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Thoughts re: Nvidia and a refurbished PC

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Stevo
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Re: Thoughts re: Nvidia and a refurbished PC

#11 Post by Stevo »

manyroads wrote: Tue Feb 05, 2019 4:39 pm
Stevo wrote: Tue Feb 05, 2019 4:35 pm As far as I know, most of the newer Nvidia 1000 series work fine in MX 18 with the Nvidia driver, such as the one in the MSI Optimus laptop:

Code: Select all

$ optirun inxi -Gxxx
Graphics:  Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics 630 vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: i915 v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0 chip ID: 8086:3e9b 
           Device-2: NVIDIA GP107M [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile] vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: nvidia v: 390.87 
           bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 10de:1c8c 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.19.2 driver: intel compositor: compton v: 0.1~beta2+20150922 
           resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 390.87 direct render: Yes
Have you confirmed that your conversions are taking advantage of all available cores? It would be annoying to get a six core machine and then find out that the conversions are single-threaded.
They throw my 4-core laptop to 100% use on all 4-cores... I hope they can use a few extra cores. :crossfingers: I, also, am hoping going from 8GB with 4-cores to 32GB with 6-cores will make things happen quicker. :snail:
In that case, the more cores the better. I wonder if one of the newer Ryzens with many cores would be a good deal.

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manyroads
Posts: 2598
Joined: Sat Jun 30, 2018 6:33 pm

Re: Thoughts re: Nvidia and a refurbished PC

#12 Post by manyroads »

Stevo wrote: Tue Feb 05, 2019 4:44 pm In that case, the more cores the better. I wonder if one of the newer Ryzens with many cores would be a good deal.
I'll check....
Pax vobiscum,
Mark Rabideau - ManyRoads Genealogy -or- eirenicon llc. (geeky stuff)
i3wm, bspwm, hlwm, dwm, spectrwm ~ Linux #449130
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken

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Davo
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Joined: Sun Jul 30, 2006 12:38 pm

Re: Thoughts re: Nvidia and a refurbished PC

#13 Post by Davo »

manyroads wrote: Tue Feb 05, 2019 4:01 pm
Davo wrote: Tue Feb 05, 2019 3:23 pm You get no SSD with your build, just a basic 1TB HD.

Maybe you do need 32GB RAM (the more the better!) but your CPU and Graphics are very quite outdated, which massively offsets any performance gains there.
I'm all in favor of good quality upper mid-range Dell refurbished stuff, but open box models are very OK too. Most mid to high end models too.

Sweet spot these days might be Intel i5-8400 CPU and the very energy efficient 1050ti Nvidia Graphics (or else the better performing 1060 models).

This model would have your ass (by a factor of 2 or more) in 95% of use cases, bar sheer size of RAM https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... gnorebbr=1

But your 32GB RAM is registered at just 1233 speed, whilst the nominally far smaller 8GB here is factored at 2666 speed, so approx 60% as good, while rest of components could be 250% better ...for same price overall.
@Davo I checked a few benchmark sites and the cpu/system did pretty well (not universally well but then it's a few years old).
Here are some I checked:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cp ... Hz&id=2389
https://www.userbenchmark.com/System/De ... -5810/7717
https://valid.x86.fr/bench/rg96li/8

I do zero gaming... what I want is a system that can quickly convert djvu files to pdf & vice versa plus ocr them. Those activities are, so far as I can tell, largely memory and cpu pigs. :anispider2: I was thinking that 6-cores with 32GB of DDR4 mem ought to be quite quick with that work.

I always worry about nvidia but it looks to me like the cards are probably of a vintage that seems to now work on debian. At least they claim it does here :confused:
https://www.nvidia.com/download/driverR ... 5161/en-us

It's always a crap shoot though. :eek:
Have you investigated setting up a ramdisk, for your professional (I presume) work?
Suppose you have 32GB of DDR4 ram, then you could decide to only retain 8GB for your normal Linux activities which is always very OK for any regular Linux needs. More than OK indeed.
The remaining 24GB you could then use as a dedicated ramdisk. Why? A ramdisk is about 10~100x faster than the very fastest SSD and towards 1000x faster than HDD, with zero disk wear-and-tear to boot.
You sort-of virtualize a large portion of your RAM (whatever you don't otherwise need) to become a dedicated virtual-hard-disk and then leverage it to give you blindingly fast operations, whatever these may be.
Myself, and I do all my custom kernel compiles and 4k video editing in this way, but also generally leverage this insane speed boost for even simple web-browsing too. It has so many and varied usages.

How to set up? Google it, of course ;-) The basic usual Linux stuff of "mkdir -p /media/ramdisk" or anything or anywhere or any name you want, then create a custom fstab entry specifying the tmpfs file-system and various other parameters, to enable boot-time ramdisk creation and instant full access. Of course, this also has the knock-on effect of making this chunk of 24GB completely off-limits otherwise and thus unseen by CPU or OS (which will only see the remaining 8GB anymore), unless you decide to revert the changes.

Usual sound business-practice caveats apply here. Remember that It's still and always basic volatile RAM, so any power outages or system freezes or lock-ups ...and everything is gone instantly and is gone forever.
Thus you should take the usual precautions of writing a tiny bash script to enable a back-up of already done work. Then add a crontab entry to do active and dedicated and (ultra frequent) back-ups. I would suggest a 10 or 15 minute interval (at max) and thus an aggressive Cron job entry here. Then any problems and you only lose the last few pages of work. Last thing you'd want to happen is to have maybe 100x successfully scanned pages of djvu to pdf just disappear instantly and forever, with no backups. So ensure that this does not happen. Again, how-tos and wiki entries and sample scripts abound here on the net, so I won't give a step-by-step, but it's all very well known stuff. These days tutorials are everywhere online, though always use common sense too - as not all are complete or always up-to-date or some may skip some essential steps. I would suggest investigating many and then drilling them down for full functionality and just applying normal and sane due diligence here.

I would really and fully recommend (to you) going the ramdisk route though, if you do have some very highly labor-intensive and regularly recurring software-based computer operations to perform. Ramdisks can be a real godsend here and the sheer speed is just out-of-this-world too. Fairly simple to set-up too. Just some basic Linux commands to leverage it all. You can buy the very best spec'd PC out there, with a great CPU, bags of RAM, high-end GPU, top-notch SSD ...and you would still only touch a tiny fraction of the speed of a ramdisk. Think of 100 minutes of some crazy and very labor-intensive crunching-the-numbers CPU/RAM work being (at times) performed in under 2 minutes, that's the kind of speed-boost that you can achieve here. Not for everybody and it's maybe very slightly technical to set it up, but not really overly so.

Give it a spin, if you want. You might be very pleasantly surprised by the results.

One further point that I might make about your newegg refurbished Dell T8510 workstation would be the following. Does it really have a 1TB SSD drive and thus no physical HDD at all? Very often, amazon, bestbuy and newegg can be quite careless here in the system specs, on the disks side of things. I don't see any real or expansive detail being provided here. I would fully expect a Dell workstation of this time period (about 2014~15) to provide a 1TB 7200-rpm HDD and to not offer any SSD OOTB at all. I would be much more surprised to then see a 1TB SSD system with no HDD as well. Usually you have some fast SSD to boot etc and HDD for more durable file operations. I cannot tell myself if the 1TB is actually SSD or not from your newegg link, and just because it's listed as such is not 100% conclusive for me. The factor (or m2 stuff) is not listed, nor the maker nor the standard. I would very strongly tend to suspect that this detail might well be misrepresented in the system specs. We are all human and we are all prone to mistakes and those that enter the system specs on the web listings are not always very tech-savvy. This is a point that I would very actively query first (via chat or else old-school e-mail or phone), before hitting the buy-now button. Very many times amazon etc get it wrong in this area. I would very strongly suspect a typo here.

Of course, life is a crap-shoot and buying stuff is also a crap-shoot. You hope for the best, try to research it all as best as possible ....and then the damn washing machine breaks down a week after you just bought it. Life sucks, or else maybe karma just decides to bite your ass this year or is else very kind towards you for this one year, haha. Been there, done that, time-and-again. Sometimes lucking out, sometimes just out of luck and can't catch a break, no matter what you try.

Anyways, best of luck ...and please do give the ramdisk suggestion a try, if you are so inclined. In any business venture, time is money - and just doing stuff much faster or else less complicated or else less convoluted can make a whole lotta difference qua productivity. Streamlining the whole process (or seeking to do so) does not hurt. Might be some slight left-field thinking needed and some sound back-up strategy put-in-place ...but the sheer speed is otherwordly.

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manyroads
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Re: Thoughts re: Nvidia and a refurbished PC

#14 Post by manyroads »

Davo wrote: Wed Feb 06, 2019 2:06 pm Anyways, best of luck ...and please do give the ramdisk suggestion a try, if you are so inclined. In any business venture, time is money - and just doing stuff much faster or else less complicated or else less convoluted can make a whole lotta difference qua productivity. Streamlining the whole process (or seeking to do so) does not hurt. Might be some slight left-field thinking needed and some sound back-up strategy put-in-place ...but the sheer speed is otherwordly.
Sorry for the delay @davo, but I installed 16GB of memory DDR4 SDRAM 2166Mhz and mounted it as a RAM disk. I moved my test document into RAMdisk and ran the following:

OCR a PDF document
Before RAM Disk:
Time (mins) -- 13
Mem (used)-- 2.2GB
CPU (use all cores)-- 100%
After RAM Disk:
Time (mins) -- 12 (8% improvement)
Mem (used)-- 2.2GB (no improvement noted)
CPU (use all cores)-- 100% (no improvement noted)
Convert PDF to DJVU
Before RAM Disk:
Time (mins) -- 1
Mem (used) --1.6GB
CPU (use all cores)-- 15%
After RAM Disk:
Time (mins)-- 1 (no improvement noted)
Mem (used)-- 1.6GB (no improvement noted)
CPU (use all cores)-- 15% (no improvement noted)
The conclusion I am able to draw is that my PCIe 1TB disk is almost everybit as fast as a RAM disk. My task(s) appear, to me, to be CPU bound.

So now that I have a BUNCH of DDR4 Ram... I will share half with my wife's laptop :alien: and also, resume search for a moose CPU multi-core refurbished device, I guess.
Pax vobiscum,
Mark Rabideau - ManyRoads Genealogy -or- eirenicon llc. (geeky stuff)
i3wm, bspwm, hlwm, dwm, spectrwm ~ Linux #449130
"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong." -- H. L. Mencken

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