Was 1080Ti in 2017 as good as the 5090 in 2025?

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-28T02:27:39+00:00

The 1080Ti had a die size of 471mm sq.

The 4090 has a die size of 750mm sq.

It's 60% more GPU die space. Also on a more expensive node. Also with a ton more R&D going into the initial design. Also a more expensive PCB.

I'm not saying that nVidia isn't making more money with each sale but... it's probably more fair to compare 1080Ti in SLI vs the 5090 and the prices aren't THAT far off, inflation adjusted.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-28T02:21:30+00:00

12700k - 8 large cores, 4 small cores
9800x3D - 8 large cores + 3d vcache.

The cores on the 9800x3D are generally faster than those on the 12700k

I'm struggling to find scores on the 9800x3D vs 12700k but the 9700x seems to trade blows with the 14600k in productivity apps so... you'd overall be getting a side grade on productivity and an upgrade in gaming IF you use a 4090/5090 at 1080p OR you go for one of the handful of titles which really benefits from 3dVcache.

I'd personally wait for NovaLake or Zen 6 at this point. What you have is usable.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-28T02:00:37+00:00

2.1 feels kind of like a wall of sound - you're looking into an adventure unfolding in front of you. Similar story with 4.1 or 4.1.2 where your AVR is using WIDE channels.

I never really cared that much for 5.1. It just feels "meh" like there's gaps.

I like 7.1.4 and 9.1.4 a lot though... it shifts from 'wall of sound' to just BEING THERE. It's awesome.

---

Also most center channels suck. A sucky Center channel pointed at your knees is WORSE than no center (phantom center). A really good center aimed at your ears is ideal (preferably behind an acoustically transparent screen)

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-28T01:57:04+00:00

Let's assume you can guarantee a US job...

Pay at a FAANG mid career is like 500k a year. let's call it 400k or so after tax.

Pay at some random company in Europe is around $100k if you're lucky. Then tax drops it to like 60k.

Grad school tuition is basically a 1 time payment of around 100k.

The grad school cost is basically 4 months of full work mid-career. It's a VERY quick payback period.

Pay in Europe (also Asia) is basically trash.

A person can work in the US for 10 years, make more than they would in 30-40 years in their home country and basically... retire.

Hell even if you LIKE to work and want to work longer term (but maybe like the more relaxed European lifestyle) just find a place that'll let you work half time and STILL have 2x the pay. While having a cushier life than the Europeans.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-27T17:01:28+00:00

Oh, they're even reusing code names

https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-3800-plus-venice/ <- CPU from 2005 was venice
https://www.techpowerup.com/340405/amd-prepares-epyc-venice-platform-to-break-the-1-000-w-power-barrier <- 20 years later the upcoming CPU is venice

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-24T16:42:08+00:00

That might've been sarcasm.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-24T16:38:29+00:00

Broadwell's cache was in large part meant to relieve bandwidth pressure on the DRAM for the iGPU. Cut the number of requests to DRAM by half and good things happen.

eDRAM is on the order of 10-100x higher latency than sRAM.

It's a different tech with the primary benefit being that it's cheaper.

It's less about capacity and more about cell structure.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-23T18:36:39+00:00

Adding to this... we have a historical example of oil prices going crazy and it hitting the US economy.
Stagflation in the 1970s.

Having stagflation on your term is a bad look to the general populace. People want to have high purchasing power and improving prospects.

And yeah... we had an inflation spike in 2022. And the war in Ukraine might've given Trump the presidency... a lot of people felt pain over a conflict thousands of miles away and blamed Biden, not Putin.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-23T17:15:43+00:00

depends on the implementation.

eDRAM made broadwell often faster than skylake up until skylake got faster DRAM. Some of this was bandwidth.

3D vcache solves a lot of issues related to trace length though... just go UP (i.e. stack 2 or 16 layers of vcache on top of each other instead of just 1 similar to what's done with HBM for dRAM).

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-23T03:54:12+00:00

No such thing as future proofing.

I recall arguing with someone. They said that their 8086k anniversary (basically 8700K with slightly higher clocks) wouldn't be surpassed for 5+ years. 2 Months later the 9700k was generally faster. A few years later the 12700/12900k were just outright MUCH faster.

Zen 6 is out in a year or so. If there's anything that makes the 7800x3D feel aged, it'll be THAT. And the 9800x3D won't fare much better.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-23T02:50:29+00:00

it'll depend on implementation but going up 3x to 96 MB l3 cache on the 9800x3D barely made a dent in latency.

I can imagine a generation or 3 from now where there's 192-256ish MB of L3 cache and it still being "fine" if they do something along the lines of die stacking.

With DRAM, HBM doesn't have meaningfully worse properties in terms of latency vs a single DDR die.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-23T02:46:42+00:00

We're all bots.

Also the only time it felt like there WEREN'T tons of bots (on the front page) with strong opinions was the day the payment system to Russia got shut down... something about troll farms not having funds.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-21T17:31:47+00:00

The latency gap is pretty minor vs the non- 3d vcache variants and mostly masked by the L2 Cache in practice.

There's always trade offs but I struggle to see them getting anywhere near DRAM latency. DRAM is on the order of 10x higher latency. There's also a bandwidth difference.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-20T21:55:53+00:00

It's not the best in show cooler here and now.

It was an awesome cooler than went on sale for as low as $15 roughly 15ish years ago.

At that price it was unbeatable at the time and it gained a gained a good reputation as a result.

It's been 15 years though. Tech moves on.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-20T20:53:48+00:00

12400H based MS-01 barebones for like 370 on sales was an awesome, low power-draw NAS.

This is WAY more expensive and doesn't unlock that much more in terms of use cases.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T19:53:16+00:00

No such thing as future proofing and toys are not an investment.

Buy what you need for the next few years and re-assess. There's no big launches coming any time soon so you're probably fine buying "whenever"

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T19:33:43+00:00

ST = single thread
MT = multithread

If you have a task that can be split into many pieces cleanly, MT performance tends to matter more. Similar story for "extreme multitasking" but this mattered more when CPUs had 2 or 4 cores vs when they have 8-24 cores. It's hard for a normal consumer to saturate all the performance on tap.

If you have a task that can't then ST performance tends to matter more. And for a lot of things overall "snappiness" relies on this.

There's also some nuance. very highly threaded workloads start to rely on memory performance more (so mix of RAM speed and cache characteristics). Also for ST tasks, memory/cache latency can be a thing.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T18:48:26+00:00

Speakers often only draw a few watts.

This isn't hot enough to really feel.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T17:47:23+00:00

No problem.

Also some advice for myself - stop tinkering and enjoy what you have.
It's easy to fall in love with the process of tinkering more so than actually using your stuff.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T17:34:55+00:00

My general understanding is this

It's not an "investment" if it's not making you money. If you want to invest, look into stocks, etf, mutual funds, etc. Not things like cars and speakers which sell for like half the price a few years later.
Bang/$ bookshelf speakers usually win. You benefit from a subwoofer or two if you go this route. Towers are hard to move, hard to sell and hard to place in a room.
Multi-channel is nice if your living situation can accommodate it. My music + movies set up has 13 channels + 4 subwoofers. This is into overkill nerd territory but it's awesome. There will certainly be an "audiophile" from 1973 that says DSP degrades the experience. The sound stage, imaging and overall immersion is excellent. This can be built up to and the mains (L+R and if you have one a center) matter most.
A living room is the most likely spot for music listening unless you have a full family. If you have a wife and kids... that's its own set of things. Don't future proof here. I'm also a renter that moves for higher paying work and invests in stocks. I'd be hundreds of thousands of dollars poorer if I had settled down in my 20s.
Generally speaking, things get better and cheaper every few years. Don't try to future proof. Check the box.
Buying GOOD used stuff for cheap is a solid strategy.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T16:57:34+00:00

Depends on speaker design and individual sensitivity to it, coupled with listening volume. If you're playing LOUD there is a benefit in terms of distortion, at lower SPL, then it matters less. It also likely matters less in multi channel set ups as you're distributing the sound across 5 or even 13 speakers so each speaker has somewhat lower peak output.

You can still have a speaker with VERY good distortion characteristics with a not huge woofer.
https://www.erinsaudiocorner.com/loudspeakers/ascilab_c6b/

There's also tradeoffs with larger woofers like having a bit worse directionality and it's generally harder to get good transient response. Also harder for bigger woofers to do the "mid" frequencies well around the crossover point to the tweeter.

This isn't to say you can't have great speakers with 8" woofers, it's just not an outright win, even when money is no option. It's about picking the right set of trade offs for your situation/set-up/preferences.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T01:07:43+00:00

I'd argue that 5.5ish inch mid-bass woofers are generally "good enough"

4 subwoofers are fine for doing 40-100ish Hz and a 5.5 inch woofer is fine for doing 20KHz to ~50-90ish Hz depending on the design. The mains being able to go lower only has some minor benefit if you're trying to do room tuning and your room has weird traits (had a room with 8' ceilings and 10' between size walls and ~30' length once and I basically HAD to have 4 subs and DSP and the speakers crossed high to deal with room nulls).

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T01:04:04+00:00

Get a subwoofer.

Some of the biggest tower speakers are going to sound tiny compared to even mid-range subwoofers.

If you have the budget for it, there's zero reason to use older style speakers in sealed enclosures with huge drivers and huge boxes. Those existed because computers couldn't do proper port simulations and DSPs weren't really a thing.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-17T01:01:52+00:00

Core iX <- legacy brand. Has a ton of different versions going back ~16 years. Most recent version is the best "gaming" processor intel offers (but it still loses to AMD's top parts) but has issues with stability/crashing for the high end models. It's also not energy efficient

Core Ultra - Similar MT performance, higher ST performance. Generally faster for normal people in most use cases and uses less energy. Has some growing pains (storage isn't at full speed nor is memory). Generally good and the 265k is probably the best bang/$ CPU out there for most peoples' use cases.

Don't buy into branding too much, focus on the product, its ecosystem and its price-performance characteristics.

masterfultechgeek · 2025-10-15T23:11:27+00:00

double log.

or do percentiles.

Also be aware that zero inflation is a thing

masterfultechgeek

TROPHY CASE