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

[WelperHelper99]

Well the holidays are coming up and, like a kid writing his wishlist to Sandy Claws, I’m looking at getting or building a PC that’s better than my ASUS laptop for Christmas.

As far as specs are concerned here are the laptop’s.

Spoiler: Specs

• CPU: 12th Generation Intel Core i7-12700H

I’d like to get a CPU that’s somewhat better than this one for a desktop PC but after hearing about what happened to Intel’s 13th and 14th Generation CPUs regarding overvoltage it’s made me a bit wary of their workmanship. I’m considering moving to AMD’s CPUs if I have to.

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop

I’ve done some research on this specific laptop GPU and it’s one of the better Laptop GPUs (currently outranked by the 3080 Ti, 4080, and 4090 Laptop GPUs) on the market but it’s only as good as a desktop 3060 or 3080 GPU. I’d get a GPU that’s better than those two desktop GPUs but I know that the most expensive part is more than likely going to be this part of the computer. One GPU I‘ve heard one should avoid is the RTX 4060 due to it apparently being shit for gaming.

• RAM: laptop comes packaged with 16 GBs of DD4 RAM, upgradable to a maximum of 64 GBs

I have 32 GBs of RAM in my laptop and it does a good job. One thing I’d like to do with this new desktop is to move from DDR4 to DDR5 RAM.

Outside of that I’m honestly clueless the specifics of PC building, I know there are other things I‘ll have to figure out (case, cooling, motherboard, etc.).

I have a 12th gen i9 12900k in my desktop. Very stable and VERY powerful. They only started getting fucky wucky in 13th gen and later in 14th gen. 12 gen is stable and solid. Also have had no issues with the DDR4 I'm packing, but I also have 64 gb.

 

[Fcret]

So let me get this straight, USB-C, the thin small connector made expressly for thin and portable devices like phones, is now your only option on the desktop Mac mini.

Yes, I buy a desktop computer because I want to deal with adapter dongles.

To be fair, the expectation is that you'll be hooking your Mac Mini up to a monitor using USB-C so you'll be able to get type A ports there. Within the Apple ecosystem, there's actually relatively few things you need full-size USB A for these days - peripherals are wireless, the common 'Apple guy' external SSDs all use USB-C natively, and even third-party mac keyboards usually come with type C connectors. I don't have a single device in my Mac setup that still uses type A and I'm usually facing a problem of not having enough type C without some kind of hub.

Even in PC land stuff has been moving over to type C quite aggressively - my Sony INZONE earbuds only have type C for the RF dongle.

Well the holidays are coming up and, like a kid writing his wishlist to Sandy Claws, I’m looking at getting or building a PC that’s better than my ASUS laptop for Christmas.

As far as specs are concerned here are the laptop’s.

Spoiler: Specs

• CPU: 12th Generation Intel Core i7-12700H

I’d like to get a CPU that’s somewhat better than this one for a desktop PC but after hearing about what happened to Intel’s 13th and 14th Generation CPUs regarding overvoltage it’s made me a bit wary of their workmanship. I’m considering moving to AMD’s CPUs if I have to.

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Laptop

I’ve done some research on this specific laptop GPU and it’s one of the better Laptop GPUs (currently outranked by the 3080 Ti, 4080, and 4090 Laptop GPUs) on the market but it’s only as good as a desktop 3060 or 3080 GPU. I’d get a GPU that’s better than those two desktop GPUs but I know that the most expensive part is more than likely going to be this part of the computer. One GPU I‘ve heard one should avoid is the RTX 4060 due to it apparently being shit for gaming.

• RAM: laptop comes packaged with 16 GBs of DD4 RAM, upgradable to a maximum of 64 GBs

I have 32 GBs of RAM in my laptop and it does a good job. One thing I’d like to do with this new desktop is to move from DDR4 to DDR5 RAM.

Outside of that I’m honestly clueless the specifics of PC building, I know there are other things I‘ll have to figure out (case, cooling, motherboard, etc.).

You're better off just hooking this up to a 1440p monitor and using it that way. 4070 laptop isn't that strong but it's more than enough for pretty much anything you'd be playing at 1440p.

If you're interested in building a desktop just because, I'd buy a monitor now, use your laptop with it, and wait until next year when X3D cpus are out and we have the new gen of GPUs.

 

[LegoTugboat]

MacBook Air - Base RAM improved to 16 GB, same price.

MacBook Pro - Receives M4, M4 Pro and M4 Max (16/4). Also the GPU in the max is fucking massive.

Ctyberpunk 2077 and Where Winds Meet get announced for Mac as well.

 

[The Ugly One]

Apple's attitude has always been that if you're a poorfag who plugs old shit into new devices, you should stop being poor. This is the actual port list on the base model:
2x USB-C
3.5mm headphones
3x Tbolt 4
HDMI

This is the back:

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

A 256 gb ssd is criminal, especially for Apple prices. Stick a terabyte in there, the costs are low enough now.

The real crime is the soldering of the SSD, the solution is getting an external drive.

The $600 model is not bad for what it is, and I've recommended that to someone who was using an iMac before. They didn't even cut down the SoC for that base model, surprisingly.

 

[TheRaptorJesus]

Building out a 7800x3d system currently. Hopefully the 9800x3d will bring the 7800 price back down.

Intel hasn't sold a single Arrow Lake CPU at Germany's largest retailer — Core Ultra 200S sales stagnate after just one week

The Tweet displays Mindfactory's CPU sales numbers for the past week. None of the five Arrow Lake desktop SKUs—Core Ultra 9 285K, Core Ultra 7 265K/KF, or Core Ultra 5 245K/KF—appear on the chart. In fact, Intel's highest-performing CPU, the Core i5-13400, takes 21st place behind a wall of Ryzen chips. A trio of 14th Gen Core i7s and Core i9s take up the rear, with all of Intel's processors selling around ten units each.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Building out a 7800x3d system currently. Hopefully the 9800x3d will bring the 7800 price back down.

You got screwed bad by not getting it when it was around $320. The price shooting up isn't a mistake and would seem to be a result of AMD stopping production of the 7800X3D. Will they resume production? I heard Zen 5 doesn't cost more to make than Zen 4.

If the price remains high you might end up getting a 9800X3D instead. Even if it's only +5-10% in gaming, thermals could be greatly affected by putting the cache chiplet under the CCD, and the packaging changes made in the previous Ryzen 9000 CPUs that already led to a 7ºC reduction. Unfortunately, the rumor mill is putting the MSRP at $480, so it could take a while for either CPU to come down to a reasonable price. That's the cost of Intel failing to compete.

Intel hasn't sold a single Arrow Lake CPU at Germany's largest retailer — Core Ultra 200S sales stagnate after just one week

New sockets are a tough sell now, as was seen with dismal Zen 5 launch sales. You would think Euros would gravitate to a somewhat more efficient CPU, but they'll just get AMD if they want efficiency.

 

[The Ugly One]

Given that the main message from the review sites is, "This thing will blue screen on you," can't imagine that would be good for sales.

 

[TheRaptorJesus]

You got screwed bad by not getting it when it was around $320.

Tell me about it, but I have a habit of waffling. If this rumor is true, it should drop it back down.

Latest leak suggests the Ryzen 7 9800X3D will launch with a price tag of $479

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D now official: $479 price, OC support, 20% faster than Core Ultra 9 285K in games

Supports overclocking (no further details). The clock speeds leaked before are official, so: 4.7 GHz base, 5.2 GHz boost. AMD claims an average +8% gaming performance vs. the 7800X3D, but it can be higher than +20% in some titles:



They compared it to the 285K instead of a 14900KS or something. Fair play, lol.

Here's something interesting:

SRAM scaling isn't dead after all — TSMC's 2nm process tech claims major improvements

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that new types of transistors (GAAFET with TSMC N2) could allow SRAM scaling to continue. Looks like +13% from N3 (38 vs. 33.55 Mb/mm^2).

 

[TheRaptorJesus]

Apparently you can Oc the 9800x3d, but i'm sure its pointless in the age if PBO and TVB.

 

[Fcret]

SRAM scaling isn't dead after all — TSMC's 2nm process tech claims major improvements

In retrospect, it should have been obvious that new types of transistors (GAAFET with TSMC N2) could allow SRAM scaling to continue. Looks like +13% from N3 (38 vs. 33.55 Mb/mm^2).

We are so fucking back bros

 

[Slav Power]

Just a small tangent on an observation I've made, and I guess this is a good thread to post about it. I used to have two SATA SSD's, one 500GB for the OS and one 1TB for games and other stuff. The OS one got some heavy wear pretty quickly while the 1TB one barely got any. Later on I swapped it for a 2TB NVMe one so it was left unused. Until I fucked up my OS by trying to repartition it with gparted, after which I did a reinstall on that 1TB SSD. Very quickly it got it's first wear percentage.

Originally I assumed Windows is just that tasking on the SSD, but after I ran a certain NirSoft utility I think the reason lies somewhere else.

The web browser constantly writes to disk. More so than any other OS component. By the looks of it, it's the profile directory that's constantly being accessed. Right now I moved it to the 2TB SSD and symlinked it so right now it will be that drive taking a beating and not the OS SSD. I still don't know why the fuck modern browsers rape your drive like that, and it kinda raises a question of whether or not you'd want a separate SSD for shit like this. Fun fact: if you try and load a Chromium profile that's on an HDD despite the browser being installed on an SSD, it'll load slow as shit anyways, so the bulk of browser loading is not in the browser itself but the profile.

On a side note, I later imaged that borked 1TB OS SSD to a VHD file, and tried booting from it from a ThinkPad for shits and giggles. Somehow it decided that it no longer blue screens on bootup and the OS woke up just fine. I still have a dilemma whether or not to format it. On one hand, I already got a fresh Win10 instance working, I didn't need a live OS to migrate my shit and I have the VHD which I can always access in case I need something or I could just spin up in Hyper-V.

On the other that OS install is quite old, and it's such a frankenstein that somehow still lives that I don't want to. It was initially an older version of LTSC, later upgraded to a newer one, then changed to regular Win10 Pro, and then swapped to a motherboard that was 8 years newer, plus a shitton of tinkering and abuse, all without any issues, and I finally fucked it up with gparted, only for it to magically unfuck itself by plugging it into a different computer. That's admirable resilience, and I was always squeamish about formatting and repurposing OS drives anyways. My old old Win7 OS HDD is gathering dust on the shelf but it would still boot. I definitely need to work more on my current system where 99% of my shit will live on a separate drive.

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D now official: $479 price, OC support, 20% faster than Core Ultra 9 285K in games

Thinking about upgrading from my 9900k to this. Am curious if Microcenter will have any good bundles and how much of a joke AMD's GPUs will be.

Kinda sad that by the time I can upgrade I'll miss out on all the sweet 7800x3D deals.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Zen 5 X3D chips shaping up to be like every other X3D release: some games see heavy increases, some...barely any at all. It's up to the buyer to determine if the games they play will benefit from it.

 

[ZMOT]

Will they resume production? I heard Zen 5 doesn't cost more to make than Zen 4.

doubt it. I expect a repeat of the 5800x3d, very cheap at some point to sell off stock and now you hardly can find one new (I missed that window 6 months ago, probably going with a 5800x as the final am4 upgrade now, but even that one is slowly going up).

however there might be quite a few second-hand 7800x3d around from people switching to a 9800x3d - if they do switch and not skip to the 11800 or whatever the number will be.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Thinking about upgrading from my 9900k to this. Am curious if Microcenter will have any good bundles and how much of a joke AMD's GPUs will be.

Micro Center generally has good bundles at some point, and if you live near one, you have surpassed the rest of the United States and most of the world in value (maybe China gets some better deals sometimes judging by cheap AliExpress stuff).

Zen 5 X3D chips shaping up to be like every other X3D release: some games see heavy increases, some...barely any at all. It's up to the buyer to determine if the games they play will benefit from it.

Well, one of the big questions is how it compares to the 7800X3D. We already saw anemic gains from Ryzen 9000 CPUs, so AMD has pulled the clock speed lever hard for the 9800X3D, allowing (full?) overclocking support, and taken a brand new approach of stacking the cache chiplet under the CCD.

But what AMD is claiming is +8% average for the 9800X3D vs. 7800X3D. Which is not a whole lot even if it could have been worse (without +500 MHz base clock). For specific titles, it can be a lot more and that will be nice for some.

doubt it. I expect a repeat of the 5800x3d, very cheap at some point to sell off stock and now you hardly can find one new (I missed that window 6 months ago, probably going with a 5800x as the final am4 upgrade now, but even that one is slowly going up).

The 5800X3D has effectively been replaced by the 5700X3D. Maybe we'll see a repeat of that sometime.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

But what AMD is claiming is +8% average for the 9800X3D vs. 7800X3D. Which is not a whole lot even if it could have been worse (without +500 MHz base clock). For specific titles, it can be a lot more and that will be nice for some.

We'll see what the actual average gain is, but when i go back in time to see what the 7800X3D increase over the 5800X3D, the average 1080p gain really wasn't groundbreaking. For instance over at:

https://www.thefpsreview.com/2023/04/05/amd-ryzen-7-7800x3d-gaming-performance-review/

we get like 10% average across those 8 games. IIRC the 5800X3D was also this way over the basic 5800X.

 

[geckogoy]

IIRC the 5800X3D was also this way over the basic 5800X.

The X3D chips utterly mog the X chips on anything that is cache or memory bound so you are likely mistaken (actually the 5800x3d beats a lot of 9000 series chips in that situation let alone its own generation)

 

[Betonhaus]

The X3D chips utterly mog the X chips on anything that is cache or memory bound so you are likely mistaken (actually the 5800x3d beats a lot of 9000 series chips in that situation let alone its own generation)

Who knew that not gimping the memory makes the cpu more powerful?