Archimago's Musings

I know, that's a massive title! But sometimes there's a bunch of stuff to talk/think about before the holidays. 🙂

With recent holiday sales, like I did recently with the Server, I thought it was time to finally update that GPU in my GAMING rig. Although I had updated the CPU last year to the AMD Ryzen 7 5700X (~US150ドル) 8-core processor, I was still playing with the old-skool nVidia GTX 1080 GPU that I got back in 2017. 

Clearly, after 7 years and a few generations, it was time to get a modern gaming GPU; yeah I have the RTX 4090 but that's for the workstation rather than gaming, in fact, I haven't even installed a single game on this workstation!

As you can see, I got the ASUS GeForce RTX 4070 Super Evo OC Dual-fan model, currently ~US600ドル (~CAD800ドル). The RTX 4070 Super variant was released in January 2024, not long ago and I figured would make for a good contemporary card with longevity for upcoming games and should last me into the 2030's. It's equipped with 12GB of GDDR6X which should be adequate for awhile. And because it's the dual-fan model, it's not as long as the 3-fan cards; this is important because the enclosure I'm using has a limit to the length of large graphics cards it can accommodate.

Okay, let's continue with our exploration of the fanless HUNSN/CWWK i3-N305 computer discussed last week. This time, we'll focus on what I did here to get it running as my music end-point (for Roon), in particular creating multiple output options for multichannel, stereo crosstalk cancellation (XTC) DSP, and also for those times when I want the highest 2-channel resolution playback to the USB DAC.

Most of the time this computer will be running "headless" although it is connected to my TV and I will on occasion watch movies using Kodi. And since the machine is quite powerful (>100GFLOPS on Linpack stock), I turned down the power utilization for my purposes which in turn will keep the fanless solution cooler.

Let's get going!

Over the years, I've written about transitioning to faster ethernet here at home with standard copper 10GBASE-T (10GbE) cabling, beginning back in 2018. This works fine even with Cat-5e in the walls of my home (although some renovations use Cat-6). More recently, my home network was upgraded to 2.5GbE for any device that can benefit, with standard 1 gigabit/s fallback.

Last month, I needed another 10GbE network interface card (NIC) and noticed that we're now seeing inexpensive Marvell mGig AQC113C NICs available, upgrades from the AQC107 cards I have been using. So I grabbed a QFly NIC-10G (~US75ドル) to try out. There are other similar products like the NICGIGA (very unfortunate name), and GigaPlus.

The card offers 10G/5G/2.5/1GbE speeds and below (100/10Mbps) for compatibility. The new chip operates at only 4W running 10G speed (I believe the AQC107 is estimated at ~6W) making it even cooler-running for heavy loads.

Let's do a quickie post this week.

As per the discussions last time, I've been doing some computer upgrades here at home and at one point a few weeks back, I was updating the BIOS on my AM4 MSI X370 SLI Plus motherboard but accidentally disrupted the power in the middle of the flash!

This basically "bricked" the machine because this particular board only has one BIOS bank and there are no facilities to reflash. Since my AMD Ryzen 7 1700 CPU is still a very reasonable 8-core processor that can still be used for many applications these days, I looked for an inexpensive way to fix this BIOS mistake. The solution is the package shown above - a CH341 24 and 25-Series EEPROM Flash Programmer (less than US15,ドル this item on Amazon Canada).

Although typically I write about audio stuff on these blog pages, not infrequently I'll talk about my computer updates as well. Looking back, this has allowed me to review the journey along the way over the last decade. As we enter into the Christmas season this year, I think this is a good time to be looking at computer parts as prices of things like SSD drives and DRAM in particular seem to be very attractive with DDR4 and DDR5 memory trending down, M.2 SSD likewise appearing to be bottoming over the last 18 months perhaps as the cost of basic necessities (food, housing, gas) have risen and disposable income reduced. I would not be surprised if inflation starts to drop in 2024 while the electronics parts rise in price again.

Who knows exactly what the future brings, but this looks like one of the best time to grab something like a 2TB M.2 SSD or some RAM:

The trend isn't as obvious with CPU prices. However, I upgraded my Workstation computer recently to the AMD Ryzen 9 5950X CPU - 16-cores, 32-threads I found at a decent price. And since it has been ages, I also updated my Gaming PC in the living room for the heck of it to the Ryzen 7 5700X .

Hey everyone, life's been very busy so not much time to think or work on audio stuff.

A few weeks back in my discussion of Qobuz in Canada, I said: "I'm curious, has anyone out there contacted their streaming service to request the addition of an artist or album? Were you able to get your requests included?"

Well, I received a number of responses, mostly from folks who were happy that Qobuz or TIDAL were able to oblige with putting their requests up. Here's a very well written one that I thought would be good to share with everyone... It brings up important points especially these days as we transition into more music lovers depending on the services to supply our music. Many, including myself these days are collecting more playlists than actual physical albums or spending the time to download anymore.