Been a while since we who remain did a battle station thread, and I'm wondering what QGL's gear looks like these days.

This is me:

https://i.imgur.com/O5TLgVl.jpg

I wall mounted my gear with open mining frames to get it out of my way and to make maintenance easier. There's minimal dust that high and what there is gets hit with a can of air every week or so.

The desk is motorised for sit/stand and ranges in between, the wheels are on casters so I can get to the wall.

I have 4 machines mounted, a dual-Xeon server as well as workstation, mining, and test rigs.

Edited the pic, had to crop out a fb chat.

Main system (workstation) specs:

i9 12900k - because it goes broom broom
Thermaltake bigole 240mm AIO cooler because Intel wants to burn my house down
2080ti - skipped 30-series because so exxy!
6700xt - second GPU for multiboxing
32Gb RAM but considering moving to 64 as I use all of it with 4 wow instances + browser/media etc

10G switch for workstation and server, gig switch for everything else. House is wired with ethernet so it connects directly to the pfSense router and gateway etc. More on that in another post.

Displays:
AORUS FV43U 4k 144hx 42" main screen, currently showing my local group multibox wow setup
Acer Predator XB241YU in portrait mode; don't recommend this model for the purpose as the narrow vertical viewing range (horizontal when rotated) makes it a bit weird to view in portrait. This seems odd given that it is a rotatable display...

After a couple years of d***ing around, I'm finally really happy with the setup.

So ... !

https://i.imgur.com/CrzXGYx.png

goddamn dude that is so awesome

I am still, embarrassingly, gaming on a laptop, the worst of all life choices. I am still really only playing Dota so it's fine but I have a bunch of games I am keen to play once I upgrade.

I borrowed a mate's spare desktop the other day and was blown away by how much better it was (flat 120fps in Dota all game). It was one of those fancy cases with the RGB lights all over it and it was too huge for my desk. The lighting stuff I find SUPER weird and almost annoying though I get why gamers dig it (SO SHINY), although I want to go full 80s retro and just get a beige box now.

I am gonna be hitting people up for suggestions on GPUs and s*** because I'm so far out of the loop, if anyone has any good recommendations for a decent gaming box - not top shelf but enough that I could play a modern game at 2K res with decent FPS - that'd be awesome.

not top shelf but enough that I could play a modern game at 2K res with decent FPS

I've invested some money and time on this so have some insights (maybe even useful ones). I'm an Intel/NVIDIA snob so Team Red would need to translate.

2k60Hz gaming is really spoiled for choice these days imo. We're moving to an era where rolling high quality settings on 1440/100Hz is the midrange (rather than top end), 4k100Hz+ is the new extreme and 8k being the WTFBBQ (this is happening now on places like Linus' tech Tips). 2k60Hz also means your other gear is probably more than OK too (CPU, memory etc).

You could stick any retail card that cost more than a couple hunge on the wall and throw darts at them. A second-hand 1080ti would be perfect for the job if you don't care about DLSS or ray tracing. The 1080 is amazing, probably the standout value card for the 2010s.

Buying new, an RTX 2060 will cost similar (about $400 dollarydoos at the moment) and smoke 2k60 gaming, with DLSS/RT support (even the early version) and a warranty you even have headroom for a few years come.

If you can wait for the 4-series to drop later this year you'll find new stock 2-series for peanuts and fit maybe a 2070 or 2080 into that price range.

Where do we go now?

This is just personal opinion, and not backed by any insider knowledge, but I think that CPU upgrades will become more important again over the next few years after years of irrelevance.

AMD has pushed the market into a situation where 4 cores are the new baseline, after Intel held us what amounted to dual-core minimum specs for several years. The Steam Hardware Survey has core count these days at 2 (11%), 4 (32%), 8 (18%), 12 (2%). Intel's cheapest 12th generation CPU the i3-12100F comes with 4 cores and 8 threads.

This means that the paradigm of a core available for rendering and a core for logic+OS+other may change. Civ6 players may know the pain of waiting for turns to be computed in late game on large maps while multiple CPU cores are essentially idle.

Speaking from experience multi-threaded programming is really HARD! But in the same way as nature abhors a vacuum, this idle general purpose compute will look for ways to shine beyond being able to play netflix on the 2nd monitor. This extra effort can now be rewarded with an improved experience for most players.

Happy to be wrong but AFAIK its the scripted AI grinding away at each turn that takes time, not rendering frames on the GPU. Without knowing the code-base I wouldn't want to throw shade on Sid's work. It just seemed like the kind of game that could use the extra compute space idle on the CPU.

The C family of languages (to me that's C/C++, C# and Java) will imo be dominant long after I'm dead. I've seen too many languages come and go to bet on anything else.

Will have to un-hide dota in Steam and run a test. Spectator mode will have to do; I don't play dotes anymore because its unhealthy for me lol.

Also while I'm here, what temperature is too hot for a 2080ti?

https://imgur.com/oQ8Lfnv.png

The poor Zotac GPU here gets up to mid-80s when I have everything running at once (5x WoW instances + OBS studio capture + browser window).

e: I get 120+ fps with my gear spectating dota, might drop below that for big fights maybe as it did wander a few FPS here and there.

lol just realised trog probably meant the computer specs I recommended and not my rig .. ^^

This is a video of a guy playing dotes on an RTX 2060 at max settings 4k



Looks decent, dotes is pretty forgiving still it seems. That said trigger warning, its a VOD of a Sniper player but ergh, was all I could find :(

You don't want to see my desk. It's just a 24" and a 34"UW poking up above a pile of mess.

also is it possible to buy a PC case these days that doesn't look like it should be keeping the beat in a really lame nightclub? call me boring but all those LEDs are just ridiculously lame. I'd like a nice small tower that can fit maybe two drives, CPU and GPU and has decent airflow. I don't need something with strobe lights or a glass case.

edit: also it looks like almost all GeForce cards are LHR?! I can see one 3060 on Umart that is not. I don't really need non-LHR but don't want to end up in a situation down the track where it being limited impacts my ability to use it for something else

I find the 2060 Super with 8 - 12 Gb of VRAM is plenty enough to play current gen games at moderate settings with whiz bang features.

The prices of GPUs are dropping nicely now and there was that 1 - 2 year period there where GPUs were insanely expensive so fk all people upgraded, lots of people are upgrading now and 2nd hand 20 series RTX cards and even some 30's are almost worth buying now as that intermediary step.

Although there are also Bitcoin miners dumping the GPUs ever since the arse fell out of those coins in spectacular fashion and also purpose built, non gaming, mining cards are becoming more available and more efficient for those crazy miners out there.
So One needs to be mindful if the 2nd hand GPU was cooked hard, provided they kept it clean and cool enough, it shouldn't be a problem though.

yeh I am getting increasingly keen to buy a new PC. One of the things holding me back is every time I look at 'gaming PCs' they all have this insanely big cases with LEDs. I just want a small plain beige box that can fit 1x SSD, 1x HDD, 1x good GPU and won't overheat. Is there such a thing or do I need to buy one of these giant glass things that are puking rainbow light everywhere these days?

You can still buy those cases. Fractal Design still make the OG style cases. But you probably won't find many retailers using them for their pre-built PCs these days. You would have to buy the parts yourself and build it, or get a custom builder to do it.

Ah yeh something like this looks pretty decent - do I need to worry about cooling with something smaller (assuming I end up getting a pretty decent GPU)? I assume/hope if I get a custom build at Umart they'll be able to tell me if I'm going to run the risk of a meltdown

edit: whoa maybe not that one it is super pricey

edit#2: why are these a******* still making cases with USB2 ports

i pieced together a pretty sick little mini-itx build about 12 months ago, and i'm looking to upgrade it with a new'ish z590 chipset gigabyte motherboard, 32gb ddr4 ram and an i9-12900 just as soon as my tax return drops up ins my bank account.

i've got some pics but they'll blow you away with awesomeness and will probably melt your screen so i dare not post them (i'll post some after i upgrade)

its just running an old mini-itx board with an i5 first gen plonker, 16gb of ddr3 ram and a nice spritely nv 3060ti so it's decent at running any pixels pushed through it

also Homeworld 3 and Starfield soon, woop woop

anyone been playing Overwatch 2 ?

last edited by trillion at 20:57:25 11/Nov/22

last edited by trillion at 20:58:04 11/Nov/22