|OT| The PC Hardware Thread -- Buy/Upgrade/Ask/Answer

didamangi

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From the options I see Asus Prime Z790-P WI-FI?

I know pretty much nothing on mobos :/
Well, the b660 you chose is a high end one but can't be used to oc or now even undervolt as well a z series one.

And the b660/z690 motherboard will need a bios update before you can even use the 13600k, it just won't boot before you update the bios.

If you want a hassle free installation and avoiding the need for a blind bios update (using only usb drive and psu) you should consider a z790/b760 board right out of the gate for your 13600k.

Asus Prime Z790-P WI-FI is a good board with good vrm but lacking optical port for the onboard audio solution and just the one heatsink for nvme drives out of 3, which is easily solvable with a 3rd cheap party nvme heatsink if you chose to use the rest of the slot.

I'd say it's the better choice for 13600k rather than the b660 one, although feature wise (as in the amount of rear usb ports and the onboard audio) is not as good as the b660 strix.
 
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AHA-Lambda

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Well, the b660 you chose is a high end one but can't be used to oc or now even undervolt as well a z series one.

And the b660/z690 motherboard will need a bios update before you can even use the 13600k, it just won't boot before you update the bios.

If you want a hassle free installation and avoiding the need for a blind bios update (using only usb drive and psu) you should consider a z790/b760 board right out of the gate for your 13600k.

Asus Prime Z790-P WI-FI is a good board with good vrm but lacking optical port for the onboard audio solution and just the one heatsink for nvme drives out of 3, which is easily solvable with a 3rd cheap party nvme heatsink if you chose to use the rest of the slot.

I'd say it's the better choice for 13600k rather than the b660 one, although feature wise (as in the amount of rear usb ports and the onboard audio) is not as good as the b660 strix.
Thank you, sounds like the z790 then 👍

I keep making small changes to this config 😅
 
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C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
Dec 23, 2018
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Kinda stupid they put a time limit on it, but I don’t see why you wouldn’t just update your controllers between now and the end of the year? It’s not like they’re giving you a week to do it or something.

And anyway, I expect the firmware will be busted open long before then. People are already looking at the firmware files Google put on the tool.
 

Alextended

Segata's Disciple
Jan 28, 2019
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I updated Samsung Magician to do a check up on my old SSD's health since it's my primary/OS drive and now it no longer has the option to perform a diagnostic, it says drive not supported. That makes no sense if new versions don't support old SSDs without warning.

Also "overprovisioning seems broken, I enable it and it does nothing, it's still disabled except in another tab it shows as 0% 0GB (so same difference I guess).

Actually here it says 10% (and Drive Health Good but how does it know without diagnostic scans)

Here it's clear

And here if I enable it with power saving mode or with custom mode then it pretends to work for a while but switching tabs it's the same as before.

I wanted it since it says it lasts longer with it and I'm pretty sure I used to have it. Actually here it claims there are 11GB OP.

That's the tab if I switch from Clear OP to Set or after I faux-enable it in the other tab where it still shows as disabled when I go back to it. I can't change the 0%.

Edit: and now after some faffing about trying to enable OP it has two sections in that tab. But still reports 0MB. And the rest behavior exactly as above. Lol? Help?
 
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EdwardTivrusky

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No idea. I don't use OP and don't think i've ran diags on my drives. By default it will just read and interpret the SMART data i assume.
On a slightly related note, how do you lot clone your drives?

I have a Samsung 990Pro which is one of the ones with dodgy health. It's showing 93% health after 100 hours and 700gb written so i have a WD SN850X in the post to replace it so i can start the RMA process. I went from 250gb Samsung NVMe to 2TB samsung NVMe so i just used Magician but obviously i can't do that now.

Any suggestions for cloning a windows system drive in 2023?
 

Parsnip

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On a slightly related note, how do you lot clone your drives?

I have a Samsung 990Pro which is one of the ones with dodgy health. It's showing 93% health after 100 hours and 700gb written so i have a WD SN850X in the post to replace it so i can start the RMA process. I went from 250gb Samsung NVMe to 2TB samsung NVMe so i just used Magician but obviously i can't do that now.

Any suggestions for cloning a windows system drive in 2023?
Is it a boot drive? Oh you did say system drive, I'm blind. I have never had any luck fully, properly, issue free cloning of a boot drive. I have no idea what I'm doing wrong there, but the fresh drive always ends up in some kind of non-bootable state, some part of some boot record isn't copied over or is otherwise broken or needs and edit and it's a pain in the ass to fix.

Actually that's in my semi near future again since I'll need update my moms pc boot drive in the next couple of weeks, the old sata ssd in there is about 10 years old now. Maybe it will work perfectly this time. :doubtblob:
 
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Parsnip

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I normally just use dd.

Code:
dd if=/dev/nvme0n1 of=/dev/nvme1n1 bs=8M status=progress
Then I use gparted to resize the final partition if the target disk is larger than the source.
Maybe I need to give this a shot too, this sounds too easy. I guess I should prepare a linux usb key for it in advance.

Is rufus still good software to make bootable disks? Balena etcher? Both are still good I imagine.
 
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EdwardTivrusky

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Quick update i ended up poking around the Western Digital site and they have a version of Acronis True Image you can download which has a 5 year license apparently. It worked fine and i cloned my Windows 10 OS NVMe from the Samsung 990pro to the WD SN850X in an external caddy in about an hour. It was slow obviously but I only had 190GB and i played on my Steam Deck while i waited.

Swapped the drives over and had no problems when i restarted the machine.
 
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Li Kao

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Jan 28, 2019
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Is there a Geforce that makes even a little sense power/budget wise ? I won't splurge more than 1000 euros on a fucking GPU.
I don't know, 4070ti seems to be 1000 and hard to get, I could see me buying the former gen, a 3070 ti, far better priced at 500+. But on the other hand it has only 8Go of memory and does the purchase of a 30xx makes sense anymore ?
 

Pommes

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Is there a Geforce that makes even a little sense power/budget wise ? I won't splurge more than 1000 euros on a fucking GPU.
I don't know, 4070ti seems to be 1000 and hard to get, I could see me buying the former gen, a 3070 ti, far better priced at 500+. But on the other hand it has only 8Go of memory and does the purchase of a 30xx makes sense anymore ?
It depends on the resolution you want to play at.
For 1080p it will (probably) be ok.

For 4K I would advice against new graphics cards with 8 GB RAM.
Both Playstation 5 and Xbox Series X do have 16 GB of system RAM. This will probably lead to more games which are hungry for GPU memory.
Raytracing is another factor which leads to a higher GPU memory usage as far as I understand it.
 

EdwardTivrusky

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I have to admit i bought an RTX 4070 ti last week. It's the cheaper end of the range, a Zotac RTX 4070 ti Trinity non-OC.
My RTX 2070 non-super was having real issues playing the modlists i play on Skyrim & Fallout 4 so i took the plunge.
I considered a 3xxx-series card but the prices are still high, they are not as power efficient, and the 4070 ti gives me close to 3080/3090 performance and has new tech. I'm not going to be playing at 4k for a few years so 12GB and 192bit bus is fine for me i reckon.

It's been nice to play cyberpunk and modded games without sounding like i'm at an airport tbh. Although i do still wince at the price, i'll get over it, i'd been saving up and it's my main hobby. My friend is gearing himself up to get an RTX 4090 which i'd have a really hard time justifying to myself tbh.

edit: Forgot to mention my monitor is 2560x1440 @ 144/165hz.


As Pommes said, what resolution are you currently running at? What's your money budget? What PSU do you have and can you dig out the cables as you may need to find another PCI-E GPU cable. Depending on CPU it may be worth waiting for the upcoming and probably overpriced RTX 4060 and see what that offers.

There's also AMD's offerings bothe the 6x and 7x series but they are probably not priced as aggressively as we'd like either.
Not everyone lives in the US :(
 
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Li Kao

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I don’t know, in a way it’s a luxury purchase, as it’s not like my 2060 super didn’t run a majority of games well enough for me. I’m playing at 1440p and I’m good with 60 fps.
But I stupidly never played Cyberpunk because of the concessions. Then the demo for Forspoken was playable but far from 60. I get the feeling it’s time for a refresh as I suppose you can’t chalk everything under too demanding or badly optimized.

But holy damn, those prices. So my new GPU will cost between 1000 and 2000 euros, this is fucking insane.
Oh fuck, yeah, I vaguely remember having a… rx550? PSU. Great, another expensive shit to replace.
 

EdwardTivrusky

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I'd hold on tbh, if you can get by with lowering settings then i'd do that for the moment and not everything is going to be as demanding as Forspoken and other AAA games.
I'd say a 750W PSU would be a good baseline idea for the current new gen cards, 650W will work but it might push against it's boundaries at high loads with newer cards especially 3-series which are not as efficient as the 4-series cards.

Fingers crossed the prices start to drop as the newer mid-range GPUs start to come out in the next few weeks & months.

I could get Cyberpunk to run pretty well and look really nice with some tweaking on my 2700X & RTX 2070.
 
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Parsnip

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Not a hardware question but a software one. Anyone know of a good way to basically build an offline searchable index of all the files and the folder structure of a hard drive. Or in my case, multiple drives/volumes that are on the NAS?
 
OP
Durante

Durante

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Do you want to index content or just filenames?
If it's only about filenames, then basically that index already exists, it's just that Windows search is incredibly bad. I can search for filename patterns through terabytes of storage and millions of files in seconds with Ultrasearch. Some people prefer Everything.

However, I'm not sure if either of them work for a NAS use case. And if you want to search content rather than just file names you'll need something different. In that case I generally use grepWin. That takes a while, but it's also a much more rare use case.
 
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Parsnip

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Do you want to index content or just filenames?
If it's only about filenames, then basically that index already exists, it's just that Windows search is incredibly bad. I can search for filename patterns through terabytes of storage and millions of files in seconds with Ultrasearch. Some people prefer Everything.

However, I'm not sure if either of them work for a NAS use case. And if you want to search content rather than just file names you'll need something different. In that case I generally use grepWin. That takes a while, but it's also a much more rare use case.
Filenames is probably enough but meta data for music files in particular would be a nice bonus. I'll check these out when I'm back home. Cheers!
 

Parsnip

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Everything seems to work great since it can just index network folders regardless of file system so the NAS with its ext4 volumes is not an issue.

:wd_warren:
 
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MegaApple

Just another Video Game Enthusiast
Sep 20, 2018
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Need a MONITOR
  • Current gaming laptop outputs 1080/60fps fairly often on most modern games.
    (GTX 1650 laptop GPU)
  • Will upgrade to a newer gaming laptop (or if possible, a PC) in next 1/2 years
    (RTX 3060 laptop or higher)
  • Want a monitor that works great on both current and future systems
  • Should be decently big (24 inches or greater)
  • Pricing - Mid range
 

d00d3n

MetaMember
Jan 26, 2019
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Need a MONITOR
  • Current gaming laptop outputs 1080/60fps fairly often on most modern games.
    (GTX 1650 laptop GPU)
  • Will upgrade to a newer gaming laptop (or if possible, a PC) in next 1/2 years
    (RTX 3060 laptop or higher)
  • Want a monitor that works great on both current and future systems
  • Should be decently big (24 inches or greater)
  • Pricing - Mid range
Is 1320 euro for the alienware aw3423dw mid range pricing? In that case it should work great on both current and future systems, and is larger than 24 inches. It also has a fantastic QD-OLED screen which will make many games look better than they used to on non-OLED screens
 

MegaApple

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Is 1320 euro for the alienware aw3423dw mid range pricing? In that case it should work great on both current and future systems, and is larger than 24 inches. It also has a fantastic QD-OLED screen which will make many games look better than they used to on non-OLED screens
Mate you can't be serious 😆
 
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C-Dub

Makoto Niijima Fan Club President
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Any single part with a 4 digit price is in no way, shape or form mid-range. And those QD-OLED screens are basically best-in-class for gaming. High-end from top to bottom.

You might need to state a price range, MegaApple.
 

Pommes

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Jun 4, 2019
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Need a MONITOR
  • Current gaming laptop outputs 1080/60fps fairly often on most modern games.
    (GTX 1650 laptop GPU)
  • Will upgrade to a newer gaming laptop (or if possible, a PC) in next 1/2 years
    (RTX 3060 laptop or higher)
  • Want a monitor that works great on both current and future systems
  • Should be decently big (24 inches or greater)
  • Pricing - Mid range
You can find many monitor reviews on the Youtube channels Hardware Unboxed and Monitors Unboxed.
For an overview you can start here:
 

Parsnip

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So anything interesting/useful I could do with a regular, 256gb SSD? It's about 9 years old but still kicking. It's actually my first SSD, but it's been in my mom's PC for a few years now, but yesterday I installed a basic nvme in there and copied the system over. So now I have this small SSD that I don't know what to do with. Maybe I'll use it as an SSD cache for my last internal HDD, or something.
 
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didamangi

Sometimes maybe good, sometimes maybe shit.
Nov 16, 2018
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Need a MONITOR
  • Current gaming laptop outputs 1080/60fps fairly often on most modern games.
    (GTX 1650 laptop GPU)
  • Will upgrade to a newer gaming laptop (or if possible, a PC) in next 1/2 years
    (RTX 3060 laptop or higher)
  • Want a monitor that works great on both current and future systems
  • Should be decently big (24 inches or greater)
  • Pricing - Mid range
27 inch ips 1440p high refresh rate monitor maybe? They're cheaper now than ever before and might fit your mid range pricing.

Pommes is right, monitors unboxed is a great resource to find one that suits your need.
 

Blu

MetaMember
Mar 12, 2019
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Hey first time building a PC and here's what I've got so far : https://pcpartpicker.com/list/6jK9Dq

I plan on mostly just gaming and streaming to friends but would like on a hobbyist level get into game development/3D modeling. Would love to hear some feedback on different brands I should consider replacing in terms of more reliable parts or just anything that doesn't make sense in the build. I'm mostly unsure of the motherboard since I picked the cheapest one that had DDR5 and 13th gen intel out the box.

I also would like a recommendation on a case. I'm looking for a case that has good thermals, airflow, and ease of cleaning? Like has built in dust filters? I was looking at the Corsair 4000D Airflow but I'm open to suggestions. Easy to build in as this would be my first time doing so would be a plus but not necessary.

I don't have necessarily have a set budget but I will be buying these parts slowly over the months so if there is anything good I should wait for please feel free to mention it.
 

MegaApple

Just another Video Game Enthusiast
Sep 20, 2018
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Any single part with a 4 digit price is in no way, shape or form mid-range. And those QD-OLED screens are basically best-in-class for gaming. High-end from top to bottom.

You might need to state a price range, MegaApple.
My bad
I want within ₹ 20,000 - ₹25,000 range, that's ~$250 / ~€230 / ~£205
I don't know if I should be aiming for higher.
 
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Durante

Durante

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In that price range I'd say the best choice for gaming/media is probably a 27" 144Hz VA panel monitor.
Something like this: AOC Q27G2E/BK ab € 229,00 (2023) | Preisvergleich Geizhals Österreich
The biggest drawback of those is that some pixel transitions aren't very fast. If that's a big deal to you you're probably better off with a TN panel, but those are worse at literally everything else.
 

didamangi

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My bad
I want within ₹ 20,000 - ₹25,000 range, that's ~$250 / ~€230 / ~£205
I don't know if I should be aiming for higher.
Might want to check out the AOC Q27G2S or Viewsonic XG2705-2K. Both are 1440p IPS 155/144hz.

It's a little bit above your budget at ~$280 in my local online store. Might be cheaper or more expensive in your region.
 

Parsnip

Riskbreaker
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Nvidia finally started selling FE cards over here in Finland and the rest of Nordics I think, in some kind of partnership with Proshop. Not older cards though, only the two 4000 series FE cards.
Though of course even then the cards are absurdly expensive with 4080 FE at 1399€ and 4090 FE at 1889€. But like for comparison the Asus TUF 4090 is roughly 2200€.
But it's nice that FE cards are now available since the build quality on those is good and while large, they are practically minuscule when compared to some of the partner cards.
 
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EdwardTivrusky

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Well, I've had PC issues so it's been a bit of an expensive week for me after lots of troubleshooting which is why i haven't been posting.
My old PC with the RTX 2070 & Ryzen 2700X was loud and hot for a long while but i put it down to the games i was playing like heavily modded Fallout 4. Fast forward to a while ago and i upgraded to 5800X3D and things improved but it was still not right but i was getting 14.4k in Cinebench R23 so i was okay with it still being a bit noisy. The Ryzen 5k series runs hot after all.

Then these last few weeks things got out of hand, it running HOT and LOUD, like boot to windows and it was idling at 60c and straight to 90c when running any form of benchmark. I finally did some poking around, BIOS reset, driver reset, Undervolting etc and the machine was still wrong. Tracked it down to probably an issue with the AIO pump and so...

I've just installed a new AIO, Corsair 240 Elite Capellix XT, BIOS reset etc and i'm now running at 35c-45c at idle on quiet profile, my Cinebench has dropped to 14000 give or take depending on fan profile and how many other background processes are running etc but it now maintains a consistent 4.2ghz boost and 70c-78c under load.

I think i might look at Curve Optimiser in the BIOS and dropping the CPU Voltage Offset by 0.05 to see if i can eek out a bit more performance but that's for later on.
 

DrShrapnel

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I’m going to be upgrading my 3070ti very soon, and I’m looking for opinions on a 7900XT as opposed to a 4070ti.

The 7900XT has 20GB of VRAM versus the 4070ti’s 12GB, but the 4070ti outperforms it in Ray tracing, and has the bonus of DLSS 3 frame generation.

With new games getting more demanding which is more the important feature? Frame generation or more VRAM?
 
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Parsnip

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I’m going to be upgrading my 3070ti very soon, and I’m looking for opinions on a 7900XT as opposed to a 4070ti.

The 7900XT has 20GB of VRAM versus the 4070ti’s 12GB, but the 4070ti outperforms it in Ray tracing, and has the bonus of DLSS 3 frame generation.

With new games getting more demanding which is more the important feature? Frame generation or more VRAM?
Well, purely gaming and Windows in mind I'd roll with nvidia, though my current opinion of the two is close enough that that could change depending on local card pricing and availability of specific partner models etc. People smarter than me generally say that you'll run into other bottlenecks before VRAM becomes a problem. For some non-gaming workloads larger VRAM amount becomes more important. I don't expect frame generation to be a big deal in the end tbh, at least not in the near term.

If Linux is a consideration, then I'm guessing AMD is probably the better option.
 

EdwardTivrusky

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You might hit a VRAM issue if you're running heavily modded games with 4k textures e.g. Skyrim and if you are looking to go for 4K res instead of 1440p then it may be a consideration... but i don't know about comparisons with the 7900XT in performance so can't talk about that.

I did buy an RTX 4070Ti a few weeks ago as it was actually in stock and they had a model that was reviewing decently and at the lower end of the RTX4 series pricing but due to my issues with my old AIO i haven't been able to really test it yet. I have just installed a couple of Skyrim and Fallout 4 mods so i should be able to compare with my old RTX 2070 non-Super and Ryzen 2700X performance.
 
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DrShrapnel

Shuwatch!
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You might hit a VRAM issue if you're running heavily modded games with 4k textures e.g. Skyrim and if you are looking to go for 4K res instead of 1440p then it may be a consideration... but i don't know about comparisons with the 7900XT in performance so can't talk about that.

I did buy an RTX 4070Ti a few weeks ago as it was actually in stock and they had a model that was reviewing decently and at the lower end of the RTX4 series pricing but due to my issues with my old AIO i haven't been able to really test it yet. I have just installed a couple of Skyrim and Fallout 4 mods so i should be able to compare with my old RTX 2070 non-Super and Ryzen 2700X performance.
I feel as though I keep reading about the VRAM issue, and lower memory bandwidth of the 4070ti. I don’t know enough to be able to say whether it’s a big deal or not. I’ve just never considered dropping $800+ on a GPU before, and I’d hate to be turning down settings in the near future after dropping that much money. I know with my 3070ti I’ve had to drop settings to get within the VRAM budget, and that’s at 1440p.

I’m probably going to stay with Nvidia though. The VRAM difference is the only advantage really with the 7900XT.
 
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EdwardTivrusky

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I totally understand. I had considered getting RTX 4080 but it was at least £450-£500 more expensive at the time and stock was patchy. Dropping over a grand on a freaking video card was just something my brain was struggling to justify too, even though i had the money saved and use my machine for hours per day most of the time especially since work-from-home/Hybrid working was a thing and is something i'll be doing for the next year at least i think.

£800 for 3090 performance at a lower power budget even with 12GB and lower memory bus was something i could just about wrap my head around and will be a big upgrade from my 2070 Non-Super. I just accepted that this was where Nvidia has driven the market and it isn't going to improve any time soon so i bit the bullet and hopefully will get a good few years out of the card before i sell it on or pass it to my sister's kids.

My 2070 is in my housemate's PC, his 1080 has gone into his office to replace my old 1070 he was using lol. He has decided not to go for a 4090 and instead has bought a new drone for when he goes on his nature walks over the spring/summer. He'll then probably buy a 4090 for the winter depending on price as he wants to mess about with RT and plays a hell of a lot of VR over the winter.

At the moment though, a 4090 for Minecraft, Far Cry and Halo Infinite when he'll be out most weekends just wasn't worth it.
 
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