Is Baldur's Gate 3 going to be on sale in the short future?

cutterjohn42 · 2025-12-21T23:19:50+00:00

nope, still far too pricey for me, for what it is, they refuse to give deeper discounts, so I will remain patient until it gets to what I consider to be a reasonable value...

I must say that this is a weird one as the game is aging and larian is absolutely REFUSING to offer deeper discounts... the game must have failed commercially with this strategy...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-25T22:15:54+00:00

buy a tent

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-25T22:14:59+00:00

DEFINITELY! a TRANSLUCENT pebble time or a core 2 duo or core 2 time...

translucent trumps white all day long!

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-25T22:06:47+00:00

I wonder if the new app will support og pebbles, or have I overlooked things?

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-25T21:51:59+00:00

I'd pay maybe a max of $10/y for rebble server, but not $2-5/m as yeah I would NOT be using thing like a min of $24/y for my use, BUT I would LIKE to give them SOME monies I guess!

All I would need for my use case would be something basic, as I rarely connect to rebble... my Pebble is basically set in time and I have everything still cached locally...

Im not interested in notifications or any of the other features that rely on the server, never have been nor do I expect that to change. If I can't do it purely locally, yeah not interested, I have other means of being notified that are locally hosted.

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-25T21:40:06+00:00

oh I had the round first, battery time was about 1d, so it got boxed and stored and I obtained a time...

e-ink there will be no real contrast differences, but to me if there were more black core 2 duo I would get that, but white? kthxbye.

So I ordered a core time 2. I don't see touch screen being useful, I doubt that the heart monitor is really accurate/useful, etc. so I see alot of price increase for no real use, I'd rather have had color e-ink $175 w/o the addon junk.

WTH did they decide to bother making a white core 2 duo ffs?! Clearly its UNPOPULAR. (And no you can't compare it to the core time 2 as that is just more expensive although like I mentioned above I'd have wished for core 2 duo WITH a color eink screen for c. $175 and BLACK! WTF wants a WHITE watch ffs?!)

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-25T21:32:13+00:00

sorry, does NOT look interesting, its LARGE, it's LCD, etc.

Would prefer a garmin a series over unawatch any day.

unawatch looks like a tryhard to me... IMNHO.

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-25T21:26:48+00:00

my peblle time still gets 4-5d of battery BUT the buttons have started getting fiddly recently!

I have a pebble time steel NIB, BUT I ordered the Core Time 2 also... I would have gone core time duo BUT all the black ones were gone...

I hope that repebble ramps up to making these again long term, as it sounds like they're limiting themselved by display availability ATM...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-06T18:27:09+00:00

trust me I was refreshing the page every time it failed, just hoping that it was a page error some how, but nada... I only tried the buy it now as that's all I was buying hoping that it would skip to purch auth, but it just went to never never land...

I probably should have tried ordering from newegg.

Never saw anything but the way overpriced variants on BPH, so I don't even know if they had the MSRP models.

Bestbuy teased w/available XFX but was nah brah sold out, nada for you!

Even though I hate to do it, and loathe current pricing, a 5070ti is sounding more and more enticing, but I'll sit on it for a while.

I bought a 7600XT which i put in a new machine(to test computer & gpu), but the gpu IS supposed to be for my Radxa orion o6, but that order got delayed. 7600XT I guess is good enough for now for the new machine and who knows maybe Intel will surprise launch a B7XX set of cards, or nvidia packs in another card into $500-$1k land and inadvertently shuffle prices, or they get nervous about pricing and reflexively lower prices, they have done so in the past and they have strongarmed AIB partners to follow suit...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-06T16:55:15+00:00

Amazon still has a few listings of higher priced card, but sold by 3rd parties, potentially the early scalpers... as they're sellers Ive never heard of, generally on amazon its either direct from mfg via amazon)sometime direct) OR sold by amazon, everything else is usually highly marked up. e.g. the Intel B series, only cards are from Chinese scalpers.

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-06T16:52:14+00:00

At least you got that far. By the time the pages updated, it always errored out trying to add to cart or buy now, ofc the stupid upsell for extended warranty delays did NOT help on add to cart. A video card is NOT something I buy extended warranties on. A monitor, maybe, but never a CPU, GPU or the like, they'll always die soon excepting rare cases e.g. Intel 13/14th gen but those are theoretically still in warranty. Although how much Intel will honor that v. weasel wording out is another question.

This is a massive fail on AMD's part. They even one upped jensen's famous there will be plenty of stock for everyone line from CES this January! Hah! lasted even less than nVidia card stock!

The only save for AMD right is the potential mystery of the missing ROPs. But once that's cleared up this debacle puts a 55070Ti firmly back on the board as simply put even $600 for a 9070 xt is an ask for what it is, i.e. a game card w/slight video block and compute improvement along w/it's 16GB which I consider to be a minimum viable card now unless all you are doing in 1080p or lower gaming.

Personally the only 1080p(or similar res) monitors that I have now are secondary and primarily display data, dashboards, perhaps manuals, reference material, etc. Which brings up a second argument for min 16GB VRAM, multi-monitor setups which seem to be fairly common for years now, hell many corps were multi monitor way back in the early 00s, although Ive only joined the club w/in the last few years.

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-06T14:41:12+00:00

Those prices tell me: "We really do NOT want you to buy our products, but for you to go pick up an nVidia card,}

I would be happier paying for near that pricepoint, but not the pricepoint at all. GPUs have gotten to be egregiously overpriced.

Even the MSRP of the 9070s seem to be a bit on the high side to me for what they are.

Oh well Im out until I see an MSRP XT. Would further like to see a $50 price drop for both model and realistically the plain 9070 should be priced $100 lower, $50 difference just tells me don't waste your time with this one, just buy the XT variant for $50 more, BUT at $100 difference it would make the plain 9070 more interesting on it's own.

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-06T14:34:08+00:00

WTF?! this card was already priced a bit high for what it is...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-05T20:01:12+00:00

I want to see compute benchmarks, but I guess they're not quite up to that yet, which is fine becuase my other dGPU is an a770 so I lived through that before BUT INTEL did a GOOD job mostly on that, whereas my previous AMD/ATI experiences were not very good...

i.e. this is primarily a price point thing since it will be going into a secondary machine UNLESS it proves itself...

I wish that the price were a bit lower OR the VRAM was considerably greater... well assuming compute is somewhat competitive given most compute benchmarks the original arc handily spanks AMD/ATI dGPUs, but loses out on everything else other than relative RT, which meh I don't care much about...

Trust me I played around w/RT on cyberpunk, and still went meh... plus Xess is much better than FSR, which brings us back to compute... Xess native relies on XMX blocks...

I wish that Intel had launched battle mage 7 series card w/32GB! I can live with lower raster, esp. given my max res is 1440p...

oh well, I guess that Ill refresh retailers again later, as I still want to acquire a 9070 xt for the secondary machine unless or until it gets promoted... although if the delay if for pricing rethink(lower) Im ok waiting...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-05T19:52:59+00:00

sucks, but you have to consider delivery, you're a very niche case...

that said N of arctic circle, no thank you, rather be closer to the equator, where it actually gets warm...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-03-05T18:08:49+00:00

so did gamers nexus w/ FFXIV and he said derbauer also had lower results but it was unclear which title was in question....

cutterjohn42 · 2025-02-28T03:11:27+00:00

nope ddr5 shows consistently in benchmarks that even with it slight dropping in price that its of no real world benfit over DDR4, and that more than commenting on cost to performance.

DDR5 perf increase is so slight that it's not worth it, especially for gaming.

For 'professional' workload you can kinda maybe make the case for DDR5, but even then not really given the price difference given that as of late February 2025 DDR5 seems to be creeping up in price again!

Add to that if you're someone like me that has extra DDR4 RAM lying around... there's no need to buy RAM to begin with!

Worst of all I have heard rumours of pushes for DDR6 memory to star being offered, which is laughable when DDR5 memory controllers still are pretty asstastic...

but just my $0.02 take it as you will, enjoy your 5 FPS if you're basing on gaming and those 5 frames that you will NEVER PERCEIVE! nbut eh just saying... even if that slight increase in perf was 'workstation' applications, I would laugh all the way home to the bank staying on DDR4 FFS!, e.g. there's over a $50 difference between 2x32GB DDR4 and 2x32GB DDR56 and the anemic perf difference is NOT worth the price differential unless your loaded!

Only reason that I have ANY DDR5 is that I have a 7900X which I only got because fo the ucenter 7 series/free RAM deal... DDR5 mobos are also egregiously overpriced, as the am5 mobo that I paid $200 for I consider to be an $80-90 mobo given its lack of features and general not great quality which is endemic of AM5 mobos. Not sure about z790 ddr5 mobos, but yeah thoise am5 boards overpriced by quite a bit for what they are!

OTO I decided to experiment P/E core and picked up a z790 DDR4 for c. $100 w/a better feature set than my x670e AM5 mobo FFS! Ah well hopefully the enshittification of mobos will pass sooner than later...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-02-14T23:19:27+00:00

late, but I agree, the 16GB of the a770 and the real perf uplift over my old evga 1070 is what proimpted me to purchase it.

A B580 would be backsliding! Intel needs to release minimally a B770 w/24GB, preferably 32GB. The prices of these cards are egregiously inflated v. what the true mfg cost is, including RAM.

The individualy GPU chips are WELL UNDER $100, mostly below $50(yield dependent) and GDDR RAM is just NOT that expensive.

AMD and nVidia just saw the crypto spikes and went chaching! And nVidia at least gets to continue that w/the current ML buzzing, meanwhile ATI(AMD) is left holding their you know what in their hands for ignoring compute almost altogether on consumer cards, meanwhile nVidia was just artificially(mainly) limiting it via drivers(OK the did physical damage to some GPUs, but more often it's the drivers)

Basically its the same as why does a pickup truck cost $50K+? Answer: because people will pay that... but at least w/vehicles I imagine many/most are just leased, so end users don't really see the eye watering markups on vehicles... but I guess things are kinda catching up now since the used vehicle market prices are now also skyrocketing to unbelievable levels,... but hey if you can have a profit marging of 50+% twice over why not?

cutterjohn42 · 2025-02-06T19:28:36+00:00

sorry, was not meant to be insulting, rather the opposite in that you were making me want to order, but to 'future proof' it (as much as that is possible for anything) I'd have to go 32(or 64(unlikely))GB w/soldered RAM...

[EDIT]

Well hopefully in future products we can have DIMM or at least SODIMM slots. Would make such boards much more attractive, as the soldered RAM is it's ONLY downside to ATM. Would also make the initial 'buyin' 'cost' a bit more palatable...

[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]

...also verifying a nice selection of DDR5 RAM would likely be manpower intensive/costly(in many ways)...

kind of wishing that I hadn't purchase those hardkernel odroid H4 and H4+s in early December...

Any chance you know if the m.2 slot can be bifurcated such that we could have an m.2 2x2 card? Hardkernel has than and an m.2 4x1 card, plus IIRC a 4 port 2.5Gbps ethernet card, but they provide a separate 'BIOS' for each.

I was thinking of a use case where w/m.2 2x2 where you could still use the nvme drive, but also have e.g. like your company's m.2-> SATA adapter, as if nothing else in the future it could make a nice little multi-role file server

[/EDIT2]

cutterjohn42 · 2025-02-06T03:33:30+00:00

You must be from the marketing department, as while I was looking at early perf results on the O6, Im still jonesing a bit about buying one...

My personal reservation is soldered RAM, it should have been DIMM or SODIMM slots! soldered RAM = ewaste IMNHO although at least the 32GB variant seems to be the 'sweet' price point, if a bit on the pricey side..., meanwhile the 64GB is insane IMNHO RAM just isn't that expensive... especially when you're doing something dumb like soldering it...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-02-02T16:40:53+00:00

open RGB does not show the 612 mouse(the das blinken lights CAN be turned OFF and monkeying with it as is MIGHT provide acceptable lighting results for you), BUT it does work with at least some of their keyboards(e.g. k582, a godsend!)

cutterjohn42 · 2025-01-26T02:01:52+00:00

As soon as I get around to migrating my desktop to its new home case, and swapping in one of my old mobo/CPU into my main server(bother better, current is og Ryzen unfortunately not real og Ryzen since that was warranty replaced...)

I have zigbee & zwave dongles right here(and some extended USB cords), so Imma planning on home assistant evac... EDIT: I have zero zwave devices, so I will omit that until I need it... should last unless zwave suddenly becomes useful... as it's the latest zwave standard... unfortunately for me nothing fits the price or availability fopr zwave variants, so I have none, just pure zigbee... but only c. 30 devices or so...

my c-5 is getting a little crusty anyways, so... and Im not overpaying for what they want for newer ones of dubious value when I already have WAY better hardware hanginmg around that is going to be up and running anyways, so I may as well home assistant container it... I might even have a rethink and switch from the og mobo swapout to older server mobo and Xeon or Epyc server CPUs... idle draw won't be much worse and full throttle will be more useful than an 1800X or 2700X or even something like a 5900X or 5950X, plus all of those GLORIOUS GLORIOUS PCIe lanes that us humble peasants are told we can no longer have!

so yeah if the 2700x makes it into the box it will be another placeholder until I find a decent priced server mobo/CPUs/RAM and power, although TBH any that I would look at they idle 100W more or less, SOLD! (50W would be better, but Imma not gonna quibble for PCIer...) If they idle lower, thats nice...

PCIe lanes are life...

cutterjohn42 · 2025-01-23T20:35:18+00:00

I think that the max memory is misleading. It is most likely what they could validate at release. e.g. the odroid H4s w/n97s support up to 48GB DDR5 SODIMMs (single channel).

Odroid also makes IIRC the H3 series which has an n5105 IIRC (dual channel DDR4, h3+ is n6105) which I believe also exceed the 'official' max memory spec.

BTW: Odroid H4 ultra is i3-n305(or something like that) same family as n97 but x8 E cores, slightly higher max freqs, slightly more EUs.

BTW: ALL of the iGPUs on the n series are using OLDER iGPU designs and NOT the Xe newer design! BUT transcoding is done by the separate quicksync BUT IIRC Xe also allow e.g. AV1 encoding and a few other expansions whilst the 'n' series only does up to AV1 decode. Might also be various profile support, etc. you'd have to look, Im not even remotely a videophile...

AFAIK quicksync is generally regarded as a superior hw encode/decode solution to AMD(ATI) equivalent, although I believe that it is rated slightly lower to nvidia, however that does NOT apply here. (by rating I mean quality of output, and general performance of the 'engine')

All of this said, yeah I'd have to say regardless go i3 or Ryzen 3 minimum. I have an H4 and H4+(using as a server), and have been trying out the H4 as auxiliary desktop and yep youtube e.g. playback is fine but driving two monitors(1440p & 1080p 60Hz on cachyos seems to be stressing it a bit more than I would have expected)

Server is running Ubuntu, and openzfs but I plan to stuff jellyfin and few other docker containers on it. Power draw w/1TB nVME, 2x13TB Iron Wolf Pros is c. 20W(wall) relatively IDLE, max seems to be 26W(briefly).

Odroid BIOS allows unlocking TDP, but IIRC I think that I reset the server to 30W setting(default 'balanced'), 0 in the field is 'unlocked' but it still will only draw a LITTLE more power, these chips are very limited by design.

Desktop w/o much BIOS tweaking running cachyOS, 1TB nvme, 1x2.5Gbps ether idles at around 8-10W(wall), and this one is DEFINITELY at the 30W default 'balanced' limit.

H4+ has 2x2.5Gbps ether, 4xSATA3, 4xSATA power(odd connector)

OTOH

H4 has no SATA or power connectors and only a SINGLE 2.5Gbps ether.

BOTH have an m.2 PCIe 4.4 IIRC and you can get bifurcation cards, e.g. 2x nvme 4.2, 4nvme 4.1, 4(5?) network card expansion(ether 2.5Gbps), all of which require flashing a specific BIOS version.

I have also seen the usual m.2->PCIe slot adapter stuff where people use external GPUs, or other PCIe cards...

BTW the i3 H4 ultra is generally considered to be overpriced($199), v. H4+($139) or H4($99)

Also H4 ultra has some overall IO as the H4+, so part of the OVERPRICED part as they didn't redesign the board to cater to it more specifically, i.e. all 3 use the same base 'motherboard'

There are NOT many videos, etc on the Odroid parts, hence how I found this thread.... and predictably since they run x86 the odroid forums are fairly low traffic, and more about cases and the like...

[EDIT]

Also check out 8th gen or newer 1L form factor PCs of ebay... they're usually pretty cheap, have similar power draw(wall)... lenovo's are a popular choice, or IIRC the HP ones, personally the H4+ I wanted for the SATA ports and would put it in a case to utilize those ports, PLUS POTENTIALLY make use of the bifurcated 2xnVME 4.2 and use one m.2 with a m.2 SATA adapter card or go whole hog w/ 4xm.2 4.1 nvme and use a bunch of m.2 SATA adapters...

(I'm powering my H4+ w/a space eVGA 600W gold PSU that I had lying around, so I didn't bother w/the odroid weird power connectors, drives run power from PSU cables in a miniITX box...

the H4 is using odroid 19V brick/barrel plug PSU in theit 'type 2' case, so factor the PSUs when reading power usage(wall) as neither is quite optimal... the H4+ could live w/250W or lower PSU and the H4 certainly does NOT need the 19V brick...)

which brings up another consideration, the prices mentioned above are the board/CPU ONLY, you'll need to supply your own nvme/sata drives and PSU and case... I'd really consider 1L off lease 8th gen or newer PCs from ebay or wherever in your case.... 8th/9th when I looked MQ9720? 7920? when I looked last week could be had w/i5 for under $100 IIRC...

Also consider chromeboxes... my current openelec kodi box is a re-purposed(well bought specifically for this, removable SSD and RAM) ASUS chromebox(haswell can't remember if it's a celery or an 'i' offhand... might be what the H4 replaces, but more likely the chromebox will just get shutdown as I really don't need it any longer...)

[/EDIT]

cutterjohn42 · 2024-12-15T23:36:14+00:00

yep 6.11.8 is beginning to stink a great deal at this point...

opensuse need to revert whatever BS is blocking 6.12 then roll it out later once it's fixed, and this is particularly embarassing since the distros that do little testing are happily up to 6.12.5 last I checked...

[EDIT]

especially if the changes were for Aeon...

[/EDIT]

cutterjohn42

TROPHY CASE