NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 Series

[gamevet]

EVA’s B stock GPUs have had a recent price cut. You can get an RTX 3070 for under $440 and a 3060 Ti for under $400. And for those 1080p gamers on a tight budget; their RTX 3050 XC is only $229.

https://www.evga.com/Products/produc...+Series+Family

[gamevet]

I've been holding out for a 3090 Ti to drop big time on the used market, but that never happened. Shortly after the announcement of the RTX 4090 and 4080, the prices for the $3090 Ti (Open box Asus Strix 3080 Ti was $935 at MicroCenter) have creeped up to an average of around $1050 on the Buy it now option and the auctions creeped nearly that high as well. So, I jumped on an EVGA RTX 3090 XC3 Ultra for $830 shipped, off of Ebay. It arrived on Saturday. Little did I know, that this card is fucking hot!!! I have to run MSI Afterburner, so I can crank up the fans and drop the frequency by 1,000 Mhz on the VRAM, because they are excessively hot (I might pull off the backplate, to replace the VRAM thermal pads with copper pads), even on the founder's edition. I didn't realize that this card's cooler was much smaller than that of EVGA's FTW3 card.

This should have been my 1st hint, when I compared it to my Asus Strix RTX 3060 Ti, that shares the same cooler as their Strix 3090.




And here's the Graphics card boxes next to each other. I had to do some serious PC cooling changes to get that Strix in my desktop PC, while the XC3 looked tiny in my full tower connected to the 4K display in the living room. Maybe I'll post that in the "Looking to Build a PC" thread.

[Frogacuda]

I've really been itching to build a new PC. I think I might go ahead and build the base system and keep my old RTX 2070 (I know...) and then buy a video card next year when the sub-$1000 cards drop.

[Opaque]

I pulled the trigger and went big on a new PC, ordered everything today, coming over the next week or so depending on the source.

i9-13900k
128GB of DDR5 5200MHz
3 2TB Samsung 9080 Pro M.2 NVMe SSD (one for boot and 2 to replace my current 2 storage drive)
GTX 3080

Plus new motherboard, case, PSU and coolers etc. I don't even have a 4k computer monitor, and not really sure I want to play games on a computer monitor when my TV is 10 feet away. Trying to figure out if/how I could best run an HDMI cable from the PC to that without it looking terrible. Also sounds like for the distance I'd need it to cover, probably needs to be a 1 way fiber based HDMI 2.1 cable or it'll just digital artifact like crazy when playing games in 4k.

Edit: totally bought the cord and a switch to make this work. It's funny to me that 15 years ago I was excited about a high bandwidth HDMI cord I got for free form a Mosnter rep and got torn to shit, and now it's common knowledge that if you want 4k 120Hz over 25 feet you better get the right cord or it will fail. That cord was only like $40 though. The future is rad.

[gamevet]

Fiber based? It’s made of copper and likely gold plated, with individually shielded conductors and another shield wrapped around the cables under the outer jacket.

I bought a 10’ HDMI 2.1a (rated for 8k) for about $20 from Walmart, to run 4K/120Hz in the living room. The previous HDMI (hi-speed) wouldn’t do more than 60Hz and the PC didn’t recognize that it was connected to an HDR display, or G-Sync. I also figured out why my 3090 was running so hot. The 3rd fan on the EVGA card won’t kick in, until you run their Precision X software. It’s much cooler now.

Nice PC, BTW!

[Opaque]

So the claim is that they're fiber optic core, and it only runs one direction. Found a lot of them and a lot of write ups about them being a thing, bought this one to try:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09TFNBSVJ...hk_typ_imgToDp

And yeah, I'm excited. My current syustem has been such a trooper for everyday work running a i7 2600k and 16GB of DDR3 with the OS on a Gen 3 SSD and a GTX980. But, the pure MATH of the difference in all the hardware of my current set up and what is coming, is nuts. I'm excited to mess with PC gamepass on a 4K 65" TV, especially for shit like Starfield next year.

[gamevet]

I've seen those one direction HDMI cables. But I don't think that those were the same things as what you posted.

It must have a small fiber transceiver built into it, because the ends are gold plated copper.

Yeah, you're gonna be blown away by it. Seeing Forza Horizon 5, with all the settings cranked up and not a stutter in frame rate will put a smile on your face.

I've been subbed to Gamepass for nearly 2 years. It's a better deal than any streaming media service, by a long ways.

[Opaque]

For the record, I'm getting 4k 60FPS on the TV with that 25 foot cable and it's pretty great. Computer does not give a fuck about running 4k over to the 4th screen while the other screens are up, it's rad.

The future is neat.

[gamevet]

You need to try out the Witcher 3 with Ray Tracing. All you have to do is hit Alt-F3 and the filter menu (Geforce Experience) will show up. Just scroll down to SSRTGI (or something like that), highlight it and it turns it on. You can click on it again to adjust the level from low to high.