2016+ CPU/GPU News

[kano]

Let's hope the sales of these new graphics cards crash harder than Zen 4 did and they have to quickly lower the prices, as was also done with Zen 4.

At least Zen 4 was a good product, outperforming the 5950x in Blender by a healthy 40%. But even offering a competitive and compelling product, which these GPUs are not, won't help when the PC market is in the toilet.

Edited May 25, 2023 by kano

[jaxa]

I don't know what will happen to the RTX 4060 and 4060 Ti, but I expect the RX 7600 price to slide on down. AMD already started the slide ~48 hours pre-release, so it's not like they're confident in the product.

I'd consider picking up a 16 GB 7600 XT as a replacement for my GTX 970, but I don't really need it for TDM.

[revelator]

well tbh im kinda glad i waited on getting newer hardware seing as my friends less than 3 years old x570 gigabyte mainboard just gave out, atleast the company refunded the price on the board but he can no longer get one with a socket that fits his zen 3 3950 cpu (atleast none left here in denmark) so were looking for a used replacement... in the meantime we moved his rx5700 xt to my old asus x79 deluxe and it is happilly chugging along on it's 10 birthday with a 1680v2 xeon 8 core and 64 gb ram.

he is a bit unhappy about the boot time but that is normal on the x79 and has nothing to do with the sata speed (bios does tons of checks before allowing it to boot) but in game it runs like oil and is quite a bit more stable than the ryzen build (not to say the ryzen is crap the mobo might have been the culprit here seing as numerous people have had troubles with the auorus series). If i could just find the riser card for the old x79 deluxe he could actually get his nvme in there as a game drive, but the x79 deluxe only ever supported one nvme drive and current riser cards have bifurcated connections allowing 4 or more nvme's and do not play well with this old mobo. There are bios modifications to the board allowing bifurcation but id rather not brick it.

[jaxa]

https://videocardz.com/newz/amd-ryzen-5-5600x3d-6-core-cpu-with-3d-v-cache-is-reportedly-coming

Rumored 5600X3D coming to AM4.

[kano]

Not hardware related, but I upgraded to Debian 12 and I swear the system feels faster and more responsive now. Quite a bit, actually. I know for sure that the AMD drivers were improved between Linux 5.10 and 6.1. But it really feels like other optimizations and improvements were made as well. And it's not a fresh install, it's an upgrade, so there's none of that "you started with a clean slate so of course it's faster" that you get when you first install Windows and the registry hasn't gotten filled with crap yet. It's just too bad that Linux 6.2 did not make it into Debian 12 as standard, because I think that's what you need for good Intel Arc support. I was this close to buying an A770 last week, but then the price went up overnight from $329 to $400. I guess Intel saw the announcements just like we did.

 

But I think I'm gonna just sit on current graphics hardware for as long as possible to teach the industry a lesson.

EDIT to be clear the desktop is faster and more snappy not just with AMD graphics, but also NVidia as well. Also the web browser too. They must have done something to improve scheduling in the kernel. Now that more consumer devices, e.g. Steamdeck are running Linux, and not just servers, one should probably expect more improvements of this nature.

Edited June 12, 2023 by kano

[revelator]

at the current speeds -> 3 years went from DDR4 to DDR6 -> nvidia went bananas with cards sucking more power than two amd R9 390X in crossfire while requiring a pc case bigger than fort knox -> amd went from AM4 to LGA sockets and had a small whoopsie with the new cpu's blowing up on OC boards due to the voltage boost many of these provide by default.

me having fun restoring previous gen PC's with proven technology, many of which can still put a dent in newer offerings hehe.

[revelator]

got my hands on one of the old lian li full aluminium pc cases in mint condition even this one was back from the core2 days came fully stocked with a violently overclocked core2 quad damn thing actually runs win10 pretty fast but the gfx card was a nvidia 560 gtx ti so no directx12 and max sata speed was sata 3 so even thugh an ssd helped a bit its still on the slow side with transfer speeds. ill yank my asrock z97 extreme6 in there with a gtx 970 and use it as a media server, downside with the z97 board is that even though it does have an nvme slot it halves the pcie lanes for the gfx card due to the cpu only having 16 (this board does not have a plx chip you need the extreme9 for that and good luck finding one hehe). still if you can live with a normal ssd it runs pretty good and is one of the most stable boards i have had. it is also stocked with a devils canyon 4790k refresh which i recently delidded and applied liquid metal to the ICH instead of the gunk intel used, this lowered the core temps by > 20 degrees so i can heartily recommend doing it. (need to be carefull though the liquid metal is conductive so do not spill any !!!, best approach is to laquer the components beside the ICH with clear nail laquer let it dry and then carefully apply a small ammount of the liquid metal on the ICH use one of the cotton pads that come with it to grind it into the chip surface evenly).

[jaxa]

Core 2 Quad Q6600? I think I know someone who had one of those. Slower than my 6600T though.

There will be some actual CPU/GPU news this month, starting with AMD launching the RX 7700/7800 cards.

[revelator]

yep one of those bad boys i actually have 2. one from an old build the board sadly gave out in the end (one of the makes with the infamous nforce chipset "MSI board"). the nforce chipset wasnt to bad but it had a tendency of getting extremely hot, sadly at the time it was pretty much needed if you wanted to run your nvidia cards in SLI. back then the PCIE lanes were all handled by the northbridge not the cpu so maybe not so odd that temperatures exploded, hell even the memory controller was located on the northbridge .

the one i got in the lian li is an intel p35 though "gigabyte board" not that i intend playing with SLI (well could be fun trying it with the gtx 560 ti since i got 2 and the card was a pretty solid performer for a midrange card back when it was new but bleargh...). as for the cpu the q6600 was a solid overclocker though far from the fastest cpu in the core2 days when overclocked it ran pretty fast.

[revelator]

 

quite a beauty aint it back in those days cable management was not a thing though so i have some plans regarding that. the front knobs are for fan control you needed a pretty optimized setup on fans to keep these old timers from going into nuclear meltdown when overclocked into the high 4 ghz range. one of my friends had one in an alienware with an ln2 setup (basically a freezer attached to the cpu as cooler) the whole board needed to be dipped in silicone grease to keep moisture out of the components so it was a bit of a mess but his board ran a core2 at 5.6 ghz so it was lightning fast at that time. for my own setup ill probably go with an aio water cooler mounted on the sidebracket in the picture. ill probably also keep the fan controls since it allows me to micromanage a positive airflow system that wont blow your head of with the fan noise.

[revelator]

heh just realized this is actually one of the few boards from that era which can still run win98 se it has both pata and sata connections as well as floppy (unused atm), i dont really need the board so if anyone wants to toy with a retro build they can have it :) cpu and ram to ofc, though if you want to go for win9x i have a dual core for it instead as win9x cannot do multicore anyway. should also be possible to get a single core pentium model for the old 775 socket.

[revelator]

well i did something rather effective with this old cabby, i threw my asrock z97 extreme6 board in there with the cooler from the core2 quad (plenty effective). the gfx card was a bit of a bummer though as i had two to choose from but both were much to large for adding an aio to the sidebracket, well actually to large for the sidebracket as well so i had to mount it a bit offset from the mesh hole in the side. i actually managed to get my well proven rm1000 corsair psu in there allthough i had to remove one drive train and move the cable wall to about the mid of the cabby (luckily this is pretty easy with the old lian li models) downside is that i now only have room for 3 harddrives unless i buy a ton of offsets and mount them in the dvd/cd trains. i removed the fan controller because this cabby only has 3 fans and no room for more unless i do some serious remoddeling, this does not matter that much as the asrock board has plenty of fan controls onboard. so atm it runs with 3 1tb mechanical harddrives and one 1 tb nvme, board has 32 gb ram and a gtx 970 (will probably throw in my 1080 ti instead once i get the dough for a rtx 3070 ti for my main pc) the cpu is a devils canyon 4790k relidded with liquid metal. it runs really well with this setup though as long as i dont try anything fancy like 4K  i can run cyberpunk 2077 with 60 fps no sweat in high.

[revelator]

well this turned into quite the project, the case had no problems with the 4790K heat wise so i bought an offhand asus rog gaming x99 board with a xeon 8 core 16 threads with HT and 64 gb ram and yanked that into it. the xeon is a haswell as well but a high end model with more cores and pcie lanes (40 to be exact) so i can now use my nvme without sacrificing half my lanes to the gpu so yay!, this also allowed me to use a slot for my thunderbolt card so im ready for some NAS action :) (or a whole slew of monitors 24 to be exact).

cpu stays at a livid 35 degrees when idle and does not go much higher when i really start kicking in the doors, the gfx card does get a little hot but its an older model and rated for far higher than the 60 degree temps im seing so im not to worried. it runs quite well actually :), the lightshow on this board is kinda wasted though as the cabby has no glass panels but i dont really care about the flashiness anyway . Had some people go wtf when they saw how fast it was because they assumed it to be an old PC hehe.

[revelator]

time to let go of my old trusty x79... im selling it with 32 gb kingston ram 3930K cpu (6 core HT unlocked) and ofc the cooler a noctua NH-UP15 (massive air cooler). the board is an asus x79 deluxe with wifi/bluetooth it can boot from an nvme if you use a pcie raiser (bios supports nvme), the board supports quad sli but one must be carefull due to the spacing between the cards (not possible with dual slot gfx cards) best bet is dual sli / crossfire due to the gfx cards taking 32 of the 40 avaliable pcie lanes. runs quite well with a 1080ti but higher than that might bottleneck this old geezer unless you overclock it which it does rather well :) got to 5.2 ghz stable without raising the vcore (3.2 ghz stock on the 3930k so 2 ghz overclock omg...) make sure you have a well ventilated cabby though as it gets rather hot at these speeds . could probably go even higher but then you would need ln2 cooling. the board can handle 128 gb ram so plenty of room for more.

if you want the most out of this board yank a xeon 1680 v2 in it :) this is basically the I7 4960x extreme with two extra cores and unlocked to so can be overclocked -> 8 cores 16 threads with HT, the clock is a little lower than the 4960x but reports indicate it overclocks just as well as the 4960x.

one warning though it does not run well with a sapphire RX 5700XT gfx card not really sure why but atleast it only seems to hate the sapphire models of this card, other models should run fine from what i heard but the sapphire model crashes this board.

 

 

[revelator]

well here it is :) might look unassuming but this puppy is driven by a 16 core xeon hehe.

and yes thats a 1kw PSU probably overkill but the old R9 290X is a powerhog so better safe than you know... the CPU cooler is a dark rock slim despite its small footprint it cools astonishingly well.

the old gfx card handles HZD with no problem using the latest nimez drivers starfield is a nogo though it does start but crashes instantly when in game guess they still need to iron out some bugs cause it also crashes with my 1080ti though i can usually play for atleast an hour or more before it happens.

 

GFX card will be replaced next but i need to find a model with a lower profile than most because of the fan assembly at the top, the cabby is simply to slim for huge GFX cards if you want the fan also and you do... the cabby only has 3 fans and they are not the most efficient at moving air (probably going to replace them with some high pressure models). and you might need to build up some muscle if you wanna steal it (it weighs 30 kg) hehe.

[taffernicus]

Oh darn my knowledge on GPU and processors still stuck in year 2015-2016 , The year when AMD unveiled its Radeon RX 460,470 and 480 and nvidia had just released geforce 10 series to public , i remember GPU and processor prices were still reasonable at that time and there were no chip shortage whatsoever , i was highly recommending ryzen processor to my friends. Nice to see this ongoing discussion

 

meanwhile i need to ditch intel trash 6th gen&8th gen hd graphic, Early 2000s intel extreme graphic , core 2 duo's intel GMA , 82830/82845/82865g chipset left a bad taste in my mouth

Edited September 11, 2023 by taffernicus

[revelator]

was just a fun little project i got going after amassing an awfull lot of hardware over the years. so i thought to myself why not build something rather OP in a case that is from around the core2 / pentium days hehe.

at the start i just went with what i had avaliable which was either an old asus x79 deluxe with a 3930k / 1680 v2 xeon cpu or an asrock z97 extreme6, well the old asus board wented to much heat when stressed so i tried out my asrock board and that went surprisingly well with the 4790k devils canyon, then my chums PC went boom and i gave him the asrock board plus cpu so he could atleast game a bit and surprisingly it turned out that even for an old model it still had plenty of power for his RX 5700 XT gfx card and was rock stable in every game he had.

so i was one board short and got a nice deal on an asus strix gaming x99 with an 8 core xeon and 32 gb of ram, the xeon ran surprisingly well depite being a more workstation oriented CPU gaming was fine on it. so i started to look around for some secondhand xeons and got hold of a 16 core model with hyperthreading so 32 threads all in all. it had a rather low clock speed of 2.4 ghz but im yet to see it choke on workloads and the turbo goes to 3.2 ghz on it when needed and does not get all that hot. only gfx cards i had laying around was an R9 290X or a 970 GTX both are pretty equal speedwise the R9 uses a lot more power though so the 970 would have been optimal sadly the 970 (asus strix) has a rather large cooling pipe sticking out at the top which makes mounting the side fan a problem (no space left) so i had to go with the R9. at some point ill probably try to get a 2080 ti for my main PC and the other one can get my current 1080 ti which is comparatively small compared to either of the old cards.

[jaxa]

4 hours ago, taffernicus said:

meanwhile i need to ditch intel trash 6th gen&8th gen hd graphic, Early 2000s intel extreme graphic , core 2 duo's intel GMA , 82830/82845/82865g chipset left a bad taste in my mouth

I've unditched some office worker's Intel 6th gen. Plays TDM at locked 720p30, yum.

I don't know where I'm headed next. Maybe Strix Halo, maybe a 11th/12th gen office PC, or something else entirely.

[revelator]

wow thats even older than my sandy still amazing what you can pull out of those oldies.

one of the reasons they performed so well (comparatively) caused a security risk though (spectre / meltdown ughhh) hence why the prediction model was scrapped in later offerings, even my 8 gen is afflicted by this turning off the meltdown / spectre security measures does affect them speedwise (some quite a lot) i dont think i ever been hacked through it though it is rather hard to detect intrusions on hardware level so who knows . does not affect my current cpu that much but my old sandy got slaugtered performance wise.

[revelator]

oups wait a sec the 6th gen is newer than the sandy which is a 4th gen the 6800k in my main is also a 6th gen (or rather 7 since its a broadwell but intel uses the same gen for both the haswell and broadwell oddly).

though one could argue that this also holds true with the CPU's from the sandybridge and ivy bridge age in which case the ivy would have been a gen 5 haswell 6 and broadwell 7. strangely while named similarily the 6700k is an 8th gen. in games the 6700k does better than the 6800k while the 6800k has a bit more pcie lanes 24 vs 16 and my xeon has 40. the difference in gaming is neglible though especially with newer games utilizing more cores. the 6800k was actually the cheapest 6 core at the time but in comparison with the older 3930k which was also a 6 core it only had 24 pcie lanes while the 3930k has 40 (intel cheaping out ?). to add insult to injury the 6850k has 40 pcie lanes while being pretty much equal to the 6800k otherwise so it does seem like they did.

the 6950x which is the fastest CPU for x99 was pretty much unavaliable for us normal folks back when it was a thing (extremely expensive at 1500$) it had 10 cores and HT and ran at a higher clock than my xeon at stock 3.0 ghz vs 2.4 ghz it also had a higher turbo frequenzy of 4.0 ghz. sadly even today they are not cheap.

[taffernicus]

On 9/11/2023 at 12:44 PM, jaxa said:

I've unditched some office worker's Intel 6th gen. Plays TDM at locked 720p30, yum.

I don't know where I'm headed next. Maybe Strix Halo, maybe a 11th/12th gen office PC, or something else entirely.

My core i5 6500 with SSD and dual channel 8gb RAM slapped on it barely hit above 80 fps on the dark mod(lowest setting, 768p resolution) , framerate is crazily high on loading screen, sometime it suffers dramatical fps drop on certain spot and freezes for a second and goes back to normal. I have tried playing with all non essential program shut down to minimize background process but to no avail. This applies not limited to the darkmod itself, strange lag spikes also occur when i play decade old games such as far cry 2, splinter cell double agent and SC: conviction, sleeping dogs, hitman absolution and Just cause 2 , all of which could be handled easily by modern intel integrated graphics. I know i have budget to upgrade but i am trying to push my pc to its limit.

 

i borrowed my sister's pc yesterday and tried running latest dark mod on ryzen 3 3200g with 8gb ram and 1GB vram allocated to its IGP , the difference was night and day.

 

Gonna purchase ryzen 5 5xxx with cheapest AMD/Nvidia GPU and this HP elitedesk 800 G3 would be repurposed as my next homelab

Edited September 14, 2023 by taffernicus
minor edit

[taffernicus]

anyway what's your longest system uptime ?

 

mine is roughly 32 days , running eve-ng virtual environment,  hyper-v, and docker container for learing purposes

 

i am too lazy to hit shutdown button to cool it down, i want it to be available at any time without having to wait to boot up, i am such a lazy ass

[jaxa]

9 hours ago, taffernicus said:

My core i5 6500 with SSD and dual channel 8gb RAM slapped on it barely hit above 80 fps on the dark mod(lowest setting, 768p resolution) , framerate is crazily high on loading screen, sometime it suffers dramatical fps drop on certain spot and freezes for a second and goes back to normal.

i5-6600T here which is virtually identical or slightly slower, same Intel HD 530 graphics, paired with 32 GB dual-channel DDR4-2133, and a M.2 SSD. With my 720p display (which is set to 1360x768 for whatever reason) I was getting around 40 FPS in High Expectations beta testing, with dips to the 20s. But the internal TDM/Doom3 FPS counter seems very erratic.

I've ended up getting a much better experience in TDM by locking it to 30 FPS. Dips are less common, the experience is playable. It's clearly faster than the old A6-3400M APU I used to use to play TDM a decade ago, which was not always bad but would sometimes crater down to 4-5 FPS. I'm pretty much always getting around 28-30 FPS when locked.

I think I can upgrade the CPU itself to at least an i7-7700T which is slightly better all around (maybe i7-7700 if I have the correct 65W-capable Dell motherboard), but the prices I've seen on ebay suck. If it's significantly more than $30 shipped, I might as well stick with the 6600T and put that cash towards the next mini PC.

 

Edited September 14, 2023 by jaxa

[revelator]

Hmm longest uptime was on my old 3930k (about 3 years). I allways go crazy on cooling with my main pc's. 

[taffernicus]

2 hours ago, revelator said:

Hmm longest uptime was on my old 3930k (about 3 years). I allways go crazy on cooling with my main pc's. 

wow that's insanely long time, has it been running without reboot? My biggest fears in running PC for a long timeframe are PSU meltdown, CPU stock cooler going bad over time and blown capacitor...

 

*Tangential, i have 18 years old Pentium D and 20 years old AMD Athlon XP PC that have not been powered up for a long time , I'm afraid it will explode when I turn it on

 

Edited September 15, 2023 by taffernicus