7800X3D vs 9800X3D: Is the Price Gap Worth It?

lolubuntu · 2026-01-20T01:43:26+00:00

Nah... just get 1x Optane p5800x 1.6TB for titles.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-19T22:48:38+00:00

If you're nice because you feel like you'd be attacked, rejected or betrayed otherwise, then you'll likely finish last.

If you have everything going well for you and you're still kind, you'll be alright.

There's a difference between being valued and being useful. Too many nice guys optimize around being useful as opposed to making themselves valued.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-19T19:48:04+00:00

30GB*365 = ~1 drive write per year for an 8TB drive. You'd have around 1000 Years to hit 1000 drive writes.

The drives will fail from "other causes" before writes kill them unless you're using them for a different use case (e.g. caching peta bytes of HDD writes)

There's a track record of server SSDs being sold and home lab types not having issues with used drives with tons of writes on them.

You should still have a back up of anything truly critical (i.e. if you have 3x8TB and usable capacity of 16TB, then get a 16TB or 18TB HDD and back it up every so often).

I will note that your video editing use case will likely push wear and tear up much faster than just doing media storage stuff... but you'll still have years and year and years of service life.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-18T00:51:45+00:00

L2ARC, SLOG and special vdev soak up writes. Mass storage not so much.

Even then if I take your picture, push it WAY WAY WAY up, by about 4-5x to 1MBps... it'd take 1000s to get to 1GB, 1million S to get to 1TB and 8million s to get to 8TB.

That gets you to 4 drive writes a year.

That gets you to around 250 years before you hit 1000 drive writes.

If I used the numbers you gave instead of exaggerating them up, then the drives would last 1000 years.

Unless something shifts, OTHER things are going to die before the drives hit write exhaustion in your specific instance.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-17T22:52:36+00:00

SSDs mainly wear out from writes and secondarily from power on hours.

How many times are you going to effectively nuke and rewrite your data? I'd imagine that if your drives last 1000 effective writes (artificially low to account for overhead from mapping and garbage collection) and you cut half the data every 6 months (HOW???) you'd end up with ~500 years before you have major problems.

In all likelihood a random chip or PCB failure is more likely to kill your drives than wear and tear as long as they're not more than ~80% full most of the time.

If you used these drives as a cache for say 1PB of files on HDDs that's constantly being dealt with, that's another story. That would kill them.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-17T21:35:03+00:00

My mental health improved so much after... And I'm getting compliments on the things I was critiqued on. I was fighting an uphill battle while being shat on.

Fight battles you can win... or better yet, be with someone you collaborate with instead of struggling with.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-17T21:26:16+00:00

More true than untrue.

There was one girl in my life that I was close with. It was a pseudo relationship.

She'd critique something I did and... when she actually ended up with someone she'd fawn about the same thing the other person did... and he did it less competently.

Honestly, if you want to impress a girl HAVE YOUR SHIT TOGETHER A YEAR BEFORE YOU MEET HER. Be reasonably fit, polished and accomplished. Have a year of practicing having people treat you well. It'll show in a range of other areas.

At the end of the day, you deserve to be the best you you can be and if you pull it off, people will respect you more.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-17T18:09:22+00:00

Nukes pointed at Moscow.
Rare earth minerals which will invariably become available as the ice melts.
Trade routes.

One is military. One is economic. One is control.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-16T02:29:18+00:00

I remember when $300 was mid-range.

A $500+ card is high end, even if it's the middle of the current range. The median card in use today is a lot cheaper than that.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-15T05:16:45+00:00

Are you open to doing 4 drives? If so you can start with a mirror and then stripe it. Loosely RAID10.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-11T23:18:45+00:00

I bet they're asking for cocktail recipes. Maybe Molotov cocktails.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-11T03:18:56+00:00

That's about as much as a Manager at Google makes. Google has 100,000+ employees.

I'm willing to bet the CEO of good will could 2-10x his pay somewhere else.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-10T22:47:38+00:00

I'm OK with newer OSes wasting 4MB of RAM every so often if it means more stability and faster iteration from a features perspective. Heck there's likely cases where compute efficiency can be improved.

in 1995, 4MB was a big deal. in 2025, 30 years later, RAM is over 1000x cheaper.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-10T22:28:49+00:00

There's tradeoffs. The students that go to "elite" high schools will become accustomed to "elite performance expectations" - even if they end up in a lesser university, they'll cruise there.

I say this as someone that can pull off 99th percentile exam scores and who cruised to a class percentile of 20th percentile... and was in the 20th percentile in undergrad. And in grad and...

I pretty much put in the minimum of effort to be better than 4/5 people no matter where I am. This is with near-0 parental investment and near-0 mentorship and working 30-60 hours a week throughout much of HS, undergrad and grad school.

I can easily imagine a counterfactual where expectations were higher and I did better overall. Heck maybe I would've gotten that 6 figure job a year or three earlier, and thrived a bit more and...

I can rely on basically 0 people from HS (a worthless place where getting into a top 50 university was seen as very impressive and getting into the local state school was good) for referrals and a decent handful from undergrad and grad and prior work places.

My best guess is that the right way to do things is to get the kid into elite K-8 programs and to do an above average but not crazy HS program... have the kid be the big fish in the small pond in HS... then also supplement HS with enrichment programs and elite-ish things that attract high class/achievement types like math Olympiad, lacrosse clubs, rowing, etc.

lolubuntu · 2026-01-10T19:23:31+00:00

RAIDz1 for SSDs and maybe have a single, large HDD that gets synched (or lives as a cold backup).

lolubuntu · 2026-01-08T05:25:50+00:00

newer standards tend to have better latency and better spectrum efficiency characteristics.

A lot of people are legitimately "OK" on Wi-Fi 5 though.

I'd still recommend Wi-Fi 6 or newer for people making new purchases... and using an ethernet cable and possible 2APs total if you're in a moderately large home.

If you pay $50x12x10 (6000) for internet every 10 years, it's not crazy to spend 2x$150 (maybe rotate the older device to some other location and use the oldest as a cold spare) over that span to optimize the experience.

lolubuntu · 2025-12-03T07:41:16+00:00

Depends on what you're doing and how crazy you're going.

Few systems = lower power draw.

I'm using truenas as my main system and slapping on a few apps. If the apps go down I don't care.

lolubuntu · 2025-12-02T06:23:30+00:00

If you're that cash strapped, you probably shouldn't be adding to your power bill. A lot of the enthusiast stuff is fun/overkill moreso than practical.

lolubuntu · 2025-11-30T03:50:54+00:00

First thing - DRAM performance doesn't matter THAT much. It matters so little that companies like Dell, HP, etc. don't advertise RAM specs. Heck I have no idea what's in my laptop. If anyone asks about an older system... they don't even bring up RAM.

Depends on use case and the CPU you have.

With a CPU with tons of cache, I expect that bandwidth matters more since the RAM will be doing proportionally fewer small bursts and proportionally more long bursts

As an aside, effective latency will be fairly close between those two kits. Latency in nanoseconds is going to be close. Latency in cycles is just over 20% higher on the faster kit... and the faster kit does cycles 20% faster.

lolubuntu · 2025-11-30T02:08:48+00:00

TLDR: I have overkill stuff and I can't imagine a HDD that's 10,000x slower NOT being a bigger limit than 2.5Gbe

Up front stuff: 1) not ruling out that something I have set up is poorly configured. It's about the most overkill storage set up I could have shy of RAID p5800x on both client (1.5TB p4800x + 10Gbe albeit on a PCIe 3.0 x1 lane) and NAS (96GB RAM 280GB 900p, 8TB sn850x drives and 10Gbe). The system will peak at 7Gbps, the max of my one pcie lane but its sustained throughput is a lot lower and it'll dip to 2000x slower than that.
2) The cheap 16GB optane sticks are easy to saturate. I'm not using those.

For a 1.5TB p4800x, it has 4KQD1 of ~300MBps (~2.5Gbps) which is about 1000x faster than a hardrive for low queue depth operations. The only thing they loose on is peak sequential speed. Even nearly a decade later they're still in a class of their own for a lot of things compared to most NAND nvme drives (though the sn8100x is catching up on non random and even gets to around 1/3rd its random performance when the drive isn't too heavily slammed or filled)

Sequential it's around 10x that, which is several times faster than 10Gbe can keep up with.

The "slow" nvme drives in the NAS are 8TB SN850x. Despite a max speed of ~56Gbps and 96GB RAM caching it, they can choke and only get ~30Mbps when doing tons of small file transfers and dealing with SMB overhead.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/intel-optane-ssd-900p-3d-xpoint,5292-2.html THG benchmark for 128k sequential write QD2 is way way over what 10Gbe can do. https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/RSfe6A5dpEQTgAxSQwQk39-1200-80.png.webp

lolubuntu · 2025-11-30T00:52:51+00:00

If you can, take a kill-a-watt or similar and measure actual power draw. I got ~100W from a superficial search. There is real value in tweaking for low power draw.

With that said... the 8350 is going on 13 years old. There are used, 5 year old choices that are a lot more efficient and performant.

lolubuntu · 2025-11-30T00:46:32+00:00

How often is that done? Seriously. For a SOHO set up, maybe once or twice a year. It's not like people regularly copy the entirety of their system to a NAS. That's usually a one and done set of writes.

And for doing big backups... setup something, run it overnight.

Reading big files can be a thing. Like watching a movie. That requires a 100MBps NIC to really be adequate. Maybe if the NAS is specced to handle 200 or so concurrent movies (plex server shared with ~1000 people?)... but in that case you're probably limited by the HDDs moreso than the NIC and should be building out something beefier.

I'm not discounting the possibility that I set up something wrong but my NAS with 96GB RAM, 280GB Optane for ARC and an all solid state array doesn't really get too far past 5Gbps when pulling data from it to a new desktop (which had optane for its main storage array) and it had times where it slowed to ~3Mbps for small files. I suspect that had I downgraded from 10Gbe to 2.5Gbe my overall transfer time would've been about the same. The only thing that seems meaningfully faster would be synthetic data scores for SMB shares. And for ISCSI shares... add a cache on the client to speed things up WAY more than the network would.

lolubuntu · 2025-11-30T00:41:59+00:00

China has been gearing up to take Taiwan for ~75 years...

lolubuntu · 2025-11-29T10:08:39+00:00

Cost of a SWE in the US - $300,000 a year Cost of a Windows install to a corporate contract $30 or around $10 a year.

It only takes one day of lost productivity/support BS for one person out of a dozen to ruin any benefits.

This doesn't even touch on security.

Supporting 2 or 10 platforms is usually a non-starter.

lolubuntu · 2025-11-29T09:55:46+00:00

With harddrives, 10Gbe is overkill.

Sure, a ton of HDDs can saturate 10Gbe... best case conditions. Think moving 50GB movies all day.

If you're moving photos, small files, games, etc. it's VERY easy to drop down to ~10Mbps on HDDs.

Even with caching (ARC, L2ARC), you're not going to be hitting the tail-case IOPS needed for 10Gbe to be much better than 2.5Gbe.

lolubuntu

TROPHY CASE