Tech Gaming Hardware discussion (& Hardware Sales) thread

[My Spot]

Gotta love Nvidia. 5070Ti is basically the GDDR7 variant of the 2.5 year old RTX 4080. The two card are almost identical (same amount of ram, same processor node, same transistor count, same memory bus, same power draw, almost identical raw performance).

Essentially a re-badged 2.5-year-old 4080 with GDDR7 for almost a thousand bucks. Clown show.

"The 4080 launched at $1200 so even at $250 above MSRP the 5070 Ti is a steal!" - probably Nvidia

 

[My Spot]

Hmm the other smaller MC here actually has MSRP in stock.

 

[Madmick]

It's not just games, either. I have super resolution activated in my media player and internet browsers for video. Even my local videos that are high-level, advanced compressions at my monitor's native resolution look better with super resolution enabled than they do despite not requiring upscaling from the source. It makes YouTube look better even if at the same resolution. It makes Twitch feeds look better even if at the same resolution.

 

[Joe_Armstrong]

Hard to get a 5070 TI right now in Europe, I´ve seen them for 1500 or more

 

[My Spot]

Hard to get a 5070 TI right now in Europe, I´ve seen them for 1500 or more

People are selling them for $1500 here on FB Markeplace even though we're lucky enough to have not one but two Microcenter stores.

 

[WhiteMousse]

Welp, here goes StockX, Newegg Shuffle and perhaps the NVidia Priority Access.

 

[WhiteMousse]

Any recommendations on prebuilts? Corsair? I heard Digital Storm has serious issues

 

[Madmick]

Any recommendations on prebuilts? Corsair? I heard Digital Storm has serious issues

Probably the most commonly recommended low-markup prebuilt brand these days is Skytech. It has held up to scrutiny from reviewers (like Gamers Nexus) with decent build quality. They don't commit fraud with components like some of the other popular budget brands you'll see on Amazon have been caught doing many, many times (ex. STGAubron).

Skytech's bigget competitors are probably CyberpowerPC, iBuyPower, and CLX Gaming which are also known for custom prebuilts where the buyer picks all the components, but I suspect most of the PCs they move are regular prebuilts. You might find some negative feedback, I'm sure, they're not perfect, nobody is, but all three are solid brands.

The HP OMEN series is well-reviewed, and well built. Probably the best option from the major companies. Avoid Dell's Alienware in particular. They're just determined to not sort out their weaknesses. Probably also worth mentioning is the MSI Codex R2. MSI has been making a greater effort to make itself relevant to builders than other companies in recent years. Meanwhile, this particular prebuilt model has been getting the top recommendation for the best value among prebuilts from some of the top publications, currently.

Origin is a boutique builder with a higher markup that has done well in the secret shopper investigations in the past. One other boutique possibly worth mentioning is Asmongold's upstart brand, Starforge. The first gen took a lot of heat, but the second gen got strong reviews from the most critical including Steve at GamersNexus.

Microcenter's in-house brand PowerSpec is worth a mention if it's an option to you. They're sort of the Kirkland of the computer world: an ACME kind of brand you can trust.

 

[WhiteMousse]

Probably the most commonly recommended low-markup prebuilt brand that gets recommended these days is Skytech. It has held up to scrutiny from reviewers (like Gamers Nexus) with decent build quality. They don't commit fraud with components like some of the other popular budget brands you'll see on Amazon have been caught doing many, many times (ex. STGAubron).

Skytech's bigget competitors are probably CyberpowerPC, iBuyPower, and CLX Gaming which are also known for custom prebuilts the user designs, but I suspect most of the PCs they move are regular prebuilts. You'll might find some negative feedback, I'm sure, they're not perfect, nobody is, but all three are solid brands.

The HP OMEN series is well-reviewed, and well built. Probably the best option from the major companies. Avoid Dell's Alienware in particular. They're just determined to not sort out their weaknesses. Probably also worth mentioning is the MSI Codex R2. MSI has been making a greater effort to make itself relevant to builders than other companies in recent years. Meanwhile, this particular prebuilt model has been getting the top recommendation for the best value among prebuilts from some of the top publications, currently.

Origin is a boutique builder with a higher markup that has done well in the secret shopper investigations in the past. One other boutique possibly worth mentioning is Asmongold's upstart brand, Starforge. The first gen took a lot of heat, but the second gen got strong reviews from the most critical including Steve at GamersNexus.

Microcenter's in-house brand PowerSpec is worth a mention if it's an option to you. They're sort of the Kirkland of the computer world: an ACME kind of brand you can trust.

God I love you.

I'd LIKE to get an Aorus WB and lean heavily into liquid cooling, I've been studying it for the past year. Thing is it's so damn hard to get a 5090. I know we're only like a month out but now scalpers are using AI to scoop up all the inventory so I have to simultaneously scour the Newegg Shuffle, StockX and then hope that NVidia makes good on its supposed "Priority" feature. All the while I want to keep an eye on the prebuilt market. The Corsair store gets me a 9800X3D and a 5090 at $5,999.99 and I'd honestly be willing to consider it if I could get a look at the motherboard and the specific GPU they put in. But I have nightmares about getting some dumb proprietary nonsense that gets incinerated the moment I boot up.

 

[Madmick]

God I love you.

I'd LIKE to get an Aorus WB and lean heavily into liquid cooling, I've been studying it for the past year. Thing is it's so damn hard to get a 5090. I know we're only like a month out but now scalpers are using AI to scoop up all the inventory so I have to simultaneously scour the Newegg Shuffle, StockX and then hope that NVidia makes good on its supposed "Priority" feature. All the while I want to keep an eye on the prebuilt market. The Corsair store gets me a 9800X3D and a 5090 at $5,999.99 and I'd honestly be willing to consider it if I could get a look at the motherboard and the specific GPU they put in. But I have nightmares about getting some dumb proprietary nonsense that gets incinerated the moment I boot up.

Yeah, this is the story every generation, now, when it comes to NVIDIA. The prebuilt manufacturers actually get priority over self-builders when it comes to distribution of inventory. First dibs. It sucks, but it is what it is.

Since the RTX 50 series cards are in such incredibly high demand, there is one caveat we learned from the COVID-cryptoboom years I should mention. It's a wisdom gained from the misfortunes of Sherdoggers themselves who took the leap: if an option, avoid custom builds, like CyberpowerPC does, and stick to their AIO prebuilts instead.

That's where a lot of the negativity towards CyberpowerPC and iBuyPower you might see comes from. In 2020 and 2021, they would take orders for custom builds where the customer chose an RTX card that nobody could find at MSRP. The thing was...the PC often wouldn't ship for 3 months or more. Because they obviously didn't have any in stock. They were just taking the order, money in hand, then letting the customers wait while they waited. Understandably, that made a lot of people unhappy. They didn't do it with their AIO prebuilts. Those would show as out of stock.

So if you want your best chance of getting your hands on one of those cards, now, without paying the scalper tax that builders are unfortunately paying, then your best chance is an in-stock prebuilt, and best of all if this is from one of the major resellers, like Amazon or Wal-Mart (directly, not third party sellers), or Best Buy, or Microcenter, not directly from the prebuilt manufacturer itself.

 

[avenue94]

God I love you.

I'd LIKE to get an Aorus WB and lean heavily into liquid cooling, I've been studying it for the past year. Thing is it's so damn hard to get a 5090. I know we're only like a month out but now scalpers are using AI to scoop up all the inventory so I have to simultaneously scour the Newegg Shuffle, StockX and then hope that NVidia makes good on its supposed "Priority" feature. All the while I want to keep an eye on the prebuilt market. The Corsair store gets me a 9800X3D and a 5090 at $5,999.99 and I'd honestly be willing to consider it if I could get a look at the motherboard and the specific GPU they put in. But I have nightmares about getting some dumb proprietary nonsense that gets incinerated the moment I boot up.

What country are you in and are you set on a 5090? Mick covered most of it, only notes I'd add.
-Omen 35 is designed very differently and has more standardized parts than Omen 25, 40, 45. Country also matters here since HP has different exclusivity deals for most of their Omen models in the US.
-CyberPower and iBuyPower have the highest priority with AIBs for stock, Skytech is much further down the fulfillment list due to size. So the former has more stock of RTX 50, but also more demand. Dunno how that shakes out. Also Cyber and iBuy tend to have lower pricing on Ryzen CPU prebuilds than anyone else since AMD heavily backs them.
-You won't be guaranteed a specific MOBO or component brand for most iBuy or Cyber, they use whatever they have supply of assembly.

Avoid Dell's Alienware in particular.

You still like Omen over the R16? I have no dog in it, I just remember the R16 getting better reviews due to simplified design and reduced price as a result. I've never seen too many reviews of Omen prebuilds come to think of it.

 

[WhiteMousse]

In the States, I'd like to grab a 5090 if at all possible. I won't go for scalped, and I'm willing to wait a few months, especially with the issues the release has experienced.

If I can find a prebuilt that will allow me to select my parts, that would be fantastic. Of course I'd rather put it together myself but I don't know if I can land a 5090. Even then, there are a couple models I'd be reluctant to buy. In fact it would be easier for me to list the ones I would go for:
FE
ASUS ROG Astral
MSI Gamer Trio
MSI Suprim X
Gigabyte OC Gaming
Gigabyte Aorus Master
Gigabyte Aorus Extreme WB

 

[Madmick]

Well damn. So AMD isn't going quietly into that good night. They're pointing to the floor. The RX 9070 XT for $599 is no joke.

It was funny to see these two videos with their titles posted in consecutive days (before and after the MSRP announcement). You can tell Steve is incredibly irritated with NVIDIA, I think his channel is making an effort to remain objective, but he's clearly not in an objective state of mind, he's been nitpicking the hell out of DLSS4, he's very annoyed with how arrogant they're apparently becoming. Everyone realizes they're becoming dangerously dominant so that everyone is pulling for AMD. The whiteboard bit in the opening five minutes was pretty damn funny.



First the below headline broke. It appears AMD execs have come to learn & understand a concept that seems to elude Microsoft executives in the gaming space. It's good to be open...but not too open. You want things to be better for everyone, but best for your customers.

AMD’s FSR 4 upscaling is exclusive to 90-series Radeon GPUs, won’t work on other cards​

Unlike past versions of FSR, FSR 4 is upscaling images using hardware-backed machine-learning algorithms, hardware newly added to RDNA4 and the RX 90-series graphics cards. This mirrors Nvidia's strategy with DLSS, which has always leveraged the tensor cores found in RTX GPUs to run machine-learning models to achieve superior image quality for upscaled and AI-generated frames. If you don't have an RDNA4 GPU, you can't use FSR 4.

Older Radeon cards (and third-party GPUs) will be limited to version 3.1 of the upscaler, which will continue to work on most modern dedicated and integrated GPUs, regardless of manufacturer.

The silver lining for tech-savvy gamers:

The good news is that adoption of FSR 4 by game developers is still a rising tide that will lift all boats. Any game that adds support for FSR 3.1 will also automatically support FSR 4 and vice versa; current FSR 3.1 games can have FSR 4 enabled in AMD's driver even if the game doesn't list it as an option. This may be familiar to some users of Nvidia's DLSS, which similarly allows users to swap the DLSS .dll file that comes with your game with an updated version to take advantage of the upgrades in newer versions of the technology. Games that use FSR 3.0 or any version of FSR 1 or FSR 2 won't support this kind of automatic upgrade.

If the rumored specs are true:

GPU	RTX 5070 Ti	RX 9070 XT	RTX 5070	RTX 4070 Super	PS5 Pro
Pixel Bandwidth (GP/s)	317	285	161	198	150
Textel Bandwidth (GT/s)	693	760	482	504	564
Processing Power (TFLOPS)	44.4	48.7	30.8	35.5	36.1
VRAM Bandwidth (GB/s)	896	645	672	554	448
VRAM Amount	16GB	16GB	12GB	12GB	16GB (shared)
Tensor Cores	280	128	192	224	0
Ray-Tracing Cores	70	64	48	56	60
L2 + L3 Cache	64MB	68MB	40MB	48MB	4MB
FSR support DLSS support	3.1 4.0 (+MFG*)	4.0 n/a	3.1 4.0 (+MFG*)	3.1 4.0	3.1 n/a
MSRP	$749	$599	$549	$599	$699

*MFG = Multi-Frame Generation (exclusive DLSS 4 feature to RTX 50 series GPUs)

 

[Croaker]

Probably the most commonly recommended low-markup prebuilt brand that gets recommended these days is Skytech. It has held up to scrutiny from reviewers (like Gamers Nexus) with decent build quality. They don't commit fraud with components like some of the other popular budget brands you'll see on Amazon have been caught doing many, many times (ex. STGAubron).

Skytech's bigget competitors are probably CyberpowerPC, iBuyPower, and CLX Gaming which are also known for custom prebuilts the user designs, but I suspect most of the PCs they move are regular prebuilts. You'll might find some negative feedback, I'm sure, they're not perfect, nobody is, but all three are solid brands.

The HP OMEN series is well-reviewed, and well built. Probably the best option from the major companies. Avoid Dell's Alienware in particular. They're just determined to not sort out their weaknesses. Probably also worth mentioning is the MSI Codex R2. MSI has been making a greater effort to make itself relevant to builders than other companies in recent years. Meanwhile, this particular prebuilt model has been getting the top recommendation for the best value among prebuilts from some of the top publications, currently.

Origin is a boutique builder with a higher markup that has done well in the secret shopper investigations in the past. One other boutique possibly worth mentioning is Asmongold's upstart brand, Starforge. The first gen took a lot of heat, but the second gen got strong reviews from the most critical including Steve at GamersNexus.

Microcenter's in-house brand PowerSpec is worth a mention if it's an option to you. They're sort of the Kirkland of the computer world: an ACME kind of brand you can trust.

I don't know if its still this way, but PowerSpec used to be a $50 mark up back in the day. It could be higher now, but it was the best value for pre-built by a country mile and the go to recommendation when Cyberpower and ibuypower were coming to prominence.

 

[avenue94]

If I can find a prebuilt that will allow me to select my parts, that would be fantastic. Of course I'd rather put it together myself but I don't know if I can land a 5090. Even then, there are a couple models I'd be reluctant to buy. In fact it would be easier for me to list the ones I would go for:
FE
ASUS ROG Astral
MSI Gamer Trio
MSI Suprim X
Gigabyte OC Gaming
Gigabyte Aorus Master
Gigabyte Aorus Extreme WB

It'll most likely be MSI Or Gigabyte if you're buying an actula prebuild from SI's. Nvidia doesn't sell FE's to SI's, and Asus is a bit pricey for them. You might be able to call Best Buy and ask what GPU is in the model, but realistically there's no way for a retailer to check.

I don't know if its still this way, but PowerSpec used to be a $50 mark up back in the day. It could be higher now, but it was the best value for pre-built by a country mile and the go to recommendation when Cyberpower and ibuypower were coming to prominence.

It's sadly not these days. You can't make a profit with that margin anymore. MC has mostly stopped making prebuilds too.

It was funny to see these two videos with their titles posted in consecutive days. You can tell Steve is incredibly irritated with NVIDIA, I think his channel is making an effort to remain objective, but he's clearly not in an objective state of mind, he's been nitpicking the hell out of DLSS4, he's very annoyed with how arrogant they're apparently becoming. Everyone realizes they're becoming dangerously dominant so that everyone is pulling for AMD. The whiteboard bit in the opening five minutes was pretty damn funny.

To me, it screams a bit of audience capture, for better or worse. I get classic pride before the content creator fall vibes, but hope it doesn't come to that.

 

[My Spot]

Updated prices on Ebay:

4060 $298
4060 Ti $370 + $13 shipping
4070 $650 + $21 shipping
4070 Super $699 + $15 shipping
4070 Ti $790 + $25 shipping
4070 Ti Super $1000 + $9 shipping
4080 $1250 + $7 shipping
4080 Super $1400
4090 $2350

 

[Madmick]

Updated prices on Ebay:

4060 Ti $370 + $13 shipping
4070 $650 + $21 shipping
4070 Super $699 + $15 shipping
4070 Ti $790 + $25 shipping
4070 Ti Super $1000 + $9 shipping
4080 $1250 + $7 shipping
4080 Super $1400
4090 $2350

I love how NVIDIA chinces production so greedily when they release a new line that even their older GPU line that has been out for over four f***ing years is selling for $70+ over its MSRPs.

 

[My Spot]

I love how NVIDIA chinces production so greedily when they release a new line that even their older GPU line that has been out for over four f***ing years is selling for $70+ over its MSRPs.

Some of those prices are actually down compared to two weeks ago.

 

[avenue94]

Some of those prices are actually down compared to two weeks ago.

I wonder if they hadn't screw up with Blackwell datacenter if they actually might have nailed the transition from 40 to 50 this time around. Because it looks like they're about a quarter or quarter and a half behind schedule from the roadmaps that were going around at OEMs a year or two ago.

Not that it matters at this point when gaming is a rounding error to them.

 

[Madmick]

Some of those prices are actually down compared to two weeks ago.

Doesn't change the point. They obviously stopped feeding any new RTX 40 series into the market several months ago. That's when prices began to spike. Has nothing to do with pandemics or inflation or tariffs or any of that shit. It's pure inventory control. Change my mind.