majestic

Well, this just in: I really am the only person on the planet who has Vampire the Masquerade - Bloodlines, did not mind the jank and yet did not find joy in it.

The RX 7600 reference models apparently cannot be used with some of the 6+2 PCI-E cables. They can still be plugged in enough to work, but not fully. Yeah, they'll probably not burn off like not properly pluged in 12VHPWR cables, but it is something to keep in mind if someone would want to buy one. Not sure why anyone would want that, though - the 6650 XT is clearly better in price/performance, and getting a decent deal on a 6700 (XT) will last a good while longer.

Well, just to expand that a little, having "issues" with older games basically just means sub-par performance in certain titles while it can match or surpass much pricier cards (including the RX 7600) in others, but we're almost always talking about more than playable performance in 1080p. Well, outside of turning on every bell and whistle in current console ports, but those choke an RX 7600 to death just as much. There are some really strange outliers like Rainbow Six: Siege where the RX 7600 pulls 60% ahead of the ARC 750, but we're talking about 230 vs. 400fps here. Kinda pointless. Edit: Intel's first attempt at ray tracing also beats even RDNA3's capabilities. Not that this in particular would matter in your use cases, but it just adds to the Intel outing being a pretty good first attempt, majorly hamstrung by software.

Nope, looking at generational increases, actual mid-range perfomance moved to the $600 point with the RXT 4070, a card that should cost $400 and be called RTX 4060 (maybe TI) and would be an amazing deal for that prize. Although, with nVidia's and AMD's marketing campaign for the Intel ARC kicking into full gear, perhaps Intel can convince their shareholders to let them continue making discrete graphics cards. If, uhm, it is not too late already. So perhaps that'll come down in the future. Even so, the A750 for $199 looks like a decent enough deal, but it does still have driver issues with older games.

Yeah, comparing the RX 6650 XT's Navi 23 with the Navi 33 configuration of the RX 7600, they're pretty similar outside of Navi 33 clocking slightly slower and having a little more memory bandwith. That's not exactly impressive. The generational boost over the RX 6600 seems to come from adding shaders and compute units more than improvements in the architecture. Basically just what they did with the 6650 XT anyway, to similar results. Guess those additional TFLOPS AMD boasts on the spec sheet over the 6650 XT were all stuffed into the AI accelerators. Level1Tech put the reference model RX 7600 into a small form factor case, which results in the hotspot of the card getting to a toasty 103° C. The reference coolers are, again, not really good. Nothing new here though.

Well, as nobody else posted it: Yeah, do not buy Jensen another leather jacket. Sounds ridiculous coming from someone who bought an RTX 4070 TI, but that card was actually pretty okay deal for the price it was selling when I grabbed one. It is less so now that vendors are no longer trying to sell the 7900 XT for 4080 prices. Makes me sad because I originally wanted to get one of those for my nephew, but he's just going to have to tough it out with the RTX 3050 for the time being. Perhaps the RTX 4060 is going to be a decent deal, at least. Yeah, who am I kidding, right?

JayzTwoCents is really weird recently. Yesterday they pulled their 4060 TI review because they did not get the memo that the card needs to be trashed and whoever reviewed it (as Jay himself is recovering from surgery) actually thought it was a fine card and had a video thumbnail saying "The new mid-range king?" - which was hilarious, because there's no way to justify that 399$ price point for the 4060 TI - and today they released an RX 7600 review video called "AMD slams nVidia" with the thumbnail reading "AMD's tiny powerhouse". That review video has been since renamed to Another GPU you'll probably just hate on anyway. I'm finding that really hilarious. The other cards in their charts were picked to make the 7600 look better than it is by virtue of only comparing it to the RTX 3060, the RTX 3050, the ARC 750 and the RX 6750 XT. Now they're getting dunked on in the comments too, and probably don't quite understand why, I mean, why... change the title to something that petulant. Also, not sure why I am doing this: The RX 7600 is a joke, and outside of a view outliers that seems to be the consensus among reviewers, although somewhat tempered by the fact that it is less of a joke than the RTX 4060 TI. It does have a decent price to performance ratio, but that is because it is the only new generation card below $400. That this card could even be considered mid-range just shows how ridiculous pricing has become. Remember, it was supposed to launch at 299 dollars until AMD panicked in the face of not being able to fight off the upcoming RTX 4060* at the same price point. Hardware Unboxed said it plainly, the only reason he's not ripping AMD as big a new one as nVidia is because the RX 7600 has an MSRP of 269 dollars. Which, as they state over and over again, does not make the card good value. It is just better value than an RTX 4060 TI. Heh. Congratulations. So, nothing has changed. nVidia doesn't want to compete, and AMD apparently can't. Man, if Intel could just get their sh*t together... While this is certainly true for the entire generation, it is better AMD's offerings than for nVidia's, outside of the 4090, which while overpriced is also a flagship product. Looking at the launch MSRPs, yeah, no, but at their current going rates the 7900 XT is actually a pretty decent card, but here it was pricier than the RTX 4070 TI for a long time (they're both equal in price now) - although the 7900 XT comes with more VRAM, it is not really worth shelling out signficantly more than what an RTX 4070 TI costs. On the flip side the power draw of the 7900 XT is ridiculous for the performance it offers, and if you have more than one screen the idle power draw of the card is going to cost you an arm and a leg at the current energy prices here. *Speculation, but based on the same leaks that predicted the 7600 to be at or around a 6650 XT level of performance, and lo, it is exactly that. An RDNA3 variant of a 6650 XT.

That went about as well as expected, as the leaks were pretty much on spot. The price drop semi-justifies the card, but Steve's recommendation is right. Either get a 6700 (XT) now while they're still available, or wait how the 4060 turns out. Last minute price drop seem to give credence to the rumors of the RTX 4060 being on par with the RX 7600 for what was possibly the same targeted MSRP. Well, the other recommendation would be to roll the dice and get an ARC for considerably less than the 7600. When it works well it's on par or better, but Intel still has some driver issues, but Intel dropped the ARC 750 to 200$, so if it a budget card you're after with only 8 GB of VRAM, then that should be the go-to one, really. On a purely technical side the specs on the 7600 once again show that RDNA3 isn't performing as expected, or the specs are just wrong. Also, a 90° hot spot on a card like that? Really? Good job. 7600 will probably end up in low end computers with bad thermals, so that's going to be toasty.

Yeah, luckily no real headache, already organized a towing for tomorrow and contacted the insurance, the shop will organize everything else. Turns out the police exaggerated a fair bit when they talked to me. I mean, yeah, the damage looks pretty wild but is mostly the plastic around the front of the car. Everything else seems largely intact, also no visible damage to the engine compartment or the axles, and absolutely no scratches anywhere outside of the impact area. The truck seems to have ripped my left front fender and with it the front bumper off - stuff that's pretty much just lightweight plastic on modern cars. Will know more once the shop's and insurance's assessment of the damage is done, but it looks like the car isn't totalled. Well, on the bright side, I can now stop agonizing over dropping the comprehensive insurance plan I have. No real point in paying a premium for full coverage after the repair. Or anything, in case it's a goner.

The day is off to a really good start when the police knocks at your door and tells you a truck just plowed through your parked car.

I also have the TG contact frame installed, and if I messed up having the right mounting pressure, it could affect memory stability too, but it looks like I can call that a win. I doubt my old Vengeance 5200s can deal with running at 6800.

Asus being Asus aside, I guess trying to run a 7200 kit on a board only rated for 6000 is a bit of a stretch, so that was probably unfair - had some crashes with the XMP profile regardless, so I dropped the clock speeds a little. So far they seem perfectly stable at 6800 MT/s, which isn't so bad considering that the memory is still pretty far out of spec for the mainboard, and 6800 kits with the same timings cost about as much or more due to useless RGB bling. Guess I'll keep the sticks, and... I need a better mainboard. Well, time to wait a bit, rumor mill has it that Meteor Lake is once again cancelled on desktop, and that would have been a refresh for LGA 1700.

Well, Austrialia does suffer from cat and rabbit overpopulations, as far as I know, as they simply lack natural predators to keep their populations in check. They're an ecological menace, really. Although I think Australia wants them gone purely because they're not deadly to humans.

Speaking purely from my current experience with the i7-13700k, even manually just setting the power limit to Intel's specifications (i.e. 253W PL2, cannot do much besides that, as the B660 chipset does not allow for undervolting) does a number for thermals and power draw, while missing less than 2% of performance on Cinebench R23. Der8auer had a gaming power draw video a while back with varied CPUs because he had like an old prototype CPU to test, and they were pretty similar. An i5-13600 under gaming load is much faster than a 7600X (well, duh) but draws about as much power, although the usual caveats apply, there's some variance in between the CPUs (and in the case of the 7600Xs, up to 40%). On the topic of Asus doing Asus things, I got myself a 32GB Corsair Vengeance DDR5-7200 CL 34 kit. Loading Asus' "XMP I" profile results in having a blue screen every other minute and stability issues like crashing Firefox tabs in between. Loading the actual XMP profile of the RAM sticks, which Asus calls "XMP II" works though. At least, well, it seems like it is stable. Also thinking about moving to a larger case or using a front mounted 360mm AIO. Even with the really low height Corsair Vengeance without RGB, I can only install and remove the sticks after dismounting the radiator from the top of the case. Now, I'm not fiddling around with my memory all the time, of course, but still, that is kinda annoying. Especially in light of perhaps having to reinstall the old sticks, if I can't use the new ones at their full potential I'm sending them back, no point in paying extra for memory speeds and timings I can't reach without introducing instability.

That FMV adventure was pretty good X-Files, don't really care what the critics thought of it.

I wonder if all the reactionaries who bought Hogwarts Legacy to spite "the left" due to the call for a boycott ended up liking all the wokeness in the game. A transwoman as owner of the Three Broomsticks and her character arc one giant call for easier access to transitioning, male characters being able to walk into any of the girl's lavatories, every minority under the sun present in rural Scotland... that must have hurt.

Well, all current information point to you calling that early. 8GB VRAM on a 128 bit bus, literally everything they and their fanboy brigade made fun of the 4060 series specs for.

Every time you navigate menus with analogue sticks God kills a kitten. Do not kill kittens!

Buy one for two, special price for you!

It is worse in Chrome, with the auto-play "feature" of videos (not YouTube's auto-play, but just videos popping off instantly) it begins playing ads, then loads something else on the page, refreshes, the ad (or some other ad, depending on Google's mood) starts to play again, and then you get the cookie notification. That one also reloads the page, and then you get to see the third ad - and the video. The Shorts page is different, that loads, presents the cookie notification and then just plays the page video. Have a habit of trying out new stuff on YouTube in private windows. I still keep getting recommendations from The Critical Drinker just because I once watched a video on Star Trek: Picard. Guy argues that the series is bad because a female admiral gives lip to Picard. Can't really have seen any other Star Trek, because the fandom does not call Admiral Bitcheyev like that for no reason. Picard sucks because it is woke, not because the writing is terrible. You heard it here first, folks! And yes, I know that there is a function that would allow me to permanently ban recommendations from any channel, but that is reserved for Linus Tech Tips. **** In other news, there's an annual event that happens where I figure "I should change that" but then I never follow through. Got a letter with my church's tithing "request", i.e. the annual church tax, not an actual tithe, and about the only piece of legislation still left of our brief stint in the Third Reich. I keep wanting to simply drop my confession, but then I never do. In the past, this had at least an actual benefit in having an extra public holiday, but that has since been changed after the ECJ found it discriminatory towards other religions. The actual idea was to give everyone else off, but the government of course did the sensible thing and just removed it entirely. Poor companies and their record profits cannot cope with one day less work per year for others. Nope. Investors would have fled the country in droves. They're really nice about it too, in the letter, saying that they readily understand when people in these trying times cannot pay their church tax without it being a danger to their existance, so they offer a 5% discount and a payment plan, which requires that I grant them a SEPA direct debit mandate. Sure guys. How... noble of you. Really noble.

Yes.

Why though? Caramella Girls works wonders for quieting my mind, being incredibly simplistic but really catchy. Plus there's the trolling issue. Whenever I post something serious here I get zero comments or reactions, posting silly music at least gets a complaint or two. Anyway, here's something for ya all, I suppose @Azdeus will already know it.

Well, at least there's some consistency to it.