sanderjk

Unfortunately, the GPU market has shifted. The biggest change was actually right after 970, which I would argue was the last 'great midtier card' that launched at $330 and was $250 pretty fast.

My short GPU advice would to always buy at least a **60 or an AMD *650. And those are currently more around $350. The drop-off in performance to the tier below that isn't worth it.

With the increase in VRAM, unless the DDR5 price drops it might be a while until a strong card comes in below $300.

321

Avengers

Wildermyth

Edge of Eternity is the worst I paid money for...

I "only" have a PCIe3 SSD, but my opinion would be no.

Here's my reasoning, which I used last year when upgrading:

The upgrade from HDD to SSD is huge. It is a 10x speed increase in load times, which returns into insanely faster boot speeds (Windows10 is fickle, but if you reboot often 10 seconds is about the region you end up with), really snappy desktop performance, where every app opens in a few seconds. And load times in games that are often between 0.1x and 0.5x of what they were before SSDs.

The upgrade from SATA to NVME is incremental. It is roughly a doubling, and maybe shaves a second here and there in realtime performance.

To spend additional money even faster NVME seems like it is better spent elsewhere in the system. Or doubling the SSD size instead, which means that you spend less time managing drive space.

Adding additional faster load times only helps if that is still the bottleneck. And even if it is, if a single player games goes from a 30 second load to a 5 second load that's great. The difference between a 5s load and a 3s load is much less impactful.

Of course in most multiplayer games load times matter even less because you're then stuck waiting for other people to load in.

The new console generation is able to take advantage of very high throughput SSDs because every console has it. This makes for really different restrictions about what can be expected to be loading into memory within a certain timeframe. But PC game makers can't really trust that, so any game designed for PC probably won't operate (much) in the "3gbs expected SSD to VRAM" space. Additionally, PC motherboards and software isn't really designed for that either, becoming bottlenecks.

That may change in the future (I believe AMD is sorting towards connecting SSDs more directly to the GPU instead of the motherboard, since for gaming the vast amount of data transfer is SSD -> GPU), but with current hardware you are basically gambling that software upgrades are going to be good enough for a long time, which is always dubious.

This may change if you have a special usecase, usually from your work. If you are constantly moving very large files around, or accessing very large files (say as a video editor), then the more speed the better.

At least you can do the swap.

In the Windows Store, where many very large games now live, you can't move games between drives. You have to set the install directory for all Apps in the same place and can't ever move them.

This came to mind when I was pondering about downloading the new Destiny2 on Gamepass, a huge game that i'd have to delete and redownload if I needed the space.

Edit: Found out this untrue.... they added a Move button in yet another subscreen. For people reading this, it's under Apps and Features. You have to install to default and can then move a game.

Mentioning Xbox controller now reminds me of the weekend I lost to what appeared to be a failing motherboard. This was around 2015.

I open my file explorer, and my secondary HDD is gone. Weird

I reboot. It stalls on boot.

I reboot into safe mode. Everythings fine.

I reboot again. My primary HDD is gone.

I reboot again. Launch windows just fine.

What the hell is going on.

I spent a lot of time on this, up to making a spreadsheet to weigh replacing just the mobo or which of the 3y old parts, until finally I noticed the light on Xbox360 controller blinking.

The USB had slipped, and was just barely making a connection, but not properly handshaking (I guess)
Whatever was happening was wrecking all my other component detection.

Clicked in the USB fully, rebooted, never a problem again until I retired it 4y later (parts out of date, bearings on the gpu cooler became very noisy)

My most pointless fight was Me vs Realtek in December 2019.

For 4 months this new PC was fine, then suddenly everyone complains that they can barely hear me.

I start investigating, and my Headset has been replaced with a "default microphone" with 0 settings. Can't control gain, can't toggle noise suppression etcet. all greyed out.

This lead to a weekend of rolling back audio drivers, including one rollback that completely bricked my windows install. Every time, the second I connect the the internet, the windows update installed the new driver. I spent hours trying to prevent this update process. Windows just lies and does it anyway. It was somehow flagged as a critical security update to the best of my knowledge.

I could only have a microphone not on 1% gain if I restarted in safe mode without the internet, used third party software to completely remove audio drivers, manually install the audio drivers, restart into windows and only then connect to the internet, and never turn the machine off or reboot. I did this for two weeks.

In the end I gave up and bought a USB headset instead of a 3.5mm one, because it had its own drivers.

Then covid came and too many headphones were messing up my ears, so now I have an midlevel dynamic mic with its own drivers from the Amp, so I can talk without it picking up my speakers (though it does pick up my keyboard)

The blame is probably shared between Realtek, MSI (the mobo) and Win10, but it is an amazing example of how "It just works" explodes on you when you try to protect users from too many settings and mistakes, and then leave them with no avenue to fix something that you broke.

I had a Realtek update a week ago, suddenly I have a settings screen. I plugged in my first headset and it works again. So that's..... 11 months. Great.

My current minor gripe is that somewhere in the chain (IDK if this is Win10, Nvidia or AOC) my monitor will screw up its *sync settings in Dramatic Ways. Like dropping half of the frames bad. It only triggers when I launch a fullscreen application, then I have about a 1 in 20 chance of being in N64 land. Restarting the monitor fixed it.

Yeah. Basically you can't watch live, because the ads just cut off the conversation. I missed how Brad died for instance on the latest stream. He was next to a guard, then I caught the tail end of a loading screen and talking about permadeath 30s later.

Twitch /says/ if you run ads as a streamer this won't happen. But afaik they don't document yet what counts as "run an ad recently"

I had 4 30s interruptions in 50mins of watching which isn't crazy, but the cut-off effect makes it terrible.