GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

[Archeops]

I finally found a case that supports ATX mobos and is the right size to fit in my shelf space: I'm getting the Lian Li Lancool 207 Mid Tower case.

I've kind of come to question my choice in GPU though, I'm playing in 1440p for another year or so and the 4070 Super should be more than enough. But like a cat singing songs of lost loves in the alleyway of despair part of my brain is screaming "quit being lazy, meme-loving fuck and future-proof your PC with a normal-ass RTX 4070 Ti Super" before shit hits the fan next year.

Thankfully I've decided that I'm going with one of Micro Center's AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D bundles (either the base $400 one featuring an ASUS B650-Plus TUF Gaming Wi-Fi ATX AM5 motherboard or their $450 “premium” option featuring an ASUS B650-A ROG Strix Gaming WiFi AMD AM5 ATX motherboard) so there's some wiggle room as far as the budget goes. Sadly I may have to give up on getting the 4070 Super Wukong Edition since the 4070 Ti Super is somewhat “future-proofed” thanks to it packing 16GBs of VRAM. Funnily enough there is S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2-themed 4070 Ti Super that just pooped up on my radar. I guess @WULULULULU has the gift of prophecy.

EDIT: I’m going with the AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D bundle feating the ASUS ROG Strix mobo. That premium mobo‘s features are pretty nice for the price.

 

[Another Char Clone]

Speaking of casing, I'm really disappointed in modern offerings. I was thinking of getting https://www.amazon.com/Thermaltake-Tempered-Certified-Computer-CA-1B6-00F1WN-04/dp/B074ZLQZ8F for my next build but I'm not sure if it could handle SSI-EEB mobos, its the same dimensions as EATX but has different screw layouts. Apparently it can't fit the latest giant GPUs either due to length.
Yes, I want the 5.25 inch drive bays, at least 2, ideally 4.

 

[The Ugly One]

Threadripper/Epyc have been around long enough that some multi-thread heavy applications can scale to use a lot of cores.

Those applications are mostly the ones running on clusters decades ago. We had a 512-core cluster in the 00s and plenty of things to run on it.

However, I believe that there are a bunch that only scale to use 32 cores (evident in 64-core Threadripper reviews), which could be a near-term "wall" for consumer processors.

Usually is a memory bandwidth issue. Computations involving large sparse matrices, which you see all over engineering computations, are typically below 1 FLOP per byte read. This is why GPUs are taking over in some sectors. You just can't beat HBM for bandwidth. You've seen a few CPUs with HBM, like A64FX, Xeon Max, and the new MI300C-based instances on Azure. Power 10 and Granite Rapids both have multiplexed DIMMs (OMI-DDR5 in power and MRDIMMs in Xeon).

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/amd-crafts-custom-epyc-cpu-for-microsoft-azure-with-hbm3-memory-cpu-with-88-zen-4-cores-and-450gb-of-hbm3-may-be-repurposed-mi300c-four-chips-hit-7-tb-s

The fundamental issue is most tasks simply aren't arbitrarily parallelizable. Something like a crash simulation or IC validation job that is doing basically the same computation on millions or even billions of elements is almost trivial to scale.

If your task can't be expressed as a homogeneous batch operation on a large data set (single program, multiple data or single instruction, multiple thread) then it won't be scalable to very large thread counts, and you are probably going to run out of ways to chop it up usefully at a really low number, like 6-8 threads.

 

[Archeops]

I just picked up my AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D CPU/mobo/ram bundle from Micro Center, it was an absolute madhouse thanks to it being Black Friday.

Oh, and I may have to change my GPU choice yet again. Due to a family friend of mine dropping a potential financial windfall in the form of an early Christmas present I might be able to afford an RTX 4080 Super or even a 4090 GPU for my build.

And to both I say…


EDIT: I guess what I’m trying to ask here is should I…

• Stick with the original plan and get a 4070 Ti Super regardless of what happens and use the funds to get better supporting equipment (case, fans, storage, OS, thermal paste/pads, etc.)
• Temper my expectations and get a 4080/4080 Super?
• Go “big-dick mode” and get a 4090 if I somehow manage to get the scratch for it?

 

[Probably An Autist]

i accidentally bought SAS drives instead of SATA and now i have to buy a fucking SAS controller card so that I can fix my own retard mistake,.

i hate computers and myself

 

[Post Reply]

i accidentally bought SAS drives instead of SATA and now i have to buy a fucking SAS controller card so that I can fix my own retard mistake,.

i hate computers and myself

Art of Server on EBay has your back.

 

[Betonhaus]

i accidentally bought SAS drives instead of SATA and now i have to buy a fucking SAS controller card so that I can fix my own retard mistake,.

i hate computers and myself

SAS drives have the ability to go up to 12gb/s while sata3 only goes up to 6gb/s, which is nice. You may need to break off or tape over pin 3 as on older systems it was just a power pin but on newer and high capacity drives it's a reset pin

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

EDIT: I guess what I’m trying to ask here is should I…

• Stick with the original plan and get a 4070 Ti Super regardless of what happens and use the funds to get better supporting equipment (case, fans, storage, OS, thermal paste/pads, etc.)
• Temper my expectations and get a 4080/4080 Super?
• Go “big-dick mode” and get a 4090 if I somehow manage to get the scratch for it?

RTX 5000 series is right around the corner, so it's a bad time to spend even more on a GPU that will soon become "obsolete" or drop substantially in price (at least on the used market).

It seems you didn't buy the 4070 Ti Super yet. If you are a lunatic like me, you'd "game" on the iGPU that your CPU has. But yeah I would stick with that one and not go up to 4080/4090. You would be in the ≥16 GB VRAM master race at least.

The RTX 4070 Ti Super Is Currently One Of The Best ‘Price To Performance’ GPUs Thanks To Its 16GB VRAM & 10 Percent Discount For Amazon Black Friday 2024 - woooooooooOw

Don't waste money on a high-end graphics card right now — RTX 4090 is a terrible deal

 

[Probably An Autist]

SAS drives have the ability to go up to 12gb/s while sata3 only goes up to 6gb/s, which is nice. You may need to break off or tape over pin 3 as on older systems it was just a power pin but on newer and high capacity drives it's a reset pin

yeah fairly sure the 3 pins need taping. had to tape something on one of my SATA drives I ripped from an enclosure too.

just a pain, my fault for being too eager.

 

[Archeops]

RTX 5000 series is right around the corner, so it's a bad time to spend even more on a GPU that will soon become "obsolete" or drop substantially in price (at least on the used market).

I’m a bit apprehensive on getting an RTX 5000 series GPU to be honest, I’m 99.999% sure they’ll be incredibly hard to get on release and the potential (or inevitability, pick your poison) of Trump tariffs affecting computer prices across the board could make a a halfway-decent one too expensive.

It seems you didn't buy the 4070 Ti Super yet. If you are a lunatic like me, you'd "game" on the iGPU that your CPU has. But yeah I would stick with that one and not go up to 4080/4090. You would be in the ≥16 GB VRAM master race at least.

Yeah, I’m just gathering the funds for all of this whilst second-guessing my ability to pick decent parts.

And thanks for the recommendation, that’ll really let me trick out this thing when more of the gears start turning.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I’m a bit apprehensive on getting an RTX 5000 series GPU to be honest, I’m 99.999% sure they’ll be incredibly hard to get on release and the potential (or inevitability, pick your poison) of Trump tariffs affecting computer prices across the board could make a a halfway-decent one too expensive.

I think the bigger problem with RTX 5000 could be disappointing uplifts below the 5090. We know the 5090 will be impressive, but then the 5080 is basically halved in every way (cores, memory bus, VRAM... based on leaks). And it could get worse from there with a 5070 12 GB, 5060 8 GB. On the other hand, these GPUs will use GDDR7 so there will be impressive memory bandwidth uplifts.

I said my piece on the tariffs. I think it's an overhyped threat, and cards are being shipped en masse to the US to get ahead of the Drumpf bull in the China shop. But if you would end up having to wait 6+ months for a 5070 Ti to be launched and available, I can see just getting it over and done with.

 

[The Ugly One]

RTX 5000 series is right around the corner, so it's a bad time to spend even more on a GPU that will soon become "obsolete" or drop substantially in price (at least on the used market).

If the 5060 is dual slot, might be worth upgrading from my hated 6700 XT.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

If the 5060 is dual slot, might be worth upgrading from my hated 6700 XT.

This nigga is Upgrayedding from 12 GB VRAM to 8 GB! Lynch him!

 

[Betonhaus]

Are there any 4 or 5 slot cards?

 

[Another Char Clone]

i accidentally bought SAS drives instead of SATA and now i have to buy a fucking SAS controller card so that I can fix my own retard mistake,.

i hate computers and myself

I've been doing some research, the best internal SAS controller bang for buck is the Broadcom/LSI 9305-16i, a 2 port SAS that can handle up to 16 SATA devices with splitters.
The earlier but more common 9300-16i runs extremely hot, about 20W of power and requires a blower. You can probably get away by putting a quiet 80-120mm fan next to the 9305-16i.
For anyone else thinking of SATA controllers, I recommend one using the ASM1166 chipset with 6 SATA ports and a PCIe3 4x lane, it can actually handle around 2000MB/s throughput, it's actually pretty cheap.

I've been looking for an internal tape drives and they're fucking expensive and its all SAS and 5.25 inch drives. I'm hoping to save up for an HPE LTO-9 drive for archiving my stuff, and I need all the bandwidth on cheap spiny rust to sufficiently feed the tape drive to run at full speed.

Edit: I misremembered. The Broadcomm/LSI 9305 is a 4 port SAS that can split 16 ways for SATA. It is using the SFF-8643 SAS interface, there are SFF-8087 adapter cables for SFF-8643 sold separately that splits 2 ways, check your SAS drive requirements.

 

[Flaming Dumpster]

i accidentally bought SAS drives instead of SATA and now i have to buy a fucking SAS controller card so that I can fix my own retard mistake,.

i hate computers and myself

LSI HBAs ripped out of servers are cheap on eBay and you can buy a set with a reflashed card and the cables you need for plugging it into SAS drives. Here's one that should suit you: https://www.ebay.com/itm/196519814705 ~$27 delivered from China

Another Char Clone is right, these things do tend to run a little toasty as they are expecting air to pass over the heatsink constantly. The LSI cards basically have a little PowerPC processor inside so they do have the potential to completely melt the fuck down, that being said, even a 120mm fan or some decent front to back cooling will take care of it. Even if it does fully self destruct, just buy another, they're so damn cheap and that cabling will work on all but the newer cards using Mini SAS HD.

I've been looking for an internal tape drives and they're fucking expensive and its all SAS and 5.25 inch drives. I'm hoping to save up for an HPE LTO-9 drive for archiving my stuff, and I need all the bandwidth on cheap spiny rust to sufficiently feed the tape drive to run at full speed.

Paging @Kees H

 

[Betonhaus]

LSI HBAs ripped out of servers are cheap on eBay and you can buy a set with a reflashed card and the cables you need for plugging it into SAS drives. Here's one that should suit you: https://www.ebay.com/itm/196519814705 ~$27 delivered from China

One thing to note is that the cheaper ones are limited to 6Gbps and don't go up to 12Gbps. But I only have seen 8tb and up drives be 12Gbps

 

[Flaming Dumpster]

One thing to note is that the cheaper ones are limited to 6Gbps and don't go up to 12Gbps. But I only have seen 8tb and up drives be 12Gbps

Yeah, it's a SAS 2 interface so you'll only get 6 Gbps per lane. There's 4 lanes on each Mini SAS connector. Each SAS interface on that fan out cable is wired to a lane and so has 6 Gbps to work with.

SAS 3 gives you 12 Gbps per lane but is basically useless unless you're plugging in an SSD or big SAS expanders.

 

[ZMOT]

Apparently there is a 7900XTX GPU sponsored by Space Marine 2, which makes me wonder, how many collab GPUs are there (the ones I can remember were the 2 EVA 3090s, the Frostpunk 2 7700XT and 2 others from Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and S.T.A.L.K.E.R 2).

remembered your post when I saw this. official waifu case - and waifu gpu! (if you live in south korea) there's more collab stuff but not really thread relevant
View attachment 6702823

 

[Probably An Autist]

One thing to note is that the cheaper ones are limited to 6Gbps and don't go up to 12Gbps. But I only have seen 8tb and up drives be 12Gbps

they're 12Gbps. In fairness speed is hardly an issue, i'm only storing videos and shit