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

I haven't looked into that inefficiency, but 5070 and 5070 Ti have 48 MiB L2, while 9070 XT, non-XT, and GRE have 64 MiB L3 (branded Infinity Cache) that plays the same role. That has been reduced from the 96 MiB of the similarly performing 7900 XTX and 128 MiB of every Navi 21 card including the 6800 non-XT. RDNA3 has higher bandwidth for Infinity Cache than RDNA2, not sure if RDNA4 increases it again.
L3 has significantly lower bandwidth than L2, it’s provable in games like spiderman 2 at 4K where the 5070ti smashes the 9070XT purely because the former doesn’t run out of VRAM
 
Bandwidth is really meaningless in terms of performance. Branch prediction and so on give greater gains than bandwidth increases and cache penalties from flushing absolutely wreck data transfers.
I saw some Newegg deals last month where you could get a core 7 ultra 265k, mobo, aio cpu cooler, and 32gb of ram for like $300 or so (might've been higher, but it was cheaper than amd by a decent bit); I still went with a 9800 X3D for that extra cache tho.
300 is really a good deal. However for gaming c7 is worse than 14 series cpu's. Intel f'd it up big time.
Intel being intel, you can't even upgrade that cpu and 14th gen is already dead.
 
The N100/N200/etc, Alder Lake-N, is Intel servicing the sub-$200 (complete system) x86 segment. AMD has chips that perform similarly, but have abandoned that segment. You usually have to go to around $300+ to find good AMD mini PCs. Intel may bring P-cores/hybrid to Atom with "Wildcat Lake" next year, boosting the performance of their cheapest chips tremendously.

There are Arrow Lake deals, seems like the good ones so far are for @Intel Core Ultra 7 265k. Despite Arrow Lake regressing from Raptor Lake in some areas, it has fine-wined slightly and it's going to have similar gaming performance to non-X3D chips (or same as all of them if you are GPU limited).

Intel is shipping the greatest volume of PC chips, so as we see businesses dumping Windows 10 computers, and Windows 11 several years from now, most of them are going to be Intel. You can get great computers for even less than what Alder Lake-N costs.

Arrow Lake laptop chips are getting more attention, and they can easily match the lackluster Krackan Point (4+4, 8 CUs):
Core Ultra 5 225H Trades Blows With Ryzen AI 7 350 But With Better Thermals; Arc 130T Comes On Par With Radeon 860M
These nice are some nice deals thanks for sharing this
 
Bandwidth is really meaningless in terms of performance. Branch prediction and so on give greater gains than bandwidth increases and cache penalties from flushing absolutely wreck data transfers.
This is wrong as an absolute statement. There are lots of operations and whole applications that are bandwidth bound. All kinds of operations on large arrays of data, from copying to solving large sparse linear systems, are bandwidth-bound. It's pretty easy to saturate bandwidth with graphics operations, too. The 9700XT's 644.6 GB/s sounds like a lot. But if you want to run your monitor's refresh rate of 180 Hz, you're limited to a total 3.58 GB of data processed per scene, and that includes anything that has to be looked up multiple times (although larger caches mitigate this). 3.58 GB goes real fast in an era where textures can be up to 64 MB. Even if you use compression, it goes fast.
 
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I had the most embarrassing PC building experience to date. After like 2 years of me having a USB-C capable case, and 1.5 year after getting the cable for it and trying to plug it in, thinking that it or the motherboard was broken in some way. Recently I've decided to try again, carefully wiggling it around in the port, and then suddenly...
*clk*
It latched on. At that moment I was furiously putting everything back together and firing up the system to see if that was the issue all along.
It was. And I was mad.
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All this time, my dumb ass wasn't applying enough force for these two little, evidently present bumps to latch onto the connector, which is why it didn't work and why it kept constantly falling out at the slightest movement. 🤦‍♂️

At least I wasn't like xQc who hamfisted this plug the wrong way and fucked up his motherboard.
 
This article is funny they use amd laptop cpus from Zen 3 to 5 yet and compare them only to meteor lake. They also didn't normalize the battery sizes. If they wanted to be fair they'd use alder lake and raptor lake in the comparisons but that wouldn't show amd having a worse battery life on average. If you buy a zen 5 laptop its usually better than meteor lake for battery life. If you bought a zen 4 laptop it was usually better than raptor lake/alder lake for battery life. Anything intel pre meteor lake is a meme the battery life on those just aren't great compared to the competition. This article is misleading.
Zen 4 vs Raptor Lake ( Zen 4 is better)
Zen 4 vs Meteor Lake (Meteor lake is better)
Zen 5 vs Meteor lake (Zen 5 is better.)
Zen 5 vs Arrow lake (Arrow lake is better)
Zen 5 vs Arrow Lake (They trade wins)

Something to note is that these laptops are all within 1-2 hours of each other given the same/similar battery size in these tests (light loads). In a mixed workload scenario they are probably the same, with any differences being due to vendor s having weird power management software. Not a nearly 3 hour difference like that article would suggest.

If you're concerned with battery life on a windows laptop you shouldn't buy based solely on the processor anyways. you have to look at the manufacturer and what they do with regards to power management. I have a 7940hs on a g14 and until i deleted all the ASUS crap and installed some 3rd party software I was getting 3 hours of battery life. This is because ASUS has shit power profiles. I had a similar situation with an intel laptop with a 13500h I was working on. 2-3 hours stock change the power management software and now 5-6 hours. Your best bet is to get a laptop with the biggest battery and the least vendor bloat or at least some option to remove it.
Desktop is a different story amd sucks in idle power draw unless you buy the g lineup
 
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Zen 4 vs Raptor Lake ( Zen 4 is better)
Zen 4 vs Meteor Lake (Meteor lake is better)
Zen 5 vs Meteor lake (Zen 5 is better.)
Zen 5 vs Arrow lake (Arrow lake is better)
Zen 5 vs Arrow Lake (They trade wins)
No, these benchmarks are misleading. Typical laptop battery use doesn't involve spinning all the compute units as hot as you can with the most demanding game you can run and waiting for the battery to drain. It's extremely bursty with lots of idling. IME AMD CPUs tend to run at higher frequencies and suck a lot more power than Intel CPUs at idle. Just a broad trend.

The Laptop Mag web surfing test is much more representative of typical energy consumption while on battery and thus a lot closer to the results you will see in the real world.

However, I can make my ASUS laptop last longer with better software, I'm all ears. I have a Ryzen 7 6800U that refuses to run below 2 GHz most of the time unless I limit it in the ASUS software. Even then, I've never gotten over 90 minutes.
 
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Anyone else hate the ARGB pin connector?
I fucking despise with all my heart cable managing ARGB cables, especially when you have 8 ARGB fans in your case. I learned from experience so now my new build this week is going to have zero RGB in it at all. The only reason why I even bothered with ARGB in the first place was to keep my build all red.
The connector does typically tend to bend if you aren't careful. Just don't be a gorilla ape retard with the connector, treat it like a princess and you'll be fine
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I have to say that stealth builds with no RGB are objectively superior to rainbow puke rigs.
I saw some Newegg deals last month where you could get a core 7 ultra 265k, mobo, aio cpu cooler, and 32gb of ram for like $300 or so (might've been higher, but it was cheaper than amd by a decent bit); I still went with a 9800 X3D for that extra cache tho.
I managed to pick up a 9600x on Amazon prime day for 150 dollars. I could have gotten a 7800x3d but it really doesn't matter much when I'm gaming at 4k resolution on a 5070ti anyway.
 
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I mean the pins are way too easy to bend.
if you are being too brutish might as well pay someone to assemble it for you or use pincers since your fingers won't get in the way.
No, these benchmarks are misleading.
if the benchmarks are gunning for the le gamer ideal shit then just tell people to buy a desktop, it's like those ads for gaming phones, they always tell you they can run games on highest setting and that they have high capacity batteries but they never mention how fast the battery will deplete if i keep my phone on my pocket waiting for a call or how much it will heat up.
 
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