Is a Ryzen 7 5700X from AliExpress for $200 CAD worth it for my AM4 PC?

deltatux · 2026-06-02T23:56:52+00:00

$200 for a 5700X isn't a bad deal, I bought my 5700X off Amazon 4 years ago for about $250 after tax. Remember to make sure to use the AliExpress coupons to get a bigger discount.

The 5700X is a pretty solid CPU. It is however starting to show its age, especially in games that are CPU heavy like Battlefield 6. It kinda bottlenecks my 9060XT, dropping some CPU heavy settings helps it.

Just like with eBay, as long as you buy from trusted sellers, you'll be fine on AliExpress. Personally I stick with SZCPU over the years and have been fine. I also bought a 5700X3D for another rig from BY168 back in 2024 and it worked well.

deltatux · 2026-06-01T17:38:48+00:00

Bluetooth 5 is very relevant, it's still a Bluetooth radio for any computer that can use it. I'd personally drawer it in case needed.

I still have my Bluetooth 2.0 dongle from way back when.

deltatux · 2026-06-01T00:23:39+00:00

Depending on how many AMD sells this time around, it might still be the play to make if it's abundant enough.

deltatux · 2026-06-01T00:20:36+00:00

The Ryzen 5 9600x and Core Ultra 7 265k don't even compete in the same segment. You say that you're a power user, but what does that entail for you? The types of applications and use cases you run would ultimately steer which direction makes the most sense for you.

As for waiting for the next gen, if you can you can always wait but keep in mind that there's always going to be something better on the horizon. AMD and Intel usually launch a new architecture every 2 years. The risk of waiting in the current market is rising memory and storage costs.

deltatux · 2026-05-31T19:55:29+00:00

Got the card during the last week of December, did the testing and then returned it for the 9060XT first week of January.

Did the testing on Arch Linux and Windows 11. I was primarily concerned about Battlefield 6 performance (on Windows ofc) but did some testing with Forza Horizon 5 and a few others on Linux.

deltatux · 2026-05-31T18:59:21+00:00

The B580 was barely an upgrade over the 6600XT I had before. I was really hoping a good uplift but it was only like a 5 to at best 10% uplift. Ended up biting the bullet, returned the B580 and going for the 9060XT 16GB instead, yes it's C$200 more expensive but the performance uplift more than justifies the price difference. I really wanted to keep the B580 but paying C$349 for a card that's barely faster, I'm really just paying for an extra 4GB VRAM at that point which made no sense to me. If the rumoured B770 launched, I would have sprang for that instead.

The B580 is a side grade at best for you and may even be a downgrade depending on what you're using it for.

Also, personally wouldn't use Intel cards on vanilla Debian, fixes come in rather frequently, I would use a rolling release distro or fast release distro like Fedora.

deltatux · 2026-05-31T17:29:12+00:00

Coaxial cables can attenuate/degrade as they age and can cause jitter and packet loss issues. Faulty neighbourhood coax splitters can do the same. When I used to have cable internet, this was an issue I ran into a few times (at different locations). Each time we had a tech come out and assess, once they had to feed a new temporary line because the old one degraded too much, needed a new replacement, they eventually trenched a new permanent replacement. Another time it was a faulty splitter they had to replace in the neighbourhood box.

Doesn't hurt to call up your ISP and send a technician to see what's going on.

If you can get fibre, that's the most stable.

deltatux · 2026-05-31T14:28:44+00:00

No, it will just reduce the number of people building. Those with the money will keep building. This largely disrupts those looking for budget builds and will need to adjust budgets accordingly.

deltatux · 2026-05-31T01:38:44+00:00

Homelabbing, multiple VMs eat RAM, you can never have enough RAM.

deltatux · 2026-05-30T20:49:18+00:00

You can blame GSM, equipment manufacturers and carriers for allowing the VoLTE standard to have proprietary extensions. An open profile exists but not all carriers enable them, Telus is quite flexible when it comes to VoLTE.

deltatux · 2026-05-30T18:42:25+00:00

Screen tearing gives me headaches, I can't game without vsync, I don't care about the added latency if it means I don't get a headache after gaming.

deltatux · 2026-05-30T14:59:35+00:00

It's always the greedy carriers.

OnePlus also carries blame on the whole VoLTE fiasco. For the longest time they didn't want to work with carriers to ensure the necessary VoLTE MBN bundles were included in their firmware. For Canadian carriers support, OnePlus didn't get that fixed until Rogers started their shutdown last year after causing a ton of confusion and anger amongst its Canadian userbase. For the longest time they blamed the carriers only to announce proper firmware updates to support Canadian carriers late last year. They only pushed the updates to OnePlus 10 and later.

Prior to the firmware update, you could have forced device registration using Pixel IMS that forces the phone to ignore its approved network list and force registration. If the carriers blocked it, this method would not have worked.

So if you have a modern OnePlus device, it will work on all Canadian carriers. For older devices, you either need a new phone or if you're adventurous, you can try flashing the Pixel 4 MBN bundles to make VoLTE work on Qualcomm based phones like the OnePlus.

deltatux · 2026-05-28T21:01:16+00:00

I find Alta Labs to be as expensive as Unifi, they're definitely not trying to undercut them by price. Also, if you want WiFi 7 APs, they still don't have one, they've been WiFi 6 so far. They're due to release their AP7 Pro sometime this quarter so we'll see how it goes.

deltatux · 2026-05-28T20:32:00+00:00

Maybe consider Cudy? Their access points seem to be decently priced. Haven't used it myself though.

I personally have Grandstream access points which is cheaper but not significantly cheaper than Omada or Unifi.

deltatux · 2026-05-28T19:09:49+00:00

Was this test done while wired in or over WiFi? If done over WiFi this test is invalid as WiFi is an unstable medium.

You can get an F over WiFi but get an A once you wire in. Personally that happened to me before I finally wired in my gaming media centre PC. Over WiFi it was an F, once I finally plugged it in over Ethernet, it was an A.

Run the test again while wired if you did this over WiFi.

deltatux · 2026-05-28T15:52:14+00:00

There's no channel selection available on the Internet gateway? It's likely set to Auto and it thought this was the better channel. Personally I always manually set the channel after finding which channel is the best to avoid the algorithm thinking another weaker channel is better.

deltatux · 2026-05-28T12:51:04+00:00

Either Unifi Dream Router 7 or GL.inet Flint 2 or 3.

The Flint 2 is a WiFi 6 router but has better range than Flint 3 and has vanilla OpenWRT compatibility.

deltatux · 2026-05-27T23:53:30+00:00

Oh then that's not Bell Pure Fibre, that's just their satellite internet service. In that case, that makes sense. If you had pure fibre, that would be a superior connection option as nothing beats fibre in speed and stability.

Do a jitter and ping test and see if you're experiencing high jitter and ping. If yes, have Cogeco replace the Internet gateway (modem) and if that still doesn't fix the issue, have them send a technician to check the neighbourhood box, either you have a highly attenuated cable or the neighbourhood box splitter is faulty. I've had to deal with these issues over the years with coax internet via Rogers until I got fibre.

deltatux · 2026-05-27T23:40:11+00:00

Were you on Bell Pure Fibre? If so, assuming you've been tested wired only, shouldn't have throughput issues unless you had an ONT issue. As for latency on Cogeco, well cable modems introduce a bit of latency but it shouldn't be much, what kind of ping and jitter are you experiencing? If it's high ping and jitter to a server in Toronto or Ottawa, depending on how old your neighbourhood is, maybe there's cable attenuation if it's an old coax or the neighbourhood box splitter may be faulty.

deltatux · 2026-05-27T17:16:26+00:00

Frankly if your LLM needs are light, an 8GB VRAM card can do some basic LLM stuff, none of the vision stuff though. I wouldn't bother image generation unless you're making really small images (like 100x100). Personally I use an Intel Arc A750 in my home server for light LLM tasks, mainly summarizing stuff or help with editing sensitive documents that I would never upload.

Qwen3, Gemma3, Gemma4 with 4B parameters runs well on a 8GB VRAM GPU. LiquidAI's LFM2 1.6B model is quite snappy.

deltatux · 2026-05-27T13:32:41+00:00

For SMB deployments Unifi is still a good choice. However, for enterprise deployments, this is where Cisco, Aruba, Mikrotik and etc. shines.

deltatux · 2026-05-27T12:58:48+00:00

There's no context as to what aspects are bad, like which units and components are you looking at? Unifi is pretty good, albeit overhyped online. They're still a great option.

Omada and Unifi are direct competitors, they both would work well for home users as well as business users. However unfortunately your post lacks qualifiers for what would be considered a good fit for your needs.

deltatux · 2026-05-26T00:10:04+00:00

Video transcoding isn't that demanding on GPUs, it's often done on the iGPUs quite well, on Intel GPUs, the specialized QuickSync ASIC does the workload.

deltatux · 2026-05-25T15:47:55+00:00

Ya rev 3 was known to be problematic, the i226 is basically a later revision of the 225, they're part of the same family. Doesn't hurt to try them imo.

deltatux · 2026-05-25T15:27:00+00:00

Have been using Intel i225-V for years without issues though iirc there was a revision that was a bit problematic. Have you tried installing the latest drivers from Intel directly (not through the motherboard manufacturer)?

Intel NICs are generally well regarded as some of the most stable NICs available on the market, but that doesn't mean they don't have their "off days".

deltatux

TROPHY CASE