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

My experience of their recent machines massively soured me on the brand and don't think I'll be buying another Lenovo machine in the future.
Well this thing costed about 130 bucks and for 130 bucks this is a good computer, alone the screen makes it worth it really. If I paid 1400 what it apparently costed at some point I'd be mad though. If I was a starving (non-AI) artist, I would buy something like this with it's excellent wacom tablet built in over the overpriced stuff wacom itself sells anyday too. The wacoms' tablets' screens aren't even this nice which for an artists tool, ist just mind-boggling.

Compared to the Fujitsu you immediately are hit with the difference in sheer build quality though. It's not like it's poorly built - Besides the keyboard which is a joke in bad taste - it is really just not that nice for it's original price. Generally the unit is okay-built quality wise, magnesium/plastic compound case - I also like how the metal stand folds down, it's much more stable that way. |_ or even /_ is just inherently more stable than |\. The downside is that it's not as elegant, slides and with that scratches more easy, also theoretically the hinges could break easier but this shouldn't be a problem with this unit. Apparently lenovo changed to |\ with 3rd gen though. It was probably mostly an aesthetic choice to look more like the Microsoft Surface IMHO. ( |_ also has the advantage to work on rather uneven surfaces like a blanket or your legs)

There's absolutely no excuse to not set thermal limits in the firmware for the processor and it just oozes chinese "numba wan benchmark" shitty practices and general lack of care and QA you usually see from chink companies. Thankfully it can be remedied in the OS but I wonder how many people are capable of it? It's even less understandable because their thermal solution is actually decent enough to deliver good speeds without the SoC fucking overheating. By default, the case gets unpleasant to the touch. With my settings, it gets slightly warm around the SoC under stress testing. This is sold as also usable as handheld tablet. You do the math.

It's also really easy to take apart, contrary to the Fujitsu (which has plastic hinges a bit too small for comfort) and HP unit (just terrible) you also have less of a feeling you can break this. The innards are not nearly as clean and elegant though, the Fujitsu is a work of art here. I noticed with my HHKB too that these Japanese really love their compartments and screws.

The unit I got was fairly beaten up. I fixed a deep scratch in the frame by filling it with Sugru, then went over it with with black touch-up paint (traffic black, RAL 9011?). You have to know there was a scratch to find it now. I wanna cover the foot in plasti dip to make it more scratch resistant and also less slide-y. If I still feel like tinkering I might try buffing out the case, it should be easy to work with. This is more just for fun and because I like tinkering like this, it's generally not really worth the effort probably.

The reality than I am starting to learn, primarily through this thread, is that for consumer workloads, virtually anything you could think to buy is fine. Home PCs are ridiculous now.
My man, if you want a tiny computer for your home to do PC things and don't want to spend a lot of money, complete with monitor you can do that for 200-300$ (and I'm being generous here, you can catch a small Esprimo with 7400T at around ~100$ if you shop a little) and have a decent machine that'll probably last you many years at this point. It'll even be decent enough to stream games from more powerful computers. (I streamed games from my desktop to both the Lenovo and Fujitsu without a hitch, although the Lenovo was better at it) It makes sense for the big corps to diversify their products into "office" and "enthusiast" levels but at this rate even that won't keep the profits up. My guess is we'll see hardware subscriptions and unlockable features in hardware soon, like in cars. Also, oh so much planned obsolecence it'll make Apple blush. The used computer market will get a lot more relevance then.
 
Well this thing costed about 130 bucks and for 130 bucks this is a good computer, alone the screen makes it worth it really. If I paid 1400 what it apparently costed at some point I'd be mad though
That's a good point, if I got mine for decently cheap it would be easier to overlook some of the chinesium defects but I paid close to full price so I was pretty salty when it started falling apart.
 
There's absolutely no excuse to not set thermal limits in the firmware for the processor and it just oozes chinese "numba wan benchmark" shitty practices and general lack of care and QA you usually see from chink companies. Thankfully it can be remedied in the OS but I wonder how many people are capable of it? It's even less understandable because their thermal solution is actually decent enough to deliver good speeds without the SoC fucking overheating. By default, the case gets unpleasant to the touch. With my settings, it gets slightly warm around the SoC under stress testing. This is sold as also usable as handheld tablet. You do the math.
Were you running it with a completely fresh OS install? I recall Lenovos of that error coming with a pretty heavy package of 'addons'- not HP or Dell bad, but quite possibly something that should have been handled by Lenovo Numba Won Power Manager in the default Windows Vista install.bb
 
AMD has been trying this ever since hUMA in 2014. It hasn't been as successful as they would like, but there have been distinct gains.

The Steam Deck is a good example of an integrated solution: middling CPU, large GPU, with shared memory. And rumours are AMD wants to push in this direction with future APUs. It also helps that the Series S is so weak, along with upscaling tech like FSR bridging the gap for casual gaming. The M1 nailed it out of the gate, but since it's :wow: Apple, anything beyond Vulkan 1.0 is going to be like flying to Mars.
Rembrandt's die size is 210mm^2, and it gets a decent 8-core and the 680M iGPU that is a little weaker than the Xbox Series S, compensating with higher clocks. Hitting 60 FPS at 1080p in many games is not hard. Phoenix Point will probably stay at 12 CUs and shrink in size, with maybe a +30-50% GPU performance increase. Strix Point could add cores.

Xbox Series S will stall the gaming industry for the rest of the decade, with shit like its 10 GB of shared RAM and 2 GB of that running slower. Even if it didn't, it's the resolution targets that matter since CPU performance of these APUs is absurd. APUs are good enough for 1080p gaming, will move towards 1440p, and FSR or other scaling algorithms could take it to 4K.

Unresolved is whether or not AMD will make a premium APU or bring big caches to an APU such as an L4 cache or 3D V-Cache. Probably not, and Dragon Range does not count.

In Steam Deck 2 news, it looks like Valve will stick with the same 4-core Zen 2 and 8 CU RDNA2 custom Aerith SoC. We'll have to wait for at least Steam Deck 3 to see a better APU. It doesn't look like AMD cares about the middling CPU, large GPU combo. It was a one-off chip intended for Microsoft, that Valve snatched up instead. Their APU strategy skips from "big" Rembrandt/Phoenix to weak Mendocino. Not counting Vega rebrands. I would rather see the 8-cores in mini PCs anyway.
 
You may have seen the benchmarks posted earlier, DDR5-4800 provided no better than 5% improvement over DDR-2133. Games simply aren't memory bound. It's like nobody's really figured out anything new to do with games in 10 years other than render at 4K.

There is literally more inventiveness in the ZZT community - including back-engineering the entire program - than I have seen in the AAA games space for several years.
 
Were you running it with a completely fresh OS install? I recall Lenovos of that error coming with a pretty heavy package of 'addons'- not HP or Dell bad, but quite possibly something that should have been handled by Lenovo Numba Won Power Manager in the default Windows Vista install.bb
If you buy a used computer, the very first thing you should do of course is to wipe the OS already on there (because there's no telling if it has been tampered with) and so I did. Same goes to the firmware really but I don't think that's a realistic threat. I also don't use windows anyways.

It's possible to set these limits via UEFI firmware and it'd be sensible to do, many mobile devices do. The OS and some weird custom power manager software is not the right place for such settings. (Not saying that's not how Lenovo solved it -very well possible- it's just not the proper way to solve it IMO)

The only downside left I see in these systems and which probably bears mentioning is spectre/meltdown type exploits which often are not easy to fix for them (fixes usually coming with a huge performance impact, e.g. retbleed) or which are not fully fixable at all. Javascript and it's consequences...
 
Could you guys give me a bit of advice?

Is this actually a good momment to buy a GPU? Would this 3060 at this price be a good purchase or is it still overpriced? I haven't been keeping up so not sure. Would an AMD be better/cheaper?


I was gonna wait and save a few months to make sure i can get a good PC that will last me for many years (im 8 years using this one) but if its likely that prices will spike up again i might consider buying the gpu alone first and saving it for when i get the other parts.
 
Could you guys give me a bit of advice?

Is this actually a good momment to buy a GPU? Would this 3060 at this price be a good purchase or is it still overpriced? I haven't been keeping up so not sure. Would an AMD be better/cheaper?


I was gonna wait and save a few months to make sure i can get a good PC that will last me for many years (im 8 years using this one) but if its likely that prices will spike up again i might consider buying the gpu alone first and saving it for when i get the other parts.
i'd say overpriced but then again i was lucky to snag a 3060 for 250~ dollars off ebay used so who actually knows
 
@LinkinParkxNaruto[AMV]

Very overpriced. There was a deal where you could snag a rx6750 on Newegg for around that same price.

A 6750 will curbstomp a 3060 all week long unless all you literally do is play loltracing tech demos.

*Edit* MSI mech model is $390 after $20 rebate (I've done it, it's reliable). You also get 2 games. Ymmv on that.

Man, you could make such a wicked 1440p setup with this and a $300 5800x3d...
 
There is literally more inventiveness in the ZZT community - including back-engineering the entire program - than I have seen in the AAA games space for several years.
You don't need to be creative to saturate bandwidth. You just need read and write lots and lots of data, and I'd expect an asset-rich AAA game to use more bandwidth than an ASCII RPG. Modern computers are just capable of insane levels of data throughput that games apparently don't need. Dual-channel DD4-2133 can transfer up to 34 GB/s. Apparently, that's plenty for a game.
 
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Could you guys give me a bit of advice?

Is this actually a good momment to buy a GPU? Would this 3060 at this price be a good purchase or is it still overpriced? I haven't been keeping up so not sure. Would an AMD be better/cheaper?


I was gonna wait and save a few months to make sure i can get a good PC that will last me for many years (im 8 years using this one) but if its likely that prices will spike up again i might consider buying the gpu alone first and saving it for when i get the other parts.
Maybe? Prices have risen since my last purchase. If you want brand new, go ahead. Personally I prefer used. Got a 3060 TI from ebay four months ago for less than $350, and sold a 2060 for about $200. Of course if you want more vram for less, the 12gb 3060 is a good choice too.
 
Maybe? Prices have risen since my last purchase. If you want brand new, go ahead. Personally I prefer used. Got a 3060 TI from ebay four months ago for less than $350, and sold a 2060 for about $200. Of course if you want more vram for less, the 12gb 3060 is a good choice too.
What makes me wary of used GPUs is likely that its been mining crypto 24/7 for months straight so who knows how much the lifespan is reduced.
 
We'll have to wait for at least Steam Deck 3 to see a better APU.
Fuck.
Could you guys give me a bit of advice?

Is this actually a good momment to buy a GPU? Would this 3060 at this price be a good purchase or is it still overpriced? I haven't been keeping up so not sure. Would an AMD be better/cheaper?


I was gonna wait and save a few months to make sure i can get a good PC that will last me for many years (im 8 years using this one) but if its likely that prices will spike up again i might consider buying the gpu alone first and saving it for when i get the other parts.
Not cheap. 3060's were good value when the insanity was high, it's not that good a product. As others have pointed out the 6700/6750 is a little more money, and is closer to a 3070. If you have 100s to burn, cheap 3080s are where the discount action is.

 
Could you guys give me a bit of advice?

Is this actually a good momment to buy a GPU? Would this 3060 at this price be a good purchase or is it still overpriced? I haven't been keeping up so not sure. Would an AMD be better/cheaper?


I was gonna wait and save a few months to make sure i can get a good PC that will last me for many years (im 8 years using this one) but if its likely that prices will spike up again i might consider buying the gpu alone first and saving it for when i get the other parts.
NVIDIA cards are overpriced because muh raytracing. A 6600 XT or 6700 is every bit its equal for everything you could care about and will come in about $30 cheaper.

Inflation isn't going away, so if you see something you like, buy it.
 
Thanks for the tip guys. I am gonna be thinking about it.

I'll probably wait till january and start buying one part every month or so not too break too much bank at once. Like i did with my current one.

I am wondering if you could give me a little advice on the case? I know these newer gpus are pretty big and produce a lot of heat.
 
Thanks for the tip guys. I am gonna be thinking about it.

I'll probably wait till january and start buying one part every month or so not too break too much bank at once. Like i did with my current one.

I am wondering if you could give me a little advice on the case? I know these newer gpus are pretty big and produce a lot of heat.
Stuff in the range you're looking really aren't too big nor are space heaters. Fwiw AMD cards generally are more power efficient, but cooling either really shouldn't be an issue.
 
I use AMD for my PC. Honestly Ryzen is one of the biggest things for me in the world of PC's. Though, I'm still using a 2700 because the prebuilt I bought came with it and the firmware for the MOBO is custom so I'm not even sure I can upgrade it. I did upgrade the PS and the GPU though. I have a 850 watt power supply. For the GPU I had an RX 580 but upgraded to the RX 5600 XT in 2020, in November 2021 I got the RX 6700 XT. I'll be honest that for my next PC I'm considering getting an Intel machine as far as the CPU goes. If Intel Arc becomes better with regular driver updates I would buy one of those.

The phone market is also changing, honestly speaking it seems like companies on Android are going from using Qualcomm's Snapdragon to developing their own Arm chips. It makes me wonder what Qualcomm is going to do when no company is using their chips other than maybe Sony, and a few other companies. Lol
 
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