Tom's Hardware of Finland

King of Posters King of Posters 2000
1776

I’m pretty sure I still get 100% utilization from my Pascal Titan X (at +20% power limit even) with my 3570k

I’m aware that quad cores are finally starting to not meet every single use case, but Intel’s only had a 6-core i5 on the market for like a year at this point and I can’t imagine it’s motivated that many upgrades and x86 is so boring compared to CUDA and like, one game that still needs the non-GPU compute power isn’t really anything to worry about yet

a 300w GPU against a 50w CPU (which is about what a 3570k will draw without the iGPU enabled) is actually about where they should sit imo, even though I look very eccentric with this setup on paper

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1777

I’m talking the very boring specific use case of 64-man BF servers, wherein my 2500k @ 4.4 was hamstringing an R9 290; jumping to a R7 1700X yielded another 40-50 fps at the same settings and is a thing you can’t reproduce in single player (which is conveniently how everyone benchmarks with BF titles)

anyway, if there’s platform longevity concerns, Microcenter is selling R5 1600s for 100 bucks with the mobo bundle discount

1778

I also played The Division 2 beta thing over the weekend and that thing eats memory and CPU like it was at a buffet

the Swedish engines named after snow must be stopped

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1779

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1780

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lol fuck me, thanks for giving me pause, @notbov

1781

man

I miss US component prices

it’s not even just the exchange rate, just the sheer volume of clearance stuff

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1782

No, that’s just Microcenter

Imagine all the people who don’t live near one, what it’s like to still have money have such a great resource nearby

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1783

God I wonder if I can still return my 2200G

1784

Shame there’s two Microcenters in Missouri but neither are close to Branson or we could time travel into a world where they still sell blank optical media and PCI expansion cards for strange parallel ports.

Also dang first time looking at it on a map, I might fucken drive.

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1785

If there was a group trip to Microcenter, half of us would be walking out with a cpu and mobo regardless of what we actually wanted

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1786

If y’all ever come to Cleveland, there’s a microcenter like 25 minutes from my house, so you too can step into the mid 90s retail world.

the employees wear ties. the raspberry pis are just in stacks. there is a whole aisle just of keyboards. it’s amazing.

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1787

There’s something to be said for getting computer stuff at a physical store and being able to go back if any issues arise instead of doing stuff through the mail

That said, I’m never buying a case from them again as a lazy public transit user

Also there’s an aisle for just video cables. I didn’t even know I wanted that until I started poking through it.

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1788

i buy my motherboards at microcenter and my rice cookers at fry’s

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1789

Microcenter is awesome, wish there were some up here

Fry’s is good too, but I’ve been there like twice in 10 years because it’s so hard to get to. It’s literally faster for me to order something off amazon than to organize an expedition to Renton

1790

What is it with Fry’s and locations super far from any place anyone actually lives in?

The nearest one is just close enough I could go to it in theory, but far enough away to be an snourmous pain in the ass.

Plus I’m still sad about it not being Incredible Universe anymore even though that was twenty years ago. Kid me was very into incredible universe.

1791

Land is expensive, electronics retail margins are thin. A place like Fry’s doesn’t rely on random foot traffic, so they make huge stores in places where land is cheap, which tend to be out of the way.

1792

so is the next month or so a good time to perform and extensive upgrade?

my computer is… like I built it in 2008, and I’ve really only upgraded the graphic card since then.

I don’t even remember what’s in the damn thing.

I probably basically just need to build a whole new thing, tho I guess I can keep my enclosure and hard drives and stuff.

if I want to spend like less than $400 on a new motherboard and processor (and probably RAM) what should I be looking at? or is that not reasonable?

1793

Both Intel and AMD have big shrinks later this year that’ll be hard to top, wait a bit if you can.

Also price/perf for graphics has been stagnant since Fall 2016, it’s ridiculous.

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1794

I don’t think Intel will have desktop parts out this year but it’s actually not clear that Ice Lake will be a huge boon on desktop, I think you can confidently buy Ryzen 3 when it turns up

and I don’t think Nvidia is going to have a whole 7nm lineup until 12ish months from now

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1795

your choices are buy nothing, cheap out on an AMD build with the intent to upgrade later or wait for new hardware launches to shake out and also all of the build options involve an Nvidia GPU unless you’re tripping over cryptominers dumping their hardware

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