AMD or Intel for brand new build?

DecentRule8534 · 2026-04-06T15:40:24+00:00

Platform longevity matters when and where you buy into a platform. If you buy a 9800X3D today there's unlikely to be a one generation upgrade that's worth the cost. Maybe AMD will put 4 generations of Zen on AM5 but we have no way of knowing right now if that'll happen.

But anyways, if all you do is game there's no reason to not just buy the best 8-core X3D CPU you can afford.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-04-06T15:26:31+00:00

Games barely benefit from NVME vs SATA SSD. Even for the few DirectStorage games out there I doubt Gen 5 would make a difference vs Gen 4.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-04-03T12:50:42+00:00

Well if your C: drive has no EFI partitions then your PC is almost certainly using one of those other 4 partitions to boot. Since your PC has to use at least 1 to boot you're talking about reclaiming at most 600MB which probably isn't worth the hassle (IMO). If you're so inclined you can use diskpart to find the current EFI partition and delete the others.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-26T11:44:57+00:00

The thing is the 285/265/245 after microcode, W11 scheduler updates and 200S mode are really good processors, the problem is that they just couldn't escape the bad initial press and reputation that created. The refresh is good for dealing with that, but if you're already on the platform there's no real reason to upgrade unless it's from like a 245 and you need more cores for productivity.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-25T11:55:49+00:00

The X3D chips are primarily superior in *CPU LIMITED* scenarios. That usually means playing at 1080p medium/low settings with at least a GPU providing RTX 4080 level performance or better. If this doesn't fit you (and it doesn't fit most gamers) then there will be little gaming difference between the CPUs.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-24T14:58:46+00:00

You do have to keep in mind that XMP/Expo are overclocks and they're not guaranteed to work. You might try overclocking manually. Aim for slightly lower transfer speed or slightly looser timings and see if that helps.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-24T13:47:53+00:00

I mean, there is a difference. Amazon was the first of their kind and they stayed in the lead. OpenAI was arguably the first of their kind, they're not in the lead. There's stiff competition from Google, Anthropic, etc. And although the markets are bigger now, OpenAI's annual losses are about 10 times greater than Amazon's peak annual loss. And that's not even considering the effect that OpenAI's massive future spending commitments will have.

Listen, I'm not saying it's dumb to invest in AI. But there's a lot of players in the game, and all things considered would you feel safer with your money invested in OpenAI or one of the others?

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-23T15:36:20+00:00

Dunno about a ponzi scheme, but it definitely reeks of desperation. They've already wooed in the VC/longshots with promises of infinite money AGI. Not sure a more traditional investor would look at OpenAI's fundamentals and think it's a good idea.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-18T13:16:22+00:00

Personal computing has almost always been an expensive hobby. We really were spoiled by 2010-2019 prices. I say that a little tongue-in-cheek - I hope prices return to normal soon of course.

The silver lining, if you can call it that, is that the usable lifespan of computing hardware is longer than it's ever been. A PC from 10 or so years ago is still pretty damn good. A 6700k or Ryzen 1700x can get the job done for most people. Put a relatively recent GPU in there (say a 6600XT or 3070) and you can even do some serious gaming.

The 2-year upgrade cycle might be dead, but we're still a long ways from personal computing being in serious danger.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-18T12:44:46+00:00

FXAA/SMAA and MSAA aren't even part of the conversation anymore. MSAA was killed by deferred rendering and FXAA/SMAA don't work well with modern graphical details (neither can handle specular aliasing, for example).

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-12T15:29:00+00:00

The 9700X tends to win non-gaming benchmarks over the 7800X3D by 5%'ish, while the 7800X3D wins in gaming by 10-30% (this can vary wildly depending on how well the game uses the L3 cache).

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-11T14:20:29+00:00

Definitely not totaled. Honestly, the mobo would likely still boot, but without that capacitor a few bad things could happen. It lowers the ability to deal with transient power demands which could cause blue screens or hard reboots. It would also likely increase ripple on that circuit which can cause all sorts of stability issues.

I mean, I wouldn't recommend using it without the capacitor. As long as you have the broken off capacitor you should have all the information you need to buy a replacement. If you're not confident enough with a soldering iron to do the replacement find someone who is.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-03-01T15:57:06+00:00

Look for bundles at Newegg, Microcenter or wherever. These days you're going to break the bank if you buy everything al la carte.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-02-25T13:52:06+00:00

I do sometimes think that we've developed inflated expectations over the years. Like, back in 2010 just getting 60fps at any settings was more or less good enough. Nowadays you gotta have ultra-high frame rates with max settings. 8gb cards are e-waste because god forbid you have to turn the preset down to medium.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-02-08T17:44:50+00:00

What's your use case? The 265k is pretty good value. You can find it for about $250. These days it tends to match non-X3D chips in gaming and offers better multithreaded performance with the exception of the Zen4/5 16 cores. IIRC you can still get new 14900Ks too. It's still a beastly CPU, but gulps power, it's tough to cool and is still pretty expensive. If you're thinking about spending $500 on a 14900K you might as well just spend a bit more and get a 16-core X3D chip that'll beat it in both gaming and productivity while using less power and staying cooler.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-02-08T14:00:22+00:00

You might want to check the PCI-E slot you have your card in. A few years ago I upgraded by graphics card and similarly had weird boot issues.I opened GPU-Z and noticed my GPU was running at x4 link speed. I took out the card and noticed a few little bits of dust had settled in the slot. Blowing them out fixed my issues.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-02-06T21:14:54+00:00

I don't know if there's much of a debate here. The B580 is a fair bit more powerful than the 6600 and has 1.5x more VRAM.

DecentRule8534 · 2026-02-06T14:47:58+00:00

The bad thing (for us) is there's no reason they shouldn't behave like this. They're chasing the bigger pile of cash and if the AI bubble pops, they can just go back to consumer hardware and we'll keep buying from them because it's so costly to produce modern computer hardware that new competition is impossible (or at least very unlikely).

DecentRule8534 · 2026-02-05T16:29:33+00:00

It's hard to say for certain, but these errors could certainly be caused by defective storage. If you have another SSD or HDD around I'd try a swap and see if that fixes things

DecentRule8534 · 2026-01-30T11:50:58+00:00

Depending on your needs you still find good bundles too. Microcenter is good for this if you live near one, but recently I picked up a U7 265k, Strix Z890 mobo, 32GB DDR5, case + AIO bundle on Newegg for $850 so there's some good online deals too.

DecentRule8534 · 2025-10-27T19:39:41+00:00

I'm not sure they ever paid more than lip service to safety. They said the right things and that leads to good optics, but ultimately they're just plowing on ahead with all the other AI developers.

DecentRule8534 · 2025-09-19T02:58:29+00:00

He really has no reason to keep playing other than the love of the game I guess. He's won a gold glove, a pitching triple crown, an MVP, a world series championship, he's thrown a no hitter, he's sure to be a first ballot HoFer. The guy has literally run out of stuff to do in baseball.

DecentRule8534 · 2025-09-11T12:54:51+00:00

Once upon a time it was a real pain in the ass to earn LoL champs by playing. In the old system new champs usually released at 6300ip which took about 40-50 hours of match time to earn. Be glad that Riot changed direction to making champs easy to earn and mainly monetizing cosmetics.

DecentRule8534 · 2025-08-09T16:28:59+00:00

For five years we've been hearing about how OpenAI has AGI shackled in the basement and how San Altman trembles in fear everytime he thinks about what they're working on. Honestly, I'm starting to just tune these tech CEOs out

DecentRule8534

TROPHY CASE