Tech Gaming Hardware discussion (& Hardware Sales) thread

[idrankyourbeer]

What, you don't like bloat on top of bloat from ASUS? This fucking app messed up the colours on my laptop after I was fucking around with RTX HDR, GameVisual on Armory Crate boosted the contrast to 100% when running of the internal GPU, it drive me fucking insane. Fuck you ASUS, fuck you in the face.

you think that's bad? their software damn near fried my gpu and i had to send it in for repair!

the asus gpu tweak software would always bug out and override my fan curve on my asus strix 970 with what appeared to be no fan curve at all, leading to my gpu spiking to over 94 degrees the moment i start playing a game before some kind of emergency safeguard built into the gpu hardware kicks in, forcing the fans to come on full speed sounding like a jet engine while the gpu starts throttling. i'd have to go back into gpu tweak and reenable my gpu profile just to get it to use the fan settings that i want, or any fan curve at all!

the last time it happened, something happened which damaged one or more of the bearings in one of the fans which would then make a loud and obnoxious rattling sound every time the fan would spin at all, and i had to ship my gpu across the country for asus to fix it because the rattling was way too annoying to deal with. i don't know what happened, gpu fans should be able to handle running at 100% speed, but i guess going instantly from 0% to 100% may have buggered something up with the internals. either that or it was just a coincidental freak occurance.

well the asus gpu tweak software had an option to automatically apply my overclock and fan settings for my selected profile on windows startup, but 7 out of 10 times it would not only fail to apply those settings at all, but somehow it would also tell the gpu to ignore its default fan settings too! it appeared to just say screw the fan curve altogether, we're just not going to cool this card, and watch it melt down when you play a game!

like normally the fans wouldnt even kick on until it hits like 50 or 60 degrees and then it ramps up from 40%. that's even how it is baked into the stock version of that card. well for some reason the fans won't kick on at all with asus gpu tweak running but no profile enabled. if it wasnt for some weird kind of safeguard that just decided to force the fans on when it started to get dangerously hot, my card would have been fried at best, and would have caught on fire at worst!

i had that happen a couple of times. but usually i would catch it the moment i hear the fans kicking on full blast. or i would catch it by checking on the app before i launch the game. this time i didn't check it and didn't know my profile wasn't loaded, got into a game but it took me a minute to notice the sound of my gpu fans over the volume of the game and then tab out of the game and get into the software and reapply my gpu profile which should have been enabled in the first place. but by then the damage was already done to one of the fan bearings somehow. i couldn't do anything with it. there was no manually fixing that shit.

and i'm pretty sure it did some internal damage to the gpu chipset or memory itself. because soonafter the card would get the black screen of death at random times and it would crash out the video signal and i would have to hard reset my pc, even while idle at the desktop screen with nothing really running. i eventually replaced it with a 2080 and i had no crashing issues whatsoever, but once i put the 2080 in a newer rig, i parked the old 970 back in its original pc and the crashing came back. so i just ran that old pc with integrated graphics until i upgraded my main rig to a 4070ti and then parked the 2080 back in the old one.

but yeah, i got rid of that gpu tweak garbage and i've been using msi afterburner long since. never once had any issues. i think i had to install armory crate once just to change the led colors on my gpu and motherboard, but after that it went straight to uninstall. i really have no interest in using any of their wonky ass software after it damn near fried my gpu, and managed to cause both physical and internal damage. i remember being stuck playing elder scrolls online off of integrated graphics for a month with terrible muddy ass textures and shitty ass framerates while i waited for them to fix my shit. i was pissed!

 

[jefferz]

5800x shipped and sold by Amazon for $122! 8/16 core. No cooler.

Super budget Asrock B450 compatible board for $60.

 

[HeLLMuTT]

Swapped out my PowerColor Red Devil AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT 8GB for a Sapphire Pulse AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT 16GB. Had that card since Nov 2019! Almost 5 years that 5700 just chugged along pretty happy about that. Got a free copy of Space Marine 2 and Unknown 9: Awakening which I'm not familiar with. So that's a nice bonus with the purchase.

Received it Saturday Installed it yesterday, easy swap out, no issues, basically plug n play and man the improvement to the both visuals and frame rates is awesome. Helldivers 2 runs at max setting getting 65-75 fps now from medium at 40 fps. Been playing a lot of Fortnite the last month and now I can play at max graphics minus RT and get about 85 fps. Funny thing I noticed is I am way more accurate and getting kills much easier now along with the fact every things looks so much cleaner.

Everything looks and runs so much better, happy I made the upgrade. Black ops 6 should be a blast. Got a number of other great games to play with and see how they preform now... Cyberpunk, Elden ring, Balders gate 3, Halo Infinity.

Going to build a full new rig in about 6 months when the new Nvidia cards are out and gift the PC I'm using now to a friend who I know won't be able to get a decent rig for himself for some time. He'll be stoked.

 

[Madmick]

I wish we were seeing sales on GPUs that were a quarter as good as the CPU sales that are being posted in this thread. The 5800X at $122, PCPP-beating builder bundles that include the options of the R5-8400F at $125 or the R7-7700 at $200, the i7-12700KF at $166 or i5-12600KF at $130, the R7-5700X3D at $182...and these are just in the last month. FML. Insanely good sales. And it feels like it's been that way with CPUs for years.

Meanwhile, the lowest priced variant of nearly any NVIDIA GPU from the last generation that launched four freaking years ago are a measly 10%-20% off the original MSRP.

It's really aggravating.

 

[My Spot]

I wish we were seeing sales on GPUs that were a quarter as good as the CPU sales that being posted in this thread. The 5800X at $122, PCPP-beating prebuilder bundles that include the options of the R5-8400F at $125 or the R7-7700 at $200, the i7-12700KF at $166 or i5-12600KF at $130, the R7-5700X3D at $182...and these are just in the last month. FML. Insanely good sales. And it feels like it's been that way with CPUs for years.

Meanwhile, the lowest priced variant of nearly any NVIDIA GPU from the last generation that launched four freaking years ago are a measly 10%-20% off the original MSRP.

It's really aggravating.

Sad thing is the 4060 and 4060 Ti are top five now in the latest Steam hardware survey.

 

[My Spot]

MC has the 7800X3D in stock for $430 and it's selling new for $530 on Ebay right now but they have a limit of one per customer. I wonder if this would work.

 

[Madmick]

Sad thing is the 4060 and 4060 Ti are top five now in the latest Steam hardware survey.

But it kind of makes sense when you check the top performance per dollar charts and those newest cards are near the top, doesn't it? That's what is so frustrating. That's not normal. Usually the older cards drop of a cliff in cost to the point their value is much better. It put buyers in the classic dilemma weighing what they desire more: choosing either peak value or better overall specs with the latest feature support.

But the sales on the older cards just don't exist. You're not seeing these crazy drops on the old 3070, 3070 Ti, 3080, or others. So why not get the 4060 or 4060 Ti?

 

[My Spot]

But it kind of makes sense when you check the top performance per dollar charts and those newest cards are near the top, doesn't it? That's what is so frustrating. That's not normal. Usually the older cards drop of a cliff in cost to the point their value is much better. It put buyers in the classic dilemma weighing what they desire more: choosing either peak value or better overall specs with the latest feature support.

But the sales on the older cards just don't exist. You're not seeing these crazy drops on the old 3070, 3070 Ti, 3080, or others. So why not get the 4060 or 4060 Ti?

Well the 4060 is really a 4050 in disguise.

 

[Madmick]

Well the 4060 is really a 4050 in disguise.

Oh. I hadn't heard that before.

I remember the backlash against the 4080 12GB when the generation was announced, because that was such an obvious mislabeling of what should have been called the 4070 Ti, to where NVIDIA conceded their misleading marketing, and changed the name ahead of launch. I also remember similar disparagements aimed at AMD's 6500 XT, and in that case, I understood the sentiment, because of the halved PCIe bus hamstringing its performance on older motherboards that only carried a PCIe 3.0 slot for the GPU, as well as the pitiful 4GB VRAM.

But what is the gripe with the 4060?

 

[avenue94]

I wish we were seeing sales on GPUs that were a quarter as good as the CPU sales that being posted in this thread. The 5800X at $122, PCPP-beating prebuilder bundles that include the options of the R5-8400F at $125 or the R7-7700 at $200, the i7-12700KF at $166 or i5-12600KF at $130, the R7-5700X3D at $182...and these are just in the last month. FML. Insanely good sales. And it feels like it's been that way with CPUs for years.

Meanwhile, the lowest priced variant of nearly any NVIDIA GPU from the last generation that launched four freaking years ago are a measly 10%-20% off the original MSRP.

It's really aggravating.

I wouldn't expect a lot of improvement for Q4 sadly, most PC companies are much lighter on RTX 40 than they were on RTX 30 at the same point in life cycle. The wonders of not ordering GPUs like a dumbass you can say, Nvidia has done a lot better this time with forecasting. Also most RTX 30 stock has been gone for almost a year at this point, no one is sitting on a huge stash of it anymore.

Sad thing is the 4060 and 4060 Ti are top five now in the latest Steam hardware survey.

The funny thing is that is mostly due to system integrators and being able to sell cheap prebuilds due to cutting corners and heavy backing for AMD (the deal was in exchange for ordering x amount of last gen CPUs AMD would toss in a lot of comarketing dollars and a much better price on the CPUs). But for whatever reason AMD has never opened the wallet to the same extent for GPUs, so SIs are a clearing house for AMD processors only.

 

[KaNesDeath]

I wish we were seeing sales on GPUs that were a quarter as good as the CPU sales that being posted in this thread.

Continued pricing of GPU's is infuriating. We're four days away from the two year anniversary of the 4000 series launch. Their prices havent budged from their launch day MSRP.

Is the 5090 Super going to cost four grand?

 

[My Spot]

Oh. I hadn't heard that before.

I remember the backlash against the 4080 12GB when the generation was announced, because that was such an obvious mislabeling of what should have been called the 4070 Ti, to where NVIDIA conceded their misleading marketing, and changed the name ahead of launch. I also remember similar disparagements aimed at AMD's 6500 XT, and in that case, I understood the sentiment, because of the halved PCIe bus hamstringing its performance on older motherboards that only carried a PCIe 3.0 slot for the GPU, as well as the pitiful 4GB VRAM.

But what is the gripe with the 4060?

A 4060 is inferior to a 3070. Unlike the 3060/2070, 2060/1070, 1060/970, etc.

 

[jefferz]

Hyper 212 with an AGB fan for $13 sold and shipped by amazon!
They haven't been this low in 10+ years.

I wish we were seeing sales on GPUs that were a quarter as good as the CPU sales that being posted in this thread. The 5800X at $122, PCPP-beating builder bundles that include the options of the R5-8400F at $125 or the R7-7700 at $200, the i7-12700KF at $166 or i5-12600KF at $130, the R7-5700X3D at $182...and these are just in the last month. FML. Insanely good sales. And it feels like it's been that way with CPUs for years.

Meanwhile, the lowest priced variant of nearly any NVIDIA GPU from the last generation that launched four freaking years ago are a measly 10%-20% off the original MSRP.

It's really aggravating.

Sadly, it's not going to get much better on the high end for gpu's.
AMD said they're not going to compete on the high end anymore.

7900xt's dropped in price a couple of days ago, and I seen a 7800xt on sale today for $430.

I bought a 7800xt a couple of months ago. I was going back and forth between that and a 4070. I don't regret my decision at all.

 

[jefferz]

you think that's bad? their software damn near fried my gpu and i had to send it in for repair!

the asus gpu tweak software would always bug out and override my fan curve on my asus strix 970 with what appeared to be no fan curve at all, leading to my gpu spiking to over 94 degrees the moment i start playing a game before some kind of emergency safeguard built into the gpu hardware kicks in, forcing the fans to come on full speed sounding like a jet engine while the gpu starts throttling. i'd have to go back into gpu tweak and reenable my gpu profile just to get it to use the fan settings that i want, or any fan curve at all!

the last time it happened, something happened which damaged one or more of the bearings in one of the fans which would then make a loud and obnoxious rattling sound every time the fan would spin at all, and i had to ship my gpu across the country for asus to fix it because the rattling was way too annoying to deal with. i don't know what happened, gpu fans should be able to handle running at 100% speed, but i guess going instantly from 0% to 100% may have buggered something up with the internals. either that or it was just a coincidental freak occurance.

well the asus gpu tweak software had an option to automatically apply my overclock and fan settings for my selected profile on windows startup, but 7 out of 10 times it would not only fail to apply those settings at all, but somehow it would also tell the gpu to ignore its default fan settings too! it appeared to just say screw the fan curve altogether, we're just not going to cool this card, and watch it melt down when you play a game!

like normally the fans wouldnt even kick on until it hits like 50 or 60 degrees and then it ramps up from 40%. that's even how it is baked into the stock version of that card. well for some reason the fans won't kick on at all with asus gpu tweak running but no profile enabled. if it wasnt for some weird kind of safeguard that just decided to force the fans on when it started to get dangerously hot, my card would have been fried at best, and would have caught on fire at worst!

i had that happen a couple of times. but usually i would catch it the moment i hear the fans kicking on full blast. or i would catch it by checking on the app before i launch the game. this time i didn't check it and didn't know my profile wasn't loaded, got into a game but it took me a minute to notice the sound of my gpu fans over the volume of the game and then tab out of the game and get into the software and reapply my gpu profile which should have been enabled in the first place. but by then the damage was already done to one of the fan bearings somehow. i couldn't do anything with it. there was no manually fixing that shit.

and i'm pretty sure it did some internal damage to the gpu chipset or memory itself. because soonafter the card would get the black screen of death at random times and it would crash out the video signal and i would have to hard reset my pc, even while idle at the desktop screen with nothing really running. i eventually replaced it with a 2080 and i had no crashing issues whatsoever, but once i put the 2080 in a newer rig, i parked the old 970 back in its original pc and the crashing came back. so i just ran that old pc with integrated graphics until i upgraded my main rig to a 4070ti and then parked the 2080 back in the old one.

but yeah, i got rid of that gpu tweak garbage and i've been using msi afterburner long since. never once had any issues. i think i had to install armory crate once just to change the led colors on my gpu and motherboard, but after that it went straight to uninstall. i really have no interest in using any of their wonky ass software after it damn near fried my gpu, and managed to cause both physical and internal damage. i remember being stuck playing elder scrolls online off of integrated graphics for a month with terrible muddy ass textures and shitty ass framerates while i waited for them to fix my shit. i was pissed!

They're AI suite software was garbage. I never used it on my z77 board, it always caused lock ups.

I had a Strix x470 board, and the included software is still garbage. I installed a TP link pci wifi card last night, and the pos fried my mobo and took out a drive as well.

 

[idrankyourbeer]

They're AI suite software was garbage. I never used it on my z77 board, it always caused lock ups.

I had a Strix x470 board, and the included software is still garbage. I installed a TP link pci wifi card last night, and the pos fried my mobo and took out a drive as well.

how the hell did that manage to happen? did you have some kind of metal from the pci card touching the motherboard? were you trying to install it while the pc was still plugged in and maybe some metal made contact on the board somewhere down the line? or maybe it was just a shitty part or installed wrong and something catastrophic happened? that's weird. usually if you put some wonky hardware in, it's not going to fuck up your machine and start destroying other parts, it's simply just not going to work.

 

[Madmick]

A 4060 is inferior to a 3070. Unlike the 3060/2070, 2060/1070, 1060/970, etc.

Ah, that's right. I actually remember an acquaintance on Discord (who is a huge NVIDIA fanboy) mocking that online disgruntlement. Meanwhile, for him, AMD can do nothing right.

At least those older AMD cards dropped in price a couple hundred bucks off their MSRPs, and some are still available like that. But they're already disappearing. You can find some from the RX 6000 series on the market in new condition from major retailers, or at least the only ones available are actually above the MSRP, now, because they're so few left. The RX 6800 and RX 6700 XT, for example.

 

[jefferz]

how the hell did that manage to happen? did you have some kind of metal from the pci card touching the motherboard? were you trying to install it while the pc was still plugged in and maybe some metal made contact on the board somewhere down the line? or maybe it was just a shitty part or installed wrong and something catastrophic happened? that's weird. usually if you put some wonky hardware in, it's not going to fuck up your machine and start destroying other parts, it's simply just not going to work.

No clue. My board gets to the splash screen where you can hit f2 or del to enter the bios, and it won't get past that part.
My server is AM4, so luckily I was able to test what was and wasn't fried.

So now I'm trying to decide if I want to buy another AM4 board and stick with the 5800x3d, or step up to AM5. $200 vs $600.

 

[JaviBrewski]

Im at a fucking crossroads and stumped and I know @Madmick and @jefferz should be able to bail me out.

I bought a new case. (Montech King 95). I didn't realize the case i got didnt come with case fans at all. So I bought some fans the following day (thank god theres a MC near me in Yonkers).Specifically I bought these MONTECH AX 120MM - PWM Fan - Silent Performance - High Speed 1600PWM - High-End Durability with HDB Bearing - Stunning Outer Ring ARGB Lighting Design – 3 in 1 Pack with 6X6 Fan Hub (AX120-3in1-B).

The issue I have is that I have an old as ROG Strix b350-f Gaming Mobo and the only headers I have are 12v 4-Pin RGB. The controller has a 3 pin argb female connector I have nothing to connect to. Am I screwed or is there a simple fix of a cable existing that adapy the 3pin 5v aRGB to my 12v 4-pin 5050 RGB.

 

[Madmick]

Im at a fucking crossroads and stumped and I know @Madmick and @jefferz should be able to bail me out.

I bought a new case. (Montech King 95). I didn't realize the case i got didnt come with case fans at all. So I bought some fans the following day (thank god theres a MC near me in Yonkers).Specifically I bought these MONTECH AX 120MM - PWM Fan - Silent Performance - High Speed 1600PWM - High-End Durability with HDB Bearing - Stunning Outer Ring ARGB Lighting Design – 3 in 1 Pack with 6X6 Fan Hub (AX120-3in1-B).

The issue I have is that I have an old as ROG Strix b350-f Gaming Mobo and the only headers I have are 12v 4-Pin RGB. The controller has a 3 pin argb female connector I have nothing to connect to. Am I screwed or is there a simple fix of a cable existing that adapy the 3pin 5v aRGB to my 12v 4-pin 5050 RGB.

RGB bling is not my thing. @Slobodan probably knows a lot more about this.

This adapter looks like it probably addresses your voltage compatibility issue so you don't blow out the circuit, but this adapter is RGB, not ARGB. So your fans probably will only offer the simplest unified RGB output instructions from the motherboard, nothing addressable. It's intended to convert the voltage and add RGB capability to basic 4-pin 12V fan headers. What you want is a step beyond.


I have no experience with this product or adapting 12V 4-Pin RGB to 3-Pin 5V ARGB (especially a complex fan hub, not an individual fan). Right away my reaction to that product is, 'Looks light a nightmare, I bet it has all sorts of issues."

RGB convertor - DeepCool

- DeepCool was founded with the mission of providing professional, innovative, high-performance PC hardware and high-quality thermal solutions for enthusiasts across the world.

www.deepcool.com

And a quick Google turned up this Reddit:


Maybe there is something better out there, but I doubt it. Your motherboard wasn't built with ARGB capability.

 

[KaNesDeath]

The issue I have is that I have an old as ROG Strix b350-f Gaming Mobo

RGB convertor - DeepCool

- DeepCool was founded with the mission of providing professional, innovative, high-performance PC hardware and high-quality thermal solutions for enthusiasts across the world.

www.deepcool.com