4 ms·

Maybe it's just that the last motherboard I got (MSI, and ... it was a newegg refurb), but the last PC I built was BY FAR the worse experience ever. - RAM: onl

Maybe it's just that the last motherboard I got (MSI, and ... it was a newegg refurb), but the last PC I built was BY FAR the worse experience ever. - RAM: only 2 of four slots worked, couldn't install in the "optimal" bank setting, just to get it to boot. Tried with two different stick brands, which various sites said would be compatible - Ryzen 5600G needed a bios update to ... kinda ... get work. The HDMI does not work at all however - BIOS update required undocumented help from the internet: need a FAT system on "not too big" of a flash drive. - OK, so try a new minimalist video card ... doesn't get recognized, but an old video card does work. - On the linux side, the kernel support for 5600G took another six months, the HDMI-over-displayport-adapter I DID get to work for 4k is now flickering and dropping signal... there are some support notes in arch linux about switching from y color space to others, or some EDID hack, or some thing with fooling DRM. None of this is configurable in text files of course, some systemd binary or direct bin file hacking.... I've never had to do even one of these problems building other PCs (this is probably my seventh or eighth box build in my lifetime).

toast0 4y ago
Refurb often means previously broken and hopefully fixed; sometimes it just means returned, but the box wasn't nice enough to sell as open boxed. Looks like your board probably still had issues after refurbishment. It would probably have been better to return it when you first got it, although newegg return processing isn't always easy. It's hard to be patient, but buying parts after they've been out long enough to get supported by the software you want to use also helps let other people find the problems with the rest of the package.
- AtlasBarfed 4y ago
  I did an AMD APU back in the A8/A10 days and that was the crankiest and most annoying build I did until that point. It is so appealing to a non-hardcore gamer to get an AMD + graphics integrated chip, and it makes so much sense with all that excess silicon real estate, but the obvious lack of attention in the entire chain of software and hardware and firmware support is unacceptable. The board (a B550) seemed to have gigantic amounts of support issues from what I can tell, because there were far too many people with similar issues, and they couldn't have been all refurbs. And obviously, a refurb/open box means there are lots of returns. It was a bad decision on my part, but why is the board accepting an old PCI graphics card but not a "modern" one, even after the most recent BIOS (which is five months old at this point, so it looks like MSI is just abandoning this board from a support perspective, even though the advertised processor support was only enabled in one of the more recent BIOS releases) I should have built it while I was close to a MicroCenter, but I'm not a person that likes to remount a CPU, so once the CPU is mounted, I'm pretty reticent to swap out a motherboard. I'll just make it a containers / VM hosting box. Finally, I just booted up my previous "fastest" box that I upgraded (problematically) to the latest Ubu and wow is it a lot slower than it was. I've had problems with snap update daemons and maybe all the snaps are eating available RAM with all their copies of libraries. People, serial speed improvement is dead, it is the deadest of the dying "Moore's law" patterns. The software industry has to start making its code more efficient. We need to loopback and start improving the stacks and execution environments to squeeze more from less. I'll know when we stop putting our heads up our you-know-wheres when OS releases make old machines faster, rather than bogging them down with Javascript Electron monstrosities and memory-is-cheap containers with complete OS's in them to run a web server or web browser. Linux in particular probably needs to start repackaging libraries into stability-focused libraries. Sweep the libraries for parts that have not changed much in 5-10 years, and start moving those into "mature" libraries, and have "volatile" libraries. But then again the constant churn in GPU compute, vector extensions, etc means that just is not going to stabilize. We might still be 50 years from where hardware "wringing" is done and the hardware interfaces stabilize for decades rather than years.
- geerlingguy 4y ago
  I bought my previous motherboard refurb, and found there was a capacitor barely hanging on near the first PCIe slot—someone had probably yanked a GPU and slammed it into that spot (there was also a little damage on the retention clip still). After a few weeks the 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port stopped working, until I resoldered that capacitor. Then a few months later it stopped working again, as one of the motherboard traces was also damaged and I couldn't repair it. Had to use a separate network card from that point on. I didn't return the motherboard because of the hassle... it wasn't the end of the world using a different NIC.

toast0 4y ago

Refurb often means previously broken and hopefully fixed; sometimes it just means returned, but the box wasn't nice enough to sell as open boxed. Looks like your board probably still had issues after refurbishment. It would probably have been better to return it when you first got it, although newegg return processing isn't always easy. It's hard to be patient, but buying parts after they've been out long enough to get supported by the software you want to use also helps let other people find the problems with the rest of the package.

AtlasBarfed 4y ago
I did an AMD APU back in the A8/A10 days and that was the crankiest and most annoying build I did until that point. It is so appealing to a non-hardcore gamer to get an AMD + graphics integrated chip, and it makes so much sense with all that excess silicon real estate, but the obvious lack of attention in the entire chain of software and hardware and firmware support is unacceptable. The board (a B550) seemed to have gigantic amounts of support issues from what I can tell, because there were far too many people with similar issues, and they couldn't have been all refurbs. And obviously, a refurb/open box means there are lots of returns. It was a bad decision on my part, but why is the board accepting an old PCI graphics card but not a "modern" one, even after the most recent BIOS (which is five months old at this point, so it looks like MSI is just abandoning this board from a support perspective, even though the advertised processor support was only enabled in one of the more recent BIOS releases) I should have built it while I was close to a MicroCenter, but I'm not a person that likes to remount a CPU, so once the CPU is mounted, I'm pretty reticent to swap out a motherboard. I'll just make it a containers / VM hosting box. Finally, I just booted up my previous "fastest" box that I upgraded (problematically) to the latest Ubu and wow is it a lot slower than it was. I've had problems with snap update daemons and maybe all the snaps are eating available RAM with all their copies of libraries. People, serial speed improvement is dead, it is the deadest of the dying "Moore's law" patterns. The software industry has to start making its code more efficient. We need to loopback and start improving the stacks and execution environments to squeeze more from less. I'll know when we stop putting our heads up our you-know-wheres when OS releases make old machines faster, rather than bogging them down with Javascript Electron monstrosities and memory-is-cheap containers with complete OS's in them to run a web server or web browser. Linux in particular probably needs to start repackaging libraries into stability-focused libraries. Sweep the libraries for parts that have not changed much in 5-10 years, and start moving those into "mature" libraries, and have "volatile" libraries. But then again the constant churn in GPU compute, vector extensions, etc means that just is not going to stabilize. We might still be 50 years from where hardware "wringing" is done and the hardware interfaces stabilize for decades rather than years.
geerlingguy 4y ago
I bought my previous motherboard refurb, and found there was a capacitor barely hanging on near the first PCIe slot—someone had probably yanked a GPU and slammed it into that spot (there was also a little damage on the retention clip still). After a few weeks the 2.5 Gbps Ethernet port stopped working, until I resoldered that capacitor. Then a few months later it stopped working again, as one of the motherboard traces was also damaged and I couldn't repair it. Had to use a separate network card from that point on. I didn't return the motherboard because of the hassle... it wasn't the end of the world using a different NIC.