computer

Desktop computer v2

Posted on by Dennis

I’ve been wanting to build a new PC for a while. My current PC was originally built back in 2012, and upgraded in 2018. There’s still a lot of life left in this PC, so it will definitely be repurposed. However, for desktop use, it has fallen short in being unable to run a few modern applications (ok, also games) that I’ve been interested in, namely: DaVinci Resolve, the 2020 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator, and Call of Duty: Warzone.

Spending a lot more time at home due to the pandemic also drove my decision to upgrade the PC. But everyone else also has had the same idea over the past year, so demand was (and still continues to be) crazy high, and supply super low. I couldn’t be too picky about the parts.

I wanted to build something based on the AMD Ryzen 5 3600. For the most part, AMD still has the edge on better price to performance ratio, although with the current economic state of supply chain issues and shortages, that could be somewhat varied. One tradeoff though is that the AM4 socket is nearing the end of its lifecycle, which means significant future upgrades may be limited. On the GPU side of things, I was looking at the Nvidia GeForce GTX 1660 series. Both of my CPU and GPU choices are popular mid-range options that are last year’s generation, which means the prices shouldn’t be as high as the latest/upcoming generation freshly released.

Over the past month (from Black Friday through Boxing day deals), I managed to get the following components:

Type Item Price
CPU AMD Ryzen 5 3600 3.6 GHz 6-Core Processor $287.67
Motherboard MSI B550-A PRO ATX AM4 Motherboard $164.99
Memory Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory $154.99
Storage Western Digital Blue SN550 1 TB M.2-2280 NVME Solid State Drive $119.99
Video Card Asus GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER 6 GB TUF GAMING OC Video Card $309.99
Case Corsair 100R ATX Mid Tower Case $54.99
Power Supply EVGA B5 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply $84.99
Total $1177.61

I don’t think anything in particular was significantly discounted at this time, however the name of the game was snagging the items before they went out of stock.

And here’s a comparison of the new CPU compared to my current PC’s past and current processors:

So far, I’m really happy with the build. It performs well for all the productive as well as entertainment purposes I had planned. I feel it’s going to be a great PC for the next few years, at least.

VMWare ESXi 5 Whitebox

Posted on by Dennis

I have 2 old computers (Pentium III and Celeron computers circa early 2000’s) that I currently use as servers for file storage, backups, and testing.  I thought it was about time to consolidate these servers I had, up the performance, and set up a flexible test environment for my coding endeavours.

VMWare’s free ESXi hypervisor piqued my interests earlier last year.  It’s comparable to XenServer but apparently has better support for Windows virtual machines.  Being a bare-metal hypervisor, it should give better performance than a usual virtual machine sitting on top of a full-blown operating system.  So I set my eyes on building an inexpensive but powerful ESXi whitebox that would take over the roles of my old computers.

I did a lot of research on ESXi and compatible components from various sites, blogs and forums.  I learned that ESXi was quite picky in what hardware it would run on.  I definitely wanted to buy the correct components that would work with ESXi 5, aiming to get everything under $500.

This is what I came up with (prices after price matching/rebates):

  • AMD Phenom II X6 1055T Thuban 6-Core 2.8GHz Processor @ $122.17
  • ASRock 990FX EXTREME3 Motherboard (ATX, AM3+, DDR3, SATA3) @ $156.60
  • Mushkin Enhanced Blackline Frostbyte PC3-12800 8GB 2x4GB Memory Kit @ $44.99
  • Gigabyte Radeon HD 5450 Low Profile Video Card @ $14.99
  • Coolermaster Elite 350 Black ATX Case with 500W PSU @ $49.69
  • Western Digital Caviar Green 2TB WD20EARS
  • Trendnet Gigabit Network Adapter TEG-PCITXR

This selection got me well within my $500 budget even after taxes.  The hard disk and network adapter were components I already had.

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Trying to crack DeepFreeze

Posted on by Dennis

This is an anecdote from when I was in elementary school and takes place around 1999-2000. Windows computers were just being installed in the classrooms. The mechanism that locked down the computers initially was system policies. You could screw around with a limited number of settings and applications on the system, but a lot of stuff was restricted.

However, one day in the school library, a new computer didn’t have such restrictions in place. Our 7th grade teacher (resident IT technician) had just finished setting up DeepFreeze on it, and challenged my friends and I to try to break it. We tried everything, like deleting all we could in C:\Windows, but it all came back magically after the reboot. I must admit DeepFreeze worked very well.

That was my first encounter with DeepFreeze, but that was definitely not the last. The computers in my high school had DeepFreeze installed. The public computers in the Vancouver Public Library are also locked down with DeepFreeze.

DeepFreeze works by redirecting all changes to the contents of a hard drive to another location, which is wiped upon a reboot. Obviously I didn’t fully understand how this worked back in 6th grade. But in any case, it’s very effective and very difficult to bypass!