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Just built a new rig last week. This isn't at all surprising. Prices are so out of whack right now. $1000 used to be the ceiling for the highest end video cards

Just built a new rig last week. This isn't at all surprising. Prices are so out of whack right now. $1000 used to be the ceiling for the highest end video cards (like a 1080 Ti), now $1000 is the floor. There are no good current gen (or even previous gen) cards available for under $1000. The 4080 is a horrible value and still regularly listed at $1200-$1400. The 4090 is overkill and sits around $1700-$2200. Even 2 year old tech 3080's are regularly selling for near a grand. AM5 motherboards are insanely priced. Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Be prepared to shell out $1000 just for the motherboard. Add to all of that, this latest batch of CPUs are just stupid power hungry - like 240w+ under load (except for the non-x variants of AMD 7000 series, just released last month). It used to be you could buy a lot of computer for $2-3K, now that figure is closer to $5K. These prices, combined with the folks that just went through this pain 2 years ago during the pandemic and yeah you aren't going to see stuff flying off the shelves any time soon.

nickstinemates 4y ago
> Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Just buy an Intel PCI-E 10g card. They're like $100. Slots on motherboards are meant to be used.
- Aardwolf 4y ago
  There are hardly any slots on motherboards too now these days. One network card may fit next to the GPU. All kinds of limitations to nvme SSD speeds and GPU bus width may start applying just for doing that.
  - paulmd 4y ago
    Exactly, as long as GPUs keep swelling larger and larger, pcie cards just aren't going to be practical. It's crazy that X670E literally has multiple chipsets daisychained together ostensibly to increase expansion capability and yet there's less and less expansion available to end-users. And what there is, is almost entirely blocked by the GPU these days. I would love to see a board with tons of pcie slots attached to the chipset or PCIe switches, but, it wouldn't make the GPU go away for those users who want a discrete GPU. The only real viable solution I see is thunderbolt, move as much as possible out of the case and break that expansion out as external ports. And tbh the PCIe add-in-card form factor just isn't working for GPUs anymore, the GPU needs to become a standardized module that is connected separately (via riser if desired) and it probably needs a 48V rail. The GPU being 3-4x the TDP of the CPU but completely dimensionally unstandardized and running crazy currents at 12V is not sustainable.
    - nickstinemates 4y ago
      There are so many motherboards that fit exactly what your ideal state describes. They just start to get expensive. As an example, I'm currently running 2 3090ti's on a MSI board in addition to 2 10GB PCI-Express cards, + 3x m.2 SSD's and I am not even close to fully utilizing the lanes OR other premium slots (like SATA) If room is an issue, get a larger case or there are also offset/vertical mount options for things like GPU's.
      - paulmd 4y ago
        Here's a list of all X670/X670E boards with 4 or more PCIe x16 slots. https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=4,8&s=41&c=158,159 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=4,8&s=41&c=... The only boards in that category are actually B650E boards, and there's only 4. https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=4,8&s=41 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=4,8&s=41 Looks like the current max for any AM5 or LGA1700 board is 5 pcie x16 slots. And of course they won't all be full ones, they'll be some x4-in-x16 (which still is better than nothing, because slot width does affect electrical delivery capability of the slot). And using M.2 slots often eats up some of the pcie slots as well. Looking at one example - Gigabyte B660 DS3H - you get 1 pcie 4.0x16 and the rest are PCIe 3.0x1-in-x16. https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=5,8&s=41,40 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=5,8&s=41,40 The promise of having these super-powerful chipsets has supposedly been that we can put more stuff on it. Same thing for pcie 5 - stuff doesn't really need it yet but you could put a bunch of slower stuff on switches and get a lot of the capability of HEDT out of a consumer board. That has not materialized, even a $700 consumer board is still pretty much intended for one gpu and maybe 2 nvme slots. If you want a bunch of pcie expansion you still have to go to HEDT or server, but AMD killed HEDT and then lost interest and went outside to ride bikes. So now it's only server. ROMED8-2T is the closest thing that exists to what I want, but, the promise of X670E and daisychained chipsets and superfast pcie is that I shouldn't have to buy an Epyc to get some decent number of real x16 slots, or at least x4-in-x16 or whatever.
jb1991 4y ago
The Mac Studio is quite a powerful machine at a relatively reasonable price.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  How many games run on it?
  - davely 4y ago
    Quite a lot, at least based on my experience using Steam and playing various games I’ve bought for my actual gaming PC, but have builds available for multiple platforms. As long as they’re 64 bit builds, MacOS’s Rosetta translation layer does a great job of running then without a hitch. Apple Silicon is a beast. I wish more developers would take advantage of it.
    - krisroadruck 4y ago
      This is only true if your primary game preference is casual games. The mac studio lacks a discrete graphics card. Ignoring the OS, the whole ARM vs x86, and Rosetta, wine, whatever stumbling blocks - just lack of a discrete GPU is enough to make it a no-go as a serious gaming rig. This isn't just me talking out of my neck either. I have 3 rigs I keep around my desk, and one of them is a mac studio. Great for dev and video editing, but for gaming not so much. Edit: "Why do you need 3 computers?" - I regularly switch between Windows, Ubuntu & MacOS, and I don't like dinking with switching my monitor inputs, dual booting or remoting in. Rather just swivel my chair. Yes I fully realize how ridiculous this is. Some people like nice cars. I like wasting money on computers apparently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
      - bitL 4y ago
        No worries, I have 12 computers around my desk...
    - amelius 4y ago
      > Apple Silicon is a beast. I wish more developers would take advantage of it. It's consumer electronics. Not very useful for people who want to build things containing a CPU/GPU.
vitaflo 4y ago
Let’s also remember when the 1080 first launched it was a massive upgrade and the retail price was $600.
- ricardobayes 4y ago
  And was considered really expensive, at the time
  - qayxc 4y ago
    Ah, those youngsters have no idea what expensive means :) Back in the early 90s a half decent SVGA card could set you back $900 easily (e.g. ATI's 1MB Graphics Ultra from 1991). And that's 1992 dollars, mind you. So about $1,900 adjusted for inflation. Heck, a SoundBlaster Pro sound card was $300 back then (~$670 adjusted for inflation) - the base model for $170 was considered a steal at that price :D And that thing couldn't do half as much as even the cheapo ALC897 sound chip in a basic motherboard.
    - pjmlp 4y ago
      Hence why I was big into flight simulators up to when they started asking for 486/ 4MB as baseline, it was over for me, as I had other things in life more relevant to spend the money.
- checkyoursudo 4y ago
  I bought a 1080 quite a while after they launched. I still have it. I have thought about building a new PC lately, and it seems to me that newer cards are ... not as much as an upgrade as I might have been led to believe? Especially given the cost. If I did build a new PC today, I am not entirely sure I would buy a new video card. The performance/value ratio doesn't seem as appealing as jumping to the 1080 did at the time back then.
  - tomnipotent 4y ago
    The 3080 to 4080 gain is the same as the 980 to 1080 jump (~27%).
arecurrence 4y ago
Reading this really points out to me how killer of a deal that GeforceNow is. I truly don't understand why more publishers don't allow their games on the platform.
- eric__cartman 4y ago
  It's not a killer deal for the consumer. That's just Nvidia fucking you over either way and still profiting off it. The market is not only bad in the high end, but there aren't any ~$200 value oriented graphics cards that provide significant upgrades over past generations. Just now the GTX 1060 has stepped down from being the most popular card in Steam's hardware survey just to be replaced by the GTX 1650, a much newer card that costs about the same and performs about the same. And with less VRAM!
- dfghjjbhvg 4y ago
  because they all learned from stadia and know how crappy and useless remote streaming of input/graphics is for most games. this tech is bad. awful. only worth for casual games which are already well served by comon hardware localy. its all a ruse to try to sell idle capacity for their gpu farms because AI model training hype never materialized
  - 0-_-0 4y ago
    I tried geforce now, it's amazing, lag is almost imperceptible with the 8ms ping I had.
    - Gigachad 4y ago
      I also tried it on a gigabit network and it was essentially unusable. Constant frame drops and audio stuttering. Even for casual gaming it was horrible. Can't imagine something multi player.
      - nottorp 4y ago
        You talking about your local network or your internet connection? It works just fine(tm) on the two fiber connections i've tried, one 500 mbps only, not 1 gbps. It only uses like 10 mbps for 1080. It's the latency and packet loss that kills you, it's unusable on wifi going though the same fiber for example.
deleted 4y ago
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gruez 4y ago
>Add to all of that, this latest batch of CPUs are just stupid power hungry - like 240w+ under load (except for the non-x variants of AMD 7000 series, just released last month). That's because in the race to get the highest benchmark scores, both companies have set the stock clocks to a level that's way beyond what's optimal (eg. adding 100W of power consumption to get 5% higher benchmark scores). The CPUs themselves are fine, you just have to adjust the power/clock limit lower.
- chx 4y ago
  ^^^^ this Someone on reddit did a power analysis of the 13900K and I reposted it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404683 https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10bna5r/13900k_power_scaling_analysis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10bna5r/13900k_po... and it shows the CPU at 100W has 75% of the performance at 40% of the power consumption...
  - oblak 4y ago
    It's still pretty bad compared to Ryzen 7000. The non-x models are just the regular guys at 65W, like my good ol 3700x. That said, Intel sure has magic dust given how far behind their node disadvantage. Serves them right, though. What a horrible company.
    - reisse 4y ago
      Their node disadvantage is mostly good marketing from TSMC though. Intel 10 (10nm, but that's not the real nanometers) is ~100M transistors per mm2, while TSMC 5 (5nm, but again, that's not the real nanometers) is ~130M transistors per mm2. Sure, 30% better, but not a 2x improvement as marketing suggests.
      - megous 4y ago
        10nm to 5nm feature size should be [naively thinking] 4x improvement in density, so it's even worse. :)
geraldhh 4y ago
> Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Be prepared to shell out $1000 just for the motherboard. quick search turns up options for around 500euros but don't be fooled, 10GbE copper is a power hungry mess. go with lower n-baseT speeds if just want some progression for the last twenty years of networking innovation or invest in optical and get a real upgrade (20/40/100 Gbps)
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  AM5 w/ PCIE 5, DDR5 support and 10GBe? I've already eaten the cost, but I would love a link to the board you found. I saw a lot in that price range with 2.5 or 5GB but didn't run into any with 10GBe. That said I may have missed one. If nothing else it may be useful for when the wifes gaming rig gets an upgrade in a few months. As to why I'm sticking with 10Gbe - I have a 24 port 10GBe switch for the house so going with the kit that matches the network I already have.
- flangola7 4y ago
  What is the use case of 10Gb Ethernet for the regular PC user? Or even the enthusiast? I have a sprawling homelab and home theater and scarcely need regular 1G. Last summer I transferred a media archive of ~10TB to new hardware, which completed overnight across Cat5. Is there some hot new hobby that generates multi gigabit bursts that I don't know about?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - lazide 4y ago
    Uh, at maximum speed on a gigabit network, it takes 22 hours, 13 minutes to transfer 10 TB. That’s not overnight unless you’re a hell of a sleeper. On a 10Gig network, assuming no other bottlenecks (harder to do), it’s 2 and a quarter hours. Personally, I use 10 gig because 100MB/s is really slow. Even 2.5Gb is much, much better and makes it a lot more likely something besides the network is the bottleneck. I personally move around enough data, it bothers me enough to be worth it.
Whinner 4y ago
$1000 as the floor? Maybe if you’re talking 4K gaming but that’s the very high end. Intel arc a750 are under $300 and are decent cards for 1080 and do well in 1440. Dx9 support has greatly increased since release. Going up a little in price, amds 6650 amd 6750 are 3-400. 6800xt are under $600.
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  I haven't bought a non-4K monitor in over 6 years. I honestly don't know anyone who is still using 1080p monitors as daily drivers if they are also using the machine for productivity or media work. But your point is not invalid.
  - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
    At my job we all got 1080p monitors for dev work.
    - qayxc 4y ago
      You poor souls. I couldn't imagine going back to 1080p for dev work.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        That's how cheap European tech companies are.
  - krisroadruck 4y ago
    @ChuckNorris89 man... why do they hate their devs? That's just mean =/ Hopefully they don't have you all on a bunch of $400 dell optiplexes too. Pouring one out for you brother.
  - pprotas 4y ago
    https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... > 60% of Steam users have a 1080p monitor as their primary display
Tuna-Fish 4y ago
There are complex reasons related to patent licensing why it makes no sense to put 10Gbe on a motherboard right now. If you want 10Gbe, don't get a $1000 motherboard for it, get a motherboard with a free pcie 4.0 slot and get an adapter. That'll cost an extra ~$100 today, and an extra ~$20 in August.
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  Fair enough - I'm clearly paying a premium to keep a cleaner interior on the build. I tend to run exactly one card - the video card, and aim to get everything else onboard, but as you pointed out that's definitely not the only way to go, and certainly not the most cost efficient way.
  - willis936 4y ago
    Vanity can cost as much as a market is willing to pay. From a function standpoint: I'm happy that multiple PCIe slots is still the standard. If I didn't have functional wants such as "more accelerators and more I/O" then I'd go with a cute ITX build. I did get a compact case recently because 5.25", 3.5", and 2.5" bays are no longer an interesting use case for my daily driver, but now I find that even if I did want to shell out for a new high-end GPU the only model that would fit in my case is a perpetually sold out AIO model.
    - myself248 4y ago
      Aye. I keep two desktops around for this reason. One is my new Ryzen APU in a small (sub-7-liter) case, which sits half empty because I haven't even dropped a GPU into it. All my games and CAD run just fine on the APU. All the included peripherals are more than I've ever needed. The other is my old Athlon64x2 4850e in a bigass M3N78 Pro board, with drives and I/O out the wazoo. It's old enough to have floppy and PATA ports, but new enough to have SATA and USB too (and even a PCIe slot), so it's my media mule. I power it up whenever I need to do CD ripping, floppy archiving, that sort of stuff. I actually picked up the fastest chip that would fit the board (a Phenom II X4 945), just for giggles because they're $30 on eBay now, but promptly swapped back to the 4850e because 125 watts in a CPU is unconscionable when 45 does the job just fine. The latter, of course, is chock-full of cables like they're goin' out of style. I made a few long floppy and PATA ribbons for working with external disks so they sit crammed up in the bottom when not in use, etc. And the non-modular PSU has like a dozen cables all splattered everywhere. It's the opposite of vanity, and I love it.
shmerl 4y ago
> Add to all of that, this latest batch of CPUs are just stupid power hungry - like 240w+ under load Eco mode is a thing for AMD CPUs. There is no point really in not using it by default - benefits are very marginal with power cost being disproportionally huge. And AMD are doing it more for marketing reasons to gain some single digit percentages in benchmarks. So just enable it (105 W one) and enjoy way more reasonable and efficient power usage with basically almost the same performance. See some details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6aKQ-eBFk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6aKQ-eBFk0
dotnet00 4y ago
Agreed, I don't mind spending extra money on GPUs (I have 2 3090s sitting next to me) because the improvement are still worthwhile for my use case, but the CPU prices have been unjustifiable, especially on the AMD side. Increasing CPU price, absurd motherboard price AND needing to buy new RAM, all for an improvement that isn't really too meaningful unless in very specific tasks, is not really worth it. I instead just got a 5900x for my computer and moved its 3900x into a server, retiring its 1600x (which was also sufficient for its work, although at least the 1600x was noticeably slower for transcoding, the 3900x is proving more than sufficient).
bluedino 4y ago
I don't keep up with PC component prices but I thought crypto crashing flooded the market with cheap cards? (Then again I guess BTC is back into the $20k's)
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  You can only flood desert for a moment. BTC hasn't been viable on GPUs for a while, either. It's the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake change that was the most exciting, but it doesn't seem to have had a significant effect, especially with newer (3-4yr old) cards.
  - svnt 4y ago
    They are good heaters. Wait til summer. Or maybe they just sell them to generative AI farms.
    - thomastjeffery 4y ago
      It's a generally global market, and it's always summer somewhere.
      - incrudible 4y ago
        Summer yes, but winter not so much.
maerF0x0 4y ago
If you care about price, the 3060, RX 6700 XT, or Intel Arc A770 16GB are your best bets. xx80 and xx90s are in the class "If you need to ask the price you cant afford it."
docfort 4y ago
There’s been a lot of ink spilled about the decline of Moore’s Law and how it hasn’t yet exactly fallen for all aspects of computer engineering. I think it’s fallen for customers, though. The economics of exponential speed improvement in traditional CPU design have gone away, and the capability/complexity ratio of software collapsed with the fall of Dennard scaling. No fundamentally new applications have come out (save ML, which is not particularly suited to CPUs or even GPUs), so consumers are happy to keep chugging along with their current setup or move more load to their phones. Even if the increase in hardware cost stays at parity with inflation, it’s tremendously more expensive than it used to be, when waiting six months could get you more machines for your budget. Gaming, a previous driver of high-end consumer growth, has split into truly mobile, consoles, and very high end PCs. But complex games take more capital and time to develop, so recouping costs is important (except if the studio is part of a conglomerate like Microsoft that can weather temporary market forces). I’d imagine that places pressure on game developers to aim for maximum compatibility and a scalable core. So too bad for the Mac, great for phones, and great for consoles (especially with monetizing the back catalog). And new PCs will have to fight against good-enough, and lower demand funding new hardware and software.
jmyeet 4y ago
> There are no good current gen (or even previous gen) cards available for under $1000 The 4070 Ti is <$1000. > Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Be prepared to shell out $1000 just for the motherboard. Why not just a PCI-e 10GbE NIC on a regular motherboard? > now that figure is closer to $5K. I see plenty of prebuilt PCs (eg CyberpowerPC) with 3070 Tis for $2k. 4070 Tis for $2.5k.
AussieWog93 4y ago
I wonder how much of this increase is due to social media. 10-15 years ago, people would buy graphics cards to play the latest games on. Epeen was a thing, but limited to just some text in your forum signature. Now, it seems like half the reason people buy any sort of "status" item is for the clout on Insta. It was eactly the same thing with the PS5 2 years ago - people clamouring for a useless object just to show other people they have it.
- Clubber 4y ago
  I believe bitcoin mining contributed a lot to the demand side as well.
- tedivm 4y ago
  10-15 years ago people were posting their rigs, adding liquid cooling, ridiculous lighting, massive overclocking. It was definitely more than a forum signature.
Spooky23 4y ago
Enterprise drives shipments and the PC industry is fucked because: the surge of Windows 7 migration is over, they’ve become appliances, and everyone bought thousands of laptops in 2020/1. The only reasons to replace business desktops are swollen batteries and Microsoft. My teams are responsible for 250k devices globally. Failure rates are <3%, and 75% of failures are batteries and power supplies. With the transition away from spinning rust complete, we have more keyboard failures than desktop PC failure. I’m taking the PC refresh savings and buying Macs, iPads and meeting room hardware.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  Yep, tech work, and especially remote software work, is all done with laptops and docks. I'm writing this from my home gaming rig, which is an old, not-cool-enough-for-Win-11 (thank god), desktop. I don't know what I'll be replacing it with when it keels over and dies. Maybe a Mac tower? Maybe a Linux rig. But it'll be my PC, not Microsoft's if I can help it.
  - downrightmike 4y ago
    mac mini is probably enough these days
    - paulmd 4y ago
      especially with the M2 Pro refresh... it's practically a studio at that point. Apple is conspiciously maintaining some differentiation like larger RAM sizes to force some people to the studio but the distinction really is slim at this point. Better cooling I guess? But M2 is not a hot chip. Maybe a few more thunderbolt ports?
      - downrightmike 4y ago
        cooling will matter if you're using it for larger workloads and renders.
  - layoric 4y ago
chx 4y ago
I am sorry but the "rule of thumb" website, https://www.logicalincrements.com/ https://www.logicalincrements.com/ disagrees with you, heavily so. You can still buy an awful lot of computer for $2k, it's right there how. The prices are real, they link -- yes, with affiliate links -- to real sales on Amazon/Newegg/etc. To quote what you can expect from their "outstanding" tier at 1628 USD: > This expensive tier has the highest possible cards that still maintain a reasonable performance/price. Sure it is pricey, but it is luxurious! > Expect high performance at 1440p, and solid performance at 4K even in the most demanding games. For 1865 USD: > Max most titles at 1440p@144Hz, and solid framerates in 4K, even with max settings. And if you want to note the 6900XT card for $720 they used here is out of stock then let me note a $700 6950XT: https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-6950-xt-rx6950xt-ocf-16g/p/N82E16814930073 https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-6950-xt-rx6950xt-ocf... which makes it an even better bang for your buck.
- bialpio 4y ago
  > For 1865 USD: You can also save up on the case (cheaper options should be available), and grab a Ryzen 7900 which should have similar perf & comparable price point to Intels they used, and comes with stock cooler, shaving off additional ~$100. I'd also probably skip the HDD and grab 32GB RAM.
  - lastLinkedList 4y ago
    That's what I'm thinking of doing when I build PCs for my partner and I later this year. I've been looking at benchmarks and I'm not as worried about the top end of performance as much as I am Intel being about ready to release a new socket design next refresh.
- waboremo 4y ago
  This is misleading. For nearly $2000, you better be getting 4K with ray tracing (max settings), AKA, a top of the line device. 1440p/144 is midrange now. Which that $1865 one does not provide. Even before ray tracing, most games struggle to hit the 144 rate you're aiming for, so with ray tracing that drops down to like ~40 (Cyberpunk 2077 for example in that 6900XT card). You have to enable workarounds like DLSS/FSR to make those games playable. The only way you're getting good framerate at 4k is without ray tracing, but you're paying $2000 to have to worry about still disabling settings? Ridiculous! So yes, they are overpriced. For $2000 you should not be worried about having to enable FSR. The usual excuse when this is brought up is "well just don't play those games, they seem unoptimized" to which again, the question is, why are you spending two thousand dollars to avoid playing certain games? How absurd.
adrian_b 4y ago
The current prices are indeed high, but if I would upgrade right now my desktop with the best components that I can find, that would cost only $1500. The $1500 would pay for an AMD 7950X, an ASUS MB with ECC support and a decent configuration of the expansion slots (Prime X670E-Pro), a Noctua cooler suitable for 7950X (e.g. NH-U12A) and 64 GB of ECC DDR5-4800 memory (which for 64 GB costs $100 more than the non-ECC variant). For the rest, I would continue to use the case, the SSDs, the 10 Gb/s NIC and the GPU that I am currently using. If I would want to also upgrade the GPU, I would buy a RTX 4070 Ti, for 3 reasons. It provides enough extra performance to make an upgrade worthwhile, it has the best performance per $ among all recent GPUs (at MSRP, a 7900 XTX would have better performance per $, but it can be found only at much higher prices), and lastly, 4070 Ti is the only recent GPU for which the vendor specifies the idle power consumption and the power consumption during light use (e.g. video decoding) and the specified values are small enough to be acceptable in a desktop that is not intended for gaming.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
sylens 4y ago
Not only are the prices out of whack, but the newest games coming out all seem to have some sort of technical issue on the PC. Shader stutter is nearly a universal thing in most new releases, or the developer doesn't optimize for the platform at all (Callisto Protocol and to a lesser extent, Hogwarts Legacy). So not only are you paying more money than ever, you're experiencing certain issues that just aren't there on consoles.
- slowmovintarget 4y ago
  I recall Jonathan Blow talking about how it's basically impossible to eliminate stutter on Windows now due to a number of design decisions in the OS driver system itself. I'm wondering if this is the moment for Linux gaming. Valve has certainly taken it a long ways from where it was.
  - incrudible 4y ago
    Linux has the same issue in principle, the problem is that shaders must be compiled anew for each driver version, at runtime. It is impractical for the developer, but a distributor like Steam can actually track and redistribute caches for most combinations of drivers and GPUs in active use. Also, warming up the cache (not just precompiling) is possible.
    - Aardwolf 4y ago
      Steam is always compiling shaders before starting a game. What is this needed for actually, can't these come precompiled with the game, just like the game's executable? There are 3 brands of GPU so max 3 precompiled versions needed? Is that naive to assume this? CPU's need only one version mostly between AMD and Intel (or at most a few for different SIMD instructions)
      - ThatPlayer 4y ago
        Unlike low level SIMD instructions, GPUs work on higher level APIs: Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL. How that gets interpreted by the GPU changes with driver updates. That's how Intel Arc GPU performance started off in a somewhat bad state yet are steadily improving. Changes in interpretation also mean changes in shaders, so you can't just take shaders on one version of a driver and use it on another. Internal pipelines can vary between GPU architecture too. Currently AMD ships a different branch of their own Windows drivers for the new RDNA3 architecture GPUs (RX 7000 series). So precompiled shaders probably work won't between architectures.
scarface74 4y ago
I doubt the decline of PC shipments is because of a statistically few people building gaming PCs
chasd00 4y ago
Unless you your inet connection can sustain 10gb then what’s the point of a 10gb nic? I have gbit fiber that rarely gets above 6-700mbit. Is a full 10gb inet connection that common? Even on LAN do you have I/O that can deliver 10gb/sec to the wire?
- allenrb 4y ago
  It doesn't have to deliver 10gb/sec to be worthwhile. 3 gbps is easy and already more than a 2.5GbE link can handle. And the prices for those switches still exceed what's available used for 10gbps. I've got an ICX7250-24p at home that cost about $200 from ebay. That's 24 ports of PoE gigabit, plus 8 SFP+ ports for 10gig. Noise and power are quite reasonable, though it doesn't belong on the desk next to you.
- supertrope 4y ago
  Regular SATA SSDs are bottlenecked by gigabit and 2.5 gigabit. 116MB/sec is not slow per se. Usually only video editors are waiting on file loading bars frequently enough to make an upgrade worthwhile. That and moving around VM images.
neogodless 4y ago
> There are no good current gen (or even previous gen) cards available for under $1000 Wait, what? Yes there are! An AMD Radeon RX 6800 will set you back $480. What is your criteria for "good" here? My computer would be, at today's prices, about $1400. AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 core | 32GB DDR4-3600 | 2 x 1TB PCIe gen 4 | Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB | (Corsair case, PSU and AIO, MSI X570)
- guidoism 4y ago
  This is almost exactly my gaming setup. I know people have different expectations but in my house this is the fastest gaming computer and can play the best games (like MSFS2020) perfectly. My main computer is an M1 MacBook Air which is essentially a perfect computer. It never feels slow. It was a little over thousand bucks. In no world I can imagine could this not be considered an amazing performance value.
teeray 4y ago
I would have expected the crypto implosion to have a depressing effect on graphics card prices (certainly in the secondary market). Any theories why they remain elevated? Is it just supply chain stuff that everything is experiencing?
- neogodless 4y ago
  In comparison, they are much less expensive. (Though people who refuse to switch brands might have a harder time.) For example, The Radeon 6700 XT 12GB was commonly $900+ during the crypto boom, but is regularly around $350 now. That's a pretty big drop. "Current generation" - only very expensive high end models have been announced (and some aren't selling as low as MSRP yet.) RTX 4070 Ti $800 | RX 7900 XT $900 | RX 7900 XTX $1000 | RTX 4080 $1200 | RTX 4090 $1600 You have to stick to last generation for excellent performance with less insane pricing.
- deleted 4y ago
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kerpotgh 4y ago
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bennysonething 4y ago
I remember buying a voodoo 3 for 130 GBP. That was pretty high end at the time. Who's the target market for 1k+ cards?! At one point you could get a decent gaming pc for about 500 or 600 GBP. I doubt that's possible now. And madness compared to the hardware in a Xbox series X. Yes I know it's hardware is subsidized.

nickstinemates 4y ago

> Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Just buy an Intel PCI-E 10g card. They're like $100. Slots on motherboards are meant to be used.

Aardwolf 4y ago
There are hardly any slots on motherboards too now these days. One network card may fit next to the GPU. All kinds of limitations to nvme SSD speeds and GPU bus width may start applying just for doing that.
- paulmd 4y ago
  Exactly, as long as GPUs keep swelling larger and larger, pcie cards just aren't going to be practical. It's crazy that X670E literally has multiple chipsets daisychained together ostensibly to increase expansion capability and yet there's less and less expansion available to end-users. And what there is, is almost entirely blocked by the GPU these days. I would love to see a board with tons of pcie slots attached to the chipset or PCIe switches, but, it wouldn't make the GPU go away for those users who want a discrete GPU. The only real viable solution I see is thunderbolt, move as much as possible out of the case and break that expansion out as external ports. And tbh the PCIe add-in-card form factor just isn't working for GPUs anymore, the GPU needs to become a standardized module that is connected separately (via riser if desired) and it probably needs a 48V rail. The GPU being 3-4x the TDP of the CPU but completely dimensionally unstandardized and running crazy currents at 12V is not sustainable.
  - nickstinemates 4y ago
    There are so many motherboards that fit exactly what your ideal state describes. They just start to get expensive. As an example, I'm currently running 2 3090ti's on a MSI board in addition to 2 10GB PCI-Express cards, + 3x m.2 SSD's and I am not even close to fully utilizing the lanes OR other premium slots (like SATA) If room is an issue, get a larger case or there are also offset/vertical mount options for things like GPU's.
    - paulmd 4y ago
      Here's a list of all X670/X670E boards with 4 or more PCIe x16 slots. https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=4,8&s=41&c=158,159 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=4,8&s=41&c=... The only boards in that category are actually B650E boards, and there's only 4. https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=4,8&s=41 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=4,8&s=41 Looks like the current max for any AM5 or LGA1700 board is 5 pcie x16 slots. And of course they won't all be full ones, they'll be some x4-in-x16 (which still is better than nothing, because slot width does affect electrical delivery capability of the slot). And using M.2 slots often eats up some of the pcie slots as well. Looking at one example - Gigabyte B660 DS3H - you get 1 pcie 4.0x16 and the rest are PCIe 3.0x1-in-x16. https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=5,8&s=41,40 https://pcpartpicker.com/products/motherboard/#h=5,8&s=41,40 The promise of having these super-powerful chipsets has supposedly been that we can put more stuff on it. Same thing for pcie 5 - stuff doesn't really need it yet but you could put a bunch of slower stuff on switches and get a lot of the capability of HEDT out of a consumer board. That has not materialized, even a $700 consumer board is still pretty much intended for one gpu and maybe 2 nvme slots. If you want a bunch of pcie expansion you still have to go to HEDT or server, but AMD killed HEDT and then lost interest and went outside to ride bikes. So now it's only server. ROMED8-2T is the closest thing that exists to what I want, but, the promise of X670E and daisychained chipsets and superfast pcie is that I shouldn't have to buy an Epyc to get some decent number of real x16 slots, or at least x4-in-x16 or whatever.

jb1991 4y ago

The Mac Studio is quite a powerful machine at a relatively reasonable price.

ChuckNorris89 4y ago
How many games run on it?
- davely 4y ago
  Quite a lot, at least based on my experience using Steam and playing various games I’ve bought for my actual gaming PC, but have builds available for multiple platforms. As long as they’re 64 bit builds, MacOS’s Rosetta translation layer does a great job of running then without a hitch. Apple Silicon is a beast. I wish more developers would take advantage of it.
  - krisroadruck 4y ago
    This is only true if your primary game preference is casual games. The mac studio lacks a discrete graphics card. Ignoring the OS, the whole ARM vs x86, and Rosetta, wine, whatever stumbling blocks - just lack of a discrete GPU is enough to make it a no-go as a serious gaming rig. This isn't just me talking out of my neck either. I have 3 rigs I keep around my desk, and one of them is a mac studio. Great for dev and video editing, but for gaming not so much. Edit: "Why do you need 3 computers?" - I regularly switch between Windows, Ubuntu & MacOS, and I don't like dinking with switching my monitor inputs, dual booting or remoting in. Rather just swivel my chair. Yes I fully realize how ridiculous this is. Some people like nice cars. I like wasting money on computers apparently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
    - bitL 4y ago
      No worries, I have 12 computers around my desk...
  - amelius 4y ago
    > Apple Silicon is a beast. I wish more developers would take advantage of it. It's consumer electronics. Not very useful for people who want to build things containing a CPU/GPU.

vitaflo 4y ago

Let’s also remember when the 1080 first launched it was a massive upgrade and the retail price was $600.

ricardobayes 4y ago
And was considered really expensive, at the time
- qayxc 4y ago
  Ah, those youngsters have no idea what expensive means :) Back in the early 90s a half decent SVGA card could set you back $900 easily (e.g. ATI's 1MB Graphics Ultra from 1991). And that's 1992 dollars, mind you. So about $1,900 adjusted for inflation. Heck, a SoundBlaster Pro sound card was $300 back then (~$670 adjusted for inflation) - the base model for $170 was considered a steal at that price :D And that thing couldn't do half as much as even the cheapo ALC897 sound chip in a basic motherboard.
  - pjmlp 4y ago
    Hence why I was big into flight simulators up to when they started asking for 486/ 4MB as baseline, it was over for me, as I had other things in life more relevant to spend the money.
checkyoursudo 4y ago
I bought a 1080 quite a while after they launched. I still have it. I have thought about building a new PC lately, and it seems to me that newer cards are ... not as much as an upgrade as I might have been led to believe? Especially given the cost. If I did build a new PC today, I am not entirely sure I would buy a new video card. The performance/value ratio doesn't seem as appealing as jumping to the 1080 did at the time back then.
- tomnipotent 4y ago
  The 3080 to 4080 gain is the same as the 980 to 1080 jump (~27%).

arecurrence 4y ago

Reading this really points out to me how killer of a deal that GeforceNow is. I truly don't understand why more publishers don't allow their games on the platform.

eric__cartman 4y ago
It's not a killer deal for the consumer. That's just Nvidia fucking you over either way and still profiting off it. The market is not only bad in the high end, but there aren't any ~$200 value oriented graphics cards that provide significant upgrades over past generations. Just now the GTX 1060 has stepped down from being the most popular card in Steam's hardware survey just to be replaced by the GTX 1650, a much newer card that costs about the same and performs about the same. And with less VRAM!
dfghjjbhvg 4y ago
because they all learned from stadia and know how crappy and useless remote streaming of input/graphics is for most games. this tech is bad. awful. only worth for casual games which are already well served by comon hardware localy. its all a ruse to try to sell idle capacity for their gpu farms because AI model training hype never materialized
- 0-_-0 4y ago
  I tried geforce now, it's amazing, lag is almost imperceptible with the 8ms ping I had.
  - Gigachad 4y ago
    I also tried it on a gigabit network and it was essentially unusable. Constant frame drops and audio stuttering. Even for casual gaming it was horrible. Can't imagine something multi player.
    - nottorp 4y ago
      You talking about your local network or your internet connection? It works just fine(tm) on the two fiber connections i've tried, one 500 mbps only, not 1 gbps. It only uses like 10 mbps for 1080. It's the latency and packet loss that kills you, it's unusable on wifi going though the same fiber for example.

deleted 4y ago

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gruez 4y ago

>Add to all of that, this latest batch of CPUs are just stupid power hungry - like 240w+ under load (except for the non-x variants of AMD 7000 series, just released last month). That's because in the race to get the highest benchmark scores, both companies have set the stock clocks to a level that's way beyond what's optimal (eg. adding 100W of power consumption to get 5% higher benchmark scores). The CPUs themselves are fine, you just have to adjust the power/clock limit lower.

chx 4y ago
^^^^ this Someone on reddit did a power analysis of the 13900K and I reposted it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404683 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404683 https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10bna5r/13900k_power_scaling_analysis/ https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10bna5r/13900k_po... and it shows the CPU at 100W has 75% of the performance at 40% of the power consumption...
- oblak 4y ago
  It's still pretty bad compared to Ryzen 7000. The non-x models are just the regular guys at 65W, like my good ol 3700x. That said, Intel sure has magic dust given how far behind their node disadvantage. Serves them right, though. What a horrible company.
  - reisse 4y ago
    Their node disadvantage is mostly good marketing from TSMC though. Intel 10 (10nm, but that's not the real nanometers) is ~100M transistors per mm2, while TSMC 5 (5nm, but again, that's not the real nanometers) is ~130M transistors per mm2. Sure, 30% better, but not a 2x improvement as marketing suggests.
    - megous 4y ago
      10nm to 5nm feature size should be [naively thinking] 4x improvement in density, so it's even worse. :)

geraldhh 4y ago

> Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Be prepared to shell out $1000 just for the motherboard. quick search turns up options for around 500euros but don't be fooled, 10GbE copper is a power hungry mess. go with lower n-baseT speeds if just want some progression for the last twenty years of networking innovation or invest in optical and get a real upgrade (20/40/100 Gbps)

krisroadruck 4y ago
AM5 w/ PCIE 5, DDR5 support and 10GBe? I've already eaten the cost, but I would love a link to the board you found. I saw a lot in that price range with 2.5 or 5GB but didn't run into any with 10GBe. That said I may have missed one. If nothing else it may be useful for when the wifes gaming rig gets an upgrade in a few months. As to why I'm sticking with 10Gbe - I have a 24 port 10GBe switch for the house so going with the kit that matches the network I already have.
flangola7 4y ago
What is the use case of 10Gb Ethernet for the regular PC user? Or even the enthusiast? I have a sprawling homelab and home theater and scarcely need regular 1G. Last summer I transferred a media archive of ~10TB to new hardware, which completed overnight across Cat5. Is there some hot new hobby that generates multi gigabit bursts that I don't know about?
- deleted 4y ago
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- lazide 4y ago
  Uh, at maximum speed on a gigabit network, it takes 22 hours, 13 minutes to transfer 10 TB. That’s not overnight unless you’re a hell of a sleeper. On a 10Gig network, assuming no other bottlenecks (harder to do), it’s 2 and a quarter hours. Personally, I use 10 gig because 100MB/s is really slow. Even 2.5Gb is much, much better and makes it a lot more likely something besides the network is the bottleneck. I personally move around enough data, it bothers me enough to be worth it.

Whinner 4y ago

$1000 as the floor? Maybe if you’re talking 4K gaming but that’s the very high end. Intel arc a750 are under $300 and are decent cards for 1080 and do well in 1440. Dx9 support has greatly increased since release. Going up a little in price, amds 6650 amd 6750 are 3-400. 6800xt are under $600.

krisroadruck 4y ago
I haven't bought a non-4K monitor in over 6 years. I honestly don't know anyone who is still using 1080p monitors as daily drivers if they are also using the machine for productivity or media work. But your point is not invalid.
- ChuckNorris89 4y ago
  At my job we all got 1080p monitors for dev work.
  - qayxc 4y ago
    You poor souls. I couldn't imagine going back to 1080p for dev work.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      That's how cheap European tech companies are.
- krisroadruck 4y ago
  @ChuckNorris89 man... why do they hate their devs? That's just mean =/ Hopefully they don't have you all on a bunch of $400 dell optiplexes too. Pouring one out for you brother.
- pprotas 4y ago
  https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Software-Survey-Welcome-to-Steam https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw... > 60% of Steam users have a 1080p monitor as their primary display

Tuna-Fish 4y ago

There are complex reasons related to patent licensing why it makes no sense to put 10Gbe on a motherboard right now. If you want 10Gbe, don't get a $1000 motherboard for it, get a motherboard with a free pcie 4.0 slot and get an adapter. That'll cost an extra ~$100 today, and an extra ~$20 in August.

krisroadruck 4y ago
Fair enough - I'm clearly paying a premium to keep a cleaner interior on the build. I tend to run exactly one card - the video card, and aim to get everything else onboard, but as you pointed out that's definitely not the only way to go, and certainly not the most cost efficient way.
- willis936 4y ago
  Vanity can cost as much as a market is willing to pay. From a function standpoint: I'm happy that multiple PCIe slots is still the standard. If I didn't have functional wants such as "more accelerators and more I/O" then I'd go with a cute ITX build. I did get a compact case recently because 5.25", 3.5", and 2.5" bays are no longer an interesting use case for my daily driver, but now I find that even if I did want to shell out for a new high-end GPU the only model that would fit in my case is a perpetually sold out AIO model.
  - myself248 4y ago
    Aye. I keep two desktops around for this reason. One is my new Ryzen APU in a small (sub-7-liter) case, which sits half empty because I haven't even dropped a GPU into it. All my games and CAD run just fine on the APU. All the included peripherals are more than I've ever needed. The other is my old Athlon64x2 4850e in a bigass M3N78 Pro board, with drives and I/O out the wazoo. It's old enough to have floppy and PATA ports, but new enough to have SATA and USB too (and even a PCIe slot), so it's my media mule. I power it up whenever I need to do CD ripping, floppy archiving, that sort of stuff. I actually picked up the fastest chip that would fit the board (a Phenom II X4 945), just for giggles because they're $30 on eBay now, but promptly swapped back to the 4850e because 125 watts in a CPU is unconscionable when 45 does the job just fine. The latter, of course, is chock-full of cables like they're goin' out of style. I made a few long floppy and PATA ribbons for working with external disks so they sit crammed up in the bottom when not in use, etc. And the non-modular PSU has like a dozen cables all splattered everywhere. It's the opposite of vanity, and I love it.

shmerl 4y ago

> Add to all of that, this latest batch of CPUs are just stupid power hungry - like 240w+ under load Eco mode is a thing for AMD CPUs. There is no point really in not using it by default - benefits are very marginal with power cost being disproportionally huge. And AMD are doing it more for marketing reasons to gain some single digit percentages in benchmarks. So just enable it (105 W one) and enjoy way more reasonable and efficient power usage with basically almost the same performance. See some details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6aKQ-eBFk0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6aKQ-eBFk0

dotnet00 4y ago

Agreed, I don't mind spending extra money on GPUs (I have 2 3090s sitting next to me) because the improvement are still worthwhile for my use case, but the CPU prices have been unjustifiable, especially on the AMD side. Increasing CPU price, absurd motherboard price AND needing to buy new RAM, all for an improvement that isn't really too meaningful unless in very specific tasks, is not really worth it. I instead just got a 5900x for my computer and moved its 3900x into a server, retiring its 1600x (which was also sufficient for its work, although at least the 1600x was noticeably slower for transcoding, the 3900x is proving more than sufficient).

bluedino 4y ago

I don't keep up with PC component prices but I thought crypto crashing flooded the market with cheap cards? (Then again I guess BTC is back into the $20k's)

thomastjeffery 4y ago
You can only flood desert for a moment. BTC hasn't been viable on GPUs for a while, either. It's the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake change that was the most exciting, but it doesn't seem to have had a significant effect, especially with newer (3-4yr old) cards.
- svnt 4y ago
  They are good heaters. Wait til summer. Or maybe they just sell them to generative AI farms.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    It's a generally global market, and it's always summer somewhere.
    - incrudible 4y ago
      Summer yes, but winter not so much.

maerF0x0 4y ago

If you care about price, the 3060, RX 6700 XT, or Intel Arc A770 16GB are your best bets. xx80 and xx90s are in the class "If you need to ask the price you cant afford it."

docfort 4y ago

There’s been a lot of ink spilled about the decline of Moore’s Law and how it hasn’t yet exactly fallen for all aspects of computer engineering. I think it’s fallen for customers, though. The economics of exponential speed improvement in traditional CPU design have gone away, and the capability/complexity ratio of software collapsed with the fall of Dennard scaling. No fundamentally new applications have come out (save ML, which is not particularly suited to CPUs or even GPUs), so consumers are happy to keep chugging along with their current setup or move more load to their phones. Even if the increase in hardware cost stays at parity with inflation, it’s tremendously more expensive than it used to be, when waiting six months could get you more machines for your budget. Gaming, a previous driver of high-end consumer growth, has split into truly mobile, consoles, and very high end PCs. But complex games take more capital and time to develop, so recouping costs is important (except if the studio is part of a conglomerate like Microsoft that can weather temporary market forces). I’d imagine that places pressure on game developers to aim for maximum compatibility and a scalable core. So too bad for the Mac, great for phones, and great for consoles (especially with monetizing the back catalog). And new PCs will have to fight against good-enough, and lower demand funding new hardware and software.

jmyeet 4y ago

> There are no good current gen (or even previous gen) cards available for under $1000 The 4070 Ti is <$1000. > Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Be prepared to shell out $1000 just for the motherboard. Why not just a PCI-e 10GbE NIC on a regular motherboard? > now that figure is closer to $5K. I see plenty of prebuilt PCs (eg CyberpowerPC) with 3070 Tis for $2k. 4070 Tis for $2.5k.

AussieWog93 4y ago

I wonder how much of this increase is due to social media. 10-15 years ago, people would buy graphics cards to play the latest games on. Epeen was a thing, but limited to just some text in your forum signature. Now, it seems like half the reason people buy any sort of "status" item is for the clout on Insta. It was eactly the same thing with the PS5 2 years ago - people clamouring for a useless object just to show other people they have it.

Clubber 4y ago
I believe bitcoin mining contributed a lot to the demand side as well.
tedivm 4y ago
10-15 years ago people were posting their rigs, adding liquid cooling, ridiculous lighting, massive overclocking. It was definitely more than a forum signature.

Spooky23 4y ago

Enterprise drives shipments and the PC industry is fucked because: the surge of Windows 7 migration is over, they’ve become appliances, and everyone bought thousands of laptops in 2020/1. The only reasons to replace business desktops are swollen batteries and Microsoft. My teams are responsible for 250k devices globally. Failure rates are <3%, and 75% of failures are batteries and power supplies. With the transition away from spinning rust complete, we have more keyboard failures than desktop PC failure. I’m taking the PC refresh savings and buying Macs, iPads and meeting room hardware.

slowmovintarget 4y ago
Yep, tech work, and especially remote software work, is all done with laptops and docks. I'm writing this from my home gaming rig, which is an old, not-cool-enough-for-Win-11 (thank god), desktop. I don't know what I'll be replacing it with when it keels over and dies. Maybe a Mac tower? Maybe a Linux rig. But it'll be my PC, not Microsoft's if I can help it.
- downrightmike 4y ago
  mac mini is probably enough these days
  - paulmd 4y ago
    especially with the M2 Pro refresh... it's practically a studio at that point. Apple is conspiciously maintaining some differentiation like larger RAM sizes to force some people to the studio but the distinction really is slim at this point. Better cooling I guess? But M2 is not a hot chip. Maybe a few more thunderbolt ports?
    - downrightmike 4y ago
      cooling will matter if you're using it for larger workloads and renders.
- layoric 4y ago

chx 4y ago

I am sorry but the "rule of thumb" website, https://www.logicalincrements.com/ https://www.logicalincrements.com/ disagrees with you, heavily so. You can still buy an awful lot of computer for $2k, it's right there how. The prices are real, they link -- yes, with affiliate links -- to real sales on Amazon/Newegg/etc. To quote what you can expect from their "outstanding" tier at 1628 USD: > This expensive tier has the highest possible cards that still maintain a reasonable performance/price. Sure it is pricey, but it is luxurious! > Expect high performance at 1440p, and solid performance at 4K even in the most demanding games. For 1865 USD: > Max most titles at 1440p@144Hz, and solid framerates in 4K, even with max settings. And if you want to note the 6900XT card for $720 they used here is out of stock then let me note a $700 6950XT: https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-6950-xt-rx6950xt-ocf-16g/p/N82E16814930073 https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-6950-xt-rx6950xt-ocf... which makes it an even better bang for your buck.

bialpio 4y ago
> For 1865 USD: You can also save up on the case (cheaper options should be available), and grab a Ryzen 7900 which should have similar perf & comparable price point to Intels they used, and comes with stock cooler, shaving off additional ~$100. I'd also probably skip the HDD and grab 32GB RAM.
- lastLinkedList 4y ago
  That's what I'm thinking of doing when I build PCs for my partner and I later this year. I've been looking at benchmarks and I'm not as worried about the top end of performance as much as I am Intel being about ready to release a new socket design next refresh.
waboremo 4y ago
This is misleading. For nearly $2000, you better be getting 4K with ray tracing (max settings), AKA, a top of the line device. 1440p/144 is midrange now. Which that $1865 one does not provide. Even before ray tracing, most games struggle to hit the 144 rate you're aiming for, so with ray tracing that drops down to like ~40 (Cyberpunk 2077 for example in that 6900XT card). You have to enable workarounds like DLSS/FSR to make those games playable. The only way you're getting good framerate at 4k is without ray tracing, but you're paying $2000 to have to worry about still disabling settings? Ridiculous! So yes, they are overpriced. For $2000 you should not be worried about having to enable FSR. The usual excuse when this is brought up is "well just don't play those games, they seem unoptimized" to which again, the question is, why are you spending two thousand dollars to avoid playing certain games? How absurd.

adrian_b 4y ago

The current prices are indeed high, but if I would upgrade right now my desktop with the best components that I can find, that would cost only $1500. The $1500 would pay for an AMD 7950X, an ASUS MB with ECC support and a decent configuration of the expansion slots (Prime X670E-Pro), a Noctua cooler suitable for 7950X (e.g. NH-U12A) and 64 GB of ECC DDR5-4800 memory (which for 64 GB costs $100 more than the non-ECC variant). For the rest, I would continue to use the case, the SSDs, the 10 Gb/s NIC and the GPU that I am currently using. If I would want to also upgrade the GPU, I would buy a RTX 4070 Ti, for 3 reasons. It provides enough extra performance to make an upgrade worthwhile, it has the best performance per $ among all recent GPUs (at MSRP, a 7900 XTX would have better performance per $, but it can be found only at much higher prices), and lastly, 4070 Ti is the only recent GPU for which the vendor specifies the idle power consumption and the power consumption during light use (e.g. video decoding) and the specified values are small enough to be acceptable in a desktop that is not intended for gaming.

deleted 4y ago
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sylens 4y ago

Not only are the prices out of whack, but the newest games coming out all seem to have some sort of technical issue on the PC. Shader stutter is nearly a universal thing in most new releases, or the developer doesn't optimize for the platform at all (Callisto Protocol and to a lesser extent, Hogwarts Legacy). So not only are you paying more money than ever, you're experiencing certain issues that just aren't there on consoles.

slowmovintarget 4y ago
I recall Jonathan Blow talking about how it's basically impossible to eliminate stutter on Windows now due to a number of design decisions in the OS driver system itself. I'm wondering if this is the moment for Linux gaming. Valve has certainly taken it a long ways from where it was.
- incrudible 4y ago
  Linux has the same issue in principle, the problem is that shaders must be compiled anew for each driver version, at runtime. It is impractical for the developer, but a distributor like Steam can actually track and redistribute caches for most combinations of drivers and GPUs in active use. Also, warming up the cache (not just precompiling) is possible.
  - Aardwolf 4y ago
    Steam is always compiling shaders before starting a game. What is this needed for actually, can't these come precompiled with the game, just like the game's executable? There are 3 brands of GPU so max 3 precompiled versions needed? Is that naive to assume this? CPU's need only one version mostly between AMD and Intel (or at most a few for different SIMD instructions)
    - ThatPlayer 4y ago
      Unlike low level SIMD instructions, GPUs work on higher level APIs: Vulkan, DirectX, OpenGL. How that gets interpreted by the GPU changes with driver updates. That's how Intel Arc GPU performance started off in a somewhat bad state yet are steadily improving. Changes in interpretation also mean changes in shaders, so you can't just take shaders on one version of a driver and use it on another. Internal pipelines can vary between GPU architecture too. Currently AMD ships a different branch of their own Windows drivers for the new RDNA3 architecture GPUs (RX 7000 series). So precompiled shaders probably work won't between architectures.

scarface74 4y ago

I doubt the decline of PC shipments is because of a statistically few people building gaming PCs

chasd00 4y ago

Unless you your inet connection can sustain 10gb then what’s the point of a 10gb nic? I have gbit fiber that rarely gets above 6-700mbit. Is a full 10gb inet connection that common? Even on LAN do you have I/O that can deliver 10gb/sec to the wire?

allenrb 4y ago
It doesn't have to deliver 10gb/sec to be worthwhile. 3 gbps is easy and already more than a 2.5GbE link can handle. And the prices for those switches still exceed what's available used for 10gbps. I've got an ICX7250-24p at home that cost about $200 from ebay. That's 24 ports of PoE gigabit, plus 8 SFP+ ports for 10gig. Noise and power are quite reasonable, though it doesn't belong on the desk next to you.
supertrope 4y ago
Regular SATA SSDs are bottlenecked by gigabit and 2.5 gigabit. 116MB/sec is not slow per se. Usually only video editors are waiting on file loading bars frequently enough to make an upgrade worthwhile. That and moving around VM images.

neogodless 4y ago

> There are no good current gen (or even previous gen) cards available for under $1000 Wait, what? Yes there are! An AMD Radeon RX 6800 will set you back $480. What is your criteria for "good" here? My computer would be, at today's prices, about $1400. AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 core | 32GB DDR4-3600 | 2 x 1TB PCIe gen 4 | Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB | (Corsair case, PSU and AIO, MSI X570)

guidoism 4y ago
This is almost exactly my gaming setup. I know people have different expectations but in my house this is the fastest gaming computer and can play the best games (like MSFS2020) perfectly. My main computer is an M1 MacBook Air which is essentially a perfect computer. It never feels slow. It was a little over thousand bucks. In no world I can imagine could this not be considered an amazing performance value.

teeray 4y ago

I would have expected the crypto implosion to have a depressing effect on graphics card prices (certainly in the secondary market). Any theories why they remain elevated? Is it just supply chain stuff that everything is experiencing?

neogodless 4y ago
In comparison, they are much less expensive. (Though people who refuse to switch brands might have a harder time.) For example, The Radeon 6700 XT 12GB was commonly $900+ during the crypto boom, but is regularly around $350 now. That's a pretty big drop. "Current generation" - only very expensive high end models have been announced (and some aren't selling as low as MSRP yet.) RTX 4070 Ti $800 | RX 7900 XT $900 | RX 7900 XTX $1000 | RTX 4080 $1200 | RTX 4090 $1600 You have to stick to last generation for excellent performance with less insane pricing.
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kerpotgh 4y ago

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bennysonething 4y ago

I remember buying a voodoo 3 for 130 GBP. That was pretty high end at the time. Who's the target market for 1k+ cards?! At one point you could get a decent gaming pc for about 500 or 600 GBP. I doubt that's possible now. And madness compared to the hardware in a Xbox series X. Yes I know it's hardware is subsidized.