Blackbird upgrade
=================
I have upgraded my Raptor CS BlackBird workstation (that OpenPOWER
thing, you know). I have installed a second-hand AMD Radeon HD 5450
graphics board.
Why? Because the build-in AST framebuffer was designed to run at no
more then 1920x1024 and my LCD can do 1920x1200. And it is insane not
to use LCD's native resolution. This is the only reason for such change
because the AST think fully satisfied all my other needs.
There is one regression - I cannot see boot screen on the OS loader
(PETITBOOT) one. This is stupid. Anyway, after these phases it works
perfectly. Possibly, I have to put some firmware to the loader but at
the moment I'm not going to copy it there.
The machine seems to be a bit more noisy (the new board was a passive
heatsink so it's cooly only by case fans) and the board temperature is
about 85 Celsius degrees but the rest of machine remains cool (~52
Celsius degrees). I hope that this is OK. The noise is relative because
the machine was perfectly silent before (except the boot phase when all
fans run at full speed...). And I ran some CPU-intensive tasks today
(some finite element analyses) so the machine was obviously louder than
usually.