Didn't know it caused GPU prices to rise. But it makes sense I think.
Anyway, a friend of mine and I had a discussion about bitcoin mining a while back, and itstead of looking up how it actually worked, we spent an entire evening speculating about it, which prompted me the next day to look up what your PC is actually doing when your 'mining' bitcoins. And I found a site that explains it rather well, so if you're interested, here's the link.
@Octane But...why are GPU prices escalating because people are.....doing what exactly....to get free pseudo money....by just participating in a distributed computing exercise? That makes no sense to me at all (with admittedly huge knowledge gaps on the subject.)
@YummyHappyPills LOL, the mental gyrations around a PC/XBox thread, the market price of GPUs, bitcoin, and tying that all in a Thathcher bow is making my head hurt.
@NEStalgia Don't quote me on this, but mining bitcoins means you're doing a lot of complicated maths (dividing and multiplying big prime numbers and the likes, the stuff you can't do on paper) which I presume is quite taxing on the GPU (correct me if I'm wrong). People want bigger or more GPUs in that case; the demand for GPUs increases, and so does their price.
'Professional' bitcoins miners have rooms, or sometimes an entire building, filled with computers to mine bitcoins.
@Yorumi Yeah, I forgot about OC until Plywood brought it up, and I realized I hadn't commented. In many PC gaming circles OC is simply assumed standard procedure, so Plywoods recommendations may not be applicable as-is. Though he's all-in on the Ryzen setup and he's probably right to sit back and watch it unfold. Then I can start this topic again in 2 years after sitting back and watching Ryzen veer around
Cloud saves. Such a shame, the only device I have any real use for cloud saves on is Switch. And it's the only one without it
Personally I try not to think too much of "long term" support for games. With ever changing hardware and drivers and patches, I tend to not assume a game will work forever on PC any more than games with required patches on a console that shuts down. I'm surprised some older games do work still, and it's a good perk, but I don't think I'd base decisions on that aspect.
And yeah, I know plywood's going the whole "the future tech and upgrade path is x!" route...he's not wrong...but that's also a lifestyle I'd never return to and only am showing interest now due to an impression the world looks more like you describe it and less like the way he describes it (which is how it was in the late 90's and early '00s.) Trying to plot along future tech to save money later usually ends up just costing more, in my experience. It LOOKS future proof, except for that ONE detail that makes it not really a good plan. I remember buying into AGP. And then the AMD socket, forget which one that was future proof! And it was!! Except it only supported x memory speed so the next upgrade would "work" but didn't make much sense to not replace it all anyway, etc because it would be bottlenecked. That ryzen setup he described coming out next month sounds cool. And upgradable (maybe).....but "next months' tech!" is never fun. I was a SATA early adopter. That was not fun.
Of course with the whole crypto thing....I do wonder when GPUs will be buyable. FWIW my current Haswell box has an HD6870 from 2012.... The THIRD card bought for that system because the first two died out within a year or two. Which may have been taken out by an iffy PSU that finally died mid-use years later after rare, random spontaneous power-downs for years that seemed inexplicable. And I rarely even ran any games on it.
@Yorumi@Octane So, basically it's distributed encryption-breaking by unknown shadowy operators where participants don't mind contributing to the encryption-breaking because they don't know what they're processing and they don't need to know and smart people don't ask questions, they just take the money, all operated under the light of day with conveniently laundered, investment manipulated funds?
I can't imagine how every institution keeps getting breached.
@NEStalgia Yeah... Well, before I jump off the boat, I honestly wonder why that always comes up here and there in the various topics. In general, most controllers nowadays are pretty ergonomic anyways, there's just a difference in button and stick placement and the response/feel of those controls, but other than that, they should fit most hands.
Mine aren't giant-sized, nor are they small, so I guess I'm the average Joe, and I can comfortably use all these controllers, which naturally makes me think that someone criticizing any of them, must either have BF hands, or teeny-tiny ones. Or some deficiency that makes them cramp up when holding a controller for too long.
I can play for hours on end with any of my controllers, even with the much criticized Wii U Game Pad, without any bodily damage, let alone any mental damage...
As for those Xbox Live prices: I've literally NEVER bought the official cards, so you can definitely take my word for it that you don't have to take those ridiculous official prices into account. It's also not season- or moment bound, just a simple matter of mixing and matching a certain number of online code purchasing sites, and they offer deals the whole year round, for both consoles and even for certain PC content. I'm VERY much in the know concerning these things, since I always hunt them down vigorously, not just for myself, but also for friends and family.
The cheapest I've paid is around €32, which now comes down to $39,27 but was less back then. Still, $40 is easily possible, and like I said it's possible to find deals anytime of the year.
Currently, most prices for Xbox Live are slightly over $40, but they literally change every month, which is why I keep tabs on all of them to get the best deals. And all those sites are also good for PS4 and PC deals as well, so you can already use them now.
Oh, and as for my upload speeds on the Xbox One S... phew!!! Like a rocket...
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
@ThanosReXXX I admit that when under stress, such as any challenging video game, I tend to crush handheld objects until you can hear the plastic/wood/metal creaking and weakening. My childhood music teachers had a blast with that So the hand grip size does matter to prevent hand cramping/wrist issues. X1/X360/SwPro are good at that. Dual Shock, not so much.
Neat links. I would never EVER plug a credit card into one, but they take Paypal so I'm good. Oh, look, they also take Bitcoin! Excuse me while I order 20+ GPUs.....
Yeah....PSN....nobody has ever accused it of being fast. Or tolerable. But showing a 1.5 upload is pretty lame....I'd have thought itw as a problem with my ethernet cable, but that wouldn't allow download to be many times that
@NEStalgia No, there's nothing shady about it, at least not in theory. There's a limit on how many bitcoins can exist in total: 21 million, there are a little over 12 million in circulation right now. It's a simple demand and supply equation, and they are pricey these days. You can either buy them, and sell them when their value increases, or you can mine them, until they've reached the 21 million threshold.
Because it's a currency with no bank, there's nobody to check on the transactions. That's were mining comes into play. You're basically 'selling' you computational power to verify transactions, making sure nothing goes wrong and making sure people aren't creating bitcoins artificially on their own. In turn, you get rewarded with bitcoins, and that's how more of them enter the market.
@Yorumi My points are fair, and they relate exactly to what @NEStalgia was asking/wondering about. All I did is supply him with the right information.
And yes, you can build a PC for roughly the same money, or slightly more, than an Xbox One X, but the console will still perform better on average, because all the parts are more in tune and the programming is done closer to the metal, so a console with the same specs as a certain spec PC should nearly always outperform that PC.
Those UHD media players for PC also aren't cheap, so that would also be an added cost if you wanted to add that to your rig.
And my point concerning multi-player stands: you're not going to reach that $800 price point that you mentioned, so that's complete BS. At most, you'd get to $700, but that's console and online play included for a whole 5 years, and what I also forgot is the 4 games free per month, 2 Xbox 360 titles and 2 Xbox One titles. Currently, I've downloaded 60 (Xbox One-only) games on the Xbox One, and most of them are full blown triple A titles, and about 10 - 15 of them are the Xbox's equivalent of Nintendo's eShop titles.
They may not be the newest games, obviously, but still: the total amount of those extra games is around $700 per year, as per Microsoft's own official statements. But let's take a lower average and say it is more something around $500 - $600. That's still a pretty good deal. So, factor in the cost of the subscription vs those benefits, and try and find a similar replacement for THAT on PC.
There isn't any: there's the odd Steam deal and the monthly Humble Bundles, but they aren't included with the system or the online subscription, so you'd have to pay extra for those.
@Octane While I'm not at all a fan of banking cartels, that whole system doesn't make even the slightest bit of sense (to be fair neither does the standard financial system....all of it is imaginary "money" that exists only so long as people believe it exists.) I realize even the USD is a currency backed by nothing and exists entirely in pixie dust and unicorn dreams but in theory it at least represents the national GDP (har har). Bitcoins honestly sound like it represents itself only and was willed into being. That selling the service of transaction verification somehow produces deflationary expansion defies all reason. I was all for new currencies in concept....especially if it was actually backed by something new other than the foundations of the central banks......but this sounds like simple madness that people actually accept as payment. And I didn't think it was possible to get even more mad than fiat currency.
Though I do imagine it's quite shady on the inside.....there's not many reasons you'd need to crunch that many big numbers. Plus bitcoins are VERY often used as payment for anonymous services....
@Yorumi Yeah, that's the philosophy I'd want to adopt in PC. Plywood represents my OLD PC gaming self like a ghost haunting me from my past. I understand what he's saying TOO well...that's what's wrong with it
As for crypto....ahhhh, now we get to it.....they take payments in central bank fiat currency in exchange for their imaginary currency! So they get real money while they peddle fake money. It all makes sense now...
@NEStalgia It's definitely going off-topic here, but now that everybody's talking about it: you won't see me ever touching a single bitcoin, not even with a ten foot pole. A lot of them are used by criminals (there's a good reason why Bitcoin is also the go to currency on the Dark Web), people get locked out of accounts/codes and what not (as it so happens, there was a whole documentary about it on TV the other week) and you'd have to seriously invest to get something interesting out of it.
Nah, I'll just stick to my card and real money, none of that shady, unpredictable stuff for this old Titan...
'The console wars are like boobs: Sony and Microsoft fight over which ones look the nicest and Nintendo's are the most fun to play with.'
I'm also trying to keep in mind that Nestea has "the curse."
Legend speaks of a horrible disaster that befell one who was chosen to bear an incomparable burden. A calamity so unspeakably tragic that it makes grown men and violins weep. A misfortune so great that it turns the greatest among us into straight jacket burritos wandering amongst a sea of pillows. Even to think of it makes me feel faint. Yes, this is how I know Nestea has mental fortitude rivaling the divine, but he has not come out of it unscathed. I'm the opposite, things come together for me with PC building intuitively, even though it may take time. I wouldn't know what to do with myself if I had to go through what Nestea did, lol
Well, GTX 1080 will last a while, but next year MCM (multi chip module) GPU's will become the beginning of a new standard, and this year Intel is teaming up with AMD for Vega-based iGPU's. Intel is kinda giving up on iGPU's, which is a huge win for AMD. Landscapes are changing, and to me that makes this a more exciting time than it has been for almost a decade! (You can probably tell I'm biased in favor of AMD at this point, but I liked my Core i5-750 and i7-870, lasted 7 years put together.)
@Yorumi Yeah....the trouble with the way they print money now isn't necessarily the deflationary nature of it, but their distribution of it is no longer one of introducing it to the market but as direct injections into the banks, or worse, the stock market. It's like a badly deformed reimagining of supply-side theory (speaking of Thatcher.) where all new assets are moved to the existing holders.....much like what the fixed supply of Bitcoin would do. Only worse because it deflates the holdings of everyone else. That's not how the idea was supposed to work.
Such irony we're down to talking about gold and silver as an alternative when that was supposed to be what the money represented to begin with. The fiat system never made much more sense than bitcoin from the start. Yet it's STILL less idiotic than currency representing nothing but computation power. If even that.
@PlywoodStick It's true....so true. I can build a $500 PC for just under $1900 by the time all the failures are sorted out!
"will become the beginning of a new standard"
But that's the thing. That's when it BEGINS. But it's not there yet. It's not refined yet. And the next year everyone's talking about how gen 1 wasn't a REAL version of it, it was still using parts from the old stuff! It no longer counts as the new thing! It's more like the old one with some other stuff from the current stuff.
Can't pull the wool over my eyes, no siree bobcat!
@Yorumi AMD was never particularly good. It was very very "budget" (read:bad) until the Athlon (I proudly jumped ship to the original Athlon at the time.....burned hotter than a nova but trounced intel.) But it wasn't that AMD was good. It was that Intel wet their bed with Coppermine and RAMBUS making AMD seem good when it was really that AMD was less bad for less. And then after that wave Intel picked up again and AMD stayed in place during that time you mention. If AMD is really pulling ahead this time it would be the first time ever in actuality. Maybe they're doing it. Hard to have faith though.
Yeah that model you describe with eGPU is awesome....I loved the idea when I first discovered it. I think we're a few generations away from that reality still. There's too many issues where TB3 ports do work with eGPU, don't work, work but with issues....
@NEStalgia That's because you can't trace the transactions. It's perfect for shady business, but I don't think the concept of the currency itself is shady. Either way, real money, the physical coins and papers, is being replaced by digital transactions too. So it's not too different in theory.
Gold and silver may work, but once they're able to synthetically create gold and silver, it's pointless too
The reason you need to crunch those numbers is because mining itself doesn't get you any bitcoins. My memory is a bit hazy on this, but it works like a lottery. You use your computer to verify transactions, to get a chance of winning bitcoins. And the lottery is solving difficult equations. The computer that can do the most calculations has the biggest chance of winning. It's weird, and I don't fully understand it either, but that's sort of how it works.
@skywake I saw your list of Aussie music and thought I’d add Closure In Moscow. You’ll thank me later 😉
On a more serious note, of course it depends on what music you like, but if you’re into groovy, experimental proggish rock you’ll enjoy the hell out of them, especially the latest album (Pink Lemonade, 2014).
Also, I got to see them live at the (for now) only gig they played here in Italy and they kick sooooooo much ass! I was lucky nobody knows them as there were something like 30 people so I got to know them in person and their some of the chillest, coolest people you could meet 😄
@Yorumi 1050 is the only viable price point up there. Even 1060 is in the $500+ range, while the whole X1X is $499.
@Octane Technically with the gold standard even if it's synthetically produced that synthesis has a materials cost (maybe you can turn some other base metal into gold somehow, but it's still going to be metal.) so it's just a deflation, like printing more money. Currency based on materials at least has actual value (I'd love to have an infinite stash of copper like China....)
But theory or not, just look at the number crunching logically: They want people throwing crazy hardware budgets to gain as much compute power as possible, to crunch ever more complicated equations....why...because Math is totally Mathematical? It's fun to do math as big as possible so here's a money lottery? They need the number crunching for something....but what could be using all that computational power that's worth giving money out for? "Do as much math as possible for us, and you win a chance for a cash prize." Dollars to donuts it's encryption breaking. The bigger question is who's it for? Anonymous? Beijing? Moscow? Pyongyang? Langley? Someones bankrolling and benefiting this thing. "We want what we want, dark web be darned".....sounds about right.
@Yorumi Top end Samsung phones already have that dock thing they can become a desktop with. People have been clamoring for a laptop shell. No reason not to make it. But they don't. Adding eGPU is still a long way off though. Pretty sure it won't run Steam though
@Yorumi Well phones (usually) are already open. Well, not Apple. Apple's gotta Apple. But Android phones, (mostly) you can build your own Android (real Android, not Google's half proprietary Android) from whatever branch and install it on any phone without a locked bootloader (I.E. non a carrier branded phone, or at least an out of contract one. And currently VZW doesn't lock any bootloaders.) I haven't done it yet, but it's a thing. Can't really do non-Android, mostly because no other OS actually supports the hardware. If it did, you could.
Forums
Topic: PC vs X1X Cost Effectiveness
Posts 81 to 100 of 192
This topic has been archived, no further posts can be added.