Cooling Cooling a Ryzen 5900X and Crappy Motherboard (Was: Cooling a Ryzen 9 9950X... on air?)

Looks like -5 is the ticket:

10:54:02 up 5 days, 20:39, 1 user, load average: 0.67, 0.80, 0.90

(It's been suspended-to-RAM for a lot of that, but still. That's with stock clock settings and 3,600MHz RAM.)

 

Nope!

18:07:32 up 2 min, 1 user, load average: 2.47, 1.52, 0.61

Six days, then poof: sudden hard reboot, while I was watching something on Crunchyroll.

Set PBO to -2, which is my last stop before 0. Bleedin' thing.

 

Nah, if I have to set PBO back to defaults I'm leaving well alone!

 

Had another crash, but not the usual symptoms: just completely frozen and unresponsive, no hard reboot. Physically rebooted, and the CPU fan went to full speed and stayed there - no BIOS, no post, no boot, no response to a long-press on the power button. Cut the power, turned it back on, booted up fine.

Have turned PBO back to "auto." Quick benchmark shows around a 10% performance penalty (3m29s to process those PNGs, from 3m9s or so before.)

Fingers crossed that's it, now; just stable from here on in.

 

21:12:20 up 7 days, 7:29, 1 user, load average: 5.02, 1.76, 1.07

First solid week with the new CPU! I guess either the chip or the motherboard or both just don't like running at anything other than stock.

 

Not much point messing with my GPU: it's an RTX 2080, from the era when flagship GPUs weren't monstrous things requiring a small nuclear reactor to power. It's a 280W TDP, 225W stock power target. I've had it down lower before, but 99% of the time I'm using the PC the GPU's ticking away at... ~6W, according to Green With Envy.

 

I forgot to celebrate two weeks, so here's to 15 days:

Code:

 _________________________________________
/ 17:23:14 up 15 days, 3:39, 1 user, load \
\ average: 0.43, 0.59, 0.87               /
 -----------------------------------------
        \   ^__^
         \  (oo)\_______
            (__)\       )\/\
                ||----w |
                ||     ||

 

Ta-da!



EDIT:
Amusingly, it popped up a dialogue to inform me that 24.04 was available and did I want to upgrade to it... while it was still in the process of upgrading me to 22.04(!)

 

Had some glitches since upgrading: DOSBox was briefly freezing at odd times - like, fine while playing Quake or something but everything grinding to a halt for ten seconds or so while loading a web page - and file dialogues were slow to appear. Oh, and it'd only get about halfway through a SMART short test before reporting it as aborted.

Traced the problem to the spinning-rust drive, which was parking the heads and going to sleep... after fifteen seconds of inactivity.

Okay, weird, but whatever. Let's turn APM off. oh, APM not supported on an IronWolf. Okay, why? Ah, Seagate has its own thing, EPC, which requires a specific tool, because of course it does. Fine, set those timeouts... Nope. Okay, disable EPC altogether. Nope, still sleeping after 15 seconds.

Turns out that it's PowerTOP: for some reason having power management enabled on the SATA port, which I've always had enabled, is the culprit. Turn that off and the drive's behaving - and no more weird freezes as something waits for it to wake back up again. (And no massive amounts of head unload/load cycle wearing on the drive!)

Weird stuff. What kind of default sleep timer gets set at 15 seconds?!

 

Yeah, this is exactly why I stick with an LTS release until the clock runs out - that, and the fact that every upgrade seems to bring with it another GNOME feature removal. (This time it's vertical workspaces, plus the old Firefox plugin for managing shell extensions doesn't work anymore - which I found while while trying to add an extension so I could have my vertical workspaces back...)

 

I'm on native Firefox - and have been since you had to use a PPA on Launchpad for it, though now I'm using Mozilla's official apt repo. (And if you're still using the PPA, I'd switch - I was two major versions out of date before I realised!)

It still doesn't work - says the connector is outdated. It doesn't really matter, as I've now got Extensions Manager (which is a separate thing to Extensions, which I already has installed) which works fine.

Thanks, tho'!

 

That's because Thunderbird isn't a Mozilla project. Or, rather, it's not a Mozilla Corporation project.

There's the Mozilla Foundation, which is the not-for-profit parent. Supposedly exists to promote an open web, recently sacked everyone in its promote-an-open-web division. Yeah. If you donate to "Mozilla," the money goes here.

That owns the Mozilla Corporation, which is in control of Firefox. Money flows one way: from Corporation to Foundation. The Foundation isn't allowed to give the Corporation a single penny from donations to fund browser development - which is why the Corporation is crapping its pants about Google getting broken up, because the vast majority of its funding comes from Google paying to be the default search engine in Firefox. (It's also why it keeps launching new services and is diving deep into AI crap: it's trying desperately to find a new revenue stream.)

Thunderbird, meanwhile, is wholly owned and operated by MZLA Technologies Corporation - another Mozilla Foundation subsidiary, but one that's completely independent of Mozilla Corporation. It shares no staff and no resources. Yes, even though it's called "Mozilla Thunderbird" and not "MZLA Thunderbird."

Confusing, right?!