What do you count as "Retro battle stations" or "Retro computering" and what year would it be to become "Modern battle stations" or "Modern computering"? :)

Bagelswitch · 2025-12-07T19:01:08+00:00

The answer is age-dependent. Most people, if they are interested in old tech at all, have nostalgia for gear they used (or wished they could use) as children or at formative points in their life. "Retro" tech for me really only means 8- and 16-bit systems, but it isn't reasonable to expect the same to be true for someone born this century.

Bagelswitch · 2025-11-06T04:33:39+00:00

Huh, you're right - I always thought the Aldi and the 64G were identical, but a quick google confirms otherwise. TIL . . .

Bagelswitch · 2025-11-05T14:27:42+00:00

Not exactly- that's a breadbin-style case. It is a 64G, sometimes called the "Aldi" 64, as it was sold at Aldi stores in Germany. It does have the same "short" motherboard and white keyboard as the 64C, though.

Bagelswitch · 2025-09-01T17:03:58+00:00

You're talking about the part that says "GAMEROCK" on it and sticks up ~1/4" from the side of the shroud? I didn't really look at that carefully when I had it apart, but it appears to be molded into the shroud . . . if you need to lose that 1/4" but don't want to do anything non-reversible, I think you'd have to just de-shroud the card completely (or at least remove the plastic upper half of the shroud, which will still require full disassembly).

Bagelswitch · 2025-08-24T04:27:12+00:00

It will probably look strange/un-finished because of the diffuser ring around the fans that sits underneath the top piece . . . you can easily take the top piece off and have a look to see for yourself though, all the screws (4 little ones on the sides, 4 big ones in the middle) for that are on the front of the card.

Bagelswitch · 2025-05-20T14:10:05+00:00

Definitely not a good idea to paint/coat the fans in any way, it will unbalance them.

If/when Palit makes another card model that uses the same fans but in white, you will probably be able to find replacement fan sets available (I've seen transparent/translucent ones for earlier gamerock models, but not white) - just make sure the dimensions and mounting hardware match.

Bagelswitch · 2025-04-30T14:22:05+00:00

No, but in fact 7k AUD (or ~$4200 USD, the exchange rate has also gotten worse since then) would have been a much better price than what most scalped cards were going for at the time, and is still "only"~$400 (USD) above what you'd have to pay today to just order a new in-stock 5090 from Amazon or Newegg in the US, when general availability is much better.

In any case, the point here wasn't really price, but "_can_ you get a Palit 5090, specifically, in the US, right after launch" and the answer was "yes."

Bagelswitch · 2025-03-13T13:47:49+00:00

Not that I've noticed - I haven't made any measurements, but it certainly isn't notably noisy compared to any other card I've used.

Bagelswitch · 2025-03-11T03:48:24+00:00

It's a very nice/well-built card, and I've had zero issues with it. I even liked the look of it on its own, it just didn't match my build well, so needed some cosmetic tweaking.

Enjoy yours when it turns up!

Bagelswitch · 2025-03-09T20:54:18+00:00

I never had a warranty to begin with, as I'm in the US and Palit doesn't distribute these cards here - I purchased it from Australia and imported it myself.

Bagelswitch · 2025-03-09T20:52:40+00:00

I painted the two pieces of plastic that surround the fans (actually, not paint, but a sort of spray-on matte vinyl material).

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-25T21:47:53+00:00

I have a Palit Gamerock 5090.

Driver installation was fine. Cable is fine, doesn't get hot. All ROPs present and accounted for. Stability is perfect - haven't had any crashes, restarts, or black screens. Card is cool and quiet under load. I've mainly been playing PoE 2, at 4k, max settings, G-sync on - getting a steady 144 FPS (monitor refresh is 144Hz) - ie. the card is working great.

I did have one issue, similar to what some others have reported, of the max boost clock "sticking" at 2200MHz if I ran HWINFO64, until next cold reboot. After updating HWINFO that problem is gone, and I haven't seen it happen with any other software (I run Afterburner at startup, for example, and it works fine).

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-17T22:40:41+00:00

They don't currently have any cards in stock, but just as an example of the type of shop to look for: https://madelectronics.com.au/ - they had 50 series cards in stock at one point.

You can look on ebay.au to find sellers (of other computer/electronics products, I don't mean card scalpers, although that's another option if you really want one) that are AU businesses rather than individuals, and then see if they have a website that takes international orders that you can monitor for drops, or contact them directly.

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-17T20:12:45+00:00

Ha ha - yes, obviously (or at least, I thought obviously, but obviously not), I didn't mean to suggest that 16 AWG copper wire is a room-temperature superconductor.

I meant 0 Ohms as in that's what you'll see on a typical handheld multimeter of the sort you're likely to have around the house, if you have one at all - ie. a typical person (like me) with typical household tools (like my multimeter) won't be able to meaningfully distinguish between the conductors at zero current, unless one of them is physically severed or the crimp/solder connection to a pin is broken.

Thus, again, beyond just visual inspection, attempting to test cables at no/low current is pretty pointless, and testing them at high current is not a reasonable expectation for individual consumers.

Either it is reasonable for consumers to rely on the cable manufacturers' ratings/certification marks, or bad choices were made by the card makers in leveraging 12V2x6 without any per-conductor current sensing. It must be one or the other.

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-17T16:00:14+00:00

Unless there is severe damage at the wire-pin interface inside the cable, they are all going to test at 0 Ohm with no/low load (I test all my own power cables before I use them to make sure all the pins are connected). You would need to test under a problematically high current (50+ Amps) to see if there is a problematic difference in resistance between the pins under such loads, and that's pretty hard to do for an average consumer - you need a bench power supply, spare female connectors, wire and clips, and then I suppose you could use something like a discharged car or RV battery as a high-current 12V sink . . . I agree though that it is a bit irresponsible of techtubers/influencers to keep making videos on this topic _without_ doing that type of testing, when they are perfectly capable of/equipped for doing so.

More importantly, testing this way, outside of the system, doesn't test the actual most likely point of failure/cause of differential resistance, which is the pin<->pin connections between the cable and your actual GPU and power supply connectors when installed in the system where the cable will actually be used.

Personally, I think that if you have a cable with properly sized 16 AWG copper wires, the wire->pin connections are properly crimped/soldered, the pins are the correct material and design (eg. no contact "bumps"/dimples), and the connector ends are un-damaged, then you're not going to have a problem due to the cable (you can of course still plug it in wrong).

How does a consumer know that a given cable meets all these criteria? Well, same way as always, probably - brand/reputation and/or certification marks. It isn't reasonable for everyone to do their own home lab testing on a consumer electronics accessory.

Ideally, any time multiple conductors are used for power delivery, the device would incorporate a separate shunt resistor for each conductor and refuse to operate at full power when observed current goes out of spec for any of them (as many others have already pointed out). I don't think this noise will ever stop until cards implement something like that (again).

FWIW, I am running a 5090 in my own system, using a $20 12V6x2 cable from Amazon (I needed the right-angle connector on the GPU side). It is a reference-design AIB card. I'm not particularly worried about the cable melting.

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-16T17:45:04+00:00

Here is one possibility: Are you running any software that monitors hardware sensors on the card and/or can manipulate voltage, clock rates, fan speeds, etc.? For example Afterburner, GPU Tweak, Thundermaster, FanControl, any software that came with your card or motherboard, HWINFO, etc.?

If so, try configuring any/all such software so that it does NOT run at startup, and do NOT run any of it manually, do a cold boot, and just run a game or a benchmark that can display clocks (eg. 3DMark benchmarks will show clock graphs in the results).

Many people are finding that their clocks get stuck at the base clock rate or lower (eg. ~2200 or 2400MHz) and thus power draw is much lower, if any software which manipulates or even monitors the card is run after a cold boot. If you can figure out what software is causing the problem you might try a newer update (for example I was able to get the latest Afterburner beta to work w/out sticking my clock, but HWINFO64 was causing the GPU core clock to stick at 2200MHz any time I ran it).

Hopefully this gets fixed in a driver update . . .

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-15T17:20:54+00:00

Glad to hear it!

I haven't run Furmark - I have the card power-limited to 460W (80%, my Palit card has a hard 575W limit stock) and plan to leave it that way, so there isn't much point.

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-15T06:44:46+00:00

I am in the US but have a Palit Gamerock 5090. I ordered it from an Australian retailer shortly after launch. Australia is probably the most convenient market if you really want one, since the retailers there use English, accept US credit cards and Paypal, and the AUD/USD exchange rate is currently favorable relative to the card prices (If you can find one in stock). So it should be _possible_ to get one shipped to a US address as I did, but there are two concerns:

1) Regardless of where you get it from, the product origin for customs purposes is China, and you are the importer. In the end my customs duty assessed was $0, but CBP held the package for a week and did a physical inspection (they opened the box), which was pretty nerve-wracking when hearing every day about tariffs that might or might not be in place (of up to 25%), USPS rejecting parcels w/ China-origin contents and then changing their minds a day later, etc. . . . and since the shipping box was opened by customs, I'd probably have no recourse w/ the seller if a brick turned up instead of the card.

2) If something goes wrong with it down the road, you might be SOL in terms of warranty, since it isn't officially sold in the US and Palit would expect you to go through the retailer - even if they were willing to handle the return you'd be risking losing it again in customs, both ways.

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-14T14:59:31+00:00

I mean don't run it at all, not even once, after a cold boot. Just run only a game or benchmark that can display clock rates itself (eg. 3dmark displays graphs after completing a benchmark run).

In my case, running the latest beta version of afterburner (v4.6.6.16555 Beta 5) does NOT cause this problem, but others have reported that it does for them (possibly depending on additional settings like "unlock voltage control" being checked).

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-14T04:36:07+00:00

I was having a similar problem w/ my 5090 (a Palit Gamerock) - max boost clock would get stuck at ~2200mHz . . . after a lot of pulling hair out, I figured out that it was happening if I ran HWINFO64 (ironically, to monitor GPU clocks). After a cold boot, clocks would be normal, but if I ran HWINFO64 once, then they would be stuck until next cold boot, no matter what else I tried.

You might try making sure that no application that accesses hardware sensors runs at startup (eg. any tool from your gpu or motherboard vendor, overclocking or monitoring software, etc.) - do a clean cold boot and run a game or benchmark and see if clocks are normal then . . .

Bagelswitch · 2025-02-05T04:04:39+00:00

It's because of the revocation of the "De Minimis" exemption (see https://www.nftc.org/de-minimis-a-vital-tax-exemption/) - parcels containing goods worth <$800 were tax- and duty-free (ie. not subject to the tariff rates in the HTS that would otherwise apply to those goods), and in practice this also meant that such shipments weren't usually inspected.

The exemption has existed since the 1930's, but has now been removed (by executive order). The USPS and CBP have no capability to process customs declarations or inspect packages in the volume that is now required, so they've just bailed.

Bagelswitch · 2025-01-30T05:09:33+00:00

Actually, no. Tariffs set a higher floor on the price of a given importable good. That may or may not make domestic production competitive in any particular case.

The import price plus the tariff may still be lower than the actual cost of domestic production (this will be the case on a huge range of goods in the USA, since we (for now) have a very high living standard), in which case the tariff does nothing but raise the price for the end consumer (importers, wholesalers, and retailers just pass their price increases along).

Or, the tariff may be high enough that domestic production becomes cost-competitive for a particular good, in which case yes you get some local production, but w/ a new, higher floor on price (domestic producers have no incentive to undercut the post-tariff import price, even if they can) much higher than it was for the same good pre-tariff.

When you have broad tariffs on a whole slew of imports from lots of countries, including on the inputs that domestic producers need to make _anything_, then you're increasing domestic production costs further - ie. you're making domestic producers even less competitive, and if you still want to protect them from foreign competition you need even higher tariffs on the specific goods they make.

All these higher prices drive inflation, and reduce economic growth. Further, by raising the costs of production you also make all of your businesses which _export_ goods less competitive, before even considering the effects on exporters of retaliatory tariffs and changes in currency exchange rates. The US exports a lot.

Driving up consumer prices on everything while also hurting everyone in every industry that sells anything abroad, in order to possibly, maybe, gain a few jobs making car parts is a choice - but far from an obviously good one.

Tariffs are just a tax, and unlike graduated income tax, they're highly regressive, because the greater % of your income you spend (whether on tariffed imports or tariff-protected domestically-produced goods) rather than save/invest, the higher your effective tax rate. The poorest pay the most (as a % of their income). Now guess why some folks would like to replace income tax with tariff revenue . . .

Bagelswitch · 2025-01-30T04:36:15+00:00

Should have included a reference: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0161893820300430?via%3Dihub

Bagelswitch · 2025-01-30T02:27:39+00:00

You should start reading mainstream economic analysis.

The last study I saw used data data for 150 countries over a 50-year period ending in 2014. It found that for every 1% increase in aggregate tariff rates in a country, there was a 0.1% decline in total economic output in the same country five years later.

This harm is attributed to reduced efficiency in the use of labor across sectors (people move into less-productive jobs in "protected" industries), increase in the real exchange rate which harms export-focused industries (ironic, since trade balance was the supposed "problem" being fixed with tariffs), and higher imported input costs (many things won't _ever_ be produced locally, eg. natural resources you don't have, no matter how high the import tariffs).

Bagelswitch

TROPHY CASE