Ambient Irony

Thursday, February 02

Daily News Stuff 2 February 2023

Groundhog Day Edition

AMD's Ryzen 7000X3D lineup has prices and schedules, with the top-of-the-line 7950X3D due on February 28th at a price of $699. (AnandTech)

If you've been following along, you might notice that this is exactly the same MSRP as the regular 7950X, making the X3D version something of a bargain. But if you've been following along, you might notice that Micro Center will sell you a 7950X and 32GB of DDR5-6000 RAM for under $600. Assuming you live somewhere with a Micro Center because that's an offer designed to get you into the store, and not available for delivery.

Still, it's basically a stealth price cut - AMD trying to avoid sabotaging its perceived value while tacitly acknowledging that the market ain't what it was and won't be for a while.

And it's likely to be the fastest desktop CPU around for a couple of years. Intel's Meteor Lake range should be out this year but may be only for laptops, and AMD isn't expecting Zen 5 to be ready until next year.
Mission accomplished. (BBC)

That tiny deadly radioactive thingy - a quarter inch wide lost in a state encompassing a million square miles - has been found. 120 miles from its starting point it fell out of the truck and rolled off the road.

Fortunately with suitably sensitive detectors it glows like a furnace and it had not in fact lodged in the tyres of a passing car and disappeared to parts unknown, so a few days scouring the highway waiting for the clicks to turn into a scream was enough to hunt it down.

Intel may be planning to cut prices on its Alder Lake chips by 20%. (Tom's Hardware)

Well, that's good news, particularly after they raised the... Wait, Alder Lake? The one that launched in 2021?

Never mind.
On the other hand Intel actually did cut the price of the Arc A750 graphics card to $249. (Tom's Hardware)

And released new drivers that offer improved gaming performance, particularly on older titles.

Intel does seem to be committed to its graphics card range - something I doubted at launch time - and at $249 this card is not a bad deal.
Loading a game from a good PCIe 3 SSD takes 3 seconds longer than the not-even-released-yet PCIe 5 models. (Tom's Hardware)

PCIe 5 - even PCIe 4 - is not worth a huge price increase for most users. If the difference between two similar models is 20%, sure, go for PCIe 4 and enjoy your three seconds; the drive will likely have smarter software and might last longer, all else being equal.

But if you have a perfectly good PCIe 3 drive there's no reason to replace it.

(The new servers that I was going to deploy last month before I decided to spend the whole month being sick instead have PCIe 3 drives.)

Disclaimer: I don't know, what if Columbus was right?

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