Fluxmaven

Steam, a gaming platform, shows that the most common cards are mid range units... Color me surprised. 

The popular cards on Steam are always going to be mid range and typically a gen or two behind. People building monster rigs are using them for something other than gaming, or barely have time to game... Whereas kids that have infinite time to game, can't afford top end GPUs. 

I really hope AMD doesn't pull out of the enthusiast GPU space, because Intel is still way out from being a real competitor and obviously if you give Nvidia an inch, they will take a mile. 

Another Microcenter observation... When it comes to open box GPUs. With the exception of the 4080, all other 4000 cards tend to sell within the week. Which is interesting because if you wait a week, the prices drop further. Suggesting that people are interested in the midrange 4000 series assuming the prices were a bit better. The AMD cards tend to sit around a bit longer. Waiting for a larger discount before people consider them. 

Which is interesting to me because often in the initial discount period, the 4000 cards are still IMO overpriced for what they offer, yet people will walk right past a better priced and performing AMD card to grab the Nvidia stuff. Obviously they do have some better features and perform better in some workloads, but it still seems odd.

People like to be associated with the winning team. Just because most people wouldn't buy a 4090 tier AMD card, doesn't mean it wouldn't strengthen their brand to be seen as an actual competitor and not just the bargain bin second place pick. 

Looks like the gloves are off... No telling what will happen once @pioneerisloud steps into the ring 

I guess my intended sarcasm didn't come through, I'm well aware of decoy pricing. 

Also I when I stated I noticed the same thing, I was referring to the fact that 4090s are selling not just that the 4080 is a bad value/not selling.

Between work and personal interest, I'm at Microcenter a couple times a month and check prices/inventory daily. Also as mentioned, I'm looking at 3 locations so between just Sir B and I, that's 4 locations being observed. 

I do realize that Microcenters in general only serve a small portion of the country and thus don't represent total sales. The whole point of mentioning any of this is just to point out that yes, people do in fact buy 4090s. 

5 hours ago, UltraMega said:

One microcenter sporadically browsed is not convincing data. 

I've noticed the exact same thing at my local Microcenter in a different  part of the country.

The 4080 stands out as the most unloved card. They just sit on the shelves. When they are sold, they are often returned. The open box returns sit for weeks until they get discounted enough to make a 4080 seem like a decent value. It's almost like they priced the card so badly to make the 4090 easier to justify.

I know this is just one more data point, but I check stock regularly. I also check the new Indy location and the Columbus location and see similar trends.

4 minutes ago, neurotix said:

 

White Peony | Rishi Tea & Botanicals

RISHI-TEA.COM

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White Peony, also known by the traditional name Bai Mu Dan, is a popular style of white tea made of young tea...

 

Get a tea ball, or you could do like me and use a French press if you have one. Highly recommended. It's good with or without honey.

 

And damn, drinking every day of the week? Even when I was younger I would just binge at house parties til I vomited. Lol.

I have a tea ball just need to find it... It's actually a duck lol 

And I was saying just drinking the whole weekend, so Friday, Saturday, Sunday. I never drank every day of the week even back in college. Now it's a struggle to just drink 2 days in a row lol

Personally, I'd rather just not have any "other" videos. If people want to go watch whatever the big techtubers are doing they can go watch it on youtube.

I get wanting to draw attention to the site to get more pageviews/interaction/whatever since we do need the site to grow. I also understand that there isn't a ton of user created content yet, but we're still just getting started. I think slowly building up a collection of relevant videos makes sense. We have a lot of very knowledgeable members here. If we can get more of that knowledge put into video form, I think it will all work itself out.

Last I checked this is a hardware site... We should focus efforts on content related to building/modifying/overclocking so we can really live by our "Pushing it to the limit" motto. 

6 hours ago, Bastiaan_NL said:

Drinking, did anybody say "drinking"???

Yes, just need the dungeon whiteboard to keep track of how many we've had. 

Although I could really go for some actual tea instead of alcohol... Can't drink every day of the weekend like I could a decade ago lol. 

So I got a 110 pack of Cherry MX Clears on clearance for $15 at Microcenter. This sparked the decision to do another "budget" keyboard. I have been enjoying the Portico75 build that I've been using on my bedroom setup and figured I'd build something similar. I actually ended up just picking up an open box barebones Redragon K649 Pro for $40. So far so good, got a nice 75% board with hotswap and Bluetooth and I'm only in it $55... I then proceed to spend 3X that on keycaps 

The keyset I picked up from Drop (IDK why they changed their name from Massdrop). For now I'm running the biip MT3 Extended 2048 standard alphas and modifiers. I also ordered the colored accent modifiers and a separate set of Caps for Causes: MT3 NoveltyCats. When the cat caps show up I'll sprinkle those in in place of some of the function keys and swap to the colored modifiers.

The black housing Cherry switches don't let much light through so I did use C³Equalz X TKC Dragon Fruit switches for the function row to let more RGB get through. If I ever get REALLY bored I might pull the clears and rebuild them to be more RGB friendly. I have a bunch of Kailh speed silvers with milk bottoms and clear tops that I'll never use because I still hate linears. Could sacrifice those and lube the MX clear stems while I'm at it... Or just spend more money and buy a different switch entirely lol. 

Man this tea I just bought tastes funny 

I'm fueled entirely by RAGE

And when that isn't cutting it I'll grab an energy drink or a coffee. 

8 hours ago, Sir Beregond said:

OK, my personal opinions about EK aside

Lol you were the first person I thought of when I read the opening line about EK quality 

As much as I'm not into AIO coolers, it's hard to deny that they are a great option for the majority of people. Anything short of the top end CPUs don't really need the extra cooling potential of a custom loop. GPUs are an easier argument for custom loop because you typically cut your temps in half. Also these days the stock air coolers are getting comically large so slapping a block on is almost a necessity if you need to plug anything into any of the other PCIe slots.

I've never tried to put the plastic socket protector back on but I assume it just snaps on. I'd have to remember where I put the stock stuff to test that though 

11 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

I didn't know we had a place for that. I might post some of my videos as long as there's a proper category for them.

I've never really looked at the member video section since it seems like it's mostly full of reposted vids from elsewhere. I just looked through and found a Z590 Dark OC settings vid that you posted. While I'm admittedly wasting it's potential having it in my racing sim PC, I do have a Z590 Dark and currently just use one of the Luumi daily driver profiles that came on the board. 

I just want to say that it's exactly what I want in a video like that. You go through everything slow enough to see what's going on, but it's not a 20 minute video of babbling about every step of the way. It's also done on a capture card and legible, not some shaky cellphone cam pointed at a monitor. 

Rant Dough/Eve

On my main setup, I've also been on the 48" OLED train for the past few years. For productivity it's perfect. I feel like it's a bit big for full screen games sometimes though. 

I feel like 42" is a great size for 4K at 100% scaling. What I'm waiting on is a PC monitor with a glossy OLED panel at 42". Until then, I deal with the mild inconvenience of turning the display on/off manually.

For the bedroom setup, If someone that isn't Dough/Eve releases a glossy OLED 27" 1440p monitor, that would go on my wishlist as well. 

In fluxmaven 

7 hours ago, kaliz said:

i found a ballistix memory cooler from the ddr3 era, modded it straight away with those fans and it looks really awesome now! 

That's way cooler (both functionally and aesthetically) than my old RAM cooler that I zip tied a Noctua on. The stock screws weren't long enough for a thicc fan 

Interesting concept but I wouldn't consider it until it became a standard across all manufactures. Don't want to pay the "Asus tax" just to get stuck with with zero upgrade options if they dump the idea after one generation. 

Since it seems like a lot of these responses will be peripherals, I guess I'll toss in my original Logitech Trackman Marble from 95ish. I admittedly don't use it daily anymore, but I did semi recently and still like to pull it out from time to time. The Clueboard has also been in the collection for a while, and is coincidentally the board I'm currently using in my work keyboard rotation. 

4 hours ago, Alex said:

Also looking forward to F@H in winter to help out with the heating.

It definitely helps out. I heat most of the 2nd floor with folding in the winter 

Finally some SSDs that are big enough for my "homework" folder

Since you like Fractal cases, the Define 7 in storage mode holds up to 14 3.5" + 4 2.5" drives. The XL version bumps that to 18 3.5 + 5 2.5" drives.  (you do need to buy extra drive trays to max out capacity)

I have a regular Define 7 with 8 drives currently. Fits big coolers as well. My Thermalright True Spirit 140 Power fits with room to spare. 

It's a shame AMD doesn't undercut them and gain some market share. At least they have been less stingy with the VRAM. It's just that most people don't want to wait for the drivers to fine wine into something usable. They also suck for VR and F@H PPD is laughable. 7XXX series is barely better than last gen, whereas the 4XXX series Nvidia stuff has massive gains over last gen. 

I need to pull my A770 out and see how it's doing on the latest drivers. Obviously it's been like paying to be a beta tester, but every time I put it on the bench it's been faster. We've got a way to go before I'd call Intel a real competitor in the GPU space, but it's nice to have a glimmer of hope for a viable 3rd choice in the market. 

Nvidia thought what if we make our top end card the only one that really makes sense. Then just price the whole rest of the lineup so bad that people find ways to justify buying a X090.  

When 3XXX series was coming out everyone freaked out "2080ti performance for $500" with the 3070. We were coming off of a different wave of mining boom so 2080ti's were still selling for MSRP all the way up till just before 3XXX launch. People were just excited to finally get a real upgrade. 2XXX series introduced a lot of cool new technologies but it took a couple years for ray tracing and DLSS to actually be implemented or optimized well enough to actually use those features. Yet that generation came with a price hike over the 1XXX series. 

Not getting the 20gb 3080 felt like a real scam. Regressing from 11gb with the 1080ti or 2080ti for the 10GB 3080 didn't feel right. Shelling out for a 3090 didn't feel right. The 12GB 3080 was too little, too late to mend our broken hearts. 

If Nvidia could just stop jerking us around on VRAM and pricing 

The whole 4000 series has been a bit of a mess from the very beginning.

When 4000 series was first on the horizon people were scared when the rumors of 600w cards came out. They were thinking it was going to be Fermi all over again. As it turned out, the 4000 series is actually very power efficient. 

People all cry about the memory bus and how cut down the card is, but for the average Joe buying a midrange card that just wants to game the 4060ti is fine. It performs in line with previous gen "70" cards at much lower power draw. 

What's not fine is that it's priced more like an upper midrange card. The whole product stack just seems off. 

If the 4060ti was priced at $300 for 8GB, $350 for 16GB,  it would be a lot more palatable. Budget gamers aren't trying to do 4K 120. They understand that getting a lower end card means that they may need to tune settings to hit their FPS goals. However, when you drop $500+ you expect to be able to just crank everything up and not worry about it. 

If the naming and pricing was closer to this, I think it would be more in line with peoples expectations. 

4090    = $1200

4080    = $800

4070ti -> 4070 = $500

4070   -> 4060ti = $400

4060ti -> 4060  =$300/350

4060   -> 4050 = $250