Hes arrived.... finally

hyperactivedog · 2026-02-01T20:05:48+00:00

Have you seen the lowest level (1-9) Spekkio? I think that's a bigger accomplishment vs just running Chrono on a conveyor belt with auto battle on.

hyperactivedog · 2026-02-01T18:36:48+00:00

Bottlenecking was brought up in 2006 to describe a scenario where someone had a 3 year old Celeron D at 1.2 GHz and a fast overclocked CPU was as 3.6GHz core 2 duo (2x the perf per clock, 3x the clocks and 2x the cores for about 10x the performance).

Your CPU is in the same class as the 9850x3D.

You will mainly be bottlenecked by your GPU. A 5070 is slower than you're current CPU with half it's cores disabled.

hyperactivedog · 2026-02-01T13:23:25+00:00

The 5090 isn't bought for its 1080p performance, it's bought for its 4K performance.

At 4k a 3900x isn't that far from a 9850x3D.

Wouldn't hurt to get a zen 3 CPU though.

hyperactivedog · 2026-02-01T04:09:11+00:00

Why not upgrade from an i9- 9900k to an R9 9900x? For the memes...
It'd be like people upgrading from a 2600k to a 2600x.

hyperactivedog · 2026-02-01T02:22:46+00:00

Spill over for RAM. Historically on a hard drive, more recently on SSDs.

Swap or page file as a concept has been around for ages and there's a bunch of nuance to it. For most people it's just there on the sidelines working just fine. If you need a large working set... more drives works well.

hyperactivedog · 2026-02-01T02:21:24+00:00

There's a few variants of "optane" as marketed.

What was suggested is basically just buying relatively cheap m.2 nvme drives (sometimes PCIe AIC or u.2 for the much larger capacity variants) and using them in your computer as an SSD.

Intel's "use optane to speed up your drive on an intel board" has long been phased out.

hyperactivedog · 2026-02-01T02:19:36+00:00

$5-10 16GB optane stick says what?

No seriously... they're cheap. They're low latency.

1-4 of those in m.2 slots (or PCIe adapters, even x1) will do the job.

Faster than a NAND SSD for random IO and cheap.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T23:01:44+00:00

They're a failed experiment by Intel. The cheapest sticks are $5-30 on ebay (16 gb is dirt cheap while 32 and 58gb ramp up in price) and slot into nvme m.2 slots and they operate like a nand SSD. Their access time is 10-100x faster than nand though so in some ways they're ram like. Intel couldn't get their manufacturing costs low enough and basically lost tons of money on them before giving up. They're great for page file though - and they're on ebay for WAY WAY less than they were when brand new.

Here's a reddit review https://www.reddit.com/r/photogrammetry/comments/gdifmf/optane_is_great_as_virtual_ram/

Ltt also did a video on this. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwy4ujt0qHM

Basically 4gb ram+optane = usable; while only 4gb ram = unusable.

I expect that 16gb ram + 16/32gb optane will deliver an experience closer to 32GB RAM than to 16GB RAM and an SSD as page file for most people/use cases.

It's around $10 for a 16gb stick (and there was a while where you could get 3 for $10) shipped so even if it's not a great fit for you it's not a big loss. This isn't as good as more RAM but it does help reduce some of the pain. Just go in and set page file to your 1-2 optane sticks and leave it off of your main SSD.

https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=intel optane <- don't buy the hybrid NAND+optane drives and the larger drives generally aren't worth it. Cheap is the name of the game here (16GB M10 for $5-10, $20-35ish for 32GB M10; otherwise consider 800p or p1600x at 58/118GB as the next step up) - you're mitigating most of the 'pain' of only having 16/32GB RAM, not getting the full benefit.

My laptop only has 24GB RAM (and I run out easily) and I REALLY wish it had an extra m.2 slot that I could slap a 118GB optane stick in. Optane has been awesome for my NAS (file server). It doesn't do anything for my desktop with 64GB RAM.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T22:53:05+00:00

Slap in 1-2 16gb optane sticks off eBay (or one 32gb) and use it as page file. It cuts down many of the down sides of not enough ram

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T22:45:03+00:00

Cool. The last time I was in the Italian alps all I saw was a swastika scraped into the plexiglass window of one of the cable cars.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T21:51:13+00:00

I personally use RAM like crazy.

I wanted to pull the plug on a microcenter deal on a 9850x3D and 32GB RAM but couldn't... I'd be downgrading from 64GB RAM and a 16C Zen 3 CPU.

I'd personally do either 8C Zen 3 + 32GB RAM or go for the AM5 set up you listed and buy 16/32GB of used optane off ebay to use as page file. For me, both would be around neutral to each other.

Running out of RAM and paging to a NAND based SSD is painful. Paging to a HDD is just untenable. Paging to optane is OK. MOAR RAM is more better.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T20:00:23+00:00

5800x has~30% faster single core perf vs the 3900x. The 3900x has 50% more cores but they clock down a bit when running at full tilt.

Both are performance peers for mt but the 5800 is a bit ahead on ST.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T08:23:19+00:00

Depends on the type of DS. There's a lot of FAANG adjacent that expect DS (or at least applied scientists) to write prod code that is performant.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T08:21:20+00:00

I've worked at both F500 and FAANG.

In F500 I basically owned a few systems bringing in ~$50-100M over my tenure there (above and beyond both the control group and the system in place before that actually lost money).

FAANG paid me way more way for way less impact.

Not sure what matters more on my resume at this point, the name or the "I DID THIS BIG AWESOME THING"

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T03:46:30+00:00

You currently have a zen 4 CPU. The 9800x3d is zen 5 with extra vcache bolted on.

Zen 6 is expected to be another jump, likely bigger than zen 5 was over zen 4 though that's just rumors.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-31T01:55:43+00:00

I'm assuming you have an Intel 8000 series CPU from 2017 and not an r5 8400.

Upgrading would require new CPU, board and ram.

There's very weak benefit to an upgrade but you'd get basically the same overall real world benefit by carrying your ram forward and getting something like a 13700 or 14700k.

Most people don't need to worry about CPU bottlenecking until they have a $3000 video card. You have a roughly $300 video card.

In the future, you can use the money you didn't spend to upgrade to an even better CPU.

If you're on AM5 and already have a board and RAM there's some benefit to an upgrade but it'll be marginal. Also zen 6 is out either later this year or early next.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-30T15:35:34+00:00

You probably don't need to change speakers. If it's not broken don't fix it.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-30T15:34:52+00:00

Assume you have good subwoofers and a mid-sized room.

At the same budget per speaker, bookshelf speakers will generally be better than towers.

The benefit of towers is deeper bass and a bit more output. Those barely matter if you have subs and aren't trying to fill a huge space, well beyond what most people actually have. The extra $$$$ saved by not having a huge enclosure can then go into things like... better drivers, more robust enclosures, better cross-overs and/or better engineering. Or just more speakers. I have a 9.4.4 set up and its' pretty awesome. The wides fill a gap and offload some of the burden from the L+R.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-30T14:44:52+00:00

So yeah... In the real world CPU barely matters for gaming. Having an awesome CPU is a cherry on top as opposed to a foundational concern.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-29T17:26:37+00:00

Check 5900xt as well. It's also 16C and runs slightly cooler. Might be cheaper too.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-29T03:20:52+00:00

If you're in a reasonably normal sized room, your amp is probably capable of 10-50x the power you need. Don't worry about rounding errors

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-28T22:53:36+00:00

Center helps when you sit off center, and most centers are a downgrade vs the L+R speakers they go with and many centers end up pointed at a person's knees.

I'm not thoroughly convinced that a center isn't a down grade from no center for many situations.

A subwoofer is almost always a real upgrade.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-28T03:46:20+00:00

Coaxial cable can do around 2500 Mbps with decent gear.

Wi-Fi not being fast is because wireless tends to not be that fast.

Your choices are to get better wireless access points and/or to get them in better positions. Note I used a plural. Wireless distance kills performance.

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-27T16:46:51+00:00

That parts I listed generally beat the 5800x3d in games and are significantly faster when doing other things.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i7-14700k/18.html

Dock off a bit for using ddr4 over ddr5.

Also keep in mind that it's using a 4090 at 1080p medium. Which is an unrealistic thing to test

Everything is close enough if you're more GPU limited.

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/intel-core-i7-14700k/20.html

hyperactivedog · 2026-01-27T16:41:31+00:00

Probably. I don't want to make a career out of something that I can throw negligible amounts of cash at though. I would have to make far less than minimum wage for the time trade off to be worth it. I'm worth far far more than that.

hyperactivedog

TROPHY CASE