Re: System Panic Makes My Life Easier

Quoting Karen Shaeffer (shaeffer-IwRZ8fqS3AoztatW0fm/[email protected]):

> I understand GPGPUs are key hardware components for consumer platforms. And in
> the past 5 years GPGPUs have become the hottest technology in datacenters as
> well. For example:
> 
> https://code.facebook.com/posts/1687861518126048/facebook-to-open-source-ai-hardware-design/

What can I say?  When I find something better than Cerberus (VA-CTCS),
I'll be glad to recommend it.

Meantime, in my experience it's been rather rare for hardware problems
to reside in GPUs _or_ CPUs -- and when that's the case, it becomes
rather obvious from the specific symptoms.

Anyway, I've been meaning to circle back to what Joseph said about past
cooling problems:

  The cpu fan has been in bad shape for some time... it's got some 
  cooling now, but I can easily imagine its lifespan was shortened 
  by overheating in the past.

This is astute, sir.  I would, in your shoes, take careful note of the
fact that heat damage to computing hardware has pernicious long-term
effects.  I would be very skeptical of the reliability of -any-
computing hardware that has undergone significant overheating episodes.

At bare minimum, any component of mine that went through a major
overheating episode would be classed as suspect from that point forward.
It would be unlucky for that unreliability to manifest as freeze-ups
rather than component failure, but that _does happen_.

Man, though, ten-year-old Opteron systems!  Those were awesome!  That's
exactly what my employer California Digital Corporation had as its
bread-and-butter around 2005:  dual-Opteron 2.2GHZ 1U rackmount servers,
in its case.  Those were fabulous for their day -- and also generated a
prodigious amount of waste heat from the CPUs:  In some cases where the
CPU fans seized up, I remember that the motherboard actually got
charred.

One way to simplify the diagnostic matrix, Joseph:  Look at a calendar.
;->   Ten years is an excellent run, and it just might be time to have
the awesome experience of ringing out the old and ringing in the new
(hardware).  

Nostalgia Ain't What It Used to Be.[tm]

-- 
Cheers,                    "A man is his own easiest dupe, for what he wishes
Rick Moen                  to be true he generally believes to be true."
rick-IyCrq+X4Fdq2oZ/[email protected]        -- Demosthenes, Third Olynthiac, sct. 19 (349 BCE)
McQ! (4x80)