Sir Beregond

Do they even have room for a card between the 7800 XT and the 7900 XT? If I understand correctly, the 7800 XT is already the full Navi 32 GCD. I suppose they could further cut down Navi 31. That's more aggressive price cutting than I was thinking they'd do, but that would probably be pretty good for them and they'd retain the good sales they currently have. I imagine they have plenty of margin to work with considering the MCM design and the relatively smaller die sizes as a result. At those prices they would still be a compelling offer in light of the Supers for the more VRAM and strong raster.

Thanks for the suggestion, will take a look. I appreciate the offer. Will let you know what I end up going with, but will probably go for new.

Good luck in your search and do let me know what you find. I bought a BNIB EVGA Z490 Dark (with a 10900k) last year and sadly spent more than that for it. I haven't had a chance to really play with it yet, but I wanted it around as a usable platform for future HWBot competitions.

Yeah the 7600 XT looks like a great card for the price. And agreed on Nvidia. The 4060 Ti and 4060 also stagnated entirely on any performance uplift over their similarly named 30-series predecessors.

Hey all - I was looking at the barebones Glorious boards that Flux mentioned looking at at Micro Center. Unfortunately not really finding any of those to my liking. I prefer full size keyboards and have no interest in tenkeyless, or 96% boards where there are still compromises on some key sizes like a short shift key, etc. Does anyone have a good recommendation for a solid full size board? I want to try to build something that has a tactile switch but is not clicky, so am looking for something that would also not be too loud.

The 4080 being $1200 was always outrageous. I still hate the $999 price, but given the new 4080 Super should reliably beat a 7900XTX with the increase in cores (albeit marginal), Nvidia doesn't have an incentive to lower it anymore than $999 because of AMD's pricing of the 7900 XTX. So color me annoyed. Feel like both companies are in cahoots to just raise prices. Now instead of the 4080 being $500 overpriced, the 4080 Super is now just $300 overpriced. We know this because of the existence of the 4070 Ti Super also using the AD103 at a slight cutdown from the 4080, but with the same bus/memory capacity and its $799. Yeah...the 4080/4080 Super should be that tier. EDIT: I do wonder if AMD will drop the 7900 XTX to $899 now and make the 7900 XT at $749 or maybe even $699 official.

Just add water.

I always hang on to cards as "emergency" cards. Problem with that approach is the increasing cost of new cards and the decreasing value of held onto cards as they increasingly become obsolete and less valuable as an "emergency card". I guess now that HWBot is a thing though, there will always be something for me to do with old hardware.

I love mayo, but would definitely not buy this lol. Speaking of mayo and seeing the packaging, I also am just not a fan of the squeeze bottle versions. We always buy a jar because at least you can use a small spatula to get the last of it out. Always feel like a bunch gets wasted with the squeeze bottles at the end.

Are old versions of Steam readily available for download still? I imagine you can just not update on existing machines, but I wonder for a new retro rig.

Yep exactly my thought. I fully acknowledge that some don't care about said features and just want the raster, but I still feel like they are/were overpriced for that too. As much as I hate what Nvidia is doing, AMD hasn't exactly won me over either.

Yeah and I bought a 6850 and two GTX 560's last year and a GTX 275 lol. I get that modern top end stuff is called "enthusiast tier", but an enthusiast just means someone into a particular subject or activity, one of which can be running period accurate hardware/OS to run period appropriate games.

Strange statement.

I still don't understand what any of this has to do with Pio's point about retro gaming/hardware/OS enthusiasts. Yes an extremely small and niche segment of people, but still, should they lose access to their games that otherwise works? "It can upgrade to 10". Cool, seems like a completely irrelevant point to the above.

This is a fun aside, but I think @pioneerisloud entire premise was that there are a small segment of retro enthusiasts who want to run computers on retro OS's that they have no intention of upgrading to Windows 10 on, and since the games they bought have a required spec of those same retro OS's, losing access to the games because of the game platform dropping support (unrelated to the games themselves) isn't very fun. So I don't think whether or not you can upgrade to Windows 10 is anything they give a rat's about in this context @UltraMega. I'm sure @pioneerisloud already has a W10 or W11 box.

Well said. Man I want to give AMD a try, but it still feels second rate to me. Sure the raster is there, but everything else not so much. I used to be mainly a Radeon guy back in the ATi days and the 5000-series back in the Fermi era, but man it just doesn't feel good to spend that much and feel like I am lacking features like RT / DLSS. The couple times I tried FSR it looked downright terrible. It would be nice if AMD cared to do more than just do "good enough" to then slot into Nvidia's BS pricing. I don't think the 7900 XTX and 7900 XT MSRPs made any sense at all and was just a "well this fits into Nvidia's pricing stack" move. The only reason the 7900 XTX was $999 was because the 4080 was $1199.

I mean I think the lowering of traditional bandwidth and replacing with cache or other software solutions is fine for some segments, but its another thing entirely when they are doing that for literally every SKU that isn't the top end halo product at a time when more people are checking out ultrawides, or 1440p, or 4k. I don't think I am jumping the gun in voicing my displeasure of that trending as we are already seeing that with the 40-series even if we don't really know what the 50-series will be yet. Yeah I don't think you are wrong on your assessment here. But at the same time, gamers have been pretty vocal about VRAM this year, so will be interesting to see how they navigate that. If they did have another 8GB card next year or 12GB at certain segments, is that really going to be seen as ok? Anyway it's not just about high resolutions either. Why are cards being marketed as 1080p cards suddenly at $500 price points as well with a clear stagnation of performance improvements over the previous generation? Talking the 4060 Ti and 4060 here. 1080p at this point is considered a basic resolution if not old at this point and the idea that a good card for it isn't also getting cheaper doesn't make much sense. Anyway, don't mind me, I just hardly miss an opportunity to rant about graphics cards.

Great points and I hope they actually take the time to craft some interesting aide quests and not just random gen "another settlement needs your help" stuff. Witcher 3 showed that can be done.

Perhaps if they keep updating it like they did with Fallout 76 it can fix some of those issues. But at this point I am kinda concerned for Elder Scrolls 6.

Yeah but they'll still have the problem of a "70" branded card being $800 which is just asinine. While they certainly are going the right direction with performance per dollar with the Supers, the stack still feels so wrong. In just the previous gen, the 4070 Ti being a performance match against the last gen 3090 Ti would make it seem more like it should be a 4070 branding wise (and pricing wise). 3070 matched 2080 Ti, 2070 matched 1080 Ti, etc. etc. has been the precedence. And then the actual mainstream 60-class cards are just stagnate, so there's literally zero worthwhile cards to buy below $550 and anything over $550 is misbranded and overpriced still. As for the VRAM issue - perhaps, perhaps not. If the next gen cards are coming out in late 2024, early 2025 and are expected to last 2+ years as a generation, I'm not so sure they can go another gen without upgrading VRAM. That said, if they keep skimping on memory bus in favor of L2, then that does sort of limit the options. That does make me somewhat question this 192-bit rumor for the 5080 though. Unless they are doubling density again and somehow making it a 24GB card over 6 chips (or maybe front and back chips like a 3090), then it seems off to me that they'd take the 16GB 4080 and then go to 12GB 5080. Seems to me that would get crucified.

I really appreciate you posting these @J7SC_Orion - it really is quite fun to watch these on the big OLED. I look back and wonder how I ever lived on an LCD

Honestly I've yet to really be drawn in like I would on a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game. I made it to New Atlantis, started doing all the side quests that were popping up and man, talk about basic and disappointing. They also kinda tease with some quests (like figuring out the power spikes in the underground area, forget the name) where you are presented with branching options, but in the end don't actually mean anything in any meaningful way. I've discovered the persuasion system to be absolutely random on what options work. I've reloaded saves just to retry failed attempts and it's different every time in terms of what works. On one hand I can kinda understand that from a game design so you can't just go to a guide and say use these 3 options, but on the other hand seems completely asinine as what persuades a person should be fairly rigid based on their personality, environment, circumstances, etc. And then as for the planets themselves...I haven't really gone past the tutorial and then getting to New Atlantis, but if that first planet was any indication, there's definitely not much interesting to see like there would be in a Fallout or Elder Scrolls game. I don't know, I always loved older Bethesda games like Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3 - there are memorable quests/questlines, exploration is wonderful, and the sandbox nature of the worlds presented a lot of compelling options/modability to your play. Now I totally agree with many who would state that games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 are incredibly shallow games, but wide enough to have fun in...again as a sandbox. But man, I am just not feeling Starfield. I haven't felt a desire to pick it back up yet, which makes me glad I didn't buy it and have just been trying it out through Game Pass. Bethesda needs better writers for one thing. While I consider both to be good games, comparing Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, and then comparing both to Fallout 4 is quite something. It's got its own flaws as a game, but honestly if you've never played New Vegas, you are doing yourself a disservice. Fallout 4 was just a flat out mess, but I will admit I still had fun going around and doing things. As for Starfield, what is there to do on an empty, barren planet? Sandbox games still need interesting environments. EDIT: And for all its flaws as a game mechanically or otherwise, wife and I are actually having tons of fun in Fallout 76. Again, its an interesting world to explore and find things in.

I wonder what the memory density will be per chip by that point. Are we talking another 24GB card? Maybe 36GB or 48GB? Are they really saying 192-bit now for the 5080? That's a low blow. While I am sure the increased L2 helps, its clear time and again that at higher resolution, you know like the ones you'd use if buying top tier products, definitely gets hampered by a 192-bit bus limiting performance potential. 4070 Ti is a great example. Sure it works at 4k, but if it was a 256-bit card, it would work even better. For the money spent, its definitely performance left on the table because of that drastic cut-down. AMD figured that out. Notice RDNA3 has a smaller Infinity Cache and larger traditional bus than RDNA2 did.

Yep true with Zen 3 before it too. Always benefited from RAM tuning and per core CO I kinda gave up on as I'd get something that passed stability testing and then something would always expose an instability. Do you need the extra cores then Pio? 7800X3D would probably be the best plug in and go solution as the X3D stuff hasn't cared as much about RAM tunings. The tradeoff being, less room to play with overall as a result. But just throwing that out there.

Merry Christmas everyone! We have a solid community here and I look forward to what 2024 brings!