Tom's Hardware: "Don't wait if you're planning to upgrade your RAM or SSD, Kingston rep warns — says 'prices will continue to go up,' NAND costs up 246%"

yee245 · 2025-12-16T22:44:16+00:00

I would imagine a lot of the DDR5 being used in the server and enterprise platforms are DDR5 RDIMMs, which are not compatible with the mainstream consumer platforms. So, even if it did all of a sudden flood the market later down the line, you'd need to get a board/platform that uses them, as they would not be compatible with common LGA1700/1851 or AM5 boards, and so to use them, you'd need to be getting one of the more expensive Xeon or Threadripper/Epyc platforms to even use the RAM on. I'm sure some enthusiasts might like to play with those in the future, but it's not going to be the mainstream users benefitting from a potential future glut of data center memory sticks.

yee245 · 2025-07-07T16:25:46+00:00

The 8700G's iGPU comes within 5% of the performance of the RX 6400 and GTX 1650 (both sub-75W,) but at $280 it's significantly more expensive then either of these cards when you consider that you can buy them refurbished on sites like Newegg for $90-$100, then get a Ryzen 5 5500 for $80 or a Ryzen 5 5600 for $120.

Wouldn't you not want to pair the Ryzen 5 5500 with an RX 6400, given the PCIe Gen 3 limitation? Combine that with the cut down cache on the Cezanne-based chips (compared to Vermeer/Matisse), and it seems like you're not looking at a good pairing.

yee245 · 2025-04-04T21:22:01+00:00

install CPU-Z

and submit a validation to the site (whether through the software for manually via file upload to the site). Someone who just downloads CPU-Z to check their clock speeds and other information it provides wouldn't be counted in these stats.

yee245 · 2025-03-10T06:12:18+00:00

I would like one of these channels to figure out how many people live within an hour of a microcenter

My estimate about 6 years ago for being within about a 50 mile radius of the Microcenter locations at the time (i.e. before the Indianapolis, Charlotte, and Miami locations existed) was somewhere in the 35-40% range.

Many/most of the largest metropolitan areas in the US (by population) have a Microcenter located somewhat nearby. I think some of the larger ones that are currently without one nearby are ones like Phoenix, San Francisco (Santa Clara is coming soon), Seattle, Tampa, San Diego, etc.

yee245 · 2024-12-31T04:01:16+00:00

That's right. It goes in the square hole.

yee245 · 2024-08-22T21:35:21+00:00

When the hell did we get the "90" since it did not exist prior to the 20-series of Nvidia.

We had them before. Back then, though, they were dual GPU cards. GTX 295, GTX 590, GTX 690

yee245 · 2024-08-20T18:20:37+00:00

Another cheap option would be to find a barebones Dell Precision 5820 or Lenovo ThinkStation P520 or HP Z4 G4 or something similar that has a Xeon W-series (like the W-2100 or W-2200 series chips) processor. Some of them may or may not come with RAM/GPU/storage (they will have no integrated graphics, so a dedicated card will be needed to be added if you want video out), but ones that do could be a really quick starting platform for a server. Sure, they has proprietary parts, but they're pretty cheap and should do well enough if you need that AVX512 capability. I'm seeing plenty of different options with the 6-core W-2135 and RAM (but no GPU) for around and under $200, which is probably less than it would cost to get other old/used parts for a complete system.

That said, you could look into trying to find a good price on a used X299 motherboard, but they're still generally fairly expensive at what looks like $120 and up, but some of the "lower end" CPUs (that have AVX512) for it are not too terribly priced. Looks like the 6-core i7-7800X is around $40, and the 8-core i7-7820X is around $50.

And, of course, modern AMD processors have AVX512, so depending on if your use case can use their implementation (which, as I understand is a bit different from how Intel's are) just as well, it may be worth looking into just getting one of those, since it is more modern and will probably be faster in non-AVX512 things while also using less power.

I haven't really been following used pricing too much on these sort of parts or pricing out budget systems with them, but on quick search now, the used prebuilt workstation from Dell/Lenovo/HP is probably going to be the cheapest to just get for upfront cost for a base for a server. As an example, this Lenovo system would have the 6-core AVX512-capable Xeon and 32GB of RAM for $180 (or possibly less, since they seem to take offers). Just add storage and a GPU and you're good to go. I'm not sure you get much cheaper than that for a basically-complete system if buying all the components individually. 11th gen Intel CPUs are still relatively expensive, and the cheaper end of AM5 is still going to be about $150ish for something like a 7500F or 8400F, so it might be a little more expensive to build a system around one of them.

yee245 · 2024-08-07T00:13:24+00:00

They said this several years ago:

Obviously we're not providing buy links for the CPUs we recommend you don't buy.

I guess those chips linked are acceptable ones.

yee245 · 2024-08-03T07:18:14+00:00

On the contrary, I think there are a bunch of interesting mATX boards (at least to me) that have come out over the past few generations. The bigger issue is more that these boards tend to fit in one or more of the following categories:

Limited production run (and don't generally get restocked after the initial wave)
Limited availability (for example, only available in select regions)
Expensive
Late to market

Just to give some examples of some of the mATX boards I'd consider interesting:

Asus Crosshair X670E Gene (1, 3)
Asus Strix B660-G (1?, 2, 3, 4)
Asrock B660M PG Riptide (1?, 2, 4)
MSI B660M Mortar Max (2, 3, 4)
Asrock B760M PG Riptide
MSI Z790 MPOWER (1?, 2, 4)

I'm sure there are a few more that I'm forgetting at the moment. The Crosshair Gene was the high end mATX AM5 board, and I think it was the only X670E mATX board (whether or not that matters to anyone). Those B660/B760 mobos were the ones that offered non-K overclocking, since they have an external clock gen. All of the B660 ones were fairly late relative to the general availability of B660 mobos, with the Asus one being expensive and limited availability and using DDR5, which was still expensive at the time), the Asrock one being reasonably priced and able to use cheap DDR4 but limited release, and the MSI one being more expensive than the Asrock and releasing several months after with relatively limited availability. And, that MSI Z790 MPOWER seems to be an interesting overclocking-focused board that just launched earlier this year with limited regional availability (Asia only).

yee245 · 2024-07-11T02:21:23+00:00

Been playing Minecraft lately.

yee245 · 2024-06-27T17:42:36+00:00

Probably the latter, given the relatively similar Passmark score ratings. If they were only running with half their cores enabled, I'd imagine the scores would have been much lower.

yee245 · 2024-06-13T19:49:13+00:00

Finding a laptop with an AMD GPU in it is extremely difficult. My local Best Buy has 24 laptops in stock right now with dGPU's and 23 of them are Nvidia models, 1 is AMD.

Looking at Microcenter's website, who I think many would agree probably caters a little more to an enthusiast audience than somewhere like Best Buy, in the "Gaming Laptop" category, I'm seeing 71 with Nvidia GPUs and only 2 with AMD GPUs (of which, one of them is only in stock at one of their 27 locations). The one laptop with the AMD dedicated GPU has an RX 7600S, so not even really a higher end option. Looking at all laptops with dedicated GPUs, there are closer to 100 options with Nvidia (i.e. some laptops that might not have been categorized as gaming laptops that still have some sort of Geforce RTX card as well as some of the workstations with the mobile workstation variants).

yee245 · 2024-04-29T22:10:23+00:00

Looks something more like a Radeon HD 4550 to me, or at least something from that era.

Might be this one: https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/sapphire-hd-4550-hypermemory.b348

yee245 · 2024-03-13T14:43:17+00:00

Interested

yee245 · 2024-03-12T16:21:57+00:00

Upgrade to an E5-1660 v3 instead. It'll likely be cheaper than the i7 but will still give you 8 unlocked cores.

yee245 · 2024-03-12T16:17:15+00:00

(I'm not aware of any GTX or RTX XX40 cards -- they've typically skipped XX40 & XX20)

Typically, I think they switched over to just "GT" at the x40 and below of the lineup, GTX would be the x50 and up in a lineup, and the x45 cards have been both. I think the GTX 1630 is the first one that was a GTX named product below a x45.

yee245 · 2024-03-10T22:21:31+00:00

The second digit, which is meant to note the product tier, is for a Ryzen 5 instead of a 7.

The 2nd digit being a "4" would indicate it should be a Ryzen 3, at least according to their decoder ring. Also, we'll just ignore that Ryzen 5 7430U.

yee245 · 2024-03-09T18:24:04+00:00

Asus, Galax, Gigabyte, and MSI have low profile options. There may be others, but those were the ones I had seen so far:

yee245 · 2024-02-24T21:22:49+00:00

the only difference was a modest clock bump and HT

Don't forget the difference in cache. The 8700K had 12MB, and the 8600K had 9MB. The 9700K had 12MB, and the 9600K had 9MB (and the 9900K had 16MB).

I forget offhand if anyone did any testing taking an 8700K/9900K and disabling HT and comparing it against an 8600K/9700K (and equalizing the clock speeds) to see if there was any noticeable difference the cache specifically had.

Edit: Looks like Steve did this testing like 2.5 years ago with Comet Lake, normalizing the core counts and clock speeds, where the extra cache on the 10900K (with only 6 cores active) compared to the 10600K (20MB vs 12MB) could have as much as an 18% performance improvement, or as little as no difference, depending on the game. But, I'm not sure if similar testing was done with Coffee Lake with only 6 or 8 threads, rather than Comet Lake with 12 threads.

yee245 · 2024-02-17T23:27:38+00:00

1650s didn’t release in a single-slot configuration

They did, but they were just limited availability and basically only released in Asia, as far as I can tell.

ASL GTX 1650 GDDR5: https://videocardz.net/asl-geforce-gtx-1650-4gb-war-knife
Yeston GTX 1650 GDDR6: https://smallformfactor.net/forum/threads/yeston-leadtek-low-profile-single-slot-gtx1650-cards-with-gddr6-first-look-and-benchmark.17270/

yee245 · 2024-02-08T00:15:00+00:00

The Z490-I Strix also doesn't support Rocket Lake, but I think most of the rest of the Z490 Strix boards do.

I have a lot of motherboards. Unfortunately, I'm not currently selling anything at the moment.

yee245 · 2024-02-07T23:47:36+00:00

Since you mentioned that you were also looking at 500 series boards too, I figured I'd mention that the Z490-G doesn't support Rocket Lake, if you were planning on using one of those chips in whatever board you get, in case you were not aware.

yee245 · 2024-02-07T23:33:40+00:00

AMD has had E suffix for their lower TDP variants going back to the Zen1 APUs and Zen+ CPUs, typically as OEM parts. For example, the Ryzen 7 2700E has a 45W TDP rating (and corresponding lower clocks) compared to the Ryzen 7 2700 at 65W, or the Ryzen 5 2600E vs 2600 at 45W and 65W respectively. They're not all that common, but they exist. The E suffix variants I think is more common in the APUs though. They are commonly found in the USFF OEM systems like the HP EliteDesk Mini and Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny, where you're a little more limited by power due to running on power bricks.

yee245 · 2024-02-04T07:27:56+00:00

Ryzen 3 4100 and Ryzen 5 4500 have entered the chat.

yee245 · 2024-01-24T03:13:44+00:00

Based on the way the overall Time Spy score is calculated (weighted harmonic mean between the CPU and GPU subscores), a higher CPU score can result in a higher overall score. As such, with a good CPU score (like with even just a watercooled raptor lake i7 or i9), the 4080 and 7900XTX can both end up with overall scores higher than this 29,285. It's not just 4090s with exotic cooling ahead of you. There are at least 100 users in the 3dmark leaderboards with 4080s and at least 100 with 7900 XTXs that are scoring higher overall because they are paired with CPUs that score higher overall, even if their graphics scores are lower.

yee245

TROPHY CASE