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Chip shortage? Here's why you shouldn't buy anything electronic now.

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Leslieann:

--- Quote from: suicidal_orange on Sat, 08 January 2022, 16:07:29 ---I know about the generations and am quite happy on my Z97 so whatever forced upgrade I have to make next was hoped to last for five years, as this one nearly has. 

--- End quote ---
I actually get annoyed when I see a system I built for someone fail to last at least 7 years with no more than a drive replacement.
This is one reason I also always spec a larger PSU than necessary, they tend to lose some capacity as they age. Last time I saw the system, my first 750 watt PSU was nearing 15 years old and still running an AMD R9 270 for a customer.

Note, If you get frequent brown outs or spikes, invest in an UPS, preferably with power regulation, those kill power supplies which kill your system.


BTW I run a lot of older hardware in my home/shop, much of it as old or older than your system.
1x 5th gen I5 laptop (my personal laptop) (6 years old)
1x 4th gen I3 laptop   (7 years olds)
5x 3rd gen processors (8 years old)
2x 2nd gen celerons  (9 years old)
1x AMD FX hex core GPU test bench (12 years old?)

tp4tissue:
The motherboards are where the price advantage evaporates for older gen.

haswell kind of is ok, because you can cheap out on the mobo and still get decent OC.  sandy, ivy, ____  coffeelake and above must have good boards..

Non-K is not an option because they gated performance so steeply.

suicidal_orange:

--- Quote from: Leslieann on Sat, 08 January 2022, 17:29:09 ---I run a lot of older hardware in my home/shop, much of it as old or older than your system.
1x 5th gen I5 laptop (my personal laptop) (6 years old)
1x 4th gen I3 laptop   (7 years olds)
5x 3rd gen processors (8 years old)
2x 2nd gen celerons  (9 years old)
1x AMD FX hex core GPU test bench (12 years old?)

--- End quote ---
This is reassuring.  My CPU was probably abused in it's early life (it's an i7-4890HQ unlocked laptop chip on an adaptor sold as an overclocking beast) and setting a core voltage in BIOS gives inaccurate readings so I'm not 100% confident in the pin mapping - it's lasting pretty well all things considered.

Trying to write this made me think back to what died of what but it's so long ago I don't remember.  What happened to the Pentium D board with a hardware vdroop mod?  I remember selling a CPU and mobo to a friend and giving him the PSU because I didn't trust it and he ran it for at least a year so can't have been too bad, but I think that was a Core 2 quad ES. 

Then I had a 2600K setup bought Jan 2012 which died, the CPU was sold on ebay to a happy buyer so it wasn't that.  I bought my first fanless 400W June 2013 for some reason (distrusting the gifted one?) then bought another identical PSU in November 2016 which was probably to test this combo's death.

Then in June 2018 I returned one of the PSUs due to coil whine, they have a 10 year warranty and I only use one at a time so could have been either of them but assumedly I would have had the 2018 one in the system due to laziness.  Though if I just pulled the cables out the side to test and it was still dead would I bother with all the screws?  When that PSU was sent away I would have put the other one in and probably it "worked", but maybe that was the one that killed the 2600K mobo.

Next build was the short lived i7-5775C where the CPU cracked and burned after a year but the mobo still worked last I tried.  Following this timeline I could have a new from warranty PSU in a box somewhere while I'm running one that was used for 3.5 years before it's current 4 year stretch.  Unless I swapped it to test the 5775, but that died slowly and painfully (no GPU then only booting sometimes then nothing) so it never looked like a PSU problem.  But if I did make that swap in the box could be a PSU that has killed a mobo and CPU...  My head hurts.

Also sorry for going way off topic but at least this important info gets bumped.

Edit:  Found the spare PSU, it's definitely not BNIB as it has a big scratch and no "new" smell despite being in a sealed box.  Not sure that helps.

Leslieann:
I'm glad it set your mind at ease a bit and this is quite relevant to the topic, longevity is a large part of what I was getting at.


CPU manufacturing is extremely tightly controlled, whereas a motherboard is not only fragile it has parts all sourced from various places and suppliers (lowest bidder) often put together by someone else. Even if you include overclocking, for every cpu I've seen fail I've probably seen 10 or more of everything else fail, it's just not that common. You say yours suffered abuse, it would have much more likely failed in the past, not now. I will say though that if it was to fail from that abuse now it would most likely be a gradual decline in stability, temporarily fixable by lowering clock speeds more and more before it ultimately just becomes unusable. This can happen fast or slow but slow enough for you to notice, it would most likely not just up and die.



Regarding your psu...
If that PSU killed a board, it would have killed this one by now, it's very likely it was the MB that failed. In my experience, even average quality PSUs in general fail less frequently than good motherboards and one thing they pretty much never do is kill one board and allow the next to live happily for years, that's not a PSU problem. 

When you send in a part for warranty they do not guarantee you will get a brand new one, you usually get one that has been tested to be sure it works (I always try and return it to the store and get a new one). They get tons of returns that are perfectly fine or just need some minor fix, the concern is that some companies do not actually test anything and just send it out a second or even third time before writing it off (stores also do this but when they do it it's called open box so at least you know what you are getting). I once got a warrantied motherboard from a major brand name with 4 dead memory slots...

The PSU you're using has lasted this long, don't mess with it unless you're having stability issues, maybe load up something to watch voltages, see if they fluctuate but otherwise I wouldn't touch it. It's a known quantity at this point, unlike your boxed one. I also wouldn't use that PSU in the box without first using it on some other (disposable) hardware first and watching voltage stability in bios. That's by no means a thorough PSU test but it's better than nothing. But why change what works and put your system at risk.


Honestly, my primary concern with your system's age is the drives, a stable system is a happy system but hard drives are sneaky little sh*ts.
if you haven't done so, read through this thread.
https://geekhack.org/index.php?topic=115792.0

suicidal_orange:
The replacement PSU was new - Seasonic are (or at least were) good and it's 80+Platinum rated and well reviewed as top tier.  I have no need for big watts but never cheap out on a PSU (these use caps too - you really don't want a covid affected PSU :eek:)  I am no keener to mess about with screws and wiring now than at any other time so it's staying in the box.  I'll have to find a sacrificial system to test it in though I must have thought it was OK when put it in the box or I'd have binned it instead.

Just looked at my spinner against the SMART stuff you were talking about in the other thread, UDMA_CRC_Error_Count = 0 which is good but your closing statement "don't think I've ever actually seen a drive with a read error (line 01) or write error (line C8) that didn't also have other more concerning problems." is scary as my read is slightly(!) more than 0, though it matches the ECC recovered value (195) so maybe this is due to the bad cable last year?


--- Code: ---ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x000f   080   065   006    Pre-fail  Always       -       115320735
  3 Spin_Up_Time            0x0003   097   096   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  4 Start_Stop_Count        0x0032   092   092   020    Old_age   Always       -       9057
  5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct   0x0033   100   100   010    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
  7 Seek_Error_Rate         0x000f   066   060   045    Pre-fail  Always       -       4560972
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   093   093   000    Old_age   Always       -       6585
 10 Spin_Retry_Count        0x0013   100   100   097    Pre-fail  Always       -       0
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   098   098   020    Old_age   Always       -       3029
183 Runtime_Bad_Block       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
184 End-to-End_Error        0x0032   100   100   099    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
188 Command_Timeout         0x0032   100   099   000    Old_age   Always       -       2 2 2
189 High_Fly_Writes         0x003a   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022   074   056   040    Old_age   Always       -       26 (Min/Max 15/26)
193 Load_Cycle_Count        0x0032   096   096   000    Old_age   Always       -       9108
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   026   010   000    Old_age   Always       -       26 (0 10 0 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered  0x001a   005   002   000    Old_age   Always       -       115320735
197 Current_Pending_Sector  0x0012   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0010   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x003e   200   200   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
240 Head_Flying_Hours       0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       1315h+05m+38.471s
241 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       4059874633
242 Total_LBAs_Read         0x0000   100   253   000    Old_age   Offline      -       2704335500

--- End code ---
My SATA SSD boot drive also has read errors, though way less.

--- Code: ---ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME          FLAG     VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE      UPDATED  WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
  1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate     0x002f   100   100   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       76
  5 Reallocate_NAND_Blk_Cnt 0x0032   100   100   010    Old_age   Always       -       0
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       4114
 12 Power_Cycle_Count       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       4606
171 Program_Fail_Count      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
172 Erase_Fail_Count        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
173 Ave_Block-Erase_Count   0x0032   097   097   000    Old_age   Always       -       115
174 Unexpect_Power_Loss_Ct  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       257
180 Unused_Reserve_NAND_Blk 0x0033   100   100   000    Pre-fail  Always       -       59
183 SATA_Interfac_Downshift 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       2
184 Error_Correction_Count  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
187 Reported_Uncorrect      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
194 Temperature_Celsius     0x0022   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       34
196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
197 Current_Pending_ECC_Cnt 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
198 Offline_Uncorrectable   0x0030   100   100   000    Old_age   Offline      -       0
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count    0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       6364
202 Percent_Lifetime_Remain 0x0030   097   097   001    Old_age   Offline      -       3
206 Write_Error_Rate        0x000e   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
210 Success_RAIN_Recov_Cnt  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       0
246 Total_LBAs_Written      0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       17058310789
247 Host_Program_Page_Count 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       154716591
248 FTL_Program_Page_Count  0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       207130153
--- End code ---

Should I be scared?

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