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]

It's a boring answer, but seems to be true. Lots of N150, N100, and a few N95 NUCs for under £200. I dont know how well Linux works on such machines given they're all Intel. They also don't have a glowing skull, so @The Ugly One wouldn't approve. I've seen mention you can't upgrade them or swap parts out, which might be a problem for drive space, but I'm not sure.

I don't see any Ryzen powered ones, and when I do they are a price bracket up at around £300+. I assume NUC is an intel term, or that AMD just doesn't make anything for this form factor.

I did buy and use a Raspberry Pi 4, before doing the smart thing and getting old Intel systems.

Intel N100 = "Alder Lake-N". It's an 8-core Gracemont die that is commonly disabled to the 4 cores you see in the N100/N97/N95/N200/N150. The instructions per clock of Gracemont is comparable to Skylake (Intel 6th gen), and it supports modern instruction sets like AVX2 that its Atom predecessors (e.g. Jasper Lake) didn't. Clocks are relatively low, and there's no hyperthreading, so an N100 should be thought of like an old Core i5-6500T or i5-6600T.

Graphics are probably better, Alder Lake-N is using newer Xe-LP of up to 32 EUs, usually disabled to 24 EUs. Alder Lake-N only has single-channel memory, but the DDR5/LPDDR5 options should have comparable bandwidth to older dual-channel DDR4 options. Alder Lake-N can use DDR4, however, which should be avoided since the discount is not worth it. You get better codec support than older stuff, with AV1 hardware decode for example.

Chinesium models like "GMKtec" are commonly available near $120. Check Slickdeals. The oldest refurbished office machines with 4c/4t should be comparable in price, or a lot less if you take a chance on ebay. So it's like the price and performance are nearly the same, it's the baseline, the new standard. An office machine may be able to take a low-profile GPU like you mentioned whereas Alder Lake-N systems are usually tiny and not coming with a PCIe connector, although some do.

Linux should be no problem. You will have more problems with getting mainline Linux working on ARM systems, or dealing with ARM compatibility issues. x86 just works.

Why does AMD have no answer to Alder Lake-N? They have a die called "Mendocino" which is like the Steam Deck APU with the graphics and memory neutered. It has similar CPU and GPU performance to Alder Lake-N and is theoretically cheap. But they don't make as many of them. The reason Intel is ubiquitous is that they are shipping the largest volume of x86 processors, and most of what corporate desktops use. Low margin, high volume, we get to experience the savings by the used market getting flooded with this stuff. Probably a lot this year with Windows 10 support officially starting to end in October.

AMD is aiming to sell higher margin, more expensive products, so they aren't going toe to toe with Intel selling CPUs that end up in complete, new $120 Chinesium systems you can buy on Amazon. AMD starts to get good around $300, with e.g. discounted Minisforum systems with Rembrandt or Phoenix APUs. You go there if you want a better CPU and iGPU.

The office PC route might be better. Alder Lake-N uses more energy than it appears to (6W "TDP" but can use up to 20 Watts). You may be able to find 8th gen or newer systems for around the same price (that $80-150 range) that offer better performance and upgradeability. But it could be a little work on your part.

 

[The Ugly One]

I dont know how well Linux works on such machines given they're all Intel.

I've never heard of Linux having an issue with Intel CPUs. Intel also has its own in-house distro, Clear Linux

NUC is an Intel term. There are plenty of "AMD NUCs" out there, they're just not made by AMD or marketed as being NUCs. Beelink and Minisforum are good places to start.

NUCs seem to be pretty well made. I've only had the one, but a friend of mine has bought several for years and swears by the build quality. I don't know one way or another about Beelink or Minisforum.

 

[Susanna]

NUCs seem to be pretty well made. I've only had the one, but a friend of mine has bought several for years and swears by the build quality. I don't know one way or another about Beelink or Minisforum.

I've never used one myself, but Wendell of Level1Techs seems to swear by Minisforum. As far as influencers go, I think that's a pretty solid recommendation.

 

[Judge Dredd]

The office PC route might be better. Alder Lake-N uses more energy than it appears to (6W "TDP" but can use up to 20 Watts). You may be able to find 8th gen or newer systems for around the same price (that $80-150 range) that offer better performance and upgradeability. But it could be a little work on your part.

I have no problem with that. It might even be more fun.

The problem I run into is a local one. In short, despite seeing such deals online, they either get me on postage, or are located miles away. The local places that do have them scalp them. I was in one shop just today. Had a bunch of "refurbished" optiplex machines. No drive, no GPU, no OS. Seems fine to me, but the price is a little suspect, especially since they don't list what CPU it has. Just "intel i5". Some had receipts taped to them detailing the refurbishment process, and includes things like "converting 3.5 inch drive bays to 2.5". Why?

Point is, the base machines are around £120-£200, I assume depending on model. Let's say £100 for GPU, a basic HDD, and any other stuff I might need. Yes, I could in theory get stuff for less if I really scrape the bottom of the barrel or look for specific deals. But either way, by the time I'm done, the price is within spitting distance of the Steam Deck and AMD mini PCs you mention.

I've never heard of Linux having an issue with Intel CPUs.

I might have been thinking of Nvidia.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Point is, the base machines are around £120-£200, I assume depending on model. Let's say £100 for GPU, a basic HDD, and any other stuff I might need. Yes, I could in theory get stuff for less if I really scrape the bottom of the barrel or look for specific deals. But either way, by the time I'm done, the price is within spitting distance of the Steam Deck and AMD mini PCs you mention.

I don't know how it is in the UK, USA might simply have better supply. But full machines with SSD+RAM (usually with Windows 10 Pro) should be easily obtainable under $150 from ebay, Dell Refurbished, etc. Dell Refurb may be less generous with RAM, which necessitated an upgrade in my case. The graphics card is a separate matter, the OptiPlex/ProDesk/whatever has to be large enough to take it (OptiPlex SFF for example) and have a good enough PSU.

But I do use these weak ass integrated graphics constantly since I now care less about gaming than at any point in my life. Any of these Intel chips should be able to play the original Skyrim at 720p, various emulators, and other older or less intensive games.

Right now I'm bidding for completely stripped systems or CPU only to try in-socket upgrades for some of the machines I already have. Prices are going higher than what I'd like though.

 

[Fcret]

It's a boring answer, but seems to be true. Lots of N150, N100, and a few N95 NUCs for under £200. I dont know how well Linux works on such machines given they're all Intel. They also don't have a glowing skull, so @The Ugly One wouldn't approve. I've seen mention you can't upgrade them or swap parts out, which might be a problem for drive space, but I'm not sure.

Linux has been a first-class citizen for Intel since like 2010 after they jettisoned GMA bullshit. I tend to find more issues with AMD chipsets on Linux than Intel ones but I could also just be unlucky. Really though - pretty much any consumer x86 hardware you buy nowadays that isn't a dGPU is probably going to have excellent Linux support.

Raspi is only really worthwhile if you want the tiniest form-factor and rock-bottom power consumption.

 

[Susanna]

I might have been thinking of Nvidia.

Historically this has absolutely been the case, anything your Nvidia GPU could do (apart from CUDA, which has always been a first-class citizen thanks to enterprise) had a chance of being an enormous hassle on Linux. AMD and Intel by contrast just worked.

It's no longer the case, though. Nvidia's "open" drivers are getting widely adopted, and 20-series or later GPUs work very well in Linux. Depending on distro you may still need to do some extra work to make sure you use the new drivers rather than the old ones, but as long as you do use the new ones it'll just work. And Nvidia's tooling is considerably better than AMD's, nvidia-smi is a very good command-line tool to manage your GPU, where AMD still has you poke numbers into weird files under /sys/devices. But really as long as you're not doing overclocking, both Intel, AMD, and Nvidia GPUs will work very well under Linux these days.

 

[Gog & Magog]

I don't know one way or another about Beelink

They make alright mini PCs, Intel and AMD, but don't expect Linux to work on them. Being a chinesium brand their customer support is poor and relies on you looking through forums for answers. FreeBSD might work but might be missing sound.

 

[Intel® Core™2 Duo E8400]

They make alright mini PCs, Intel and AMD, but don't expect Linux to work on them. Being a chinesium brand their customer support is poor and relies on you looking through forums for answers. FreeBSD might work but might be missing sound.

I've got a N100 beelink and it's been pretty smooth. Just gotta make sure that you'll be using a kernel with drivers for intel AX101 wifi. Back when I got it, debian stable didn't have them yet, so I went with mint. As usual make sure the hardware is supported before you buy, watch out for broadcom or realtek wifi, etc.

From what I've seen it's actually more fiddly to use windows on them, since they require you to disable updates and you need to beg them for the key if you want to reinstall.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

Intel Reportedly Reached Pre-Silicon Validation Phase For Celestial GPUs, Confirming Existence Of Xe3-Based Discrete GPUs (archive)

Intel’s Nova Lake “X3D-Like” CPUs Are Now Very Much a Possibility; Could Potentially Feature the 18A-PT Process With Foveros Direct 3D Packaging

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT is not available at MSRP for over 2 months

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with 8GB memory sees up to 10% performance loss when switching to PCIe 4.0 (archive) - Meanwhile Mindfactory data shows the 16GB model selling like 20x better. 5070 12GB is not selling too well as it's hitting MSRP in Europe, but the 5060 Ti 8GB is really going to rot. Still $420 on Newegg though.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I don't know how it is in the UK

On paper, it's the same. In practice, they're either far away requiring lengthy travel time and expense, or they grift on the postage.

 

[Gerelatha]

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti with 8GB memory sees up to 10% performance loss when switching to PCIe 4.0 (archive) - Meanwhile Mindfactory data shows the 16GB model selling like 20x better. 5070 12GB is not selling too well as it's hitting MSRP in Europe, but the 5060 Ti 8GB is really going to rot. Still $420 on Newegg though.

seems like low VRAM is finally becoming a real dealbreaker on these cards, it's kind of annoying that the only "no compromises" upgrade possible from my 3090 was the 5090 (4090s can't be found anywhere in my country), if i went with the 5080 I would have been sacrificing a good chunk of VRAM, and AMD didn't help matters only releasing a 16gb card too.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

seems like low VRAM is finally becoming a real dealbreaker on these cards, it's kind of annoying that the only "no compromises" upgrade possible from my 3090 was the 5090 (4090s can't be found anywhere in my country), if i went with the 5080 I would have been sacrificing a good chunk of VRAM, and AMD didn't help matters only releasing a 16gb card too.

Too bad. It's widely expected that Nvidia will launch a RTX 5080 Super (24 GB)... eventually. 5070 Super 18 GB is also explicitly mentioned. Nobody is putting their name to a 5060 12 GB leak yet.

The reception of the 9060 XT 8 GB is also going to be fun to watch.

 

[Gerelatha]

The reception of the 9060 XT 8 GB is also going to be fun to watch.

the marketfor these cards is purely newbies who don’t know any better and it’s pretty disgusting from both Nvidia and AMD

 

[Betonhaus]

the marketfor these cards is purely newbies who don’t know any better and it’s pretty disgusting from both Nvidia and AMD

I think a bigger question is how many games that don't run well on a 3060 are worth playing, and are at a price point that doesn't limit it to people who won't get a AIRTX 9999 whatever card anyways?

 

[Bogan]

The reception of the 9060 XT 8 GB is also going to be fun to watch.

How cheap would an 8GB card need to be to be well received? Intel set the bar for 12GB at $250 but hasn't been able to supply any at that price.

Considering how much debate they had over their 9070 prices, I have a feeling they'll set the price just slightly higher than reviewers want them to. Maybe $250 for the 8GB and $300 for the 16GB.

 

[The Mass Shooter Ron Soye]

How cheap would an 8GB card need to be to be well received? Intel set the bar for 12GB at $250 but hasn't been able to supply any at that price.

Considering how much debate they had over their 9070 prices, I have a feeling they'll set the price just slightly higher than reviewers want them to. Maybe $250 for the 8GB and $300 for the 16GB.

I think $250 would be received fairly well. This scenario could be more likely:

5060 Ti 16 GB = $430 MSRP
5060 Ti 8 GB = $380
9060 XT 16 GB = $350
(7600 XT 16 GB = $330 and it held that price easily)
9060 XT 8 GB = $300
5060 8 GB = $300
5050 8 GB = ???
9050 8 GB = ???

9060 XT should be faster than a 5060, but slower than the 5060 Ti and 7700 XT. But with 16 GB it's a better buy than the 5060 Ti 8 GB. So the 9060 XT 16 GB price could be set pretty high, and street pricing will take it even higher. 9060 XT 8 GB is theoretically better than a 5060, but less exciting at the same price.

9050/5050 have shown up in leaks. The RTX 5050 would use GDDR6 to cut cost.

 

[Fcret]

I think a bigger question is how many games that don't run well on a 3060 are worth playing, and are at a price point that doesn't limit it to people who won't get a AIRTX 9999 whatever card anyways?

It's not about 'running well', it's about being able to max out settings. A lot of people got conditioned during the 2010s to running everything at mega fuck-you ultra settings with entry-level cards and some part of their lizard brains scream at them if they have to turn settings down when they get a new card.

 

[LegoTugboat]

Not entirely related, but an interesting look.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14667535/Apple-secret-testing-labs-Cork-campus.html

Daily Mail got invited to have a look at Apple's Mac hardware testing process in Cork, Ireland, with a few photos.

Few tidbits include:
An oven
The drop test, including shaking
Tipping a Mac over
Blowing dust at the ports
Cold and hot temperature alternation
Sprays of salt water

 

[The Ugly One]

I think a bigger question is how many games that don't run well on a 3060 are worth playing, and are at a price point that doesn't limit it to people who won't get a AIRTX 9999 whatever card anyways?

Everyone's got a different definition of "run well."

I think $250 would be received fairly well. This scenario could be more likely:

5060 Ti 16 GB = $430 MSRP
5060 Ti 8 GB = $380
9060 XT 16 GB = $350
(7600 XT 16 GB = $330 and it held that price easily)
9060 XT 8 GB = $300
5060 8 GB = $300
5050 8 GB = ???
9050 8 GB = ???

9060 XT should be faster than a 5060, but slower than the 5060 Ti and 7700 XT. But with 16 GB it's a better buy than the 5060 Ti 8 GB. So the 9060 XT 16 GB price could be set pretty high, and street pricing will take it even higher. 9060 XT 8 GB is theoretically better than a 5060, but less exciting at the same price.

9050/5050 have shown up in leaks. The RTX 5050 would use GDDR6 to cut cost.

Looks like the market will currently bear around $500 for an 8 GB card. $300 is the price scalpers will pay.