2016+ CPU/GPU News

[revelator]

no reboots :) just make sure the mainboard has solid capacitors (most gamer boards have this today) still they wont last forever but the board i have my 3930k in is about 10 years old and still works fine. cpu's generally don't degrade unless you overclock them beyond there capability or used sub standard cooling so you should be safe, as a rule of thumb from my technician days silicon usually does not start to degrade unless you hit > 80 degrees celcius, if that is the case then the cooler is simply to small (rule of thumb no 2 the cooler needs to be able to dissipate the same amount of watts pumped into it atleast). for caps in those older boards make sure they dont bulge if they do then yeah there is a good chance they might go boom when turned on, if not it should be safe turning it on :).

[revelator]

oh noes my 4k screen just burned out on the upside i now get around 120 fps in starfield though it did take a lot of the detail out of the game to run it at 1920x1080 . well guess the cheaper 4k models are just crap (3 years old).

[revelator]

i threw my 1080 ti into the old cabby despite the mainboards being pretty similar the rog strix gaming x99 was a bit more stable than my asus x99-A II though tests say the A II is the better board so huh ?!? only difference as far as i can see is that the rog gaming x99 has built in wifi but otherwise the boards look exactly the same despite the color.

might just be a glitch with mine since i had quite some trouble with getting it to run when i got it (one ram module turned out to be bitchy) strangely the single module had no errors but when i ran it with any of the other modules in the set the mainboard crashed all the time, so i bought a quad paired set of g-skill aegis 8gb modules and cleaned the board thorougly. its been running ever since though a few oddities have turned up from time to time. so right now it runs my old R9 290X gfx card and after some messing about with a mod called potato mash i can even run starfield on it. ill delegate it for msys2 package development for now though.

the old cabby runs like a small rocket due to the 16 core xeon so ill use that for gaming for the time being .

[revelator]

well ill probably invest in an rtx 2080 ti and call it a day both machines are running quite well now, the one in the older lian li got a bit hot on the VRM which i fixed with a small clip on cooler (normally used for cooling OC ram) and some elbow grease getting it fitted. ill drop the rtx in the newer lian li as it has better airflow. then ill see if i can get some dough for a new 4k screen.

[revelator]

btw. if you still happen to have an artic freezer extreme rev.2 dont throw it out. despite being a midrange cooler it actually cools very very well (actually beat my dark rock slim cooler Oo) and its extremely quiet too. the rev.2 model also fits on lga 2011.v3 sockets and has a bigger base compared with the rev.1. it also handles some modest overclocking quite well. the upside compared to the dark rock is that it is a dual tower cooler so it has a bit more cooling area while still being slim compared to the dark rock pro and noctua nh-up15 which are pretty massive. performs best in a well vented case but thats true for all coolers.

[revelator]

well my park of older asus boards now include an asus x99 deluxe one asus x99-AII and one asus rog gaming x99. all running quite well. I gave away the rog gaming to my sister who was still using an old mac pro (the one with the amd 290x gfx card) and a xeon 8 core sandy. while it was still running it was suffering from some heat delirium clogged up with dust (damn i hate taking apart these mac pro's allmost broke it because you need fingers the size of pencils to get the ribbon cables back on when reassembling it). the rog gaming with a 6900K ran circles around the old sandy even after cleaning it despite both having the same ammount of cores and the gfx card i gave her also had the old 290x based chip beat (980 gtx). If she needs something stronger the board can easily manage an rtx 2080 ti a 3080 might be pushing it though.

[revelator]

https://www.3dmark.com/spy/7379449

besides the board its the same setup i use bottlenecks ??? where 2000 points less than a RX 7900 XT in a much more recent board 9000 points less than a 4090 rtx in an amd board using the 3d cache ryzen thats just sad...

utterly destroys a normal gaming PC from 2023 while still keeping up with a high end PC from the same year... yeah.

and it cost me around 500$ to build

[jaxa]

Why even bother with Crossfire tho? It's Current Year.

[revelator]

heh its the rtx 2080 ti asus strix gaming OC not even running in SLI the cpu was overclocked a bit 4.2 ghz up from 3 ghz (gets pretty hot beyond that but at 4.2 it barely scrapes 40 degrees in my setup). the 6950x is a 10 core 20 thread broadwell i7 so not to shabby. the gaming machine i built uses SSD's exclusively 2 x 2tb samsung 870 evo and one 2tb crucial nvme. PSU is a 850 watt seasonic platinum. it has 32 gb of G-skill DDR4 ram. board is an asus x99 deluxe with a dual thunderbolt adapter which i dont use atm so is disabled. plays everything i throw at it at more than 60 fps in 4k.

only lacking the tpm module for the board which ill probably get next to atleast have some of the requirements ready for win11, still have to disable the check for the cpu because its not on the win11 list but it runs fine (tested).

[revelator]

the sad thing was that the 6950x was 2000$ when it was new so only something for the wealthy back then, and ryzen was starting to nip it in the butt with lower priced and allmost as fast cpu's. could actually be fun to try out the 2080 ti on a recent ryzen build to see the result, but im quite happy with my setup now i even got an asus x99-AII with a 6900k and a 1080 ti which plays pretty much everything (as long as you dont use raytracing and lower settings a bit for the newest titles). Well not completely true you can actually use raytracing with it using FSR2 but it does lower the framerate quite a bit 20 > 30 fps on some titles, as long as you dont go 4k its more than playable though -> callisto protocol at high settings with raytracing and FSR2 runs at 75 fps at 1080 resolutions.

[revelator]

well... i just ran the same benchmark and mine beats it by about 1000 points 14856 in timespy with mine 13888 points on his setup holy hell... guess i won the silicon lottery . i own the fastest 2080 ti setup on a 6950x cpu ever recorded.

[revelator]

the 2080 ti is not a great 1080p player it starts to shine at higher resolutions best at 4k at 1080p it barely beats my 1080 ti at 1440 it runs about 15 to 20% faster and at 4k it speeds away at more than 30%. i can barely get it warm at 1080p mostly stays at 40 degrees in crysis remastered at can it run crysis mode (nope it cant really run it heh) getting around 30 fps at 1080p with occasional spikes into the 50 range heh. at higher resolutions the fps starts to go up which is kinda weird when used to it murdering fps at 1440 i get around 40 fps and at 4k it goes into 59 fps but cant quite break the 60 fps barrier sigh, it does look very good though. my old cpu might actually be holding it back at lower resolutions despite being comparable to a ryzen 3700x in performance (benchmarks show allmost the same performance between them), then again at the insane detail levels at the highest setting of this game it might be better to just go 4k anyway at which point it does not matter that much.

[jaxa]

How about some actual news for a change?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21208/amd-unveils-ryzen-8000g-series-processors-zen-4-apus-for-desktop-with-ryzen-ai

New desktop APUs are finally coming to the AM5 socket.

8700G and 8600G are technically based on the "Hawk Point" refresh of Phoenix, with the faster AI engine and maybe some fixes in silicon.

8500G (retail) and 8300G (OEM-only) are based on the Phoenix2 hybrid Zen 4 + Zen 4c die, with greatly diminished graphics. Still might be worth it to somebody, especially when the 8500G goes on sale.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21215/amd-adds-radeon-rx-7600-xt-to-product-stack-16gb-1080p-gaming-card-for-329

The RX 7600 XT has 16 GB of VRAM and slightly higher GPU clocks, at a $329 MSRP. There's been some grumbling about this one but if the price drops a little it could be a good alternative to at least the RX 6700 10 GB.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21209/amd-announces-new-zen-3-chips-with-2-new-apus-and-the-ryzen-7-5700x3d

AMD is tossing a 5700X3D and some other cheap chips out there for AM4 users.

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/nvidia-axes-rtx-4070-ti-and-rtx-4080-to-pave-the-way-super-variants-reduces-rtx-4070-msrp-to-dollar549

Nvidia adjusted its lineup with new Super cards.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21219/ces-2024-intel-briefly-shows-lunar-lake-chip-nextgen-mobile-cpu-uses-onpackage-memory

Lunar Lake is basically a sequel to Meteor Lake-U low power mobile chips, specifically the unreleased variants with on-package memory, indicating a bit of lineup divergence as Intel chases Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3) with similar designs.

Edited January 11 by jaxa

[revelator]

hmm yeah i heard something about the new lineups being optimized for AI, guess it will be the new hit with all the focus there has been on it :). hopefully the gfx card lineup with the 4070 ups the memory bandwidth and ammount which was actually a rather big stopgap for the 4060 to really shine not sure if it was as much a problem with th 4070.

hmm i wonder if lunar lake is going to be the new atom ?? sounds a bit like it,

apples M series are interresting ARM based i think ? looks like they are going back from standard x86 again, but yeah ARM should be more mature now, also the older motorola based cpu's they used before changing to intel were heat monsters, my old G5 had a ginormous hybrid water cooling system built in i remember.

a 3D cache chip for AM4 well those who havent yet updated for the new socket would be thrilled i bet

[revelator]

mostly looking forward to this https://www.pcgamer.com/microsofts-light-based-computer-marks-the-unravelling-of-moores-law/ no more noisy and expensive cooling needed would most likely also be pretty fast in comparison with current cpu's.

also they are by nature quantum computers ssince they can use the whole ligt spectrum for data flows no 1 - 0 but everything between 1 and 0 including. they also dont need to be cooled by stuff like liquid nitrogen or other fancy stuff so that is pretty big.

[jaxa]

32 minutes ago, revelator said:

hmm yeah i heard something about the new lineups being optimized for AI, guess it will be the new hit with all the focus there has been on it :). hopefully the gfx card lineup with the 4070 ups the memory bandwidth and ammount which was actually a rather big stopgap for the 4060 to really shine not sure if it was as much a problem with th 4070.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_40_series#Desktop

4070 Super adds performance, 4070 Ti Super adds performance and +4 GB VRAM, 4080 Super adds very little performance but constitutes a ~20% price cut.

4070 Ti and 4080 are discontinued, 4070 non-Super remains but gets an official price cut.

Nvidia repaired their lineup somewhat, and that could be good tidings for some.

32 minutes ago, revelator said:

hmm i wonder if lunar lake is going to be the new atom ?? sounds a bit like it,

No. It looks like a premium mobile product. 4+4 cores, 64 EUs, an NPU, 16-32 GB RAM on-package, VVC/H.266 decode support, etc. Perhaps it's less expensive from being smaller and having about half the cores and graphics than larger mobile dies.

The current "Atom" is Alder Lake-N with no P-cores and 8 E-cores (Gracemont). The quad-core chips such as the N100 are extremely popular in sub-$200 mini PCs right now. The rumor mill says Alder Lake-N will get refreshed as "Twin Lake", with no major changes at all.

32 minutes ago, revelator said:

apples M series are interresting ARM based i think ? looks like they are going back from standard x86 again, but yeah ARM should be more mature now, also the older motorola based cpu's they used before changing to intel were heat monsters, my old G5 had a ginormous hybrid water cooling system built in i remember.

Looks like you are very late to the party on Apple news.

32 minutes ago, revelator said:

a 3D cache chip for AM4 well those who havent yet updated for the new socket would be thrilled i bet

It's a decent price cut for those who couldn't stomach a ~$300 5800X3D. Hopefully with not too much of a performance loss from clocks. Reviews will sort it out.

AM4 is a massively popular platform and these latest releases could help the POORS who don't live in places like 'MERICA.

25 minutes ago, revelator said:

mostly looking forward to this https://www.pcgamer.com/microsofts-light-based-computer-marks-the-unravelling-of-moores-law/ no more noisy and expensive cooling needed would most likely also be pretty fast in comparison with current cpu's.

There's always big talk coming from the labs. I was supposed to get my holographic discs 15+ years ago.

Edited January 12 by jaxa

[revelator]

well hal9000 was based on optical computing... lets hope we dont end up with something monolithic here

probably right right about the apple stuff havent owned one since my G5 so i havent kept that much track of developments.

its probably still pretty far of into the future with the light based stuff sorta like the fusion reactor (should be up and running in 30 years.. said 30 years after they last said it ho hum...) still pretty cool but i wouldnt be surprised if im dead and gone before it becomes a reality :P.

[revelator]

hmm i should have thought about that when i noticed the built in ram on the lunar lake, though also usable on a micro computer it makes more sense for mobile.

4070 ti super sounds like a good deal if the price is right, not so sure about the other models ?, performance wise they are already up there but may lack a bit more memory for higher resolution gaming, 12 gb iis mostly ok though, strangely it seemed the 4060 16 gb model was a flop but being the lowest model of the midrange cards might have been a hinderance (not performant enough to warrant the memory increase) the 4070 should have the muscle to make it a hit though.

agree on the m4 socket still being popular and actually a smart move to also make the 3d cache chips availiable  on those boards, looking forward to see the performance.

 

[jaxa]

5700X3D has the same cache, so it's all about the effect of the ~400 MHz clock reduction. Probably not much, I'd guess 3-5% slower on average than 5800X3D. We have not seen the 5500X3D, maybe they'll toss that to the peasants.

Hard for me to call Nvidia cards "a good deal" but I see some arguing that DLSS makes all the difference over AMD cards.

[revelator]

bad wording a good deal compared to the other models maybe no....

it was the memory bus that was the problem with the 4060 ti, at 128 bit it did not really have the bandwidth to take advantage of the added ram and was only 5 to 8 % faster at 4k sadly it could not even manage 30 fps at that resolution so erf.  the added ram became moot at 1080 and only miniscule at 1440 resolutions.

the 4070 does have a wider bus so it should handle it better i reckon.

lets cross fingers for more X3D  models for the am4 a 400 mhz drop should not be to bad

 

 

[revelator]

DLSS is supossedly better when moving where FSR has a tendency to artifact more, speedwise it should also be a good deal faster though the gap is shrinking i heard. cant really see much difference myself my eyesight is not what it was, i can see the difference at 1080p but it looks like crap at that resolution and they actually discourage using it there.

[nbohr1more]

From what I gather, some research group finally figured out how to make use of carbon structures in a semiconductor.

They made a hybrid silicon\carbon substrate that works at least as good as silicon but has thermal conductance pretty close to that seen in graphene lab samples. Estimated to be less than 5yrs from commercial viability. Maybe that is why TMSC is skipping ASML's EUV High-NA tools? They think they can save money and hit ultra clock-speeds if they invest in the carbon\silicon hybrid wafers?

https://www.anandtech.com/show/21194/asml-ships-first-high-na-euv-scanner-to-intel

[revelator]

aye lots of experiments going on atm, germanium is also making a comeback as a semiconductor material in cpu's mostly hybrid silicon/germanium though.

[revelator]

https://www.waferworld.com/post/why-is-germanium-making-a-comeback-in-the-semiconductor-industry

germanium was the material used in the first transistor but was harder to work with, so it got waylaid when silicon was discovered. it does have better charge carrying capabilities and is very stable, with the advanced fabrication technology today it made sense. since it also has 3 times the electron movement speed compared to silicon

[revelator]

huh seems there are some future plans for a smart transistor based on the hybrid materials silicon germanium and carbon nanotubing which promisses to cut down the transistor count in a cpu by as much as 85% due to it being able to auto reconfigure itself 85% ... omg.