GR ~ PC Hardware thread

[unfnknblvbl]

I honestly cannot believe that there's been no unified connector developed for the Front Panel stuff. It truly is a crime against humanity.

[Rorschach]

The front connector thing is garbage. I recently did two new builds with Gigabyte board and used the quick connector thing but even then, the LED light connectors were misaligned. The GPU is so monstorously large I can't be bothered fixing it.

[flipswitch]

Lot of great deals on SSDs on Amazon at the moment.

[Peppermint Lounge]

What a difference a modern CPU makes. I knew I'd get good gains but I'm still pretty wowed when I see literally double the framerate for God of War in the main open hub lake area with the same GPU.

[pilonv1]

What was your prior CPU Pep?

This generation's cards has me seriously thinking about a 6700XT as an upgrade to my 1070. Probably don't need it for Baldurs Gate III but probably will for Starfield.

[Peppermint Lounge]

Overclocked Skylake 6700k.

I'm still running a 6700XT and it's an ample 1440p card (rubbish ray tracing performance notwithstanding). It's included in the current AMD Starfield campaign too so you can redeem a Starfield Premium Edition key after purchase.

https://www.amd.com/en/promotions/starfield-bundle

[pilonv1]

Don't think I'll end up doing it since it's still $500 for a 2+ year old card. Would prefer the 4070 but with only 12gb of VRAM for $1k I'd probably end up just paying the $250-300 more and getting the 7900 XT with 20gb. What a shitshow.

[Peppermint Lounge]

7700 and 7800 from AMD isn’t far off but they’re not looking like they’ll redeem this joke generation. 7700 looks like it’s sticking with only 12gb vram which is disappointing. If I was upgrading today I’d go the 7900xt too.

[pilonv1]

12gb of VRAM is fine now but given this card would be lasting me more than 2 years I don't see that being the case in 2025/26. 16gb would be fine I think but 20gb is probably the best long term solution and no issues with AMD for me since RT doesn't excite me and I'll have nothing to do with frame generation

[F for Fake]

Grabbed myself an RX 6750XT last month. From an RX 480 so a nice little upgrade.
Got the new RE4 with it but they don't just send you the steam code. Had to make an AMD account, then link it to my steam account where they can get everything on my profile -_-
Temporarily set my profile to private, hopefully they don't keep refreshing it.

[pilonv1]

Gigabyte 6700XT Eagle (three fan) for $455 on eBay, couldn't resist. Don't feel like paying twice as much for the similar performance to get a 4070 just for gsync and ray tracing, and can't imagine the 7700/7800 will be anywhere near this price even if they're better.

Free Starfield is good but I've got Gamepass Ultimate till Feb 2025 so that's not overly useful. If it's a Steam code then it might be better.

Feels strange going full team red after over a decade of blue and green. Last Radeon card I had was a XFX 5850 in 2009

[Peppermint Lounge]

Congrats. It's a huge upgrade. I reckon you'll like the software too. There were some issues with 5000 series drivers (I didn't have any, though I did have to undervolt my 5700xt for stability when playing Cyberpunk 2077) but 6000 series is rock solid.

Meanwhile I'm tossing up the idea to replace my QHD IPS 165hz panel with a Samsung Odyssey G6 (G65B) which is an updated G7 that comes with HDMI 2.1 and some other stuff. G6 is a super fast 240hz VA. It has a 1000R curve though which is way more aggressive than curved displays I've used previously.

[pilonv1]

Do you use SAM/Resizable Bar? Reading conflicting issues about it

[Peppermint Lounge]

I have it on. It's free performance for newer games. I'm not aware of a situation that warrants leaving it off.

[Peppermint Lounge]

I got the Samsung Odyssey G6 and I'm unsure whether I'll keep it. Out of the box it looked substantially worse than my Gigabyte M32Q. A bad start. The monitor has a bunch of flicker in some instances - there's some auto feature adjusting brightness muliple times against dark backgrounds (and I prefer dark mode for dekstop use). Colours are harsh and I'm seeing a lot of noise and artifacts during dark scene transitions. Forza Horizon 5 however looks amazing and 240hz is nice. All other games I've tested look worse. There's an in-built Game HDR menu item that apparently provides decent HDR returns but the menu is greyed out for me. I suspect maybe Freesyc HDR (which looks terrible) is overriding it.

This is over Display Port, btw. There was no HDMI cable in the box so I could try connecting via HDMI 2.1 to see if that makes a difference. Unfortunately I've not been able to find much in the way of preferred settings. Rtings has a review up with a couple of suggestions. Not enough to make this thing look any good to me.

[pilonv1]

That's disappointing, maybe you've just been spoiled by how good the M32Q is?

[Peppermint Lounge]

M32Q is very good.

I've made progress with the G6. I ended up enabling HDR and ran the Windows 11 HDR calibration tool. I turned on auto HDR which works great with Diablo 4. HDR lowers the garish brightness and eliminates the noise. Colours look way more IPS-like now with better contrast (G6 is a VA panel). Let's see how it goes. I keep the M32Q on stand-by for a while I think.

[pilonv1]

6700XT arrives tomorrow. Just in time for Baldurs Gate 3

[pilonv1]

Performance is pretty good, was able to put most of the settings in Hitman 3 to high/ultra and not drop below 80fps in the short time playing.

Card is super loud though - think I need to do some tuning or sort out the zero fan option. Sounded like a jet whenever the GPU was getting to 95%+ utilisation. From limited reading it's due to the hotspot reading which was getting to the low 70s, but the GPU itself was mid 50s

[Peppermint Lounge]

Checking now and reviews cite the Eagle has having smaller fans and heatsink than other brands so more fan RPM and therefore noise is required to maintain the same temps. It's still not super loud vs other modern GPUs but prob louder than you're used to.

[pilonv1]

I think some of it is that the default fan curve is set at 72% @ 72C then 100% at 80C. The GPU Hotspot was hovering between 72 and 77 when gaming last night. So tge fan was probably working between 80-90% most of the time. Will try it tonight with a less aggressive curve.

re: size, it's about the same size as my old Gigabyte 1070 Windforce model. Always liked the triple fan GPUs, but you're right I'm probably not used to it running hotter. I couldn't get my 1070 to go about about 70C with the fan profile I set before, I miss parts that were powerful and didn't run stupidly hot.

I'm also using the Zero RPM setting for now,

[pilonv1]

Also I can't use Resizable Bar because the drive with my Windows installation is the wrong type

Was thinking of doing a fresh Windows install later this year anyway after picking up two of the 1TB Samsung 980 Pros for $135 on prime day.

[Peppermint Lounge]

Lol. Yes, reformat. I picked up a Samsung 980 Pro for my OS drive. I wasn't expecting to notice much speed/response difference using Windows between the old and new platform but there certainly is.

Loving the G6 now. The first impression is horrible but after finally landing on some good settings I'm enjoying it.

[pilonv1]

I'll probably do the reinstall for Starfield. BG3 is tomorrow and I don't want to mess round.

I ended up playing about 2hours of Team Fortress 2 last night after testing out Wreckfest and Control. Really putting that new graphics card to work.

[unfnknblvbl]

Man... the thought of reformatting gives me the heebie jeebies right now. I haven't done it in three years, and I have many many gigabytes of unfinished projects. Even though I always try my hardest to keep everything sanitised and away from the system drive, I always lose something important.

Maybe when I upgrade to Socket AM6...