The PC thread

[El Barto]

Bethesda won't lose any customers at all because, bugs and all, people love their games. Their next game could be Elder Scrolls VI--Our Customers are Bleedin Idiots, and it'd still set records for units shipped. So, yeah, they prioritized their partnership with AMD because it was essentially free money. Makes ya feel good, don't it?

and I dont have a stat just a gut feeling, that AMD GPUs are much less than Nvidia.

Less what? They only make up 12% of the market share. There are several reasons for this, all based on the fact that Nvidia are just producing better cards right now. Unless you're playing Starfield. 

[cramx3]

Much less in quantity used.  Your 12% market share is the number that confirms that 

Funny enough, I almost used a AMD GPU but it gave me issues so went back to Nvidia

[faizoff]

Reading about this new set of features introduced with DLSS 3.5 is interesting. Ray Reconstruction apparently uses only the AI pipeline thus giving the GPU more reign to generate FPS. Right now it's only on Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty and the 40 series cards.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-dlss-35-ray-reconstruction/

[ReaperKK]

Much less in quantity used.  Your 12% market share is the number that confirms that 

Funny enough, I almost used a AMD GPU but it gave me issues so went back to Nvidia

My second ever gpu was a GeForce 3 TI-500. I then switched to ATI and used them until I went back to nvidia for the 20 series. Honestly having an Nvidia/Intel build is great cost aside. AMD/ATI rigs I had always had shitty/buggy drivers, and just never performed great. The hardware wasn't that good either. That Geforce 3 still works when I checked it a few years ago, none of my old ATI cards lasted for any considerable length of time.

[El Barto]

Reading about this new set of features introduced with DLSS 3.5 is interesting. Ray Reconstruction apparently uses only the AI pipeline thus giving the GPU more reign to generate FPS. Right now it's only on Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty and the 40 series cards.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-dlss-35-ray-reconstruction/

Something else that concerns me is the generational state of graphics cards. It used to be that newer cards were simply better. Now it's that newer cards contain entirely new feature sets that necessitate a new purchase. I bought a high end 2000 series card, and while it should continue to serve me well, it's simply no longer relevant, and this trend will continue. When the 5000 series hits all of those 3000 series cards will follow the same path, where the improvements will only be relevant for the 4s and 5s.

Have I said "Fuck Yeah, Capitalism!" in this thread yet? 

[cramx3]

Reading about this new set of features introduced with DLSS 3.5 is interesting. Ray Reconstruction apparently uses only the AI pipeline thus giving the GPU more reign to generate FPS. Right now it's only on Cyberpunk Phantom Liberty and the 40 series cards.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/nvidia-dlss-35-ray-reconstruction/

Something else that concerns me is the generational state of graphics cards. It used to be that newer cards were simply better. Now it's that newer cards contain entirely new feature sets that necessitate a new purchase. I bought a high end 2000 series card, and while it should continue to serve me well, it's simply no longer relevant, and this trend will continue. When the 5000 series hits all of those 3000 series cards will follow the same path, where the improvements will only be relevant for the 4s and 5s.

Have I said "Fuck Yeah, Capitalism!" in this thread yet? 

The "simply better" gains are marginal.  But it's the new features that are "better" and make the upgrade, I think it's a fairly equal trade off.  I honestly don't see too much of a difference other than the cost of these cards just being outrageous.  I also feel like, Starfield for example, the new games aren't coming out wiht these new features.  At least not immediately.  So you really don't need the latest and greatest.  Your 2000 series card isn't performing worse enough to really need the upgrade on a lot of these games.

What bothers me more is that a lot of games are using the CPU more than the GPU.  Like COD is a CPU intensive game.  It's not utilizing the high end graphic cards the way they should be.  That all just adds in, to me, that upgrading GPUs is not the priority some make it out to be.

I relate a lot of this to phones where every year the new Iphone/Samsung was significantly better to make you want to upgrade but now, year over year, there's not much of an upgrade just some new features.  There's no need to get the latest and greatest phones for most people.

[faizoff]

Much less in quantity used.  Your 12% market share is the number that confirms that 

Funny enough, I almost used a AMD GPU but it gave me issues so went back to Nvidia

My second ever gpu was a GeForce 3 TI-500. I then switched to ATI and used them until I went back to nvidia for the 20 series. Honestly having an Nvidia/Intel build is great cost aside. AMD/ATI rigs I had always had shitty/buggy drivers, and just never performed great. The hardware wasn't that good either. That Geforce 3 still works when I checked it a few years ago, none of my old ATI cards lasted for any considerable length of time.

My list of GPUs is a very short list

2005 - 2011
ATI RADEON 9600XT 128MB DDR AGP

2011
Sapphire Radeon HD4670 1GB DDR3 PCIe (temp card)

2011 - 2020
XFX Radeon HD 6870 1GB PCIe

2020- 2021
Sapphire Technology AMD Radeon Pulse RX 580 8GB GDDR5

2021 - current
EVGA NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 ULTRA  10GB GDDR6X



Briefly had the 3080Ti FE for a couple of months before settling on the 3080 FTW3

[ReaperKK]

Ayyy we got the same 3080!

[cramx3]

GTX 460 -> GTX 770 -> GTX 1080 -> RTX 3070 (if memory is correct, kind of forget my first build)

[El Barto]

I don't remember them all, but I know I was an AMD guy for the longest time after starting with All In Wonders Pro and 9800. It was only when the driver support became so godawful that I jumped ship to Nvidia, and the idea of going back horrifies me. Part of the reason I can't remember the cards is because I always had two back in the AMD days. And moving to Nvidia consolidated all of my outputs.

[XJDenton]

From what I remember:

9800 Pro
Whatever my laptop had
8080 GTS
GTX 260
Whatever my two work laptops had
RTX 3070 Ti

[ReaperKK]

Here is what I remember:

Savage 3D (I think that's what it was called) powerhouse at 2mb of ram
VooDoo3 2000
GeForce3 TI-500
Radeon 9250
Radeon HD 6850
Radeon HD 7970
Radeon R9 290
EVGA 2080 FTW3
EVGA 3080 FTW3

[Nick]

I tend to play more cutting edge stuff on console, I couldn't even tell you what card I have in my PC right now.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

My gaming computer days go all the way back to the early '90s, pre accelerated graphics days. I'm not sure if I can remember all the GPU's I've had over the years, but let's see...

3dfx Voodoo2
Riva TNT2
GeForce 2 (I don't remember which one though)
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (this was the first PC I built from the ground up myself in the summer of '03)
GeForce 6800XT
GeForce 8800GT
GeForce GTX 285
EVGA GeForce GTX 670
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1070
GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 Super
EVGA GeForce RTX 3070
EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra
GIGABYTE Gaming GeForce RTX 4090

[ReaperKK]

How do you like the step up to the 4090? I've been itching to move up but it's definitely a want rather than need, I don't even have a 4k monitor.

[faizoff]

My gaming computer days go all the way back to the early '90s, pre accelerated graphics days. I'm not sure if I can remember all the GPU's I've had over the years, but let's see...

3dfx Voodoo2
Riva TNT2
GeForce 2 (I don't remember which one though)
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (this was the first PC I built from the ground up myself in the summer of '03)
GeForce 6800XT
GeForce 8800GT
GeForce GTX 285
EVGA GeForce GTX 670
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1070
GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 Super
EVGA GeForce RTX 3070
EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra
GIGABYTE Gaming GeForce RTX 4090

Those are some upgrades!
I did my first solo build in 2000 with the Intel PIII 933 Mhz. I built mine with the 810e chipset which supported a faster FSB speed. If I'm correct the chipset on the board at the time was one of the first ones to support both onboard sound and graphics. And back then you could play quite a few games with the onboard chips.

Glad we don't have to set IRQs and use jumpers for Master/Slave drives anymore.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

My gaming computer days go all the way back to the early '90s, pre accelerated graphics days. I'm not sure if I can remember all the GPU's I've had over the years, but let's see...

3dfx Voodoo2
Riva TNT2
GeForce 2 (I don't remember which one though)
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (this was the first PC I built from the ground up myself in the summer of '03)
GeForce 6800XT
GeForce 8800GT
GeForce GTX 285
EVGA GeForce GTX 670
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1070
GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 Super
EVGA GeForce RTX 3070
EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra
GIGABYTE Gaming GeForce RTX 4090

Those are some upgrades!
I did my first solo build in 2000 with the Intel PIII 933 Mhz. I built mine with the 810e chipset which supported a faster FSB speed. If I'm correct the chipset on the board at the time was one of the first ones to support both onboard sound and graphics. And back then you could play quite a few games with the onboard chips.

Glad we don't have to set IRQs and use jumpers for Master/Slave drives anymore.

I definitely don't miss those days, LoL. Not to mention IDE cables, serial and parallel ports, floppy discs (the actual 5 1/4 floppies and to a lesser extent the 3.5" floppies, the 8" floppy discs were well before my time...), Zip drives......oooh and the infamous Turbo button 

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

How do you like the step up to the 4090? I've been itching to move up but it's definitely a want rather than need, I don't even have a 4k monitor.

The main reason I got it was because I started working with Unreal Engine and I need the extra Vram. It doesn't hurt that it brute forces its way through every game I throw at it 

I was actually happy with the 3080 up to that point though.

[nobloodyname]

My gaming computer days go all the way back to the early '90s, pre accelerated graphics days. I'm not sure if I can remember all the GPU's I've had over the years, but let's see...

3dfx Voodoo2
Riva TNT2
GeForce 2 (I don't remember which one though)
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (this was the first PC I built from the ground up myself in the summer of '03)
GeForce 6800XT
GeForce 8800GT
GeForce GTX 285
EVGA GeForce GTX 670
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1070
GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 Super
EVGA GeForce RTX 3070
EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra
GIGABYTE Gaming GeForce RTX 4090

How on Earth can you remember all those?! Amazing!

I definitely had the Voodoo 2, the first before that. Had a Matrox Mystique, I think, before then? Anyway, I think our graphics card journey is very similar.

[nobloodyname]

I had a 3080 followed by a 3090, I think. And then the 4090. Frame regeneration in Flight Simulator made it instantly worth it for me. It was one of those, "my god, this is AMAZING!" moments for me. And they're few and far between now. Probably because I'm getting old.

[ReaperKK]

My gaming computer days go all the way back to the early '90s, pre accelerated graphics days. I'm not sure if I can remember all the GPU's I've had over the years, but let's see...

3dfx Voodoo2
Riva TNT2
GeForce 2 (I don't remember which one though)
GeForce FX 5900 Ultra (this was the first PC I built from the ground up myself in the summer of '03)
GeForce 6800XT
GeForce 8800GT
GeForce GTX 285
EVGA GeForce GTX 670
GIGABYTE GeForce GTX 1070
GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 Super
EVGA GeForce RTX 3070
EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 Ultra
GIGABYTE Gaming GeForce RTX 4090

Those are some upgrades!
I did my first solo build in 2000 with the Intel PIII 933 Mhz. I built mine with the 810e chipset which supported a faster FSB speed. If I'm correct the chipset on the board at the time was one of the first ones to support both onboard sound and graphics. And back then you could play quite a few games with the onboard chips.

Glad we don't have to set IRQs and use jumpers for Master/Slave drives anymore.

I definitely don't miss those days, LoL. Not to mention IDE cables, serial and parallel ports, floppy discs (the actual 5 1/4 floppies and to a lesser extent the 3.5" floppies, the 8" floppy discs were well before my time...), Zip drives......oooh and the infamous Turbo button 

Christ I'm getting Vietnam style flashbacks lol. I really want to build an era accurate PC, basically my dream PC when I was a kid. Something from the windows 98 days. I gotta start attending retro PC conventions.

[faizoff]

I loved that Turbo button! I've been using PCs since the x86 days (yes the first one). Had an x386 and my friend had the x486 and would always boast how his turbo made things go super fast, games ran a lot quicker on his machine.
I didn't do it at the time but my cousin used to build and sell PCs and I'd watch as he'd solder chips on the board, don't even recall what he used to solder. Such an ancient time.

[XJDenton]

One thing I do lament is the lack of modern cases with good design AND a 5 1/2" bay, as the one person who still uses DVD drives.

[King Puppies and the Acid Guppies]

One thing I do lament is the lack of modern cases with good design AND a 5 1/2" bay, as the one person who still uses DVD drives.

Any time I need to use an optical drive I just use an external....which is almost never. I have no desire to install an optical drive in a PC case anymore.

[faizoff]

One thing I do lament is the lack of modern cases with good design AND a 5 1/2" bay, as the one person who still uses DVD drives.

I had held on to my ancient Cooler Master Sniper case for ages and when I upgraded 2 years ago I re-used the case as it held all my 5 HDDs plus 4k Blu-ray drive. I then moved to an ITX case, I shifted the HDDs to a DAS unit and put the blu-ray drive in an external case.


I think having the extra space made the move worth it.

[cramx3]

One thing I do lament is the lack of modern cases with good design AND a 5 1/2" bay, as the one person who still uses DVD drives.

This has been me, I still occasionally rip CDs.  Granted, my next build will probably go down to just one bay.  Definitely don't need all the ones I have on my current case. 

[El Barto]

I learned something new the other day. I had to add a HDD as I was running out of space on numerous partitions, and there's also the matter of Starfield's whopping big size. The object was to offload half of a 2TB drive and expand the other partitions to use that space. One of those partitions was my game install drive (D:). I'd noticed that my heavily modded SSE was taking every bit of of 2 minutes to launch. I figured this was just one of SE's unique qualities, and the number of mods I have. Three gig of Interesting NPCs is well known to slow down loading, among other things. Still, it was on a fast Samsung NVME drive, so I was a little confused. I ran into an issue resizing it because apparently you cannot expand EXFat partitions, which D was. DL software, convert it, resize it, and now it's formatted NTFS like the other partitions. Start time from MO2 is 20 seconds now. I was aware that ExFat wasn't as efficient for some applications. It's got times where it's better and times where it's worse. I really had no idea how much worse it could be, though. We're talking about every bit of six times faster just by changing the file system away from it. Who knew?

[axeman90210]

Need some tech advice. I had to bring my laptop into a repair shop because I was having issues with the power cable charging the laptop. I assumed it was an issue with the cable or maybe the USB-C port it plugs into. The repair shop found that the cable and port are fine, power is making it to the motherboard but the motherboard is not distributing power correctly throughout the machine. A new motherboard + installation will run me about $500, or I can buy a new laptop and they'll do a data transfer for me. Thus laptop is a little bit less than three years old and was otherwise fine. I also spent a little more than strictly necessary (~1k) when I got it just to basically have what I thought would be my laptop for a long time. I'm leaning towards having them replace the motherboard because a new laptop with similar specs will be a bit more money than the repair cost. Thoughts?

[El Barto]

Need some tech advice. I had to bring my laptop into a repair shop because I was having issues with the power cable charging the laptop. I assumed it was an issue with the cable or maybe the USB-C port it plugs into. The repair shop found that the cable and port are fine, power is making it to the motherboard but the motherboard is not distributing power correctly throughout the machine. A new motherboard + installation will run me about $500, or I can buy a new laptop and they'll do a data transfer for me. Thus laptop is a little bit less than three years old and was otherwise fine. I also spent a little more than strictly necessary (~1k) when I got it just to basically have what I thought would be my laptop for a long time. I'm leaning towards having them replace the motherboard because a new laptop with similar specs will be a bit more money than the repair cost. Thoughts?

Is this your primary PC, or just the portable one?

How do you define "a bit more?"

Is it a Dell?

[cramx3]

Never replaced a laptop motherboard, nor paid for such a service to know, but $500 seems like a lot of money.  My gut says to get a new laptop.  Something about taking the entire thing apart and putting it back together, for a laptop, just seems like it's going to have more problems in the future. 

[axeman90210]

Need some tech advice. I had to bring my laptop into a repair shop because I was having issues with the power cable charging the laptop. I assumed it was an issue with the cable or maybe the USB-C port it plugs into. The repair shop found that the cable and port are fine, power is making it to the motherboard but the motherboard is not distributing power correctly throughout the machine. A new motherboard + installation will run me about $500, or I can buy a new laptop and they'll do a data transfer for me. Thus laptop is a little bit less than three years old and was otherwise fine. I also spent a little more than strictly necessary (~1k) when I got it just to basically have what I thought would be my laptop for a long time. I'm leaning towards having them replace the motherboard because a new laptop with similar specs will be a bit more money than the repair cost. Thoughts?

Is this your primary PC, or just the portable one?

How do you define "a bit more?"

Is it a Dell?

It's a Lenovo, and it's my only computer (no personal desktop). I spent about 1k on it, came with 32 gigs of RAM, a decent Intel CPU, and a 1TB SSD.  Would still be a out $1k for a similarly spec'd new machine from what a quick search turned up, plus I'd need to pay for a data transfer since I hadn't backed anything up in a while.

[nobloodyname]

So half the cost of the laptop to replace the mobo? $500 to replace a Lenovo motherboard is exorbitant. You could get a second opinion, of course. I'd go with a new laptop. And I wouldn't buy it from the repair shop. If the laptop is actually usable, you could do the file transfer yourself. We could help guide you through that if you're unsure how to do it.

[El Barto]

So half the cost of the laptop to replace the mobo? $500 to replace a Lenovo motherboard is exorbitant. You could get a second opinion, of course. I'd go with a new laptop. And I wouldn't buy it from the repair shop. If the laptop is actually usable, you could do the file transfer yourself. We could help guide you through that if you're unsure how to do it.

Indeed, those MoBos seem to be fairly cheap to purchase, but I suspect swapping them out is a real PITA.

If I were going with a new laptop I'd have the repair shop give me the old one back still disassembled. A USB to SATA cable should run all of $10 and there's your data transfer. Downside on that approach is that the repair shop will then charge a diagnostic fee since they didn't do any work, so that'd be on top of the cost of the new lap top. Kind of a tough call all the way around.

[faizoff]

Interesting discussion, I've never replaced the board on a laptop before either. Only repair Ive done on a laptop is to clean the cpu fan which accumulated a ton of dust. Even that was a pain to disassemble and put back just due to the nature of how tightly things are packed.

Like others have said data transfer is a cinch these days. If you get a hold of your drive, whatever type it is, and get the correct cable, that's pretty much it. In windows you'd just plug that into another computer and copy paste.

[cramx3]

If that's the only drive and a Windows boot partition, can you just plug it into another PC and grab the data? I know it's that simple for drives that aren't bootable, but can't recall doing that to a "C" drive since I never store my data on that drive.