I don’t mind a single small LED backlight that lets me know something is turned on. It’s useful when glancing around a workshop to ensure everything is shut down for the evening.
My motorbike has an intensely annoying & unnecessarily bright, blue high-beam indicator light. On a damp & misty night when my visor is a bit foggy, visibility is at a premium. I very much dislike clicking highbeam & suddenly finding mysef in a teleportal glow, where the only discernible thing is this piercing starburst of blue light that obscures everything.
I wonder what clown thought that was a good idea?!
Even with black ellectrical tape across the front, the glow still actually lights up the entire area of the gauge. Dumb & unnecessary.
My computer is not a ‘show’ case, so I like it plain and simple without any ‘useless’ lighting, just to look fancy. I do however love to see what people can come up with modding their cases.
It looks like an old 19th century trick called “Pepper’s Ghost”. It involves partial refraction in a sheet of clear glass. The old versions used live actors, but it works just as well with a video image.
It was done with a clear LCD display, first shown at an exhibition in Osaka June 2017.
I could link the original first posts about it, but most of us likely prefer English
The styling is more boy-racer aggressive than I like, and I’m not keen on the lights. Still, it’s very big, and reasonably cheap.
However, it now turns out that it’s not available in Europe. You can only get them in the US. Amazon will ship one from the US to the UK (for a price), but I’ve had lots of problems doing that in the past. If things are broken or faulty, returning them becomes a nightmare.
So my second choice is this one:
It doesn’t have as many drive bays, and it’s not quite as big, but the styling is nicer, and it’s cheaper. Probably my choice of the moment.
Whilst researching the Enthoo Pro, I discovered that it has a brother - the Enthoo Elite. They appear to be very similar, apart from the Elite having lights in the front trim. Oh, and the price. I can have an Enthoo Pro for £95.00. The Elite will cost me a staggering £857.00. That’s right. For a computer case.
Here it is:
I can’t even imagine who spends £850 on a case. It’s just a metal box, for God’s sake.
The current plan is that once I’ve built and commissioned my new computer, the old one (the one I’m using now) will be reborn as a Linux box.
I’ve fooled around with Linux over the years. I am particularly impressed by Ubuntu. The only thing that’s preventing me from making the switch altogether is games performance. I was really hoping for big things from Steam OS - if that had seriously taken off, all games hosted on Steam would have been Linux compatible. It looked fantastic - Steam OS, Steam box computers, Steam controllers, Steam/Linux games… but, sadly, the whole Steam thing just fizzled out.
So, for now, I’m stuck with Windows as my primary system. But I think I’ll give Linux a chance.
The Phanteks Enthoo Pro looks like a good choice for what options you have. It should fit an RTX 2080 Ti as well with 347mm clearance without having to remove HDD cages. The one pictured without the window, is the PH-ES614PC. They have a split windowed version as well, which I assume is more common, but not what you wish (PH-ES614P).
Wow, the Elite is way over-priced! Seems to have a lot of similarities with the Corsair 900D, which was only half that amount. Must be the Ambient RGB making the diff … LEDs are soooo expensive, right?!
How is the new PC coming along?
Just in case you come across any Ubuntu stories about 32 bit support being dropped by Canonical and thus by Steam, it is untrue.
Steam still needs to reply but Canonical says you will still be able to run 32 bit in 64 bit Ubuntu. They are dropping support for 32 bit Ubuntu OS but your 32 bit programs will still work because the library that runs 32 bit will still be there, but it will be frozen to 18.04 LTS.
This has caused a lot of confusion…someone at Steam got the wrong understanding due to poor wording…DON’T PANIC. (Where is my towel?)
I’m taking it very slowly. The money doesn’t come through until end of June / beginning of July, so there’s no rush. Still, I bought the case - which arrived yesterday. It’s VERY big.
Regarding 32 bit Ubuntu, I don’t think I actually have any 32 bit kit I ever plan on using again - but it’s nice to know that people can keep their old faithfuls running.
I do still use a few old 32 bit programs. I would be sorry to lose them.
All the same, it’s interesting that Canonical should be dropping the 32 bit OS. When Ubuntu first launched, the whole philosophy was to provide a free OS and software suite, specifically aimed at people in poorer countries, who otherwise wouldn’t have access to the educational and/or creative opportunites offered by commercial computing resources. And that almost inevitably means support for older hardware. I wonder what’s changed?
Roomy! That’s a couple of inches taller and deeper than mine.
I had 7 slots for hard drives but removed 4 for my graphics card. So you should have enough room to head up the first manned Mars mission, lol.
Been looking at the link you posted for the extra usb’s, etc…but I have not had time for such things recently.
Maybe you will be up and running for BEYOND.
Unlikely. As I said in the intro to the thread, my current computer is more than capable of running NMS. The one I’m planning to build is intended to be my (to some degree) future-proof replacement.
The computer I have now will still run anything I throw at it. I built it to a high specification. But that was six or seven years ago, and it’s starting to show its age - technology marches on.
So now I’m looking at building the computer I will be using in another seven or eight years. I’m not in a hurry - I can take my time. But compatibility with expected future developments is important. The money may not come round again.
In the meantime, I’m upgrading my Raspberry Pi investments. I’ve just ordered an extra motherboard (V3 B+), and a 7" touchscreen.
Raspberry pi…my son has big dreams of a PDA styled wrist-worn PC…he is having a bit of trouble finding an appropriately sized power source…big dreams, tiny spaces…
The Raspberry Pi is a load of fun. It’s ridiculously cheap, and uncommonly powerful. But it’s not, and was never, intended to be a marketable consumer product. It’s an educational and development tool - or maybe it’s just fun for those (like me) who like to tinker.
For 35 dollars, the Pi 3 B+ will give you more (much more) functionality than a 2,000 dollar IBM PC would have given you back in the 1980s. And you can play with it. What’s not to like?
Bu.gger. More expense. And I bet most of the accessories and expansions for the 3B+ are incompatible with the 4.
Still, even if you buy a Raspberry Pi and every possible add-on, you’ve still only spent about a quarter of the cost of a good PC.
There’s some mission creep going on here, though, isn’t there? The Raspberry Pi was specifically intended to be cheap. It was intended to bring totally accessible computing to everyone who was interested - regardless of income. It was set up as a charitable foundation, to do just that.
But the power keeps creeping up and up. And with it, so does the price. It’s no longer a schoolkid’s pocket money computer.
I wonder whether, rather than offering different memory versions of the 4 (1, 2, or 4 Gb), they should have just put a memory expansion bus on the board. The possibility of memory expansion is something I’ve always thought was lacking in the Pi. Even the Sinclair ZX80, back in 1980, had a memory expansion bus - but the Pi doesn’t.
The price increases worry me. Not because I can’t afford it - I can - but because of the foundation’s departure from their mission to provide cheap computing for all. Once you accept that the price can increase a little, then you accept that it can increase a lot. And pretty soon, kids and poor people get priced out of the market.
Yeah. At least with the Linux 32 bit issue, the Arch Linux group has already built support for 32 bit and has it running very well. That’s the nice thing about Linux. Different groups can make their own builds and keep things like that working.
I figure, with Raspberry Pi, they will keep trying to push the limits of what it can do, but that will come with increased cost. I guess the question is, at what point have they gone too far?
