Personal computing discussed

Moderators: renee, Hoser

 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 12:41 pm

Vhalidictes wrote:
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.


You can easily break 200 on sustained sequential, low-LBA blocks for most new HDDs these days.

I got two $18 10Gbe refurb Mellanox cards and a cheap 1m passive DAC cable for a point-to-point link between my NAS and main server, just put in last week. No longer bottled by 1Gbe, I got 180+ sustained on 1-2 year old 4TB disks copying from who knows where on the physical disk.

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


Yeah no way, not even close. Multiple orders of magnitude.

Not even garbage USB thumb drives are that bad on random 4k reads. They usually get multiple hundreds, spinning rust at 7.2k is ~100 tops.
 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 12:44 pm

Vhalidictes wrote:
In practice, those DRAM-less TLC drives are pushing less than 30MB/sec in Random read/write performance.


100 * 4096 = ~400KB/s

And it's usually the write performance that's rekt, not the read.
 
Vhalidictes
Gerbil Jedi
Posts: 1835
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2005 2:32 pm
Location: Paragon City, RI

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 1:21 pm

Thanks for the perspective, Glorious.

I've been using a tertiary PC recently, put together from what was lying around. Sandy Bridge Celeron, 4GB of slow DDR3, and three crap 3-platter 500GB drives (WDC Blue, I think) in a FakeRAID 0 array.

Single partition, OS is Windows 10, performance is shockingly decent as long as I keep it defragged. The system had a 250GB Samsung 840EVO drive (fully updated firmware) in it before I stole that for another project, and other than game load times, there's no appreciable difference in performance.

My experience with this system is the root cause for my thought "Go Spinning Rust instead of Crap SSD and pocket/save the difference"
 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 1:32 pm

yeah I mean I still have my games stuff on the windows box on a 2TB HDD.

I don't really notice.
 
just brew it!
Administrator
Posts: 54500
Joined: Tue Aug 20, 2002 10:51 pm
Location: Somewhere, having a beer

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 1:34 pm

I'd probably go half way. For desktop systems, I'd recommend a small, decently performing SSD for OS and frequently used things that benefit from fast random access. Mechanical for everything else.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 1:37 pm

JBI wrote:
I'd probably go half way. For desktop systems, I'd recommend a small, decently performing SSD for OS and frequently used things that benefit from fast random access. Mechanical for everything else.


Exactly what I did. OS + normal applications is SSD. Games are on the 2TB HDD.
 
whm1974
Emperor Gerbilius I
Topic Author
Posts: 6361
Joined: Fri Dec 05, 2014 5:29 am

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 1:45 pm

Glorious wrote:
JBI wrote:
I'd probably go half way. For desktop systems, I'd recommend a small, decently performing SSD for OS and frequently used things that benefit from fast random access. Mechanical for everything else.


Exactly what I did. OS + normal applications is SSD. Games are on the 2TB HDD.

Maybe three drives?
1) Boot/OS/App drive/ on SSD
2) Files on HDD
3) Games on HDD
 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 1:46 pm

Files on are server/nas with RAID etc....
 
just brew it!
Administrator
Posts: 54500
Joined: Tue Aug 20, 2002 10:51 pm
Location: Somewhere, having a beer

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 1:50 pm

Glorious wrote:
JBI wrote:
I'd probably go half way. For desktop systems, I'd recommend a small, decently performing SSD for OS and frequently used things that benefit from fast random access. Mechanical for everything else.

Exactly what I did. OS + normal applications is SSD. Games are on the 2TB HDD.

I do OS and normal applications on SSD, home directory on RAID-1 HDD. I also have hot-swap bays (2x 2.5" and 1x 3.5") that I use for additional storage and backups as the need arises. Right now one of the 2.5" hot swap bays has another SSD in it that I've been hosting some VMs from.

Although it may seem a little like a throwback to the old days of floppies and CD/DVD-ROMs, I'm thinking it kind of makes sense to have a hot-swap bay (or two), and treat SSDs like removable media. If you have data specific to certain tasks that would benefit from the performance of an SSD, but that you don't need to be accessible all the time, it lets you add fast storage on an as-needed basis.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
Waco
Maximum Gerbil
Posts: 4850
Joined: Tue Jan 20, 2009 4:14 pm
Location: Los Alamos, NM

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 5:49 pm

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.

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...

I've never understood the obsession with high random write performance.

You do not do that on a normal computer for sustained periods of time.

Let me repeat that...
YOU DO NOT DO THAT ON A NORMAL COMPUTER FOR SUSTAINED PERIODS OF TIME.


Seriously - it just doesn't matter for consumer workloads. Bursty writes are fine on these types of drives, and that's what users do (for updates, installs, whatever). Read dominates the workload so heavily that the write speeds under heavy abuse just don't matter.

You could artificially bottleneck an SSD to 1000 random write IOPs (~4 MB/s) and you'd still be at least ten times faster than any HDD. The random read speeds are orders of magnitude faster and sequential reads are almost always a few times faster at minimum. You are never better off with spinning rust unless you need high sequential writes for long periods of time (consumers don't, OS drives don't, game drives don't) or are running something that actually issues random writes constantly (again, no typical application).

Can someone explain this insanity to me?
Victory requires no explanation. Defeat allows none.
 
Vhalidictes
Gerbil Jedi
Posts: 1835
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2005 2:32 pm
Location: Paragon City, RI

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:03 pm

Sigh. I shouldn't respond, but WTH. Sure, waco, a few things.

1) I'm specifically talking about the $/GB value of a crap no-RAM-cache TLC drive against 7200RPM HDDs in a RAID 0+1 configuration - keep that in mind for the below.

2) SSDs are tiny and in my experience, never less than 75% full at any give time. We're not talking about fresh-drive SSD performance here, on average we're talking about a almost-full drive, and unfortunately, that hampers TLC drive performance particularly badly.

3) SSDs fail suddenly, and good luck recovering any data without shipping the drive to experts. Once past the crib-death period, spinning rust drives don't fail quickly, and when they finally do you can recover the data yourself with a one-time ~$80 software investment and a USB shell that you probably already have.

4) I'm not obsessed with 4K performance. If I was, I'd never suggest spinning rust as a better alternative to low-end TLC SSDs. You're perfectly correct that even a full, RAM-less low-end TLC drive has probably dozens of times the performance of a HDD in random reads. Random read performance that really doesn't justify the cost of a SSD - get a better SSD (usually for about $5 more) or don't get one at all.
 
Waco
Maximum Gerbil
Posts: 4850
Joined: Tue Jan 20, 2009 4:14 pm
Location: Los Alamos, NM

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 7:51 pm

Vhalidictes wrote:
Sigh. I shouldn't respond, but WTH. Sure, waco, a few things.

1) I'm specifically talking about the $/GB value of a crap no-RAM-cache TLC drive against 7200RPM HDDs in a RAID 0+1 configuration - keep that in mind for the below.

2) SSDs are tiny and in my experience, never less than 75% full at any give time. We're not talking about fresh-drive SSD performance here, on average we're talking about a almost-full drive, and unfortunately, that hampers TLC drive performance particularly badly.

3) SSDs fail suddenly, and good luck recovering any data without shipping the drive to experts. Once past the crib-death period, spinning rust drives don't fail quickly, and when they finally do you can recover the data yourself with a one-time ~$80 software investment and a USB shell that you probably already have.

4) I'm not obsessed with 4K performance. If I was, I'd never suggest spinning rust as a better alternative to low-end TLC SSDs. You're perfectly correct that even a full, RAM-less low-end TLC drive has probably dozens of times the performance of a HDD in random reads. Random read performance that really doesn't justify the cost of a SSD - get a better SSD (usually for about $5 more) or don't get one at all.

1). Understood, and it still makes no sense except for bulk storage. Even the crappiest TLC drive will be demonstrably better in every normal operation than any reasonable number of drives in a RAID 10 array.

2). Of course, but modern drives with TRIM don't exhibit odd performance when nearly full like older non-TRIM drives did.

3). Not only do I disagree with the premise that HDDs don't fail quickly or without warning; data recovery on either is far more expensive than you're implying. If software can fix it, the drive didn't really die. SSDs, in general, are far more reliable. Further, you should *never* have your data in a single place on a single drive. That's lunacy.

4). So you don't think SSDs are worth the investment? That's not really negating anything I posted above, you just don't see the benefits (regardless of write speeds). The MLC drives are only within reach of the TLC drives today because there is a global shortage and old drives are selling cheaper than newly produced drives. Are sequential writes your only beef? What application on a standard desktop needs sequential write speeds to be super high (well, ~200 MB/s, since that's all a 4-drive RAID 10 will do in practice)?


I appreciate the response, but it didn't really cover anything I was talking about. All I keep hearing is a rehash of the same arguments that popped up when SLC drives first launched. We heard it again when MLC drives launched. I expect to hear the same when QLC drives launch...
Victory requires no explanation. Defeat allows none.
 
whm1974
Emperor Gerbilius I
Topic Author
Posts: 6361
Joined: Fri Dec 05, 2014 5:29 am

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Tue Jul 25, 2017 8:50 pm

On another note, prices on starting to come down on Newegg. Geforce GTX 1070 for less then $500 and 1060 for less then $300.
 
Krogoth
Emperor Gerbilius I
Posts: 6049
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2003 3:20 pm
Location: somewhere on Core Prime
Contact:

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 5:41 am

HDDs are only good for bulk data storage, multimedia content and older games. SSDs are better choices for newer games (especially titles that constantly read off the HDD/SSD) and OS drive.

SSDs are pretty reliable as long as it has stable power to it and isn't offline for months/years at a time. HDD reliability has suffered from price pressure which is forcing HDD vendors to cut corners on QC.
Gigabyte X670 AORUS-ELITE AX, Raphael 7950X, 2x16GiB of G.Skill TRIDENT DDR5-5600, Sapphire RX 6900XT, Seasonic GX-850 and Fractal Define 7 (W)
Ivy Bridge 3570K, 2x4GiB of G.Skill RIPSAW DDR3-1600, Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H, Corsair CX-750M V2, and PC-7B
 
Topinio
Gerbil Jedi
Posts: 1839
Joined: Mon Jan 12, 2015 9:28 am
Location: London

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 8:01 am

Krogoth wrote:
SSDs are pretty reliable as long as it has stable power to it and isn't offline for months/years at a time. HDD reliability has suffered from price pressure which is forcing HDD vendors to cut corners on QC.

Nah. Both suck, and always have. (If you have evidence for either assertion, though, please link it!)

Krogoth wrote:
HDDs are only good for bulk data storage, multimedia content and older games. SSDs are better choices for newer games (especially titles that constantly read off the HDD/SSD) and OS drive.

I beg to differ. While the games will run a bit faster from a SSD, the sheer size of them makes a HDD the better choice for most users.

My thought process is:

  1. Less than 20-30% free on a SSD is not very clever.
  2. The minimum reasonable baseline for a new non-gaming PC build is a ~250 GB OS drive (aiming for "only" 150-200 GB used).
  3. A reasonable modern per-game budget is up to ~50 GB. CoD Infinite Warfare's minimum is 70 GB...
  4. Most gamers I know play a few at a time and have a fair few uncompleted games they haven't uninstalled because of the "might go back to it" thoughts: let's say 5 games is not uncommon. Particularly on shared or family PC.
  5. Then there's updates e.g. a recent patch for Doom was >37 GB, so you need a +1.
  6. Therefore, a gaming build needs at least another 300 GB on top of the standard PC's storage requirement.
  7. This means either the SSD is 750+ GB, or there's an additional drive as either a 480+GB SSD or a 500+ GB mechanical drive.

In price terms, just looking at minimum cost from 1 vendor's stock and with no eye for quality, that translates to

  1. 250 GB SSD + 500 GB HDD >= £77 + £36 = £113
  2. 250 GB SSD + 480 GB SSD >= £77 + £137 = £214
  3. 1 TB SSD >= £258

so the dual SSD option is £101 more than the HDD one. The single-drive SSD is £145 more.

If you don't care about that at-least £101 extra, for £3 more you can get a 4 TB HDD instead of the 480 GB SSD and have loads of storage space for all the games, photos, whatever you want.

For a fixed budget build, or a system upgrade, buying a SSD for putting games on takes you down from e.g. a GTX 1060 6 GB to a 3 GB one (£72 difference) or from a GTX 1060 3 GB to a GTX 1050 Ti (£73). Is not better choices for newer games.
Desktop: 750W Snow Silent, X11SAT-F, E3-1270 v5, 32GB ECC, RX 5700 XT, 500GB P1 + 250GB BX100 + 250GB BX100 + 4TB 7E8, XL2730Z + L22e-20
HTPC: X-650, DH67GD, i5-2500K, 4GB, GT 1030, 250GB MX500 + 1.5TB ST1500DL003, KD-43XH9196 + KA220HQ
Laptop: MBP15,2
 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 8:36 am

Waco wrote:
1). Understood, and it still makes no sense except for bulk storage. Even the crappiest TLC drive will be demonstrably better in every normal operation than any reasonable number of drives in a RAID 10 array.


Yeah, I'd be happy with a 2TB SSD if the cost was just 3x as much as the 2TB HDD. But it isn't, it's more like the cost of the computer I'd put it in.

And, more broadly speaking, most of what I use is bulk storage anyway. If it isn't, usually it'll fit on one of the >250GB SSDs.

Waco wrote:
3). Not only do I disagree with the premise that HDDs don't fail quickly or without warning; data recovery on either is far more expensive than you're implying. If software can fix it, the drive didn't really die. SSDs, in general, are far more reliable. Further, you should *never* have your data in a single place on a single drive. That's lunacy.


Yeah, agreed. Actually, to my recollection the last two HDD failures I had were abrupt and total: The drives were dead, unrecognized by anything. The solution of "plug into USB dock and attach to another computer" does not help for serious drive failure as you say, for dying drives it might just give you chance to get something off a volume that is now otherwise unbootable: The drive isn't going to get any better.

I have experience with HDD recovery firms: It's thousands to tens of thousands of dollars and there is no guarantee they'll be able to get anything. Generally they give you a preview of what your car purchase price will be buying you(i.e. they already did it and are holding your data contractually hostage), because what they can recover may not even be what you want.

Effectively, for the hobbyist, this is not a real option.

Backups people, your future self will thank you.

Waco wrote:
What application on a standard desktop needs sequential write speeds to be super high (well, ~200 MB/s, since that's all a 4-drive RAID 10 will do in practice)?


It really gets to the point for hobbyists where it's more like ~110MB/s, because unless you are doing a copy internal to that computer, you're going to need > 1Gbe to do anything better (which most hobbyists don't even have, save the turbonerds spending multiple thousands at STH etc...). Which is precisely why I got those cheapy 10Gbe Mellanox adapters: My drives were faster than what I could write to them (and that was *with* a completely dedicated p2p 1Gbe link).

And we're talking about "copy", not really an "application" per se, like you say.
 
just brew it!
Administrator
Posts: 54500
Joined: Tue Aug 20, 2002 10:51 pm
Location: Somewhere, having a beer

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 9:09 am

Glorious wrote:
Yeah, agreed. Actually, to my recollection the last two HDD failures I had were abrupt and total: The drives were dead, unrecognized by anything. The solution of "plug into USB dock and attach to another computer" does not help for serious drive failure as you say, for dying drives it might just give you chance to get something off a volume that is now otherwise unbootable: The drive isn't going to get any better.

Most of my HDD failures have been more gradual.

About a year ago the data drive in my son's PC (a really ancient HGST drive IIRC) started disconnecting sporadically (once a day or so). All data was still intact, the drive would just randomly decide "I'm gonna go off in the corner and take a little nap now".

Last HDD failure one on one of my own systems had the drive developing lots of bad sectors, but was still (sort of) readable; fortunately it was in a RAID-1, so only a minor inconvenience. I'd been planning to upgrade the array to larger drives anyway, and that gave me an excuse to pull the trigger.

My old file server had a drive drop out of a RAID-5 array a couple of years back; IIRC the drive was still visible, but I did not diagnose it further since I was already in the process of replacing the server. I just made sure I had a current backup of the contents of the array and let it run degraded until I cut the new server over.

Prior to that, I lost a few Seagate 7200.11 drives to intermittent bad sectors (7200.11 series really sucked).

Going even further back, I had a WD drive die due to (apparent) sudden motor bearing failure. In the normal (PCB down) orientation it would not spin up and made horrible grinding noises, but if you flipped it over (PCB side up) it would spin up and run normally. It ran that way for long enough that I was able to recover all of the data from it.
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be.
 
Waco
Maximum Gerbil
Posts: 4850
Joined: Tue Jan 20, 2009 4:14 pm
Location: Los Alamos, NM

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 9:39 am

just brew it! wrote:
Most of my HDD failures have been more gradual.

I wish I could say the same. Almost every drive failure I've experienced has been very sudden with very little time to respond, if any. SMART monitoring helps dramatically in terms of detecting an impending failure, but the last few drives I've had fail at home warned via SMART and died before I could even get any data off of them (they were in an array, so no data loss, just inconvenient).

We occasionally get a warning before failures at work (~20,000 drives) but they are typically so quick that there's no much we can do to avoid rebuilding everything. That drive population encompasses everything from SMR SATA drives to high-end SAS.

The few times I've gotten early warnings were simply for bad sectors...and those drives kept happily running for years with an annoying warning about reallocated sectors.
Victory requires no explanation. Defeat allows none.
 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 9:43 am

That's the thing, they might not totally just die out of nowhere, but they certainly CAN.

I'd hazard a guess that total failure is something like 33%-40% of all "failures".
 
Vhalidictes
Gerbil Jedi
Posts: 1835
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2005 2:32 pm
Location: Paragon City, RI

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 10:44 am

Glorious wrote:
That's the thing, they might not totally just die out of nowhere, but they certainly CAN.

I'd hazard a guess that total failure is something like 33%-40% of all "failures".


I guess I've been lucky, then. I've had ~20 drive failures over the years (maybe not *that* lucky) and in every single case the drive lasted long enough to get all the data off. Sometimes I'd have to re-orient the drive, but I didn't spend the $ on R-Studio NTFS for my health, I did it because I've never had a drive over a month old both suddenly and totally not spin up.

Yes, I keep all sorts of backups, I brought the subject up because I read Newegg reviews, and pretty much every model of SSD has the same 1-star "right after copying all my data / installing Windows the drive controller failed and the BIOS doesn't even see the drive".

If SSDs need one thing, it's more graceful failure states. Due to the design I doubt that will ever be a thing though. Keeping that in mind, my mid-tier storage is all Mirrored. If you think SSDs are expensive as-is, try buying twice as much storage as you need on top of that.

A NAS would probably be a better solution than keeping backups, but who has that kind of $? Even if I sacrifice my old gaming desktop, buying 8 3TB HDDs, returning 4 of them because apparently 2-4TB drives just can't be made properly, is actually more expensive than getting enough SSDs for my main machine.
 
whm1974
Emperor Gerbilius I
Topic Author
Posts: 6361
Joined: Fri Dec 05, 2014 5:29 am

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 10:51 am

OK what about GPU prices? I' just looked at Newegg last night and it looks like prices on the 1060 and 1070 based cards are going back to something more reasonable.
 
Glorious
Gerbilus Supremus
Posts: 12343
Joined: Tue Aug 27, 2002 6:35 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 10:57 am

Vhalidictes wrote:
A NAS would probably be a better solution than keeping backups, but who has that kind of $?


I bought this earlier this year for $205 at the time: https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 001A-000S2

I mean, yeah, that's still money, but it's not ridiculous either. You can put 6 harddrives in it.

And, no, it's not a backup, not really.

I really recommend that everyone use something like crashplan or backblaze for actual backups. It's like 70 dollars a year for the basic plan, and they don't seem to blink even if you have 10 TBs (I don't, but a friend does).

Yes, it'll take forever to upload those TBs, and forever to re-acquire your data in the event of a loss, but it's a real off-site backup that means you can't forever lose whatever even if your whole house burns down.

Vhalidictes wrote:
Even if I sacrifice my old gaming desktop, buying 8 3TB HDDs, returning 4 of them because apparently 2-4TB drives just can't be made properly, is actually more expensive than getting enough SSDs for my main machine.


Well, get 6 4TBs for $120 = 720 USD. That's roughly the cost of 2x 1TB SSDs, I'd imagine.

I'm not sure where you are going with this?
Last edited by Glorious on Wed Jul 26, 2017 11:03 am, edited 1 time in total.
 
Waco
Maximum Gerbil
Posts: 4850
Joined: Tue Jan 20, 2009 4:14 pm
Location: Los Alamos, NM

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Wed Jul 26, 2017 11:03 am

Vhalidictes wrote:
A NAS would probably be a better solution than keeping backups, but who has that kind of $?

You mean in addition to keeping backups, I hope. A copy of your data on a NAS doesn't mean it's a backup just because it's not in your local machine...

On-topic, it does appear that GPU prices are returning to sanity, at least based on Newegg and Amazon pricing.
Victory requires no explanation. Defeat allows none.
 
Krogoth
Emperor Gerbilius I
Posts: 6049
Joined: Tue Apr 15, 2003 3:20 pm
Location: somewhere on Core Prime
Contact:

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Thu Jul 27, 2017 12:07 am

I beg to differ. While the games will run a bit faster from a SSD, the sheer size of them makes a HDD the better choice for most users.


Games aren't that large unless you are a massive data packrat. 1TiB SSD units are quite affordable and prices will continue to drop. It will not that long until 2-4TiB units will become much more reasonable. There's really no excuse to get SSD for a boot/gaming drive unless budget is a serious constrain.

Again, HDDs are only good for bulk data storage or if budget is a serious constrain on a system build.
Gigabyte X670 AORUS-ELITE AX, Raphael 7950X, 2x16GiB of G.Skill TRIDENT DDR5-5600, Sapphire RX 6900XT, Seasonic GX-850 and Fractal Define 7 (W)
Ivy Bridge 3570K, 2x4GiB of G.Skill RIPSAW DDR3-1600, Gigabyte Z77X-UD3H, Corsair CX-750M V2, and PC-7B
 
Noinoi
Gerbil Team Leader
Posts: 280
Joined: Fri Jun 26, 2015 11:31 pm
Location: Sabah, Malaysia

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Thu Jul 27, 2017 1:35 am

Krogoth wrote:
I beg to differ. While the games will run a bit faster from a SSD, the sheer size of them makes a HDD the better choice for most users.


Games aren't that large unless you are a massive data packrat. 1TiB SSD units are quite affordable and prices will continue to drop. It will not that long until 2-4TiB units will become much more reasonable. There's really no excuse to get SSD for a boot/gaming drive unless budget is a serious constrain.

Again, HDDs are only good for bulk data storage or if budget is a serious constrain on a system build.


A quick check on PCPartPicker significantly favours a 1 TB HDD compared to a 1 TB SSD in terms of about 5x the cost-per-GB. ($249 vs $48, as an example)

$200 is enough for, say, jumping up a video card tier from a 1060 to 1070 (if the prices aren't crazy right now), or adding a basic 1060 to a system that otherwise wouldn't have one.
[email protected] | Patriot 2x16GB | Asus GTX 970 | Aorus Z390 Pro Wifi | Intel 660p 512GB + Kingston Fury 240GB + 2x4TB WD HDDs | Win 10
 
freebird
Gerbil
Posts: 89
Joined: Thu Aug 31, 2006 4:03 pm

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Thu Jul 27, 2017 2:18 am

Just an FYI, subscribing to alerts from someone like EVGA's direct website for Card availability is a plus. I got notified by email of the availability of this...

https://www.evga.com/products/Product.a ... P4-6573-KR on EVGA site for $449.

and newegg is selling it for $479
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product. ... 6814487320

and amazon want $509.
https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss ... P4-6573-KR

there may be cheaper 1070s but I liked this one because it only requires one 8-pin power connector making it easy to power and/or SLI and still has decent clocks...
and btw is still good ethereum miner when undervolted ;)

p.s. don't trust Google's shopping search because they won't show it there even though they have no problem finding the link listed above for the on the evga site with a non-shopping search... so how does Google make such huge profits again... hmmm....just sayin...

oh and I just checked the leading "ad" on Yahoo! search which is CDW @ $517.99 followed by Amazon... funny how that works... not that i didn't realize the search engines bump up "sponsers" to the top of the list, but it seems like an unseemly racket... if politicians did that with their votes on the Hill based on who gives them the most money than we'd say "off with their heads!!!" ... er wait, I better shutup now... I think the NSA is listening... click.
 
Topinio
Gerbil Jedi
Posts: 1839
Joined: Mon Jan 12, 2015 9:28 am
Location: London

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Thu Jul 27, 2017 6:20 am

Noinoi wrote:
Krogoth wrote:
Topinio wrote:
I beg to differ. While the games will run a bit faster from a SSD, the sheer size of them makes a HDD the better choice for most users.


Games aren't that large unless you are a massive data packrat. 1TiB SSD units are quite affordable and prices will continue to drop. It will not that long until 2-4TiB units will become much more reasonable. There's really no excuse to get SSD for a boot/gaming drive unless budget is a serious constrain.

Again, HDDs are only good for bulk data storage or if budget is a serious constrain on a system build.


A quick check on PCPartPicker significantly favours a 1 TB HDD compared to a 1 TB SSD in terms of about 5x the cost-per-GB. ($249 vs $48, as an example)

$200 is enough for, say, jumping up a video card tier from a 1060 to 1070 (if the prices aren't crazy right now), or adding a basic 1060 to a system that otherwise wouldn't have one.

This.

(Here, I saw the 1 TB options as £38.99 vs £258.49)

As I wrote in the post Krogoth quoted (in the (large) bit that was ignored):

Topinio wrote:
If you don't care about that at-least £101 extra, for £3 more you can get a 4 TB HDD instead of the 480 GB SSD and have loads of storage space for all the games, photos, whatever you want.

For a fixed budget build, or a system upgrade, buying a SSD for putting games on takes you down from e.g. a GTX 1060 6 GB to a 3 GB one (£72 difference) or from a GTX 1060 3 GB to a GTX 1050 Ti (£73). Is not better choices for newer games.


Needing >700 GB means spending between £39 for a HDD and £258 for a SSD. That's a £219 maximum saving which can be spent as extra on the GPU.

If we all agree a £77 SSD boot drive is worth it, we're at needing to spend at least £113 for the SSD+HDD option, so have £145 of GPU money in our pocket when comparing against the cheapest "quite affordable" 1 TB SSD.

Most gaming users would be better served by a £145 higher GPU budget, therefore a HDD is the better choice.

Most users would be better served by having 4.25 TB total storage than 1 TB total storage all on a single SSD.

Therefore, a HDD is the better choice for most users.
Desktop: 750W Snow Silent, X11SAT-F, E3-1270 v5, 32GB ECC, RX 5700 XT, 500GB P1 + 250GB BX100 + 250GB BX100 + 4TB 7E8, XL2730Z + L22e-20
HTPC: X-650, DH67GD, i5-2500K, 4GB, GT 1030, 250GB MX500 + 1.5TB ST1500DL003, KD-43XH9196 + KA220HQ
Laptop: MBP15,2
 
derFunkenstein
Gerbil God
Posts: 25427
Joined: Fri Feb 21, 2003 9:13 pm
Location: Comin' to you directly from the Mothership

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Thu Jul 27, 2017 9:00 am

I agree with Topino. Most folks who get a 1TB drive will fill it with games they never play (and the couple they are playing RIGHT NOW), and they've wasted most of the drive and therefore the money they spent on it.

Instead, get a 275GB MX300 (or even a 525GB MX300) and spend less cash on a 1TB hard drive. You can fit the stuff you need to RIGHT NOW on the SSD and have the rest of your hoarded stash on the spinning rust. Get a nicer GPU and be happy.
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.
Twittering away the day at @TVsBen
 
Vhalidictes
Gerbil Jedi
Posts: 1835
Joined: Fri Jan 07, 2005 2:32 pm
Location: Paragon City, RI

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Thu Jul 27, 2017 10:50 am

derFunkenstein wrote:
I agree with Topino. Most folks who get a 1TB drive will fill it with games they never play (and the couple they are playing RIGHT NOW), and they've wasted most of the drive and therefore the money they spent on it.

Instead, get a 275GB MX300 (or even a 525GB MX300) and spend less cash on a 1TB hard drive. You can fit the stuff you need to RIGHT NOW on the SSD and have the rest of your hoarded stash on the spinning rust. Get a nicer GPU and be happy.


I agree with everyone here. The only reason I have a 1TB SSD is 1) It was a gift, and 2) I play modded Bethesda games, which need all of the space and actually run better from an SSD.
 
derFunkenstein
Gerbil God
Posts: 25427
Joined: Fri Feb 21, 2003 9:13 pm
Location: Comin' to you directly from the Mothership

Re: Will high GPU prices kill off PC gaming?

Thu Jul 27, 2017 11:03 am

Well if it's a gift, it'd be a crime against good budgeting to NOT use it. :D
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.
Twittering away the day at @TVsBen

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 1 guest
GZIP: On