Well well… more than four years passed since The Resolver workstation was built… and?

It’s still working perfectly! I must admit I got some problems with the AMD Radeon VII drivers – mostly related when the PC is waking up from sleep mode – but, apart occasional blue screen due to this – again, related to software – hardware is going on without a fuss! Thousand hours switched on, often for days, sometimes for a week or more, and still going!

Do I feel the urge to replace it? Sure, a new Ryzen like the 7950x is quite tempting, and it will speed up things like avisynth conversions and video encoding, but for everyday use, it’s still fast and able to do anything I’m thinking of.

So, let’s continue with it and, in case, I’ll post here news about an eventual Resolver 2!

 

Recently released, new benchmark added here:
http://theresolver.sporv.com/benchmarks/passmark

 

The usual “cute” Windows Update decided to lock both keyboard and mouse two weeks ago… they worked on BIOS, but can’t be able to do anything on Windows… tried everything, but at the end something went wrong and the OS got corrupted… Read more

Struggling lately with the Enermax AIO cooler – temps rised a lot, 15/20°, and can’t be only because it’s an hot summer, I suppose – so I decided to give an air cooler a go. The obvious choice would be the Noctua, but I really hate the ugly color of its fan Read more

Finally, after quite some buying and selling activities, I end up with the GPU I wanted since the beginning: the AMD Radeon VII!

Now, some could argue “Why now? It is almost surely EOL! And why not a 5700 XT?”… well, now because, as written before, I end up to get it at a lower price than retail, thanks to some earnings due to buy/sell; I do not care at all if it’s EOL – at the contrary, it will be a “collector’s item”! And, about 5700 XT, it is a very nice GAMING GPU, but the VII is waaay better with DaVinci Resolve and other computational intensive tasks.

So, I think I made the best move ever. It is even better than Nvidia RTX 2080ti in Resolve, at a very lowest price in comparison!

To whom it may concern: now The ResolveR has not 2x AMD Vega Frontier anymore, but only a “mere” Sapphire RX 580 Nitro+ 8GB; this due to monetary needs, waiting better times to get an AMD Radeon VII…

I know, it’s a big downgrade from the previous GPUs, but overall it still works very well, just a bit slower than before in those tasks with a huge GPU demand – of course. Hope to get a Radeon VII soon, even if I’m not so sure to spend around 700€ to get “only” +82% speed improvement. What I’m pretty sure is that a second (or even a third? fourth?) RX 580 could improve speed in DaVinci Resolve, still dunno if in that case it will be on par with the VII – surely not in the RAM size/speed, yet it *should* be near it…

Well, after A LOT of benchmarks, tests and so on, I’m finally over them, and started to use The ResolveR for what it was meant: video editing.

DaVinci Resolve has been barely used, mostly because I’m lazy to study how to properly use it; yet, I made some thinkering with it, and it is really promising… but, I’m an old dinosaur, still using AviSynth in 2019, so… Read more

Doing various experiments about overclocking, I discovered a potentially deadly bug in the BIOS of my Asus ROG Zenith Extreme; beware, it is very dangerous, and could really kill your CPU and/or motherboard, so keep an eye – or, better, both, open!

When it happens: if you load the 4GHz overclock profile, the temperatures read are way lower than the real ones – and when I say way lower, I mean something like 40°C! Yes, sometimes on idle temps are below zero!!! So, if you don’t know it, you continue to push your sistem, fans will never know that CPU temp is too high and stay at low speed, CPU will continue to operate at very high temp and if you are lucky, the system will just switch off; if you are unlucky Read more

As the max temperature of my (overclocked) CPU was a bit higher than expected – at least, following some data found on the net – I tried to find out why it happened… and, guess what? There were two (actually, three) main reasons:

• alternate fans: I used not the original fans, because I had two ones with red LEDs that I wanted to use… they worked well, BUT… their speed and air flow were not up to the task, so I switched back to the original Enermax ones – that are faster – and max temps went down by two or three degrees
• push or pull? The default setup is push – it means that fans push hot air from inside the case through the radiator, then out of the case; the pull option is to take the fresh air through radiator from outside the case, and release it inside the case; I went for a third option, pushing fresh air from the outside, with fans on top of the radiator instead on bottom, like in the first row, second column of the following image; temp went down another few degrees

Read more

O U want 1 2? Just pay me top $$$! 😀 😀 😀
Or, simply, shop for the parts – eventually replacing one or more with others – and build it up! My advice is, make your homework first – find out what your next computer should (mainly) do, then go for the right one; beware! “The ResolveR” is aimed to video editing, and it’s good for a lot of tasks; but, if you need a computer mainly to surf the web and simple office task, you better off spending a fraction of its cost, and spend the rest to get a nice vacation with your partner! Or, if you want to play games, then you can get better results using a CPU with less cores, and getting a single powerful GPU.

If, after reading this, you are still convinced to spend an awful amount of money to get an “ultimate restoration workstation”… well, follow some more advices: Read more