Later down the river bend

Greetings again open, federated, free, public international network! It is I The Woodcutter and I am enjoying a mighty fine Saturday indeed. I write a post because it's my blogger's duty to post SOMETHING after nearly 3 months of nothing. Nothing includes even significant downtime. About the downtime, I admit, I was lazy and didn't feel like operating a webserver for any more than my XMPP's HTTP Upload feature.

As for what has happened, well, I mentioned previously I was working on an ultra small form factor gaming computer. It's a Lenovo Thinkcentre M90q Gen 2 and I put an AMD Radeon RX 6400 into it and it does indeed play Need For Speed Unbound at highest FHD resolution on medium settings. If I shut off vsync, in pretty much all my games, the FPS is appreciable and it's a fair amount of fun. It is a very tiny computer and for my final upgrades to it, after I put a 32GB Gskill 3200MHz CL22 SODIMM (just one) in it, are going to be an i9-11900F CPU upgrade (which is massive) as well as maybe a little bit of modifying the grille on the top of the cover to be able to fix to it a Noctua 5V PWM -> USB fan that should drive air into the case onto the board and thus underneath the GPU card and the blower fan for the CPU. This feels like it could be a very effective cooling strategy just that I am trying to conjure up if any more aerodynamic or efficiency things could be constructed or modified. It would be only a 40x10mm fan or possibly a 40x20mm fan if that one has better induction. I want it to remain very neat and tidy and thought about using some random screws and set screw type fixers like what you'd mount an ATX motherboard to a computer case with type of nicely fine machined metal stuff. Has to be neat and tidy and presentable BUT also removable because one of, if not the most important, feature of this setup (pics below) is it's tiny-ness. Boasting the GPU and a custom, but made as efficient as possible, cooling mod, I think it'll end up pretty damn tricked out!

That is not the only thing I needed to do for cooling. I imagine it's old and might have numerous hours on it, plus myself cooking the CPU at top of it's turbo frequency, the heat paste needs renewal so I bought some Arctic stuff as I recall more than one person tell me that's the very best stuff. I have seen the great boost new heat paste gives and I'm hopeful that once I get around to pasting the CPU it will make a considerable improvement.







I predict that by time september comes (about 3 weeks away) I can evaluate that I've had a pretty good summer. I've gotten smiles from some beautiful women and felt some good vibes and I owe it all to the Lord our God at the high point of the great place among us. However amidst the daylight is nightdark and some of my time was also punishment and tribulations. I am confident that the season's turning will leave me satisfied and with enough spirit to carry on with strength as I have some things I want to do. I will also be moving a fair ways away from here where I live now and segregating myself to a lot less excitement. It will be a challenge and I unfortunately haven't constructed anything for an ideal light at the end of the tunnel. I'm trying to slow my perspectives and focuses to see more of what is around me than be centered on thoughts which are just ideas or arguements I have with myself or even wonderings. I definitely plan to program some COOL stuff this winter and much more seriously than I've been able to do before. I'm legitimately planning on it.

I've always been the type that has style and really appreciates style. I don't consider style and aesthetic or intriguing visual things are vanity at all and hence more likely a fruit of God and of people. A certain style that's curious to me is the idea of a digital nomad. My brother and long time good friend had years ago piqued my interest in finer things of hacking and one of his interests was particularly in wireless communication. I've been slowly nurturing a potentially very big and consuming interest in broadband wireless types of things. One day I may very well be in a sea of encrypted bytes ran off of coils emitting high frequency pulses. Hacking modems and devices and softwares to modulate and/or manipulate (hack) beyond normal even educated amounts of understanding of how LTE, rangefinding, guarding and scrambling and intercepting and detecting, plus more I'm sure, all this niche technological hobby stuff. It excites me and once again I've ordered another industrial LTE modem gateway for what I may get a pelican case for and make like a clandestine kit out of. Anyways, I don't do illegal stuff I am strictly non-invasive and ethical interests only. I've been asked before to help and always deny helping ill motives. Just felt I needed to say that.

So I'm just absorbing this portion of 15 lifetimes of round the cloud computer use in my one and only life. I just want to do cool shit and maybe somebody may see it someday and actually comprehend it enough to go "holy shit man whoa" and I would grin, though that already does happen sometimes.

Here's some more pics of my USFF Thinkcentre gaming equipmento:






Yea so the sticky pieces of foam are all on the top and the bottom of it so as that NO metal from ANYWHERE on the GPU touches ANYTHING else at all. You can see in the final picture the angled riser. This is PROPRIETARY and must match the FRU number from Lenovo to properly expand the 8x slot that the motherboard has and give a 8x electrical 16x pcie slot, and angled perfectly so to get a really really low profile GPU like the one I have to fit under the case top. This is so friggin sweet I love it. As well my GPU, aside from how super slim it is, has a maximum draw of 53W and a friend on XMPP network told me he was pretty sure that the limit of 8x pcie was 50W. It works alright though with the exception of windows doing covert updates and ruining my graphics drivers and I've had to reinstall windows twice now because tearing out the embedded crap from the adrenaline drivers from the rest of windows is FAR too much like work and I do NOT care to get that intimate with an operating system I detest (windows). The adrenaline drivers have lots of bells and whistles and settings and stuff but using one of the nice settings, only one, will choke absolutely all my threads in that computer and it heats up more than I'd want it to. Also without even initiating user settings with adrenaline driver it's considerably worse FPS playing Need For Speed Unbound than just what drivers windows ships themselves. AMD is not stable. That's my opinion and I am allowed to clone it and put it in everyone's mailboxes so everyone knows what I think. I will however NOT be interested in any other GPU because this one is so damn slender, fits the setup to a literal perfection and I've grown to like it's grumpy behaviour.

I am probably going to get to doing a HELL of a lot of creative and productive stuff over the next while so if God willing, you'll hear from this cat again.

Tags: summer, creativity, m90q, usff, thinkcentre, project, melon, hat

Lenovo USFF Project News for May

Greetings TCP farers. Did you know? Neither did I! That is a multitude of things LoL

I have not been on my keyboard for programming so much lately but instead playing games. I ordered a Lenovo ThinkCentre from Ebay that was stuck in that damn ebay global shipping program, which I honestly can't stand. After waiting a full month I got my refund back yet still the (expensive) thing came! I truly did feel blessed in a time amidst multiple hardships. This enabled me to move right ahead and get the project done as it were simple from there. What I needed was a PCIE 8x (proprietary) Lenovo riser that provides a PCIE 16x port on a 90 degree angle. In case you aren't aware this computer is very small. It's like 7x7x1.5 inches and can be mounted behind a monitor. Maybe you've seen such a device, about the size of a thin client. Anyways, then to get a GPU for that slot. The computer's CPU is actually not bad at all and has quite appreciable graphics without a dedicated GPU but my friend on XMPP found one that meets my hardware constraints and actually boasts real performance. Hardware constraints such as not using too many watts for the PSU cable, which I've upgraded to 230w from 135w demand stock, size for the sake of fitting in the case (this is a large portion of the appeal for this project) as well as not needing external SATA or PCIE power.

So I bought this literally TINY half height AMD Radeon RX 6400 that doesn't require external power and is about 157mm in length and fits into the already tiny computer I have on that riser I mentioned. I have been able to play Need For Speed Unbound and even made a few screen recordings and posted on my YouTube Channel. It's not quite as good as my previous gaming MSI laptop but it definitely is appreciable for what it's worth. Being tiny and, although loud, not producing really serious amounts of heat.

I have had about ③ weeks of fun with this, and a lot of fun as I was missing NFS Unbound's Volume 6, however unfortunately I had to learn something and had made a costly mistake. The mistake was not knowing, or thinking when I installed it and seen the GPU's pcb board resting on the metal housing of the USB jack on the rear, that some metal contacts on the GPU's board might short by bridging across the metal housing of the USB port. I honestly didn't think much about it at the time and when I was playing on it for the first while the performance was literally really good but (and only after noticed) eventually slowly degraded to a point where it seemed I couldn't tweak settings to achieve what I had before. After a while it had did something weird my computer reset on me, but wouldn't actually boot then. It did a few more times in shorter intervals and at last after doing it twice in shorter time caused my computer not to boot.

That caused me much sadness, so much sadness that I wouldn't even mess with it for ③ days. I had to get in a good mood to bother cracking it open and popping the GPU + riser card out and alas! It booted! I had noticed that while not booting no fans would operate and the lit up ends of my HDMI cable wouldn't light up BUT the power light on the machine did. This is how I thought it may be a power fault.

What I eventually seen while inspecting the GPU's board was an odd light discoloration looking vaguelly like a burn that was sort of through the board and seemed to travel from the HDMI slot on the GPU towards a capacitor on the other side of it. It was at that time that I declared officially my (not so cheap but fortunately not that overly expensive either) GPU dead. Sad, I see it on one of my shelves, so new and only 3 weeks of life, it's dead 😔

Now my only remaining concern was if somehow I burned out a component on the riser. If I did, and I'm honestly not sure exactly if I'd be able to determine, then I would need to pay another approximately 350CAD to redo this all. I am not rich, not even close, I am dirt poor just about I won't lie so this deepens my sadness but I am still extremely grateful this little beast fired up again, the computer I mean. At first I really worried that it had died but fortunately it wouldn't have been that humongous of a loss, if so, because I did acquire it free. Thanks capitalism! You finally did me a solid but I still hate you! 🖕 LoL ... I actually like ebay, for the most part, and definitely with the exception of the ebay global shipping program.

If my home life wasn't so damn terrible, er, lack of a decent home, whatever, I'd consider redoing this right soon and getting another GPU but it will be postponed for the sake of leaving this entire civil district and getting away from a doomed mission to live in a place that I cannot be free or comfortable. Always losses in life and that will cost too (A LOT). So perhaps I will also postpone pictures and a more detailed post until I am able to make it work under the best conditions. Here's hoping that happens, and soon!

Here is a sweeeet forum post with a MASSIVE amount of details related to computers like this, you might probably find this interesting .. and some more related .. 🎲

Tags: tinyminimicro, lenovo, thinkcentre, project, computing, the8woodcutter, amdradeon, nfsunbound, thestonewall, hardware, gaming, life