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Actually, these days you can go the external enclosure route thanks to thunderbolt. Mac laptop users love these.
My dual 1080s are doing just fine in my currentt rendering laptop. It's built with a pretty extensive cooling array w/3 separate heatpipe/fan assemblies (CPU, GPU left, GPU right) which includes a boost fans button, although it's probably better described as a desktop relplacement.
My previous 17.1" laptop was also billed as a desktop replacement. It had 6 USB ports, plus firewire and a PCMCIA slot, which was quite nice at the time. Running multiple music devices simultaneously (keyboads 1 & 2, drum module, guitar module) via USB was sweet, and I also had multiple 8 channel Firepods daisy chained on the Firewire. I really pushed that laptop to it's limits, and it took everything I could throw at it in this regard. And it did OK at gaming too, although it's graphics were soon left behind as technology progressed.
You don't know how useful having 6 USB ports on a laptop is until you have 6 USB ports. Charge a phone and an MP3 player simultaneously on seperate USBs, with an external HDD attached to another port, and 3 left over for USB midi instruments, and/or a thumb drive... Oh and cant forget the 3G/4G USB modem too (goodness I love having a 4G USB modem, it goes everywhere I go when I'm toting a laptop, which is great when WiFi isn't handy/available). Sure, you can buy an external USB expander/splitter, but it's so much easier and less of a fuss if you just HAVE 6 USB ports.
My 18.1" monster laptop only has four USB... sure, one doubles as a Thunderbolt port, but it's not the same.
I've definitely considered grabbing a a Quadro P6000 in an external TBolt box, but P6000's aren't cheap (they cost more than what I payed for this laptop/DTR, which was a lot). Cooling would be a breeze, as that'd be handled by the external enclosure, which also has it's own power supply. I've also considered a 1080T via TBolt, but at this point I might as well wait to see what the GTX 11xx series has to offer.
Also, somewhat related, if you are ever looking for a small MP3 player, The AGPTek A12 is awesome, and priced reasonably. The 32GB MicroSD card slot, plus the 8GB of internal storage, means lots of music, and the battery life and sound output is excellent. The Walmart site says up to 30 hours. Dunno about 30, but yeah 16 hours is easily doable...
I'm sure there are other tiny MP3 players with more features, but I grabbed this when the battery in my Sandisk Clip MP3 player (which looked very similar to this one) started to become useless/was down to say an hour per charge. I definitely feel like I traded up with the A12.
The screen can be a bit hard to read in bright light, but for less than $30, and with the awesome battery life... I use it often when mowing the lawn, riding the bike, road trips, etx.
BTW, the image below is much larger than the actual player, unless you are on a tiny screen.
I manage to upgrade to the 2nd Windows 10 release with no problem but i haven't tried any of the upgrades that follow that. i guess they won't work from what you are saying.
Mine keeps saying there is an update (I got the second windows 10 update installed too, so I think it's the first Creator's update that's "waiting"), but it never installs. I am thinking of doing a system restore and erasing all the data, then try again with a basically blank drive. I read somewhere that while newer devices need 2 GB ram to run Windows 10, MS grandfathered devices with less RAM for the upgrades.
If you don't have the 1st just do the 2nd. I do mine by using the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool to create a Windows 10 ISO and then 'burn' that ISO to a USB flash drive and then upgrade directly from Windows 10 running (it will say 'install' but it saves old app & program installs, drivers when their ain't newer ones, and Documents & Settings (you must tell it too though instead of clean install).
Greetings,
Oh gods... Let's see... From smallest to largest, and then as stuff came to mind, I guess:
Apple Watch, two Chromecasts (one 4K, one not), iPhone 8+, Apple TV 4K, Kindle (non-fire, non-touch, purely ebook reader), two Google mini's, one Google Home, Mac Mini (the last model with a SuperDVD drive), 10" iPad Pro, a Wacom drawing tablet, an Amazon Echo, 2017 MacBook Pro, Synology DS413j NAS with 12TB of RAID5 storage, a PlayStation 3, two PlayStation 4 Pros, an XBox One X, and a 2011 iMac. A mostly homebuilt Windows 10 box with i7 and nVidia 1080 GTX and 32GB of RAM as my rendering beast, another Windows 10 box (iBuyPower i5 (I think), nVidia 970 based with 16GB of RAM) for the living room (hooked up to an Oculus Rift), and an ancient Linux box that sits in a corner and just...works, as a server. Oh, and I have a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ mostly for the kids to program on and me to run RetroPi.
I have a TiVo (with grandfathered lifetime service), a Nintendo Switch (okay, my kids mostly play with it), an ANCIENT iPod Video that runs my car's music. I have two printers, one of which is also a decent scanner.
I've got five main lights in the house hooked up to a Homekit network that is controlled by the Apple TVs. While I have a ton of little devices also, one of the cooler that I have is a powerful Bluetooth shower speaker with a suction cup that lets me play tunes without having my phone in the bathroom. :)
That's the stuff that *I* use on a regular basis.
I've got a TRS-80 model 4 in the garage, a Spectravideo SV-318, and other old stuff, as well as a Nintendo Wii, a Playstation Portable (PSP), and a Nintendo Gameboy Advance.
...
Then there's the stuff my kids have, and my wife, which I won't enumerate.
Yeah, I'm a tech junkie. I got it bad.
-- Morgan
I suppose I am a tech junkie. My main computer is an Alienware desktop that is around 5 or 6 years old but still has reasonable performace, and I have three windows laptops that still work, when I upgrade a laptop I keep the old one. I've also got a Pandora handheld that I use a lot, this is a very small computer that runs it's own version of linux. And of course I've got four Raspberry Pis.
For older tech I've got an Atari 800XL, a 48k Sinclair Spectrum and a ZX Spectrum Vega. I do cheat a bit on the older machines, I've got add-ons for the Atari and the Spectrum that store tape and disc images on SD cards so I don't have to use real cassettes or floppy discs. I've got Amiga Forever and C64 Forever, emulators that let you have a virtual Amiga and C64 on your PC, and I use various non-commercial emulators.
For consoles I've got Playstations 1, 2 and 3, an original type X-Box, Game Cube, Wii U, Playstation Portable, Vita, Gameboy Advance and 3DS.
On the other hand, my mobile phone isn't very smart and I don't use it very much.
I read this and was thinking "Is this person a reviewer for a tech publication?"
I am more of a tech "enthusiast".
I do try to get every bit of utility from a peice of technolgy before discarding it.
I have 2 Smart phones, a tablet, 2 laptops and a compaq tower.
The win7 laptop has a 500 gig hard drive with an external 5 TB for backup& storage.
The compaq tower has a 350 Gig HD and the Old White Macbook has a 100 gb internal
and two 250gb lacie firewire external drives(one a bootable clone of the macbook)
and a 500gig USB external for film project files.
Lately I have had alot of useful tech literally handed to me by my neighbors.
You all might have seen my thread about the 5TB Seagate external my neighbor handed me one day.
I have another upstairs neighbor who collects a large monthly pension
and wants to be a "techie."
However he gets easily frustrated and a bit careless with his new toys and is quick to discards them over minor "issues".
However he always stops by my flat on his way to the dumpster.
The big monitor pictured on the right above the white Macbook, was given to me by this neighbor.
It is a 24 inch SAMSUNG SyncMaster NC240.
It retails for about $800 USD brand new.
It is the first External monitor ,I have used ,that Looks better than My macbook's built in Display,particularly for color exact work.
From what I could tell,the only "issue " was a bit of soda pop spilled on the outside enclosure.
Editing Films in My legacy Final cut pro 5 is a joy on this Display
The 19 inch Acer external monitor on the far left is also from this neighbor and it does have a broken on/off switch.
I have to turn it on/off by completing the exposed 3 point contact circuit
by placing small sliver of baking tin against it.other than that it works great.
The big monitor in the middle is a 22 inch HPw2207h.with both VGA and HDMI input
About $ 300 USD new.
It could be used as a TV with a HDMI External TV tuner for about $40 USD from Amazon.
I paid $25 USD for this Display at the local Salvation Army Family thrift store.
Lastly,I was walking home from my Masjiid last Friday
and saw shipping carton for an HP pavillion tower
on the grassy area of the side walk.
I gave it a subtle kick as I passed, and it did not fall over!!
I cut open the taped flaps with my pocket knife
and inside was ..an HP pavilion tower PC
along with a USB mouse and AC power cord and the original instruction
manual still in its plastic wrapper.
I quickly shoved the mouse& power cord into my backpack
and popped open the side case.
All of the 8 gigs of ram were missing and someone meticulously
Detached every component from the motherboard but left them all in place.
I Lugged the Bloody thing home anyway and salvaged the PSU and the optical drive and the 1 TB internal SATA drive running Windows 8.
Greetings,
Oddly enough the only one I've ever reviewed in any official capacity (along with the editor of Audio magazine as adult supervision) was the Spectravideo SV-318, when I was 14 years old for MicroKids magazine's inaugural issue. (They didn't last long.)
But yeah, I am a seriously tech addicted neophile. I love new technology, especially that I can program. It makes me downright giggly to open up a new thing, and immediately set to work bending it to my will...and my career has made my constant willingness to learn new technologies and reinvent my skills surprisingly lucrative.
-- Morgan
Now that was a walk down memory lane... While I'd never heard of the magazine, I definitely was in the target audience. My first computer was a TI99-4/A, and that started my love of tech.
Small is the new sexy!
Mini ITX, X470 (Ryzen+), 17cm x 17cm, has a x16 PCIe Gen 3 slot, 2 M2 2280 slots, and 2 ram slots (max 32GB of ram). They crammed quite a bit into such a tiny package! Review here:
I'm thinking that building a small form factor PC with this could be a lot of fun! Finding a suitably shorter length Nvidia graphics card could be an issue though, if you are trying to stay within the 'footprint' of such a tiny motherboard.
Yep, that's the tech junkie in me, thinking about what unusual enclosure I could stick this in, while billing it as my 'other rendering machine'...
For comparison, a Mac Cube was 25cm x 20 cm x20cm... I'm thinking the power supply would be the most challening issue, i.e. finding a suitably shaped one with sufficient 'oomph' for this setup while still fitting in your custom enclosure.
...crikey, the CPU cooler takes up most of the system.
I'm cautiously happy as a clam right now, and had to share what I'm doing right now...
Well, my preparation for future Daz content is going well so far. I had 2 OEM Samsung 512 GB NVME drives in a Raid 0 config, which I've successfully cloned over to a (single) Samsung 860 EVO 2 TB M2 SATA, and am currently cloning AGAIN over to a (single) Samsung 970 EVO 2 TB M2 NVME. I only have 2 NVME slots, hence the need to clone to another drive before cloning again to the new NVME drive.
The '1st' clone booted immediately, no muss no fuss despite moving from the NVME Raid array to the (larger) M2 SATA drive. I'm using Samsung's Data Migration software to do this btw.
Upgrading to a 2 TB drive was necessary, as I was running out of space on my 1 TB Raid array, and I prefer internal solutions when possible. The 2 TB SATA EVO seems to boot just as fast as the old Raid array, and I'm now waiting to see how well this much hyped Samsung 970 EVO NVME I'm clonging to now does... It should be much faster than the SATA drive, which seems pretty snappy to begin with...
Once THAT is done, I also grabbed a 2 TB Samsung 5400 RPM HDD, to move the contents of my current 1 TB HDD over to, which also arrived today. The price was right ($89, sale at Newegg), so I figured, might as well go for broke, plus my 'Data drive' partition is almost full (I set up a second partition as a photoshop scratch disk, which has a bit of space left). ! I like putting my pics, videos, and other files on a HDD, even though SSDs are extremely reliable these days. That way I don't have to sweat the 'less than 25% space remaining' warnings that I've been seeing with my NVME Raid array lately, plus HDDs are great for archives.
The external enclosure I ordered for my soon to be replaced HDD hasn't arrived yet (different shipper), but if needed I have other 2.5" external enclosures if I need something (very unlikely).
Not sure what I'll use the M2 SATA drive for once it's done being a 'go between' for cloning. I suppose I could use it as a RAID 1 mirror for the C drive (assuming that the NVME and SATA would play nice), or just a place to copy backups of my Daz stuff to for now...
So, short form, I've upgraded from 2 TB to 6 TB of storage space in this mondo 18.4" MSI GT83VR laptop of mine. I'll still have the option to add ANOTHER 2 TB via the now vacant 2nd NVME slot, but let's be honest. I just added 4 TB of additional storage, and it'll take a LONG time to fill that up - certtainly at least a year, probably several years....
I have 'brand unity' now too, although that means pretty much nothing. My current HDD is a HGST OEM drive. Maybe I can get an endorsement from Samsung or something... (I'm kidding of course).
As I mentioned before (in another post), I could re-use one of my 2 512 GB NVME sticks in my now vacant 2nd NVME slot, but I'm putting both of those away for now as a 'hard backup' of my current system/OS. Just in case I have a drive failure or something...
I looked into putting my 2 512 GB NVME drives into a Thunderbolt 3 NVME raid enclosure (one such option currently exists), but that thing is expensive... maybe when the price comes down on TBolt 3 stuff. There's plenty of SATA external stuff out there, but the NVME external enclosures are a bit more rare...
Of course, I already have been backing up my Daz folders (every month or two), onto a 4 TB external USB/SATA hard drive. Multiple backups good...
At some point, I may put that Thunderbolt 3/USB 3.1 combo port I have to run another GPU in an external enclosure (maybe the 24 GB Quadro P6000's will come down in price, who knows...). Yep, I be geeking out here. I forked out a lot of cash on this laptop, but haven't regretted the purchase.
Setting up a 'render station' and using this laptop to run it remotely could be another option, but that'd be new territory to me,. I've never done remote anything before...
Sure, there's things I wish thjis laptop had, such as a higher resolution screen, and programmable RGB for my illuminated keyboard, I just have red keys on my slightly older model, which is still awesome, AND a better power connector... but overall I've been relatively happy with this laptop. Been using the heck out of it over the last 10 months!
I suppose I could get a 4K TV, and use my HDMI port to work at a higher resolution, but I like having the TV on as background noise/something do distract me as I'm waiting on renders. I already use my blu-ray player in the laptop to watch Blu Ray disks (my DVD player isn't Blu Ray, haven't squeezed the life out of it yet). I mostly buy DVDs anyways ('cuz they are cheaper), the extra resolution from Blu Ray isn't that important to me.
This MAY qualify me as a tech junkie, as I'm actually enjoying doing this storage upgrade! I always get excited about upgrades, even if it's just installing a higher capacity battery into a laptop when the current battery is on it's last legs... That's not the case with this MSI yet, although it already has pretty short battery life due to the large screen and dual 1080's, but I may have to worry about that someday...
Anyways, just had to share my day...
My turn!
(All of my computers are running Windows 10 Pro)
Workstations / Desktops:
Dell Precision T7610 (Primary Daz Render Machine)
Dual quad core Intel Xeon E5v2 CPUs, 64GB 8 channel, ECC DDR3, GTX 1080 ti 11GB, Quadro K4000 3GB, 525GB SSD, 1TB WD Black HDD, 2TB WD Green HDD, 2x 2TB WD RE4 HDDs, Soundblaster Audigy 4, 43" LG 4K TV running 8bit full range RGB.
Dell Precision T7500
Dual 6 core Intel Xeon CPUs, 24GB 6 Channel ECC DDR3, GTX 560ti 2GB, 240GB SSD
Custom Build Desktop
AMD 8 core FX-8350 CPU, 16GB DDR3, GTX 1060 6GB, 500GB WD Velociraptor HDD, lots of Internal and external HDDs for video and music. 60" 1080p Sharp Quattron running 12bit full range RGB.
Alienware Steam Machine (Clearance purchase at gamestop $300)
Quad core i7 CPU, 8GB DDR3, GTX 750ti/860M 2GB GPU, 1TB HDD.
Mobile Workstation/Notebook Computer:
Dell Precision M6700
Quad core i7 CPU, 16GB DDR3, GTX 980M 8GB, 480GB MSATA SSD, 2x 2TB HDD, 1080p Screen.
Older IBuyPower Gaming Laptop
Quad core i7 CPU, 16GB DDR3, GTX 580M 2GB, 500GB HDD, 1TB HDD, 15" 1080p Screen.
Phone/Tablet:
Phone: OnePlus5t 8GB Ram, 128GB Storage
Tablet: Nvidia Shield lte, 32GB + 128GB MicroSD
(This list does not include my Wife and Son's computers/Tablets/Phones
Wow, I'm not alone (in my addiction). LOL
Laurie