Biostar TB360-BTC PRO times four.

A little backward step here from the last post, that white computer that I just detailed as being sold included a 8th/9th generation Biostar TB360-BTC PRO motherboard and in January I had obtained four of them at bargain prices that should be highlighted here in my digital diary.

As I have already written, I was very aware of the price of DDR4 RAM going up a lot, so I had been on eBay surfing and came across these ex-mining motherboards that came with a CPU and a cooler and 4GB of DDR4 and the price, shipped, was $40. You can see 11 PCIe 1X headers next to the yellow PCIe 16X header which indicates that these motherboards are mining units, however, they work like any other 8th/9th generation motherboards and can be used for office or gaming machines. They did not come with the Intel cooler fan shown above, but some terrible third party unit as shown here :

Anyway, after I received the first motherboard and was happy with it, I thought I would see what the seller had left, he originally had 10 and over the week or so had sold more (not surprisingly) and had three left, so they were bought.

A week or so later they arrived, all working, all with that terrible fan, all with a 9th generation terrible mining rig CPU, the Intel G4930T and all, except one, had 4GB of DDR4, one actually had an 8GB stick of DDR4 and that was icing on the cake and in the few weeks between then and now I have upgraded the CPUs and the fans and two of them have been sold in built computers on marketplace.

The main comment I will make about my actions in regard to "mining" equipment over the last month or so is that the market will be absolutely flooded with the stuff over the next year and prices like the above and examples like the mining rig I bought with five, good graphics cards, will continue on a downward trend. There has been a shift regarding crypto coin mining, Bitcoin started it with a shift on how the "currency" can be mined, which basically meant that mining technology became unprofitable, that for every dollar of Bitcoin mined, they paid two in equipment and electricity. In essence, the miners were left holding the bag and wish to recoup some of their cash spent on equipment which, in their case, is obsolete.

The four motherboards were the start of a three week mad time for me on the computer bench, more details to come.

Things coming in, things going out.

It has been a truly mad couple of weeks on the computer bench since my last blog post, I suppose I should go through some photos and explain what has been happening.  The first thing should be an account of that white Fractal Design Pop Air case I bought in January and what happened to it along with a few other components, how they ended up in it and how it was freed from captivity.

The twenty dollar case had arrived with supposed issues relating to the start switch and the case audio jacks not working, they turned out to be not a problem, some contact cleaner and actually plugging the audio header into the motherboard fixed them. The case was bought with five internal fans, all like new, two of them black Actic 140mm PWM 4 pin fans that sell for around $20 each, so for my original case cost of $20 I ended up with a couple of quality fans that would go in my "free" trove.

I had not built a white computer before, sure back in 1993 I would have built beige computers as that was the only colour they were back then, but this one was to be the first true white machine, so at the start of February I took one of my bargain Biostar TB360-BTC PRO motherboards, installed an Intel i3-9100F and stock cooler, the ASUS GTX 1060 and 16GB of DDR4. Storage was a 256GB SSD boot drive with Windows 11 and a 1TB HDD for data. 

I don't think I mentioned the Biostar motherboards, perhaps in the next blog.

That was it and I listed on marketplace for $350 and it sold five days later for $300 cash for a nice little profit of $75, however, that profit was on paper, or spreadsheet and in fact, I was approaching a point when everything I had was technically free, because of other trades, I decided to be a little more serious about tracking money and another spreadsheet was created.

August 7, 2024, at 5:02 PM

The date reflects the moment of birth of my daily driver laptop operating system, Linux Mint which is 545 days since I committed myself to running everything for my daily needs on a Lenovo Thinkpad T530 which is quite remarkable because this laptop originated on the planet around June 2012 and there is a story why I did what I did, and I can firmly lay the credit on Microsoft.

The Lenovo Thinkpad T530 with an Intel i5-3320M CPU and 8GB was my main machine before that date, happily running Windows 10 Pro, but as time was going by, the Windows update process seemed to be deliberately hobbling the legacy computer. I will be cynical for a moment, we have a tech industry that is totally driven by capitalism and it has been demonstrated over and over that they will bend over backwards to bend consumers over whatever barrel they can to sell more stuff.

When Microsoft announced Windows 11 we all said "What?" because Microsoft said that Windows 10 would be the last version of Windows, Windows, Windows, Windows. Of course, they lied. I will not get into the details of what they intend to do with consumers over the next twenty years, but I suspect none of it will be good. Windows 11 will not be the last version either, more than likely, as they did with that version, the next version will force obselescence on good, old technology, even if it still works.

The horrible thing was that there was to be a new operating system that nobody wanted, yet at the same time "in the interests of the customer" at least half of the user base of Windows 10 would not be able to upgrade because, in the eyes of Microsoft, those machines were obsolete.

In the years before that date I had played with Linux Mint on two vacation machines, converted Acer C720 chromebooks in 2022, upgraded with Linux Mint installed and they travelled twice to the UK with us and worked for everything we needed. There was the industrial mITX desktop machine for my upstairs room, just to browse the web and stream and what have you which worked even though it was 3rd generation Intel, probably considered old and obsolete, yet it worked great. I had created a streaming box for the TV and originally it was Windows 10 Home and it worked great until one day, because of Windows updates, it didn't. That NUC6CAYS sixth generation intel NUC would become the fourth computer in this house to run Linux and it has been running flawlessly for 18 months now.

It wasn't the October 14th 2025 deadline that made me do it, it was the mind numbing slowness of Windows update that would slow my computers down to less than a crawl, however, Microsoft giving me that end date pushed me in the direction of the alternative and I had already demonstrated to myself four times that I could move away from Windows and keep my darling T530 as my true daily machine.

I had a thought half an hour ago, because I have found that I can do almost anything in Linux, I thought to myself "can I find out when I installed Linux Mint on this machine?" and did a little search online and the answer was, of course :

stat /lost+found | grep Birth

Birth: 2024-08-07 17:02:38.000000000 -0700

Thank you Microsoft for showing me the way!

Boring, repetitive, essential

If there is anyone out there, Good morning all.

In the garage this first day of February to fire up a test motherboard and process some hard drives that have been sitting in a box for a long time, some are from my old machines, some acquired when I bought a massive amount of electronics from a technician who was moving to Ottawa and some that I have salvaged recently from older machines destined for the landfill.

The test setup is simple enough, a vintage Asus P8H61-M LE/CSM with Intel i5-2400 and 8GB of DDR3 running a "live" version of Linux Mint from a thumb drive. The hard drives are SATA and I use gparted to kill off old partitions and create a new one, after that I run disks and do the SMS extended smart tests to see if the drive is ok, so far (and I will update as I go along) five drives have passed with flying colours, five have failed and are in the box to the electronics recycle depot in town. I have many more, it will be a repetitive morning and perhaps more than one, but I'm not really doing any real work myself except drinking coffee and having some snacks along the way.

The reason why I am doing this is (a) find drives I can sell, but sell them in a safe manner with no data on them (b) find drives that are bad that have been living rent free in our house for years now and recycle them (c) completely purge any of our old drives that may contain sensitive, personal data, you know, family pancake recipes and the like and occasional photos of ladies bits.

It is a reminder to all of you out there, if you exist, to remove your hard drives when you sell or recycle your old computers, you can purge your data and reuse or simply take out your anger about the planet in general by beating the hard drives to bits, drilling holes in their brains and bashing the daylights out of them. 

Ok, I'm off to see if the next one has passed or failed and update the count, rinse repeat.

Some things make no sense whatsoever.

As I have said many times before, I hang out on Marketplace far too much for my own good, but it is an essential source of stuff that I have used over the years for my zero cost computer hobby, I have not kept an exact spreadsheet of my accounts, but I can confidently say that this obsession of mine is mostly "net zero" when it comes to what is a most enjoyable hobby.

Yesterday I bought a computer case at a price of $50 and it is a nice case, a Corsair Carbide 270R with a single rear fan, very good black case for a future build. There was a motherboard in the case with some bent CPU pins and an 8GB stick of DDR4 RAM, which in todays prices is worth $35 alone.

I will attempt to fix the motherboard, although the CPU pins are very tiny and I am not sure my hands are steady enough to not do more damage, however, nothing to lose.

<time passes>

In the afternoon I spent a (sort of) relaxing hour with the motherboard, a jewelers loupe and my best soldering tweezers, there were eight bent pins, but no broken ones, I aligned them to the best of my ability and then installed a 9th Generation Intel G4930T CPU and stock cooler (which had cost me $5 a year ago) and quite surprisingly, everything seemed to be working. This morning I put the motherboard up on marketplace for $40 (they sell on eBay for $110 without CPU) and it was bought in half an hour, the purchaser was very happy and that meant so was I as the case now cost me only $15, not forgetting that free stick of DDR4.

Shortly after that I saw another case for sale in town, just around the corner, it was only $20 and I could not resist, I have not built a computer in a white case for a long time, in fact probably never as they used to be beige or cream coloured back when I started. The case is a Fractal Design Pop Air and the seller said that the power button was temperamental and the case audio jacks did not work, so instead of recycling it he wanted to sell on marketplace.

This is the "some things make no sense whatsoever" moment as the case appears to be pristine and new ones are listed on Amazon for $150, plus there are two extra 120mm fans installed in the "used" one. I brought it home, took the back off the case and the HD Audio plug looks like it has never been plugged into the motherboard socket, and I sprayed the power button with contact cleaner and it appears to be fine, I will get my multimeter out at some point and waste more time on it.

Unlike us old farts, young people nowadays do not seem to try and troubleshoot anything, as soon as something is not working it is classified as e-waste and banished to the dump or sold for pennies on the dollar on marketplace. I don't get it, but in a way, I am glad that it happens.

As for the motherboard buyer, who is a locel, repeat customer, an older chap, we messaged back and forth today while he straightened the pins more to his satisfaction and installed a more powerful i5-8500 CPU. It was fun but by the end of it, we both agreed that we deserved a beer; our eyes were so strained that we decided if we ever do this again, we’re definitely investing in a digital microscope.

Future builds in both of the above cases will be discussed here on the blog, along with fresh beers.

Happy Hunting!!

Not going to mine, never, however...

A local guy on marketplace sold off his crypto mining electronics, he is giving up the futile gesture and this year is going off out into the fresh air and will be mining for gold, pan in hand, off to enjoy a stake in British Columbia, I can think of worse things to do.

I bought this off him :

Yes, before you think it again, I have gone a little crazy, but that is the way I roll. This is a quality steel chassis, with a lid, with four industrial fans, a Bitmain AW7-12-1800W mining quality power supply, a BTC65 8 GPU slot motherboard running an Ivy Bridge "Pantherpoint" CPU with 4GB DDR3 and a 64GB mSATA boot drive with HiveOS installed and I paid $400 for it.

I have to qualify that though, I paid the money for the three MSI and two Gigabyte GPU cards, they are NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI 6GB video cards, so fundamentally, I paid $80 each and I have cleaned them up, brushed out all the dust bunnies and they all work and are ready for action, or inaction as they will be sitting in my drawer for a month or so, waiting patiently to be installed in computers.

Here at the start of 2026 these GPU are useless for mining digital coinage of any sort, I asked the chap if he ever made any money in "crypto" and he said he just about broke even which I consider to be the situation for most of his ilk who participated in the gold rush, the institutions that were guaranteed to make money being the ones that "sold the picks" the component parts, being the chassis, motherboard, fans and all the graphics processing units and to a lesser extent, those that sold the electricity and the governments that collect the taxes.

Today, the energy used per hour with the five GPU, the four industrial fans, the motherboard and the main PSU would be running in the region of 750W so here in British Columbia, that would cost your average homeowner $2.65 a day, and if they were mining coins like ethereum classic they would generate between $0.40 and $0.55 a day, so a daily loss of $2.10 or $766.50 a year which is why this rig is obsolete. 

Every miner sells his original equipment at a loss, an example of that would be this rig which from my conversation with the guy was bought back in 2021, during the "mining fever" time, so the cost would have been in the region of $4000 or more and yes, in the first twelve months money would have been made, but then when ethereum went to proof of stake at "The Merge" in September 2022, things went downhill very fast for this particular miner. 

I highly doubt if most domestic miners run their rigs as a business and write off their equipment, nor do they bother to maintain a record of the comings and goings of the money, a spreadsheet of gain and loss, so like most gambling sorts they have an opinion or a feeling of how they did, and the truth is an elusive commodity, a bit like the actual crypto currency itself.

A rough estimate from the original owner was that he "broke even" and possibly only because for a while he was using the rig as a heat source and there is the sad reality of this mining nonsense from the domestic user point of view, perhaps the accountants at the industrial level only allow for profit, industrials are profitable because of the massive scale, write downs and cheap electricity, your average Joe has none of those benefits.

Anyway, another discussion of gambling from me and I am now faced with having five lovely NVIDIA GTX 1660 TI 6GB video cards to do something with, and the empty chassis to flog as quick as I can to someone out there who still thinks they can make some easy cash because as someone once said, there's one born every minute.

Will keep you posted.

Predictions

 In the middle of December I emailed my good buddy out in Nova Scotia and told him this :

"At this festive time of the year I should let you know of something that has been festering for the last month or so, perhaps a "too late" timely comment, which may still be in time, depending on which way you see it. A little background, something that has not affected you and would never have, during the covid years video cards, GPUs, increased dramatically in price because of a perfect storm of high demand and for many reasons, supply issues. They went up 200% to 300% and the cynical amongst us acknowledged that the industry was taking advantage, of course, greed was also a factor with consumers. This would not have been on your radar because of your computing requirements.

Fast forward to a chilling announcement just a few weeks ago from Micron, they announced that they are exiting the consumer market for ram, specifically modern ram like DDR4 and DDR5. The big three memory companies are Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix, basically those three supply most of the planet's memory products, which is a factor in absolutely everything, everything. What Micron has done, and the other two companies will surely follow, have shifted from consumer products to chasing high bandwidth HBM customers, mainly data centres, bitcoin conglomerates, AI processing plants, all of which are seeing trillions of dollars of governmental funding. 

The effect of the announcement on the 3rd December has caused memory products to spike 300% or more in the consumer market, a budget-friendly 32GB kit of DDR5 in September would have been $95 and today is around $440, this being is seen across all memory products and I consider will be irreversible by February when Micron (and probably the others) will pull the plug. I say memory products because it will affect SSD drives, GPU prices and the sinister aspect is that everything that uses silicon will be affected by this "AI Squeeze" which is planes, trains and automobiles, dishwashers, consumer electronics, everything.

So, back to my point. If you think you will be in the market for a new computer at some point in 2026 or 2027 you should consider that this is a sweet spot to buy existing inventory from a company like Dell Refurbished." 

At that point I linked him to a Dell Precision 5820 Tower workstation, at the time the price was $419 that was a screaming deal, the workstation class machines exceptional in specifications, it was an "A" condition machine, they had 31 units left and I was tempted to buy one myself.  Windows 11 Pro, 16GB DDR4, 11th generation Intel, 500GB SSD. When you added tax and shipping, the workstation was $500 which was a great price.

Two weeks later, they have none.

Sure, they will have more, I hope, but it is a sign that "hot cakes" need to be bought. If I think this way, all the other lemmings will be thinking the same way, prices will rocket in 2026 and there will be no going back, that is the way the market works, in my tiny world, used DDR4 prices have gone up a lot in the last month, that is because the word is out, sellers are selling for more, because buyers are paying more. 

The question is, this inflationary process, is it real?

I can answer that question somewhat, but it might go around the houses. One reference is part of the same "wave" that is still part of the process, but it was exacerbated by covid, starting around 2020 GPU prices shot up because of scarcity in supply chains, lockdowns, "FOMO" fear of missing out (by gamers) and demand by data centres and crypto miners, oh, and good old fashioned human scalping of prices. This trickled into the used market as well and it was a great time to sell, but not to buy.

There was a period when things improved, sort of in the middle, manufacturers sorted themselves out, consumers calmed down, however, one thing that was evident, MSRP had increased across most of electronics, you name it, it had gone up and as we all know, prices of everything else went up and there is little sign of things ever coming down again.

They say that for electronics (which are in everything) there is a hidden "AI Tax" that pervades all things and in the last couple of years, AI has become an obsession, not only in industry but also from government and in the last month or so, manufacturers seem to be abandoning the consumer, the little guy, the hobbyist, in favour of the big guys, the data centres and the crypto complexes. It is perhaps wrong to call what NVIDIA and it's competitors are creating video cards or GPUs now, they are data processing units, or DPU and like the NVIDIA Tesla units from back in 2007 they do not need video output.

This is the round the houses bit, the NVIDIA Tesla C870 was a "headless" GPU and was officially called a GPU Computing Processor, their sole purpose was to act as a co-processor for heavy math rather than driving a monitor, the physical video ports were removed, but the manufacturer still referred to them somewhat as GPU. That was in 2007 and flash forward to today and the wider industry are producing more headless GPUs now than at any other point in their history and they are no longer marketed to gamers or even standard workstation users; they have become the backbone of the global AI and Data Center industry.

NVIDIA and the other two GPU manufacturers sell 90% of their product into the industry, it is also true that Samsung, SK-Hynix and Micron sell about the same percentage, of course they sell to NVIDIA and the other GPU manufacturers, they also sell to consumer electronics companies, the automotive industry, aerospace and the good old AI and Date Center industry, theres a lot of imbreeding going on. 

I will stop the bus and get off, enough round the houses for this diatribe.

When one of the three, Micron, made their announcement that it would exit the consumer market, it signalled a chilling warning of things to come, DDR5 prices doubled in the following weeks and scalpers raised their little heads once again, on the used market, DDR4 prices have also risen. The longer term consequences are that world demand for high speed ram is rising rapidly and the supply chains are being choked once again, after all, NVIDIA and AMD and INTEL have to buy all the ram for their headless chickens, some with as much as 288GB of HBM3e memory (High Bandwidth) and they will all be competing for it, prices will rise to the stratosphere until Skynet becomes sentient and we all say goodbye as the internet stops being of all the things and just of one thing, called AI.

I will continue here on the OTG until then, please stay tuned, normal service will resume shortly.