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

You guys think trading my 5700xt for a 6700xt/6800xt from miners a good idea?
Where are you finding the ex-mining cards anyway? Local buy/sell groups? I thought there was a website floating around a while ago but it's been so long since I even thought about it.
 
Where are you finding the ex-mining cards anyway? Local buy/sell groups? I thought there was a website floating around a while ago but it's been so long since I even thought about it.
I didn't find anything I just saw posts about people doing this, granted they were made like a year ago. Feel like I missed out, should've been more clear.
 
Might still be possible to upgrade to a 6700xt for relatively little. Sold a 5700xt just a couple weeks ago on ebay for $500 or so. Can get a 6700xt for $480+tax.
Checks out, this is in CanuckBux:
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Trying to decide if I should just stop paying attention to price drops and availability alerts until the summer/fall and do a proper rebuild then. My desktop is randomly seizing up on me lately. Definitely got my money's worth out of the old girl.

Although with my luck the Chinks will lock down everything and try to invade Taiwan right when I start trying to get parts.
 
Checks out, this is in CanuckBux:
View attachment 3223328
Trying to decide if I should just stop paying attention to price drops and availability alerts until the summer/fall and do a proper rebuild then. My desktop is randomly seizing up on me lately. Definitely got my money's worth out of the old girl.

Although with my luck the Chinks will lock down everything and try to invade Taiwan right when I start trying to get parts.
I am holding onto my old 2060 super just because I can't afford anything new. Was going to sell it a few months ago, but just couldn't do it.
 
Monitor related question. I saw a good deal on AOC 24g2u and 27g2u (24 and 27 inch) 1080p IPS monitors. I'm considering getting one.

However, I get conflicting opinions on if the 27 inch is worth getting. I see opinions that anything more that 24 inch is unusable for 1080p due to the lack of pixel density. Others say anything larger than 24 inch is impractical for computer work. And some even go so far as to say 1080p is a dead resolution. Yet there's also people that say 27 inch 1080p is fine.

I tend to use 125% zoom on most websites to see text more clearly on my current 24 inch monitor.

So far, the most compelling argument is that I should buy 27 inch and see for myself, but I thought I'd ask here since I'll not be buying until tomorrow.

Then Intel tears AMD a new one with the release of Alder Lake, where the i3-12100 and the i5-12400 became one of the best choices in the budget market.
And now, AMD is dropping AM4 in favor of AM5 which is DDR5 only, meaning it will be automatically disqualified from any budget setups.
I thought Alder Lake didn't work well on any os other than Win11, and even then there were issues, and I thought you needed DDR5 to get decent performance out of it?
 
However, I get conflicting opinions on if the 27 inch is worth getting.
It depends entirely on what you're doing. If you mostly watch movies and play vidya and the screen is kinda far away, the pixel density (while higher being always nicer) doesn't matter as much and there's an argument to be made for a big screen being more "immersive". If you like to sit close to your screen and do a lot of non-gaming stuff or shitposting or general GUI-related things, the more PPI/DPI (pixel per inch/dot per inch) the screens has, the sharper everything (and especially fonts) will be and the better. This is usually not mentioned in marketing but it's an important metric. A smaller 1080p screen can look a lot sharper and nicer than a bigger 4k screen.

These days where even Linux of all OSes handles higher DPI reasonably with the common programs and scaling is computationally relatively cheap, I personally don't think I'd ever aim for a screen below 140 DPI again. Fonts are just too nice the higher the DPI is. (If you have a smartphone, it's likely it has a density of 250-400 DPI, to give you a thought example) There's diminishing returns there though. e.g. 90 DPI to 110 DPI is a massive jump you will notice. 160 DPI to 260 DPI might not be *that* noticeable, if at all. The common opinion is that everything above 300 DPI is pointless because mere human eyes won't be able to make out a difference. It also depends how far you sit away from the screen. Basically, the higher the DPI, the closer you have to be to the screen for your eyes to make out indvidual pixels. You already guess it - it also depends on your eyesight.

Higher DPI panels are also more difficult to make and are usually just nicer by default. Best would be to buy somewhere with a generous return policy and have a look yourself. There's also DPI calculators online to calculate the density beforehand.
 
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Monitor related question. I saw a good deal on AOC 24g2u and 27g2u (24 and 27 inch) 1080p IPS monitors. I'm considering getting one.

However, I get conflicting opinions on if the 27 inch is worth getting. I see opinions that anything more that 24 inch is unusable for 1080p due to the lack of pixel density. Others say anything larger than 24 inch is impractical for computer work. And some even go so far as to say 1080p is a dead resolution. Yet there's also people that say 27 inch 1080p is fine.

I tend to use 125% zoom on most websites to see text more clearly on my current 24 inch monitor.

So far, the most compelling argument is that I should buy 27 inch and see for myself, but I thought I'd ask here since I'll not be buying until tomorrow.



I thought Alder Lake didn't work well on any os other than Win11, and even then there were issues, and I thought you needed DDR5 to get decent performance out of it?
DDR4 on Alder Lake isn't a huge loss:
And Windows 11 doesn't bring you a magical gigantic performance uplift on Alder Lake:
 
Monitor related question. I saw a good deal on AOC 24g2u and 27g2u (24 and 27 inch) 1080p IPS monitors. I'm considering getting one.

However, I get conflicting opinions on if the 27 inch is worth getting. I see opinions that anything more that 24 inch is unusable for 1080p due to the lack of pixel density. Others say anything larger than 24 inch is impractical for computer work. And some even go so far as to say 1080p is a dead resolution. Yet there's also people that say 27 inch 1080p is fine.

I tend to use 125% zoom on most websites to see text more clearly on my current 24 inch monitor.

So far, the most compelling argument is that I should buy 27 inch and see for myself, but I thought I'd ask here since I'll not be buying until tomorrow.



I thought Alder Lake didn't work well on any os other than Win11, and even then there were issues, and I thought you needed DDR5 to get decent performance out of it?
I have a 27 inch 1080p monitor and don’t have any problems with mine. I am a speccy four eyes though so if you have 20/20 vision you might wanna test it out idk. Is there like an IRL PC part store where you could compare the two or will you just have to buy one and return it if you don’t like it?
 
I only use 24" IPS screens and at the distances I sit they're fine. When I sit close enough to use the keyboard I feel that something larger would be an annoyance due to the need to shift my eyes to the corners or turning my head slightly. When I lean back and only use the mouse a 27" would be perfectly fine for my field of vision.
That's my personal opinion but I am also the type of sperg that won't buy a TV larger than 40/42 inches because I don't want more TV in my home.

What's a decent mouse these days? Gaming mice are pretty nice in general because they have a bunch of buttons that supports application specific macros.
 
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I only use 24" IPS screens and at the distances I sit they're fine. When I sit close enough to use the keyboard I feel that something larger would be an annoyance due to the need to shift my eyes to the corners or turning my head slightly. When I lean back and only use the mouse a 27" would be perfectly fine for my field of vision.
That's my personal opinion but I am also the type of sperg that won't buy a TV larger than 40/42 inches because I don't want more TV in my home.

What's a decent mouse these days? Gaming mice are pretty nice in general because they have a bunch of buttons that supports application specific macros.
I have a Corsair Harpoon mouse and I quite like it, it's good quality. Although it does have a proprietary charging cable, it's only microUSB but they made it so the port is super recessed and you need the plastic around it to be a specific shape to fit in the hole. So that's annoying, but the cable itself seems pretty robust at least.
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What's a decent mouse these days? Gaming mice are pretty nice in general because they have a bunch of buttons that supports application specific macros.
Most "decent" gaming mice I've tried stopped working after a year.

I really like the Logitech B100. It's a standard 3 button mouse, good build quality, last a long time). The best part, they were only £3. These days they go for the vastly inflated price of ...£6. Still amazing value for money. I bought a bunch of them. I don't know if Logitech's other products hold up as well.
 
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I used nvidia only, for years, because their Linux drivers were vastly superior. It's only been in the past few years that the AMD drivers have caught up.

The nvidia blob is hated by purists, including the kernel devs.
Not only hated by purists but by anyone who wants real vulkan support, but more to the point anyone who wants a non buggy frame buffer and doesn't want nivida destroying the mesa stack.

Most "decent" gaming mice I've tried stopped working after a year.

I really like the Logitech B100. It's a standard 3 button mouse, good build quality, last a long time). The best part, they were only £3. These days they go for the vastly inflated price of ...£6. Still amazing value for money. I bought a bunch of them. I don't know if Logitech's other products hold up as well.
I don't know what your definition of decent is, but I've found semi cheap steel series mice to be very long lasting.

I've never really used an actual GPU before (I am building my first PC with a dedicated one soon, all of my systems have used onboard graphics), but I'm ultimately going with Nvidia for a few key reasons.

Firstly, the AMD laptop I have just doesn't offer a great selection of graphics options. Now admittedly, a lot of that has to do with the fact that it is technically a lower tier graphics processor, but even then I've noticed that a lot of user guides on how to get older games running properly tend to lean towards Nvidia since most of the options don't seem available to even higher tiers of AMD cards. Now I'm pretty uneducated in this department, so I might be getting it totally wrong, but to me Nvidia seems like it would be easier to work with when it comes to messing around with graphics settings. Half the time the guides recommend you download some third-party software to get AMD to do what you want.

Secondly, AMD doesn't support OpenGL that well, at least not according to the research I've done and personal experience. A huge majority of my PC game catalogue consists of older titles, most of which run on OpenGL, and most of the time they run badly on my laptop, which is annoying because I had an older Intel laptop that ran those games just fine. To my extremely limited knowledge, Nvidia has better support for OpenGL drivers, and I like that.

Like I said, I'm not really experienced in this field, just thought I'd give my two cents on it.
If your using Linux and you want a decent graphics card, your only sane choice is AMD at the moment. So however, you came to these conclusions, I hope you change your mind quick. Also OpenGL is quickly becoming irrelevant and Vulkan is way better. That all said AMD graphics on Linux has good OpenGL support.
 
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qI only use 24" IPS screens and at the distances I sit they're fine. When I sit close enough to use the keyboard I feel that something larger would be an annoyance due to the need to shift my eyes to the corners or turning my head slightly. When I lean back and only use the mouse a 27" would be perfectly fine for my field of vision.
That's my personal opinion but I am also the type of sperg that won't buy a TV larger than 40/42 inches because I don't want more TV in my home.

What's a decent mouse these days? Gaming mice are pretty nice in general because they have a bunch of buttons that supports application specific macros.
For maximum features at a great price, I recommend the PCSensor/RDingTech products. You can acquire them from their website or off AliExpress.

I own, from them, a 9 button mouse*, a three-pedal foot pedal setup, and a couple additional pedals. I have to touch my keyboard to type text, sure, but browsing the internet is a breeze with pedals tied to modifier keys and page switching. Don't even use the mouse normally. They also do a bunch of gear for things like wiring up a whole bunch of regular switches as USB HID inputs.

Here's the great thing about their products. Regular gaymer hardware might let you do some programming of macro keys on some of your buttons... if you run some shitty companion software that takes 300mb of RAM. With the PCSensor hardware, there's some nice simple .net programs that you can download from their site if you need to change the programming on an axis or a button to a key or key combination... a mouse movement/button.... a joystick input... a MIDI keyboard input, and from there it's all just handled from the device.

* the mouse also has a temperature sensor, 16gb usb storage (I haven't tested the full storage capacity despite the usual concerns about Chinese products, but it holds a few files at least), microphone??? and speaker ????? **
** actually, there is one thing really wrong with it, which is a color-cycling RGB led on the front. Easy to paint over though.
 
I'm looking to get a 32 inch 1440p monitor for gaming. I currently have a 27 inch 1440p dell monitor since 2017 and been thinking it's time to get an upgrade and something a little bigger.

My rig is currently a rtx 3080 and I9 so should be able to handle high framerates.
 
I have a Corsair Harpoon mouse and I quite like it, it's good quality. Although it does have a proprietary charging cable, it's only microUSB but they made it so the port is super recessed and you need the plastic around it to be a specific shape to fit in the hole. So that's annoying, but the cable itself seems pretty robust at least.
View attachment 3246359
Most "decent" gaming mice I've tried stopped working after a year.

I really like the Logitech B100. It's a standard 3 button mouse, good build quality, last a long time). The best part, they were only £3. These days they go for the vastly inflated price of ...£6. Still amazing value for money. I bought a bunch of them. I don't know if Logitech's other products hold up as well.
Trackball mouse. The Logitech ones are great.
For maximum features at a great price, I recommend the PCSensor/RDingTech products. You can acquire them from their website or off AliExpress.

I own, from them, a 9 button mouse*, a three-pedal foot pedal setup, and a couple additional pedals. I have to touch my keyboard to type text, sure, but browsing the internet is a breeze with pedals tied to modifier keys and page switching. Don't even use the mouse normally. They also do a bunch of gear for things like wiring up a whole bunch of regular switches as USB HID inputs.

Here's the great thing about their products. Regular gaymer hardware might let you do some programming of macro keys on some of your buttons... if you run some shitty companion software that takes 300mb of RAM. With the PCSensor hardware, there's some nice simple .net programs that you can download from their site if you need to change the programming on an axis or a button to a key or key combination... a mouse movement/button.... a joystick input... a MIDI keyboard input, and from there it's all just handled from the device.

* the mouse also has a temperature sensor, 16gb usb storage (I haven't tested the full storage capacity despite the usual concerns about Chinese products, but it holds a few files at least), microphone??? and speaker ????? **
** actually, there is one thing really wrong with it, which is a color-cycling RGB led on the front. Easy to paint over though.
All good advice(I apologize for the mass quoting, just want to credit you all, it is very nice of you).

I use mice in such a weird way that a trackball might not be feasible but I have been curious about them. Wired mice is a no-go for the same reason.
The Corsair looks very similar to the one I have now and the shape is nice, but I really prefer exchangeable batteries that I can charge on their own instead of charging the mouse itself. Plus they add more weight.
The PCSensor/RDingTech with macro pedals sounds hilarious but I already use a secondary (5kr/50 cent Dell) keyboard filled with auto-switching application specific macros. It is very pleasant. It's part of my ghetto video editing setup. I also made a Steam controller into a shuttle and I'm not spending hundreds of dollars on a real one when I have random dusty crap in a box to mutilate. The "excessive amount of buttons" mouse sounds interesting, I'm going to look into that one.

The corsair is the most tempting one right now, hopefully they have one with AA batteries. Are left and right click super sensitive? That's a plus for me and part of why I go for gamer mice, I kind of swipe them with my thumb near where that middle mouse button is located.

Oh and now I remember, Microsoft has the Sculpt Mouse or whatever it is called with some kind of touchpad around the thumb that can be configured in some way. Has anyone used that?
 
It's easier to learn how to replace a broken switch than finding a mouse that never breaks.
Maybe things have changed in the last 5-10 years or so.

Back then, it wasn't just broken switches (though those did happen). There were other problems like the scroll wheel flicking back up after a downward scroll. Back then, replacement switches were hard to find and often so expensive that is was just as much to get a new mouse, especially if it was cheap. I think some might have been moulded plastic so repairing them usually meant cracking the shell open which never went back together right.

Oddly enough, I was in a computer shop yesterday and saw mechanical keyboards for £30-£60. No idea if they're any good. When I got my mechanical keyboard almost a decade ago, sub £100 mechanical keyboards were rare. The options were basically £10 membrane keyboards that wore out in a year, or you payed almost triple digits for mechanical. In the middle you had "gamer" keyboards that were just membrane keyboards but with lots of lights.
 
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