Sir Beregond

Yeah, well in many respects Apple really is just a fandom/fashion accessory. The whole ridiculousness around blue/green bubbles comes to mind, and there's your average Apple user. They've certainly managed to build a huge business on this, but eventually you reach a point where what else is there to do. Has the iPhone drastically changed much or provided anything meaningfully innovative in recent years? No. Apple Silicon sure helped Macbook, but aside from your existing demographics of Macbook users, is there anything else to draw people in? Microsoft on the other hand has sufficiently diversified their business into multiple revenue streams. I obviously don't agree with everything Microsoft is doing on Windows side of the house, but it cannot be denied that they are certainly making good business choices with AI, cloud, and other things.

I'm not sure why this old thread popped up on the side, but I can tell you this. At work my old 2019 Intel MacBook which I would describe as a complete piece of garbage with PC laptop levels of bad battery life was replaced with an M1 Pro based MacBook Pro in December and I love this laptop. I literally used it for an 8 hour day and the battery had only gone down to 60%. My old Intel one, even when new, barely lasted a couple hours before having to find a plug. I move around the house a lot for where I work (I work from home) and sometimes I work outside the house, so it's nice not having to be tied down to a cord. In terms of calling it "wasted"...I'd say that's not really true. I work for a fortune 10 enterprise and our department uses nothing but Macbooks to code/develop, etc. They are perfectly functional machines that everyone here would say work much better than their previous Intel i9 based Macbooks which would just immediately throttle and performed worse than i7 based models. Of course that was just Apple's stupid design with no real thermal solution for a hot chip like an i9. The M1's are definitely better that way. If you say well they aren't gaming laptops, well...yeah. It's Apple. Anyway, my team are not particularly power users by any stretch like the development teams are, i.e. I'm not really running apps as most of what I work on is in Outlook, Teams, web Office 365, or web based CI/CD tools. Given that though, it is nice running all day on battery and not having to even look at the icon to see if I am running out of juice. EDIT: And given that, my job would obviously be perfectly fine on a Windows machine too. I don't really care which. The iOS app devs probably like the Macs though would be my guess.

3rded

@The Pook is right. Somehow everything is upside down in this picture. Man I haven't had Papa Murphy's in probably a decade. How was it?

You're right. I didn't even notice they used 580 on this meme. Oops.

What's funny is that it was actually ATI that started the war of the big dies that led to G80 and the 8800 GTX. Within context of the general die sizes of the era, they completely upset Nvidia with the R300 (which was the legendary 9700 Pro and later derivatives) as their way to completely dethrone Nvidia who was winning the performance crown at the time and Nvidia just kept increasing die sizes after to win until ATI and later AMD couldn't keep up with big die strategy. 2900 XT was a complete flop for them. And of course Nvidia just kept pushing it, though AMD still pushed it hard with 4870 and 5870 against the big Nvidia dies and did very well except for where it mattered...sales and profit. And who can forget:

Took a look at TPU. 7900 XTX is full Navi 31, 7900 XT is cut-down Navi 31. 7800 XT is full Navi 32, the next die down. There is a 7900 GRE that is a further cut-down of Navi 31 from what the 7900 XT is. That seems to suggest that there could be room for a 7800 XTX or whatever based on Navi 31, but I guess that would also depend on yields. If their yields are too good they might not want to release another cut-down Navi 31 product if the 7900 XT and 7900 XTX are sufficiently selling supply of said dies and their yields are too good to justify a further cut-down SKU. With the 7800 XT being full Navi 32, there is no room with that die for a higher SKU. That said I definitely agree there is plenty of gap between the two products to support something in between. I just don't think they'll do it. Credit where credit is due though. At least they didn't sandbag on cards with full dies like Nvidia tends to do.

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.