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 Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Now this is news to me. I wasn't aware X3D chips were good at that workload. I mean it made loading bloated saves of RPG/RTS/TBT games actually possible but hey, good to know its great in that purpose.

It's one reason why a dual-CCD 7950X3D and 9950X3D only come with a single cache chiplet, which is the only amount games actually need, while Milan-X and Genoa-X Epyc chips come with up to 8/12 cache chiplets, for a total of 768/1152 MiB of L3 cache respectively. An Epyc 9684X with 96 cores all equipped with V-Cache has a list price of $14,756.

Phoronix: AMD EPYC 9684X Genoa-X Provides Incredible HPC Performance

 

[marcuswright]

:/ has anyone been able to get their hands on a TUF A18? would love to hear some reviews

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

This is going to be like the train thing on the Russian thread isnt it?

I don't know what that is but I hope not.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

:/ has anyone been able to get their hands on a TUF A18? would love to hear some reviews

I only buy laptops on clearance.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/RTX-5070-powered-Asus-TUF-A18-gaming-laptop-18-inch-behemoth-debuts-with-powerful-internals.943791.0.html

Maybe it's not the first choice for reviewers since it's using a previous generation APU, but hopefully Notebookcheck would do a review of it eventually.

 

[Dean Pentel]

You're unlikely to find either at these prices and the GPU market sucks ass right now.

So if one wants to build a solid gaming PC (because fuck consoles anymore) should they just wait, keep hunting for in-stock items from reputable sites and hope there's not a 40% markup, or has the market been like this for a while now (in other words, it's going to be bullshit forever)?

 

[Null]

:/ has anyone been able to get their hands on a TUF A18? would love to hear some reviews

I've owned several Asus laptops and if you get a really big one I would recommend buying a 3rd party power brick with it because without exception every single one of them has exploded. Years ago I ended up having to rush a Power+ adapter and that one lasted forever.

 

[marcuswright]

I've owned several Asus laptops and if you get a really big one I would recommend buying a 3rd party power brick with it because without exception every single one of them has exploded. Years ago I ended up having to rush a Power+ adapter and that one lasted forever.

Wtf, thats really dangerous
My tuf dash's 180w bricks hasn't crapped out yet.

 

[Fcret]

So if one wants to build a solid gaming PC (because fuck consoles anymore) should they just wait, keep hunting for in-stock items from reputable sites and hope there's not a 40% markup, or has the market been like this for a while now (in other words, it's going to be bullshit forever)?

Last year we had tons of GPUs available at MSRP but no one was buying them. Once the new gen came out and everyone realized that stock was going to be scarce on the new gen, the remaining stock of the old gen also got bought up.

So probably in a few months we'll be back down to MSRP. AMD seems committed to producing fucktons of 9070s and 9070 XTs so supply problems will likely clear up. Pricing is going to be weird with tariffs though so you might be paying an extra hundo or two even when stuff returns to 'normal.'

Nvidia and AMD have both found markets outside of gamers so they're not going to be in a 2010s situation again where they're bound to that audience and have to sell things really cheap. They're both committed to making sure that GPU supply never substantially outpaces demand. I wouldn't expect another era of 600 dollar plays-everything-at-ultra PCs again anytime soon.

tl;dr normal soon, but 'normal' is still going to be pricey compared to what we had in the 2010s

 

[The Ugly One]

Nvidia and AMD have both found markets outside of gamers

I'm not going to re-find the market report I was reading the other day because I'm lazy, but AMD has a 4% market share of datacenter GPUs. You could be less successful than AMD, though. For example, you could be Intel.

 

[Slav Power]

I really don't get the idea of gaming laptops. I guess if you want something like a SFF PC with a screen and keyboard when you move frequently and want to set up a full system for work and gaming instead of having a full tower PC it kinda makes sense, but they're so impractical as a laptop.

The ones that are worth a shit, so the ones with a powerful dedicated GPU and a powerful CPU, will be those 18 inch, 2.6kg bricks requiring a high power charger to be plugged in at all times since running demanding workloads on those components will drain the battery in a second. It's massive and heavy to be able to cool those high performance parts, so you're not gonna be hauling it around in your backpack. Maybe if you go full autismo and get one of those massive hiking backpacks with support straps, but still, it's not really a laptop when it's so big, heavy and power hungry that you only carry it to set it up on a desk.

IMO if you already have a powerful rig at home, all you realistically need for a laptop is a 14-inch, sub-2kg laptop with an AMD APU. It has enough performance for all the standard desktop tasks, realistically the iGPU will be more than enough for your average use case outside the house and it will be able to run older games, the battery life will be much better, it's slightly larger than an A4 notebook and even if it's not a sub-1kg ultrabook it's still decently light. Plus, with everything using USB-C nowadays, you can get something like a 100W charger, and it'll be enough to charge your laptop and your phone simultaneously as well as charge your laptop from a powerbank as those smaller laptops need 45W/65W to charge and not 100W.

Do you really need your entire home PC to fit in your backpack? Or do you just need a middle ground between your home PC and a smartphone?

 

[DavidS877]

Do you really need your entire home PC to fit in your backpack?

Yes.
I run a ton of VMs for work, when I travel I need the same capability as when I'm home. Being not near a plug isn't an issue and even my gaming laptop will deal with the 1-2 hours being in a meeting when needed. At home I have a personal desktop and then my gaming laptop where work usually runs. Now, sure, I'd like a 128GB gaming laptop and 4TB instead of 40GB and 2TB.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I really don't get the idea of gaming laptops. I guess if you want something like a SFF PC with a screen and keyboard when you move frequently and want to set up a full system for work and gaming instead of having a full tower PC it kinda makes sense, but they're so impractical as a laptop.

I agree and I want my laptops to be cheap, light, low-power, and ultimately disposable. Like an ARM laptop or one of those Ryzen 5 7520U Mendocino shits. Probably smaller than 14". I will carry it around, toss it around, and remotely connect it to a more powerful desktop if needed.

When I traveled recently, I took an OptiPlex MFF, a 15.6" portable screen, keyboard, mouse, and the power brick. They didn't take up that much space in a backpack. The keyboard was the bulkiest thing because of its width. That sat at a desk and I used an 11.6" laptop anywhere else.

 

[Slav Power]

ultimately disposable

Ryzen 5 7520U Mendocino shits

I have a 7535U 14" and I wouldn't say it's disposable. The CPU is on par with my desktop i5-12400 that does everything that I'd need it to do, and it has expandable RAM. Laptops from a decade ago? Yeah sure, aged like milk. But right now we're in this "golden age" of hardware that's already so capable that it's not going to age as poorly, and AMD is really killing it when it comes to mobile chips. Strix Halo is looking extra promising in the power draw department, and Lenovo has recently pulled it's head out of it's own ass and started to make their 14" ThinkPads more user serviceable, bringing back the RAM SODIMMs and making the battery a CRU. Hell, we may see a Strix Halo ThinkPad in a few years that may have LPCAMM2 RAM, and with it a whole bunch of other user-serviceable parts since now they can afford the real estate for it, that will last well over 10 hours of battery life on average.

 

[Flaming Dumpster]

Do you really need your entire home PC to fit in your backpack?

My big fancy home PC is about 10 thousand miles away right now so it's difficult to do any work with it. Therefore I really do need something that's extremely capable on-the-go and it's not practical to lug around something with an external monitor when you're in a different place every week and may not even have access to a desk.

Current setup is a leather recliner, coffee table I stole from a common area that I'm using for my mouse and a Keychron K3 perched on top of the miserable laptop keyboard.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I have a 7535U 14" and I wouldn't say it's disposable. The CPU is on par with my desktop i5-12400 that does everything that I'd need it to do, and it has expandable RAM. Laptops from a decade ago? Yeah sure, aged like milk. But right now we're in this "golden age" of hardware that's already so capable that it's not going to age as poorly, and AMD is really killing it when it comes to mobile chips. Strix Halo is looking extra promising in the power draw department, and Lenovo has recently pulled it's head out of it's own ass and started to make their 14" ThinkPads more user serviceable, bringing back the RAM SODIMMs and making the battery a CRU. Hell, we may see a Strix Halo ThinkPad in a few years that may have LPCAMM2 RAM, and with it a whole bunch of other user-serviceable parts since now they can afford the real estate for it, that will last well over 10 hours of battery life on average.

Disposable meaning I buy a $200 laptop, maybe a refurb, treated with little care and no expectation of longevity. 7520U is quad-core Zen 2 with 2 CUs of RDNA2 graphics, typically paired with 16 GB of soldered LPDDR5. It can act like a thin client, but even those specs should be fine for real work.

Certainly, just about anything bought today could be usable nearly indefinitely. Even Intel's Alder Lake-N Atoms are roughly on par with low-power Skylake. Every iGPU will play Unremastered Oblivion or Skyrim, and all the new stuff has AV1/H.265 hardware decode.

Strix Halo and the memory situation is interesting. Framework recently announced their "upgrade-friendly" cheap-ish Strix Halo motherboard. I believe they considered using LPCAMM2 but could not make it work within the available space on the mini-ITX board (it would need double the usual slots due to the 256-bit memory bus). I might have the details wrong but there should be some discussion of their reasoning out there.

So every Strix Halo product to date uses soldered memory despite CAMM/LPCAMM2 being recently introduced to keep upgradeable memory alive. With Medusa Halo, we may see a 384-bit bus option in addition to 256-bit, although that might be related to LPDDR6 having wider subchannels.

 

[The Ugly One]

The ones that are worth a shit, so the ones with a powerful dedicated GPU and a powerful CPU, will be those 18 inch, 2.6kg bricks requiring a high power charger to be plugged in at all times since running demanding workloads on those components will drain the battery in a second.

The dGPU automatically disables on a gaming laptop when you unplug it...in theory. In reality, if a single process is using the dGPU, it won't disable. Since web browsers these days use GPU acceleration, guess what, it's actually really tricky to get that dGPU to actually turn off. Then, once you do, again in theory, it shouldn't be any worse than a normal laptop at managing power. Except for some reason, my gaming laptop refuses to drop the CPU clock speed below 3 GHz for any reason. I have to manually downclock it. And then, for whatever reason, it still lasts maybe 90 minutes on battery. There's no real reason it has to be like this, but it is like this.

 

[Mister Fister]

Last year we had tons of GPUs available at MSRP but no one was buying them. Once the new gen came out and everyone realized that stock was going to be scarce on the new gen, the remaining stock of the old gen also got bought up.

So probably in a few months we'll be back down to MSRP. AMD seems committed to producing fucktons of 9070s and 9070 XTs so supply problems will likely clear up. Pricing is going to be weird with tariffs though so you might be paying an extra hundo or two even when stuff returns to 'normal.'

Nvidia and AMD have both found markets outside of gamers so they're not going to be in a 2010s situation again where they're bound to that audience and have to sell things really cheap. They're both committed to making sure that GPU supply never substantially outpaces demand. I wouldn't expect another era of 600 dollar plays-everything-at-ultra PCs again anytime soon.

tl;dr normal soon, but 'normal' is still going to be pricey compared to what we had in the 2010s

It’s probably better to think of the actual release date as 6 months after the “official “ launch

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

I don't even care about the Intel habbening, it's whatever, but this Wccfkek headline made me laugh:

Intel Q1 2025 Earnings: Lip Bu-Tan Eschews Layoffs For Now, Guidance Is Wholly Disappointing [Update: Layoffs Imminent] (archive)

First AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE graphics cards leaked, 12GB memory confirmed

 

[Slav Power]

I don't even care about the Intel habbening, it's whatever, but this Wccfkek headline made me laugh:

Intel Q1 2025 Earnings: Lip Bu-Tan Eschews Layoffs For Now, Guidance Is Wholly Disappointing [Update: Layoffs Imminent] (archive)

First AMD Radeon RX 9070 GRE graphics cards leaked, 12GB memory confirmed

People gave Pat a ton of shit during his tenure, but he had something that the current CEO doesn't. Pat knew Intel was a semiconductor company and had the background for it. Whichever schmuck that runs it now doesn't, and that'll ultimately do more damage to the company. Like Steve Jobs said, when the marketing department starts running the company, that's when it dies. And IIRC he was the one to greenlight and risk Intel Arc despite the disastrous launch of Alchemist, and the current leadership will kill it off without any moment's notice the moment the green line dips slightly down.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

18" laptops are absolutely amazing, But I'm able to always have it plugged in when at use in work or around the house....so yeah. As for weight, idk, people could try not having limp wrists.