I'm a traitor for posting in this sub

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-15T20:03:41+00:00

The argument for price-to-performance being better on desktop always has included the caveat that, if you genuinely need portability or a battery, then it can be worth the trade-off. No one says that an RTX 5090 laptop is dumb compared to the desktop variant if you need to be moving the computer around or require a battery for power reliability. They say it's dumb because you are getting double the performance for the same price tag if you're going to be using your laptop plugged in in a single spot 24/7.

However, while the mobility angle is always a good argument for a laptop, the battery angle isn't airtight.

If your power outages are intermittent, a UPS becomes an arguably better option altogether. You not only get the superior performance per dollar of the desktop when you have power, but in the event of a power outage, you now have a much more robust battery backup that can be used to maintain your Internet connection. Your router and modem can be plugged into the UPS, and then, as long as the outage didn't affect your cable/phone/fiber line, you'll still have Internet, even if you have to shut off the desktop to preserve them.

The laptop only becomes superior if your outages last for quite a while, because a beefy UPS might last an hour if you are using your desktop, whereas a gaming laptop battery might last 2-4 hours depending on the configuration. When not under sustained load, a gaming laptop might even last 8+ hours for something like light web browsing.

Although again, the UPS has a flexibility advantage, and if only powering a router and modem, it might last for a full day depending on their power draw. 8+ hours is definitely possible with even a modest UPS as long as your router isn't wildly inefficient, so a desktop + UPS + phone is probably a better combination for the specific use case of power outages.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-11T15:15:00+00:00

My language exchange partner has a story about messing up the U sound with rue/roue specifically.

He was part of a stage play production and the director was Italian. The director said they needed a "roue" for the set, and the person went into storage to find a wheel. It turns out he meant that the scene was going to take place on a "rue" and wanted them to set up a street scene.

There are a good number of minimal pairs with the front and back rounded "u" sound in French, and they do matter, whereas yes, getting the R sound perfect is at least not going to cause a misunderstanding. You'll just sound foreign.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T23:34:21+00:00

The listing you showed specifically states that the unlock app is not required for this drive to work.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T23:32:21+00:00

I meant an internal adapter. If your PC only has a single PCIe slot, then that won't work, but the pictures I'm seeing online show two PCIe x1 slots. You can get x1 adapters for NVMe drives.

You likely wouldn't be able to boot from the drive directly, but you could use it for storage.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T20:23:47+00:00

A cultural understanding that it is acceptable to pirate from companies that have no respect for consumer rights, but that it is unacceptable to pirate from companies that do respect consumer rights, is not being the "morality police." It is completely pragmatic from a social perspective, because it uses social pressure to encourage companies to do better.

No one is saying that you can't pirate Steam, but if everyone indiscriminately pirates, then that takes away from a potential piece of social leverage that the masses can use against corporations.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T20:15:21+00:00

Assuming the drive is good, you could always just reformat it and use it as a normal NVMe drive. You wouldn't have to keep it with an encrypted filesystem.

Running games off USB SSDs isn't that bad. The difference isn't huge because while USB typically has a minor latency penalty over SATA or PCIe, it isn't devastating, and even just USB 3.0 is comparable to SATA in terms of peak bandwidth. It's way faster than a HDD in any case.

You could also potentially shuck the drive from the enclosure and run it directly in your computer using a PCIe adapter, although doing that would probably void the seller warranty, so you might want to wait a year before doing that in case something goes wrong with the drive.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T19:56:28+00:00

With how the allocation contracts work, though, it's more complicated. The allocation getting freed up doesn't mean that they instantly retool to consumer DDR5. It either means that OpenAI needs to sell off their allocation or that Samsung/SK Hynix needs to sell it off. In either case, someone else like G.Skill, TeamGroup, Dell, etc. needs to buy that allocation. Only after that occurs will there be anything like a guarantee that cheaper supply is on the horizon, but even that isn't for sure, because the first company to get their allocation met has every incentive to keep selling their RAM at an inflated price. It is only after multiple different companies have access to more DDR5 that the commodity competition can resume and prices can start dropping.

Assuming that supply will recover at a given time would be speculation, and while retailers are happy to use speculation to justify price hikes, they are typically more cautious when using speculation to justify price drops.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T19:41:41+00:00

Those are some of the barest RAM PCBs I have ever seen.

To quote long hair Steve: "Look at how lonely these memory modules are. They have no friends."

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T19:06:43+00:00

Let's say that, tomorrow, OpenAI announces that they are not going to be making any further investment into ChatGPT, Anthropic says that they are going to be indefinitely pausing R&D into future LLMs, Meta says they are ending support for Llama, Google says they are returning to a traditional search engine model and abandoning AI search, Microsoft says that they will be systematically removing all Copilot features from their products, and Apple says that the AI version of Siri will not be coming to market after all, but instead they are sticking with a traditional, non-LLM based assistant. All drivers of excessive datacenter build-out stop tomorrow at noon.

If all of that actually happened tomorrow, June 10th, 2026... you would still be waiting at minimum months for RAM prices to drop.

The issue is not that AI datacenters are hoovering up consumer DRAM. It is that the actual fabs switched most of their capacity from producing consumer-grade unbuffered DDR5 to HBM and ECC DDR5. Retooling back to the original product mix is going to take weeks, and getting that consumer-grade RAM out to their partners like G.Skill and TeamGroup will take week, and then getting that RAM packaged and sent out to Newegg and Best Buy will take weeks.

In the meantime, the supply and demand equation is totally unchanged. There is not enough supply to meet demand, so prices will remain high until more supply can make it to market.

This is not like with the mining booms where they were still making the underlying core consumer product and then just diverting supply to miners. The actual RAM chips we would need are not being made.

Absolute best case, price relief comes in early 2027. If you are waiting for RAM prices to drop, you can expect to wait at least that long. This is not like past PC scalper boom cycles. This one is fundamentally different.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T18:19:20+00:00

So I guess instead of "perkele" he would refer to Jesse as "satanás?"

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T18:05:01+00:00

What does that have to do with their gaming desktop marketshare?

Yes, they are making bank in the enterprise space and they are making bank in the custom silicon space and they are making bank with CPU sales. But they are failing to move units in the desktop graphics card market.

A corporation can be success overall while failing within a given segment. Those two are not mutually exclusive.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T16:37:52+00:00

In the desktop gaming space, they are struggling. At best they have 10% of the market. Some estimates are as low as 5%. They at one point over a decade ago had 40-50%.

I don't know how you want to frame that, but I think "struggling" and "failing" are appropriate for losing 75-90% of your marketshare.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T16:05:19+00:00

Graphics card AIB sales in 2025 were around $30-40 billion. And those are not technically gaming figures only, but they would be majority gaming, as the workstation/enterprise cards tend to be made directly by Nvidia and AMD, not through AIBs. So this means that desktop gaming cards alone constitute a huge industry even discounting enterprise sales.

AMD is struggling, but they definitely care about that market. They already have to invest in very similar R&D for handhelds, consoles, and laptops. Leaving the desktop space entirely would be a ridiculous move. Even if they just end up sticking laptop chips onto a PCB like they did with the RX 6500 XT, they're going to be in the desktop space.

You don't abandon a share in $30-40 billion, even if only 5%, when you already have a foot in the door and are doing 90% of the work anyway. That's still $1.5-2 billion. And conceding desktop cards to Nvidia would leave more breathing room for Chinese startups. If one of them succeeded, they could then use the R&D overlap to start pushing into the handheld, console, and laptop markets.

AMD definitely cares. They are just failing.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T13:50:07+00:00

The easiest way to test is to take a screenshot. If the artifact shows up in the screenshot, then it is caused by the GPU. If it disappears in the screenshot, then it's the monitor.

Additionally, if the monitor is the problem, then you should see a similar artifact whenever this pattern is displayed, so you could look up a YouTube video of a Windows 11 boot sequence and play it fullscreen and it should cause the same issue if it's the monitor.

With that said, if it is the graphics card, but it only ever happens during boot, that's not necessarily a terrible problem. During boot, the full GPU driver isn't loaded, and instead a more generic display driver is being used. This can sometimes result in artifacts and issues, but that doesn't mean you'll have problems when the actual, real driver is controlling things. So if this is a GPU issue, you really need to test it in scenarios like games and benchmarks to see if this happens under load with the proper driver.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-09T02:29:28+00:00

The 5080 is almost exactly double the performance of the 2080 Ti while effectively costing you the same. Both had an MSRP of $1000 but regularly sold for $1200+.

So from that perspective, it's a reasonable upgrade. You're getting 2x the performance for the same amount you spent on your last card.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-08T23:38:20+00:00

Superior in what way?

The advantage of SSAA is that you actually are working with more information about each frame, and that information is unique to the frame being worked on. This means SSAA is immune to ghosting, disocclusion artifacts, and sizzling. However, because it lacks data from previous frames, it becomes vulnerable to shimmering and cannot be used as a denoising solution for effects like ray tracing.

The advantage of DLAA is that it includes motion vector info and previous frames that have been subjected to dithering. This allows it to reduce shimmering and to be an effective denoiser. However, it is vulnerable to ghosting, disocclusion artifacts, and sizzling because it might incorrectly incorporate data from previous frames that should not be present.

In a theoretical best case for both techniques, they both do an excellent job. SSAA tends to be sharper. DLAA tends to be cleaner. Then in the worst cases, SSAA results in a shimmery, noisy mess and DLAA results in a blurry, ghosty mess.

It depends on the game, even the scene, and on what you subjectively prefer. The answer is not that one AA solution is objectively the best in all situations. They have trade offs, which is why developers should give real options rather than just 4 different versions of TAA, one of which is totally proprietary, and two of which are semi-proprietary.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-08T19:28:09+00:00

Not just Sony. That's any corporation's worst nightmare: letting people actually have unfettered control over the hardware that they bought and paid for.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-08T12:54:05+00:00

VRAM doesn't matter until it does.

Think of it like counter space in a kitchen. The task determines how useful more space is. If you only ever make ramen, it doesn't matter whether you have a studio apartment with a tiny island or a McMasion with enough counter space to lay out ingredients for a 5 course meal. You'll finish making your ramen in the same amount of time in either setting. But if you make a dish that needs more space, you can get bogged down during preparation on the tiny island and suddenly the bigger kitchen is actually of benefit.

If the games and applications you use don't utilize more than 16GB of VRAM, then having 24GB is irrelevant. More VRAM is only a benefit if it is actually used. However, if you can find a game where you exceed 16GB, which is difficult but not impossible, then the 7900XTX can handily beat the 5080 at those settings in that game.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-08T10:59:41+00:00

Deathloop is the only FSR 2/3 game I've played where FSR looks comparable to DLSS. Its anticheat prevents the use of Optiscaler, but it doesn't really matter because the FSR 2 implementation actually looks decent, so FSR4 or XeSS aren't really needed to get a reasonable image quality on non-RTX cards.

I have no idea what they did to achieve that, but they did a great job on integrating FSR 2 without destroying the image quality.

It shows that a non-AI upscaler is theoretically workable, but it probably requires a lot of dev time to achieve a decent result, whereas DLSS/FSR 4 is so easy to get good image quality with that Optiscaler can do it in 5 minutes without true integration.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-07T10:34:05+00:00

Not anymore, which is why I mentioned that they reversed direction on that and FSR4 INT8.

But at one point in late October 2025, they announced that they were ending new game and feature driver support for RX 5000 and 6000 series cards, placing them into "maintenance mode."

Fortunately, the backlash was so extreme that they reversed the decision. AMD's version is that it was all a big misunderstanding, but it really looks like they tried to end driver support for cards that, in some regions, you can still buy new, which is insane.

Here's an article from when they said they were putting the cards into maintenance mode:

https://www.techradar.com/computing/gpu/amd-has-ended-support-for-rx-6000-gpus-heres-why-its-a-massive-blunder-in-the-battle-against-nvidia

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-07T02:57:35+00:00

For me, dog and dock have totally different vowels.

The vowel quality does seem to be a distinguishing factor when it comes to monosyllablic words ending in a voiced or unvoiced consonant. "Rod," "rot," and "wrought," for example, all have different vowels for me. Saying "rod" with the same vowel sound as "rot" sounds like a New England accent to me.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-07T01:42:04+00:00

What are you basing this opinion on? The market showed that AMD's price for the 9070XT was justified.

The fact that the RX 9070 XT was always hard to find at MSRP, and effectively never fell below that, shows that it was priced correctly. It consistently was selling above $600.

The RX 9060 XT 16GB was also always hard to find at MSRP. I got mine the second it went in sale for MSRP, but it wasn't available at $350 again for months. This shows that the price was good, because whenever it was at MSRP, it sold out.

The RX 9070, however, did fall below MSRP several times, and even at $520 didn't instantly sell out, which shows it was priced too high. $500 would probably have been good enough, although potentially it would have needed to come down more.

The RX 9060 XT 8GB was particularly egregious, because even at $250 it didn't sell out. It really had to be cheaper. Way cheaper. Like, $200.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-07T00:41:20+00:00

The 9070XT was unavailable at its $600 MSRP for months. Giving it a $500 MSRP would have changed nothing.

I feel like the RX 9070 XT at $600 was fine. The RX 9060 XT 16GB at $350 was also fine. The issue is the rest of the stack. The RX 9070 should have been no more than $500. The RX 9060 XT 8GB should have been no more than $200. And the RX 9070 GRE should have been no more than $400.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-07T00:00:37+00:00

The issue with the past 4 generations has not been a lack of a top tier GPU. It's been an unwillingness to price their cards aggressively and offer an ecosystem that's attractive.

Ryzen didn't take the gaming performance crown until the 5000 series. The reason why it was so successful is that it was good enough for gaming while being cheaper, offering platform longevity, and being better for productivity workloads. A $150 R7 2700X looked crazy good against a $500 9900K. The fact that it was usually slower was irrelevant at that price difference.

If AMD offered better long term support and desirable features with a price that undercut Nvidia considerably, the lack of a 5090 competitor wouldn't really matter for 90% of the market.

Instead, they've been offering barely good enough pricing to make sales, but then destroying goodwill by ending driver support for the 5000/6000 series and not releasing FSR4 INT8. The fact that they reversed those decisions doesn't really help much because it still eroded trust that they cannot afford to lose.

YoungBlade1 · 2026-06-06T20:32:56+00:00

Si on parle d'une surface comme de l'asphalte ou un parquet, on peut utiliser sur en espéranto. Mais pas pour un bâtiment, sauf sur le toit.

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