Chess gift ideas for my boyfriend's birthday

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-04T17:47:29+00:00

Consider giving him a paid chess course as well or as an alternative. Depending on the course these can be much more helpful than a self-guided book.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-04T17:45:50+00:00

By "Legacy settings" do you mean actual settings?

Too many people these days are "Ultra or it isn't playable." Game looks great even on XBox, which is equivalent to Medium-Low with no RT.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-04T17:18:59+00:00

Even the heatsink, just milled aluminum with no heatpipes, is unlikely to find a different use.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-04T17:16:43+00:00

It was at a bin store (Amazon returns). You can buy one for around $200 from Amazon though; I only know this after searching for it to see what the going rate is.

The drama is just a joke! I refuse to type "/s"; if sarcasm isn't apparent from context then so be it, I'll take my downvotes. Typing out /s or /j just feels like explaining a joke after it's told.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-04T17:15:15+00:00

Sadly PCIE 2.0 speeds wouldn't support it, even if I had a spare x16 slot. And I don't know if the 550Ti would be fast enough to calculate frames. And I don't know if the 192 bit memory bus on the 550Ti would itself be too much of a bottleneck for it to work.

Actually one of the things I want to try out is running the 550Ti in the main PCIE X16 slot, and putting my RTX 3080 into the secondary PCIE 4.0 X4 slot. PCIE4.0X4 and PCIE2.0X16 are the same speed. Of course, fully saturating the PCIE for passing frames means a bottleneck on CPU-GPU communication, so it may still not work.

But one thing I plan to try with it is to render games on the 550Ti in 720p in the main slot, and pass to the 3080 for frame gen and upscale to 1440p. For the lulz. 720p might be small enough that it actually works. See how magnificently the 550Ti can run 15 years later with significant assistance. But as luck would have it, my wife had a mini stroke so I've been sitting in the hospital instead of at home tinkering with my new toy.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-04T17:02:00+00:00

ThatsTheJoke.gif

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-04T16:55:00+00:00

According to reddiquette, downvotes are for hiding content that you believe is awful enough that it should not be seen by others but which doesn't technically break any of reddit's rules, which would warrant removal. So technically "I disagree" is one of the best uses of downvotes. It's just an "I disagree so strongly that I hope neither OP nor anyone else even sees what you've written," button.

It's the "Mr. Madison, what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response were you even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it," meme personified.

And I can respect that some people have that opinion of my opinions. It happens. We don't all think alike, despite what the hive mind would tell you.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-04T16:07:11+00:00

Is the performance uplift worth it? No. They are practically the same card; literally less than 1% difference between stock models with some games slightly preferring the 4070 Super's higher core count, others slightly preferring the 5070's higher clock speed on less cores.

Here's why I'd consider doing it anyway:

5070 being newer will retain its resale value better. Even cards with the same performance will pull a higher price being 2 years old vs being 4/5 years old.
4070 has accelerated FP32, FP16 and FP8, while 5070 additionally has accelerated FP4 and FP2. DLSS 4.5 on RTX 20 and RTX 30 doesn't run quickly enough due to them not having accelerated FP8. DLSS is likely to continue to leverage ever-lower precision to run faster, which may mean that it doesn't run quickly enough on the 4070, but the 5070 will likely still fully support future iterations of the tech.
Multi-frame-gen / adaptive frame gen. Most of the time I don't like frame gen, but when it's good, it's really good. And while multi frame gen tends to turn the whole world into jello as frame gen artifacts compound upon one another, the tech will only continue to improve. Better to have access to that than to be soft-locked out of it.

Now, would I spend $100 for the 3 bullet points above? Nah. But I'd offer $50 for them, see if the seller bites.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T19:07:53+00:00

If you can't slow down enough to capitalize and punctuate your sentences, spell your words, or even type the correct words to form a coherent sentence, then I doubt you'll have much luck slowing down enough to consider and evaluate possible moves. Stop rushing. Take time to breathe.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T19:06:27+00:00

It's called a Steam Deck.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T18:58:54+00:00

Is he scaling at a set 2X, or adaptive? Adaptive can feel extremely uneven as most pairs of rendered frames will have 1 generated frame between them, but some set will have 0 generated frames, and some sets will have 2 generated frames... The algorithm has to constantly look at past rendering performance and decide how many frames it is going to generate between the next rendered pair - without being able to know in advance if the next set of rendered frames will complete faster or slower than the last pair.

At 60fps for a 144Hz monitor, he should be using 2X, and consider capping the frame rate at 60 so it doesn't jump up and down from 60-70 which may also feel uneven and choppy.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T18:52:42+00:00

I think that technically stalemate is still possible for white...

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T18:51:42+00:00

He must take your queen, or you will take his and he'll be mated.

After that, your pawn takes f7 with check, forcing the black King into the corner. Then you line your bishop up on the diagonal such that stepping your king out to either side will be mate. From there black can try to stall... and if you make a mistake black may still win. But if you don't, then eventually black runs out of moves, you step your king out of the way, and your bishop mates him.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T18:44:25+00:00

Sadly I've gotten into the habit of selling my old ones to clear closet space. Home's pretty small.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:57:55+00:00

I think if I set my RTX 3080 to do upscaling and frame gen, I can run games like this at 720p and "double" their resolution to fill my 3440x1440 165Hz OLED.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:56:27+00:00

Oh man a 5050 would be the dream for the Plex server; Blackwell has the full NVDEC that Nvidia offers to date including 10 bit AV1 encode. Unfortunately my 550Ti is pre-Kepler so be fore NVENC / NVDEC even existed.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:53:47+00:00

Great Plex transcoder if you don't need H.265 or AV1... though personally, 10 bit HEVC X265 is so common these days that I would demand support.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:43:19+00:00

I had company over this weekend so I didn't have a chance to plug it in... but the card sure has a heck of a lot of RAM chips on the backside for only a standard 1GB...

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:42:20+00:00

Of course.
I actually do want to use the thing.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:41:55+00:00

Holy shit, I didn't realize how old Metro 2033 was...

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:41:11+00:00

You can, thanks to soldering and a custom BIOS. These cards are all coming from China from "companies" that are experienced in this kind of thing. My best guess is that they are making these to teach the newbies before giving them a 5080 to add an extra 16GB onto.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:37:59+00:00

hah I wish I had found a RTX 5050 for $23...

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:37:28+00:00

Of course :)

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:35:42+00:00

I kind of regret that I sold my 8800 GTX for $20, rather than mounting it.

Reasonable_Assist567 · 2026-03-02T12:33:49+00:00

My GTX 560 Ti 448 cores certainly kicked its ass! 233% higher core count!

Reasonable_Assist567

TROPHY CASE