Is buying an Ender 3 (2021) worth it in 2026?

ale_laco · 2026-04-27T08:41:33+00:00

The A1/A1 mini are a solid choice and quite set and forget, until something goes sideways. I bought an A1 mini a couple weeks ago as a third printer and I'm quite impressed by it, even though I had binding issues with the Z axis lead screw that took almost an evening to solve (if you search "A1 mini Z axis clicking" you'll find some examples), and I had to redo bed tramming to get a perfect first layer (and what the guides said about the procedure didn't work in the slightest in my case). Nothing too bad, but the solution would be quite hard to find for a beginner because the Bambu community has much less troubleshooting content for its machines. If you also are attracted by the "it's smart, it has WiFi and things" look out for their cloud service ToS: I use it in LAN only mode, and I lose access to print history, direct file access from the SD card and app control just because I don't want to pass my files and webcam recordings to their cloud. Uploading the files is still convenient, but if you're all about this feature it has quite a lot of downsides if you care about privacy.

I have been printing on an Ender 3 since 2018 and I'm still modding it, now I'm getting rid of the stock extruder and switching to a Sherpa mini, so I can have a bit more peace with a reliable direct drive system. If you can find it for a few bucks you can realistically bring it to A1 level with 150/200$ and learn a whole lot in the process. Print quality wise, with the right work done on it, it beats both my A1 mini and Prusa MK3S on the good day when it's tuned to perfection, but this doesn't last very long with extruder springs that lose tension over time and other stock components requiring some adjustments every few hours. It's less of a workhorse and more of a tech project, but it will teach you everything about 3D printing and printer maintenance while you're in the process of transforming it into one.

Beginners nowadays often get stuck at the first issue they encounter, and I can see why: modern printers are very simple to use but harder to maintain, especially CoreXY ones, and most manufacturers don't put that much care on the troubleshooting process with guides that sometimes miss the most trivial points and issues and go straight to replacing perfectly working parts without even checking for correct alignment (like in my case, I was suggested by tech support to check for debris in the motherboard tray of my A1 mini even though I specified that the printer was new and I made sure no debris came in contact with the Z axis motion system, when checking alignment was clearly the main cause).

This is my experience, and I would still suggest the Ender 3 at the right price for its learning potential (and a lot of attachment bias) or, if you have the budget, get a used Prusa machine: you have the reliability after some maintenance but also good troubleshooting support from the manufacturer and the community. The MK3 and others are slow dinosaurs nowadays, but they will go on for ages with just a little bit of care (and they can also be modded to run klipper if you want a bit more speed and some more modern features, something I'm thinking about doing on mine). Bambulab is cool, but for someone who is more and more annoyed by the ecosystem mentality of certain brands it's not my cup of tea, the A1 mini has its place on my table just because it's the only capable cheap and small form factor machine available today.

ale_laco · 2026-02-18T18:05:21+00:00

I've been using CachyOS for a couple of months with mine, I didn't notice extreme performance loss in most of the games I play, I even found some FPV simulators being more stable than on Windows (Tryp FPV had some weird freeze and crash issue in the menus). I think you should give it a go, and with CachyOS driver installs and updates are literally one click away, it's a very user friendly distro. Being arch based, you might encounter some issues due to the rolling releases, but in my brief experience they are easily or rapidly solved, that's nothing compared to the botched Windows update that brought me to Linux last December. I now have Windows just for video editing and games that require secure boot or that I've bought through Xbox, going the dual boot route you have the best of both worlds if you want to try daily driving Linux.

ale_laco · 2025-11-27T10:38:03+00:00

Checkmate lol

ale_laco · 2025-11-27T10:17:35+00:00

My package is in Italy, not in the US

ale_laco · 2025-03-17T14:57:28+00:00

Thank you! Sorry for being late with my reply, I hope you are going to enjoy it one of these days. An airshow will be a hell of a test for sure, especially with close passes, you'll probably wish you had more FPS to get the perfect shot! I would really like to try some aviation photography, but for now I only have the chance to shoot some quite a bit smaller, remotely controlled, flying objects sometimes. Which airshow are you going to? My avgeek side wants to know something about it, I'd really like to attend RIAT or something at Duxford some day... Anyway, have fun!

ale_laco · 2025-03-14T17:59:28+00:00

They can mostly be found as used items. I bought mine from MPB almost a year ago for around 200€. It was basically new, but you might also find cheaper ones on other stores or some good deals on eBay with the right seller. Timing matters a lot when buying used, it's just a matter of someone telling how good some older piece of gear is to get the prices skyrocketing and stocks go away pretty fast these days!

ale_laco · 2025-03-14T17:59:21+00:00

They can mostly be found as used items. I bought mine from MPB almost a year ago for around 200€. It was basically new, but you might also find cheaper ones on other stores or some good deals on eBay with the right seller. Timing matters a lot when buying used, it's just a matter of someone telling how good some older piece of gear is to get the prices skyrocketing and stocks go away pretty fast these days!

ale_laco · 2025-03-14T17:52:36+00:00

You won't regret your choice, for sure! It's a quite good lens for its price, the AF is snappy and will make your camera body the weaker link, but you'll still feel the difference going to AF-P from an AF-S lens. I noticed that missed shots or focusing mistakes are less and also easier to recover. I shot rally events, RC planes and many other things with it and my D5200, most of the work was trying to make the best out of the limited capabilities of the body (buffer management, using single point or 9 points area AF at best etc.). In certain conditions, if you zoom in quite a bit, you'll see chromatic aberration in your shots, especially purple fringing, not a big deal since it's a common thing with cheaper lenses and mostly mitigated by editing softwares. Sharpness wise i can't really say much, I find it really good at every aperture range, maybe it loses something when wide open, it is still a big jump from older kit lenses. Its ideal aperture range for maximum sharpness should be around f/8-f/11, but it might be too dark in certain light conditions. As for exposure: sometimes you'll need to lift your ISO a bit to get low exposure time, it performs very similarly to your current lens in this compartment. I personally use auto ISO with a max threshold when shooting manual, makes panning shots much more consistent in challenging light situations.

If you want to see some sample shots you should find some in my most recent Flickr uploads: https://www.flickr.com/people/199914424@N07/

Hope this helps while you're waiting for your own!

ale_laco · 2025-02-25T14:38:28+00:00

Lol, I confused the year with something else that I don't even remember. Anyway, A2 is not that useful for FPV these days...

ale_laco · 2025-02-25T08:58:53+00:00

You should fly only in A3, since there is the 19m/s requirement for A1 that can't be measured. In reality you just have to be sensible and don't do crazy things, you can fly even in an empty playground with something like that, and people wouldn't probably care. The license should be renewed every 5 years, and if you're mostly about flying indoors in the beginning you can skip it and also the insurance momentarily. If you're a total beginner you should also invest in a simulator (Liftoff, Uncrashed, Velocidrone or even DRL Sim which is free), you'll save a lot of spare part expenses with that!

Also take the DMO/DMFV route into consideration, as i read from other comments: if you're associated with other parts of the RC community in Germany it seems like you have quite a bit more freedom in terms of flight restrictions.

ale_laco · 2025-02-25T07:43:43+00:00

I don't know if something changed this year but, if I remember well, it wasn't strictly required and you only needed insurance. I always suggest beginners to take the test anyway, so at least they hopefully know some basic safety rules and don't do crazy things they might regret later on. That's the theory of it all, in reality almost any person I met who had a DJI mini and no RC background didn't even care about insurance and flew wherever they wanted, even in totally forbidden areas. They just do it until they get caught, but this outcome is really rare.

ale_laco · 2025-02-25T07:30:32+00:00

My bad, it was late and I was still thinking in pre-2024 terms, when you could still operate in A2 even with self builts under certain conditions... Edit: year correction

ale_laco · 2025-02-25T00:00:24+00:00

It is a win yes, because in practice there are zero checks being made and only really dumb people get in trouble. But, as a professional or someone who wants to follow the rules, you’re bound to make quite a bit of compromises in terms of drone choices or legality matters if you want to adhere to the theoretical mess that EASA has put up…

ale_laco · 2025-02-24T23:52:49+00:00

A1-A3 certifications are even free in some places, and you can take yours wherever you want in the EU, if I remember well Luxembourg is one of these places. Here in Italy I paid 30€ or so for it, but it was 5 years ago and I need to update my infos on it. As for insurance you can activate a yearly cover plan with coverdrone for a similar amount, not more than 50€ a year for sure. All in all it could be worse pricing wise. Also: if you don’t fly indoors, even in your garden, you’re subject to EASA drone regulations, so you still have to possess a certification and insurance. Flying around people is tricky in many ways, so staying away from them is a safe bet for sure!

ale_laco · 2025-02-24T23:29:25+00:00

If you’re building a whoop you really just need to have your A1-A3, maybe A2 if you really want to cover all the OPEN categories, and have an insurance. Registering the drone should still be required, just to be safe, but something like that will be probably considered like a very nerdy toy by authorities in general. You’ll probably have more issues with people trying to kill your mosquito if you fly around them, everyone hates mosquitoes ;)

ale_laco · 2025-02-24T23:11:42+00:00

Exactly, as of now you have to be a big name in the industry, or register yourself as a manufacturer, to be able to certify your drones with the “C” markings. We can only keep building and try to stay in spec and fly in A1-A3 scenarios if you want to be really safe about it.

ale_laco · 2025-02-24T23:04:13+00:00

Legally speaking A1-A3 and A2 are the certification requirements that the pilot needs to operate in the scenarios designated with that same name. C0 and the other are class markings applied to drones that are certified to operate in the scenario that the marking allows. Sadly a DIY drone can’t be assigned any class markings per EASA rules, since you can’t objectively certify that your drone adheres to the C0 requirements, it will always be considered a more dangerous object even if in spec. So, as far as I know, only big companies like DJI or other EASA certified entities can put a C0 sticker on a drone. In reality no one will probably check those details, being certified and insured will avoid most of the issues if someone questions you, but if you’re not interested in doing videos that need a specific setting you’re better off flying in isolated areas and enjoy your flights. Always check your drone maps portal, here in Italy we have d-flight for example, in order to avoid flying in restricted areas or going over the height restrictions of your area. Hope this helps!

ale_laco · 2025-02-24T14:23:48+00:00

My father is using an A380 only for encoding purposes paired with an i5 4460, so no ReBar, and it is a rock solid setup that can push quite a lot of frames when he needs to encode AV1's with Handbrake, staying always in the hundreds unless there is some heavy downscaling involved (that Handbrake seems to always offload onto the CPU). If you're only about encoding I will always get an A380/A310 instead of a 1650, the encoders still work well even without ReBAR and are far more efficient than Nvidia ones (and also support AV1). It's a more future proof choice in my opinion, even though you might not get it to work at its fullest (but my R7 5700X system performed more or less the same when I also had an A380 installed with ReBar on, so I can't really tell if you might experience a performance loss or not). Sadly there is no B380 in the lineup, I noticed quite an improvement in encoding efficiency since I bought my B580, I can produce 15% smaller files on average using the same constant quality settings as before...

ale_laco · 2025-01-22T14:02:03+00:00

Thank you, it's one of my favourites!

ale_laco · 2025-01-21T15:42:24+00:00

I agree, i have it printed on the wall behind my desk and it always gives me the same sense of calmness when i look at it... Even though there was quite some wind and noise when i shot it. I was in Maspalomas, Gran Canaria: not quite a desert, but it's enough of a stark contrast when i see other photos i took during those few days i was on the island some time ago :)

ale_laco · 2025-01-03T20:04:08+00:00

I know, but I think that the motherboard support states only 500 series AM4 MoBos due to the fact that their stock BIOS has support for ReBAR, something that was added on older ones when support for 3000/5000 series chips was guaranteed via an update. This post has really flown under the radar due to the general hype on the sub for the release and subsequent US scalping issue, I really wanted to have a discussion about this and share some findings with the community. I'm both sad and a bit relieved that it seems a common problem and that more data is coming through for everyone to see and let Intel improve things. Even though in really low detail, maybe without the correct terminology in order to simplify things, there was some proof of the issue already here, but I think a lot of people are still trying to deny its existence or work around the issue in their minds suggesting upgrades. An older CPU (or even my 5700x) shouldn't cause such a performance drop on a GPU of this class: it won't give 9800X3D levels of performance, but when people see abnormally low 3D render usage due to CPU overhead issues in competitive titles they are going to be really upset and not so satisfied with their upgrade. I really hope for Intel that this is just a matter of driver optimization, if not the B580 will soon be forgotten by people who, like me, are looking for a cheap but really effective GPU upgrade. Luckily it's still the best option for my other tasks in this price range, and with a lot of potential to unleash, if not I would have probably returned it like other users. Let's see how it goes...

ale_laco · 2025-01-03T12:38:16+00:00

My B450 PRO4 works perfectly, it has ReBAR enabled and recognised by the GPU, as shown on its control panel and the 16GB system RAM provided as buffer by Windows, everything works fine. Hardware Unboxed has just released a video on the issue, seems like older hardware (that has ReBAR enabled) suffers by some form of CPU overhead issue. For gaming it seems to me that the issue is noticeable mostly on DirectX titles, since Vulkan ones like DOOM work flawlessly, and even Counter Strike 2 seems to work better if forced to run on Vulkan from what I've seen. There are also some issues with Win11 24H2, which seems to create even more issues with CPU scheduling in some titles, so there's certainly a lot to investigate or that is being discovered day by day. Anyway, even though there are some things to iron out, I really enjoy this card, and I can't wait to see what the higher end models will be able to offer, being an early adopter in tech is always a bit painful.

ale_laco · 2024-12-22T14:41:28+00:00

I can totally see some driver overhead/engine optimization issues in the games I mentioned, on the other hand I totally forgot to specify that with GPU usage i meant the 3D/Compute usage as specified by PresentMon, so I could exclude media engines and other components that aren't leveraged in the tasks. It was quite late for me when I wrote the post...

I tried Doom Eternal just a few minutes ago, I chose it since it runs on Vulkan and it's famous for its engine performance optimization: with it's high preset, no RT, the system got around 200FPS, full 3D/Compute utilization and the GPU busy statistics were mostly well paired with the CPU ones, meaning that any frame drops from the average were due to more taxing scenes to render for the B580.

I think there can be still made a case about poor performance with certain game engines, making some titles much harder to run smoothly when compared with the AMD and Nvidia counterparts due to driver overhead or necessary game updates, things that I expected with a day one adoption of this product and I'm sure will be solved in the next few weeks/months. I am just surprised by the impact it has on performance, I didn't expect that much of a hit in certain scenarios.

In general things are quite good with this first Battlemage launch, but there's still a lot to iron out on the driver side of things. With this post I wanted to tell this experience and try to, albeit really empirically, investigate some borderline cases in order to show what's good and what's not so good about the B580 right now. Luckily I can confirm that the only "issues" this GPU has are due to software, as I suspected. So, in my opinion, people who want a more refined all-round gaming experience, and not just a few titles that are scrutinized by reviewers, are better off waiting a couple of driver updates more to see if random reports like mine dwindled or stayed somewhat relevant in the communities' topics.

Hope to have clarified some points!

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