There's just not been anything to post about. Nothing that I care about, at least.
My audio setup's fine, nothing's caught my eye there recently. The Virts SS25 is cool as expected. Tech...
Oh fuck. Tech.
Intel didn't launch the B770. Nvidia didn't launch the RTX 50 Super series - Not that it was worth even thinking about, but still. AMD has done fuck all since the 9070 XT launched. RAMageddon happened. Prebuilt shops are offering computers without RAM so that people can at least buy the rest of the hardware without having to sell an organ. 40% of the world's DRAM capacity has been reserved until 2028 for a singular fucking OpenAI project. Micron has completely abandoned the consumer segment. HBM (the type of memory that datacenter GPUs need) is far less space efficient to manufacture than DDR (memory used for consumer hardware) - as in, assuming you have two equally sized silicon wafers, the one you cut into HBM dies will just give you fewer dies, further skewing the balance against consumers. SSD prices have doubled. GPU prices are starting to climb up from their MSRPs again.
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I've spent the past few days playing with undervolting settings for my RTX 2060 Super.
TL;DR of the results:
Around 15-20% performance loss vs stock, double that vs my usual overclocked profile. Power draw has gone down anywhere between 35-55%, depending on the benchmark. Synthetic benchmarks tend to have smaller power draw savings while games show bigger improvements. This is NOT a stable setting, more tweaking is needed. More details (and how to do this!) under the cut.
Just to be clear, this was an attempt to push voltage as low as possible with absolutely no regard for performance. I just wanted to see how low I could go while still technically running above stock clocks. I tried Steel Nomad and Time Spy for synthetic benchmarks, and a couple of games I frequently play for game tests. DLSS/FSR/XeSS were always OFF, all these tests are at native resolution.
-- IMPORTANT CAVEATS --
This is NOT a well controlled environment, this is me firing up games off my library, letting the temperature and framerate stabilise in a location that performs worse than average, then taking screenshots.
I do NOT have a good performance logging solution configured, nor do I have preset benchmark runs for these tests. They are quick and dirty and should be taken with more than one grain of salt.
The only thing that changed in between test runs was applying my custom profile on MSI Afterburner and returning to stock settings.
I expect the margin of error to be large, well above the 1-2% we usually see in professional benchmarks and reviews. I cannot verify exactly how much it is, so assume the worst.
Whenever "my overclocked profile", "overclocked" or anything with the same meaning is mentioned, it means the following settings in MSI Afterburner:
-- SYNTHETIC BENCHMARKS --
All tests run at default settings.
In 3DMark Steel Nomad, the card peaks at around 110 W for a decrease of 37% from stock, while performance drops by 13%. Compared to my overclocked profile, power draw went down by 41%, and performance went down by 18%.
Results links: Undervolted (110 W), Stock (175 W), Overclocked (185 W). Note that the Undervolted run still has the VRAM overclocked for this test.
3DMark Time Spy had similar results. Performance loss was 14% vs stock and 17% vs overclocked, with power draw reduced by 43% and 46% respectively.
Results links: Undervolted (100 W), Stock (175 W), Overclocked (185 W). Note that the Undervolted run still has the VRAM overclocked for this test.
-- GAME BENCHMARKS --
All settings and spots where screenshots were taken can be found here.
Assassin's Creed Mirage, custom Medium settings.
The undervolted profile consistently draws 85 W or less even in more crowded areas. At stock settings the card draws between 175-180 W. That being said, this does come at the cost of significantly less stable frametimes, meaning this undervolt is probably on the absolute edge of stability and a bit more voltage would be necessary for a long-term setting. Note the over 20% performance loss alongside the nearly 500 MHz frequency drop.
Redout 2, max settings.
Stock does incredibly well here, delivering over 100 FPS in most occasions. Tested at Neo-Tokyo, which tends to be one of the more performance-heavy tracks in my experience. Undervolting here dropped performance by up to 20%, and reduced power draw by 42%. Note that the overall frametime consistency has worsened here too, but it's fast enough that it doesn't detract from the experience.
Cyberpunk 2077, custom Medium settings.
Stock settles in at around 60 FPS with my settings, while undervolting drags down to 50. Power draw drops below 100 W as a result.
-- HOW IT'S DONE --
Since Nvidia doesn't let you directly control the voltage of your GPU, you have to find a different way around it, and there is one:
Setting a maximum clock speed using MSI Afterburner's Curve Editor means your GPU will aim for that clock speed at the lowest voltage that matches it.
What this means is, if you make your V/F curve completely flat from one voltage onwards, your GPU will never try to go above that voltage. Thus, you effectively cap your card's voltage and select a target frequency for it.
For a visual example, here's my card's stock V/F curve:
And here's the undervolt setting:
There's a quick way to do this, so you don't have to set each little point manually. Select the leftmost point (lowest voltage) you want to try, set it to the frequency you want. Then, hold Shift, and drag across all the other points to select them together. Finally, hit Shift+Enter twice, and Afterburner will flatten the rest of the curve for you. Hit Apply and hope you don't crash.
-- THOUGHTS OVERALL --
Averaging out my results, power draw went down by 44% vs stock settings and 47% versus my overclocked profile. At the same time, the performance change was -18% versus stock. I didn't keep record of my overclocked gaming results, but the performance bump seemed to be around the same as that in synthetic benchmarks, if not a little less.
This makes for an efficiency improvement of 24% overall versus stock, accounting for performance loss versus power draw reduction. Not fucking bad, though again this DID really mess with frametime stability, so be mindful of that when trying this yourself. Frametime stability is just as (if not more) important than average framerates - A game running at 100 FPS with frequent stutters will usually not feel as good as a game running a rock-solid 75 or even 60, depending on the severity of said stutters.
My next attempt will be running stock clocks undervolted, though of course that's probably not going to be anywhere near as big an efficiency improvement. I wanted to go as hard as I could for the start, and 0.712 volts was what it settled down in.
Let me start by saying this: I fucking love how the 9070 XT turned out in terms of performance and I'll probably be buying one when I get the chance.
If you can find one at its MSRP of 600 USD/570 GBP, it's actually pretty solid. Not "shut up and take my money", but solid. Almost reasonable pricing for a GPU for the first time in however many years, relative to its build and performance class.
Nerdy details under the cut.
In short, the 9070 XT is maybe a tiny bit slower than the 5070 Ti, but also $150 cheaper.
In long:
(Image credits in order: Gamers Nexus, Hardware Unboxed)
It's within *earshot* of the RTX 5070 Ti for raster benchmarks, which is more or less what I was hoping for. With undervolting, Der8auer even managed to squeeze past the 5080 in 3DMark Time Spy Extreme:
Not bad. I don't expect the 9070 XT to win against the 5080 in any real-world benchmark (and it doesn't), but for $150 under the 5070 Ti? Not fucking bad.
There is one segment, however, where Radeon still gets absolutely pummeled: Ray tracing. The more RT heavy a game is, the worse the 9070 XT will perform.
It's immensely better than last generation was in this situation, don't get me wrong, but don't expect Black Myth: Wukong or Cyberpunk with Path Tracing turned on to run well.
(Image credit: Gamers Nexus)
With a less RT-heavy workload, the 9070 XT finds its footing again, but still doesn't beat the 5070 Ti:
(Image credit: Gamers Nexus)
The new media encoder also seems to be doing well, with image quality in H.264 not quite where the competition is but really close:
Meanwhile, in AV1, it's almost the exact same:
Considering that Twitch lets you stream at 6000 Kbps (and they won't stop you if you set your OBS to 8000), while YouTube lets you hit 10000 Kbps, this encoder is completely acceptable.
Overall? I love it, it's more or less three times as fast as my RTX 2060 Super and it has double the VRAM, which means I should be able to stream Redout 2 and Ghostwire: Tokyo without Unreal Engine being a bitch about it.
Now, these SHOULD have been $400 and $500 respectively, but it's basically known at this point that AMD GPU prices drop to more normal numbers soon after launch.
Opinions under the cut.
Pricing the 9070 XT at $600 is acceptable, and really nicely undercuts the 5070 Ti. Considering rumours show the 9070 XT being just a tiny cut under the 4080 Super (and thus 5080) on average, at $150 cheaper it's gonna fight well even if it isn't the "shut up and take my money" that it would've been for $500.
For the 9070 on the other hand... They didn't try at all. It'll just have to be faster than the 5070 since it's launching at the same price, but if it's not, it'll be a miss. This card would've absolutely murdered at $400 and it's a shame seeing AMD just forgetting to undercut the competition at all.
Nvidia has had the absolute worst launch possible. Cards failing on driver installation, cable current imbalance leading to melting connectors that's unfixable without a hardware revision, absolutely no stock, the entire 50 series stack occasionally missing physical hardware, prices not being real at all and partners scalping their own cards, it's an absolute joke. AMD had an opportunity here to come out swinging and storm the market by undercutting both their lower offerings by $150 flat and steal MASSIVE market share, but they chose not to.
It won't be a massive swing over, but at least it'll move more people away from the growing monopoly that is Nvidia.
I'm probably buying a 9070 XT, especially if I can find one for under $550. We'll see.
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The 5090 Failures Will Continue Until Morale Improves
I thought none of them ever being in stock was gonna be enough. I thought "it dies when I install the driver" was gonna be enough.
It was not.
As reported by der8auer and elaborated upon by Buildzoid (and PLEASE watch both videos for details as they are way more qualified to explain this than I am), as it turns out, the six 12v wires feeding power to the RTX 5090 have no current balancing whatsoever.
What does this mean?
It means that even though these wires are rated for 8 amps each, you can have a situation where most of them are maybe doing 2-3 and you have one or two wires running twenty fucking amps each.
In simple terms, that means those two wires will hit 150 degrees C and rapidly become a fire hazard.
Why is this an issue?
Because Nvidia has only placed one shunt resistor on the 5090 behind the power plug, so as far as the graphics card itself is concerned, that's one wire, not six. Translation:
You could cut five of the six 12v wires in your 5090's power cable. It would still try to run, then try to draw 575 W off one wire, and subsequently fucking catch fire.
So the RTX 5090 is out and it's basically zero architectural improvement vs last gen (+30% core count, +30% power draw, +30% price, +30% performance) - but that isn't the point of this post.
The point is that something unfathomably funny has happened.
Some RTX 5090s in the wild are frying themselves just by driver installation.
More info below the cut.
Yup, you heard me. TechPowerUp reports that users are having trouble with RTX 5090s straight up dying with seemingly burnt circuitry after just installing the goddamn graphics driver.
Not only is supply for these cards extremely limited (The TOTAL amount of units shipped to all MicroCenter locations across the US was below 250), not only did those cards get scalped to hell and back, but now they're also just completely impossible to use.
Congratulations, Jensen. You've taken the piss so hard that I'm going back to calling your company "NoVideo" instead of just "NShitia".
I just hope AMD doesn't disappoint - though part of me knows they probably will.
So the brand whose name sounds embarrassingly like mine has revealed the design of its new Alienware laptops.
I don't typically care about this sort of thing, but there's one Big Funny™ under the cut for you, alongside images in general.
So, they look pretty alienware-y, right? Standard stuff:
And then you look at the bottom.
Wait, what's that there? Computer, enhance.
ENHANCE
Dear god, that's glass. That's fucking GLASS.
Glass at the bottom of a laptop? Yeah, and apparently it's so that you "can see the components".
Except there are heatsinks on them.
And they're on the side of the laptop you don't see when you're using it.
And you can see the fans, meaning there's no direct intake path.
Meaning that this laptop has the revolutionary new feature of breaking regardless of whether it's placed right side up or upside down!
It's like watching a rat in a cage trying to learn how to design a machine, and you give them a lil treat every time they make something that doesn't catch fire.
Learn how to build a fucking computer, you guys. Come on.
