PCs and Steam: Thread 01

[MartyG]

I'm not prepared to do that - until reviewers verify which is the better card (RTX3080 or RX6800XT), my money is going to remain in my pocket.

If it turns out once the reviews are available that they're very similar in performance - the card I buy will be whichever is available first, but it'd err towards NVIDIA.

Delaying the reviews isn't doing AMD any favours here from a purchase point of view.

[MartyG]

Orders open at 2pm GMT apparently, but they're expected to sell out at 2.05pm GMT due to lack of availability (despite AMD claiming otherwise).

Available to buy from scalpers on eBay at 2.06pm GMT though.

Still no reviews available, so looks like these aren't going to go up until after the launch.

Shame on AMD for doing this.

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Yep - that went about as well as expected. Of course you couldn't buy a card even if you wanted to without knowing how they perform.

The reviews are coming in now at least, will have a look in a bit.

Edit Edit - having seen the reviews now, yeah, you want an RTX3080, no wonder they did a review embargo until the moment of launch.

They're good, but they're well behind on the raytracing. Massively behind in fact - so if that's your main interest you want team green. It's hit and miss on raster and the 6800XT draws more power from the wall than the 3080. No doubting that both Team Red and Team Green are destroying the previous gen cards. If ray tracing isn't in your remit, you're probably not going to be disappointed with the performance of either brand.

And so the scalp begins: https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/AMD-Radeo...oAAOSwaAdftS2q

No one was shocked that day :/

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[Digfox]

Seems like a a very 'unfun' launch, even if everything sold out. I did check OCUK at 2pm and couldn't even get past the captcha system they put in place to stop bots. The website was unresponsive.

It seems that today was reference 'blower' cards only, with AIB Partner cards due next week. I noticed a staff member on Overclocker's Forums mention some of these cards today are one-time only stock so won't be in stock again, although they didn't mention which brands.

UK prices seem awful again and way above MSRP.

[MartyG]

On eBuyer they were between £649 and £699 for the XT card. Not really interested in the non-XT, it's not priced well IMO when compared to the RTX3070 (even if it is slightly higher raster performance).

I couldn't even get to a basket this time - CCL Online didn't even bother listing them (and still haven't). Pretty disappointing really given AMD's hubris over availability compared to NVIDIA.

Mind, I can't get hold of a Zen 3 Ryzen CPU either, so my replacement gaming PC is currently short of two critical components: a graphics card and CPU.

The EVGA Supernova Gold PSU looks nice tho.

[Digfox]

Ouch, hope your luck changes.

It seems OCUK had their 6800XT's at £80 above MSRP (£599.99). Not great.

Traditionally AIB cards have always been more expensive so that might not bode well next week (i.e. £700-900 AIB 6800XTs). Just an awful time to be buying tech.

PS. Appreciate these 68xx AMD cards aren't 'blowers' but the reference cards always used to be. Force of habit.

[MartyG]

The Hardware Unboxed review of the RX6800 was pretty postive

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y26liH-poM

I can help but think that the driver support and DLSS 2.0 make the RTX3070 a better buy though, despite the smaller VRAM buffer, so I'm not sure I agree with the conclusion. The advantage that SAM currently has will disappear once NVIDIA gets that working on the new cards, so we can expect a performance uplift that will push the 3070 above that of the 6800.

The power draw measures from Hardware Unboxed are at odds with Gamers Nexus though - GN were showing a higher system draw with the AMD cards.

[speedlolita]

The EVGA Supernova Gold PSU looks nice tho.

I've got a Platinum EVGA and it's been solid for 5 years now, even came with a 10 year warranty. Believe their better lines are made by Super Flower who are pretty much the best power supply manufacturer alongside Seasonic.

Card availability right now is stupid. If you're not prepared to pay more than RRP, or you're not an influencer you're not getting one.

[MartyG]

I've got a Platinum EVGA and it's been solid for 5 years now, even came with a 10 year warranty. Believe their better lines are made by Super Flower who are pretty much the best power supply manufacturer alongside Seasonic.

Card availability right now is stupid. If you're not prepared to pay more than RRP, or you're not an influencer you're not getting one.

Yeah :/ - the recent hardward releases have been awful. When I bought the GTX1080 at launch there weren't anywhere near the bot problems of late. I'm definitely not prepared to pay scalper money.

I've ended up buying a used Ryzen 7 3700X temporarily and will use my 1080 until I can get hold of a 5800X & RTX3080 readily, but I'm not really expecting it to be much of an uplift from a 6700K for gaming. It should help with the video editing/transcoding though.

[dataDave]

**** you Nvidia. The lengths I had to go through to get this... Including having it shipped to a random address in the hopes that I could divert it to a drop-off point post process.

[wakka]

That snake looks ray traced.

[dataDave]

Quake II RTX is really quite impressive, from a technical standpoint. It's a supremely polished turd.

[fishbowlhead]

The lengths you went to to get that card and you played, quake 2 🤣. Could of got yourself a Ps5 with a few games for less.

[speedlolita]

Trying to start a flame war?

[dataDave]

The lengths you went to to get that card and you played, quake 2 🤣. Could of got yourself a Ps5 with a few games for less.

Naturally. If nothing else it's a great benchmarking tool for hardware capable of ray tracing. It was making my system take off at a lowly 60fps. The global illumination on display is something else entirely, and not really able to be pulled off as well on any other hardware out there right now.

Besides, I'd have to wait X number of months to play an inferior version of Cyberpunk if I went with the PS5. That's next, though.

[eastyy]

Funnily enough i felt Quake and Quake 2 were a bit overrated at the time, I remember starting Quake 1 and thinking....this is a lot of Brown and the enemies were pretty generic.


when it came to raytracing i joked " cannot wait for Pong RTX without Rtx a billion fps a second with Rtx 5 fps