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Don't know if I would call it a Switch killer. Let's count how many technically superior handhelds have taken a dirtnap at the hands of Nintendo. It's not about technical superiority. It's about mass appeal and I don't see the Steam Deck managing to appeal to a wider audience than the Switch. Still, it's pretty cool and even though I don't care much about handhelds... competition is always good. But Valve doesn't have the best track record of hardware support.

Unfortunately, I'm not much of a Linux guy. Too much of what I do doesn't work in Linux. However, if MS continues doing the BS they're doing, I might start playing with a dual boot.

I finally watched it not too long ago, since it was the only movie in the official Avengers timeline that I hadn't seen. It was alright, not terrible. Torn on which version of The Hulk is "better" but it was worth seeing for continuity's sake, if nothing else.

There's more than enough evidence that it CAN. However, I think it's benefit is highly dependent on skill level, and how much it's going to help, but it definitely helps. Also, this can depend on your eyes. It might not help a lot because of variances in people's eyes, so this can change from person to person. I know that I can tell the difference between gaming at 60Hz vs. 100Hz. I have a hard time much past 120Hz and being able to tell the difference. Also, I'm noticeably more accurate at higher refresh than I am at 60Hz.

From a technical standpoint, absolutely, yes. You can tell a difference, provided other factors line up. Other factor can effect the law of diminish returns to the point of it being irrelevant depending on the person.

Yeah, it will have a 1080 Ti so it can play Crisis just fine. However, I'm building this machine as an editing and encoding rig that I also game on. I'll make use of the cores. Also, newer games seem to be showing that even six cores can become a limitation. So, it looks like developers are really starting to optimize games for more than four cores.

Yep, I use them to play older PC games. The one with 3.11 was my first computer. I always thought it was a pile of crap growing up, but it still runs perfect. And yeah, both are isolated from my network, let alone the internet.

Thought I would give you an update. I did not by the 2970WX as there's some latency due to the architecture begin designed to work best with octa channel memory. I ended up going with the 2950X. Still in the build process.

Generally Amazon and Newegg for me. If I had Fry's or Micro Center, I would go there too. I usually go to PC Partpicker to check prices and occasionally I'll buy from other sites to get the best deal.

Prices are getting close to where they were about two years ago. Hell, I got a new case for one of my systems and decided to upgrade because prices on RAM are pretty damn good.

Everything save for the two old systems are running Win 10. The older two are running 3.11 and Win 98.

@Polygon - I'm looking into Sonic Mania... I've been jonesing for the games since you mentioned it.  Still playing it?

If you liked the ones on the Genesis you'll love Mania. I'm still playing and I love it. It really scratches that nostalgia itch for me while being fresh and not some rehash. I can't recommend it enough.

Besides whipping my nieces and nephews butts at Mario Kart 8 I tried to play through the first Castlevania over the weekend. Coun't beat Dracula's second form. :/

I love the competition too. I can't justify buying the 32 core regardless of how much I want to. I think it's interesting how Intel has seemingly given up on HEDT, for now, and are just handing that section of the market over to AMD. Then again, cannibalizing your Xeon's to sell in the consumer market might have been more of a drain on money then it was worth.

@Polygon - What did you do for your Stagnated Channel?

Mostly retro game related stuff. I liked to repair and mod stuff. I did some other videos, but I'm dropping all the other crap moving forward. Going to focus on hardware, repairs, mods on consoles and PCs, centered on gaming. Might do hardware reviews as well. I'll have to see on that one.

I have a Twitter account for my stagnated YouTube channel. I don't really use it. That may change when I start making videos again, but I might have to make a new Titter account for that. I've thought of making a personal account as well. I just don't know if I would really use it.

Well, let's just say that I'll be getting the 24 core Threadripper when it releases. AMD is really knocking it out of the park and is gaining a lot of market share. Confidence is up and so are stock prices.

Threadripper is now in it's own little bubble since it seems that Intel is abandoning HDET CPUs. So, it looks like they decided not to try and make a 28 core enthusiast level CPU. Instead the i9 is now the i7 and the i7 is now kind of an i5 with more cores since they will no longer have hyper threading. So, it seems that they're just giving that small niche to AMD and let's be honest, it's not a big money maker for Intel. We'll see how it works for AMD. At least their prices are more reasonable.

I think that price is where Intel is going to have to try and compete. The whole higher IPC and better single core performance arguments only matter to a small group of people. Most people are more concerned with price, to a point. Low cost and high performance is going to be more enticing to the masses. Still, desktop component sales are not a huge segment of the CPU market. Enterprise... servers, is. With the latest earnings and proof that market share is shifting, confidence is growing in AMD and Epyc might be a force to be reckoned with for the Xeon. If AMD undercuts Intel like they've been doing in the consumer market, all while offering a CPU that consumes less power and runs cooler, Intel might need to start worrying.

All of that coupled with the fact that they're having trouble with 10nm, the whole 28 core debacle, and the "firing" of Krzanich, Intel is not in a great position right now and it feels like they're scrambling to try to keep one step ahead in terms of performance, and really that mostly just in games. They've still been playing the game like they don't have any competition. I think the fact that Krzanich didn't see this coming, didn't react accordingly, as well as some other poor decisions like the misleading 28 core presentation and the failure of 10nm was why is he was told to step down. The relationship was merely an excuse to save face.

This coming from someone with like nine computers, all running Intel... for now.

I haven't had time to play anything substantially lately, but I did start playing Sonic Mania finally and the nostalgia is killing me. I really like how they managed to make it feel like a true continuation of the 16 bit games without making it a carbon copy.

Welp, rumors are out. @Polygon you going to grab the 32 core 2990X?

I want one so badly -- compile times would massively improve and it would give an interesting coding challenge to keep all cores busy.

What kind of encoding do you do? From what I heard a bunch of the popular encoders have a relative thread limit?

Yep, I have been waiting for Threadripper+ to launch to build my next system. I already have the case. I would love to have the 2990X because, 32 cores... but I can't justify it at the potential cost of $1,700 and I don't think I'll get a $700 reduction in encode times between it and the 2950X. So, I'm going to opt for the 24 core. Sadly, right now I'm having a dilemma with what to cool it with. There aren't any good air coolers that allow for overclocking, yet. Though I am hopeful for the Dark Rock Pro 4. There's only one AIO that has a TR4 sized cold plate but I'm not sure I trust it after seeing a lot of corrosion issues. The other option is an open loop, which I'm not very apt to jump to right now.

For encoding, I'm using Handbrake and it seems to just eat up cores. It should cut my encode times significantly from my current overclocked 6800K. I also use Lame which I don't see really benefiting much, if at all. Not like it matters since encodes finish in 15 seconds on average right now. I've been using Power Director for some time now and I don't think it would benefit at all from the better processor becaise it's just a garbage program. Thus, I'm moving to DaVinci Resolve for editing. I thought about going Premier, but it would be a waste on an AMD platform. This should also last me longer than this 6800K has, which is about a year and a half at this point.

This is one I'm interested in playing even though I've never played any other titles in the series. I'm going to wait for it to come down in price or buy it used though.

I don't play the PS4 all that much. That being said I installed a 2TB HDD in mine. That's probably the smallest I think should be in a modern console.

I have so many, I'll just name the bigger ones.

I'm very into computers, so much so, that it started out as a hobby in middle school and turned into a profession. Another big one is cars. I'm a huge gear head. I guess I just like working with machines. I enjoy fixing them, modifying them, and ultimately... driving them in ways that generally aren't legal on the street. I'm an amateur photographer. Mostly like to take pictures of cars and landscapes and I've been dabbling in videography as well. I like another kind of shooting, though I wouldn't call it a hobby so much... but I'm big into guns. I love to go shooting and I'm a very big proponent of the 2A and the entirety of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. Since I like working with machines, I actually enjoy cleaning them too.

There are quite a few others, that are less notable.

Haven't seen it, but planning to go. I was saying that if they don't play Dust in the Wind by Kansas during the credits, it am going to be upset.

Cool, thanks for the list. I'll check it out.

As for console 4K, a lot of games are starting to do native, not all of course but as devs get more experience, you'll see that number increase. I agree, upscaling in any form is not as good as native but devs can have console do upscaling and PC go native. Yes, cost at the moment is prohibitive to some players but once these new video cards come out, I see that being less and less. I guess we'll seee in a year or two.

No problem.

While the new nVidia cards should improve things with 4k, it still won't get near the 100+ FPS and that is something the people with the money to buy those components really cares about. Plus, a 4k monitor that does more than 60Hz is really expensive. If 4k takes of for PC gaming, I think it's going to be at least a year before it does.

Is there a list? I would be interesting in seeing to see if it makes sense for me to go ultrawide (and if there isn't a list, maybe we should start one on this board.) I do like having the extra real estate for work as well like Targetrasp mentioned.

Consoles aren't that powerful but devs are still making it happen one way or another because it's a great bullet point to have on the box. The latest 1080Ti/Vega64 graphics cards come really close at playing a lot of newer games in 4K/60FPS as well. I see that gap become even smaller with the newer cards this year.

Here's a list, not sure how complete it is.

http://www.wsgf.org/mgl/uws

But yeah, they're making it work on consoles with things like checkerboard rendering and upscaling. There's no comparison between native 4k and what they're doing on consoles. The cost to play native 4k @ 60FPS is very high and most PC guys seem to be more interested in higher frame rates with a higher refresh that 4k resolution. That's different for consoles since 21:9 TVs aren't really a thing. However, I'm seeing more and more people connect their latest gen consoles to monitors.

I think I've suffered from assuming bloggers talking about what type of monitor they prefer knew what they were talking about when it came to resolution and aspect ration. I also think marketing makes the pure technical definition muddy...


I grabbed this off of some wiki site:


720p = 1280 x 720 - is usually known as HD or "HD Ready" resolution
1080p = 1920 x 1080 - is usually known as FHD or "Full HD" resolution
1440p = 2560 x 1440 - commonly known as QHD or Quad HD resolution, and typically seen on gaming monitors and on high-end smartphones. 1440p is four times the resolution of 720p HD or "HD ready".
2160p = 3840 x 2160 - commonly known as 4K, UHD or Ultra HD resolution. It's a very large display resolution and it's found on high-end TVs and monitors. 2160p is called 4K because it offers four times the pixels of 1080p FHD or "Full HD".
4320p = 7680 x 4320 - is known as 8K and it offers 16 times more pixels than the regular 1080p FHD or "Full HD" resolution.


The above is only in 16x9 aspect ration correct? 4k isn't the vertical pixels (not even sure how i'd got that notion in my head), its 4 times the total pixels of full HD (8 million ish).. So theoretically 4k can be offered in any aspect ratio including whatever aspect ration people are calling ultrawide.

3840 x 1600 is an ultrawide aspect ration but resolution wise is a little more than 6 million pixels, i've seen LG call this UHD, but not slap the 4k sticker on it...

Yes, those above resolutions are all 16:9 aspect ratios. As for 3840x1600, that is a 21:9 ultrawide. Ultrawides are a little tougher as the resolution can vary greatly with the size. The 3840x1600 resolution would be used on something around a 38" monitor. My 3440x1440 monitor is a 34" and as they get smaller, they can get down to 2560x1080. Something like 3440x1440 is considered a 2.5K I believe.

Ultrawides will only gain traction if game devs start supporting it more. Because of consoles, you're probably going to see more games have 4K resolutions over ultrawide aspect ratios. However, I wouldn't be suprised if 2160p ultrawide monitors become more of a thing.

You might be surprised at how many games support 21:9, and that list is growing. Plying games at 4k isn't really feasible. Even top end computers struggle to do it at 60FPS at the elusive high, and above, settings. Consoles can't even do 4k natively.

I honestly have my reservations about 4k monitors being the next big thing for computers. I really think it's going to be ultrawides.

I've been waiting for a considerable drop and I bought it the other day. I've played the hell out of the first one. Though I never really played much MP. I really liked the survival mode and since I only paid $5 for it, I really got a lot out of it. With this one I'll be excited to play the single player mode as well as try some new survival levels.

I never finished the single player campaign and I'd really like to go back and complete it.

Right now, my main PC is a 3440x1440 and I have no desire to move up to 4k. I'll be using an ultrawide into the distant future. Both my backup PC and game room PC are on 1080p.

970 can't keep up with high res textures since it only has 4GB of memory and even then, it's split up as 3.5GB and .5GB. If memory usage goes beyond 3.5GB then it has to access the rest, which is slower than the bigger memory pool. I don't know why Nvidia thought that was a good idea but it hurt them for sure once people found out.

I wish I could have seen that conversation when someone assured the higher ups that there was no way anyone would figure it out. Then again, you have to consider that nVidia is pretty pretentious as a company. They figure they can do no wrong. the partner program was a prime example of that.

I haven't too much. I've been pretty happy with my LG 34" ultrawide. I would like to move to something that can do 100Hz+ with GSync but I can't find anything that does but also has good color accuracy as I use this for production work as well that I wouldn't have to hock a kidney to buy. I've kinda of given up looking. :/