These dual socket ones were designed exclusively for mining with the launch model RTX 3060 (as defeating its mining limiter required an x8 or higher slot). They found a second life on budget AI farms where PCIe bandwidth kinda matters.
This Realtek part appears to work OK, but it can only reach line speed on a 20Gbit USB port, as 10Gbit USB after overhead is ~7.8 at best.
If there's any plastic left to hang on to, I melt the inserts back in with a soldering iron and use a longer screw. Only partially successful on this machine because the alignment was a bit off.
The laptop's left side hinge mechanism, with broken rusted metal and a screw post that broke off the plastic housing. The screen cable runs close to this mechanism.
Actual cause was the screen cable getting pinched by a broken hinge retention mechanism, because as a wise man once said, HP stands for Hinge Problem.
Just repaired a laptop with a built-in analog horror generator.
Sent a request on Discord, thanks in advance.
Hey, can you upload that disk somewhere? I'd like to take a look at that DOS and figure out why those files are like that.
A Lenovo laptop dock with two USB-C plugs, a third proprietary plug and two guide posts, designed to mechanically fit their ThinkPads only.
The ThinkPad dock charging a Dell laptop through a sketchy USB-C extension cable.
Life, uh, finds a way.
I propose a solution to our ongoing RAM shortage:
90s colorful box for a "Mouse Phone" "Let's use mouse to combine you & your life closer:" "total new concept mouse phone"
T H I S I S R E A L T O U C H
Meme showing six logical operators illustrated with jack-o'-lantern images. trick OR treat trick AND treat trick XOR treat trick NOR treat trick NAND treat trick XNOR treat
Laptop motherboard with a CMOS battery consisting of two NiMH button cells side by side in a green wrapper, attached to red and black wires going to a motherboard connector with visible corrosion on its pins.
This Sony Vaio laptop circa 2010 has, among other issues, a leaking NiMH CMOS battery instead of a regular lithium cell. Party like it's the 1990s Varta bombs.
Unearthing an Android app that hasn't been compiled in years is always fun. You have SDKs, JDKs, Android Studio telling you to install a different Gradle every step of the way, small Gradle syntax changes, library dependencies that were lost to the JCenter shutdown...
The switch turns 16x 2.0 lanes from 990FX into 32x 3.0 lanes for the slots, as weird as it sounds. There is no 16x+16x uplink, the switch does support it but AFAIK you can't bond them together to speed up a single card (the 2019 Mac Pro has this but only lets you select one uplink for each slot).
Piecing together all available info:
Interesting yet deceptive. They put a PCIe 3.0 switch on a single 2.0 x16 uplink (the manual proves the article wrong) and called it a 3.0 board. It's useful for corner cases at best, like running 3.0 x4 SSDs from years later.
The STPC Client was only specified in 66x1 and 75x1 bins, there is a later Consumer II at 66x2 with the same package and feature set but it might not be pin compatible.
These chips are fascinating, there's a final 686-class (Rise mP6 based) one that apparently never shipped in volume.
if you love something, take it apart until you understand it, then share it with the world.
Right up there with the PORNITOR
Power supply section of the control panel, with charred components and a huge hole on the SMPS control chip.
Main section of the control panel, slightly charred or just dirty, with a Renesas R7F0C902B2 microcontroller and a voltage regulator.
Other side of the control panel board, which identifies as a Lytran R-LT2103 IDU Main Board V1.0 from 2021. A transformer, various capacitors, the feedback buzzer and a programming header are visible.
A cheap window air conditioner gave me quite the scare a while back. Control panel was acting weird and eventually started making arcing sounds. Looks like the switching power supply for the electronics failed catastrophically.
My old Wikipedia Chain experiment (inspired by xkcd 214) is now working again after modern browsers broke it. Also added the ability to start from a random page.
richardg867.github.io/wikichain
The Fediverse bot at mastodon.xyz/@wikipediach... is still going after years of zero maintenance.
WD Green M.2 SSD installed inside the ThinkPad. No label as it's on the back of the SSD.
The ThinkPad displaying a "2100: Detection error on SSD0 (M.2)" after the WD SSD crashed the system.
A random "KeepData" M.2 SSD installed inside the ThinkPad. It ultimately worked fine.
The ThinkPad X1 Carbon 2nd Gen has many flaws, but requiring a SATA M.2 SSD (now a cursed form factor) takes the cake. In upgrading this machine, a brand new WD Green kept crashing so I had to fall back to a China special.
Windows 10 blue screen of death, but the text area is blended with a still from a YouTube video I was watching.
Had a BSOD today, and a frame from the video I was watching managed to sneak in through the GPU video decoder!
Insides of a small form factor PC with the front drive cage removed and replaced with 7 vertically-mounted 2.5" hard drives, all individually connected to SATA power and data cables.
Old BIOS screen showing all 7 hard drives detected by the PC.
Terminal with a GNU Screen session split into a 4x2 grid of windows, each displaying the badblocks command output and identification data for one hard drive, except for the bottom right window displaying dmesg output for drive errors.
Built a bulk hard drive testing rig for validating a job lot of old drives. Horrible chain of power adapters as this PSU has the 5V capacity but very few connectors. Even got an IDE-SATA converter (works surprisingly fine) for the 7th drive.
The existence of Norway implies the existence of Nandway.
The underlying plastic plays a role. On this laptop, isopropyl just stripped the coating to reveal translucent plastic underneath, but degreaser cleaned the coating without stripping it: bsky.app/profile/mess...
Dell Latitude E6320 laptop with the palmrest's rubberized coating partially removed in the area to the left of the trackpad, revealing the translucent plastic below.
Same laptop, now with the palmrest's coating completely removed, making it translucent. The black keyboard, trackpad, buttons and (still coated) LED area contrast with the translucent plastic.
In trying to clean the sticky rubberized finish on this old laptop, I ended up stripping a chunk of the coating, then asked myself: why not go the rest of the way? It looks way cooler than I expected. Happy little accident.
Nintendo Switch plugged into a powered USB-C dock, displaying its error message about an incompatible dock.
FNIRSI FNB58 USB tester display, showing that the dock advertises an USB Power Delivery profile of 15V at up to 2.4A, which has been selected by the Switch.
There's lots of speculation as to what exactly makes an USB-C dock incompatible with the Nintendo Switch. One factor is Power Delivery: docks tend to reduce the advertised current (because their USB ports need power) just enough to fall below the Switch's 15V 2.6A requirement.
fourthed
