Etern4l

Micron VRAM. Nuff said. Sorry to hear, must be annoying, but good thing you ordered from Amazon and it happened within the return period.

Yeah, definitely good to see these enter the market - they have a place. The problem with that game is that it essentially boils down to "who has deepest pockets". You can spend 20-30 grand on a Xeon workstation base (just CPUs, cooling and some RAM) from what I can see, so I guess most folks will be left out of the high end game. Here is an enthusiastic piece by LTT (who can afford that lol): Interestingly, he mentioned the obvious too - HEDT market (TRX4 specifically) got destroyed by the insanely powerful consumer chips. Another interesting fact he mentioned is that the whole Sapphire Rapids architecture is based on 12th gen (minus eCores obviously), so a bit deprecated from the start.

What do you mean "a Xeon"? Dual Xeon or bust ;) On a more serious note, dual Xeon mobos seem to be harder to find, compared to say 5-10Y ago. Again, less rationale given how much the baseline and max single CPU performance have increased. 112 cores on a single CPU is a lot.

If anyone is still not clear on MS having become an even more evil company, just go and watch any interview with the CEO. Luckily using their products is a choice, not a necessity.

LOL. I prefer to think of a PC as a hardware platform. One can certainly go a long way towards avoiding becoming a Public Computer user by using Linux or hacking Windows, as people here tend to do.

Yes, back then it made more sense. It wasn't anywhere near that long ago, but these things are much harder to come by currently due to the amount of compute you can just get from the consumer baseline. Many places also virtualise workstations now.

Former dual Xeon WS user here, just to keep things on the clear side lol Remember that the RAM will be somewhat slower, and I would really like to see hardcore overclockers "having fun" with 128GB DDR5 RAM+ configs. Also, as everyone knows, the overall performance improvement due to faster RAM is certainly very far from linear, and close to nil in many use cases, and even more so in the Xeons with larger caches. Hello CB23. Just saying that Intel pushed the consumer desktop platform so far with the 13900K, they sort of cannibalised the lower tier of their Xeon line for most WS use cases. Same story with Nvidia on the GPU side. Sure, a 32 core Xeon will ultimately run faster at 3x the TCO, which business are looking closely at too these days. If you can get away with using the consumer platform, you just get much more work done per $, which tends to be a good thing.

Yep, a lot of the "pro" offerings are a just a tax on large businesses, the technically-naive people who believe they will get better performance out of those products, and of course the serious hardware addicts :) I would include the lower tiers of Sapphire Rapids in this assessment, locked or unlocked. Of course, these products have genuine use cases, but then the question would be whether not to just use the cloud instead.

Sapphire Rapids is not HEDT in the X299 sense though. These are just Xeons, so a purely business line. Pretty sure people will be disappointed with the overclocking side of things there. I mean 4.8GHz max baseline and enterprise-level ECC memory.

Ah yes, managed to overlook that one. At about 3x the price, hardly a super-attractive offering there by Intel.

And when will that be? :) You can still buy a good selection of brand new 20xx'es.

Yeah, I just set the first 3-4 values, and never bother with the rest. MSI BIOS has features when it tries to automatically tighten other timings too, although this can obviously affect stability. Probably best to tighten them one by one in order for optimal results. Very time consuming though.

OK, so looks like you would need a w7-3445 to beat a 13900K. Clearly, Rocket Lake represents extremely good value, the main limitation being RAM capacity available to a single CPU. For a price of a single w7-3495X you could have a farm of 13900Ks that would decimate it in terms of memory bandwidth and pure compute power, except in use cases that do rely on huge amounts of RAM available to a huge CPU. Very niche stuff, although looking at it from the energy efficiency or space perspective does improve the picture. Different story on the server side of course, where you can't use consumer-grade chips (that I heard of).

8 DIMMSs would be nice. I wonder what RAM speeds will this support (I guess ECC will be required) .... With AL/RL we are talking about 4000-4400 MHz officially supported on 4 high density DIMM configs lol

I have a 980 Pro 1TB with 154TBW and health is showing as "good". Not unlucky then.

Are you talking about Sapphire Rapids?

If you are using Windows then AIDA64 and SiSoft Sandra are probably best for benching. Recommend you also test stability using Memtest86 over several hours.

This is mostly caused by massive demand for GPUs from the tech industry. That's all they can spare for laptop gamers.

Looks that way.

ECC is only present on the x090 models, to support some ultra-high reliability applications. I ran it for a long time and never saw any errors so turned off as it costs some usable VRAM capacity and likely performance. I'm thinking maybe HWBOT(3dMark?) have this policy to prevent people from gaining an edge with super-overclocked and artifacting VRAM. Just failing at playing devil's advocate.

Had is correct. Ngreedia recently nerfed it back to 8GB. According to this prerelease info, it's still an upgrade in compute power, but memory bandwidth is getting a serious haircut: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-4060.c3891 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/geforce-rtx-3060.c3682 The 3060 specs are for the 12GB model, so I imagine Nvidia nerfed the 3060 to make things look right at 4060 launch. Sad.

Second that. @ryan is clearly a good bro, passionate, and offers a diversity of thought and opinion. Plus we get IQ testing info to boot

There is barely any difference between BD and streaming in practice. On Netflix you will sometimes spot some minor artifacts (it was bad during covid when they were forced by regulators to cut the bitrate), but the higher resolution is very clear, and the overall image quality is excellent almost always.

I mean the difference is massive, there is no way anyone would confuse 4K and 1080p content, unless there is some eyesight issue. If in doubt, just go to a TV store and look at 4K content. The improvement is super-obvious.

Yeah, there is a huge delta between 4K and 1080p, I'm not sure up to what distance, but would guess at least 10m. Netflix/Amazon Prime 4K content is really good, not much difference vs BD in practice. The improvement brought by 8K vs 4K is also fairly subtle.