Daily Tech News 29 October 2023

• The Hugo Awards are here again and the Best Novel apparently did not go to a woke trash diversity pick. (Gizmodo)
  
  I haven't read T. Kingfisher's (not her real name) Nettle & Bone, which won this year, but I have read her Paladin series and Clocktaur books, and they're fine. Not the sort of genre-changing works we expect to see winning Hugos, but enjoyable reads.
  
  Which, sadly, might count as genre-changing these days.

• The Lexar NM790 is a low end (though not lowest-end) PCIe 4 SSD. But what does low-end mean in late 2023? (Serve the Home)
  
  It means that under sustained heavy write loads - the weak point for DRAMless budget drives - it slows down to as little as 1GBps.
  
  Which is... Fine. For most tasks, that's plenty.
  
  Sequential reads are over 7GBps, which is as fast as PCIe 4 will go.
  
  I wouldn't recommend it for a server, but for a desktop, particularly as a second disk, it seems like it would be great.
  
  The 4TB model sells for $189.
  
  
  
• The new RTX 4060 Ti model from Asus takes the unused eight PCIe lanes and adds an M.2 slot with them. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  A prototype had two M.2 slots - after all, they use four lanes each, and eight are available. The problem is, Intel desktop CPUs can't split the lanes up like that.
  
  So rather than make a card that would only work fully in AMD systems, they took that second slot out.
  
  
  
• Supposed specs of the upcoming Nvidia 40x0 Super cards. (Tom's Hardware)
  
  The 4080 Super would be a cut-down 4090, the 4070 Ti super a cut-down 4080, and the 4070 Super would be an irrelevant overpriced piece of junk.
  
  
  
• Should you buy a second-hand Nvidia 170HX from a bankrupt Mongolian crypto mining farm? Probably not. (niconiconi)
  
  These cost $5000 new two years ago, and are now on the market second hand for around $500. The 170HX is a variant of Nvidia's A100, the top of the line, which cost over $10,000.
  
  The problem is, Nvidia lobotomised it to stop it cannibalising sales of the more expensive card. It was good for mining Ethereum, but nobody mines Ethereum anymore. Literally nobody, since there no longer is such a thing as Ethereum mining.
  
  On other tasks it's all over the map, performing anywhere from 3060 levels to the equivalent of the 3080. Unless you know exactly what you want to use it for and have benchmarks to hand, best to avoid.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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