✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 27

heyyyyyy. check this out

i bought one of those chinese motherboards which get the UEFI package from American Megatrends and then enable options with the guiding principle of "YES."

check out how many juicy bits it has

you can turn the memory scrambler on and off! it even tells you the seed it has on, i think, this specific boot?

Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 27

it has soooo many PCIe configuration options. port bifurcation is just the start of it. there's probably an option for every power related register

you can enable "PCIe Stop & Scream", whatever the hell that is

Show threadAndrew Zonenberg

@whitequark I see configuration for emphasis too.

That is a dangerous option to expose to me, I'd have probes on every lane of every addin card optimizing signal integrity and never get around to actually booting the thing :P

Feb 27 at 3:09pmWeb
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 27
@azonenberg hahaha I know right? I now really want to get another one of these motherboards (it cost me about $40, including the Xeon CPU, with I think free delivery?)
Show threadAndrew ZonenbergFeb 27
@whitequark lol nice... not sure if you saw my lab upgrade threads recently but i just scored half a TB of free DDR4 RDIMM and a pair of xeon platinums that i'm starting to deploy (it's a lot of work because each upgrade is displacing RAM/CPU that I then want to use to upgrade something else, so it's not just a single part swap)
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 27

@azonenberg niiiiice

I bought 16GB of 2133 DDR4 for this thing (it's going to be a quiet build server) plus 100GB or something of Intel Optane that I'll use as swap; this is my strategy for getting 100GB of almost-RAM for $100 or so :P

Show threadZack WeinbergFeb 27
@whitequark @azonenberg ... you can still buy optane ??!?
Show threadDragonHunter274Feb 28
@whitequark @azonenberg where did you find over 64gb of optane for 100$? i can only find 64gb m.2 for about 120 and then the 900P pcie devices start at 170
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 28
@dragonhunter274 @azonenberg that's the "or so"... I buy in GBP, and I'm too lazy to do the exact exchange rate calculation when giving ballpark figures in replies
Show threadDragonHunter274Feb 28
@whitequark @azonenberg
that makes sense
do you use a single optane drive or multiple?
I didn't see the start of the thread at first where you mentioned bifurcation, so probably multiple?
Show thread✧✦Catherine✦✧Feb 28

@dragonhunter274 @azonenberg currently single, i'm not made of money :p

the primary purpose of this machine will be a quiet build server for my packages, now that github can't be relied on and i have to run my own CI (also for friends). so many slower cores for cheap = good. the optane drive will be used to extend memory beyond a paltry 16 GB of DDR4