PC Sherdog PC Build/Buy Thread, v6: My Power Supply Burned Down My House

[jefferz]

Whats the difference between a GTX 1070 ti and a GTX 1080? Both are on the same price point with the 1080 being $40 cheaper.

1080 is more powerful.
Here’s how to decode an nVidia gpu. When you look at that 1080, the 10 part means the generation. The 8 means model. The zero means nothing.
So a 1070 would be 10th generation, model would be 7, and the zero means nothing. The higher the model number, the more powerful it is.
The ti on the end is sort of like a revision. So in the 1070ti’s case, they took a 1070 and tweaked it a bit to make it more powerful

 

[Joe_Armstrong]

Who can help to share folders on two windows 10 PC's ?
I want to share a folder on one PC and make a shortcut on another PC
in the same network to that folder.

 

[Shogun515]

do you guys think its gonna be a long time before parts go down because of crypto?

 

[m52nickerson]

do you guys think its gonna be a long time before parts go down because of crypto?

Very hard to tell, there are just to many moving parts to the story. I have a feeling GPU prices are going to stay high for some time.

 

[m52nickerson]

I finally upgraded my GPU!

While I wanted to get a GTX 1070, I just could not justify spending $500 or more for a GPU that is a bit overkill for 1080p. So I found a small shop 2 hours away selling Asus ROG STRIX 1060 6gb cards for $325.

My venerable EVGA GTX 960 SSC now resides in my son's Ryzen build. Dad is happy, son is happy...mom was less excited.

 

[jefferz]

do you guys think its gonna be a long time before parts go down because of crypto?

Even if crypto dropped to $0 tomorrow, there would still be a gpu shortage. Prices may lower to a reasonable level though. You'd be able to buy plenty of used cards.
There's a ram shortage right now. The ram manufacturers are having problems getting enough raw materials. DDR4 is in really high demand and is used a lot more than the DDR5 that our gpu's use.
Look at RAM prices, it's DDR4 but has damn near doubled in the past year. SSD prices have gone up as well.
Another blow upcoming to GPU's is that TSMC is trying to shrink their die size but the demand for their current size is keeping their production at max capacity due to ASICS.

 

[Quipling]

do you guys think its gonna be a long time before parts go down because of crypto?

Ram and ssds are purportedly inflated because they compete with the smartphone market. (SSD prices are coming down reasonably though). Gpus are probably going to stay high for a while. Hopefully the switch to PoS (algorithm that is worse for mining for a major currency) combined with dropping prices reduces profitability. But there will still be a lag effect because there are already about six months of consumers who have been putting off upgrades. Miners might eventually unload into the secondary market but not everyone trusts that.

 

[Madmick]

You know, this morning, in constructing two posts, one comparing a Sea of Thieves Xbox One X bundle sale to PCs and their respective specs, and another conversing with @Quipling about the potential longevity of the Ryzen 5 2400G, something eventually stood out to me about the following chart:

I know when it has come up over the years it seems as though analysis indicated AMD CPUs fall off more quickly than their quad core Intel counterparts, when ironically one of the key strategies of more cores was future relevance, but I swear every time I actually look up the "Recommended" (not "Minimum") specs for a new game I'm still seeing the old octacore FX processors make the cut. It seem conspicuous that both consoles' have 8-core architectures, and this minimum aligns. Can anyone think of even one that demands a Ryzen processor? PUBG is my sole example. In this instance, the ideal mainstream 1080@60fps "Recommended" settings call for an FX-8150 or i5-4690.

The FX-8150 was released in October, 2011. The i5-4690 was released in May, 2014.

Maybe not so ironic, after all.

 

[jefferz]

You know, this morning, in constructing two posts, one comparing a Sea of Thieves Xbox One X bundle sale to PCs and their respective specs, and another conversing with @Quipling about the potential longevity of the Ryzen 5 2400G, something eventually stood out to me about the following chart:

I know when it has come up over the years it seems as though analysis indicated AMD CPUs fall off more quickly than their quad core Intel counterparts, when ironically one of the key strategies of more cores was future relevance, but I swear every time I actually look up the "Recommended" (not "Minimum") specs for a new game I'm still seeing the old octacore FX processors make the cut. It seem conspicuous that both consoles' have 8-core architectures and this minimum align. Can anyone think of even one that demands a Ryzen processor? PUBG is sole example. In this instance, the ideal mainstream 1080@60fps "Recommended" settings call for an FX-8150 or i5-4690.

The FX-8150 was released in October, 2011. The i5-4690 was released in May, 2014.

Maybe not so ironic, after all.

I'm amazed the Q9450 will still give a playable experience.

 

[Madmick]

I'm amazed the Q9450 will still give a playable experience.

Fortnite is on phones, now.

It's only a matter of time before there's a legit dedicated sit-down iOS machine. That will usher in the change Android has been impotent to effect, but they'll be happy to oblige with an NVIDIA Shield 2, or whatever, and at this point the Shield will be legit. The HTPC products seem on a crash course to merge with the advent of these machines. For example, the "Apple TV Arcade" will debut with an MSRP of $299, and include a dual-analog controller in addition to the remote.

What a hell of a backdoor Jobs found into the gaming market, after all those years. The fucking iPhone.

 

[jefferz]

Fortnite is on phones, now.

It's only a matter of time before there's a legit dedicated sit-down iOS machine. That will usher in the change Android has been impotent to effect, but they'll be happy to oblige with an NVIDIA Shield 2, or whatever, and at this point the Shield will be legit. The HTPC products seem on a crash course to merge with the advent of these machines. For example, the "Apple TV Arcade" will debut with an MSRP of $299, and include a dual-analog controller in addition to the remote.

What a hell of a backdoor Jobs found into the gaming market, after all those years. The fucking iPhone.

Fortnite on phones just goes to show how garbage PUBG is. They're built on the same engine.

 

[Madmick]

Fortnite on phones just goes to show how garbage PUBG is. They're built on the same engine.

It's a fair point that PUBG doesn't really seem to have improved much of anything during their nearly year-long Beta, but I don't think Fortnite is nearly as ambitious graphically due to the much lower emphasis on realism.

Bluehole's biggest mistake seems to have been balking at the rampant Chinese cheating. I have no problem with them disagreeing with the authoritarian Chinese government about the right of Chinese citizens to use third-party VPNs, but their personal concern should have been why those VPNs were being pursued. They banned over a million players in January, and I think it was 1.5m in February. They're having to use automated detectors, obviously, but that has them spinning their wheels sorting out the wrongful bans. This crisis has them so bogged down I don't think they can pay any attention to things like core utilization, API overheads, or tickrates:
BattlEye data shows that 99 percent of banned PUBG cheaters are from China

They won the Chinese market, alright. Turns out that was a bit of a white elephant.

 

[method115]

Fortnite is on phones, now.

It's only a matter of time before there's a legit dedicated sit-down iOS machine. That will usher in the change Android has been impotent to effect, but they'll be happy to oblige with an NVIDIA Shield 2, or whatever, and at this point the Shield will be legit. The HTPC products seem on a crash course to merge with the advent of these machines. For example, the "Apple TV Arcade" will debut with an MSRP of $299, and include a dual-analog controller in addition to the remote.

What a hell of a backdoor Jobs found into the gaming market, after all those years. The fucking iPhone.

I have a hard time seeing a dedicated sit-down IOS machine taking off in gaming. Would be pretty crazy though if Apple was able to pull it off.

 

[Madmick]

I have a hard time seeing a dedicated sit-down IOS machine taking off in gaming. Would be pretty crazy though if Apple was able to pull it off.

Why not?

They have zero interest in developing OS X aka MacOS as a gaming platform, and haven't for well over a decade, now. In fact, at this point, it's become pretty clear they're trying to figure out a way to get rid of the desktop OS altogether, without pissing off professionals, in order to meet the challenge of Google's thrown gauntlet: the Pixelbook. Apple tried and failed to enter the gaming market numerous times under Jobs. The most aggressive move was back in 1996 right after Gabe first split with Microsoft and everyone in the PC world was hungrily obsessed with springing on Nintendo and Sega's long unchallenged dominance to win the rat race asserting dominance over the enormous, burgeoning industry.

Microsoft and Sony initially won, but that's changing. Steam and PC gaming eventually caught up and eclipsed their console success, but now everything is being devoured by mobile gaming. With iOS it's not like Apple has to choose. They can have their cake and eat it, too. All of the games that are better optimized for gameplay with touchscreen controls can exist alongside ones that work better with a controller, and there's no reason Apple can't have both, or even demand touchscreen controls for those porting in games native to controller setups (they wield such control over their development platform and developer market) so that nobody who holds an iPhone or iPad is left out.

They might opt to do this by corralling developers who don't want to add touchscreen controls to their game into tvOS instead of iOS (the former is just a more restrictive branch of iOS). Meanwhile, for games that support controller setups, they could sell an Apple accessory that copies the idea of the attachable bluetooth touchpad cases you've seen on Amazon for the Android market for the past half decade. Because Apple made one, suddenly everybody would have to have one. Alternatively, they might just try to sell a special gaming version of the iPhone since they've run out of ideas to keep smartphones sales up despite the lack of need/demand from the public for upgrades.

The point is that there is a convergence of decreasing processor gains with decreasing processor demands for high quality graphics (due to the famously diminishing returns on polygons). So at the point Apple feels there are enough titles like Fortnite to justify it they can release a $299 version of the Apple TV and open the floodgates to more ports without affecting the experience of a single person who holds an iPhone or iPad, but doesn't game.

The disappearing gap between desktop and mobile processing performance allows it.

 

[method115]

Why not?

They have zero interest in developing OS X aka MacOS as a gaming platform, and haven't for well over a decade, now. In fact, at this point, it's become pretty clear they're trying to figure out a way to get rid of the desktop OS altogether, without pissing off professionals, in order to meet the challenge of Google's thrown gauntlet: the Pixelbook. Apple tried and failed to enter the gaming market numerous times under Jobs. The most aggressive move was back in 1996 right after Gabe first split with Microsoft and everyone in the PC world was hungrily obsessed to spring on Nintendo and Sega's long unchallenged dominance to win the rat race asserting dominance over the enormous, burgeoning industry.

Microsoft and Sony initially won, but that's changing. Steam and PC gaming eventually caught up and eclipsed their console success, but now everything is being devoured by mobile gaming. With iOS it's not like Apple has to choose. They can have their cake and eat it, too. All of the games that are better optimized for gameplay with touchscreen controls can exist alongside ones that work better with a controller, and there's no reason Apple can't have both, or even demand touchscreen controls for those porting in games native to controller setups (they wield such control over their development platform and developer market) so that nobody who holds an iPhone or iPad is left out.

They might opt to do this by corralling developers who don't want to add touchscreen controls to their game into tvOS instead of iOS (the former is just a more restrictive branch of iOS). Meanwhile, if a game has both, they could sell an Apple accessory that copies the same attachable bluetooth touchpad cases for iPhone/iPads that have accompanied the Android market for the past half decade. Suddenly everybody would have to have one. Alternatively, they might just try to sell a special gaming version of the iPhone since they've run out of ideas to keep smartphones sales up despite the lack of need or demand for upgrades.

The point is that there is a convergence of decreasing processor gains with decreasing processor demands for high quality graphics (due to the famously diminishing returns on polygons). So at the point Apple feels there are enough titles like Fortnite to justify it they can release a $299 version of the Apple TV and open the floodgates to more ports without affecting the experience of a single person who holds an iPhone or iPad, but doesn't game.

The disappearing gap between desktop and mobile processing performance allows it.

I think all the tools are there for Apple to do it but I just don't see them being able to pull it off. Entering the gaming market is a very tough thing to do and they kind of stumbled their way into with the Iphone but I don't think it goes any farther than that.

 

[Quipling]

It's a fair point that PUBG doesn't really seem to have improved much of anything during their nearly year-long Beta, but I don't think Fortnite is nearly as ambitious graphically due to the much lower emphasis on realism.

Bluehole's biggest mistake seems to have been balking at the rampant Chinese cheating. I have no problem with them disagreeing with the authoritarian Chinese government about the right of Chinese citizens to use third-party VPNs, but their personal concern should have been why those VPNs were being pursued. They banned over a million players in January, and I think it was 1.5m in February. They're having to use automated detectors, obviously, but that has them spinning their wheels sorting out the wrongful bans. This crisis has them so bogged down I don't think they can pay any attention to things like core utilization, API overheads, or tickrates:

I know I'm a bit of a pubg fanboy, but there's been a fair amount of optimization over the past few months. Much of it coming on the tail of outsourcing a lot of the anticheat work.

I can't speak as to technical specifics, but people on low-end machines find the game much smoother than it used to be. Ive seen some more limited improvements with a higher-end machine.

Tickrate is way better-i posted an image about 2 months ago showing it had meaningfully improved since launch. It's improved since, but I don't have a handy image right now. Iirc, it now starts at around 15hz and goes up to a stable 30 within a few minutes (started at 12 and took about 8 minutes to hit 30 in January, started at 8-10 and averaged an unstable 17hz at release).

The soft pinglock also seems to have helped with cheating. At least for people in regions not adjacent to China. The one cheater I saw this version had a two day old account and stopped playing shortly after, so detection heuristics might be better.

Still no map selection, though.

 

[Madmick]

I think all the tools are there for Apple to do it but I just don't see them being able to pull it off. Entering the gaming market is a very tough thing to do and they kind of stumbled their way into with the Iphone but I don't think it goes any farther than that.

They have "stumbled" their way into market dominance, here:
https://newzoo.com/insights/article...-108-9-billion-in-2017-with-mobile-taking-42/

Now that mobile processors are becoming capable of running AAA games, I'm not sure what more they have to do to execute it beyond wait for the ripe moment when the hardware is capable to release it, and wait for the software/ports to come to them. I can't imagine a company like Apple would get hung up on the logistics of licensing deals, partnerships, or other challenges of corporate business.

All they have to do is continue to develop their presence among the world's most popular multiplats. They don't have to claw for exclusives, and if they did, they'd have more money than God to buy developers. After all, unlike the consoles, they don't require an ounce of enticement to sling their iPhones. iPhones sell themselves. Their software ecosystem is already swimming in cash with developers coming to them; with many pioneering or developing exclusively for iOS simply because it's the developer's most profitable market by far. They don't have to introduce and push some radical new product. The Apple TV is already profitable as a pure HTPC. They don't have to undertake new manufacturing. They already design their own processors.

It's all icing and gravy: for them and the developers. Nothing ventured, everything gained.

 

[method115]

They have "stumbled" their way into market dominance, here:
https://newzoo.com/insights/article...-108-9-billion-in-2017-with-mobile-taking-42/

Now that mobile processors are becoming capable of running AAA games, I'm not sure what more they have to do to execute it beyond wait for the ripe moment when the hardware is capable to release it, and wait for the software/ports to come to them. I can't imagine a company like Apple would get hung up on the logistics of licensing deals, partnerships, or other challenges of corporate business.

All they have to do is continue to develop their presence among the world's most popular multiplats. They don't have to claw for exclusives, and if they did, they'd have more money than God to buy developers. After all, unlike the consoles, they don't require an ounce of enticement to sling their iPhones. iPhones sell themselves. Their software ecosystem is already swimming in cash with developers coming to them; with many pioneering or developing exclusively for iOS simply because it's the developer's most profitable market by far. They don't have to introduce and push some radical new product. The Apple TV is already profitable as a pure HTPC. They don't have to undertake new manufacturing. They already design their own processors.

It's all icing and gravy: for them and the developers. Nothing ventured, everything gained.

When you say "they" I assume you mean mobile gaming in general and not Apple themselves? As the graph seems to lump in android and Iphone together. Last I checked Apple accounted for just over 50% of the mobile gaming market. It's certainly possible that Apple can pull it off but if I was a betting man I'd bet against Apple here. Either way they've already done very well for themselves and have exceeded what I thought was possible with mobile gaming. So what do I know.

 

[Madmick]

When you say "they" I assume you mean mobile gaming in general and not Apple themselves? As the graph seems to lump in android and Iphone together. Last I checked Apple accounted for just over 50% of the mobile gaming market. It's certainly possible that Apple can pull it off but if I was a betting man I'd bet against Apple here. Either way they've already done very well for themselves and have exceeded what I thought was possible with mobile gaming. So what do I know.

Yes. Apple and Android are lumped in together, and while Android software-- not just games-- generates more revenue if you count outside app stores (principally Chinese ones), iOS is still projected to make more through 2021 via the official stores. All in all it's pretty even between just the two:

The Consoles section doesn't divide Sony/Xbox/Nintendo/others.
The PC section doesn't divide Steam/Microsoft/Facebook/autonomous developer software revenue.

 

[Madmick]

The point is that there is a convergence of decreasing processor gains with decreasing processor demands for high quality graphics (due to the famously diminishing returns on polygons). So at the point Apple feels there are enough titles like Fortnite to justify it they can release a $299 version of the Apple TV and open the floodgates to more ports without affecting the experience of a single person who holds an iPhone or iPad, but doesn't game.

The disappearing gap between desktop and mobile processing performance allows it.

Speak of the devil. I posted this in the Ryzen thread, but this couldn't be more relevant:
http://forums.sherdog.com/posts/139666513/

So I don't know why in the hell this benchmark didn't come through any of my feeds a few months ago, but I'm addled and a bit upset.

That Intel + AMD project @PEB and I have mentioned in this thread appears to be the upcoming "Kaby Lake G processors (high power)":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaby_Lake#List_of_Kaby_Lake_G_processors_(high_power)
These combine the Intel Kaby Lake CPU architecture with an onboard AMD Vega M GPU.

The i5-8305G and the i7-8705G, which is the least of these i7 processors, so will likely be the one we actually see in shipped units, and shares the same GPU (with identical clockings) to the i5, both boast graphical performance just barely inferior to a GTX 1050 (Mobile):
Early benchmark released for Intel's new Core i7-8705G CPU with on-board AMD Radeon Vega graphics
View attachment 359371



Additionally, these Kaby Lake G processors are already showing up in benchmarks like Passmark.
-- Overall: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
-- Single Thread: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

UserBenchmark only has a single benchmark recorded for the i7-8705G, so this could be misleading, but comparing this to the most popular commercial laptop CPUs from the past several years (the ones they actually sell) in terms of CPU performance using UserBenchmark's "Effective Speed" the i7-8705G is...
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/453718/IntelR-CoreTM-i7-8705G-CPU---310GHz

• DESKTOP CPUs
  • 33% inferior to the i9-7980XE
  • 23% inferior to the i7-8700K
  • 2% inferior to the i5-8400
  • 3% inferior to the Ryzen-1800X
  • 12% superior to the i3-8100
    
  • 53% superior to the Pentium G4560
• LAPTOP CPUs
  • 26% superior to the i7-7700HQ*
  • 32% superior to the i7-8550U
  • 40% superior to the i5-8250U
  • 44% superior to the i7-6700HQ*
  • 64% superior to the i5-7500U
  • 81% superior to the i5-7200U
  • 89% superior to the i7-6500U
  • 109% superior to the i5-6200U

*The "HQ" series CPUs are gamer-class laptop CPUs traditionally seen in units marketed to our niche


Yeah, so...I don't know what to say. Normally, I'd be excited. But...I have a sinking feeling, mixed feelings, here. These numbers are simply too good. We all knew this was coming, but I didn't expect it this quickly. I'm not sure how much longer our desktop gaming culture is going to be relevant.

VR seems like the best hope to prolong the relevance, but between:
(1) laptop CPU power like the above,
(2) laptop GPU power brought by the GTX 1080 Max-Q (Mobile),
(3) the fact they're now stuffing desktop DDR4-RAM into laptops instead of LPDDR3, and finally
(4) NVMe/m.2 SSDs instead of crappy extra slow 5400RPM thin laptop HDDs
...they will have nearly caught the best gaming performance the market can offer in a single GPU build once they combine them. Only high-end streamers, who require more CPU cores, will really demand more horsepower.

Desktop relevance in any consumer market isn't long for this world.

There's now 6 benchmarks for the flagship i7-8809G; the above benchmarks are no fluke:
http://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/422264/IntelR-CoreTM-i7-8809G-CPU---310GHz