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just brew it! wrote:

@cynan - I don't think you've been reading enough of his threads.

Maybe you've had to read too many.

derFunkenstein wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

@cynan - I don't think you've been reading enough of his threads.

Maybe you've had to read too many.

Touché!

just brew it! wrote:

derFunkenstein wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

@cynan - I don't think you've been reading enough of his threads.

Maybe you've had to read too many.

Touché!

Unavoidable being a mod. We have to suffer through reading all those and the spams to bring the rest of gerbils a cleaner forum. It's a thankless job.

just brew it! wrote:

Vhalidictes wrote:

The Egg wrote:

Upcoming whm1974 topics:
When will augmented reality headsets become mainstream, and exactly how much will it cost?

2048, $200 US.

In inflation-adjusted 2017 dollars, or 2048 dollars?

2017 dollars. I'm not that good!

EDIT: Would a new post "propose whm1974's next thread title" help by concentrating all this into one place, or hurt, overall?

Vhalidictes wrote:

EDIT: Would a new post "propose whm1974's next thread title" help by concentrating all this into one place, or hurt, overall?

Is 'Would a new post "propose whm1974's next thread title" help by concentrating all this into one place, or hurt, overall?' the subject of that new thread?

I counter-propose that the subject should be 'Will people stop joining in with click-bait whm1974 speculative threads of borderline trolling?' and state that my answer in that thread is:

Topinio wrote:

Nope. Much and long as I try to resist, I will inevitably join in, once and probably twice per thread.

It doesn't matter how or it all gets, really; he's good value, you just gotta roll with it. Cheers!

While kill off might be a little bit of an overreaction so is most of this discussion peeps. He had a legit point.

High end PC gaming costs have gotten out of control IMO. As long as this system stays working I'm done buying anything for many years unless I can sell off this 1070 later for a decent amount.

LostCat wrote:

While kill off might be a little bit of an overreaction so is most of this discussion peeps. He had a legit point.

The only "legit" part was the observation that cryptocurrency mining is wreaking havoc with GPU prices.

LostCat wrote:

High end PC gaming costs have gotten out of control IMO. As long as this system stays working I'm done buying anything for many years unless I can sell off this 1070 later for a decent amount.

"High end" has always required a non-trivial cash outlay. What's different today is that more of the cost of a high-end gaming rig is in the GPU, as opposed to other system components. I don't think overall system cost has changed much in roughly 2 decades.

just brew it! wrote:

"High end" has always required a non-trivial cash outlay. What's different today is that more of the cost of a high-end gaming rig is in the GPU, as opposed to other system components. I don't think overall system cost has changed much in roughly 2 decades.

All I can say is the cost of everything (except SSDs) has gone up notably from my last build. I'll be glad to wait the market out as long as possible before buying anything again.

Hell, I'll happily become a 'console peasant' after this if it gets me what I need.

Well, between the Ethereum craze driving up GPU prices, and the DRAM and NAND flash shortages, the past few months have been a particularly bad time to build a new system. It's a bit of an anomalous "perfect storm" sort of situation though.

And even if SSD prices haven't risen in absolute terms, you're typically paying the same price for flash with crappier endurance as the race to the bottom continues.

just brew it! wrote:

And even if SSD prices haven't risen in absolute terms, you're typically paying the same price for flash with crappier endurance as the race to the bottom continues.

The chances of an SSD crapping out in normal usage scenarios still seem monumentally slim even with the worse endurance. I'll worry about it when I have a reason to.

My only dead SSD so far is the one that had physical damage to the connector.

whm1974 wrote:

Now I'm and now wondering with the outrageous prices of GPUs now if that will end up killing off or doing some major damage to PC gaming? I mean I would I would be pissed off if I couldn't play new games at 2560x1600 considering how much I paid for my display or if I would have to pay an arm and leg to be able to do so.

I mean really I checked Newegg's prices on GPUs and even older ones like the 970 are really high. I wish this mining thing will crash and crash hard.

The recent GPU craze will not last very long. I have felt much more frustrated with
(a) RAM prices that have gone up for months and will probably stay that way for another year (luckily, I bought 32GB at $200),
(b) HDD prices that stagnated for YEARS (I bought the WD RE 2TB at $150 and the WD RE 4TB, four years later, at $250), luckily things seem to improve a little bit recently, and finally
(c) SSD prices that have also reached a plateau with no discernible change (per GB) during the last 2 years.

Admittedly it sucks if you need a GPU today, but right before the mining craze the RX480 at sub $200 was immense value. Let's hope things improve with Vega (although with 8GB HBM2, I'm not optimistic).

just brew it! wrote:

"High end" has always required a non-trivial cash outlay. What's different today is that more of the cost of a high-end gaming rig is in the GPU, as opposed to other system components. I don't think overall system cost has changed much in roughly 2 decades.

I would also add the peripherals. I used to buy $10 keyboard and $5 mice. The re-introduction of mechanical keyboards (I already had one in the 1990s) has pushed prices a bit. Most importantly, the introduction of "gaming" peripherals has also increased prices significantly. Or maybe I'm less cheap than what I used to be...

LostCat wrote:

The chances of an SSD crapping out in normal usage scenarios still seem monumentally slim even with the worse endurance. I'll worry about it when I have a reason to.

My only dead SSD so far is the one that had physical damage to the connector.

For a number of drives in the units or even low tens those odds are acceptable (to most people), when responsible for thousands of the things less so. But then, I view consumer hard disk drives as way under adequate.

just brew it! wrote:

And even if SSD prices haven't risen in absolute terms, you're typically paying the same price for flash with crappier endurance as the race to the bottom continues.

I'm of the hopes that these new 64-96 layer NAND chips will soon boost capacities significantly, thus offsetting some of the endurance issues.

To answer the op question - nope.
If I understand it correctly - As difficulty ramps it becomes uneconomical to use video card to mine and people will move to asics once they have been designed and manufactured.
I expect prices for 1050, 1060, rx 470 / 480 and rx 570/580 to return to MSRP around thanksgiving.

There will be lots of used video cards on ebay around that time for good prices as well but they will be abused and might not be as good of a deal as one would hope.

Aranarth wrote:

To answer the op question - nope.
If I understand it correctly - As difficulty ramps it becomes uneconomical to use video card to mine and people will move to asics once they have been designed and manufactured.
I expect prices for 1050, 1060, rx 470 / 480 and rx 570/580 to return to MSRP around thanksgiving.

There will be lots of used video cards on ebay around that time for good prices as well but they will be abused and might not be as good of a deal as one would hope.

From what I understand, some of the newer cryptocurrencies (e.g. Ethereum) are being explicitly designed to make ASIC mining impractical (memory requirements, IIRC).

just brew it! wrote:

From what I understand, some of the newer cryptocurrencies (e.g. Ethereum) are being explicitly designed to make ASIC mining impractical (memory requirements, IIRC).

Yup until someone comes up with a way to make it practical.
I bet people are already working on it and probably already have some test hardware done on FPGA's.

Aranarth wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

From what I understand, some of the newer cryptocurrencies (e.g. Ethereum) are being explicitly designed to make ASIC mining impractical (memory requirements, IIRC).

Yup until someone comes up with a way to make it practical.
I bet people are already working on it and probably already have some test hardware done on FPGA's.

Maybe. But FPGAs that can handle multiple channels of high-speed DRAM are very expensive, so I expect progress is being slowed down by that.

I also have to wonder: Once you've added the complexity of the added DRAM interfaces and the cost of the DRAM itself, would ASICs still have much of an advantage over GPUs? Presumably performance will be throttled by RAM bandwidth as well, so having a more efficient hardware-based implementation of the algorithms likely won't help as much.

Aranarth wrote:

Yup until someone comes up with a way to make it practical.

There's no practical way to defeat a memory-hard algorithm that requires 2-3 GiBs (it's growing....) of randomly accessed (and changed weekly) data.

Which is exactly what Ethereum's PoW is.

JBI wrote:

I also have to wonder: Once you've added the complexity of the added DRAM interfaces and the cost of the DRAM itself, would ASICs still have much of an advantage over GPUs? Presumably performance will be throttled by RAM bandwidth as well, so having a more efficient hardware-based implementation of the algorithms likely won't help as much.

Right, they won't.

This is *precisely* why Ethereum's creators chose this scheme: It was launched just 2 years ago, they designed it with full knowledge of all the previous history.

ptsant wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

"High end" has always required a non-trivial cash outlay. What's different today is that more of the cost of a high-end gaming rig is in the GPU, as opposed to other system components. I don't think overall system cost has changed much in roughly 2 decades.

I would also add the peripherals. I used to buy $10 keyboard and $5 mice. The re-introduction of mechanical keyboards (I already had one in the 1990s) has pushed prices a bit. Most importantly, the introduction of "gaming" peripherals has also increased prices significantly. Or maybe I'm less cheap than what I used to be...

I'm in the same camp myself. I brought a ~$100 keyboard not too long ago as well. Hell ten years ago I would have laughed at those who spent that much or more on a keyboard. And I really did get bitten by the high end hardware bug.

Don't know... but I spend more time mining then I do gaming anyhow... but speaking of high end hardware, I never spent more than approx. $300 for a video card (approx. price of my AIW 9800 & R9 290s when purchased) until I recently bought 2 1070s and put them to work mining... currently in 2 seperate machines, but I may SLI them in my main rig and still mine when not using my main PC.

As for other Hardware, I remember the days of paying $400-500 for 16MB of memory for my i486 PC build and I got a great deal on a Conner 540MB HD at around $450 when everwhere else I looked had it listed at $600. This was back in the days of the "Computer Shopper" HUGE paper magazine, in the AI era (Anno Internet). So my computer habit has gotten somewhat cheaper as I have aged in the new Internet era.

just brew it! wrote:

And even if SSD prices haven't risen in absolute terms, you're typically paying the same price for flash with crappier endurance as the race to the bottom continues.

JBI, the good news is that a lot of older MLC drives are still available on the market for essentially the same price as the new crappy RAM-less TLC drives. For as long as that's still the case it's possible to get more for your money.

whm1974 wrote:

ptsant wrote:

just brew it! wrote:

"High end" has always required a non-trivial cash outlay. What's different today is that more of the cost of a high-end gaming rig is in the GPU, as opposed to other system components. I don't think overall system cost has changed much in roughly 2 decades.

I would also add the peripherals. I used to buy $10 keyboard and $5 mice. The re-introduction of mechanical keyboards (I already had one in the 1990s) has pushed prices a bit. Most importantly, the introduction of "gaming" peripherals has also increased prices significantly. Or maybe I'm less cheap than what I used to be...

I'm in the same camp myself. I brought a ~$100 keyboard not too long ago as well. Hell ten years ago I would have laughed at those who spent that much or more on a keyboard. And I really did get bitten by the high end hardware bug.

You can still buy the $10 keyboards and $5 mice if you want. Nobody is forcing you to buy mechanical. A good mechanical keyboard will also last a very long time, so the higher cost can be amortized across multiple builds. My RK-9000 was purchased 2 or 3 builds back, and the key action still feels as good as when it was new.

LostCat wrote:

High end PC gaming costs have gotten out of control IMO. As long as this system stays working I'm done buying anything for many years unless I can sell off this 1070 later for a decent amount.

IMO, they're the cheapest they've been in...ever...really. Look at what $500 could purchase a decade ago, or two decades ago. You can get a far more useful gaming system today for that money than you ever could in the past, and that's not even accounting for inflation.

Dammit, 20 FPS at 320x240 used to be damn good if you were running full 16 bit color, and it didn't take a cheap machine to do that. People are spoiled.

just brew it! wrote:

whm1974 wrote:

ptsant wrote:

I would also add the peripherals. I used to buy $10 keyboard and $5 mice. The re-introduction of mechanical keyboards (I already had one in the 1990s) has pushed prices a bit. Most importantly, the introduction of "gaming" peripherals has also increased prices significantly. Or maybe I'm less cheap than what I used to be...

I'm in the same camp myself. I brought a ~$100 keyboard not too long ago as well. Hell ten years ago I would have laughed at those who spent that much or more on a keyboard. And I really did get bitten by the high end hardware bug.

You can still buy the $10 keyboards and $5 mice if you want. Nobody is forcing you to buy mechanical. A good mechanical keyboard will also last a very long time, so the higher cost can be amortized across multiple builds. My RK-9000 was purchased 2 or 3 builds back, and the key action still feels as good as when it was new.

Right. However at the moment I don't when I will do another build since the one I have pretty well meets my needs for now and I still can do upgrades to fill futures one as well. Such as a new GPU or more storage, even perhaps adding some extra memory later on.

Waco wrote:

LostCat wrote:

High end PC gaming costs have gotten out of control IMO. As long as this system stays working I'm done buying anything for many years unless I can sell off this 1070 later for a decent amount.

IMO, they're the cheapest they've been in...ever...really. Look at what $500 could purchase a decade ago, or two decades ago. You can get a far more useful gaming system today for that money than you ever could in the past, and that's not even accounting for inflation.

Dammit, 20 FPS at 320x240 used to be damn good if you were running full 16 bit color, and it didn't take a cheap machine to do that. People are spoiled.

Yes we are. At the very least I will not back to a HDD for a boot/OS/application drive instead of using an SSD. Or for that matter less then 1440p/1600p for a desktop display unless I'm forced to.

Vhalidictes wrote:

JBI, the good news is that a lot of older MLC drives are still available on the market for essentially the same price as the new crappy RAM-less TLC drives. For as long as that's still the case it's possible to get more for your money.

Inherent unsustainability is unhappy-making, though, and it's getting worse than TLC; I think it won't be too long before the new and crappy QLC drives using crappy 3D charge trap NAND are what's available.

Topinio wrote:

Vhalidictes wrote:

JBI, the good news is that a lot of older MLC drives are still available on the market for essentially the same price as the new crappy RAM-less TLC drives. For as long as that's still the case it's possible to get more for your money.

Inherent unsustainability is unhappy-making, though, and it's getting worse than TLC; I think it won't be too long before the new and crappy QLC drives using crappy 3D charge trap NAND are what's available.

But then you're better off with spinning rust. A new-ish not-too-fragmented HDD can push 150MB/sec sequential; At some point there's no advantage to Flash any more.

EDIT: Now that I'm thinking about it, a 4-drive RAID 0+1 array of new small 7200RPM HDDs (1-2TB each, say) might actually outperform a **** TLC drive in random-access. It sure as **** would for sequential. Hmm, 4TB for ~$200...

Vhalidictes wrote:

Topinio wrote:

Vhalidictes wrote:

JBI, the good news is that a lot of older MLC drives are still available on the market for essentially the same price as the new crappy RAM-less TLC drives. For as long as that's still the case it's possible to get more for your money.

Inherent unsustainability is unhappy-making, though, and it's getting worse than TLC; I think it won't be too long before the new and crappy QLC drives using crappy 3D charge trap NAND are what's available.

But then you're better off with spinning rust. A new-ish not-too-fragmented HDD can push 150MB/sec sequential; At some point there's no advantage to Flash any more.

For desktops I typically do a SSD system disk and HDD RAID-1 for my files.

Vhalidictes wrote:

EDIT: Now that I'm thinking about it, a 4-drive RAID 0+1 array of new small 7200RPM HDDs (1-2TB each, say) might actually outperform a **** TLC drive in random-access performance.

Random? Not a chance. Seek latency completely dominates random performance for HDDs. Sequential performance maybe.

just brew it! wrote:

Vhalidictes wrote:

EDIT: Now that I'm thinking about it, a 4-drive RAID 0+1 array of new small 7200RPM HDDs (1-2TB each, say) might actually outperform a **** TLC drive in random-access performance.

Random? Not a chance. Seek latency completely dominates random performance for HDDs. Sequential performance maybe.

In practice, those DRAM-less TLC drives are pushing less than 30MB/sec in Random read/write performance. Fantastic for any kind of spinning rust, sure. But I'm suspicious that during any sort of garbage-collection scenario, or when they are full of data (both?) performance of spinning rust would be functionally identical for the end-user.

At which point the $/Gb difference starts to be a problem.