New hardware, new fun

I have treated myself to a new laptop. A MSI Prestige 14, with 8 core i7 CPU, a Geforce GTX 1650 Ti, 1TB nvme storage, and 16GB RAM.

Quite the step up from my old red laptop (Acer E571G with Intel Core i5, Geforce 840M, originally with 8G Ram and 1TB disk, upgraded to 16G Ram and 1TB SSD by me at some point)

I’m not going to give a detailed blow by blow description of how I set it up – or even one of those “unboxing videos”. That I shall leave to people who do it on YouTube and make money from it.

I’ll just drop an unsorted list of bullet points about the quirks I’ve encountered.

  • Shopping: I also got (had to get): 1 USB Thumbdrive >> 32GB to create a windows recovery medium; 1 Thunderbolt port extender thingie with RJ45 Ethernet, 3x USB3, 1x USB3 Type C, HDMI and a card reader (because the laptop itself has only ONE classic USB port)
  • Also: a mounting frame to put the 1TB SSD from my old laptop into my desktop computer as D: – no point in wasting it 🙂

Random fun facts during setup:

  • 4k resolution on a 14″ screen is crazy. I switched the screen to FullHD at 1920×1080 and that is by far enough resolution – I get 158 DPI that way – and the graphics card has to move only 25% of the data.
  • On linux you need a really current kernel, because of the intel Iris XE graphics – so I’m running tumbleweed on it for now.
  • Building rpm packages for TW is fun – not. All this “bleeding edge” is definitely a good thing – but I have some packages that need python 2 to build, and that need some older libraries…

Random factoids after set up:

  • Games are demanding software.
  • Demanding software makes laptops run hot.
  • Heat makes laptop throttle down the CPU.
  • Throttling down breaks sound in some games.
  • Playing games with broken sound is no fun.
  • Just because a rpm package builds fine does not necessarily mean that it will actually WORK :/

On the plus side: nvme storage is FAST. And a Geforce GTX 1650 Ti runs glxspheres at 550 frames per second on prime offloading, when you turn off vsync.

By now two weeks have gone by, and I got pretty much everything but the keyboard to work fully to my liking – and the only thing on the keyboard that doesn’t work properly yet is that one key to toggle the touchpad. So for now I’m good.

Finally, here are two pictures of my old laptop on the way to recycling:

Yep, I cannibalized it – the two 8Gig memory sticks are on a shelf here together with the DVD drive, the 1TB SSD is in my desktop computer by now.

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