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Am I being too snobby? / Spec me a GPU for Starfield

Rik1254 said:
Honestly, budget isn’t a huge concern, I tend to avoid higher end cards because they typically don’t offer the best value.

My main focus is value for money, if I’m paying £700 for a card, will it give me £700 worth of value over the 3-5 years I plan on keeping it? Probably not, which is why I stick to the mid range.
Click to expand...

Yes, you pay more so can play with higher settings, then you upgrade more often recouping some of the money because high end cards tend to hold their value better.
As long as you don't go to the highest enthusiast level (think 4090) then you'll likely get the same value but higher up the product range enjoying better visuals

For example, I spent £650 on my 3080 when it launched and enjoyed using pretty much max settings in all my games for 3 years. I can sell that 3080 today for £300 so it would have only cost £350
If I had spent £350 on a graphics card 3 years ago it would be worth pretty much nothing now so I would still be £350 out of pocket but would not have been able to enjoy gaming with highest settings
 
no_1_dave said:
They were selling in seconds and being resold for £800+
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The 3080 was just as near-impossible to get one's hands on, and you used that as your example of what £650 bought in 2020. Can't have it both ways. There was tons of drama about companies only doing a single run of the "cheap" SKUs and then discontinuing them, leaving people who ordered at launch waiting over a year I believe for stock that was never coming. In the end I think Gibbo told people just to cancel, although I also remember him shuffling people around and trying to get them a different model in some cases. It was pandemonium. The FEs were also unobtanium for anyone who couldn't sit around waiting for stock alerts all day in a state of cat-like readiness. If you got a 3080 at or near launch for anything close to MSRP then you were extremely fortunate. Just as anyone who got a 3060 Ti, or indeed any 3000-series card was.
 
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no_1_dave said:
They were selling in seconds and being resold for £800+
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3080s were selling well over £1200.

I think this is my issue, cards sold for well over rrp and the used market is still high to try to recoup costs, which has in turn kept new cards holding a high value.

Looking back through previous generations, by now in the life cycle, the exiting generation would be 20-30% under rrp, but it’s barely 10% for the cards which are actually available.
 
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JediFragger said:
Not worth it due to the 10GB vRam, Ultrawide will just gobble it up and ask for more. The value play is a 6700XT atm inc Starfield Premium at £299, but you'll need to compromise a little at the res you play at with most newer games. Expect to upgrade again in 2 or so years.

www.overclockers.co.uk

Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT Pulse Gaming 12GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Order Sapphire Radeon RX 6700 XT Pulse Gaming 12GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk www.overclockers.co.uk

What is your current card? Ofc a £699 7900XT is your ideal choice but sounds like you have a fairly hard budget limit below that.
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Nonsense mate. My 3080 didn't even fill it's VRAM or have issues with Jedi Survivor or CP2077. And that was with Ray Tracing. Sure at 4k it would be an issue, but at 21:9 1440p it's way less of an issue than people make out.
 
Rik1254 said:
3080s were selling well over £1200.

I think this is my issue, cards sold for well over rrp and the used market is still high to try to recoup costs, which has in turn kept new cards holding a high value.

Looking back through previous generations, by now in the life cycle, the exiting generation would be 20-30% under rrp, but it’s barely 10% for the cards which are actually available.
Click to expand...
Keep your eye out on MM seen used 3080's go on there for around £350, can probably get some warranty and you're not going to lose much on the resale value if you upgrade again in a year or two.
 
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JediFragger said:
Do some research and not just 'games I play are fine guv yr full of it'.
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This was taken from HW unboxed's recent review of the 7900GRE and still shows the 3080 holding up well at 4k.

Screenshot-614.png
 
Rik1254 said:
[..]
Timings or raw speeds? I’ve read AM5 doesn’t play too nicely with higher speed kits?
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Really quick summary: With the latest microcode, memory speeds above DDR5-6400 probably won't make any difference in actual use and may well be lower in performance than the same memory clocked at DDR5-6400. That's with the latest microcode. With older versions of the microcode, the sweet spot is 6000, not 6400. It might be 6000 even with the latest microcode, depending on the silicon lottery.

The main thing is the ratio between clock speeds for infinity fabric, memory and memory controller. With Zen4, memory clock to memory controller clock is the most important ratio (1:1 is best). Infinity fabric clock still matters a lot, but performance won't drop as harshly if it isn't 1:1:1 as it would with Zen3. DDR5-6000 should work with optimal ratios. DDR5-6400 will probably work with optimal ratios and a recent microcode version. Higher than that will have suboptimal ratios (2:1, I think) so you'd need much higher memory clock speed to offset the drop in performance from the suboptimal clock speed ratio.

Details:

www.igorslab.de

The big Ryzen 7000 Memory and OC Tuning Guide - Infinity Fabric, EXPO, Dual-Rank, Samsung and Hynix DDR5 in Practice test with Benchmarks and Recommendations | igor´sLAB

AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs, based on the Zen4 micro-architecture, still use the same chiplet design as their predecessors, with a few small but not negligible changes. Igor already gave details…
www.igorslab.de www.igorslab.de

Then of course there's the subtimings, as usual. It's possible to take DDR5 over 9000 on AM5, but with suboptimal ratios and slack timings.

We don't yet know how sensitive Starfield will be to memory clocks and timings. Maybe as sensitive as Fallout 4, maybe not. Maybe more so.

CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
The earlier version of Creation Engine in Fallout 4 loved high clocked ram with tight subtimings:

The two CPU bottlenecks will be the graphics rendering and Papyrus scripting. This will be evident in settlements, both stock and user created.
Click to expand...

I had about a gazillion mods on my FO4 installation. Mostly for settlement building and including one to remove size limits. I managed to get my framerate below 10 in my largest settlement :)
 
montymint said:
at your res I'd go for:

www.overclockers.co.uk

AMD Radeon 6950 XT MBA 16GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Order AMD Radeon 6950 XT MBA 16GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk www.overclockers.co.uk
Click to expand...

Why not spend ~5% more and buy a 7900XT instead?

www.overclockers.co.uk

Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse 20GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Order Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse 20GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk www.overclockers.co.uk

Looks like better value to me.
 
montymint said:
at your res I'd go for:

www.overclockers.co.uk

AMD Radeon 6950 XT MBA 16GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Order AMD Radeon 6950 XT MBA 16GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk www.overclockers.co.uk
Click to expand...
I was looking at the 6950 xt and is currently top of my list if I go new, just need to do a bit more research into power and heat to see what PSU I need along the 7700x.


Angilion said:
Why not spend ~5% more and buy a 7900XT instead?

www.overclockers.co.uk

Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse 20GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Order Sapphire Radeon RX 7900 XT Pulse 20GB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card now online and benefit from fast delivery.
www.overclockers.co.uk www.overclockers.co.uk

Looks like better value to me.
Click to expand...

They’re actively available for around £600 elsewhere (one currently listed for £565 without Starfield, another £609 with Starfield and some extras).


I think the 6950 might sway it, I wasn’t interested in such a high power card, but I just read TPUs review and they show the power consumption which locked at 60 fps of only 150w, that’s mad and shows how much headroom is possibly available (it’s a 350w card).
I’ll probably kick myself when I see the power bill, but that’s future me’s problem.
 
Rik1254 said:
I was looking at the 6950 xt and is currently top of my list if I go new, just need to do a bit more research into power and heat to see what PSU I need along the 7700x.




They’re actively available for around £600 elsewhere (one currently listed for £565 without Starfield, another £609 with Starfield and some extras).


I think the 6950 might sway it, I wasn’t interested in such a high power card, but I just read TPUs review and they show the power consumption which locked at 60 fps of only 150w, that’s mad and shows how much headroom is possibly available (it’s a 350w card).
I’ll probably kick myself when I see the power bill, but that’s future me’s problem.
Click to expand...

my 6900XT only pull close to it's max tpd when I'm going all out on it.

A lot of games barely hit 70% utilization to have a smooth 60fps so it rarely uses much
 
Rik1254 said:
[..]
I think the 6950 might sway it, I wasn’t interested in such a high power card, but I just read TPUs review and they show the power consumption which locked at 60 fps of only 150w, that’s mad and shows how much headroom is possibly available (it’s a 350w card).
I’ll probably kick myself when I see the power bill, but that’s future me’s problem.
Click to expand...

As far as I know, the 6950XT is effectively factory overclocked way up out of the peak efficiency range for the hardware and that's why limiting it greatly reduces power consumption. It's a typical pattern for overclocking. You could probably shave a bit more off the power consumption by manually tuning for it, but simply capping the framerate is much simpler and works well enough.
 
CAT-THE-FIFTH said:
Sounds about right! :cry:

@ Rik1254 Do you intend to mod the game? Extra VRAM might be useful.
Click to expand...
I used to run a lightly modded FO4 on a GTX 970 and an i5 2500k. To most, probably trash, but I found it perfectly playable. I know mods are larger now and newer games will also push the GPU harder as a baseline, but it doesn’t take much to keep me happy.

For context, I’ve been running my Steam Deck in desktop mode playing games at 3440x1440 in the 25-30 fps range with no quibbles.
I enjoy playing the game, if it looks good, that’s a bonus :D
 
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