Lafité ethernet??

hogfish

Bronze Level Poster
I can't see an RJ25 port on the new Lafife' laptops. Have I missed it? Surely nobody would build a serious machine without?
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
It's a thin and light laptop, and part of achieving the thinness is to ditch the Ethernet (RJ45) port. It's extremely common with ultraportables these days not to have one. My Dell doesn't for instance.

One would use a docking station or a simple USB to Ethernet adapter.
 

hogfish

Bronze Level Poster
Hmm. I have been looking at usb to ethernet adapters since posting. I don't really like losing some of the bandwidth by cramming more streams through a single port. I would much prefer a stick and sturdy portable with decent thermal management rather than the current fashion for silly extremes that make the engineering harder and less reliable :) And if there was a Ryzen option that I could buy without Windoze, I would be ecstatic!

Thanks for the reply.
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Either you're not explaining very well or you might be conflating a lot of things. :)

The Lafite has a -u series CPU, which is more than fine in a thin and portable chassis. It's designed for that kind of use. Unlike the -H series CPUs and powerful gaming GPUs sometimes crammed into thin chassis with inadequate cooling solutions, causing high temps, which seems to be what you're referring to by extremes of engineering. Thermals are a non issue - the -u series CPUs are the ones that are actually meant to be in thin laptops; that's their raison d'etre.

As for bandwidth... I'm afraid I have no idea what you're on about. More streams through a single port. What?
You buy a USB to ethernet adapter
It turns your USB port into a gigabit ethernet port. You use it like you'd use any ethernet port. I have one of those and it does exactly that. Bandwidth isn't an issue.

If you're talking about docking stations, they're widely used and not an issue unless you intend to saturate GbE and concurrently copy to/from multiple external SSDs.

In which case you get a USB 3.1 Gen 2 USB dock which used with the Lafite's Gen 2 ports gives 10gbps bandwidth.

As for Ryzen and non Windoze... ? Just buy the Lafite and put Linux on it? You can run Linux on Intel. You don't need Ryzen for Linux.

PCS don't do any Ryzen chassis, but you can dodge Windows if you want.
 

hogfish

Bronze Level Poster
Well, I have designed hardware in the past, and sharing bandwidth on a single connector is less than optimal. However, I had a quick look at the thunderbolt 3 specification, and it does seem to support multiple high bandwidth channels, so I guess this won't be an issue here.

As for the -u series of processors, I know that they are intended for this sort of thing, but physics still applies: the cooler the better. I just don't see the point of making things so thin for everyday use. Presumably that is why the Lafites don't have RJ45 ports: they don't fit. Ditto the expensive M2 SSD type of drive without also a standard SATA port. Yes I know (and use) UBS3 to SATA cables for multiple external SATA SSDs, and that does saturate most of the bandwidth of an USB3 port.

As for Ryzen, they have a much more secure architectures than the Intel offering: I am talking about the Spectre-class of speculative execution vulnerabilities. AMD is not immune, but have fewer problems. The Clevo on which I am typing is now slower than it was because of the firmware (and kernel) changes to mitigate the vulnerabilities. Intel, AMD and ARM all have problems and need major redesigns, but Intel has a much bigger problem than the others. It will be years before Intel can redesign from the ground up, which is what seems to be needed.

That aside, the high end Ryzen CPUs are much better value for money, and in at least some respects outperform the Intel chips. So I am hoping PC specialist (does that mean Clevo?) will offer a high end Ryzen mobile, that's Ryzen-7, I think, with support for at least 32GB of RAM. Clevo did seem to offer a few AMD laptops in the past, but they were very low end. I imagine they didn't sell well, so got dropped. But if they had offered models with a decent amount of RAM and so on, maybe it would have been a different story.

As a Linux user, I have another motive for wanting AMD: they give decent support to the open source GPU drivers. Intel GPUs are fine, and the Lafite is good in that respect, The problem is NVIDIA who are decidedly unhelpful to the Linux community, and high end Intel CPUs are very often coupled with NVIDIA GPUs. So most of the Clevo offerings are ruled out for me by NVIDIA GPUs.

This is really more than I wanted to post, but may give some insight. I was just taken aback when it seemed that the Lafite didn't directly support ethernet.
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Still no idea what you're on about by sharing bandwidth on a single connector. If you get a USB to ethernet adapter, you're not sharing that port with anything else. Perhaps you're talking about controllers.

As for M.2 SSDs, there are M.2 SSDs that are just as cheap or only a tiny bit more expensive than 2.5" ones. They're not all 970 Evos. It's wrong to class all M.2 SSDs as expensive. You get sata SSDs with M.2 connectors. Though PCIe SSDs with M.2 connectors can be pretty well just as cheap as Sata SSDs in either 2.5" or M.2 flavour.

Obviously if you want a cheap internal 2TB HDD you're out of luck, for sure.

I think your point about AMD + Linux pairings may be more valid in the future, once AMD actually have some relevant products to offer in the high end. Which might be quite soon, if they offer Zen 2 mobile after CES 2020 as expected (the 3000 series AMD CPus currently available for laptops are still Zen+ only). Nvidia have had AMD licked for power efficiency for a long time (since Maxwell in 2014) and so this is why they still dominate the dGPU space in laptops.

At the moment it's unfortunately more of a wishlist versus anything you'll actually find widely available (or available at all in some cases) :(
 
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ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
This is really more than I wanted to post, but may give some insight. I was just taken aback when it seemed that the Lafite didn't directly support ethernet.
This is an example of why it's wise to do your research before buying, or ask for advice on here. The current fashion for lighter and thinner laptops means that there are bigger and bigger compromises made.....
 
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