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The fan blades deform & vibrate under rotation & airflow. Controlling that deformation is the point of the use of materials like Noctua's Sterrox LCP or other flglass-fiber reinforced LCP materials in other premium fans. So lower clearance isn't just a matter of manufacturing tolerance

Noctua talks about it on this page: https://www.noctua.at/en/expertise/tech/sterroxr-liquid-crys...

Yeah, but those aren't noctua fans. Noctua's claim to fame is being lower noise, not moving the most air. I'm sure somebody is buying a premium low noise-focused fan and then pinning it to max, but that's definitely not going to be typical.

We don't know what Noctua's tolerance is. The clearance in this case has to account for the flexing that will inevitably happen as the fan spins around in an environment than can easily see 50C temperatures. ABS (what Lego uses) begins softening at around 40C, which will increase how much it's deforming at 1500-2500 RPM.

Fan tip clearance is the main driver of fan efficiency at the price bracket this fan is competing at

The specific fan in question has a rated max power draw of 1.8 W. In actual deployments it's going to be a lot less since ~nobody is running a noctua fan at 100% speed unconditionally

A mac mini uses a lot more than 6w under load. 2024 M4 base mac mini has a rated max of 65W[1] and the M4 more than doubles that number to 140w

1: https://support.apple.com/en-us/103253

> Here you go[0]. 'Aztek Ruins offscreen'. Although I misremembered the exact FPS, the 3090 is at 506 FPS.

Oh, GFXBench not geekbench.

Realistically that 506 fps result is probably CPU bottlenecked, not that aztec ruins is all that relevant. It's a very old benchmark, released in 2018, that was destroyed for mobile GPUs, so realistically is using a 2010-ish GPU feature set.

If that's your use case, great. But it's not significant at all.

> And here[1] you have it smoking an Intel i9 12900K + RTX 3900.

Not using the GPU, so irrelevant. Also not using 700-800w

> Also, the GTX 1660 (technically an RTX 2000 series, but whatever) is about 26% less efficient than an 3090[2].

"bestvaluegpu" I've never heard of but holy AI slop nonsense batman. Taking 3dmark score and dividing it by TDP is easily one of the worst ways to compare possible.

Here's actual perf/watt results taken by, you know, actually measuring the power draw https://www.techpowerup.com/review/msi-geforce-rtx-3090-gami...

> They did it with AMD's GPUs later down the line, pretending like Vulkan couldn't be implemented so they could promote Metal.

It was even worse than that, they just stopped updating OpenGL for years before either Vulkan or Metal existed at all. Taking a Macbook and using bootcamp would instantly raise the GPU feature level by several generations just because Apple's GPU drivers were so fucking old & outdated.

What geekbench 5 fps are you talking about? Geekbench only has OpenCL and Vulkan scores for the 3090 as far as I can tell, and the M1 Ultra is less than half the OpenCL score of the 3090. And the M1 Ultra was significantly more expensive.

Find or link these workloads you think exist, please

> The M1 was (well, is) a marvel and absolutely smokes a 3090 in perf per watt.

The GTX 1660 also smokes the 3090 in perf per watt. Being more efficient while being dramatically slower is not exactly an achievement, it's pretty typical power consumption scaling in fact. Perf per watt is only meaningful if you're also able to match the perf itself. That's what actually made the M1 CPU notable. M-series GPUs (not just the M1, but even the latest) haven't managed to match or even come close to the perf, so being more efficient is not really any different than, say, Nvidia, AMD, or Intel mobile GPU offerings. Nice for laptops, insignificant otherwise

> Then we decided to just have no markings at all on USB C cables.

I'm shocked the LTT TrueSpec cables are the first I'm aware of to so such a small and basic thing. I have so many USB C cables and no idea which are power only, USB 2 only, or what. Such a mess

I mean.. kinda everything about Mythos for example? Anthropic has a good product, but they also pretty consistently say some stupid ass shit if you're being generous, and blatant lies if you aren't

Presumably the upside for Google is they'll just lock it behind the "Google AI Plus" subscription plan if it isn't already

The only reason I haven't canceled my Plex is because I bought a lifetime pass a decade ago so I literally can't. :/ I almost wish I hadn't specifically so I could cancel it and send that signal.

But yes Plex is quite enshittified now. Would definitely start with Jellyfin or something else these days.

Since DVDs are ~5mbps mpeg2, no, no it isn't. 5 mbps h264 is dramatically better.

Now, when compared to blu-ray... That's different. Very, very different.

> OP here might be misremembering DVDs, here: the physical media skipped or froze intermittently and the players themselves were finicky

In my teens my friends and I watched probably hundreds of DVDs, and they almost never had a problem. Skips & freezes were almost only ever a factor for highly scratched copies, more typical of those from Blockbuster than anything we picked up in the $5 bargain bins.

I don't think I've ever encountered a "finicky" player, either. I don't even know what that'd mean.

> You can get the 4 lego movies for $5 on DVD on Amazon right now. A "Tom Cruise 10-Movie Collection" is $12. You get the idea.

The image quality on these is also quite bad, especially with cost cutting resulting in these being compressed further to fit on a single-layer DVD. Often without any indication that it happened, as well. Whether or not you find it acceptable is definitely a matter of personal taste, but it's very much apples & oranges vs. Netflix. Blu-ray by contrast is generally better quality than what you'll get from streaming services.

The MX440 was an entry level budget card? If it was all the rage in pro gaming circles at the time that's really just a reflection of how poor pro gamers were back then rather than anything to do with the MX440 being particularly noteworthy. In fact looking back at old reviews, it was if anything a flop. Launch MSRP was too expensive for the performance it offered. Especially when it was a DX7 card surrounded by DX8 cards at almost the same price point (including Nvidia's own Ti4200 for just $50 more)

The GeForce 4 generation as a whole, while being solid enough cards, were historically not interesting. They were just basic spec bumps over the GeForce 3. No new features or similar. And, critically, the 9700 Pro released the same year as the GeForce 4 and absolutely smoked the living shit out of it.

Why? Just make iMessage users put up with green bubbles if they want to talk to you?

Thanks to Apple co-opting phone numbers, there's literally no need to ever have iMessage for anyone

They can abandon it multiple times ;)

When they introduced the cheese grater Mac Pro the new high end GPUs were a showcase feature of it. Complete with the bespoke "Duo" variants and the special power connector doohickey (MPX iirc?). So I'd consider that an attempt to re-enter that market at least.

The Thunderbolt offerings on the current Mac lineup offer dramatically less bandwidth in total if that matters for a given use case. Thunderbolt 5 is the equivalent of PCI-E Gen 4 x4. So if all 4 of the Thunderbolt 5 ports on a Mac Studio can run at full speed, that's still only the equivalent of a single gen 4 x16 slot. That's less than half the bandwidth of a basic consumer x86 CPU, to say nothing of the Xeon that was in the previous Intel Mac Pro or a modern Epyc/Threadripper (Pro).

This is a big reason why things like eGPUs kinda suck. Thunderbolt is fast for external I/O, but it's quite pathetic compared to internal PCI-E.

Their compact solution doesn't cover all needs, they just decided that they didn't care about some of those needs. The Intel Mac Pro was the last Apple offering with high end GPU capabilities. That's now a market segment they just aren't supporting at all. They didn't figure out how to do it compactly, they just abandoned it wholesale.

Similarly if your use case depends on a whole lot of fast storage (eg, the 4x NVME to PCI-E x16 bifurcation boards), well that's also now something Apple just doesn't support. They didn't figure out something else. They didn't do super innovative engineering for it. They just walked away from those markets completely, which they're allowed to do of course. It's just not exactly inspiring or "deserves credit" worthy.

I use Nix for my homelab servers, and I'm using AI to be my IT support staff essentially. I don't need to ask AI for help installing hyperland, that is trivial as you say, but setting up nginx port forwarding? samba configs? k3s or k8s? Yeah individually any one of those things isn't very hard. But instead of spending 30 minutes reading through config examples and figuring out where it's setup I can instead spend 30 seconds just telling AI what I want, skimming the output to see if it's looks reasonable, and then doing a good ol' `git commit` of the config file & kicking off the "now go do it" nix build command.

And, critically, at no point does an LLM ever have access to sudo, shell, etc.. It just works with plain text files that aren't even on the machine I'm deploying it to.

yeah I'm using mobile Firefox and it has an awfully high overlap with Safari. Almost like a bunch of the stuff Chrome supports isn't actually a standard at all yet...

javac for better or worse is aggressively against doing optimizations to the point of producing the most ridiculously bad code. The belief tends to be that the JIT will do a better job fixing it if it has byte code that's as close as possible to the original code. But this only helps if a) the code ever gets JIT'd at all (rarely true for eg class initializers), and b) the JIT has the budget to do that optimization. Although JITs have the advantage of runtime information, they are also under immense pressure to produce any optimizations as fast as possible. So they rarely do the level of deep optimizations of an offline compiler.

The problem is it's quite easy to poke holes in a sandbox when you're outside the sandbox looking in, especially when the user is granting you special permissions they don't understand. These apps aren't doing things like manipulating the heap of the banking app, they are instead just taking advantage of useful but powerful features like screen mirroring to read what the app is rendering.

I purposely picked a CPU with the same thread geometry as your 9900K to avoid calls of "apples & oranges" or whatever. If you want more threads, the 9950X is right there in the same socket. Or Core Ultra 9 285k. Either of which will run circles around a 9900K in code compilation.

You can research microarchitecture differences if you want, it's a fascinating world, or you can just skip to looking at benchmarks/reviews. Little hard to compare against quite that large of a generation gap, but eg https://gamersnexus.net/cpus/rip-intel-amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-c... or https://www.phoronix.com/review/amd-ryzen-7-9800x3d-linux/2

Your 9900k at 5ghz does work slower than a Ryzen 9800X3D at 5ghz. A lot slower (1700 single core geekbench vs 3300, and just about any benchmark will tell the same story). Clock speed alone doesn't mean anything.

If M5 has 9-18 cores and takes ~20w, then that's ~1-2w per CPU core. If these are 200-300W, and have ~100-200 CPU cores, then guess what? That's also ~1-2w per CPU core.

Xeons, Epycs, whatever this is - they are all also typically optimized for power efficiency. That's how they can fit so many CPU cores in 200-300W.

> you swapped your whole system memory in 3 seconds, which is impressive.

As a user a 3 second hang is unusable. Also, critically, swap consumes the life of the drive. Since the Neo's isn't user-replaceable, a 3-5 year lifespan before death is actually a non-trivial compromise, although time will tell on that one I suppose.