Fluxmaven

The price to performance of the higher end cards is at least heading in the right direction... Being Nvidia I don't plan to see them in stock anytime soon. Since they are discontinuing the existing 4070ti and 4080, I'm sure the production of the new cards will be suspiciously low until they clear out all of the existing inventory. If they had full shelves of these new Super variants, that would force them to discount the old cards.

I got the notification that Revolution was out. I did install and play through the first couple chambers just to check it out and it looks good so far. I'll sit down and play through it soon.

A lot of it is stuff I bought just for hwbot. Problem is I don't have time to sit around benching all day. I run the stuff in the one category of the competition that's happening at the time, then it goes on the shelf. Now that I have my stuff better organized I plan on going through and benching more. Just been kinda burnt out on computer stuff lately.

I look computer components as a sunk cost in entertainment. I'd get more hours of enjoyment from a 4090 than a ticket to a Taylor Swift concert for the same cost. Granted I wouldn't enjoy one of her shows if it were $20 lol. Eventually I'll probably get tired of the hobby and sell everything off for cheap, but at that point I'll have had years of enjoyment from everything.

Back when I was married and only allowed to have one PC, I'd sell a card to offset upgrading to the next card... Now that I'm divorced I have several PCs and the old card gets trickled down to the other systems in the house when I upgrade the main rig. After rotating out of use, cards get stuck in the inventory of stuff for HWBOT comps that I barely ever compete in. At last check I have 20 Nvidia, 11 AMD, and 1 Intel Arc GPUs. I grossly overpaid for my 3090 when I "won" the chance to buy it in a Newegg shuffle back in the GPU craziness, but I sold a few of my other cards for a profit to make up for it.

Considering their lack of feature parity I don't see how AMD gets off pricing their second rate cards as high as they do. The 7900XTX is an alright card if you just look at raw raster. Being a gen behind on RT and upscaling tech while just slotting into the price bracket between a 4070ti and 4080 just seems outright lazy. I just wish they would undercut Nvidia or actually step up and make a 4090 level card.

That was another tangent I was going to go down, but figured I'd typed enough the other day A lot of things just work better/only work on Nvidia. My roommate does 3D modeling and the plugins he uses only work on Nvidia. There are some newer options that support AMD but that involves paying for and then learning a different software which isn't really feasible. When the current gen of cards was coming out I was thinking he'd at least be able to grab a 7900XTX for his VR rig... In typical AMD fashion that comes with 6 months of waiting on driver fixes. Not something that sit's well when you drop $1000+ on a new card. I personally enjoy donating resources to the Folding@home project and Nvidia is just head and shoulders above in that department. It'll be a while before the dynamic at the high end shifts. AMD has been content with letting Nvidia dominate the upper end of the market. If Arc can get more traction and steal some of that lower to midrange market, AMD will have to step up in some way. That could just be with prices. But they might decide to get serious and make something special.

The problem is at this point people have proved that they will pay for it. Pascal was the last gen that made sense price wise. Turing came along with a big price hike and barely any raw performance uplift and just a huge focus on ray tracing and various software add ons that nobody asked for. Back then we had one of the mining booms which kept the prices sky high all the way until Ampere came along with that cute promise of buying 2080ti perfomance for $500. A handful of lucky people got in on an original MSRP 3070 or 3080. Most people got shafted because they waited and waited and waited to upgrade. Just for another mining boom paired with a global pandemic to make affordable GPUs a distant dream. Now, big surprise they follow that up with the most mis-priced lineup of cards ever. While people * and moan constantly about how much they hate them, they still keep buying it all up. Mostly because you had a bunch of people still holding on to those Pascal cards or even Maxwell waiting for a time when a decently priced card would come along and it just never did. As for the VRAM thing, if we get more, it'll be in the form of a new $3000 Titan. They don't like doubling flagship VRAM without making some comically priced "best card in the universe". I think the lower tier cards will continue to get bumped up. I can see 12GB as the new minimum offering with more cards in the 16, 20, and 24GB range. I just don't see them giving us a 48GB 5090 as a direct replacement for the 4090 at the same price level. They should, but I'm sure they will find a way to make it a more expensive product. Then serving up the cut down version at still absurd prices. AMD should have priced more aggressivly to undercut Nvidia's poor pricing/naming this gen, but they are happy to just sell what they sell of their also overpriced cards.

I really doubt they will give us more than 24GB anytime soon. Wouldn't want to compete with their own professional GPUs. Also with how hard they push DLSS and frame gen I think it's safe to say they will keep relying on software magic VS give us stronger hardware. I totally understand cutting down specs for lower tier cards, but It's REALLY annoying how hard they start gimping their lineup starting with the XX80 SKU's. When Amphere was first announced I was really hoping for a 20GB 3080. I ended up buying a 3090 because I was wanting it for my 4K OLED and wasn't going to buy a 10GB "high end" GPU. Interestingly the 4070 Ti Super is getting upgraded to 16GB of VRAM on a 256 bit bus. If they just replace the current 4070 Ti that would probably be the best value Nvidia card on the market. Knowing them, they will sell it along side the current cards and jack the price up.

Did someone say volleyball?

Did someone say Chug a lug a luggin' 5 miles an hour?

call me petty, but I'd make it my life mission to make them as miserable as I could without committing any serious crimes. And if that didn't work, I'd get some 3rd party to commit the crimes.

Better luck next year

Quick check of the inventory spreadsheet shows 35 GPUs in the house... And that's assuming I haven't missed any If only the majority of them weren't old stuff for HWBOT comps. I'd love to have some more RTX 4XXX cards for folding

I'm just using them to store my benching cards. I'm tired of every flat surface in the office being covered in hardware

Down to the last few hours. I decided to spin up a few extra cards to torment my long-term rival @neurotix. Sorry bud I couldn't help myself That comes at the cost of the office being a bit warm while I'm in here building my rack mount GPU storage shelf. I only have 20 of these risers currently but the rails are 3' deep so I can squeeze 3 or 4 shelves worth in here.

I'd love to go back down to a 42". The 48 is just a bit too much for how close I sit. I don't use mine for anything other than the PC so I'd like to get away from a TV. Turning it on and off manually is only a minor inconvenience, but if I'm gonna spend more money, I'd like to get exactly what I want. I haven't come across a 42" glossy OLED monitor yet. They always put some sort of BS Matte coating on the monitor versions of all the big OLED displays. That being said. I still love my CX and it's been going strong for a few years now with no issues. At work currently so I can't check but the last time I looked a couple months ago I was just shy of 2300 power on hours. Still no burn in. Haven't needed to or at least haven't been prompted to do a pixel clean. *Just checked and she's at 2481 power on hours.

I think when I bought my Datavac they were around $70. I just borrowed the one from work for years until I switched jobs and had to buy my own For just dusting off PCs these new battery powered ones probably work great. I also use my Datavac for blowing coolant out of custom loops and I kinda doubt the little battery powered ones have the same grunt as the 500w Datavac for that niche use case.

Finally got around to fixing the one thing I hated about this car which was lack of Android Auto. Normally I'd get an aftermarket unit. Newer cars use the display for a bunch of other stuff like climate control so it was simpler to stick with an OEM option. The parts for the conversion came out to $584 which is reasonable to me considering the quality of life upgrade. While I was in there I upgraded the center speaker to an Infinity reference 3.5". I have a couple more of these to put in the upper door location. It got dark before I got to those. Once those are in I'll decide if I need to do the tweeters, lower doors, and rears.

Yes, they have been mailed out. I did wait an extra week for people to reply (still only heard back from about half the people). I dropped them in the outgoing mail box last Sunday night with the exception of Memmento Mori's. I took off work a bit early Monday to make it into the post office to get that one shipped out since it was going international. They are all just going snail mail USPS so who knows where any of them are at this point.

While this is neat, getting fiber to more areas seems like a better investment than making it way faster for a few people. The real crime in most residential internet is the abysmal upload speeds. Even the lowest tier from my fiber provider is 400/400. I'd take that over 1000/20. I have a symmetrical gigabit connection at home and don't have any need for anything else. We could go up to 2gig but it was nearly double the cost last we checked. My entire home network is 2.5Gb but that's just so all the machines can talk to the NAS faster. I don't really need to talk to the outside world any faster. If I were to upgrade the network further, I'd get a separate line from a different ISP to do dual WAN. The UDM Pro can support failover and they recently added load balancing as well.

With mechanical keyboard stuff if you get the parts within a year of ordering it, I call that a win lol. It's a niche hobby run by small shops. On top of that, look at a calendar. This is the busiest time of year for shipping things. As far as buckling springs go... If you want to try those, buy a Unicomp. Don't care what you've heard or remember from back in the day. A brand new Unicomp will be much nicer than some clapped out old board. If you managed to find a unicorn new old stock model M that's been hiding in a climate controlled storage for a couple decades, it would set you back more than buying a whole stack of fresh Unicomps would. This is coming from someone who actually owns a Unicomp. I have typed on an IBM model M, but never side by side. I was also a child back when I last had access to an original.

In Fluxmaven