to justify unless you have a specific use case that really requires it.
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The OP was talking about running SPICE, an electronic circuit analysis and simulation.
SPICE is a program developed at UC Berkeley in 1973. When I was studying EE then, it was run on a Univac 1100 mainframe.
It's purely number crunching. All CPU and RAM. The program is still in use today, and that tells of its usefulness.
GPUs are used in mining rigs, because they can do repetitive calculation of the SHA-256 cryptography algorithm very fast. I wonder if anyone has adapted a GPU to help with SPICE calculations, or if it even makes sense or is possible, even though there are now GPUs with floating-point capability.
PS. Back in 2000, I wrote a program to crunch through a large database of 100 GB, and that consisted of ZIP'ed files. It took more than 1 week running nonstop to finish with a 600-MHz Intel CPU then. The CPU speed was the bottleneck.
__________________
"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man" -- Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
"Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities" - Voltaire (1694-1778)
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03-26-2022, 09:00 PM
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#37
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Jul 2008
Posts: 35,712
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OK, people have thought of using GPUs to aid with SPICE calculations. This requires rewriting the software, and the structure of the problem of circuit simulation does not readily lend itself to being solved with a GPU.
See this: https://www.eetimes.eu/gpu-powered-spice-simulator/.
__________________
"Old age is the most unexpected of all things that happen to a man" -- Leon Trotsky (1879-1940)
"Those Who Can Make You Believe Absurdities Can Make You Commit Atrocities" - Voltaire (1694-1778)
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03-27-2022, 06:18 AM
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#38
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Full time employment: Posting here.
Join Date: Sep 2017
Posts: 816
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Quote:
Originally Posted by jim584672
I think most of these things are overkill. You might shave a second off a file load or something. Not that having a state of the art system isn't nice, but the cost / reward ratio is hard to justify unless you have a specific use case that really requires it.
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It's more than that. Some sims have run minutes and the machine operation is tied up during that time ... using other windows is choppy and also lags.
File loading is not an issue.
__________________
“Earth is the insane asylum of the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
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03-27-2022, 03:00 PM
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#39
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Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
Join Date: Jan 2013
Location: SoCal, Lausanne
Posts: 4,408
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If you have a fast CPU like the Ryzen 9 5000 series, a slow GPU becomes a system bottleneck and defeats the purpose of having a fast CPU. High performance GPUs are needed for content creation such as 4K and 8K video editing with special effects. Modern video editors take advantage of the hardware encoders and decoders as well as video effects using the GPU and it dramatically offloads the CPU during rendering as well as editing. For still photography, many functions in Photoshop will not even work without GPU acceleration.
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03-27-2022, 03:05 PM
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#40
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Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Portland, Oregon
Posts: 7,108
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Buy a second, large, monitor if you are using a laptop.
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Duck bjorn.
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