yeah I think HDR support in a PC ecosystem is still so convoluted that there just isn’t much of a market for this in practice yet
the market for HDR on PC is literally the handful of games that support it because Windows 10 is too afraid of blinding you with pure whites and no streaming service supports 4k in browser. there’s also still no consensus on the HDR format that will win (HDR10 or Dolby Vision)
4k is cool, I guess
FreeSync means you won’t see the artifacts of or perceive when your frame rate drops below the magical V-sync threshold because the card is telling the monitor to refresh only as many times as frames are being rendered. This is a good thing if the FreeSync range is generous enough to not totally crap out at too high a minimum frame rate (and if you have an AMD card, of course)
I for one am wary of this because they aren’t listing the adaptive sync range, but it otherwise sounds like MP doing their thing, which is good
meanwhile, crappy monitors for sale over here
Ehhh kinda. It depends on what the minimum refresh rate is. Low Framerate Compensation (LFC) is the useful sub-feature of FreeSync when FPS < 60, and LFC is only enabled when max refresh is 2.5x min refresh, and I sort of doubt that the min refresh is 24Hz. Like I said, kind of a marginal feature.
350 nits is probably too low for good HDR, yeah. Hopefully at the very least the color won’t be terrible garbage?
three done, four… five more bits to get/go.
couldn’t pass on a deal for the 1800X. Now for the mobo…
1 Like
a generational improvement on haswell is N E V E R C O M I N G
feels like it’s gonna be until 2019 at the earliest before my 2013 notebook is really worth replacing, if it hangs on that long
that said, apple and nvidia have only really just caught up in terms of actual density (as opposed to reported process size), so there’s reason to believe there’s an actual wall here, and Intel is at least starting to trickle out four core 15w notebooks, but it’s going to be another few months before apple adopts those, then probably a whole other year before they make a configuration with GPUs better than they had in 2014 (apparently thanks to AMD)
Alright, after spending a saturday afternoon with partly music videos playing in the background, partly listening to a french guy* live streaming himself driving a Renault Megane RS (no, not the V6 one, the boring touring car!) around the nurburgring (why would you DO that - wait, who am I to say even a word here ~~~), I decided to eliminate part of my christmas pay-bonus asap, and now, aside from the vapourwarega gfx card, I think I’ve got all components shipping soon-ish, that is next week.
Spent quite some time figuring out if I could - and _should_ - try to cram everything in a Silverstone Sugo SG11, or go for a HiFi-rack model, i.e. the Grandia (srsly) GD10.
Well, since I went for the 1800X and want to use this as a performance-monster/gaming machine, I guess I’ll get to that 95W TDP limit a lot, and the Noctua cooling towers explicitly mention that when going > 25°C it’ll get a bit tricky to keep things cool … and when am I going to surely use this machine?
Yes, when I’m inviting people over for watching & celebrating the Nürburing/Le Mans 24h races, which is in spring/summer … and if that VapourVega64 ever actually comes out, it sure isn’t going to be a cool’ish card, if the first pictures of the custom designs sporting three fans are any indication.
Alas, the smallest cooler I deem acceptable is the Noctua NH-D9L, and I’m looking forward to learning a few things about packaging:
That’s going to be a FUN build, I can tell you.
for the record, I've considered this cooler, but tbh, even for me
this looks a bit too cramped, and would’ve given me only a leeway of about an inch to the PSU, if I went with the SG11.
So! now I'm waiting for the parts to arrive. ~~~~
*: user’s called C–H--E–V--Y, if you want to e-stalk who I have been e-stalking for a bit
1 Like
:pushes up glasses:
well actually TDP is a measurement of how much heat needs to get dissipated and not of power draw; witness the furor over the high-end Skylake-X CPUs, which could draw 500+ watts from the wall after overclocking
as for cases, I’ve been eyeballing this one as a “I want a smaller case but also just want to throw unused parts in there instead of having to search around for an ITX motherboard for an old platform”, with the only catch being I’d need an SFX PSU: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811133314&ignorebbr=1
1 Like
addendum: at least maybe by then they’ll have non-bullshit keyboards on the new MBPs and the idea of a USB-C ecosystem won’t be a joke
like it’s straight up embarrassing that a hackintoshed xps 13 would be a fully superior machine to the current MBPs in terms of hardware design (form factor, specs, and ports) if not for the nuisance of hackintoshing but the keyboard failure rate is actually too obscene to buy into
1 Like
you see, i am an AMD guy, so TDP equals first and foremost heat, not performance or other actually usedul things.
And heat == problems, since… AMD.
the experience of many is that you will likely hit the Ryzen wall of 4 GHz (or less) before thermals become an issue unless you just have that bad an overclocker and you have to pump the thing full of voltage to get some of the safer speeds. even then…
I think the guidance from AMD was 1.45 was the upper limit for everyday use; I’ve got mine set for 3.8 @ 1.2875 v, which usually sits at an even 1.3 from normal use. I could probably push back up to 3.9 but I’m lazy.
what I’m trying to say is that I would be more concerned about the heat a Vega would shoot out in an ITX case than anything else. like, did you see that Sapphire Vega card with 3x8-pin connectors? that thing could pull 525 W by itself
computers are great
1 Like
is Vega actually as reasonable at lower voltages as the AMD people want to claim? The current narrative seems to be “yeah, it’s a bit of a disaster when it tries to put up pascal-level tflops, but it’s pretty competitive below 120w” which would be good news for both that new Intel part and the PS5 APUs but idk if there’s any basis for that.
testing by people who care shows that AMD probably was way to aggressive on setting voltages on Vega and conservative on clocks and that both of the desktop variants out right now have a decent amount of performance headroom while also not melting themselves and drawing a ton of power
then there’s this thing that just came out:
so the 2500U (4 Zen cores and Vega 8, which I forget how few cores that is) is supposedly a 15W part and it seems to be hanging well with lower-end discrete mobile parts while also outdoing Intel’s iGPU, so take that as you will
1 Like
that’s good, the benchmarks did seem implausibly bad before. How did they dick up their consumer binning that much?
double an Intel 620 is roughly where it felt like 16nm iGPUs should be clocking under current architectures so that’s encouraging, I would buy a laptop that had those plus something kaby R-ish for CPU numbers in a <20w form factor
whew, those 2500U specs almost sound too good to be true, or I have been too disappointed about intel igpus in laptops. Or that’ll explain how on earth Intel decided to integrate AMD into a package of their IP…
I want to hear what you think of this case because I want a smaller case but also don’t want to give up all these spare ATX parts I’ve got laying around (I’m assuming this is one of the Grandias)
Grandia G10, yes!
In a surprising turn of events tho,
something’s acting up, it may be the mobo or the CPU? nothing else has been left connected, so the usual suspect (RAM) is already out of the question. did change cabling, ports, reconnected PSU cables, tried to erase the BIOS settings via jumper, connected a PC speaker from my quad phenom II to the new mobo (how on earth would you find out what’s up if there isn’t a speaker…) but to no avail, black screen, fans are spinning, nothing’s happening tho…
well, gotta grab a new mobo tomorrow and see whether that’ll make a difference!
I’m just staring at that motherboard
there’s no heatsinks on the VRMs
I’m kind of concerned for its health in the future
tbh, I was surprised it still had so much space for… things on the circuit board. I expected it to be Blade Runner 2049 town array grids of things, with the atari and pan am logo included somewhere, but there’s still some space to be seen, so…
n. b. joke’s on me for having time to inspect the mobo instead of using it, first step to tru RYZEN XPERIENCE 
Holy shit I can play doom at 4k on ultra, what an amazingly optimized game
The monitor I got is pretty good, not perfect, but hard to beat at $250. Took a lot of messing with it to get freesync to work, and there’s a good bit of IPS glow. Oddly enough turning sharpness to 0 means “make it blurry” not “turn off the sharpness filter”.