Episode: 3096
Title: HPR3096: Unscripted ramblings on a walk:  PC Building.
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3096/hpr3096.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:39:07

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,096 for Monday 15 June 2020. Today's show is entitled
Unscripted Ramblings on a Walk, PC Building,
and is part of the series' hardware upgrades. It is hosted by Christopher Monsieur Hobbs
and is about two minutes long
and carries a clean flag. The summary is,
I take a walk and discuss my experience building a new PC
after having not done so for many years.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
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Hello, Hacker Public Radio.
This is CM Hobbs, or Hobbs C, one of those.
Do you remember which name I'm using? I went back and I looked
and I have been posting on Hacker Public Radio nearly once a year
since 2013. I skipped it looked like 2015 and 2018.
And you got several from me in 2017 and 2019.
But bottom line is trying to establish that I post
podcasts relatively and frequently.
And I still owe Ken an episode on DNS.
But due to a recent server crash, I'm not real happy talking about DNS right now.
So I had an idea for maybe a series.
I walk regularly and I walk about a mile.
During that time, I, what is a mile and not freedom units?
And I don't remember is that two kilometers are not quite two kilometers.
Anyway, got distracted.
I walk a lot and I figure it's a good time for me to have more unscripted
ramblings.
If this is boring or not a good idea or gets too weird or whatever,
there's a comment box for that.
But the last time I did unscripted ramblings,
they seem to go over pretty well.
So we'll do it again.
So I'll do my little walk and then maybe in a couple of days,
I'll bring another recorder with me on another walk.
And see if we can keep it up and get some episodes in.
Tonight, if I have enough time here,
I would like to talk a little bit about my experience building a computer
for the first time and probably not really sure.
Doing a build from the ground up, I don't know, it may.
It's been at least 10 years since I built one for myself.
Maybe, maybe even longer.
Maybe even gosh, 13, 14 years if I had to guess.
I spent a lot of time taking older computers and putting them together,
repairing things and trying to salvage them.
In fact, I built a little personal network on some of that.
There's people coming, pause for a minute.
Let them get out of your shot so they don't think I'm crazy.
But spent some time piecing to get their older computers,
trying to revive them.
That worked out really well.
You know, the usual swap parts here and there, I'm going to bone yard.
Some of it's from some side hustle.
I do repairing machines for people.
I often package them up into the local computer recycling facility.
And they usually let me pick over parts before I turn it in.
So I've had lots of functional machines.
But I've come to a point in my professional life where I need more horsepower,
a lot more horsepower.
I need to build a lab to do some training.
And I don't have a lot of space at the moment for computer rebits.
So I figured I'd build a big fancy rig.
And that's what I did.
And I was actually shocked at sort of the way a lot of things have changed.
A lot of my computers, my newest computers,
besides laptops that have been issued to me by my full-time employers
over the last few years.
I think the newest machine I had was probably from 2011.
Maybe 2013.
I had a 2013 iMac and that finally died.
That was the catalyst for all of this.
The 2013 iMac running Linux on it.
MX Linux.
I've been using and enjoying quite a lot lately.
Maybe that's a good jumping off point for another episode.
My usage of antics and MX.
When the 2013 iMac died.
It's one that I had purchased from a friend and upgraded.
Had to unglue the screen and everything.
The RAM put a terabyte SSD in it.
And that was the hottest machine I'd had in the house.
The only other more modern machine is probably my son's gaming PC.
But I don't actively use that.
And I didn't assemble it.
It was a gift given to him by somebody else.
It was pre-assembled.
So I'm coming from knowledge of PC building from.
I really hate to say it.
But I think maybe as late as 2006.
Something like that 2004.
Maybe even 2003.
And things have changed quite a lot.
It looks like we've got a lot more up ahead.
So it might get loud.
Things have changed quite a lot.
So I figured I would enumerate some of the most striking differences that I've noticed.
First off, I think.
The most amazing thing to me.
I have our friend here.
We have two friends on the walk that feel the need to vocalize their feelings.
Large, ominous dogs.
Overweight.
Fluffy, but bark a lot.
Anyway, the first thing I noticed is very striking to me is the case.
I ordered a fractal designs case.
I can't remember what model it is.
But I made sure to get one that did not have a clear side.
My son has acrylic.
Maybe it's not acrylic.
Maybe it's a tempered glass.
It's very scared I would break that.
So I got one with.
Middle sides.
And I'm amazed at the modularity of it.
It's really quite striking.
Everything is easy to get to.
I found a mounting thing.
Even with my larger hands.
It was not really all that difficult.
It's been very difficult in past years to mount things.
And in this case, everything was easy to access.
Look what this mower is not too loud.
Many of the parts were modular and interchangeable.
I can move them around as I soft bit.
There are several storage mounting options.
There's a plate to mount three or four SSDs.
And it came off and it made for easy mounting.
And then the easy reassembly.
Mount points for the motherboard were plentiful rather.
This was a pretty, I think it's pretty big to me.
They called it a mid-size case.
But it looked like.
It looked very spacious.
I could fit a lot of things in there.
The cooler, too, I didn't go with liquid cooling.
But the cooler for the processor is very large.
And it fit just fine.
Much larger than any cooler I had ever seen before.
Another very useful and striking thing is that the power supply was on the bottom.
And I found that bottom in the case.
I found that to be really nice.
Cable management was excellent.
A lot of problems have been solved in the last 10 or 15 years.
Modular power supply surprised me as well.
Fewer cables.
Only had the cables for what I need.
And I'm sure for a lot of people listening,
a lot of this is just a part of the course.
But I was really amazed at the leaps and technology.
The cooling options on the case were another amazing thing to me.
Because it has dust covers.
And it has vents on the top and the bottom.
I can take the top off and vented.
I can take the bottom off and vented.
I can place fans really wherever I like.
To customize the airflow for myself.
However, I want it to be done.
Or I suppose redirect liquid cooling or that sort of thing.
Very, very neat.
Another thing that surprised me,
not from the case, but moving on to the motherboard,
is all of the, I believe there.
I'm going to show my ignorance of hardware.
So if you're screaming at me, I'm sorry.
Think they're M.2 slots.
Storage has gotten much smaller.
And that amazed me as well.
I feel like I've popped out of a time machine.
And I'm in the future.
I did not put an M2 drive in it.
M.2, I'm not sure how you say that.
But it has, the motherboard I purchased,
has three spots for it.
And I can use my traditional,
big chunky spinny disks, or I can use SSDs.
I can use those M2s.
Lots of options.
The processor was also much larger than I recall processors being.
I ended up going with an AMD Ryzen.
I don't remember the model number,
but it's the 12 core, 24-thread option.
And that was just mind-boggling,
something to the order of three,
some odd gigahertz per core,
just wild.
And I put 32 gigs of RAM in it.
The board tops out at 128 gigs of RAM,
which completely blows my mind.
One day, I hope to fill it up with that.
Don't know what I'll do with all of that.
The 32 gigs is enough for me to build my home lab
for virtual machines to do my training.
But I don't know.
128 sounds pretty sweet.
And with the board I have,
I can also replace the processor with their 24 core model
that allows for 48 threads.
That's more machine than I ever thought could exist.
I'm not saying that to Brian,
because anybody can go out and buy these things,
but I'm saying it because I'm completely floored
at home computing has moved to this space.
You know, I'm not as old as some of the listeners are.
But I do remember the first computer
I had messed with was a Tandy 1000HX.
And my gosh, this is leaps and bounds.
We've come a long way.
And especially mind-boggling to me,
because my most recent machine
that had any power is,
I think, had a X1 carbon sixth gen
that my employer has given to me to use.
And it's a pretty speedy machine,
but this is very impressive.
So another thing I've noticed,
along the lines of the case,
is there's no,
and I bought the case for this,
partially for this purpose for some novelty,
but there's no base slots on the front.
You know,
now I'm going to put a CD or DVD drive in it,
not going to have bits hanging out of the front of it.
It's just an obelisk.
It's a rectangle.
It's got some ports,
but it's a rectangle with a big blue line on it.
And that's another thing.
All of the RGB LEDs.
My goodness.
Everything is rainbow colored.
I tried to find parts without,
but even my motherboard has an RGB LED,
maybe array on it.
It has this circle of lights.
It's something else.
I put a very modest video card in it,
and I was surprised at how large video cards have gotten
even this modest one.
It's a very inexpensive,
I think I paid all of maybe $60 for the video card.
I do intend in the future to place several higher end video cards in it
to do some work with GPUs,
like password cracking and that sort of thing.
But the processor alone at the moment is enough
that I can run a lot of the resource intensive builds
that I need to do a lot of my programming work.
I can have several virtual machines.
It's really impressive.
The cable management is something else
that was pretty amazing to me.
So a lot of Velcro, in the case,
zip ties, luckily,
there were not many of those zip ties
that are in nightmare to work with.
The options on the motherboard for storage
beyond the 3M2 slots that appeared to be on there
was pretty cool too.
It has onboard,
I believe, eight SATA ports.
That was pretty mind-boggling to me as well.
I had never considered putting that much storage
or needing that many drives in a single machine.
I really went for broke with expandability options,
but now I'm sort of unsure of where to go with it.
At the very least, I know I can upgrade it.
I don't really play any games.
I run a lot of virtual machines.
I analyze a lot of network traffic.
I open fairly large packet capture file.
It's been a lot of time building
sort of large software projects.
So there's room to do all of that.
Another thing that's kind of impressed me
that I can't make use of
and did not with this computer,
but, for example, my work machine,
it has a high DPI display.
I think it's 4K.
Again, displays and graphics are not my area of understanding.
So the network's security guys.
I do know that these high DPI displays
are really kind of frustrating to me
because my eyes are awful.
We're bifocals and all that.
I find that I have to
use larger resolutions
or, I guess, smaller resolutions.
And screens that most people would find
awful across the street
and get away from yet another one lower.
And so that's something I've bumped into
being a problem is even with this computer,
I've got it plugged into a fairly large monitor
and it's not a high DPI display.
However, the display is so large
that I have to zoom in my text
and I have to set an appropriate screen resolution
so that I can read everything.
I'm not blind.
I just don't see so well.
So I have to make adjustments for that.
And that I've found adjustments for screen size
and Linux has been really awful.
Scaling is just tough.
At a previous job, I had to use a Mac
with a 4K screen
and the UI scaling was really,
really easy, the whole UI scaled at once.
And on these Linux rigs,
the scaling is just crazy.
It's almost like it's a per application basis.
And I think that's part of the problem
of the display managers display servers
like X or Wayland or whatever.
And the only desktop environment I found,
I prefer to use XFCE usually.
I've used all these bespoke
styling window managers,
but I eventually set up an XFCE just getting things done.
Window manager wars can come another day.
Use what you like, folks.
But the only window manager
or desktop environment that I've found
that handles scaling well enough
is actually KDE Plasma.
I've noticed in Genome,
I can only double the scaling size,
I can do a 1.5 scale
and that works well enough for me.
So,
I've drifted off a little bit away from my new rig.
I suppose if I had to sum it all up,
the things that amaze me
as far as PC building is concerned now,
that I've missed out on in the last 10,
maybe 15 years.
Modularity, that's a big one.
Highly modular.
The
organization of the cases is amazing.
How quiet the cases are is astounding to me.
I've got this big monolith
and even when the CPU is really cooking,
when I take the governor off of performance mode
and I open it up so I can do some heavy computation,
it's whisper quiet.
And I don't know how they pulled that off.
I guess good bearings in the fans.
Also no spinning discs,
no spinning hard drives.
So yeah,
modularity,
ease of use, the quietness.
All of the vast options in the bios
are amazing too.
I have so much control over storage.
It's another person walking here
so I'll sidetrack a little bit.
I'll give you a little bit of a service around people,
the social anxiety.
Good evening.
Back to the story.
So yes, the options in the bios
I have seemingly great control over everything
from storage controllers to processor features,
virtualization features.
There's even overclocking options baked in
as well as corresponding to hardware switches on the board.
Overclocking seems deceptively simple,
afraid of cooking something.
I don't know that I want to mess with it.
I've spent too much money on this,
so I don't want to burn it up.
But overclocking seems like something I could do
if I really needed to.
I understand why people build gaming rigs now too.
This whole podcast I feel makes me sound like I'm a little ignorant
and maybe I have been.
I think it was totally worth building a machine.
I don't know how much money I saved.
But I certainly got everything I wanted
and I didn't come with all the garbage that
pre-built computers would come with.
And I feel like I'd be able to upgrade it a little better.
So maybe the tide's turning for me from
rescuing old computers and recycling them,
though I do think there's merit to that.
But I may just stick with building them in the future.
I still pack up all of these things for my clients
and take them to the recycling facility for them.
But I may not pick over the parts so often.
Maybe for a home server,
you know, or a little network device.
I might do that.
But I've really enjoyed this.
I don't know how much I enjoyed putting it,
the actual act of putting it together.
It was kind of frustrating and migrating all of my data
and all this and that.
The more I go with computing as my career,
the bigger pain in the backside it is
to deal with general systems management myself.
But I do enjoy the tinkering.
And I was amazed at how easy it was to piece everything together.
I do remember having issues with previous builds.
Also compatibility was pretty straightforward.
I used PC park ticker,
which I'm sure everybody uses.
And sadly,
I did not really need to know much about whether or not the parts
would go together.
PC park ticker took care of that for me.
I feel like I should have paid closer attention to that.
But that's another extension of it that I've noticed over the last 15 years.
Figuring out what works together is way easier than it used to be.
It's all a good thing.
And again, I probably sound ignorant,
but it's been a neat experience stepping out of my time machine
and standing in front of the bench full of computer parts
and tossing it all together and remembering how it used to be.
I'm surprised that I haven't built one sooner
but I was on the kick of salvaging machines.
So I've walked my mile almost
and just a few steps from my home.
So I'll cut this one off here,
try to summon the courage to go inside and submit it as an episode.
And let me know what you think.
If you'd like to hear another one of these,
I can find a technical topic to discuss while I walk.
It seems like an easy way to produce a podcast.
Thanks, everybody, for listening.
And thanks, Ken and friends, for keeping HPR alive.
I really enjoy listening.
And if you're thinking about contributing an episode,
definitely throw one out there.
You can see the quality of this episode.
I just walked around the block and recorded it.
So give it a shot.
Have a great weekend or whatever your listening time is.
Folks, we'll catch you on the next episode.
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