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Comment by mrweasel | Hacker News Reader

If they can keep up with the AMD and Intel CPUs they list, then that's actually pretty impressive and actually useful. There is a lot of people still daily driving 5 - 10 old processors just fine, it's absolutely plenty for a office desktop or even light development work.

I would like to see actual benchmarks though.

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I use a core i7-920 from first generation that I recently changed with a Xeon compatible socket and another i7-3770 from third generation as daily drivers. And I do some gaming with non-intensive games. The computer works perfectly with no major drawbacks.

The third generation is noisy because it is in a small format case and with very deficient ventilation that I can't solve.

Did you try to at least remove the dust/dirt which tends to clog those parts over these timespans? With forced air from a pressured can to blow it out, or the other way around with a vacuum cleaner? (But arrest the fan, or unplug it while doing so, if possible! Otherwise it can spin like crazy and working as a generator, even frying the controller!) Furthermore the cooling paste/glue/mat between the die, or the lid of the CPU and the underside of the cooler tends to degrade/dry out, also because of time. Exchanging that requires disassembly, removing the old stuff carefully with isopropanol, reapplying some thermal paste, nothing special, just Arctic MX4 is good enough, and then reattaching the cooler.

Would work wonders, I guess.

I had changed the thermal paste last year, and I think it had still the original thermal paste (completely dry) and it was improved a lot. Like going from 90 degrees to like about 70 degrees.

But the machine is still noisy. I also got a nvidia 1050ti small format into it, and it completely breaks the small flow path that exist. The flowpath is provided with the cpu fan and a plastic piece to redirect the flow.

Lately is having some very nasty blue screen of death. That when I look online they say might be produced by the RAM failing. But running mem86+, one stick at a time and both stick together, always pass with 0% error. So I am getting out of ideas.

> actually useful

Except it's a custom ISA (fork of MIPS). It could be fine for Chromebook-like use cases (basically web browser machine), but not really for anything more serious ...

I guess you mean on the desktop? If this thing runs linux, it is as serious as everything that can run Linux.

OpenBSD has a history of supporting the Loongson arch. https://www.openbsd.org/loongson.html

Only some Chinese distros support it. For a lot of serious things, you will need to have binary support - commercial software, docker etc.

That's why they have:

LoongBT, faster x86 and ARM binary translation, 213 instructions

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