This is it. Intel Arc’s time to shine. Everyone getting on board with Team Blue.
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I mean yeah, sure
at MSRP
the majority of AIB partner 5090s with wider availability are 3000+
congrats to the few thousand people who copped one for 2000 though
hey, at least it’s easy to go on ebay and buy a 5090 that had the die and ram yanked off
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there isn’t even enough grid capacity or extant datacenters to turn all these GPUs on, much less do anything useful with them. and 2025 america, I gotta say, not well known for its manufacturing and infrastructure upkeep. if the AI boom even stalls, much less unwinds, these GPUs are going to end up in landfills or laundered to china. if LLMs become useful enough to do what openai needs them to do in order to turn a profit, who is to say china won’t simply deem TSMC a national security threat and invade taiwan
as for what an AI financial crash actually looks like, that’s a good question. venture capitalists and private equity probably get incinerated, to the chagrin of absolutely no one. openai gets dissolved by microsoft. microsoft/google et al end up fine, because they are invincible. oracle might be in trouble. stocks get poleaxed, but that doesn’t seem like something that would last for a decade or whatever. I don’t know if there is what the sickos call true systemic risk, but at the same time our financial system is so dumb that I don’t think anyone can be confident in that.
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they can’t even stop devaluing their currency! they’re obsessed with stability! they’d rather just domestically manufacture something two generations behind and insist it’s just as good and from their point of view why would they not
but the rest of your post is more interesting
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if china invades taiwan for TSMC, I’m saying they’d do it to stop nvidia’s production rather than to seize anything for themselves (though they would of course do that too). if LLMs are so good that this rollout accelerates, china could simply decide that letting us continue as we please was not worth the risk. then again, they already have the rare earth metal lever that they can pull before it gets to that point. I’m not real informed on how easy to do or decisive that would be (china is already fucking with the silver markets though).
The problem is there are material constraints that the AI demand is competing with and it is doubtful there is a world in which every one in the big tech-military-industrial complex gets what they’re wanting or needing.
I read this a couple weeks back and found it useful.
From here: https://x.com/ctindale/status/1997471488514134481
When I think of “an AI crash” I’m basically thinking of what happens when this thing we’re basically putting all of the eggs into one basket turns out to not actually be possible the way the hype men are saying. Who ends up holding the bag when the music stops.
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thanks for reminding me to pick up another spool of Cat 5e, solid core & stranded
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it’s 2026
love yourself, bump it up to cat 6 or 7
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pointless?? plus I need to spend responsibly to save for SFP+ modules
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just me crying when I’m at work and I see cheap Extron or Creston AV switches on ebay that do 4k over ethernet but bandwidth/distance gets limited because we keep shoving 5 or 5e instead of anything more recent
I’m a goddamn idiot and I’m willing to spend my own money to buy this stuff but whoops the cables ain’t up to snuff
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Just installed my LG 27gx700a-b monitor, a new type of tandem OLED that finally might be bright enough for the sunny room my PC is in. I got it for $600 which felt like a really good deal (indeed now it’s $850).
Text quality was godawful when I first turned it on, and I was like “I guess this is the infamous OLED subpixel problem I was worried about”. But it turns out it was mostly because of a setting called DSC (“Display Stream Compression”). Tragically, turning this off means my framerate is now limited to only 240Hz.
I guess DSC might be the new motion smoothing (enabled-by-default feature that good samaritans go around turning off for their friends).
DSC is actually a bit more complicated than that — if you look at the tables toward the bottom of the Wikipedia article on DisplayPort, you’ll see where certain resolutions exceed the bandwidth of (most commonly e.g.) the Display Port 1.4 spec, requiring some kind of chroma subsampling to be used. this is also why some GPUs need to internally allocate two of their (usually) four internal “heads” to a single display, making it so you can’t use all the ports on the GPU at once (often very confusingly)
it’s actually relatively rare that this is toggled on the display itself though, I would expect the monitor itself requesting a lower bitrate stream to go quite badly yeah
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Yeah QHD @ 280Hz seems to be barely over DP 1.4 bandwidth. The monitor marketing is quite proud of the 280Hz spec so I assume that’s why the monitor requests it by default.
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automatic DSC under certain circumstances — most(?) commonly using a 4k144hz monitor with an RTX 4xxx GPU as I am doing since Nvidia didn’t bother supporting DP 2.x before the 5xxx series and is therefore limited to HBR3 rather than UHBR20 — is perceptibly lossless, but there’s no toggle for it, except I simply can’t plug 4 displays into my Nvidia GPU without it flipping out and only being able to enable 3 of them at random, so I wonder what the toggle on the monitor side is actually trying to do
I wonder if that’s actually forcing chroma subsampling which is technically harsher compression than the baseline DSC spec
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Join us, we don’t need graphic cards more than Intel 810 Graphics, and sometimes not even need to plugged.
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Amazon is insane with their “do you want to buy this again” suggestion shit, but it’s a fun way to find out the 2x16GB DDR4 RAM I got for $80 in July is running $250 now.
Was floating the idea of getting a Deskmeet X300 and some sorta SFF GPU and making my own Steam Machine if that thing is expensive, but it’s increasingly clear that won’t be any cheaper. Hell even my CPU, which is fine, is creeping up in price, probably because it’s OOP.
All this shit is just expensive now. Sucks.
Anyway Austin is finally getting a Micro Center, hermit crabbing into what used to be the Fry’s. Hell of a time to open a computer shop.
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I just tried the HDMI 2.1 input and ran into the exact same problem, which looks more like primitive upscaling/downscaling artifacts, so I think it’s some kind of problem with negotiating the native resolution with Windows.
As I cycled through the different resolution/refresh rate options in Windows display settings, almost all of the choices had asterisks next to them, and I saw repeated problems like pillarboxing and my monitor warning that the input was setting a non-native resolution. Then for some reason, forcing vanilla DisplayPort 1.4 seems to have finally enabled Windows to negotiate the resolution correctly.
I still can’t find anything online explaining what was happening exactly.
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that makes sense! whatever was happening, I don’t think that whatever that monitor was calling DSC was inherent to baseline DSC
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it is funny how all these new high end monitors have all these QoL annoyances with whatever display controller they’re shipping to do the actual input negotiation (and how infrequently that shows up in reviews). my Cooler Master 4K display was a massive leap forward in color accuracy and the adaptive sync works perfectly without flickering and has great response times, but its input switching is like, going back 2 generations in terms of flakiness, to the point where I think I’d have returned it if most games didn’t use borderless windowed mode for fullscreen now. it’s sort of like DDR5 making boot times horrible I guess. turns out that syncing a 30gbit signal that’s also doing weird bit reordering on the fly to skirt a spec, when the GPU also has to sync timings with several other displays, is hard.
updating monitor firmware is also a horrendous process, it’s like ok this is going to reconnect at 4 different resolutions while it cycles through its safe mode boot loop and it’s going to do that faster than the OS can actually reconnect to it so say goodbye to all your window positions and also just hope it works bc you can’t see anything
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I humbly apologize for my slander of the perfectly honorable DSC protocol
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