Desolutional

5000 dpi is not going to be cheap.

I reckon a lot of the gamers still sit in the low to mid range of the market, the 8 core purely 3D cache CPU would be fantastic for people who don't need to do productivity work.

I'd be more interested in the 1440p/4K gaming, File Compression and Encoding performance of the new Zen4 3D chips as a real world use of the 3D Cache, at £449 the 7800X3D will need to match the 13600K for performance to make it worth switching too. I still view the 3D Cache as quite a limited feature which works in a small amount of situations - but when it does work it has a large performance gain.

I've thought about upgrading from X99 to this new W790 platform, but it just doesn't seem worth it unless you need some really niche workstation features like IO-MMU. Main reason I went with X99 was the PCIe lanes, and now with PCIe 5.0 it doesn't really seem to matter much to me now that SLI and Crossfire is gone. Z790 motherboards offer a full x16 speed PCIe 5.0 slot and 2 or 3 x4 PCIe 4.0 slots. PCIe 5.0 hasn't even started to be used in recent GPUs yet, and doubt it's going to be a bottleneck for a long time, plus the x4 bandwidth of those PCIe 4.0 slots is more than enough for a second GPU or WiFi card etc. I'm still waiting to see if there is a refresh of Raptor Lake, or if they are just going to release Meteor Lake, DDR5 is still overpriced for the performance gain you get.

I think once QLC (Quad Layer) production gets much cheaper and SSDs are sold at or below 2x the cost/GB a lot of consumers will move entirely to flash storage. QLC basically offers HDD performance in sequential write/read, but much better random IO speed. One drawback to QLC is due to the amount of different voltage stages per cell it has far lower data retention when unpowered and lower read/write cycles.

Yeah, I think there will be a few more people joining over the next few days after that post.

I hope they solve the idle power consumption problems with RDNA3 too, that's the only thing keeping me from upgrading to it, and the alternative is paying much more for RTX 4000 series.

I'd avoid using any normal tools on an NVMe drive - download Samsung Magician and use the format tool in there, might need to write down the long code on the drive as the software will ask you to enter this when formatting. Also make sure you've disabled Intel VMD/RST in the BIOS and set it back to AHCI mode before using any tools.

Got to see how reliable HAMR drives are first, the idea of using a laser to cram more bits onto a platter doesn't seem too great for long term data retention.