Comment by randerson
11 hours ago
I've developed a new fear of my 2025 desktop PC being damaged by a power surge or something, because it would cost at least $2K more to replace than I paid for it, assuming I can even find parts now. Compared to the rest of my adult life when I used to secretly pray for something to fail so I would have a reason to upgrade.
Living in developing countries taught me to never plugin expensive computers without a surge protector UPS.
Commercial uses layered surge protectors (Type I, II, and III), which is also recommended for other users but rarely followed.
In surge prone areas, at a minimum I would have good quality whole-house surge protector (eg Siemens 140 or Eaton 108), and a good quality surge protector strip for any computer/TV/phone charger.
I also put surge protectors in front of expensive white goods like the fridge, washer/dryer, dishwasher, and garage door opener. Besides being costly to replace these can contain "sparky" motors and this provides protection in the other direction too. Over time smaller surges can degrade the main surge protector for your computer.
Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes, but for anything less it should provide decent protection.
Are you in an area with a bad electrical grid or something? In 40+ years I've never had a single device get fried from a surge/storm. My "surge protector" power strips are from the 90s and probably don't even work.
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> Nothing (reasonable) can protect against direct lightning strikes
Belkin make a number of surge protectors which offer a connected equipment warranty in the UK. Admittedly: financial protection, not data protection, but I felt it was worthwhile for the peace of mind.
https://www.belkin.com/id/p/6-outlet-surge-protection-strip-...
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>In surge prone areas
What areas are surge prone?
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Lightning can mess you up in every country lol. Had to replace a PSU because of that, thankfully it was just that and minor damage to GPU.
Lightning damage is mostly an issue if the last-mile power lines are above ground. In my experience, power surges in urban areas with a decent grid are so rare that people generally don't bother protecting their devices.
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Where I live it's not an issue.
Honestly even in "developed countries" it's not worth blindly trusting that the power in your house/building is clean. It's cheap and easy enough to just put any expensive hardware on a UPS rather than speculating what's going on behind the walls.
Eh, if these surges are rare enough, then you are statistical better off just risking your 'expensive' hardware to a one in a trillion possibility rather than spending money on gear you don't need.
Do you live in a bunker to protect against artillery shells?
I work on embedded systems. I can often see whether my A/C or other appliances are running on my oscilloscope signals. They often affect the output of USB power supplies.
Doesn't even sound like a developed country to me. Is that the US or something?
Do you still need a UPS if you have one of those household (Powerwall style) battery packs? Also Apple switched mode power supplies are pretty well built.
But then again there's horror stories like
https://www.reddit.com/r/applehelp/comments/1maegvb/i_burned...
My understanding is that home batteries are not UPSes, they don't go through the battery. They have a switch between power company, solar, or battery. I think that means would be exposed to surge from power company.
You can install a whole house surge protector. Those go in the panel and would protect from different sources.
Yes. The power walls are like cheap UPS topology. You could still get whacked with a transient from the grid before the ATS decides to island the house.
Depends on how they are configured, I think in some regions (where power outages are very rare), they are wired to sync up with external network, and without external network they shut down as well.
Living in California taught me this
Over the last two years I bought 2 4TB SSDs, 64GB DDR5 ECC UDIMM and 4 14TB HDDs.
I couldn't justify buying any of them today.
Silver lining: literally all Macs are a total steal right now.
Anyone have a good take on how well Asahi linux keeps the power management working on mac hardware? The biggest killer feature for me of mac hardware is the battery/weight. I have found it hard to get a good laptop in the linux ecosystem mainly because of power consumption. If Asahi doesn't really impact the battery life then I would seriously consider going that route. Similar question about support for pytorch on linux/arm64 / Asahi.
I think it's improved from when I last tried it, but it still isn't great. You can get like 60% of the battery life compared to macOS.
Someone with more recent knowledge correct me on this, but I believe idling is the biggest power drain in Asahi. You will want to shutdown and/or hibernate whenever possible.
How good is Mac virtualization? Would it be doable to put an Ubuntu inside a VM and just run it full screen all the time?
Too bad I can’t play the games I want to play on them
Crossover[1] is surprisingly good for this purpose if you game occasionally and don't need FPS-level responsiveness. You also need 3rd party software like LinearMouse and Mos to make a mouse usable.
[1]: https://www.codeweavers.com/crossover?srsltid=AfmBOor-7wbD-o...
Hint : GE Force Now
ssshhhhh... do not tell anyone I told you...
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Not really a steal, just that the price differences have narrowed.
I bought a Mac Mini in February and maxed out the ram and storage. Now, it seems like that was a prescient move, but honestly I really only bought it for photo editing and playing the new World of Warcraft expansion (don't judge me!).
Serious question: how does WoW still appeal to players except for habit social connections to keep them locked into the game? I used to spend nights and love the game, now, even with all these expansions it feels exactly like it was in 2006 but without what happened to the gaming world in the past 20 years.
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You pay an $1k extra just to get the model with 1TB disk. How is that a steal?
pro tip: don't
I mean they're still expensive, they just seem relatively good value because everything else has gotten more expensive.
All value is relative, so everything else getting more expensive is essentially the same as macs getting cheaper.
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Yeah, that's what @SlightlyLeftPad said.
Good Mac Pro models are still spendy, but the M3/M4 laptops are great if your software use-cases are met. =3
I’m still doing great even with an M2!
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The AMD395+ PCs have unified memory and since it's not tied to a garbage OS nor reasonably affected by future dram costs, it's a better choice for reasonable people, unless you're going for greater than 128GB
It sounds like it won't affect prices that much?
> South Korean memory giant SK hynix has since said it had diversified supplies for helium and secured sufficient inventory. Meanwhile, TSMC said that it doesn’t currently anticipate a notable impact following Ras Laffan going offline, but that it’s monitoring the situation.
It also just be the typical “don’t scare the shareholders just yet” PR speak. Time will tell.
Thankfully UPSes are still cheap. Get one before Sam buys the entire yearly production of cyberpower.
I got to get me some new surge protectors and not the cheapies. maybe a small ups.
I have a UPS with surge protection which I plug my computer into for this reason. Do others do the same or use something else?
I bought a PC in early 2021 IIRC. It was good for the time and a good deal for a high end PC. IIRC it was $2800 and had a 6900 XTX. Last year I accidentally killed it. The CPU temps were higher than I'd like (~85C). the thermal grease can become hard and ineffective over time so I figured I'd replace it. Instead, it had become like cement and by twisting the AIO off, I snapped the socket on the motherboard.
This was an expensive mistake as I both looked into buying a replacement motherboard and CPU but that quickly gets to the price of a new PC. Paying someone to rebuild my PC is expensive and I'm beyond the age of wanting to fully remove a motherboard and effectively rebuild my entire PC myself. So I didn't know what to do with it.
Anyway, I ended up buying various alternatives like a NUC with 32GB of RAM, a laptop (with a 4080) and a Mac Mini. But I also ended up buying a new 9800X3D PC with a 5070Ti. Like I said, it was an expensive mistake.
But I decided for no particular reason to upgrade the (already good) 32GB of DDR5-6000 to 64GB with a $200 kit of DDR5-6000. This was in July I think. I also upgraded my laptop to 64GB for no readily apparent reason.
I recently checked and that $200 64GB kit now costs $950. SSDs are through the roof too but through complete accident I'm surrounded by about 5 PCs and a bunch of spare RAM. I don't see myself upgrading anytime soon.
I will say that there are some good deals (relative to current pricing) for combos including CPU, motherboard and memory or even some pretty good prebuilts.
We used those Tripp Lite LC1200 to knock down the noise floor (14dB) on remote equipment.
These line-conditioners actually perform well given the cost, but never buy used surge-arresters given the finite spike hit-count. Best of luck =3
These devices are basically autotransformers. So they reduce the noise by providing inductive filtering. But they don't really protect against strong surges by themselves.
So Tripp Lite uses a regular varistor for that, just like any other surge protector. In Europe you'd be far better off buying a voltage relay and adding it to your electrical panel, but it's not usually possible with the non-modular US electrical panels.
The simple line-conditioners were surprisingly effective, and are a fraction of the cost of lab/medical grade galvanic isolation ferroresonant transformers. =3
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