Actually, the older Gen Intel processors seem to be quite available now. And at great prices too. See lots of notices and advisories for deals at all the main Tech sites.
Intel has control over their own foundries so are not having any issues making parts using their older processes.
The good deals on older cpus probably is vendors wanting to get rid of old stock now that the new Gen 11 cpus are being released end of this month.

---

Actually, the older Gen Intel processors seem to be quite available now. And at great prices too. See lots of notices and advisories for deals at all the main Tech sites.
Intel has control over their own foundries so are not having any issues making parts using their older processes.
The good deals on older cpus probably is vendors wanting to get rid of old stock now that the new Gen 11 cpus are being released end of this month.

Hi Keith,

I'm already running an 8th Gen i7 8086K. At my age (69) I'm thinking that my next upgrade will more then likely be my last. So I've decided to go 10th Gen. When I'm done here I'm gonna check on the Newegg stock to see what they have. I know they have the mobo; I looked at it yesterday before I decided to see an upgrade to the one I have which supports 8th/9th Gen CPUs. Mine is a Z370 chipset and only supports up to 8th Gen. Then I just have to wait for... wait for it... the stimulus check! ;-)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr XO - L L & P _\\//
USS Vre'kasht NCC-33187
Winders 10 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Actually, the older Gen Intel processors seem to be quite available now. And at great prices too. See lots of notices and advisories for deals at all the main Tech sites.
Intel has control over their own foundries so are not having any issues making parts using their older processes.
The good deals on older cpus probably is vendors wanting to get rid of old stock now that the new Gen 11 cpus are being released end of this month.

That's very good for us crunchers, faster at a good price

Actually, the older Gen Intel processors seem to be quite available now. And at great prices too. See lots of notices and advisories for deals at all the main Tech sites.
Intel has control over their own foundries so are not having any issues making parts using their older processes.
The good deals on older cpus probably is vendors wanting to get rid of old stock now that the new Gen 11 cpus are being released end of this month.

Hi Keith,

I'm already running an 8th Gen i7 8086K. At my age (69) I'm thinking that my next upgrade will more then likely be my last. So I've decided to go 10th Gen. When I'm done here I'm gonna check on the Newegg stock to see what they have. I know they have the mobo; I looked at it yesterday before I decided to see an upgrade to the one I have which supports 8th/9th Gen CPUs. Mine is a Z370 chipset and only supports up to 8th Gen. Then I just have to wait for... wait for it... the stimulus check! ;-)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

LOL!!! I like that "I'm thinking that my next upgrade will more then likely be my last", I'm 68 and bought a Ryzen 3800 cpu and a water cooling block for it that I immediately put in storage until Thanksgiving or so this year!! If my next stimulus check comes in soon I may get another one too!! My wife and I each get to decide how we spend/save our checks and I'm always thinking more and better!! $1400 could get me a way overpriced 30xx gpu or an on sale cpu and mobo so I'm thinking cpu and mobo with ram of course. I've been looking at the 20xx series of gpu's too but they too are waaaaay too much money!!

I want an upgrade to a Ryzen 9 5950X from my 3950X. I can afford to pay the scalper prices, but I refuse to do so on principle. I'll wait till I can snag one at MSRP.

Same for the Nvidia RTX 3000 cards. No hurry since there are only a few projects that can run those cards anyway.

The last purchase I did was for the Epyc mobo, cpu and ECC memory. I think I got very good deals on all the parts. Waited way too long for the Threadripper mobo and TR3000 cpus to become available and the server parts were readily available. Plus I got to learn a little bit about server hardware which I had never worked with before. Win-win in my book.

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So I've decided to go 10th Gen. When I'm done here I'm gonna check on the Newegg stock to see what they have

Tom's hardware had 21% off Intel 10th Gen Intel cpu Newegg deals 4 days ago using their coupon codes.

I would think you would be happy with the i5-10600K or i7-10700K $225 or $330.

---

I want an upgrade to a Ryzen 9 5950X from my 3950X. I can afford to pay the scalper prices, but I refuse to do so on principle. I'll wait till I can snag one at MSRP.

Same for the Nvidia RTX 3000 cards. No hurry since there are only a few projects that can run those cards anyway.

The last purchase I did was for the Epyc mobo, cpu and ECC memory. I think I got very good deals on all the parts. Waited way too long for the Threadripper mobo and TR3000 cpus to become available and the server parts were readily available. Plus I got to learn a little bit about server hardware which I had never worked with before. Win-win in my book.

My son brought home a Server the size of a mini fridge one time when he was in high school in the mid 80's the State Dept had given to his IT Teacher to play with and then give away when they were done with it, it already had the software on it but all the classified stuff of course was gone. It did have the State Department name in a few places here and there but with the funky EXPENSIVE drives and memory and that it didn't have very many cpu cores after playing with it for a couple of months I passed it on to an IT guy who wanted to learn how to play with the Server software so he could get promoted at work. I know the new ones are smaller and much faster so have fun with yours!!

Greetings,

@ Keith & Mikey:

I've already selected an ASUS Prime Z490-A mobo at $249.99 and an Intel i9 10850k CPU at $429.99. I looked at the reviews of the CPU and 87% were 5 star ratings. I didn't see any of the non-5 star rating reviews. :-) Just gotta wait on the stimulus check.

So those prices total is not quite half of the stimulus check. You guys gave me another idea I didn't think about. I'm still running on a GTX 1660 TI GPU, I should be able to land a 20xx RTX at a decent price. I will have to look after I'm done here. I'll let you know what I find. Sure is nice to be in a situation where I'm retired and doing pretty well. The stimulus check is quite the bonus! :-)

[edit 1] Holy crap! Either the manufacturers are scalping or Newegg is scalping. The best price I could find on an in-stock 20xx RTX was $702.99 for a MSI GeForce RTX 2060. I checked the prices on the 30xx RTX GPUs and they were all reasonable and much lower than the 20xx's. But, none were in stock. I'll have to think long and hard on the 2060. ;-) [/edit 1]

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr XO - L L & P _\\//
USS Vre'kasht NCC-33187
Winders 10 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Greetings,

@ Keith & Mikey again:

Rats! I was putting a second edit on my previous post and the time ran out. :-(

[edit 2] After reading the reviews for the Z490 mobo, I decided to go with a Z590 instead. It seems that there were problems with the i225 LAN. Most all reviewers had bad LANs and several also had non-operational DIMM slots. Some were just 2 not working one or more was 3 not working. The only problem I'll see with this mobo is that one of the 3 M.2 slots will only work with a Gen 11 CPU. That CPU supports 4.0 PCIe. I only use 2 M.2 SSDs currently, so no big deal. I can still use the Gen 10 CPU. This board is only $30 bucks more at $279.99. [/edit 2]

Thank the programmers for "copy & paste". ;-)

This should be no problem. This board selection will be future proofed in case I happen to live long enough to do yet another CPU upgrade. ;-)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr XO - L L & P _\\//
USS Vre'kasht NCC-33187
Winders 10 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

@Siran, the i225 LAN chip is relatively new, It supports the new 2.5Gb LAN rate which is useless unless you already have newer ethernet components like a 2.5Gb or better router/gateway and CAT 6e cabling and a fiber or cable connection that supports the higher data rate.

The old Intel i215 LAN chip is very stable and compatible and been around for years supporting the common 1Gb data rate.

@Mikey, I am not working with a standard server chassis. Just my normal PC case. The motherboard is a standard SSI CEB workstation form factor. The cpu is an Epyc 7402P. Just had to learn about BMC interfaces, IPMI management, server BIOS settings and ECC memory. A lot more BIOS settings exposed compared to a standard PC BIOS

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@Siran, the i225 LAN chip is relatively new, It supports the new 2.5Gb LAN rate which is useless unless you already have newer ethernet components like a 2.5Gb or better router/gateway and CAT 6e cabling and a fiber or cable connection that supports the higher data rate.

Hi Keith,

Yeah, I saw that in the spec sheet for both mobo listings. i225 is backward compatible to the 1Gb components I have now. I have no plans to upgrade to the 2.5Gb rating any time soon. It would be nice, sure, but not necessary right now. I don't know if Mediacom (our ISP) has a higher data rate than 1Gb. I'm sure that if they did and we were to go for it, it would cost me an arm and a leg, if not more, than the outrageous cost I'm paying right now. Get this, we're paying for telephone service and we don't even have a home phone. We use our cells all the time. To get what we wanted for TV and Internet, we had to bundle the phone in. Anyway... Thanks for the info about i225 even though I already knew about it. ;-)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr XO - L L & P _\\//
USS Vre'kasht NCC-33187
Winders 10 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Well the mobo makers and gateway/router makers felt it necessary to upgrade the standard 1Gb ethernet ports on products because of the new Wi-Fi 802.11ax or Wi-Fi 6 standard that is being used on phones and other wireless products. Its throughput exceeds the old 1Gb ethernet port link speeds regularly by quite a bit which throttles the connection.

There are even 5Gbps ports going into products also. Reason is that the chipset that manages those speeds are getting popular and much cheaper because of scale in production and usage.

Much cheaper than the 10Gbps port speed chips by Aquantia for example. Those are still reserved for server type products for the most part because of their cost and need for fiber connections.

---

Well the mobo makers and gateway/router makers felt it necessary to upgrade the standard 1Gb ethernet ports on products because of the new Wi-Fi 802.11ax or Wi-Fi 6 standard that is being used on phones and other wireless products. Its throughput exceeds the old 1Gb ethernet port link speeds regularly by quite a bit which throttles the connection.

There are even 5Gbps ports going into products also. Reason is that the chipset that manages those speeds are getting popular and much cheaper because of scale in production and usage.

Much cheaper than the 10Gbps port speed chips by Aquantia for example. Those are still reserved for server type products for the most part because of their cost and need for fiber connections.

10 years ago I went on a photo shoot with my wife in New England and was at brunch one day and a lady from Hong Kong was sitting next to me, she asked how to get 1000Mbps on her wifi like they get in Hong Kong..I had to tell her the US is nowhere close to that yet, She was NOT happy that it took over 20 minutes to send a picture.

I still have pokey ole 1Gbps ports on everything and no device faster than 802.11ac. I do have a 10Gbps port on my X399 mobo but nothing to use it at that speed. Runs at lesser speeds just fine though.

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I still have pokey ole 1Gbps ports on everything and no device faster than 802.11ac. I do have a 10Gbps port on my X399 mobo but nothing to use it at that speed. Runs at lesser speeds just fine though.

I just upgraded my Dell laptops wifi card and now it gets 5G if it becomes available in this building or when I move into my new home, right now it's VERY VERY slow connection and the Boinc uploads often timeout before they finish so have to try again and again. There are no wired internet ports here so it is what it is.

Greetings,

I have one question: Is it wise or necessary to do the kernel updates in Linux as often as they show up in Update Manager?

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr XO - L L & P _\\//
USS Vre'kasht NCC-33187
Winders 10 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Greetings,

I have one question: Is it wise or necessary to do the kernel updates in Linux as often as they show up in Update Manager?

Have a great day! :)

Siran

The easy answer is maybe....I know alot of people do just to keep up to date with the latest and greatest things and for the security that comes along with it in some cases, on the other hand I prefer to never update and just find a version that runs on my pc's and stick with it. With new versions sometimes comes learning new ways of doing old things or even breaking things that you might like the way they work. I think Keith keeps pretty up to date with everything but then he's a very geeky guy and keeps on top of most things going on both within his own distro but also others, I asked him for help with a problem and he figured it out for me even though he wasn't using the same distro I am.

I think Keith keeps pretty up to date with everything but then he's a very geeky guy and keeps on top of most things going on both within his own distro but also others, I asked him for help with a problem and he figured it out for me even though he wasn't using the same distro I am.

Hi Mikey,

Yeah, Keith has helped me a lot since I moved from using Winders for everything to using Linux for everything but gaming. I haven't even been gaming or booted into Winders for about 3 or 4 months now. I got tired of it. My laptop, that does crunching here, still runs Win 7 and my main laptop runs Winders 10, which I use when I'm trying to figure out something on this Linux PC.

I like to keep up to date on the updates for Linux Mint. It just seems that every other week or so there's a new kernel update. I just did one about a week ago. I'll see what Keith has to say and decide from there. It's probably better to do the updates as they come out. ;-)

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr XO - L L & P _\\//
USS Vre'kasht NCC-33187
Winders 10 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath

Yes, I update every kernel update offered. You can always read the changelog in the release for any "show-stopper" that might affect your specific use case.

Generally, the main reasons for frequent kernel updates are additional device coverage or removal of deprecated devices. Removal of deprecated legacy devices is a good thing as it usually removes thousands or sometime millions of lines of code making the kernel smaller and faster.

The kernel maintainers make a decision to remove old hardware that isn't being used by anyone anymore or the code for those devices isn't being maintained anymore. They post the notice to the community and ask for any feedback on the proposed removal and if no one objects the kernel-proposed branch gets updated.

So, you can see probably at least a update once a week based on the recent activity over the past month.

Also, it is good to read the reviews and tests done by testing sites like Phoronix.com on any regressions in performance for the recent kernels against the older legacy kernels. You can read one article here for example:
Linux 5.0 To Linux 5.9 Kernel Benchmarking Was A Bumpy Ride With New Regressions

It is a good idea to read such articles and see where your use case might be affected by a regression and hold off on updating to the latest and greatest. Usually, the testing sites call out serious regressions and that prompts a rapid response in mitigating and correcting the issue in the next release.

I haven't run into a single performance regression for my use cases or loss of device coverage yet for all the kernels I have used since going over to Linux.

---

Yes, I update every kernel update offered. You can always read the changelog in the release for any "show-stopper" that might affect your specific use case.

Generally, the main reasons for frequent kernel updates are additional device coverage or removal of deprecated devices. Removal of deprecated legacy devices is a good thing as it usually removes thousands or sometime millions of lines of code making the kernel smaller and faster.

The kernel maintainers make a decision to remove old hardware that isn't being used by anyone anymore or the code for those devices isn't being maintained anymore. They post the notice to the community and ask for any feedback on the proposed removal and if no one objects the kernel-proposed branch gets updated.

So, you can see probably at least a update once a week based on the recent activity over the past month.

Also, it is good to read the reviews and tests done by testing sites like Phoronix.com on any regressions in performance for the recent kernels against the older legacy kernels. You can read one article here for example:
Linux 5.0 To Linux 5.9 Kernel Benchmarking Was A Bumpy Ride With New Regressions

It is a good idea to read such articles and see where your use case might be affected by a regression and hold off on updating to the latest and greatest. Usually, the testing sites call out serious regressions and that prompts a rapid response in mitigating and correcting the issue in the next release.

I haven't run into a single performance regression for my use cases or loss of device coverage yet for all the kernels I have used since going over to Linux.

HI Keith,

OK then. I did have the idea that new devices were added, but I didn't think about old devices being removed. When and if I get a stimulus check, I'll be upgrading this PC to more current tech, ie motherboard and CPU. :-)

I think 5 days is my longest uptime. With the need to reboot after a kernel update, it makes it hard to get a decent uptime. ;-) I will continue to update...

Have a great day! :)

Siran

---

CAPT Siran d'Vel'nahr XO - L L & P _\\//
USS Vre'kasht NCC-33187
Winders 10 OS? "What a piece of junk!" - L. Skywalker
"Logic is the cement of our civilization with which we ascend from chaos using reason as our guide." - T'Plana-hath