About 6 months ago I got a Nissan LEAF ZE1 (2019 model) [1]. Generally it’s going well and I’m happy with most things about it.

One issue is that as there isn’t a lot of weight in the front with the batteries in the centre of the car the front wheels slip easily when accelerating. It’s a minor thing but a good reason for wanting AWD in an electric car.

When I got the car I got two charging devices, the one to charge from a regular 240V 10A power point (often referred to as a “granny charger”) and a cable with a special EV charging connector on each end. The cable with an EV connector on each end is designed for charging that’s faster than the “granny charger” but not as fast as the rapid chargers which have the cable connected to the supply so the cable temperature can be monitored and/or controlled. That cable can be used if you get a fast charger setup at your home (which I never plan to do) and apparently at some small hotels and other places with home-style EV charging. I’m considering just selling that cable on ebay as I don’t think I have any need to personally own a cable other than the “granny charger”.

The key fob for the LEAF has a battery installed, it’s either CR2032 or CR2025 – mine has CR2025. Some reports on the Internet suggest that you can stuff a CR2032 battery in anyway but that didn’t work for me as the thickness of the battery stopped some of the contacts from making a good connection. I think I could have got it going by putting some metal in between but the batteries aren’t expensive enough to make it worth the effort and risk. It would be nice if I could use batteries from my stockpile of CR2032 batteries that came from old PCs but I can afford to spend a few dollars on it.

My driveway is short and if I left the charger out it would be visible from the street and at risk of being stolen. I’m thinking of chaining the charger to a tree and having some sort of waterproof enclosure for it so I don’t have to go to the effort of taking it out of the boot every time I use it. Then I could also configure the car to only charge during the peak sunlight hours when the solar power my home feeds into the grid has a negative price (we have so much solar power that it’s causing grid problems).

The cruise control is a pain to use, so much so that I haven’t yet got it to work usefully ever. The features look good in the documentation but in practice it’s not as good as the Kia one I’ve used previously where I could just press one button to turn it on, another button to set the current speed as the cruise control speed, and then just have it work.

The electronic compass built in to the dash turned out to be surprisingly useful. I regret not gluing a compass to the dash of previous cars. One example is when I start google navigation for a journey and it says “go South on street X” and I need to know which direction is South so I don’t start in the wrong direction. Another example is when I know that I’m North of a major road that I need to take to get to my destination so I just need to go roughly South and that is enough to get me to a road I recognise.

In the past when there is a bird in the way I don’t do anything different, I keep driving at the same speed and rely on the bird to see me and move out of the way. Birds have faster reactions than humans and have evolved to move at the speeds cars travel on all roads other than freeways, also birds that are on roads are usually ones that have an eye in each side of their head so they can’t not see my car approaching. For decades this has worked, but recently a bird just stood on the road and got squashed. So I guess that I should honk when there’s birds on the road.

Generally everything about the car is fine and I’m happy to keep driving it.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/05/27/leaf-ze1/

One of the problems I encountered with the PinePhone Pro (PPP) when I tried using it as a daily driver [1] was the charge speed, both slow charging and a bad ratio of charge speed to discharge speed. I also tried using a One Plus 6 (OP6) which had a better charge speed and battery life but I never got VoLTE to work [2] and VoLTE is a requirement for use in Australia and an increasing number of other countries. In my tests with the Librem 5 from Purism I had similar issues with charge speed [3].

What I want to do is get an acceptable ratio of charge time to use time for a free software phone. I don’t necessarily object to a phone that can’t last an 8 hour day on a charge, but I can’t use a phone that needs to be on charge for 4 hours during the day. For this part I’m testing the charge speed and will test the discharge speed when I have solved some issues with excessive CPU use.

I tested with a cheap USB power monitoring device that is inline between the power cable and the phone. The device has no method of export so I just watched it and when the numbers fluctuated I tried to estimate the average. I only give the results to two significant digits which is about all the accuracy that is available, as I copied the numbers separately the V*A might not exactly equal the W. I idly considered rounding off Voltages to the nearest Volt and current to the half amp but the way the PC USB ports have voltage drop at higher currents is interesting.

This post should be useful for people who want to try out FOSS phones but don’t want to buy the range of phones and chargers that I have bought.

Phones Tested

I have seen claims about improvements with charging speed on the Librem 5 with recent updates so I decided to compare a number of phones running Debian/Trixie as well as some Android phones. I’m comparing an old Samsung phone (which I tried running Droidian on but is now on Android) and a couple of Pixel phones with the three phones that I currently have running Debian for charging.

Chargers Tested

HP Z640

The Librem 5 had problems with charging on a port on the HP ML110 Gen9 I was using as a workstation. I have sold the ML110 and can’t repeat that exact test but I tested on the HP z640 that I use now. The z640 is a much better workstation (quieter and better support for audio and other desktop features) and is also sold as a workstation.

The z640 documentation says that of the front USB ports the top one can do “fast charge (up to 1.5A)” with “USB Battery Charging Specification 1.2”. The only phone that would draw 1.5A on that port was the Librem 5 but the computer would only supply 4.4V at that current which is poor. For every phone I tested the bottom port on the front (which apparently doesn’t have USB-BC or USB-PD) charged at least as fast as the top port and every phone other than the OP6 charged faster on the bottom port. The Librem 5 also had the fastest charge rate on the bottom port. So the rumours about the Librem 5 being updated to address the charge speed on PC ports seem to be correct.

The Wikipedia page about USB Hardware says that the only way to get more than 1.5A from a USB port while operating within specifications is via USB-PD so as USB 3.0 ports the bottom 3 ports should be limited to 5V at 0.9A for 4.5W. The Librem 5 takes 2.0A and the voltage drops to 4.6V so that gives 9.2W. This shows that the z640 doesn’t correctly limit power output and the Librem 5 will also take considerably more power than the specs allow. It would be really interesting to get a powerful PSU and see how much power a Librem 5 will take without negotiating USB-PD and it would also be interesting to see what happens when you short circuit a USB port in a HP z640. But I recommend not doing such tests on hardware you plan to keep using!

Of the phones I tested the only one that was within specifications on the bottom port of the z640 was the OP6. I think that is more about it just charging slowly in every test than conforming to specs.

Monitor

The next test target is my 5120*2160 Kogan monitor with a USB-C port [4]. This worked quite well and apart from being a few percent slower on the PPP it outperformed the PC ports for every device due to using USB-PD (the only way to get more than 5V) and due to just having a more powerful PSU that doesn’t have a voltage drop when more than 1A is drawn.

Ali Charger

The Ali Charger is a device that I bought from AliExpress is a 240W GaN charger supporting multiple USB-PD devices. I tested with the top USB-C port that can supply 100W to laptops.

The Librem 5 has charging going off repeatedly on the Ali charger and doesn’t charge properly. It’s also the only charger for which the Librem 5 requests a higher voltage than 5V, so it seems that the Librem 5 has some issues with USB-PD. It would be interesting to know why this problem happens, but I expect that a USB signal debugger is needed to find that out. On AliExpress USB 2.0 sniffers go for about $50 each and with a quick search I couldn’t see a USB 3.x or USB-C sniffer. So I’m not going to spend my own money on a sniffer, but if anyone in Melbourne Australia owns a sniffer and wants to visit me and try it out then let me know. I’ll also bring it to Everything Open 2026.

Generally the Ali charger was about the best charger from my collection apart from the case of the Librem 5.

Dell Dock

I got a number of free Dell WD15 (aka K17A) USB-C powered docks as they are obsolete. They have VGA ports among other connections and for the HDMI and DisplayPort ports it doesn’t support resolutions higher than FullHD if both ports are in use or 4K if a single port is in use. The resolutions aren’t directly relevant to the charging but it does indicate the age of the design.

The Dell dock seems to not support any voltages other than 5V for phones and 19V (20V requested) for laptops. Certainly not the 9V requested by the Pixel 7 Pro and Pixel 8 phones. I wonder if not supporting most fast charging speeds for phones was part of the reason why other people didn’t want those docks and I got some for free. I hope that the newer Dell docks support 9V, a phone running Samsung Dex will display 4K output on a Dell dock and can productively use a keyboard and mouse. Getting equivalent functionality to Dex working properly on Debian phones is something I’m interested in.

Battery

The “Battery” I tested with is a Chinese battery for charging phones and laptops, it’s allegedly capable of 67W USB-PD supply but so far all I’ve seen it supply is 20V 2.5A for my laptop. I bought the 67W battery just in case I need it for other laptops in future, the Thinkpad X1 Carbon I’m using now will charge from a 30W battery.

There seems to be an overall trend of the most shonky devices giving the best charging speeds. Dell and HP make quality gear although my tests show that some HP ports exceed specs. Kogan doesn’t make monitors, they just put their brand on something cheap. Buying one of the cheapest chargers from AliExpress and one of the cheaper batteries from China I don’t expect the highest quality and I am slightly relieved to have done enough tests with both of those that a fire now seems extremely unlikely. But it seems that the battery is one of the fastest charging devices I own and with the exception of the Librem 5 (which charges slowly on all ports and unreliably on several ports) the Ali charger is also one of the fastest ones. The Kogan monitor isn’t far behind.

Conclusion

Voltage and Age

The Samsung Galaxy Note 9 was released in 2018 as was the OP6. The PPP was first released in 2022 and the Librem 5 was first released in 2020, but I think they are both at a similar technology level to the Note 9 and OP6 as the companies that specialise in phones have a pipeline for bringing new features to market.

The Pixel phones are newer and support USB-PD voltage selection while the other phones either don’t support USB-PD or support it but only want 5V. Apart from the Librem 5 which wants a higher voltage but runs it at a low current and repeatedly disconnects.

Idle Power

One of the major problems I had in the past which prevented me from using a Debian phone as my daily driver is the ratio of idle power use to charging power. Now that the phones seem to charge faster if I can get the idle power use under control then it will be usable.

Currently the Librem 5 running Trixie is using 6% CPU time (24% of a core) while idle and the screen is off (but “Caffeine” mode is enabled so no deep sleep). On the PPP the CPU use varies from about 2% and 20% (12% to 120% of one core), this was mainly plasmashell and kwin_wayland. The OP6 has idle CPU use a bit under 1% CPU time which means a bit under 8% of one core.

The Librem 5 and PPP seem to have configuration issues with KDE Mobile and Pipewire that result in needless CPU use. With those issues addressed I might be able to make a Librem 5 or PPP a usable phone if I have a battery to charge it.

The OP6 is an interesting point of comparison as a Debian phone but is not a viable option as a daily driver due to problems with VoLTE and also some instability – it sometimes crashes or drops off Wifi.

The Librem 5 charges at 9.2W from a a PC that doesn’t obey specs and 10W from a battery. That’s a reasonable charge rate and the fact that it can request 12V (unsuccessfully) opens the possibility to potential higher charge rates in future. That could allow a reasonable ratio of charge time to use time.

The PPP has lower charging speeds then the Librem 5 but works more consistently as there was no charger I found that wouldn’t work well with it. This is useful for the common case of charging from a random device in the office. But the fact that the Librem 5 takes 10W from the battery while the PPP only takes 6.3W would be an issue if using the phone while charging.

Now I know the charge rates for different scenarios I can work on getting the phones to use significantly less power than that on average.

Specifics for a Usable Phone

The 57W battery or something equivalent is something I think I will always need to have around when using a PPP or Librem 5 as a daily driver.

The ability to charge fast while at a desk is also an important criteria. The charge speed of my home PC is good in that regard and the charge speed of my monitor is even better. Getting something equivalent at a desktop of an office I work in is a possibility.

Improving the Debian distribution for phones is necessary. That’s something I plan to work on although the code is complex and in many cases I’ll have to just file upstream bug reports.

I have also ordered a FuriLabs FLX1s [5] which I believe will be better in some ways. I will blog about it when it arrives.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinephone-status/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/12/15/oneplus-6-debian/
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2022/03/15/librem-5-first-impression/
• [4] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/07/23/more-5120×2160-monitor/
• [5] https://furilabs.com/shop/flx1s/

As a follow up from my last post about my 8K TV [1] I tested out a Samsung 65″ QN900C Neo QLED 8K that’s on sale in JB Hifi. According to the JB employee I spoke to they are running out the last 8K TVs and have no plans to get more.

In my testing of that 8K TV YouTube had a 3840*2160 viewport which is better than the 1920*1080 of my Hisense TV. When running a web browser the codeshack page reported it as 1920*1080 with a 1.25* pixel density (presumably a configuration option) that gave a usable resolution of 1536*749.

The JB Hifi employee wouldn’t let me connect my own device via HDMI but said that it would work at 8K. I said “so if I buy it I can return it if it doesn’t do 8K HDMI?” and then he looked up the specs and found that it would only do 4K input on HDMI. It seems that actual 8K resolution might work on a Samsung streaming device but that’s not very useful particularly as there probably isn’t much 8K content on any streaming service.

Basically that Samsung allegedly 8K TV only works at 4K at best.

It seems to be impossible to buy an 8K TV or monitor in Australia that will actually display 8K content. ASUS has a 6K 32″ monitor with 6016*3384 resolution for $2016 [2]. When counting for inflation $2016 wouldn’t be the most expensive monitor I’ve ever bought and hopefully prices will continue to drop.

Rumour has it that there are 8K TVs available in China that actually take 8K input. Getting one to Australia might not be easy but it’s something that I will investigate.

Also I’m trying to sell my allegedly 8K TV.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/11/25/edid-and-my-8k-tv/
• [2] https://tinyurl.com/2arl3al7

I’ve had a Pine Time for just over 2 years [1]. About a year ago I had a band break and replaced it from a spare PineTime and now I just had another break. Having the band only last one year isn’t that great, but it’s fortunate that the break only affects the inner layer of plastic so there is no risk of the watch suddenly falling off and being broken or lost. The Pine64 web site has a page about this with bad options, one broken link and a few Amazon items that are have ridiculous postage [2].

I started writing this post while using the band from a Colmi P80 [3]. I bought one for a relative who wanted the metal band and the way the Aliexpress seller does it is to sell the package with the plastic band and include the metal band in the package so I had a spare band. It fits quite well and none of the reported problems of the PineTime having insufficient space between the spring bar and the watch. The Colmi band in question is described as “rose gold” but is more like “pinkish beige” and doesn’t match the style of the black PineTime.

I ordered a couple of cheap bands from AliExpress which cost $9.77 and $13.55 including postage while the ones that Pine64 recommend have over $15 postage from Amazon!

The 20mm Silicone Magnetic Buckle Watch Strap Band For Huawei GT2 Smart Watch Connected Bracelet Black Watchband Man [4] cost $13.55 including postage. It has a magnetic unfold mechanism which I find a bit annoying and it doesn’t allow easily changing the length. I don’t think I’ll choose that again. But it basically works and is comfortable.

The 20mm Metal Strap for Huawei Watch GT2 3 Quick Release Stainless Steel Watch Band for Samsung Galaxy Watch Bracelet [5] cost $9.77 including postage. I found this unreasonably difficult to put on and not particularly comfortable. But opinion will vary on that, it is cheap and will appeal to some people’s style.

Conclusion

There are claims that getting a replacement band for a PineTime is difficult. My experience is that every band with a 20mm attachment works as long as it’s designed for a square watch, some of the bands are designed to partly go around a round face and wouldn’t fit. I expect that some bands won’t fit, but I don’t think that it’s enough of a problem to be worried about buying a random band from AliExpress. The incidence of bands not fitting will probably be lower than the incidence of other AliExpress products not doing quite what you want (while meeting the legal criteria of doing what they are claimed to do) and not being used.

I’m now wearing the PineTime with the “Magnetic Buckle Watch Strap Band” and plan to wear it for the next year or so.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/10/11/pinetime/
• [2] https://pine64.org/documentation/PineTime/Accessory/Watch_band/
• [3] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/09/22/more-colmi-p80/
• [4] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006159932767.html
• [5] https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005007707373939.html

The FOSS Android program for communicating with smart watches is Gadget Bridge which now has support for the Colmi P80 [1].

I first blogged about the Colmi P80 just over a month ago [2]. Now I have a couple of relatives using it happily on Android with the proprietary app. I couldn’t use it myself because I require more control over which apps have their notifications go to the watch than the Colmi app offers. Also I’m trying to move away from non-free software.

Yesterday the f-droid repository informed me that there was a new version of Gadget Bridge and the changelog indicated support for the Colmi P80 so I connected the P80 and disconnected the PineTime.

The first problem I noticed is that the vibrator on the P80 when on it’s maximum setting is much weaker than that on the PineTime, so weak that I often didn’t notice it. Maybe if I wore it for a few weeks I would teach myself to notice it but it should just be able to work with me on this. If it could be set to have multiple bursts of vibrating then that would work.

The next problem is that the P80 by default does not turn the screen on when there’s a notification and there seems to be no way to configure it to do so. I configured it to turn on when I raise my arm which can mostly work but that still relies on me noticing the vibration. Vibration and the screen light turning on would be harder to miss than vibration on it’s own.

I don’t recall seeing any review of smart watches ever that stated whether the screen would turn on when there’s a notification or whether the vibration was easy to notice.

One problem with both the PineTime (running InfiniTime) and the P80 is that when the screen is turned on (through gesture, pushing the button, or a notification in the case of the Pinetime) it is active for swiping to change the settings. I would like to have some other action required before settings can be changed so that if the screen turns on when I’m asleep my watch won’t brush against something and change it’s settings (which has happened).

It’s neat how Gadget Bridge supports talking to multiple smart watches at the same time. One useful feature for that would be to have different notification settings for each watch. I can imagine someone changing between a watch for jogging and a watch for work and wanting different settings.

Colmi P80 Problems

No authentication for Bluetooth connections.

Runs non-free software so no chance to fix things.

Battery life worse than PineTime (but not really bad).

Vibration weak.

Screen doesn’t turn on when notification is sent.

Conclusion

I’m using the PineTime as my daily driver again. While it works well enough for some people (even with the Colmi proprietary app) it doesn’t do what I want. It is however a good test device for FOSS work on the phone side, it has a decent feature set and is cheap.

Apart from lack of authentication and running non-free software the problems are mostly a matter of taste. Some people might think it’s great the way it works.

• [1] https://gadgetbridge.org/gadgets/wearables/moyoung/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/08/19/colmi-p80-smartwatch/

I just bought a Colmi P80 SmartWatch from Aliexpress for $26.11 based on this blog post reviewing it [1]. The main things I was after in this was a larger higher resolution screen because my vision has apparently deteriorated during the time I’ve been wearing a Pinetime [2] and I now can’t read messages on it when not wearing my reading glasses.

The watch hardware is quite OK. It has a larger and higher resolution screen and looks good. The review said that GadgetBridge (the FOSS SmartWatch software in the F-Droid repository) connected when told that the watch was a P79 and in a recent release got support for sending notifications. In my tests with GadgetBridge it doesn’t set the time, can’t seem to send notifications, can’t read the battery level, and seems not to do anything other than just say “connected”. So I installed the proprietary app, as an aside it’s a neat feature to have the watch display a QR code for installing the app, maybe InfiniTime should have a similar QR code for getting GadgetBridge from the F-Droid repository.

The proprietary app is quote OK for the basic functionality and a less technical relative who is using one is happy. For my use the proprietary app is utterly broken. One of my main uses is to get notifications of Jabber messages from the Conversations app (that’s in F-Droid). I have Conversations configured to always have a notification of how many accounts are connected which prevents Android from killing it, with GadgetBridge that notification isn’t reported but the actual message contents are (I don’t know how/why that happens) but with the Colmi app I get repeated notifcation messages on the watch about the accounts being connected. Also the proprietary app has on/off settings for messages to go to the watch for a hard coded list of 16 common apps and an “Others” setting for the rest. GadgetBridge lists the applications that are actually installed so I can configure it not to notify me about Reddit, connecting to my car audio, and many other less common notifications. I prefer the GadgetBridge option to have an allow-list for apps that I want notifications from but it also has a configuration option to use a deny list so you could have everything other than the app that gives lots of low value notifications. The proprietary app has a wide range of watch faces that it can send to the watch which is a nice feature that would be good to have in InfiniTime and GadgetBridge.

The P80 doesn’t display a code on screen when it is paired via Bluetooth so if you have multiple smart watches then you are at risk of connecting to the wrong one and there doesn’t seem to be anything stopping a hostile party from connecting to one. Note that hostile parties are not restricted to the normal maximum transmission power and can use a high gain antenna for reception so they can connect from longer distances than normal Bluetooth devices.

Conclusion

The Colmi P80 hardware is quite decent, the only downside is that the vibration has an annoying “tinny” feel. Strangely it has a rotation sensor for a rotating button (similar to analogue watches) but doesn’t seem to have a use for it as the touch screen does everything.

The watch firmware is quite OK (not great but adequate) but lacking a password for pairing is a significant lack.

The Colmi Android app has some serious issues that make it unusable for what I do and the release version of GadgetBridge doesn’t work with it, so I have gone back to the PineTime for actual use.

The PineTime cost twice as much, has less features (no sensor for O2 level in blood), but seems more solidly constructed.

I plan to continue using the P80 with GadgetBridge and Debian based SmartWatch software to help develop the Debian Mobile project. I expect that at some future time GadgetBridge and the programs written for non-Android Linux distributions will support the P80 and I will transition to it. I am confident that it will work well for me at some future time and that I will get $26.11 of value from it. At this time I recommend that people who do the sort of things I do get one of each and that less technical people get a Colmi P80.

• [1] https://tinyurl.com/253uyr7u
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2024/08/10/pinetime-status/

I am always looking for ways of increasing the compute power I have at a reasonable price. I am very happy with my HP z840 dual CPU workstation [1] that I’m using as a server and my HP z640 single CPU workstation [2]. Both of them were available second hand at quite reasonable prices and could be cheaply upgraded to faster CPUs. But if I can get something a lot faster for a reasonable price then I’ll definitely get it.

Socket LGA2011-v3

The home server and home workstation I currently use have socket LGA2011-v3 [3] which supports the E5-2699A v4 CPU which gives a rating of 26,939 according to Passmark [4]. That Passmark score is quite decent, you can get CPUs using DDR4 RAM that go up to almost double that but it’s a reasonable speed and it works in systems that are readily available at low prices. The z640 is regularly on sale for less than $400AU and the z840 is occasionally below $600.

The Dell PowerEdge T430 is an ok dual-CPU tower server using the same socket. One thing that’s not well known is that is it limited to something like 135W per CPU when run with two CPUs. So it will work correctly with a single E5-2697A v4 with 145W TDP (I’ve tested that) but will refuse to boot with two of them. In my test system I tried replacing the 495W PSUs with 750W PSUs and it made no difference, the motherboard has the limit. With only a single CPU you only get 8/12 DIMM sockets and not all PCIe slots work. There are many second hand T430s on sale with only a single CPU presumably because the T330 sucks. My T430 works fine with a pair of E5-2683 v4 CPUs.

The Dell PowerEdge T630 also takes the same CPUs but supports higher TDP than the T430. They also support 18*3.5″ disks or 32*2.5″ but they are noisy. I wouldn’t buy one for home use.

AMD

There are some nice AMD CPUs manufactured around the same time and AMD has done a better job of making multiple CPUs that fit the same socket. The reason I don’t generally use AMD CPUs is that they are used in a minority of the server grade systems so as I want ECC RAM and other server features I generally can’t find AMD systems at a reasonable price on ebay etc. There are people who really want second hand server grade systems with AMD CPUs and outbid me. This is probably a region dependent issue, maybe if I was buying in the US I could get some nice workstations with AMD CPUs at low prices.

Socket LGA1151

Socket LGA1151 [5] is used in the Dell PowerEdge T330. It only supports 2 memory channels and 4 DIMMs compared to the 4 channels and 8 DIMMs in LGA2011, and it also has a limit of 64G total RAM for most systems and 128G for some systems. By today’s standards even 128G is a real limit for server use, DDR4 RDIMMs are about $1/GB and when spending $600+ on system and CPU upgrade you wouldn’t want to spend less than $130 on RAM. The CPUs with decent performance for that socket like the i9-9900K aren’t supported by the T330 (possibly they don’t support ECC RAM). The CPUs that Dell supports perform very poorly. I suspect that Dell deliberately nerfed the T330 to drive sales of the T430.

The Lenovo P330 uses socket LGA1151-2 but has the same issues of taking slow CPUs in addition to using UDIMMs which are significantly more expensive on the second hand market.

Socket LGA2066

The next Intel socket after LGA2011-v3 is LGA2066 [6]. That is in The Dell Precision 5820 and HP Z4 G4. It takes an i9-10980XE for 32,404 on Passmark or a W-2295 for 30,906. The variant of the Dell 5820 that supports the i9 CPUs doesn’t seem to support ECC RAM so it’s not a proper workstation. The single thread performance difference between the W-2295 and the E5-2699A v4 is 2640 to 2055, a 28% increase for the W-2295. There are “High Frequency Optimized” cpus for socket LGA2011-v3 but they all deliver less than 2,300 on the Passmark single-thread tests which is much less than what you can get from socket LGA2066. The W-2295 costs $1000 on ebay and the E5-2699A v4 is readily available for under $400 and a few months ago I got a matched pair for a bit over $400. Note that getting a matched pair of Intel CPUs is a major pain [7].

Comparing sockets LGA2011-v3 and LGA2066 for a single-CPU system is a $300 system (HP x640) + $400 CPU (E5-2699A v4) vs $500 system (Dell Precision 5820) + $1000 CPU (W-2295), so more than twice the price for a 30% performance benefit on some tasks. The LGA2011-v3 and USB-C both launched in 2014 so LGA2011-v3 systems don’t have USB-C sockets, a $20 USB-C PCIe card doesn’t change the economics.

Socket LGA3647

Socket LGA3647 [8] is used in the Dell PowerEdge T440. It supports 6 channels of DDR4 RAM which is a very nice feature for bigger systems. According to one Dell web page the best CPU Dell officially supports for this is the Xeon Gold 5120 which gives performance only slightly better than the E5-2683 v4 which has a low enough TDP that a T430 can run two of them. But according to another Dell web page they support 16 core CPUs which means performance better than a T430 but less than a HP z840. The T440 doesn’t seem like a great system, if I got one cheap I could find a use for it but I wouldn’t pay the prices that they go for on ebay. The Dell PowerEdge T640 has the same socket and is described as supporting up to 28 core CPUs. But I anticipate that it would be as loud as the T630 and it’s also expensive.

This socket is also used in the HP Z6 G4 which takes a W-3265 or Xeon Gold 6258R CPU for the high end options. The HP Z6 G4 systems on ebay are all above $1500 and the Xeon Gold 6258R is also over $1000 so while the Xeon Gold 6258R in a Z6 G4 will give 50% better performance on multithreaded operations than the systems I currently have it’s costing almost 3* as much. It has 6 DIMM sockets which is a nice improvement over the 4 in the z640. The Z6 G4 takes a maximum of 768G of RAM with the optional extra CPU board (which is very expensive both new and on ebay) compared to my z840 which has 512G and half it’s DIMM slots empty. The HP Z8 G4 has the same socket and takes up to 3TB of RAM if used with CPUs that support it (most CPUs only support 768G and you need a “M” variant to support more). The higher performance CPUs supported in the Z6 G4 and Z8 G4 don’t have enough entries in the Passmark database to be accurate, but going from 22 cores in the E5-2699A v4 to 28 in the Xeon Platinum 8180 when using the same RAM technology doesn’t seem like a huge benefit. The Z6 and Z8 G4 systems run DDR4 RAM at up to 2666 speed while the z640 and z840 only to 2400, a 10% increase in RAM speed is nice but not a huge difference.

I don’t think that any socket LGA3647 systems will ever be ones I want to buy. They don’t offer much over LGA2011-v3 but are in newer and fancier systems that will go for significantly higher prices.

DDR5

I think that DDR5 systems will be my next step up in tower server and workstation performance after the socket LGA2011-v3 systems. I don’t think anything less will offer me enough of a benefit to justify a change. I also don’t think that they will be in the price range I am willing to pay until well after DDR6 is released, some people are hoping for DDR6 to be released late this year but next year seems more likely. So maybe in 2027 there will be some nice DDR5 systems going cheap.

CPU Benchmark Results

Here are the benchmark results of CPUs I mentioned in this post according to passmark.com [9]. I didn’t reference results of CPUs that only had 1 or 2 results posted as they aren’t likely to be accurate.

• [1] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/04/05/hp-z840/
• [2] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/04/05/hp-ml110-gen9-z640/
• [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_2011
• [4] https://tinyurl.com/2ddumsfe
• [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1151
• [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_2066
• [7] https://etbe.coker.com.au/2025/06/19/matching-intel-cpus/
• [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_3647
• [9] https://www.passmark.com/

One thing that annoys me on TV shows and movies is getting the details wrong. Yes it’s fiction and yes some things can’t be done correctly and in some situations correctly portraying things goes against the plot. But otherwise I think they should try to make it accurate.

I was just watching The Americans (a generally good show that I recommend watching) and in Season 4 Episode 9 there’s a close up of a glass of wine which clearly shows that the Tears of Wine effect is missing, the liquid in the glass obviously has the surface tension of water not of wine. When they run a show about spies then have to expect that the core audience will be the type of detail oriented people who notice these things. Having actors not actually drink alcohol on set is a standard practice, if they have to do 10 takes of someone drinking a glass of wine then that would be a problem if they actually drank real wine. But they could substitute real wine for the close up shots and of course just getting it right the first time is a good option.

Some ridiculous inaccuracy we just need to deal with, like knives making a schwing sound when pulled out of scabbards and “silenced” guns usually still being quite loud (so many people are used to it being wrong). Organisations like the KGB had guns that were actually silent, but they generally looked obviously different to regular guns and had a much lower effective range.

The gold coins shown on TV are another ridiculous thing. The sound of metal hitting something depends on how hard it is and how dense it is. Surely most people have heard the sounds of dropping steel nuts and ball bearings and the sound of dropping lead sinkers and knows that the sounds of items of similar size and shape differ greatly based on density and hardness. A modern coin made of copper, cupro-nickel (the current “silver” coins), or copper-aluminium (the current “gold” coins) sounds very different to a gold coin when dropped on a bench. For a show like The Witcher it wouldn’t be difficult to make actual gold coins of a similar quality to iron age coin production, any jeweller could make the blanks and making stamps hard enough to press gold isn’t an engineering challenge (stamping copper coins would be much more difficult). The coins used for the show could be sold to fans afterwards.

Once coins are made they can’t be just heaped up. Even if you are a sorcerer you probably couldn’t fill a barrel a meter high with gold coins and not have it break from the weight and/or have the coins at the bottom cold welded. Gold coins are supposed to have a precise amount of gold and if you pile them up too high then the cold welding process will transfer gold between coins changing the value. If someone was going to have a significant quantity of gold stored then it would be in gold ingots with separators between layers to prevent cold welding.

Movies tend not to show coins close up, I presume that’s because they considered it too difficult to make coins and they just use some random coins from their own country.

Another annoying thing is shows that don’t match up the build dates of objects used. It’s nice when they get it right like the movie Titanic featuring a M1911 pistol which is something that a rich person in 1912 would likely have. The series Carnival Row (which I recommend) has weapons that mostly match our WW1 era, everything that doesn’t involve magic seems legit. One of the worst examples of this is the movie Anna (by Luc Besson which is mostly a recreation of his film Nikita but in the early 90s and with the KGB). That film features laptops with color screens and USB ports before USB was invented and when color screens weren’t common on laptops, as an aside military spec laptops tend to have older designs than consumer spec ones.

I’ve mostly given up on hoping that movies will get “hacking” scenes that are any more accurate than knives making a “schwing” sound. But it shouldn’t be that hard for them to find computer gear that was manufactured in the right year to use for the film.

Why can’t they hire experts on technology to check everything?

When companies design products a major concern seems to be what the reviewers will have to say about it. For any product of significant value the users are unable to perform any reasonable test before buying, for a casual user some problems may only be apparent after weeks of use so professional reviews are important to many people. The market apparently doesn’t want reviews of the form “here’s a list of products that are quite similar and all do the job well, you can buy any of them, it’s no big deal” which would be the most technically accurate way of doing it.

So the reviewers compare the products on the criteria that are easiest to measure, this lead to phones being compared by how light and thin they are. I think it’s often the case that users would be better served by thicker heavier phones that have larger batteries but instead they are being sold phones that have good battery life in a fresh installation but which don’t last a day with a full load of apps installed.

The latest issue with bad reviews driving poor product design is electric cars. For a while the advocates of old fashioned cars have touted the range of petrol cars which has become an issue for comparing EVs. I have been driving cars for 35 years and so far I have never driven anywhere that’s out of range of the current electric charging network, even with the range of the LEAF (which is smaller than many other EVs). If I ever felt the need to drive across the Nullarbor Plain then I could rent a car to do that and the costs of such car rental would be small compared to the money I’m saving by driving an EV and also small when compared to the premium I would have to pay for an EV with a larger range.

Some of the recent articles I’ve seen about EVs have covered vehicles with a battery range over 700Km which is greater than the legal distance a commercial driver can drive without a break. I’ve also seen articles about plans to have a small petrol or Diesel motor in an EV to recharge the battery without directly driving the wheels. A 9KW Diesel motor could provide enough electricity on average to keep the charge maintained in a LEAF battery and according to the specs of Diesel generators would take about 55Kg of fuel to provide the charge a LEAF needs to drive 1000Km. The idea of a mostly electric hybrid car that can do 1000Km on one tank of fuel is interesting as a thought experiment but doesn’t seem to have much actual use. Apparently a Chinese company is planning to release a car that can do 1400Km one one tank of fuel using such technology which is impressive but not particularly useful.

The next issue of unreasonable competition is in charge speed. Charging a car at 2KW from a regular power socket is a real limit to what you can do with a car. It’s a limit that hasn’t bothered me so far because the most driving I typically do in a week is less than one full charge, so at most I have to charge overnight twice in a week. But if I was going to drive to another city without hiring a car that has better range I’d need a fast charger. Most current models of the Nissan LEAF support charging speeds up to 50KW which means fully charging the battery in under an hour (or slightly over an hour for the long range version). If I was to drive from Melbourne to Canberra in my LEAF I’d have to charge twice which would be an annoyance at those speeds. There are a variety of EVs that can charge at 100KW and some as high as 350KW. 350KW is enough to fully charge the largest EV batteries in half an hour which seems to be as much as anyone would need. But there are apparently plans for 1MW car chargers which would theoretically be able to charge a Hummer (the EV with the largest battery) in 12 minutes. One obvious part of the solution to EV charging times is to not drive a Hummer! Another thing to note is that batteries can’t be charged at a high rate for all charge levels, this is why advertising for fast chargers makes claims like “80% charge in half an hour” which definitely doesn’t mean “100% charge in 37.5 minutes”!

There are significant engineering issues with high power applications. A 1MW cable is not just a bigger version of a regular power cable, there are additional safety issues, user training is required and cooling of the connector is probably required. That’s a lot to just get a better number in the table at the end of a review. There is research in progress on the Megawatt Charging System which is designed to charge heavy vehicles (presumably trucks and buses) at up to 3.75MW. Charging a truck at that rate is reasonable as the process of obtaining and maintaining a heavy vehicle license requires a significant amount of effort and some extra training in 3.75MW charging probably doesn’t make much difference.

A final issue with fast charging is the capacity of the grid. A few years ago I attended a lecture by an electrical engineer who works for the Victorian railway system which was very interesting. The Vic rail power setup involved about 100MW of grid connectivity with special contracts with the grid operators due to the fact that 1MW trains suddenly starting and stopping causes engineering problems that aren’t trivial to solve. They were also working on battery packs and super capacitors to deal with regenerative braking and to avoid brownouts in long sections of track. For a medium size petrol station 14 bays for fuelling cars is common. If 6 such petrol stations were replaced with fast charging stations that can charge cars at 1MW each that would draw the same power as the train network for the entire state! There is a need for significant engineering work to allow most cars to be electric no matter how it’s done, but we don’t need to make that worse just for benchmarks.