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

[The Ugly One]

God I hate HUB, they are so smug. I still prefer seeking out benchmarks that are as close as possible to what I have. 1080p low with 4090s benches are a dime a dozen. Lemme know how my 3080 at 1440p will fare. Even if you are unlikley to gain frames, maybe you'd gain consistency.

You can look up benchmarks for the CPU you currently have, and if the 1% lows are still faster than your target frame rate, then about all it will do for you in games is make you feel good about yourself.

What I have found, though, is that going from a quad-core i7-7700 to an 8+8 core i9-12900 resulted in being able to have a bizarre amount of browser tabs open, which is pretty neat. Alt-tabbing between a game and a web browser was a lot faster, too. Having all my office apps open? No big deal. You never really regret having too much memory or too much CPU power.

 

[AmpleApricots]

The magic of 200 browser tabs is a browser plugin that unloads inactive tabs, which will also free the RAM. That's how I pulled two open browser instances with ~100 tabs on each on an i5-7y57 with 8 gigs of ram. (Yes my life is out of control)

It's honestly such a nobrainer to unload tabs that haven't been viewed in a while that it should be the standard. I don't know how browsers handle JS in non-active tabs (so maybe they do this already) but having them suspended by default is probably not a bad idea from a security standpoint either.

 

[big pauper]

I upgraded from a 7600k to a 7940x a few years ago when they were cheap (they still are but they're getting old) and I didn't realize how bad 4 cores are at multitasking until then.

The magic of 200 browser tabs is a browser plugin that unloads inactive tabs, which will also free the RAM. That's how I pulled two open browser instances with ~100 tabs on each on an i5-7y57 with 8 gigs of ram. (Yes my life is out of control)

It's honestly such a nobrainer to unload tabs that haven't been viewed in a while that it should be the standard. I don't know how browsers handle JS in non-active tabs (so maybe they do this already) but having them suspended by default is probably not a bad idea from a security standpoint either.

I have a feeling that browsers used to do this but then stopped when chrome got popular to make browsing faster,and it just means it gets put in virtual memory now - which is the worst possible outcome when every web page takes 300mb of JavaScript and it's competing with everything else on the system on a sata ssd

 

[The Backwards Man]

Regarding the reddit 9800x3d/msi thing; newegg, bestbuy, microcenter etc should force their customers to partake in an IQ test where if they score below the national average their purchases are limited to budget laptops and prebuilts. Redditors just cannot be trusted with anything high end.

 

[Archeops]

I've been using various PC-building sites to figure out what the ideal build for my hypothetical desktop PC would look like, here's what I've got so far.

Spoiler

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D or Ryzen 7 9800X3D

Intel's 13th and 14th Gen CPUs being afflicted with overvoltage bullshit has made me very wary of their integrity so I'm moving to AMD for this build. I'm considering Intel's 12th Gen i9-12900KS as a last-resort "budget" option since it's a cheaper CPU but going with it might throw a monkey wrench into a lot of the builds I've been working with.

And as far as which AMD CPU I'd go with it'll be largely based on availability when I get the ball rolling, if 9800X3D CPU is available I'll go for it but if not I'll stick to the 7800X3D.

• CPU cooler: Undecided, but leaning towards liquid coolers

I'm looking at various liquid coolers with me favoring the NZXT Kraken line of coolers. And yes, it's mostly due to me liking that LED screen I was also considering getting a graphene cooling pad over thermal paste.

• Motherboard: Undecided

I'm avoiding A620-backed mobos (as recommended by @The Mass Shooter Ron Soye suggested) but I plan on going to Micro Center to learn more about which mobo is best for my builds. I wanted go full retard and get that "fancy" Sonic-themed mobo from ASRock but it's been retired for a while AFAIK, it's only compatible with Intel chips, and there are two versions (a Z790 mobo without Wi-Fi and a B780M with Wi-Fi) .

• RAM: 32 GBs of DDR5

With an entirely new mobo I'm going to upgrade to DDR5 RAM, I've come to realize that DDR4 isn't particularly fast in the current environment.

• GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Super

One of the things I've realized is that my laptop's RTX 4070 GPU only packs 8 GBs of on-board memory and I feel like it's a bit lacking. If I go with this one I'll probably go with MSI's due to it being cheaper and certain editions packing a monke.

I did have a look at AMD Radeon GPUs (just in case I can't get a RTX 4070 Super) and the only one that came up in 1-to-1 comparisons was the Radeon RX 7800 XT which goes for around $100 less

• OS: Windows 11

I'm going to go with Shitdows 11 since that's what I''ve got on my laptop and AFAIK you can't downgrade it to Windows 10.

The case and PSU are still works in progress but I'll get more info as I learn more about the PC building process.

Oh, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that there isn't a desktop equivalent to my laptop's MUX switch. That'll be a learning experience.

 

[DavidS877]

here's what I've got so far.

You might also want to add some storage. I'm a big fan of overkill, so I tend to go for 2TB these days. But if you don't have large game or video needs then 1TB is likely fine. Depending on the MB you might spring for PCIe Gen 5 right out of the gate. I like Samsung, but opinions vary there, and I certainly wouldn't get their strange Gen 4x4/Gen 5x2 unit, that just seems bizarre.

 

[Archeops]

You might also want to add some storage. I'm a big fan of overkill, so I tend to go for 2TB these days. But if you don't have large game or video needs then 1TB is likely fine. Depending on the MB you might spring for PCIe Gen 5 right out of the gate. I like Samsung, but opinions vary there, and I certainly wouldn't get their strange Gen 4x4/Gen 5x2 unit, that just seems bizarre.

Yeah, that slipped my mind when making the list. As far as storage goes I'm going for a 2TB SSD, my laptop's storage is almost full and I blame my recent "get a game when it's free and it catches your eye" catches for that.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I've been using various PC-building sites to figure out what the ideal build for my hypothetical desktop PC would look like, here's what I've got so far.

Spoiler

undefined

What was your current system again, some RTX 3050 laptop?

Prices for the 7800X3D are ass now, I think they bottomed out at $330. A bundle might be the way to go.



32 GB kits are often sub-$100, the average B650 motherboard is probably at least $150 even if I assign a value of "$100" to "motherboard" in my head (being a cheapass). So the CPU could be considered $370-420 here (+ $80 RAM + $100-150 mobo).



This 7700X would be $170-220 (normally $250). The specific Gigabyte motherboard in that $400 bundle is technically $180 but I ignore that price and substitute what I would be willing to pay looking at more options.

https://www.microcenter.com/product/5006972/amd-ryzen-5-7600x3d,-asus-tuf-gaming-b650-plus-wifi,-gskill-flare-x5-series-32gb-ddr5-6000-kit,-computer-build-bundle

Here's perhaps the best option. The MICRO CENTER EXCLUSIVE 7600X3D instead of 7700X for the same $400. You'll get similar gaming performance to the 7800X3D while saving a whopping $200. Become a 6-core peasant, it won't hurt.

 

[Archeops]

What was your current system again, some RTX 3050 laptop?

It's this RTX 4070 Laptop GPU-powered ASUS TUF laptop that I picked up last year. The funny thing is that released a newer model (with the only notable difference being that it's packing a 13th Gen Intel Core i7-13620H CPU) that was released a few months after I picked up mine.

Prices for the 7800X3D are ass now, I think they bottomed out at $330. A bundle might be the way to go.

That's actually something I was thinking about doing at first and I suppose I should still keep it on the table.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

That's actually something I was thinking about doing at first and I suppose I should still keep it on the table.

I concluded you should get the 7600X3D bundle. At $400 for CPU+mobo+RAM, that's less than what some sad sacks are paying for the 7800X3D alone right now.

 

[Fcret]

I'm looking at various liquid coolers with me favoring the NZXT Kraken line of coolers. And yes, it's mostly due to me liking that LED screen I was also considering getting a graphene cooling pad over thermal paste.

I would strongly suggest not overthinking your cooling. A $35 thermalright peerless assassin will perform basically as well as a 240mm AIO unless you're doing something where the CPU is going to spend long periods boosting. Games generally have bursty CPU load rather than sustained CPU load so the AIO won't really help there. A tower cooler is going to be cheaper and far less prone to malfunction and give you basically identical performance to an overpriced AIO.

If you're absolutely dead-set on an AIO, I recommend Arctic's Liquid Freezer line over NZXT. I don't recommend buying a cooler based on gimmicks like screens that you can just buy separately.

Motherboard: Undecided

Do you care about USB4 (aka thunderbolt) and PCIE 5.0? If not, then stick to B650, B650E, and B850. Pretty much all mobos come with overbuilt power delivery and cooling these days because they're an easy way to bake in margin for the manufacturer. Expensive mobos only add features which you probably don't care about for gaming. Buy whatever looks pleasing and fits in your budget from these chipsets. For the 9800X3D, you will probably need to update the BIOS before using the CPU. All AM5 motherboards come with BIOS flashback capabilties that allow you to flash the BIOS using a USB drive without a CPU installed so no need to look for this specifically.

RAM: 32 GBs of DDR5

This is a good choice. Aim for 6000 MT/s CL-30 EXPO as that's kind of the 'most likely to work good' spec for Zen 4 and Zen 5 generally. Higher speeds don't benefit X3D as much so don't overspend on some 6800 MT/s meme shit. Going above 6000 MT/s on Zen 4/5 comes with a bunch of caveats and diminishing returns for microarchitectural reasons so while it's possible it's not really worth spending extra money.

GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Super

Wait until January to see what Nvidia and AMD are doing. I'm normally anti-wait but we're basically two months from Nvidia announcing the 5000 series and AMD announcing RDNA4. If you somehow come across a killer deal on a 4070 Super for black Friday (at or below $500), then I'd ignore previous advice and just pull the trigger. I would not pay full MSRP for any card right now.

The Radeon 7000-series cards lack features compared to Nvidia you might want and we know AMD is going to be focusing heavily on adding equivalent functionality in the next gen so you might feel a little gimped if you buy one of them now. That being said, if you don't care much about ray-tracing performance and AI upscaling, $50 more than the 4070 Super will buy you a 7900 XT which completely dumpsters all over that card in terms of raw rasterization performance and VRAM. I don't recommend buying any card right now, but you could do way worse than a $650 7900 XT and we'll probably see prices dip way lower for black Friday.

tl;dr don't buy a card unless you get an insane deal on one for black friday

 

[seri0us]

Oh, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that there isn't a desktop equivalent to my laptop's MUX switch. That'll be a learning experience.

Why would you want that on a desktop?

 

[Susanna]

Why would you want that on a desktop?

I use this on my desktop, it's a really nice feature to have for passing through your dGPU to a VM. My monitor is plugged into the iGPU, and the dGPU is available to render frames for games or handle CUDA tasks without needing to be plugged directly into anything. Also saves a tiny bit of power when I'm only doing light tasks, since I'm not using a 24GB 4090 to display my animated wallpaper and some browser windows.

Oh, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that there isn't a desktop equivalent to my laptop's MUX switch. That'll be a learning experience.

It won't be a physical switch, but you can still get this functionality on desktop. I doubt it'll prove particularly useful for you, since you're probably not as deeply into virtual machines and VFIO passthrough as I am, but you can do it. Turn on Hybrid Graphics in BIOS (might have a different name), and then just boot. On Linux most applications that use reasonably modern 3D implementations will handle switching automatically, troublesome ones you can tell which GPU to use with the environment variable DRI_PRIME, for example "DRI_PRIME=pci-0000_01_00_0 %command%" for an arbitrary Steam game. No idea how this stuff works on Windows, but I assume it does somehow because this is how most modern laptops handle d/eGPUs.
But unless you have a specific reason to want hybrid graphics on desktop, like my example with passing through the dGPU to a virtual machine, you should just be plugging your monitor into the dGPU and leave the iGPU unused. Hybrid graphics always carries a small performance penalty, and you're not actually saving that much power even with a 4090. With some browser windows open right now, my 4090 as sole renderer sits at 28W, with the iGPU only graphics is using 22W. Those six watts are negligible while doing nothing graphically demanding, and if you do start something graphically demanding, the dGPU is going to suck up a lot of power no matter what.

You might also want to add some storage. I'm a big fan of overkill, so I tend to go for 2TB these days.

*Looks at workstation's 3*4TB SN850 storage pool*

 

[AmpleApricots]

There's also the downside that programs that have no business touching the dGPU (or any of the dGPUs, in theory the number is not limited) love waking up the dGPU all the time just to query if it's there. I realized this when I removed the fans from the dGPU and had linux-controlled case fans that turn on when the program controlling them registers the GPU coming out of D3. mpv is such a candidate. Normally it doesn't matter but once in a while the linux kernel likes to break in ways where this waking up/going to sleep cycle eventually leaves the card in an undefined state. Same with binding and unbinding.

The usage of an iGPU can still make sense since they are inherently more power efficient and run cooler. Especially since a lot of software is very poorly optimized and will just take from whatever GPU it runs on what it can get, even if it doesn't need it. There's a difference between maxing out a Ryzen APU and maxing out a 4090, in heat, power consumption and also noise.

I used to have an even more elaborate setup where the rendering was done on a headless server on the network and forwarded to my desktop via VirtualGL. When it worked it worked really well but when it didn't, it didn't at all. This was fairly random. I have no idea how well it works now.

In the 90s I was promised networking OSes that let me run stuff like this on completely transparent, virtualized nodes with no regard to even differing hardware architectures. Now what.

 

[WULULULULU]

Aim for 6000 MT/s CL-30 EXPO

*sweats in CL32-38-38-96*

 

[Susanna]

*sweats in CL32-38-38-96*

Dial your tRefi way down and you’ll still get decent performance.

 

[⠠⠠⠅⠑⠋⠋⠁⠇⠎ ⠠⠠⠊⠎ ⠠⠠⠁ ⠠⠠⠋⠁⠛]

In the 90s I was promised networking OSes that let me run stuff like this on completely transparent, virtualized nodes with no regard to even differing hardware architectures. Now what.

How does that advance Wayland adoption, chud?

 

[AmpleApricots]

How does that advance Wayland adoption, chud?

It's not the Linux thread but I'll always remember trying out wayland and having "feelable" latency on the terminal emulator, googling for the problem and finding posts akin to "uhh no chud, lowering latency was NEVER the goal of wayland compositors" - That was like, the one goal they had. They moved the goal posts so much they're in the parking lot now.

But no, this isn't the fault of Wayland. It's the fault of Linux being conceptually half-cooked. I was promised something like this or this. Of course that's never going to happen.

 

[Archeops]

My Amazon app just gave me a notification regarding an AMD CPU going on sale, I could pick up an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X CPU for $226 (with two different bundles containing ASUS mobos, one of ‘em even contains two mobos AFAICT).

I concluded you should get the 7600X3D bundle. At $400 for CPU+mobo+RAM, that's less than what some sad sacks are paying for the 7800X3D alone right now.

I guess I’ll have to wait on getting it regardless of which CPU I go for, both the 7600X3D and the 7800X3D are sold out at my local Micro Centers. Thankfully they seem to get shipments in regularly,

I would strongly suggest not overthinking your cooling. A $35 thermalright peerless assassin will perform basically as well as a 240mm AIO unless you're doing something where the CPU is going to spend long periods boosting. Games generally have bursty CPU load rather than sustained CPU load so the AIO won't really help there. A tower cooler is going to be cheaper and far less prone to malfunction and give you basically identical performance to an overpriced AIO.

I’ve always assumed that AIO coolers are the better option but if a simple air cooler performs just as well then I hav no issues going with it, especially if I don’t have to deal with any fluid leakage.

That and I should’ve expected air coolers to do a decent job from the start, my laptop has a cooling pad that does wonders for my laptop.

If you're absolutely dead-set on an AIO, I recommend Arctic's Liquid Freezer line over NZXT. I don't recommend buying a cooler based on gimmicks like screens that you can just buy separately.

I’ll probably buy those gimmicky parts separately or 3D print some things to trick out my case.

Do you care about USB4 (aka thunderbolt) and PCIE 5.0? If not, then stick to B650, B650E, and B850. Pretty much all mobos come with overbuilt power delivery and cooling these days because they're an easy way to bake in margin for the manufacturer. Expensive mobos only add features which you probably don't care about for gaming. Buy whatever looks pleasing and fits in your budget from these chipsets. For the 9800X3D, you will probably need to update the BIOS before using the CPU. All AM5 motherboards come with BIOS flashback capabilties that allow you to flash the BIOS using a USB drive without a CPU installed so no need to look for this specifically.

When it comes to PCs I’m more of a “I like having options” style over “I’ll only pick up what I need” basics.

As far as power delivery is concerned I don’t think I’ll really need it since all of my shit’s being powered on its own and data is either being delivered via USB-A (audio, keyboard, and mouse) or DisplayPort/HDMI (video). I’m not sure if PCIE 5.0 is necessary for gaming but from what I’m seeing it’s not.

I’m still kind of flip-flopping on the CPU (although AMD is winning right now) I want to use and I’ll probably get a better idea on which CPU to go for when I go to Micro Center this week. If I do go for the Intel Core i9 (12th Gen) i9-12900KS I’m seeing decent prices for, I’ll more than likely go full autism and pick up that Sonic-themed B780M mobo from ASRock Unless it has serious issues that kill the idea.

This is a good choice. Aim for 6000 MT/s CL-30 EXPO as that's kind of the 'most likely to work good' spec for Zen 4 and Zen 5 generally. Higher speeds don't benefit X3D as much so don't overspend on some 6800 MT/s meme shit. Going above 6000 MT/s on Zen 4/5 comes with a bunch of caveats and diminishing returns for microarchitectural reasons so while it's possible it's not really worth spending extra money.

I feel like 32 GBs of RAM is a nice sweet spot since my laptop functions well with that much in it while 64 GBs is really only useful for serious gaming with mods enabled.

Wait until January to see what Nvidia and AMD are doing. I'm normally anti-wait but we're basically two months from Nvidia announcing the 5000 series and AMD announcing RDNA4. If you somehow come across a killer deal on a 4070 Super for black Friday (at or below $500), then I'd ignore previous advice and just pull the trigger. I would not pay full MSRP for any card right now.

The Radeon 7000-series cards lack features compared to Nvidia you might want and we know AMD is going to be focusing heavily on adding equivalent functionality in the next gen so you might feel a little gimped if you buy one of them now. That being said, if you don't care much about ray-tracing performance and AI upscaling, $50 more than the 4070 Super will buy you a 7900 XT which completely dumpsters all over that card in terms of raw rasterization performance and VRAM. I don't recommend buying any card right now, but you could do way worse than a $650 7900 XT and we'll probably see prices dip way lower for black Friday.

Raytracing is a must (a fair amount of games I play use it) so I guess that means I’m sticking with Nvidia for now.

tl;dr don't buy a card unless you get an insane deal on one for black friday

That was the plan and there‘s a good chance I probably won’t bite on anything until then or December, I’d probably have to sell some high-value collectables before I make any sort of commitment. This is basically just theoretical building at this point.

 

[Email]

From microsoft's co-pilot.