Considering that both AMD and nVidia has basically abandoned the value market, it's very unlikely that we will be able to get a GPU at MSRP prices anytime soon.

To make matters worse:




Really though the best way for this is just get a PS5/XSX if you can find one at non-inflated prices (quite unlikely) and buy a cheap PC for basic tasks
...unless you also do performance intensive work like photo and video editing

This is a really bad time for those who want to get into PC gaming

Those next-gen consoles are very tantalizing in terms of price/performance, and you'll probably need a PC that costs 2-3x higher than the price of the console just to match their performance. Sure you have to deal with higher priced games and subscriptions, but value-wise the consoles are far better than any PC parts released today

This post has been edited by chocobo7779: May 6 2021, 12:21 AM

That's not going to deter miners from circumventing the limiter though

...and the miners will just find another way to go over it (see what happened to the 3060 mining limiter)

Even if you consider if there are no price hikes and all GPUs are sold at MSRP, the Ti cards are pretty poor value to say the least (compared to AMD's offerings)

Unless you want RTX/DLSS, there's very little reason to go for those cards over a RX6800 or the 6900XT, especially that the 3070 Ti only comes with 8GB VRAM which is going to be a problem for those who are gaming at 4K

Considering RT performance right now, there's very little reason to go RTX considering how little games actually uses proper ray tracing (even if they do, it often comes with a significant performance penalty)

The only reason I may consider going RTX is DLSS, but that one might become a hard sell in the future since AMD's FSR may soon become very popular and widely adopted in games as it will be used on consoles as well (note that FSR is crossplatform, and will work from integrated graphics to next-gen consoles)

Still too early to tell though without proper analysis, but certainly interesting to see nonetheless (might end up like G-Sync vs FreeSync, with G-Sync having technical superiority but limited adaptation, with FreeSync being inferior but has widespread adoption)

Looks like the GPU competition is now on, but too bad the competition only started in the wrong timing

At any rate it's very unlikely that GPU prices will go down, considering that the userbase already gets used to the new pricing

nVidia/AMD have been steadily increasing prices and somehow we are willing to accept them

This is not healthy for the PC gaming market in general (especially when you consider that price/performance ratio of the new consoles)

This post has been edited by chocobo7779: Jun 3 2021, 01:38 PM

So basically it's a slightly faster 3080 with 2GB more VRAM for a 71% price premium.... this has to be one of the worse value Ti cards nVidia has ever made IMHO

They had a chance to match or even undercut the 6900XT, but they decided to price it $200 higher

Assuming MSRP (which is basically unicorns these days), there's very little reason to buy this over the 3080, 6800XT or even the 6900XT

Guess my 5700XT is going to stay for a very long time unless AMD/nVidia come to their senses and stop charging ridiculous prices for their GPUs, but that won't happen anytime soon (if not forever)

This post has been edited by chocobo7779: Jun 3 2021, 01:43 PM

Good news:

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/asrock-sa...dropping-report

A sign of good things to come?

...with the water shortages in Taiwan easing right now, this can mean good news for all

This is the first time a x60 card being one of the worst card in nVidia's history from a price/performance ratio (the 3060Ti though, is way better)

A worry trend for me is that there is an increasing trend for PC hardware makers to prioritize aesthetics rather than cooling... it used to be that motherboards have proper VRM heatsinks like this:

https://bit-tech.net/reviews/tech/motherboa...h-x58-review/1/

...now we have things like huge plastic shrouds and RGB lighting covering the heatsinks, acting as an insulator

The same thing goes to cases too, cooling for modern cases have regressed due to lack of front mesh panel or the usual oven case design (it's weird to see that old cases like the HAF X or the old Silverstone Ravens outperforming a good majority of modern cases in terms of thermals)

Too bad manufacturers are fixated on shoving RGB lighting and copious plastic shrouds on graphics cards and heatsinks rather than designing a proper cooling system for those cards (GDDR6x/GDDR6 memory are known to run hot, and somehow Zotac didn't cool it properly in such an expensive card is borderline unacceptable IMHO)

This post has been edited by chocobo7779: Jun 19 2021, 10:09 PM

Colorful is hardly a low tier brand IMHO (It's very popular in the Chinese/South Korean market)

You can't simply generalize brands with their products (you have good brands churning out bad products, and the reverse is true as well, and sometimes bad brands churning out both good and bad stuff as well)

Colorful also owns Segotep, which also puts out some pretty decent PSUs and some low quality ones too (a few brands like Enermax also use their designs as well)

It's pretty disappointing to see GPU power efficiency to go backwards considering we used to made huge strides in power efficiency several years ago, especially from the Maxwell/Pascal era, and that enormous power efficiency gains often benefits well to small form factor machines and laptops. I still remember that laptop GPUs back then used to perform quite comparable to its desktop counterpart (minus power and thermal limits, that is), and now something like the flagship 3080 Mobile only performs at the same level as a 3060

I can't really imagine how's the cooling on those future cards (the cards would look super chonky, so four slots anyone?) - especially considering that 300W+ GPUs like the 3090/6900XT are already hard enough to be air cooled
You can really say goodbye to SFF PC builds if those power consumption figures are indeed real

If the charts were any indication, AMD's custom silicon division is certainly impressive nonetheless - they somehow managed to design a chip that fits a 8c/16t Zen 2 CPU at decent clock speeds with a GPU that is comparable to a 5700XT/RTX 2080/Super (the Series X), and the consoles still consume less power than some gaming laptops and is cheap enough for Sony/Microsoft to price those consoles well

This post has been edited by chocobo7779: Aug 2 2021, 04:36 AM

I remember back in the day buying a GPU gives you 3 free games and the games are actually pretty decent at that time
My old HD7950 actually comes with Far Cry 3 + Hitman Absolution and Sleeping Dogs

Could it be the GDDR6X memory that causes the 3070Ti to be inefficient compared to the regular 3070?

RAM is too low for gaming (or even general use), and is not exactly cheap either - you're much better off buying a Series X/PS5 over this

Yeah, quite close to the original pricing of the 3060Ti here (IINM the 3060Ti used to retail at the RM1900 mark)

Good times indeed, but crypto prices are creeping up so the good times might be short-lived