A cool computer

[Triplex]

If anyone is interested in my desktop, it's a refurbished OptiPlex 3010. The graphics is a Zotac NVidia GTX 1050ti which I got for X-mas in 2018, nothing special about the card besides it's low profile. Runs with 8GB of RAM and an Intel Core i5-3470 at 3.2GHz, I'll definitely need to upgrade this in the future. The drives are a 128GB SSD and a 1TB HDD which when booted provides a total of 117G of drive space. The partitions are kinda special since the HDD has a total of 5 partitions which I got working by using a GPT type partitioning table. Here's the layout of my drives outputted by lsblk:

Code Select Expand

NAME   MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
sda      8:0    0 119.2G  0 disk
├─sda1   8:1    0   300M  0 part
└─sda2   8:2    0   119G  0 part /
sdb      8:16   0 931.5G  0 disk
├─sdb1   8:17   0   500G  0 part /home
├─sdb2   8:18   0    30G  0 part /usr/include
├─sdb3   8:19   0   100G  0 part /var
├─sdb4   8:20   0   300G  0 part /opt
└─sdb5   8:21   0   1.5G  0 part [SWAP]

The sda device is my SSD and the sdb device is the 1TB HDD. The thing I find crazy about my setup is that this upgraded 2012 computer boots in 17 seconds and runs Arch Linux, the graphics work great even though is crammed behind my desk. Does anyone else thing this is an interesting build? If anyone else needs help with this kind of setup for Arch Linux or Linux in general, just ask me and I'll happily help out on the forum or Discord.

[Goujer (she/her)]

Boot speed isn't surprising as Arch Linux is massively basic and requires user setup to do anything complicated in the back end at boot, having an SSD and distributing to another physical drive will also allow the computer to draw from two sources at once for data (similar to a RAID).
Mostly though the SSD and Arch Linux are the likely cause of the speed. My Macintosh LC III takes like 20 seconds to boot and it uses a 128MB SCSI harddrive, the OS isn't that complicated and isn't doing much that requires the system to take a long time to boot.

Not sure why you think it being crammed behind a desk would impact graphics or speed either.

[Triplex]

I'm referring to the temperature of the rig affecting performance. And the boot time I get is overall boot time including the firmware and boot loader.

[Goujer (she/her)]

Firmware/BIOS/UEFI does not take long and neither do boot loaders really.

Unless you're getting near the upper 80s°C you shouldn't see any throttling on components. A more modern card like the 1050ti should hold on until the upper 90s.
CPUs will last until 70 to 80ish range.

[Triplex]

The slowest thing that happens during booting is the firmware, if I can somehow decrease the time it takes to load the BIOS then I can get even faster.

[Goujer (she/her)]

There are plenty of settings for that.

Edit: Reddit will not answer your prayers. Go into your BIOS, the settings related to speed should be obvious for a low level Arch Linux man such as yourself.

[Bella]

Not really sure why you'd need a faster bios. If you're running an SSD you should only have a boot time of a few seconds and I'm not sure why it'd need to be faster than that.

[Goujer (she/her)]

My boot is 2 minutes which is plenty of time to brush my teeth and get a snack.

[Hālian He/him]

Fireblade takes 34"82 to boot up. For some reason, it spends quite a bit of time doing POST checks and whatnot before displaying the boot screen.