Hardcore Will Never Die But Hardware Will

this is my favorite thing about the thread, like two people actually read it and then everyone else waits until they have to put their hands on a computer part to even open it

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There is half a dozen of us! Half a dozen!

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Even I only skim this one I must shamefully confess

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it seems like if I cold boot then it will no longer boot with expo, but if set expo off, boot to windows, then restart and enable expo it will work. man, fuck amd. probably going to do manual timing stuff from the Smart People and see if that works. eventually.

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keep in mind you’re gonna need a mobo and ram too, whatever you got now ain’t gonna cut it. if gaming matters pretty much at all I think whatever X3D ryzen chip you can comfortably afford is still going to be the best option

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I can’t even jokingly suggest Intel because 13th and 14th gen are a smoldering wasteland and Arrow Lake is… okay but the motherboard prices aren’t (they’re getting better. better-ish.)

you can probably just be nice and set with a Ryzen 7600 or 9600

or buy a mac

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my comedy answer is to semi-seriously consider one of the insane Minisforum all in one boards with mobile CPUs on them because you literally cannot swing a 16 core Zen 4 part and motherboard for 400 bucks (seriously, a 7950X is more by itself)

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yes, and we care about Hard(ware)core! :servbotsalute:

next installment of this thread will have to be called ‘Half a dozen: The Hardware Obscure’ i guess :tarothink:

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Performance-wise don’t be afraid to buy one of the older/lower-end AMD six-core CPUs (the cheapest right now is the 8500G at ~150). IMO you should always get the newest available motherboard chipset. An 8500G, B850 board, and 48GB of DDR5 should be around $400.

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will wait then i think, the 3070 has held 60+ fps at 1440 in new releases i’ve played lately (last of us 2, doom dork age, clair obscur) but the vram usage is proper on the bone

also getting an amd gpu would probably tempt me to use desktop linux next time Outlook (New) shows up and i don’t know if i can cope with that

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thanks @geist @notbov and @megabat. this gives me a few angles to consider.

my pc is actually humming around just fine, really. but i built it as a low-mid-range system in 2020, and i have the money right now to do it if i want to, and i’m a little spooked about the tariff apocalypse coming at us and if, like, my pc shits the bed in 9 months i might really regret having put it off

one more question: when i try to select pc parts on some parts builders, it warns me that some motherboards’ bios might need to be updated before they’ll be compatible with certain cpus. this sounds like an impossible ordeal, but is it as horrible as it sounds?

actually, one other question: is there any reason not to just reuse my perfectly fine ATX/Micro ATX/Mini ITX case? it’s five years old, but it’s a nice simple black box and that’s all i ever really want.

the only reasons to replace a case are logistical (cable management), aesthetic and size (mostly if you decide to buy a honking long GPU)

a decent amount of mid-range and high-end of motherboards now let you flash the BIOS without a CPU. check the description/specs of a board and look for something like “BIOS Flashback” if you’re concerned about potentially being locked out

iirc if you buy from a Microcenter, you can probably ask them to flash at the store for a small cost

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to confirm: so, like, intel processors are still just shit now? if i were choosing between a 14th gen i5 and a ryzen 5800g, i should still go with amd?

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gun to my head, the choice between those two: Intel unless you’re going to lean on the integrated graphics, at which point I’d lean AMD

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AHEM.
RX 9070 Sapphire is a normal-sized GPU in a sea of nvidia battleships, there is no excuse to settle with an intel 580 or whatever their best model is atm :tarothink:

I went with AMD in my early-2023 build because it ran much cooler and lower-power than an Intel CPU with the same performance (a tip I got from Felix who made a similar choice).

Which translates to a quiet PC, even though I have a low-profile heatsink to fit in my ITX case, which has no soundproofing. When the workload is light, no fans are spinning in the first place.

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Yeah for years Intel just cranked the TDP until they hit a wall and ran out of ideas. I am hoping they innovate again though and not just in the AI-marketed processor space.

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well, they do the whole efficiency cores now and they killed hyperthreading. pretty sure their goal with that is to keep the enterprise laptop market, I don’t think they care about desktop chips too much

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i just appreciate that intel’s future depends on something called backside power delivery

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so Intel had a decent set of processors recently (Meteor Lake? no, Lunar Lake) that were performant and sipped power and the caveats to these were 1. they’re mobile only parts and 2. Intel paid TSMC to fab them

which probably looked bad if you were Gelsinger or a shareholder because 1. Intel is losing space in server and flailing in AI, not so much in client and 2. you have made massive bets on multiple Intel-developed and operated processes and the idea that you can sell fab space to your competitors and you’ve taken billions in grants from the US government and you’ve pushed back the opening of that plant multiple times

but that’s not relevant to the discussion

if you take their engineers at face value, killing SMT reduces the power footprint and cores are good enough that it’s a performance loss now (it arguably was before, the past few generations had a lot of people getting gains by turning HT off). also it keeps opening up holes to ring 0?

seems bad

I know Intel makes the distinction of “performance” and “efficiency” cores, but IIRC the W/perf curve is kinda fucked on the little cores if you were crazy enough to actually send enough juice through them, but on the flipside they actually have good performance (last I remember they were being compared to Skylake performance) and they’ve gone crazy enough to make Xeons that are just small cores

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