Thousand times this. For actual builders that care about the nuance it all probably makes sense but then there is me over here looking at pre-builts wondering why the fuck are two seemingly identical machines have a $500 difference between them.
I’m spending so much time pouring through spec sheets to find “oh the non-z version discombobulator means this cheaper one is gonna be trash in three years when I can afford to upgrade to a 6megadong tri-actor unit”.
I’m in this weird state of to cheap to buy a Mac and can’t be arsed to build my own.
Just go here and check the charts for the kind of work you want the PC to do. If one looks promising you can check specific reviews on YouTube.
For gaming the absolute best cpu/gpu combo currently is the 9800x3d and a rtx 4090, if you don’t have a budget.
Yes the part naming is confusing but it’s intentional.
It’s funny that you wrote the wrong GPU name while agreeing that the naming is confusing.
Gamer’s Nexus
R*TX 4090
Yes the part naming is confusing but it’s intentional
Yes, that’s what people are upset about.
For very broad definitions of “convention”
I recently had to go through this maze. I hate it. And I’m glad that my PCs tend to live ~10y, this means that I’m not doing it again in the foreseeable future.
Meanwhile the data i care about, efficiency, is not readily availlable. I’m not gonna put a 350 watt GPU in the 10 liter case if i can have the same power for 250 watt.
At least TomsHardware now includes efficiency in tests for newer cards.60% or 60 percentage points ?
This is why I love Lemmy (it’s a reference to another thread btw)
That post is older than Lemmy
Wouldn’t that be the same thing with no other percentages in sight because we’re subtracting from 100%?
I have no idea, that was just a tongue in cheikh reference to that other thread
Fortunately there are resources that make a good starting point because I agree; naming schemes are a shit show. I generally start with this and go from there research wise. https://www.logicalincrements.com/
I’d be very careful relying on that site… just flipped through some of the build and it was very strange.
E.g. they were recommending a $500 or $900 CASE at the highest tiers - not even good cases, you can get something less than half the price with better performance. They recommended a single pcie 4.0 SSD and a SPINNING HARD DRIVE for a motherboard with pcie 5.0 m2 slots. Recommending CPU coolers that are far, far in excess of requirements (a 3x140mm radiator for a 100W chip? Nonsense). Memory recommendations for AMD builds are also sus - DDR5 6000 CL30 is what those cups do best with, they were recommending DDR5600 CL32 kits for no reason.
Just strange… makes me question the rest of their recommendations.
Mind you, recommending a PCIe 4.0 SSD is the one part that makes sense. Right now very few people will gain noticeable benefits from a PCIe 5.0 SSD, AFAIK. The rest though… yikes.
The price differential doesn’t really exist anymore, though. If they were recommending 4TB, then I’d agree (only a few 4TB 5.0 and they are quite pricey), but at 2TB you’re looking at like $10 difference between something like the MP700 and the SN850X they recommend (not counting all the black Friday sales going on).
Ah, good to know. Thanks.
…I just the other day ordered all the components to make the first “Extremist” tier build, nearly verbatim.
I guess I made some of the right choices, then.
Power consumption is part of the equation now too. You’ll often see newer generation hardware that has comparable performance to a last gen model but is a lot more power efficient.
Or you’ll see something equally efficient and equally performing at the same power levels…except you’ll see newer gens or upgraded skus allowed to pull more power
Just buy AMD 😜
Honestly my preferred manufacturer since I started putting together my own machines.
Make sure to get your 5900x3d with your 7900XTX. Note that one is a CPU and the other is a GPU. For extra fun, their numbers should eventually overlap given their respective incrementation schemes. The 5900x3d is the successor to the 5900xd, which is a major step down in performance even though it has more cores.
I’m gonna give this award to Intel, which has increased the numbers on their CPU line by 1000 every generation since before the 2008 housing crash.
It’s so annoying when you buy a GPU instead of a CPU.
Or when you buy a GPU inside of your CPU.
They already do overlap, 7000 series CPUs have been out for a while. As have the 5000 series GPUs.
…don’t worry, I’m sure Intel won’t change things up on us… right? (Just pretend the last year of Intel CPUs didn’t happen)
I assume you haven’t seen the latest series of processors from Intel…
You still need to understand their naming convention if you plan on comparing hardware.
The only thing you should realistic understand from the naming conventions is relative generations and which bracket of price/performance the part targets. Assuming more than that is just a mistake.
Is it not still “higher better” at AMD? With the obvious X or “m”, but usually price reflects the specs when the numbers are the same.
I always go by the rule of the larger the number/more letters the better. The exception being M that usually means it’s made for mobile devices.
i’ll trade you my geforce 9500 for your 4090.
Ok maybe also look at the year the card was released too.
Q. E. D.
quantum electrodynamics
how about my geforce 9500 for your vega 64?
The other exception being monitors, which are named by connecting three keyboards to one computer and then rolling a bowling ball across all three.
They know people like you are the majority, that’s why, specially when it comes to low-end hardware, they up the price while selling you the same or worse performance just because the part is newer.
I occasionally “refresh” my PC with new board, CPU etc. I never buy the top of the line stuff and quite honestly there is little reason to. Games are designed to play perfectly well on mid range computers even if you have to turn off some graphics option that enables some slight improvement in the image quality.
I agree. Another good trick: Don’t buy a 4K screen. GPU’s work for much longer that way.
For many games you can set graphics rendering to for example 1080p but run the whole game in 4k so text, menues and so on are super crisp but the game still runs very light. But maybe it’s good advice to never even start because I can’t imagine going back to 1080p after using 2k and 4k screens
I just go by PassMarks rating for CPU and GPU. It may not be the most nuanced rating, but it does give numbers that can be easily compared.
And it sucks! Sorry, I mean it SUX.
They periodically run out of integers so they have to reuse old ones.
Naming conventions are somewhat consistent; it’s the pricing that has gotten a bit out of hand.
