Building new systems with ReactOS?

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dizt3mp3r
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Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by dizt3mp3r »

A few of my friends are considering new machines to cater for the future. It seems multi-core systems are now the trend rather than more powerful processors and 64 cores are no longer out of the question for everyday users. Ryzen Threadrippers seems to be the hardware of choice for the higher-end power needed to support the rendering 3D graphics and perform other tasks that need CPU and cores.

From my own more lowly point of view, I am building PCs at the bottom end for normal every day home use, gaming, office-style apps and coding/graphic development boxes, four core systems with decent GPUs, nothing special.

The main question on everyone's mind appears to be which operating system to run. Windows 10 has been installed on several laptops and desktops and the feedback from the users is that Win10 is slow and runs like a pig, it has a complete lack of 'snappiness' and when an action is accompanied by a blue screen with a white cog for 5-10 secs it instills a lack of confidence in the o/s. Win10 'feels' heavy and slow. The AMD hexacore laptops take 4-5 mins to finish booting, 3rd/4th generation i5 systems take 2 mins or so and then seem to take a while before the background tasks are really finished. Sometimes Win10 will take an extra couple of minutes for no apparent reason.

This perceived slowness coupled with an incomplete UIX change that no-one seems to like has made them question the use of Win10 and some serious users are looking for an alternative. The top end users seem to be looking at Linux for the first time to run base apps like Firefox/thunderbird/libreoffice and hoping to use Wine for the Windows apps that it supports and where it cannot, instead running a VM with multiple dedicated cores to support the more complex apps that Wine cannot yet run.

This takes the user away from the mental commitment to one single o/s so we can stop being Windows fanbois and gives us the choice to run any o/s we wish to test, be it XP, Win 7 or 10 if we need access to a UWP app. It allows comparison of o/s and frees us from the shackles of Microsoft. A mindset change.

I would love to have been able to suggest ReactOS as a possibility but it is just isn't there yet but I think it shows that the time is ripe and that ReactOS is needed more than ever. The fact that some dedicated Windows users are thinking about moving away from real Windows for the very first time is a wake up call that ReactOS is required.
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by Reactions »

dizt3mp3r wrote: Fri Apr 26, 2019 11:24 am A few of my friends are considering new machines to cater for the future. It seems multi-core systems are now the trend rather than more powerful processors and 64 cores are no longer out of the question for everyday users. Ryzen Threadrippers seems to be the hardware of choice for the higher-end power needed to support the rendering 3D graphics and perform other tasks that need CPU and cores.

From my own more lowly point of view, I am building PCs at the bottom end for normal every day home use, gaming, office-style apps and coding/graphic development boxes, four core systems with decent GPUs, nothing special.

The main question on everyone's mind appears to be which operating system to run. Windows 10 has been installed on several laptops and desktops and the feedback from the users is that Win10 is slow and runs like a pig, it has a complete lack of 'snappiness' and when an action is accompanied by a blue screen with a white cog for 5-10 secs it instills a lack of confidence in the o/s. Win10 'feels' heavy and slow. The AMD hexacore laptops take 4-5 mins to finish booting, 3rd/4th generation i5 systems take 2 mins or so and then seem to take a while before the background tasks are really finished. Sometimes Win10 will take an extra couple of minutes for no apparent reason.

This perceived slowness coupled with an incomplete UIX change that no-one seems to like has made them question the use of Win10 and some serious users are looking for an alternative. The top end users seem to be looking at Linux for the first time to run base apps like Firefox/thunderbird/libreoffice and hoping to use Wine for the Windows apps that it supports and where it cannot, instead running a VM with multiple dedicated cores to support the more complex apps that Wine cannot yet run.

This takes the user away from the mental commitment to one single o/s so we can stop being Windows fanbois and gives us the choice to run any o/s we wish to test, be it XP, Win 7 or 10 if we need access to a UWP app. It allows comparison of o/s and frees us from the shackles of Microsoft. A mindset change.

I would love to have been able to suggest ReactOS as a possibility but it is just isn't there yet but I think it shows that the time is ripe and that ReactOS is needed more than ever. The fact that some dedicated Windows users are thinking about moving away from real Windows for the very first time is a wake up call that ReactOS is required.
Those facts are evident.

As for the question, ReactOS needs to be 64 bit and support a custom kernel32.dll before it can run Blender, which is what I use. In addition, the UI code needs debugging or improvement so that drivers, for AMD at least, can install correctly. Once all that happens, ReactOS will become my daily OS.

I have an i7-3770, 12gb ddr3 ram, 1tb SSHD, RX 560. I plan on upgrading soon to Ryzen with 2 Navi GPUs in crossfire.
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mrmajik45
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by mrmajik45 »

AMD 5 2600, 32GB DDR4 (16GB DDR4 a week ago), 1tb M.2, Sapphire RX580 8gb-Vram. WIndows 10 boots in 5 secs.
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

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mrmajik45 wrote: Fri Apr 26, 2019 5:02 pm AMD 5 2600, 32GB DDR4 (16GB DDR4 a week ago), 1tb M.2, Sapphire RX580 8gb-Vram. WIndows 10 boots in 5 secs.
Dang, how do you afford that? Lol
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by mrmajik45 »

$1104.49 exactly. XD. (If you include mobo, 2nd/3rd drives, PSU, Case, and cpu heatsink) I slowly upgraded overtime. (Now you know how much it is for a beast PC)
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

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mrmajik45 wrote: Fri Apr 26, 2019 5:07 pm $1104.49 exactly. XD. (If you include mobo, 2nd/3rd drives, PSU, Case, and cpu heatsink) I slowly upgraded overtime. (Now you know how much it is for a beast PC)
I too know, I've always investigated RIDICULOUS builds. Like 32 core threadripper with like 4 titan xps and 24tb of storage.
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dizt3mp3r
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by dizt3mp3r »

32 core threadripper has serious memory bottleneck issues - too many cores for the memory controllers to handle, might be worthwhile waiting for a bit for the next gen.

AMD 5 2600, 32GB DDR4 (16GB DDR4 a week ago), 1tb M.2, Sapphire RX580 8gb-Vram.

A 5 second boot time for Win10 is expected from a system like that but if you don't have the cash?

The problem is that Windows really needs the hardware these days just to perform.
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by mrmajik45 »

With a first gen Intel i7 It took 10 secs XD
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dizt3mp3r
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by dizt3mp3r »

mrmajik45 wrote: Fri Apr 26, 2019 8:26 pm With a first gen Intel i7 It took 10 secs XD
Current 3rd gen i5 seems to take 3 mins, I just tried.
2nd gen i5 took 5mins.

The electricity where you are clearly has more zap then here.
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by ROCKNROLLKID »

I bought my first SSD over 6 years ago. Infact, I am still using that SSD till this day. I use to think SSDs were a waste of money and didn't really offer much improvement over a hdd, but was I proven wrong really quick. I can transfer files within seconds and boot up windows and linux in ~10seconds. On a HDD, it takes like 30 seconds to boot and hours to transfer files depending on file sizes. It's a 840 EVO 1tb, second fastest SSD at the time I bought it. It cost $330, which at the time was actually really cheap because this was a $500 SSD. I would never pay that much again for a SSD, but I do want to upgrade it, but with pci-e 5.0 so close to release, I decided to wait. My next system upgrade is in 2020-2021. I currently have a ryzen 1700 with 1070. My next upgrade was planned to be a AMD AM5 system, but I heard Intel might actually release discrete cards in 2020. If that is the case, I might instead build a Intel system with a Intel gpu. I would go with a Intel SSD, but they seem to be investing alot into those crappy QLC chipsets, which I refuse to use because of there shorter lifespans. I want at least a MLC SSD, like the Samsung Pros do. I wish to one day see SLC being used again, but it seems like there are issues getting SLC to work with 1tb+ models.
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by Reactions »

Do you guys know how many pcie lanes the next ryzen generation will have? I need to know whether it's enough for 2 top tier navi GPUs and an nvme ssd.
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onestop_mid
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by onestop_mid »

8.1 boots from power button to login screen in ~20 seconds. AMD Athlon II x4 640, 24GB DDR3, 1050TI. On some 500GB HDD I fished out of a Gateway from '07. Motherboard and case are both Pavilion p6727c.
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dizt3mp3r
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by dizt3mp3r »

I think it is time to upgrade all my desktop systems to SSDs, they are cheap enough now. The AMD hexacore (Quad+2 GPUs) laptops need it most as they are SO slow, I need to find a way to upgrade these HP pavilions with an SSD and retain some decent storage capacity - and keep it cheap.

My 12 yr old XP system boots in 25 secs now. SSD next to do. I'm struggling to get the supposedly faster and quicker i5/i7 hardware (HDDs) to match my old XP core2quad on boot times.
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by PurpleGurl »

Yeah, that's the rub. The time is ripe but ReactOS isn't.
justincase
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Re: Building new systems with ReactOS?

Post by justincase »

dizt3mp3r wrote: Fri Apr 26, 2019 7:53 pm32 core threadripper has serious memory bottleneck issues - too many cores for the memory controllers to handle, might be worthwhile waiting for a bit for the next gen.
The 'memory bottleneck' you mention is actually much less severe than it would appear to be. In fact, the issue that seems to have made so many think that they have such an extreme memory bottleneck is actually an issue in Windows thread scheduling, and Process Lasso can 'fix' it by monitoring the system for unusually slow threads and simply 'bumping' the CPU affinity of them (without even actually changing it) which apparently makes Windows reevaluate how it's scheduling that thread, and it can drastically improve performance (at least with benchmarks).
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