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Visited Microcenter, what a candy store!

I have a Microcenter near where I live (its in Cambridge). I visit it on occasion. I'll make every effort to buy from them instead of going online. I used to work in computer stores back in the 1990s, and seeing them disappear was sad. So I want to do my part to support Microcenter.

With that said, the high price of components is such that I'm unwilling to spend money on this, and I suspect many others are. I hate the fact that Nvidia/AMD come out with a new GPUs, and regardless of what the stated MSRP is, we see prices often 2x, maybe even 3x of that.
 
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maflynn said:
I have a Microcenter near where I live (its in Cambridge). I visit it on occasion. I'll make every effort to buy from them instead of going online. I used to work in computer stores back in the 1990s, and seeing them disappear was sad. So I want to do my part to support Microcenter.

With that said, the high price of components is such that I'm unwilling to spend money on this, and I suspect many others are. I hate the fact that Nvidia/AMD come out with a new GPUs, and regardless of what the stated MSRP is, we see prices often 2x, maybe even 3x of that.
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That's where I was and where I plan to get parts for my next build.

This is a funny time as I've seen reviews with issues with Intel Core 9 Ultra, 14700 and 14900, 13700 and 13900, and Ryzen 9800X3D, 9900X and 9950X. I'm leaning towards 9700X but the MB bundles are better with the 9900X and 9950X. If they had an i9-11900K, I'd just buy one of those and do a straight CPU upgrade but the only way to get those is to buy them for Hong Kong and the prices are the same as current gen i9s.

Then there's the pricing issues with GPUs. Our daughter bought a 4060 late last year and I wish I had bought one or a 4070 as well. The prices of those are crazy now if you can even get one. The 5xxx supposedly have driver issues. Fortunately I don't really need a GPU and I have a 1050 and 1660 if I did need one to support more than two monitors.

I saw a RTX 5090 for $3,200 at Microcenter. Sometimes I think it would cost less to buy a gaming PC at Costco to get the 4060 or 4070 GPU than it would be to buy the similar 5xxx card.
 
maflynn said:
the high price of components is such that I'm unwilling to spend money on this, and I suspect many others are
Click to expand...

Aye; I am reluctant to give-over monies for things that will probably not greatly improve my Life.

I just received a pristine nV RTX A2000 from teh Bay.

No games anymore; just deep learning.

I want to better-understand what it means to tokenize locally, even-if only for a handful per second ;)

That being said, I am awaiting my own DGX Spark Dual...
 
pshufd said:
I saw a RTX 5090 for $3,200 at Microcenter
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Yeah, that's where I draw the line, and in all seriousness what games actually need or could realistically benefit from a 5090? I feel most people who opt for a 5090 do so for bragging rights/flexing their gaming rig.

Now I understand there's non-gaming usages for the 5090 and those use cases makes sense.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not a hard core gamer, and truth be told, my RX 7800 XT is a solid GPU. Its more then enough for my game playing style and preferences.

I actually visited Microcenter a few weeks back as I was considering building a new PC, but I couldn't justify the cash outlay. I've been eyeing the M2 Grater case, and building a new PC around that case but after visiting the Microcenter, I changed my mind. I was looking at well over a thousand dollars not including the GPU.

I do like their PC Builder web page, that does help get your components lined up and TBH, the bundled deals are pretty sweet. With my daughter in college and other expenses its less important for me to get toys then get stuff for my family.

1748686261664.png
 
maflynn said:
Yeah, that's where I draw the line, and in all seriousness what games actually need or could realistically benefit from a 5090? I feel most people who opt for a 5090 do so for bragging rights/flexing their gaming rig.

Now I understand there's non-gaming usages for the 5090 and those use cases makes sense.

I'll be the first to admit I'm not a hard core gamer, and truth be told, my RX 7800 XT is a solid GPU. Its more then enough for my game playing style and preferences.

I actually visited Microcenter a few weeks back as I was considering building a new PC, but I couldn't justify the cash outlay. I've been eyeing the M2 Grater case, and building a new PC around that case but after visiting the Microcenter, I changed my mind. I was looking at well over a thousand dollars not including the GPU.

I do like their PC Builder web page, that does help get your components lined up and TBH, the bundled deals are pretty sweet. With my daughter in college and other expenses its less important for me to get toys then get stuff for my family.

View attachment 2515078
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I'm trying to decide on bundles. The $429 AMD 9700X bundle would meet my needs and it's revenue generating. The thing is that I'd like a better motherboard and the bundles give you CPUs with higher core counts which I do not need or want.

We put our kids through college finishing in 2013 and we felt rich afterwards. I thought that college prices were ridiculous back in 2008-2013 (I paid $3,500 for college) but prices today are just so much higher than even when we put our kids through. Energy prices in MA this past winter were crazy and property taxes, homeowners insurance, car insurance make living in MA challenging.
 
pshufd said:
I thought that college prices were ridiculous
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Yeah, don't get me started on that aspect.

I asked ChatGPT how many years could Harvard pay for student's undergrad degree with their endowment (around 40 billion). It spit out 124.5 years. Something is wrong, to put it bluntly.

My daughter goes to UVM, which is effectively a 3 1/2 to 4 hour trip from our house. Far enough for her to be on her own, but close enough that we can visit her at a moment's notice.

Given the ever increasing cost of living, I don't feel like I'm getting anything particularly note worthy with the current set of CPUs and GPUs.

My CPU is probably a little long in the tooth - its a 3700X, but it offered the low powered high-ish core/thread count that I wanted for my build at a low-ish price. I built this specific desktop in 2021, and in 2023 upgraded to the AMD RX 7800XT. The AMD GPU exceeded what I could get from Nvidia
 
pshufd said:
Trading.

I have one program that runs horribly on Apple Silicon and I need to run it or else I'd be 100% macOS. It actually uses tiny resources on Windows but I want responsiveness. The thing about Intel and AMD is that you get better single-core performance with the more costly models and it's the opposite of what I need. It appears that eight is the minimum for Ryzen 9xxx CPUs whereas you could get lower core counts in the 7xxx generation.
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6 core CCD. It is how they make the 12 core part (2 6 core ccd's) though for single core performance you are probably better off going intel
 
diamond.g said:
Supposedly bios updates have fixed a lot of 285/295 issues. I would still avoid 13th//14th gen though.
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Keyword supposedly, and from how I was following this story, it took a number of bios updates to finally fully fix the issue

Given their financial woes, and seemingly doing things to keep up with AMD, I'm not sure I trust their designs right now
 
maflynn said:
Keyword supposedly, and from how I was following this story, it took a number of bios updates to finally fully fix the issue

Given their financial woes, and seemingly doing things to keep up with AMD, I'm not sure I trust their designs right now
Click to expand...

The 13900/14900 are supposedly fixed too but people are still reporting them. It's possible that their processors were damaged permanently and they would need a replacement to be made whole but, until we know for sure, and we may never know, it's hard to trust Intel, even with their newer stuff.

If someone sold an i9-11900K for about $100, I'd buy that and stick it in my existing system right now. Ask is generally close to $400.
 
maflynn said:
Keyword supposedly, and from how I was following this story, it took a number of bios updates to finally fully fix the issue

Given their financial woes, and seemingly doing things to keep up with AMD, I'm not sure I trust their designs right now
Click to expand...
To be fair, only the unlocked (K SKU) had the issue, right? So going for a lower end MB/CPU should keep things safe.
 
Another description of the affected processors seems to indicate that it can affect all of their desktop CPUs.

evatech.com.au

Information on Intel's 13th & 14th Gen Instability Issues Help Docs | Evatech Australia

We've been monitoring the developing situation being widely reported by various tech media outlets regarding stability issues with some models of Intel 13th and 14th gen CPUs that result in crashes or BSOD events. At the time of (original) writing, not everything is known or clear, but we'll...
evatech.com.au evatech.com.au
 
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pshufd said:
Another description of the affected processors seems to indicate that it can affect all of their desktop CPUs.

evatech.com.au

Information on Intel's 13th & 14th Gen Instability Issues Help Docs | Evatech Australia

We've been monitoring the developing situation being widely reported by various tech media outlets regarding stability issues with some models of Intel 13th and 14th gen CPUs that result in crashes or BSOD events. At the time of (original) writing, not everything is known or clear, but we'll...
evatech.com.au evatech.com.au
Click to expand...
This is why (as a former Intel fanboy), I've lost all trust with intel cpus. Given the cost of these bad boys, I'd rather stick with AMD. Maybe when Panther lake sees the light of day, my opinion will change. Arrow Lake really didn't move the needle for me from a price/performance perspective.
 
1BadManVan said:
13700kf here and oc'd, still going strong after almost 2 years
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Gamers Nexus received complaints on the 14900. Level One Techs looked into server farm failure data on reported on problems with the 14900.

There's a thread at Reddit on 14700 failures at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabytegaming/comments/1ei1p8n/help_intel_i714700k_crashing

So most of my familiarity was with the 14700 and 14900 but Intel said that it affected other processors too.

At any rate, it's not something I really want to take a chance on.

I've also read up on the 9800X3D failures with Asrock motherboards and I made a mental note to never buy from Asrock again. Companies need to understand that reputation is hard to get back after a disaster.

I ran into this once with Sandy Bridge back around 2010 or 2011 and it was a chipset failure and what a pain to take my system apart, mail back the motherboard, wait for a new one and then put it back together again. It was my first build and I was fortunate to have an experienced builder to help. I'm a lot better at it now but I really hate having to deal with component issues.
 
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