Sir Beregond

Welcome to EHW! Glad to have ya.

Anyone on Reddit still at all who could maybe invite EVGA folks over to check us out?

This. I guess I can give Google props for at least removing stuff from their "pledges" that the public can see. Just makes it easier for people to see you can't take any of these pledges seriously. Once something "pledged" gets in the way of making money, it will be dropped faster than you can say AI.

I bought a share of Nvidia when it was at $118 last week.

It's owned by one guy who probably just wants to close up shop and retire. I definitely figured writing was on the wall for EVGA to close up shop in the next few years after they ditched doing graphics cards. You saw it in that they also killed the motherboard division, and here you are seeing them ditch the forums. Maybe some can join in here.

Yeah want to say it was 1 year contract with 2 or 3 year price lock. Yeah don't get me wrong, I hate these pricing games. If fiber or other comparably fast services hit my area, I'll happily ditch Comcast. For now my only other options where I live would be DSL that they can't reliably deliver more than 30mbps with, or something dumb like mobile 5G or satellite or something. The service itself though has been fine for us. We pretty much always have 10-20% faster speeds than what we are paying for regarding the download. Upload is what it is. As for outages, been some but usually they tell us ahead of time if planned which my old service never did, so I honestly can't complain at all about the service itself.

Yeah...until they have parity there, they have to compete on price.

No fiber here. Man that's monopoly pricing for sure. I'm paying $85 for the 1.2gbps

I'm more and more becoming convinced that AMD waiting was a very smart idea. Nvidia right now is coming off as having rushed their Blackwell launch which has functionally just been a paper launch, and the 5080 shows that there is minimal improvements on everything below the 5090 over their 40-series predecessors. AMD has an opportunity to be pretty competitive to the 5070 and 5070 Ti in raster, a major uplift to their RT (but still behind Nvidia). If the rumors around FSR4 being a huge improvement work out, and they manage to launch with volume while pricing correctly for what the market really wants / needs, then I think AMD will be compelling again. They made a lot of huge mistakes with RDNA3 generation which is why they lost marketshare during that generation. I know @Slaughtahouse was saying why would AMD want to lose margin, but I don't think they are running the same margins as Nvidia, biggest clue being that most of the horribly priced at launch cards in RDNA3 usually wound up at better prices later on that was more fitting. $900 7900 XT was just stupid at launch. Later when it was $650-$700? Absolutely. If their stated goal is to win back marketshare and they can't outperform Nvidia, then they have to compete on price. Nivida price minus $50 ain't it and hopefully AMD has learned this lesson. RDNA3 showed the majority of people just buy Nvidia if the cost is the same or close enough, even if AMD is the cheaper option. Now AMD has a habit of botching things a lot, but I hope they pull this one off. AMD not rushing to launch early this time makes me feel cautiously optimistic.

Well they weren't gaining marketshare in the RDNA3 era with that pricing strategy, so sure...I can guess they might be dumb about it again. But one hopes they learned that lesson. They stated their goal is to gain marketshare in the mainstream. No one's going to ditch the Nvidia options over $50 in my opinion.

I don't disagree with your points at all. Imo, $700 and $500 would be a mistake and one of those things that won't gain them any market share for the reasons you stated. Its the whole Nvidia price minus $50 again. What RDNA3 showed is that that's a losing strategy. I'm hoping they learned that lesson. And yes if it's between 7900 XT and 7900 XTX raster and 4070 Ti in RT, that's a massive RT uplift that if FSR4 ends up being a real hit would make the 9070 XT and 9070 real threats to the 5070 and 5070 Ti. All AMD has to do at that point is price them correctly to woo the market. Nvidia price minus $50 ain't it. Now there's a lot of ifs above I'll grant you.

Paper launch. I was beating up on AMD for not showing more of RDNA4 at CES, but I might have to eat my words and say them waiting is making more sense by the day. Don't get me wrong...they still have to execute it correctly for it to fully make sense, and they can screw it up, but if: 9070 XT can match 4080 / 5070 Ti in raster, then the marginal increase in the 50-series over the 40-series is a win for AMD in this situation as that means they remain competitive in current market segments If they catch up to 4070 Ti'ish levels of RT, then they are not that far behind Nvidia anymore like RDNA2 and RDNA3 were. If FSR4 is a rock solid advancement that can rival DLSS. If they price it correctly. Quit with this "Nvidia price minus $50 BS" If they have a real release with real volume. If all that is true, then AMD wins here for the mainstream, exactly what they were going for. The 50-series specs for the hardware below the 5090 just looks flat out phoned in for this generation with at best ~5% increases in shaders over their 40-series counterparts. And the 5080 reviews show how that's working out. I don't see how anyone looks at the 5080 and below and isn't ultimately massively disappointed. AMD has a prime opportunity here to appeal to that. They usually never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity, but at the same time they didn't rush out a launch like they usually do. Maybe they're learning. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Yeah from what I recall that was by design starting with Zen 4. The Zen 3 Vermeer chips (like what I have - 5600X, 5900X, etc.) did not have an iGPU at all. With Zen 4 they started including it, but It wasn't meant to be much more than a basic display out. If Strix Halo integrated graphics are indeed that good...would love to see that also end up in the Zen 5 APU lineup. Would be a good way to do a budget gaming PC in this day and age.

Strix Halo is laptop CPUs, but I don't see why the integrated graphics wouldn't make its way into Zen 5 desktop APU's.

Speaking of AIB pricing, what is ASUS smoking?

We just upgraded our internet speed with Xfinity since last 2 year contract just finished. It was only $15 more to go from 800mbps to 1.2gbps so we did. It was cheaper to go with their modem/gateway with included unlimited, so we did. But it only had a single 2.5g ethernet, so went ahead and picked up a couple of 2.5g switches at Micro Center today for the rooms that needed it and upgraded some old cat5e cables to cat6 while I was at it. Pretty solid so far with the overprovisioning on the download speeds.

Yeah its odd. There's a reason I don't play multiplayer shooter games...I am so bad at them and I have really no desire to play or improve in those types of games. Just not my cup of tea when I want to play a game these days.

Ah I hadn't considered the difference between a single vs dual CCD config in that equation. Good to know. Yeah that's the plan. Think life is just going to have me wait for Zen 6

30% seems about right. They are both on the same process (N4) and the 5090 has approximately 32% more shaders and about 28% higher TDP than the 4090 (575W vs 450W stock). I know TDP numbers don't mean everything so will be interesting to see how these actually work out power wise in real world testing. Given the much lower increase in shaders on the 5080, 5070 Ti, 5070, but still an increase in power, going to be interesting to see where those land too.

Yes, real respirators and N95's are quite difficult to breath through, especially if doing anything strenuous. But its got Are Gee Bee!!!

Good information, thank you. I'm not on any DDR5 platform yet for my main rig, so other Zen 4/5 users can maybe correct me. On an Intel system I definitely wanted a 2-dimmer since the goal is to get as fast as possible. Not sure that matters so much on an AMD system. My biggest gains on my 5900X came more from tightening my secondary and tertiary timings. It may be different on Zen 4/5 now since I think you can do different ratios with the FCLK while on Zen 3 it had to be 1:1 with DRAM, but I think it's still a case of biggest gains probably coming from tuning the timings vs raw MT speeds like on Intel. Still a 2-dimmer is nice just for that reduced stress on the IMC. I certainly intend to look for a 2-dimm board when I get around to upgrading next. And I've been a little perplexed about the PCI-E lanes and where you can and can't use your nvme drives. Seems really confusing these days.

LOL, I forgot about those things.

The MSI and Asrock boards no good?

Interesting. Explains the power increase somewhat.

Seriously thinking about an external setup if I can make it work...i.e. where to put it, etc.