Over the years I have bought and installed more memory upgrades than I would care to mention. First stop has been either Kingston or Crucial. No préférence, usually price or availability of the product.
But just read the price has rocketted by great amount due to all the demands of data centres and AI. So one has decided to stop direct sales
Just left with Kingston, unless you know or use another ?
But also have to admit, more and more computers coming in for repair have the memory direct on the motherboard board, or the case is so difficult to open they are no longer designed to open. But worse still they continue to sell new laptops for windows 11 (installed) with 4gb memory which is not wonderful.
Hynix, Samsung, G Skill if you want “better sounding” brands (they probably spent more on marketing).
I used “no name” CSX or Teamgroup modules, and had no problem with them.
I seem to remember “Kingmax”, but I’m not sure this brand exists today.
I saw that Crucial story too and I have bought direct from them more than once. You can still get Crucial from Best Buy or Amazon and probably other places. In the past the pricing was not much, if any, different buying direct versus Best Buy. I don’t think Crucial wanted to alienate their large customers like Best Buy by undercutting prices.
Note - these shortages and price hikes should only affect DDR5…
I’m just about to buy 16 GB of DDR3 and 1 TB SSD (from Bezos Corp) for a box I’m going to use to run Jellyfin - it’s a media streaming platform/server, but it’s fully open source, unlike Plex…
I’ve got a Quad Core i5 sitting on my floor next to me desk - hasn’t been powered up since my youngest daughter switched completely to Apple (iPad, iPhone, Mac Mini and MacBook) - so probably 3 years?
Going to whack in a spare NVidia (GTX1650 super with 4 GB) and keep it plugged direct into my switch and index my movie and TV show collection on my NAS over 1 Gbit… Probably install Ubuntu 24.04 on it - still undecided about whether desktop, or headless… Probably easiest to install desktop - I can always disable GDM from running when I’m ready for it to go “headless”… That will be the easiest way to get NVidia proprietary drivers working - too much stuffing around in Debian…
I was using Plex Media Server on a Pi4 - but - it was just too damn slow to find and “transcode” new content on my NAS… I don’t think Pi4 (or even Pi5) is quite ready yet to run heavy compute stuff…
What I like about having my own streaming server - anyone in the house can access it - and I can watch stuff on my laptop or MacBook, or iPad or Android phone - and resume where I left off when I move to another device (e.g. my desktop machine) - just like having my own self-hosted Netflix…
Hmmm… I already have an idle i7 (not sure what gen) with 16 GB RAM - and I have spare 256 GB SATA SSD’s… Probably cheaper to buy a low profile intel arc a310 - as the JellyFin recommendations seem to prefer that over NVidia GPU… That way I don’t need to buy RAM or SSD… and spend that money on an Intel Arc GPU instead…
Same here - my most grunty system is still on DDR4…
And all the Apple shite I (and my family) have is all soldered on - maybe DDR5 - but no upgrade path…
That Intel ARC A310 GPU has 4 GB of DDR6!
I should get one ASAP…
I’d love ECC… But the only system I have using (or that can use ECC) is my HP N40L microserver running TrueNAS 13… I upgraded from 8 GB non-ECC to 16 GB ECC and - no issues…
I really need to get a spare Power Supply for this system…
Update - just ordered my Intel Arc A310 GPU (Sparkle brand)…
Hopefully pick up today.
Going to install it in an ancient Lenovo ThinkCentre with some older gen i7… 16 GB DDR3… 256 GB SATA SSD…
Install Debian Trixie (13) get it online - then disable the DE / GUI and install JellyFin media server on it…
– edit update –
Hmmm - I thought it was an i7 - but it’s an i5… Considered resurrecting my old AMD Phenom II X6 desktop - which was my daily driver for over 10 years (2010 to 2021) - but did a search : apparently a circa 2012 i5 “vPro” is better than a circa 2020 AMD Phenom - even if it has 2 less cores…
I was tossing up whether to go Ubuntu 24 or Debian 13 - opted for the latter - Ubuntu 24 has ffmpeg 6x - Trixie has ffmpeg 7x… it’s one of those things that gets better each release…
6.x is VASTLY better than the old 4.x ffmpeg that came with Ubuntu 22 (and thus Pop!_OS 22)… and in many ways - Debian is often easier to update to next release than Ubuntu (just update it to the latest in its current release - and use set to replace trixie with forky - e.g.
Anyway - I remember doing that to upgrade Squeeze to Wheezy… and it worked… I wouldn’t necessarily do that with Raspbian though - which is pretty much Debian for armhf/arm64 - but I wouldn’t risk it - I’d wait for the Pi Foundation to officially release it…
– edit –
Here I go again - updating / editing posts…
Famous last words - tried that new Intel GPU in two different systems - they won’t even POST! i.e. no display output on the HDMI out port of the new GPU… Haven’t tried other GPU… Don’t care to… If they won’t POST with the new GPU - they’re landfill…
I may end up digging out my old 13 yo AMD desktop and trying it out there… I used to game on that System with an NVidia GPU (GTX650Ti / OC) on Linux - then replaced that with a GTX-1650Ti “Super”)…
I keep replying to my own posts - but - just thought I’d update…
This “mini-project” was to build a Debian Trixie system to host JellyFin media streamer… I was previously using a Pi4 and Plex - but the Pi4 just doesn’t have enough grunt to do transcoding and it would take literally days to re-index my library of video files (mostly movies, and TV shows)…
I underthought my idea to save $$$ - i.e. add a PCIe Intel GPU to an older i5 or i7 system… Instead of adding RAM and SSD… it was cheaper - or so it seemed.
Now it seems - I was wrong and didn’t do my research… The Intel ARC A310 GPU requires at least a 10th Gen i5 or a Ryzen 3000…
So - it won’t work in ANY of the i5/i7 systems I have - nor will it work in either of the pre-Ryzen AMD systems I have! Doh! I reckon most of those will probably end up as landfill now…
I think I might have to “invest” in a very SFF 10th gen or later mini-PC that has a half height PCIex x16 slot for a GPU… and I think I also need a Mobo with 4.0 PCIe bandwidth… Doh!
The reason to have a home-based streaming system? So I can use it like Netflix or Apple TV or Amazon Prime - watch content from any device in the house - and - resume where I left off watching something - e.g. I start watching a show on my desktop PC - then I’d like to resume watching where I left off - on a laptop, tablet or even smartphone…
Plus its kinda fun doing this sort of thing… Sure - now it’s looking like yearly subscriptions to all those services might be cheaper than me buying hardware!
Not planning on updating my daily driver Ryzen 7 with 64 GB DDR4 and 8 GB Radeon GPU… it’ll do me for at least another 5 years - maybe more… Just like the AMD Phenom II I built in 2010 - and used daily till 2021…
It would work in my current desktop - but - my Radeon X6600 is a better GPU…
I’m going to hunt around for a cheap SFF PC - like a ThinkCentre Mini PC with a Gen10 i5 or i7 and PCIe x16 slot (the tiny Geek-com style ones are too small and don’t have PCIe slots for GPU).
This reply has been sitting in draft for the last couple of hours or so …
Just ordered a refurbished Dell Optiplex SFF from e-bay with an i5 10500 Gen10 CPU, 16 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD… Got wait till early Jan… So putting this mini-project on hold till then…
Great minds think alike.
I have a refurbished Dell Optiplex SFF with an i5., 8Gb ram, 500Gb ssd.
It is my spare , in case of failure, plus for experiments like Gentoo.
Probably a bit older than yours … its an Optiplex 9020.
True - my parents were involved in amateur theatre in my hometown of Newcastle NSW - my mum an actress (she used to insist on the non-gendered “actor”) and my dad a set and costume designer…
My mum occasionally got paid gigs too - my dad worked for the local TV station (NBN 3 in Newcastle) as a graphic designer - and my mum used to appear in the late afternoon segments between cartoons - with a clown who’d do horrible things to her (never liked clowns since).
By 1973 - my dad was working professionally as a theatre designer (stage sets, and costumes) - and my mum was getting professional work as an actor in theatre shows…
And I worked for a local theatre on and off here in Perth - I liked the job - but it was unreliable as a means of income and the pay wasn’t great… Worked six weeks on an extended run of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” - mostly doing scene changes (the set revolved - but it was heavy and it took three blokes on a winch to turn it) - but I also appeared as a mourner at Ophelia’s funeral (and had to restrain Laertes [Ophelia’s brother] when he tried to attack Hamelt). Then as a Norwegian soldier in Fortinbras’ army after the end climax when Hamlet and Claudius are dead…
Can you imagine what it is like writing a play… compared to writing a story. You would have to deal with all the props as well as the story and there would be no scope for text telling the reader about the locale.
Then when implementing it, you would have the actors putting their own interpretation on top of what the author envisaged.
It is a whole different world. Shakespeare was off the planet.
I think writing software is more like writing a book than a play. The author has full control.
If software were like a play you would need a ‘theatre’ to run it in and ‘actors’ to play various roles. Maybe some gaming software comes close to that.
