GA-A320M-DS2 - cheaper AM4 mainboard

AMD promised AM4 mainboards at prices as low as 50 USD, but VAT and mainboard manufacturers will surely modify (increase) this price point. Right now the cheapest mainboard, as far as I've seen, is the Gigabyte GA-A320M-DS2, which costs 57GBP = 71USD (+ VAT).

The  Gigabyte GA-A320M-DS2 mainboard is based on the second cheapest AMD chipset, the A320, which offers the least amount of ports, slots and BIOS tweaks... but in terms of mainboard price, this may turn out to be the cheapest, as the cheaper chipset, the A300, is meant for mini-ITX boards, which need additional layers, thus adding to the price.

First about compatibility. This mainboard has:

• analog VGA port and a single link DVI port
• PCI-Express 3.0 slots, backwards compatible with 2.0
• 6 x USB 2.0/1.1 ports
• 4 x SATAIII ports, backwards compatible with SATAI and SATAII
• one PS/2 port for mouse and/or keyboard

What you can't use from an older PC is the memory, as the mainboard has two DDR4-2667MHz slots, supporting ECC (with the appropriate CPU).

The CPU you'll be using on socket AM4 will most likely be a RyZen (or later), BUT the mainboard can also be used to replace a defective mainboard in an OEM system, which was fitted with old-fashion 28nm Excavator AM4 CPU or APU (first released in 2016). The following 28nm processors are supported by the mainboard: Athlon X4 950, A6-9500E, A6-9500, A8-9600, A10-9700E, A10-9700, A12-9800E, A12-9800.

Although this mainboard can be used in a single video card gaming PC, a high end card would almost certainly cover the two small PCI Express x1 slots, so just keep that in mind, when shopping for add-in cards and USB adapters.

As you may have figured out already, there's no M.2 slot on this board, so it's not recommended for applications which need that ultra-fast storage of up to 4GB/s, but personally I can't think of any App, which wouldn't work just fine on a couple of mid-range SSDs, operating at 550MB/s each on SATA III.

Tesla Model S, X and Hyundai Ioniq efficiency

Bjorn Nyland, a popular Youtuber among EV owners and Tesla fans, recently did a very simple power consumption test with the Tesla Model S 70D facelift, Model X P90DL and Hyundai Ioniq.

If you like the video, please subscribe to Bjorn Nyland's channel!

The results are somewhat surprising, as they reveal cheapest car, the Hyundai Ioniq, to be the most efficient of the three. On the other hand we should have expected such results, as the cheap car is much lighter and has very few features, when compared to the luxury sedan and SUV.

As you can see from the figures above, the Ioniq is exceptional when it comes to city traffic at relatively low speeds. Its top speed is just 150kph/93mph, as it has only a 88kW/117hp motor and 28kWh battery at 32.000USD, while the cheapest Tesla Model S 70 has a 245kW motor and 70kWh battery pack. The model S and X used in this test are both AWD (Model S with two 192kW/259hp motors and the Model X 90D with ~700hp total), so that's where the extra weight comes from.

AMD RyZen 5 is in stores - review

AMD RyZen 7 is not recommended for gamers, who don't stream or anything else while gaming, as 4 of the 8 cores remain mostly unused in today's games. Most games are optimized for 4 cores, so RyZen 5 makes much more sense for gamers, as they can spend less money on the CPU and more on the GPU, making the system much more affordable and balanced.

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In terms of raw CPU performance the AMD RyZen 5 1400/1500X 4c/8t is on the same level as the previous generation AMD FX-8000 processor lineup, while the power consumption is just 50% of the AM3+ platform... but for gaming, obviously the new platform is much better, as it features PCI-Express 3.0 and up to DDR4-3600Mhz memory, alongside the fast M.2 SSD storage slot.

AMD RyZen 5 1600/1600X 6c/12t has more power than Intel's Core i7-7700 4c/8t, but it's not as good a deal gaming, as the RyZen 5 1400 4c/8t. This processor is recommended for heavy multitasking on a very low budget.

The good news about these processors is that they all contain two quad core modules, with 2 or 4 cores disabled symmetrically, so the 16MB L3 cache, PCI-Express lanes and memory controllers remain intact - they are the same as in the RyZen 7 lineup.

In some situations it would be faster to have a single module, as the four cores could be directly connected to everything, instead of going through the Infinity Fabric between CPU modules, CPU and RAM, CPU and video card...etc. BUT some reviewers did a simulated comparison, and came to the conclusion that in real world gaming it doesn't make a noticeable difference.

The big question in my mind is whether AMD will release some low end processor (RyZen 3 or Athlon category) with only one module, as they would be faster and more efficient than current FM2+ and AM3+ quad core processors, even though they would be limited to single channel memory and 8 PCI-Express 3.0 lanes for the main graphics card slot. It remains to be seen if AMD will consider such products at least for low end laptops, where single channel memory is actually quite common.

PewDiePie's new MainGear PC

PewDiePie is the best Youtuber, as he has an unimaginable number of subscribers (54M+) and views ... and is growing every day. He recently had some troubles with "the real media" (Wall Street Journal), which ran a campaign against him, accusing him of some immoral things, based on some scenes from his videos, taken out of context... a real mess. They basically destroyed PewDiePie's side projects, he lost a lot of money, but luckily his Youtube channel is still intact, so he still has a significant income... but more importantly, the majority of his subscribers support him and advertisers still advertise on his channel ... and give him free stuff :)

MainGear live built an awesome liquid-cooled PC for him, and shipped it a few days ago. It's a beast, with two nVidia GTX Titans and wrapped in PewDiePie-designed skin. MainGear and PewDiePie are giving away a similar system, in a red case, but the specs are a bit more modest:

• MSI Z270 PC Mate motherboard
• Intel Core i5-7500 Kaby Lake processor
• Maingear Epic 120 Supercooler
• 8GB HyperX Fury DDR4-2666Mhz RAM (2x4GB)
• nVidia GTX 1070 8GB GDDR5 video card
• 860W Corsair AX860 Professional power supply
• 512GB Samsung 960 Pro SSD
• Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64bit

Take a look at PewDiePie's unboxing video and subscribe to him, if you haven't already:

Retiring some old PC hardware Part 1

When I moved, about 10 years ago, I threw away most of my old computer parts, including my first PC called "8088XT 10Mhz Turbo System" up to my 80486DX 100MHz mainboard and processor. What I still have, is a 900MHz Athlon processor with mainboard, an AMD K6-2 350MHz board and CPU ... and several other defective mainboard I have replaced for friends over the years. Today I took pictures of some old hardware parts, which can't really be used anymore, as they aren't compatible even with Windows XP, which is really old (15+ years).

This is a 10Mbps network card, which I bought for about 15 USD and used it in our first neighborhood network in ~2001. At first we used coaxial cables with terminators at each end and had very frequent problems. On it we shared a 128Kbps unlimited internet connection (paid about 40 USD/month, out of which 5USD were for the cable modem) and played multiplayer games like Starcraft, Warcraft 2 ...etc.

Later we switched to a switch-based network and the card went into my sister's PC, as it only supported 10Mbps on the UTP cable too.

This was our first switch ... to be more exact it's the replacement switch for the original one, which died after a thunderstorm. It was mostly our fault, as we strung a cable between two apartment buildings right between the tops. Lighting didn't strike it directly, but our building's lightning rod got struck and created an electromagnetic field strong enough to fry ALL our switches and a couple of network cards.

All in all this was our first real network, running at 100Mbps between 6 users, later between ~25 users, as we expanded our network and got faster and faster internet.

This is a simple 100Mbps network card, which survived the lightning strike, because it was not in a PC at that moment, as its connector was broken and the cable kept falling out ... At one point it was installed in a Pentium II 266Mhz server, which I built for better bandwidth management and user blocking with the Wingate app. The server had 3 network cards, as I managed to combine two 256Kbps internet connections together (for browsing only).

This is an ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP video card with 8MB memory. I didn't use it at all, as I got it from one of the old PCs I bought for peanuts ... I only wanted the cases, as they had 6 x 5.25" bays.

I used this IDE/ATA133 controller card in the large computer case, which had 6 x 5.25" bays (I later added two more bays). At one point I installed 8 DVD writers in it with two of these cards and could copy four DVDs on-the-fly, but only at 4X (15 minutes/4.7GB).

Anyways, into a large box in the attic they'll go, along with other interesting parts, which I'll include in a later blog post.