Tech Gaming Hardware discussion (& Hardware Sales) thread

[Madmick]

I've been wanting to build a gaming PC for a while, but with graphic card prices going crazy, it's been on hold.

The RTX 3000 TI series looks to be down to MSRP with a discount, but with all of the different varients and price ranges, I'm really not sure. Is it safe to buy now or is there still room for them to come down? I'm not really in a hurry so I do t mind waiting.

The reason prices crashed is because the cryptomarket crashed for 2 straight months. No ifs ands or buts. Had nothing to do with supply or insipid manufacturer-led price control efforts. So I'm with Method, I think now is the time to buy, because over the past week, I see almost all crypto going back up on Coinbase, and however you interpret that, as crypto recovering or as a fresh effort from those behind a grand Ponzi to create that impression, it doesn't bode well for GPU prices unless it immediately reverses.

If you can score one at MSRP I wouldn't chance it. Even the best markets don't typically see more than a 20% depression below MSRP in GPU prices around this point. So the upside is marginal, anyway.

 

[Dinkin_Flicka]

Thanks guys, will likely pick one up when we get back from vacation in a few days. Don't really want one sitting on my porch for a week.

Any major differences in the different brands MSI, EVGA, GIGABYT, etc? Or is there one that performs better than the others? The GPU is probably the component that I want to shell out the most for.

 

[560ti]

The reason prices crashed is because the cryptomarket crashed for 2 straight months. No ifs ands or buts. Had nothing to do with supply or insipid manufacturer-led price control efforts.

Agreed, the whole "supply chain causing price increases and huge supply bottlenecks" was the biggest BS that AMD and Nvidia threw around.

Nvidia literally sold more graphics in both 2020 and 2021 then did in 2019.......... ("we can't manufactuer even an average amount" was complete BS).

 

[JBSchroeds]

Thanks guys, will likely pick one up when we get back from vacation in a few days. Don't really want one sitting on my porch for a week.

Any major differences in the different brands MSI, EVGA, GIGABYT, etc? Or is there one that performs better than the others? The GPU is probably the component that I want to shell out the most for.

The different brands are all board partners with nVidia/AMD and the core silicon comes directly from them. That means the differences will usually come down to cooler design and various bells-and-whistles (tuned overclocks, multi-bios, tuning software, junk like that). There can be some differences in reliability but as long as you're not seeing a lot of negative reviews for a specific card model you can usually get away with purchasing any version that strikes your fancy. I would suggest that not paying extra for an OC version of a card or ones with massive coolers, there aren't many situations where you'd notice a difference in real-world usage. This is especially true if you're shopping in the mid-tier, where you're almost always better off paying a the little extra to bump up to the next model rather than getting an OC of the lower model.

Anecdotally I would avoid MSI: I've had shit luck with them. I've had fans die on two of their videocards, a monitor outright shit the bed in less than two years, and a motherboard that may have gone bad. You could hand me one of their products for free and I'd dump it straight in the trash.

 

[Blayt7hh]

Agreed, the whole "supply chain causing price increases and huge supply bottlenecks" was the biggest BS that AMD and Nvidia threw around.

Nvidia literally sold more graphics in both 2020 and 2021 then did in 2019.......... ("we can't manufactuer even an average amount" was complete BS).

Yeah but also what was demand in 2019?

 

[Blayt7hh]

I've been wanting to build a gaming PC for a while, but with graphic card prices going crazy, it's been on hold.

The RTX 3000 TI series looks to be down to MSRP with a discount, but with all of the different varients and price ranges, I'm really not sure. Is it safe to buy now or is there still room for them to come down? I'm not really in a hurry so I do t mind waiting.

IMO now is the time to buy. They could possibly go lower but I wouldn't want to risk it. Then again the 4000 series is supposed to be coming out soon so who knows. If it was me I'd be doing it right now. Steam summer sale is currently going so you'll have plenty of deals on games to really test out the new system.

I don’t think you will see them dip too far below msrp unless they way overproduced cards in the light of the crypto crash. The question now is buy a nearly 2 year old piece of tech, or wait for the next gen that is around the corner? Of course, the 4000 cards will be sold out probably for a couple of months as well.

If you do decide to by a 3000 card, make sure it’s brand new and not used no matter how tempting the price gets. The markets getting flooded with former crypto farm cards and a lot of those cards get cooked h the farming process.

 

[560ti]

Yeah but also what was demand in 2019?

That's 100% our point. The graphics cards companies can't just come out and say thanks to cryptocurrency the demand is so high we can price gouge for record profits.

Instead they just came up with BS excuses like supply issues, covid, tariffs to make them not the bad guys when really they were intentionally price gouging due to cryptocurrency demand

It's the same thing with new builds where I live. They were raising the prices multiple times what it has actually costing them extra to do and now that supply is getting higher and interest rates are going up they're having to do with the graphics cards companies are currently doing and lower everything back to MSRP

 

[Dinkin_Flicka]

I don’t think you will see them dip too far below msrp unless they way overproduced cards in the light of the crypto crash. The question now is buy a nearly 2 year old piece of tech, or wait for the next gen that is around the corner? Of course, the 4000 cards will be sold out probably for a couple of months as well.

If you do decide to by a 3000 card, make sure it’s brand new and not used no matter how tempting the price gets. The markets getting flooded with former crypto farm cards and a lot of those cards get cooked h the farming process.

Yeah, my plan was for a brand new card. Everything I've read is that pretty much all of the used cards are trashed from the non stop farming.

Think I'm going to go with a 3000 series and I can always upgrade later. I've been a console guy my whole gaming career and only recently bought a gaming laptop for work travel. It's been awesome to have, but it only has a RTX 2070, so I won't really know what I'm missing going with a 3000 instead of the new 4000 series.

 

[Blayt7hh]

Yeah, my plan was for a brand new card. Everything I've read is that pretty much all of the used cards are trashed from the non stop farming.

Think I'm going to go with a 3000 series and I can always upgrade later. I've been a console guy my whole gaming career and only recently bought a gaming laptop for work travel. It's been awesome to have, but it only has a RTX 2070, so I won't really know what I'm missing going with a 3000 instead of the new 4000 series.

It also depends what your gaming on. If you’re not doing 4k then you probably aren’t going to notice a massive difference from the 3000 cards anyways. If you are doing 4k then probably will.

3000 series would be a massive jump for you from a 2070 even if he doesn’t sound like it. The laptop gpus are not the equal of their desktop name sakes. I actually hate that they market it that because it’s so misleading. If you got a desktop 3070 (or even a 2070) you would see a big jump up from the laptop.

Anyways, to wait or not to wait is always an annoying conundrum in pc gaming. Since you don’t have a desktop right now I would probably say go for it. Who knows how long it will be until you can get a 4000 card at msrp anyways

 

[Madmick]

That's 100% our point. The graphics cards companies can't just come out and say thanks to cryptocurrency the demand is so high we can price gouge for record profits.

Instead they just came up with BS excuses like supply issues, covid, tariffs to make them not the bad guys when really they were intentionally price gouging due to cryptocurrency demand

This. Don't forget the "leaked" drivers that broke the hash-throttling feature on new cards they introduced & touted to present themselves as good guys fighting crypto-inflation. Horse manure: posturing.

Everyone selling opportunistically exploited the increased demand from crypto: down the line. That's okay, that's capitalism. It's entrepreneurial. It pisses me off, and I don't want to take a part in it, or help profit this who profit, but this isn't like price gouging of food or basic goods during a state of emergency such as wildfires bring. I'm all for outlawing that behavior, and we do here in California. But GPUs run a luxury good. We're talking about video games, here.

I just don't care for the noise, and I got really tired of the "sponsored content" marketing with the blitz of articles over the past two years harkening a soon-to-materialize crash in GPU prices that never materalized. As I said again and again, prices were never coming down until the crypto market crashed. And it finally did. Voila, GPU prices came down. It's arithmetic, not calculus. I consider it a public service to make sure everyone who comes into these threads is made aware of it.

 

[My Spot]

Cheapest 3050 at MC is still $80 above MSRP.
Cheapeast 3060 is $100 above.
Cheapeast 3060 Ti is $140 above.
$130 above for the 3070.
$100 above for the 3070 Ti.
$220 above for the 3080.
3080 Ti is actually $20 below.

 

[Unknown Pleasures]

I'm pretty desperate to upgrade my 1070, but since my CPU is 6th Gen I'm going to wait and upgrade the whole lot at once.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if buying a complete system, even if 4000 series cards are sold out as stand alones, generally PC makers have stock to put the new cards in the complete systems they sell right?

I'm kind of hoping that the timing works for a 13th GEN intel CPU, a 4080 graphics card, and DDR5 RAM by then is a mix of down in price and more optimized in terms of latency.

@Madmick I am kind of running out of harddrive space these days so am thinking of picking up a zippy Gen 4 NVME SSD now and use an external enclosure, then slide it into my new PC once I have it. I know that won't be optimal in the near term (my current PC is a micro-ATX and I don't think has any free NVME ports). Any good reco's on an SSD like that? I take it heatsink isn't necessary as will come built in with a decent motherboard when I get a new PC.

 

[Madmick]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if buying a complete system, even if 4000 series cards are sold out as stand alones, generally PC makers have stock to put the new cards in the complete systems they sell right?

Yes. They get first dibs. The first 4000 series GPUs will probably be out for about a month in prebuilts before the opportunity to actually buy them (not merely pre-order them) is available at all. And good luck with that rat race-- or maybe I should call it a bot race. Conversely, the prebuilts will be obtainable.

I'm kind of hoping that the timing works for a 13th GEN intel CPU, a 4080 graphics card, and DDR5 RAM by then is a mix of down in price and more optimized in terms of latency.

@Madmick I am kind of running out of harddrive space these days so am thinking of picking up a zippy Gen 4 NVME SSD now and use an external enclosure, then slide it into my new PC once I have it. I know that won't be optimal in the near term (my current PC is a micro-ATX and I don't think has any free NVME ports). Any good reco's on an SSD like that? I take it heatsink isn't necessary as will come built in with a decent motherboard when I get a new PC.

Best priced top tier option among PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives out right now is the ADATA S70 Blade. The S70 is identical, but has a built-in heat spreader. So sounds like you want the Blade. It's amazingly affordable thanks to how obscure SSD's actual specifications are to the mainstream.
https://pcpartpicker.com/product/qC...2280-nvme-solid-state-drive-agammixs70b-2t-cs

Just bear in mind that if you buy an external enclosure to house that you're going to throttle it for the time being. On paper, the peak read/write bandwidth of that drive is 7.4 GB/s & 6.4 GB/s. That's gigabytes. Meanwhile, in gigabits (divide by 8 to get bytes), here is what USB and Thunderbolt can bus:

• USB 3.0 = 5.00
• USB 3.1 Gen 1 = 5.00
• USB 3.1 Gen 2 = 10.00
• USB 3.2 Gen 1(×1) = 5.00
• USB 3.2 Gen 1(×2) = 10.00
• USB 3.2 Gen 2(×1) = 10.00
• USB 3.2 Gen 2(×2) = 20.00
• USB 4.0 = 40.00
• Thunderbolt 1 = 10.00
• Thunderbolt 2 = 20.00
• Thunderbolt 3 = 40.00
• Thunderbolt 4 = 40.00

So even USB 4.0 and Thunderbolt 3/4 have a ceiling of 5 GB/s. Even if you can find a 3.2 Gen2(x2) enclosure you'll be limited to 2.5 GB/s. Anything less than that will be 1.25 GB/s or less: delivering only ~1/6th of what the drive can sustain.

Spoiler: PCIe 4.0 & 5.0 SSD Full List

PCIe 4.0

• Acer GM7000 (Predator)
• ADATA ATOM 40
• ADATA S50 Lite
• ADATA XPG Pearl
• ADATA S50
• ADATA ATOM 50
• ADATA Legend 840
• ADATA Legend 850
• ADATA XPG Indigo
• ADATA XPG Sage
• ADATA S70/S70 Blade
• ADATA Premium
• Addlink A92
• Addlink S92
• Addlink A90
• Addlink S90
• Addlink S95
• Addlink A95
• Apacer AS2280Q4
• Apacer AS2280Q4U
• Asgard AN4
• ASUS Strix SQ7
• Corsair MP600 CORE
• Corsair MP600
• Corsair MP600 PRO
• Corsair MP600 Pro Hydro X
• Corsair MP600 Pro LPX
• Corsair MP600 PRO XT Hydro X
• Corsair MP600 PRO XT
• Crucial P3
• Crucial P3 Plus
• Crucial P5 Plus
• Essencore ECT455
• Galax HOF 4.0
• Galax HOF 4.0 Extreme
• Gigabyte Gen4 Aorus
• Gigabyte Gen4 Aorus v2/Premium
• Goodram IRDM Ultimate X
• Goodram IRDM Pro
• HP FX900
• HP FX900 Pro
• Hynix Platinum P41
• Inland Performance
• Inland Gaming Perf. Plus
• Inland Performance Plus
• KingMax PQ4480
• KingMax PX4480
• Kingston Ghost Tree
• Kingston KC3000
• Kingston Fury Renegade
• Kingston Grandview ES
• Kioxia Exceria Pro
• KLEVV CRAS C720
• Lexar NM760
• Lexar NM800
• MSI M450
• MSI M471
• MSI Lightning
• MSI M470
• MSI M480
• MSI E26 (Spatium)
• Mushkin Tempest
• Mushkin EON
• Mushkin DELTA
• Mushkin EON Pro
• Mushkin GAMMA
• Mushkin Redline Vortex
• Netac NV5000
• Netac NV7000
• Nextorage NEM-PA
• Patriot Viper VP4100
• Patriot Viper VPR400
• Patriot P400
• Patriot Viper VP4300
• Plextor M10e
• Plextor M10P
• PNY CS2140
• PNY CS4040
• PNY CS3040
• PNY CS3140
• Sabrent Rocket Q4
• Sabrent Rocket 4.0
• Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus
• Sabrent Rocket 4.0 Plus (8TB)
• Samsung 980 Pro
• Seagate FireCuda 520
• Seagate FireCuda 530
• Silicon Power UD90
• Silicon Power US70
• Silicon Power XS70
• Team Z44L
• Team Cardea Zero
• Team Z44Q
• Team Cardea Z44Q
• Team Cardea Ceramic C440
• Team Cardea Zero Z440
• Team T-Create Classic (NVMe 2)
• Team Cardea A440
• Team Cardea A440 Pro
• Transcend SSD 240S
• WD SN850X
• WD SN750 SE
• WD SN770
• WD SN850
• Zadak TWSG4S

PCIe 5.0

• ADATA Project Blackbird
• ADATA Project Nightbird
• Apacer AS2280FS
• Zadak TWSG5

 

[My Spot]

I'm pretty desperate to upgrade my 1070, but since my CPU is 6th Gen I'm going to wait and upgrade the whole lot at once.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but if buying a complete system, even if 4000 series cards are sold out as stand alones, generally PC makers have stock to put the new cards in the complete systems they sell right?

I'm kind of hoping that the timing works for a 13th GEN intel CPU, a 4080 graphics card, and DDR5 RAM by then is a mix of down in price and more optimized in terms of latency.

@Madmick I am kind of running out of harddrive space these days so am thinking of picking up a zippy Gen 4 NVME SSD now and use an external enclosure, then slide it into my new PC once I have it. I know that won't be optimal in the near term (my current PC is a micro-ATX and I don't think has any free NVME ports). Any good reco's on an SSD like that? I take it heatsink isn't necessary as will come built in with a decent motherboard when I get a new PC.

What resolution do you play at? 1080p is still good to go at 60 FPS and (mostly) high settings with a 1070.

 

[Unknown Pleasures]

What resolution do you play at? 1080p is still good to go at 60 FPS and (mostly) high settings with a 1070.

1440, have a 34 inch widescreen monitor.

 

[560ti]

This. Don't forget the "leaked" drivers that broke the hash-throttling feature on new cards they introduced & touted to present themselves as good guys fighting crypto-inflation. Horse manure: posturing.

Everyone selling opportunistically exploited the increased demand from crypto: down the line. That's okay, that's capitalism. It's entrepreneurial. It pisses me off, and I don't want to take a part in it, or help profit this who profit, but this isn't like price gouging of food or basic goods during a state of emergency such as wildfires bring. I'm all for outlawing that behavior, and we do here in California. But GPUs run a luxury good. We're talking about video games, here.

Exactly, the fake MSRP wasn't china tariffs or supply chain issues it was simply them jumping on the opportunity to exploit/gouge the crypto demand. Like you said that's part of business but the fake posturing was what was annoying (trying to blame others for the high prices when really it was your own doing).

Unfotunately alot of business are using covid as an excuse to exploit record profits (my job for example now has a $4 "eco fee" for ever person that comes into the spa, it doesn't actually go towards cleaning supplies or them transitioning to green practices it's literally just a way for the owner to make an extra $150 a day on money that she doesn't have to split with the employees)

Cheapest 3050 at MC is still $80 above MSRP.
Cheapeast 3060 is $100 above.
Cheapeast 3060 Ti is $140 above.
$130 above for the 3070.
$100 above for the 3070 Ti.
$220 above for the 3080.
3080 Ti is actually $20 below.

Talk to my local microcenter rep last week and there at a standstill. They can't order lower MSRP priced evga cards until the shelves start clearing out for the supply they already bought (most evga models they have 25+ in stock currently).

Eventually they'll have to lower them to a price to where they will actually lose money which is kinda bullshit (there forced to eat a financial loss because evga artifically raised the MSRP to a price that's not sustainable in a regular market and currently where in a more regular market).

 

[KaNesDeath]

Exactly, the fake MSRP wasn't china tariffs or supply chain issues it was simply them jumping on the opportunity to exploit/gouge the crypto demand.

Everything played a role. Though it was primarily cryptominers driving up demand leading to the shortage. Which is the same exact thing that happened when Nvidia released their 970GTX+ architecture cards in 2014.

Here we are eight years later and history just repeated itself, again.

 

[jefferz]

That new Fractal Pop Air looks pretty good.
And it comes with a little tray. You can put your weed in there.

 

[adam199]

Is it worth it to get a 3000 series card at these prices or wait for the 4000 series? I'm leaning towards waiting for 4000, but I'm paranoid that they'll be hard to come by and that GPU prices will rise again when they release.

 

[Madmick]

Is it worth it to get a 3000 series card at these prices or wait for the 4000 series? I'm leaning towards waiting for 4000, but I'm paranoid that they'll be hard to come by and that GPU prices will rise again when they release.

Of course they'll be hard to come by, and it's overwhelmingly likely MSRP's will raise again. That doesn't mean the raw performance value curve rises. It tends to go down even if the MSRP rises with a new gen. The new cards depress the cost of previous gen cards, even if only a tiny bit, and the raw processing power per dollar spent improves.