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roadrunnertwiceHey, remember Sketchy Seagull, the gaming PC I was putting together?
Well, it’s working pretty great, and I’m mostly done messing with it for now. In the last few weeks I scored a much quieter and more efficient power supply ($20) and a used video card upgrade (a $60 GTX 950; performs ~70% better, uses ~40% less power), and I sold that huge Radeon video card that came with the system (-$30) and the original power supply (-$8). So the grand total I’ve spent on this thing comes to about $165.
Here’s what I learned about shopping for video cards, which is maddeningly complicated and a real dubious use of your time:
- ATI and Nvidia make the actual GPU chips, but a bunch of companies (Asus, MSI, EVGA, and many more) put them into video cards. Said cards mostly compete on cooling and overclocking, and the differences are minimal.
- There’s “gaming” cards and “professional” ones. The latter cost more and I guess they’re better for AutoCAD.
- Rely on a benchmark comparison site (like this one) to make sense of things. Benchmarks aren’t everything, but they can show you the order-of-magnitude differences, whereas model numbers are intentionally confusing and the release year actually tells you a lot less than you’d expect.
- ...But, don't get mono-focused on maxing out benchmark numbers. The modern top-of-the-line is plain ridiculous because of VR and 4k, and you really do want something older and/or lower-end. As far as I can tell, a G3D mark of 8000 is outrageous overkill for any normal purpose, and you'll probably be just as happy with something down in the 5000s.
- Watch out for power consumption (usually listed as “TDP” in comparisons, though that’s only a ballpark figure). High-end cards from the distant past can often perform like today’s mid-end cards, but at a heinous energy cost, which has a knock-on effect on ventilation, noise, and other component requirements (good luck getting that GTX 770 to play nice with your 450 watt power supply). As a rule of thumb, a TDP > 150w means do some extra investigation to be sure it'll work.
- Craigslist, not eBay. eBay’s global buyer pool and more predictable market make actual bargains pretty rare, and even though the bitcoin boom is mostly over the gpu market is still extremely silly.
- By the way, Craigslist can serve an RSS feed for any given search! If you’re idly shopping for something without a time limit, maybe save some of those in a folder in your feed reader. (Pro-tip: set the minimum price field too, to something like $8. That’ll weed out those bozos who set a price of $1 when listing five different things for $180 a pop.)
It’s weird going back into Windows land for the first time in like a decade-plus! I feel like Windows 10 is a perfectly acceptable OS for a game console; it seems WAY less rickety than XP/Vista/7 did, the built-in malware protection seems like a serious attempt this time, and the improved startup times make it really convenient to just turn it on and off as needed.
But the idea of trying to do real work on Windows still makes me wince — it’s all just so awkward and gross once you get beyond the shiny surface layer. Like, why are there at least three different archeological layers of settings screens? It’s completely demented that I can’t even change the mouse speed without entering a hell-portal back to 1995.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-16 06:53 am (UTC)Best sentence of my craigslist post for the PSU:
Best sentence of my craigslist post for the old video card:
u gotta make your own fun on craigslist dot com.
no subject
Date: 2019-02-16 07:03 am (UTC)