Aaron44126

I feel like the OS support timeframe for Macs is more like 6-8 years (depending on the model, you might get lucky and land on the longer end of that timeframe). This has typically been an advantage for Windows, where you could expect to be able to upgrade "forever"... but look at Windows 11. They dumped support for all PCs older than three years (at the time of its launch). Who knows if they will try something like this again whenever Windows 12 rolls around...

NVIDIA puts GPU+laptop model ID together in their driver INF file. If you're running an "unsupported" GPU+laptop model combination, you'll have to do an INF modification in order to get the driver to load. https://www.nbrchive.net/forum.notebookreview.com/threads/precision-7530-precision-7730-owners-thread.820539/page-253.html#post-10937563

That’s the same as mine. I’ll have to double check what power limit I am observing. Pretty sure I was seeing 130W when this system was new.

Huh, if there is a different vBIOS version floating around, @MyPC8MyBrain can you report what vBIOS version number you are seeing?

Ha ha ha ha... Elon Musk temporarily suspends Twitter Spaces after being confronted by banned journalist https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/16/23512930/elon-musk-twitter-spaces-washington-post-new-york-times-banned Last night, Elon Musk popped into a Spaces chat discussing his move to ban a bunch of journalists’ accounts from the platform. Confronted by Buzzfeed News’ Katie Notopoulos and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell (who was one of the banned reporters) on how he can claim to support free speech while also ejecting journalists who report information about him that he does not like, Musk stuck to his refrain of “you dox, you get suspended.” (The banned users had not, in fact, doxxed him.) He dipped out when pressed further. Within hours, Twitter Spaces was at least partially removed from the platform, with users saying they were unable to access it on iOS or Android. Musk claimed that the feature was removed to fix a newly identified bug: that banned users like Harwell were able to join a Spaces chat, which is genuinely an issue that Twitter ought to remedy. But under normal circumstances, it’s easy to imagine this bug being quietly updated when the fix was ready. The swift and extreme response of removing the vertical until it is fixed feels personal. Recording of the exchange -- https://twitter.com/ForeverEversley/status/1603612770892918784

Twitter now blocking all links to any content on Mastodon? That could be seen as anti-competitive. https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512113/twitter-blocking-mastodon-links-elon-musk-elonjet Apparently the journalists that have been blocked (see above) are just suspended for seven days.

BIOS update 1.8.0. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=JG0V9 - Firmware updates to address security vulnerabilities including (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - CVE) such as CVE-2022-3365 and CVE-2022-30339. ————— I am also seeing WHEA events. They seem to come in "bursts". The most recent I have is a batch of 15 which occurred within 20 seconds of each other, about two days ago. They don't occur often. I see a few bursts on December 13 and 14, but then I have a break all of the way back to December 2. (My system is powered on 24/7.) I haven't noticed any actual problems timed with these events, so I'm just going to ignore it.

BIOS update 1.18.0. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=XHMM6 - Firmware updates to address security vulnerabilities including (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures - CVE) such as CVE-2022-3365. [Edit] Updated, no issues so far.

On past systems, performance was slightly reduced when using dock power only. You can avoid it by attaching a 240W power adapter directly to the system in addition to the dock cable.

Musk bans live location sharing, says he’ll sue creator of plane-tracking bot https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-bans-live-location-sharing-says-hell-sue-creator-of-plane-tracking-bot/ But more critically... Elon Musk starts banning critical journalists from Twitter https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23512004/elon-musk-starts-banning-critical-journalists-from-twitter Freedom of speech, right? [Edit] Hitting more mainstream, non-tech media as well. https://www.npr.org/2022/12/15/1143291081/twitter-suspends-journalists-elon-musk-jet

I feel like 4000/5000 cards have had the same power limit (& roughly the same performance) going all of the way back to the Pascal cards in the Precision 7X30 line (2018), which I think was the first time that the 4000-level card hit 100W. Since then, there's been no reason to get the 5000 card, really, unless you need other capabilities that it provides. (Until this generation, they had different vRAM amounts at least...) Benchmarks have shown the performance difference otherwise to be pretty consistently less than 5% off. This is reflective of the "low" power limits that NVIDIA is putting on these power-hungry desktop GPU dies that they are shoving into laptops. Because they have the same power limit, they have the same performance, with the higher-end GPUs getting a very slight nudge up because they are able to run more cores at a lower clock speed (a little bit more efficient). Actually, I sort of suspect that the A3000 GPU would be competitive against the top-end cards as well, at least if you are not pushing vRAM above 12GB. NVIDIA says it supports up to 130W TGP so it should have the same power limit as the A4500 and A5500 in these systems (or at least in the Precision 7670). I'd love to see some benchmarks on this. Regarding undervolting, previously the pro/Quadro/RTX line has been locked down, but starting last year with the pro Ampere line, NVIDIA seems to be allowing undervolting in the pro GPUs using tools like MSI Afterburner. (I have not tried it yet, but other users did report being able to undervolt the GPUs in the Precision 7X60.)

Elon Musk offloads about $3.6 billion in Tesla stock. (Twice so far this year, he has said that he is done selling Tesla stock.) Up to around $23 billion since the Twitter purchase stuff started. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2022/12/elon-musk-offloads-another-3-6-billion-of-tesla-stock/

With 3080Ti, I got 399. I think the GPU power limit is going to be the main limiting factor in a test like this, if you're just comparing various Ampere GPUs... You'd definitely want a 17" system for best performance, but if you want to push the GPU power limit any higher than what you get in the 7770, you'd basically need a gaming-focused laptop 😕.

Twitter invents a new policy to explain the disappearance of @ElonJet (which is now unsuspended, though the operator’s main account is now suspended). https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/14/23509817/twitter-elonjets-ban-creator-jack-sweeney-links-trackers

It seems like U.S. authorities spent a few weeks gathering evidence and preparing the list of charges, and waited until they had a pretty overwhelming list before filing everything and asking authorities in the Bahamas to do the arrest (which they appear to have carried out without delay). What they have against him right now seems insurmountable. This guy is going to jail. Listened to this piece yesterday while running errands in the evening; the second half dives into his parents' connection to the whole thing a bit.

Elon Musk is apparently interested in not paying out the three months' severance that he promised employees facing termination. (Plus, issues just managing his legal team.) https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/musk-brings-spacex-lawyers-to-twitter-as-layoff-lawsuits-mount-report-says/

About the same as mine then. I wonder why the fan speed is so restricted... (I guess they are a bit larger than the older fans.)

Have you paid attention to the max fan RPM speed that you have observed? (Dell Fan Management can report the fan speed.) Mine seems to top out at around 3500 RPM, whereas in older Precision systems I have regularly observed mid/upper 4000's. I'm wondering if the other fan models are different.

Ha. Twitter account "@ElonJet" was taken down. This account tweeted updates about the location of Elon Musk's private plane (...I assume using publicly available flight tracking data?). https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/14/23508898/elonjet-twitter-ban-elon-musk-jet-tracker There was already some drama over this account... Before taking over Twitter, Elon Musk (supposedly) contacted the account operator and offered to pay to have the account taken down (paywall). After taking over Twitter, Elon Musk said that he will not ban the @ElonJet account, because, free speech. The account operator noticed that the account's visibility had been reduced, posted about that and somehow obtained an (alleged) internal screenshot of someone in Twitter's internal Slack asking for its visibility to be restricted. Perhaps in reaction to those posts, the account's visibility was restored to normal. (I saw an article about this a couple of days ago but can't find it right this moment...) ...And now, the account is dead. [Edit] Another article. Apparently the same guy has plane tracker accounts set up for other planes (Bill Gates, Russian oligarchs, Air Force One, ...) and those are still working. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/twitter-suspends-elonjet-plane-tracking-bot-after-musk-pledged-to-leave-it-up/

Normally using Ethernet. Ran on Wi-Fi overnight and woke up to find my system had crashed from a BSOD (Netwtw10.sys ... Wi-Fi driver). I have the current Wi-Fi driver installed, 22.170.2.1. Great...? This system has been normally quite solid for me, stability-wise. (I'll just go run an Ethernet cable to where I was sitting yesterday and do a more in-depth stability test after another Intel Wi-Fi driver is posted...) Also, I inspected the fans after about four months of use. Very dirty. Regular cleaning required.

The many lies of Sam Bankman-Fried https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/13/23507361/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-alameda-cftc-complaint-lies (Basically summing up the charges) The guy clearly got himself in a hole… and then kept digging it deeper 😕 [Edit] Denied bail, extradition hearing Feb 8. https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/13/23508217/sbf-sam-bankman-fried-ftx-bail-john-ray-congress-hearing

Twitter's "Trust and Safety Council" (established in 2016) has been disbanded. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/12/twitter-ditches-trust-and-safety-council-as-musk-tweets-fuel-harassment/

Didn't realize that we were looking at new MXM cards that don't support eDP at all. Hmm. Guessing these weren't really designed for laptops 😕

NPR picked it up pretty promptly yesterday. (Heard radio coverage on the situation through them this morning as well.) https://www.npr.org/2022/12/12/1142361088/bankman-fried-ceo-ftx-crypto-exchange-arrested-bahamas-charges-sdny I don't follow any sort of cable news, but I can actually see it on the front page at edition.cnn.com (and regular cnn.com as well). https://edition.cnn.com/2022/12/13/business/sam-bankman-fried-charges/index.html

Apparently, Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested today. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2022/12/12/ftx-founder-sam-bankman-fried-arrested-bahamas-says/ https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/12/23506483/sam-bankman-fried-arrest-us-extradition-ftx-crypto