“Old RTX 3080 GPUs”
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That was my first thought, they are only last gen guys! And easily comparable to the top of the line in the current gen!
With 20GB?! I’d take that over a 4070 or even 4080 any day
I’m never going to be able to afford an upgrade.
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My Steam Deck replaced my old laptop and I keep it at work since its usually not busy. No need for it at home since my PC is faster.
What card do you have?
1080ti. Still strong but starting to show it’s age with newer games and AI stuff.
If you’re not doing huge models a used 2080ti can be picked up on eBay for 300 ish bucks which is pretty capable (best price to performance cuda core count I think)— just a little lacking in ram for huge stuff.
I use it for mostly gaming, AI is just a bonus. I’m looking for a big upgrade if I can ever afford one.
1080 ti is still a beefy card, about the same performance as a 3060 ti / 4060, just without the AI core shenanigans and more VRAM - not bad for a 6 year old card. I recently updated from a 1060 to a 3060 ti, which gave me roughly 50% extra performance, you’d have to grab a 4080/4090 to do the same. But yeah, not fast enough anymore if you do 4k or high hz stuff.
At this point I’m just waiting a few more generations. I don‘t think there going to be reasonably affordable any time soon.
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Aside from anything else, the cooler looks spiffy. Not an over-the-top RGB monstrosity, and it’s obviously designed to be compact.
The coolers work well, but at the cost of noise. under any gaming load they are exceedingly noticeable. The classic use case for this form factor is often servers, where noise doesn’t matter. you also see these on more professional cards, but their whole power budget is often under 100W, so remotely the same category.
what is the appeal of blower-style cooling?, i always heard about it being worse for cooling
Blower fans are better if you want a bunch of cards in one system. Open air coolers dump too much of the hot air back into the case and are usually thicker. For non-gaming loads it’s frequently better to have more cards at less than max speed.
They’re really only worse in the sense that they can be louder. In a datacenter/mining rig/etc where you don’t care about noise at all, they’re pretty much the best solution to cooling a large amount of cards as they blow air out near the outputs instead back into the rack.
Thanks – and what is the quieter solution vs. blowers? Liquid?
Most mainstream solutions will be quieter than a blower at full tilt (i.e. the normal GPU design on having fans on the face that blow air back into the case). That said, blowers aren’t inherently stupidly loud or anything. I’ve got a reference model blower 5700XT and have the fan curve set that I can’t ever hear it with my (open back) headphones on and never really go above 80C. If I said fuck it I could turn the fan curve up and have it sound like an original Xbox 360, but my temps sure would drop!
The quietest solution is passive but you won’t get very good performance out of that.
It’s all a balance
Passive would be like a heat sink?