saturnotaku

Most single-player games lose the majority of their player base within a few months of release.

There are M2 Pro 14s available from the Apple refurbished store for $1600. They have standard M3 models with 16 GB of RAM for a bit less. On the Windows side, there isn't going to be much that offers comparable performance while delivering similar battery life. Maybe the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i with the new Intel Core Ultra CPUs, but don't quote me on that. I also think that Costco dropped the 4-year warranty perk - you only get one year of extra coverage, even if you pay with their in-house Visa card. I have to say I am a huge fan of my M3 Pro MBP 14 and have virtually no desire to return to a Windows-based laptop any time soon.

Same point about DLC can be made about hardware. People (myself very much included) rewarding companies' bad behavior only incentivizes more of it. At this point, I really hope Intel can take that next big step forward with Battlemage and price it as aggressively as they did with the A770.

Less money, less faster, still crappy value.

The duality of man.

Much as it sucks from the consumer's perspective, NVIDIA's (and AMD's and Intel's) primary responsibility is to its shareholders so the company is only going to do what is in those people's best interests. At the same time, it's asinine to say that every higher-end GPU should never cost more than $700 ever (this is an exaggeration of course, but you get my drift). As much as I like HUB, this is something they do all the time. The GeForce3 was $500 at its launch in 2001, which would be more than $870 today.

He actually does a decent job explaining the methodology and provides a process document for the public to view.

Not if you already have a 3090, no. It seems like Linus is making good on the promise to revamp and improve his group's testing methods. This sort of scientific (as scientific you can get on YouTube without getting put to sleep anyway) analysis is not something I would have ever expected from his channel, and that's a very good thing.

Frame gen is not a performance enhancing technique but rather a performance smoothing one. If your base frame rate in a game is 30 and frame gen increases it to 60, you're still getting a 30 fps experience in terms of overall feel, input latency, etc.

I played with the Alienware OLED at a local Best Buy last weekend, and I'm slowly warming up to the idea of going that route. It wouldn't be with that model, rather the 27-inch Corsair that uses the same WOLED panel as the LG 27GR95QE because I need its KVM switch functionality. I would be keeping the LG 27GP950 in my upstairs office as it's primarily a productivity monitor that displays a lot of static content throughout its time in use. Plus an OLED would be too dim for the room. The Corsair would replace my current Gigabyte M28U, though I don't know if I'm ready to give up 4K resolution. I wish there were 4K/144 OLEDs in the 27-28-inch form factor.

Picking up a 4080 Super makes no sense either.

MSI will likely be the vendor of choice for my next motherboard. I wish there was a company that made enthusiast-grade boards without any of the bling. High-quality VRMs with appropriate cooling but no RGB headers. All customization, including fan curves and such, available through BIOS. Any tuning software would be minimalistic in presentation, yet entirely optional, with a way to easily export and flash any profiles you want to create without having to constantly reboot to change settings. While I personally wouldn't care about any of the tuning stuff, I just want something that doesn't require gobs of intrusive software to do basic things. Getting rid of all lighting would go a long way toward solving that problem.

Asus is like the Porsche of computer parts: They'll charge whatever they think they can get away with, and they know people will happily pay. The only reason I have an Asus motherboard is because that's what MicroCenter upgraded me to when the AS(s)Rock one I was using spontaneously stopped powering on. I'll admit this had me worried about buying one of their GPUs, which is why I did invest in the MC replacement warranty just in case. Adding that basically brought the price of the open-box card up to a brand-new one so no real harm or foul.

The top comment on this video says it all, "AMD never misses an opportunity to miss an opportunity." I also like the one about AMD being allergic to gaining market share. This would have been yet another chance for AMD to piss all over NVIDIA at the lower end of the market, but they just couldn't bring themselves to do it. They can't have been so stupid as to not know that there is still a massive supply of RX 6700 XT GPUs available that cost the same but with performance that's better by a double-digit percentage margin.

Death Stranding Director's Cut is slated to launch on the MAS on January 31. They're offering a pre-order price of $20.

Another perspective on the Framework: The 16-inch seems very much like a "version 1.0" product that needs some tweaks/refinements before it can really be taken seriously outside of tech-head circles.

While I own AW, I never actually played it. Instead just watched a let's play, which was more than enough. I did play Control when it was released on Xbox Game Pass. Played it a bit less than half through way before getting bored. I did go back and try it with the "one shot kill" option enabled, which made it fun for a little while longer, but it still couldn't keep me engaged enough to see it through until the end. The 4070 Ti Super looks like a pretty big disappointment. The 7900 XT appears to outperform it in most straight rasterization tests. Despite the AMD card's MSRP being $100 more, right now it can be purchased for $50 less. This makes my 7800 XT purchase look even better: It's about 20-25 percent slower but only cost slightly more than 50 percent as much. NVIDIA must be using the worst of the worst 4080 silicon to make the 4070 Ti Super.

You're expecting a company like ASRock to put actual forethought into their designs LOL. Based on the promo pics, I think it's just for show. ASRock | AMD Radeon™ RX 7800 XT Phantom Gaming 16GB OC

I used the 7800 XT GPU swap as a teaching moment to show junior some of the finer points of PC building. I think it turned out pretty well, at least on the hardware side. Software was a bit of a mess, but I attribute this to the s****y nature of As(s)us' and AS(s)Rock's control suites. A motherboard BIOS update followed by a clean Windows reinstall appears to be working for now, unfortunately at the expense of Asus AISuite no longer being functional. Fortunately, said BIOS update seems to have fixed the ability to set the fan curves to my liking there without needing to rely on software. The 7800 XT runs extremely quiet, with probably the least amount of coil whine I've ever heard from a GPU that has similar or higher power draw. It passed the 3DMark stress test with flying colors, not exceeding 70C according to the software. I'll need to reinstall all my games, but so far so good. As an added bonus, despite purchasing the GPU open box, I still got a code for a free copy of FarCry 7, aka Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.

I'd rather shave with a cheese grater, but you do you.

As much as I love having my rays traced, I can't justify $600 for the 4070 Super (4070 at $550 is still a joke) when I found a 7800 XT for $150 less.

Should have listed it here. I very likely would have bought it from you since it would have been ready to go, priced reasonably (I hope LOL), and with no fleBay tax, you certainly would have had more cash in your pocket. Oh well. As neat as my cheap RTX 4060 is, it's also struggling mightily in some of the more intensive games I have in my back catalog, at least when running at anything resembling quality visual settings. I found an open box RX 7800 XT at the local MC for $450 that I'm planning to grab today. While it won't give double the performance given it's almost twice as much as what I paid for the 4060, the boost will be enough to provide a more playable experience at non-potato settings. It should also make the entire setup more sellable down the road.

Despite product listings claiming that the RTX 4070 and below can run at 140W, they only do so in very select use cases. In the overwhelming majority of applications and games, they draw a maximum of 100W due to an NVIDIA-imposed voltage limit. This is not the case with the RTX 4080 and 4090, so the liquid cooler would be rather superfluous on the lower-end models. I'm pleased to see Tongfang has finally added USB-C charging support to their laptops. Not that I'll be switching back to a Windows laptop any time soon, but still cool to see nonetheless.

Not sure if it's been mentioned here, but the Radeon RX 6950 XT is available for just $550 right now. AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT Triple Fan 16GB GDDR6 PCIe 4.0 Graphics Card - Micro Center

The 4070 Super is an impressive bit of kit that can hang with a 3090 in situations where VRAM is not a limiting factor. I'd be kind of pissed if I paid four figures for a 3090 but 2080 Ti owners should still feel good about how well their cards are still holding up. I really wanted to snag a 4070 Super but my $230 open-box RTX 4060 is more than capable enough to get me by until Intel 15th-gen/Ryzen 8000 (9000?) and RTX 5000.