The Gamers Arms

So I finally have an RTX 3080. It's taken two and a half months, and a browser extension that checked stock levels on multiple websites every 30 seconds (and even after setting that up it took two attempts to buy the thing as in the time it took me to hit buy, the stock had gone). It has been infuriating, and I've probably spent over the odds, but it's here, it's in my machine and it's working. Now I hope I never think top buy a graphics card at launch ever again.

I've got an MSI Gaming X Trio 10G, one of the more expensive cards in the 3080 lineup, but it's the best performing card at the moment, and more importantly one of the coolest and quietest. I actually had to remove the old hard drive trays from the front of my case as it wouldn't have fit otherwise (and this is a full ATX case), and there was a significant amount of swearing and at least two skin punctures getting it in due to it getting wedged in the PCI-E slot latch.

Now, for some Cyberpunk...

So, a few brief benchmarks. I have as mentioned above a 3700X and 32gb of DDR4 3200 RAM and everything's installed on a 2tb NVMe Gen 3 SSD, and have a 3440x1440 monitor.

DCS World - It's perfectly smooth in VR. This is basically unheard of.
Cyberpunk gets around 40-60fps with everything but Raytracing on the highest setting (raytracing is on the highest but one). I haven't yet tried any of the tweaks I've seen floating around.

And then Doom Eternal gives me no lower than 200fps (with highs in the 260 range). In a big fight. On the highest graphics settings. That's insane.

The bad news? The whopping great RGB bar across the near edge of the card itself can't be controlled. It can't even be turned off. It's permanently rainbow-puke. The software MSI advertises as able to control it just doesn't work, and it interferes with my Corsair peripheral control.

which browser extension did you use ?

I will be in the market for a 3080 sometime in 2021 and I could definitely do with some help tracking down stock

on a side note - this dearth of GPUs - is this new ? I cannot recall a time when no one can get anything

Yup ditto on the browser extension...
Edit: oh, after a google, was it Distill?

Edit 2 : Any recommended websites to watch?

Yeah, Distill web monitor is the extension I used.

The way that eventually worked for me was to use the "select parts of page" function and select something specific that will change if an item is in stock. In my case I used AWD-IT, though I'm not sure how strongly to recommend them as I didn't realise until afterwards just how much over RRP they were charging. Because AWD have their buy buttons on the page regardless of whether they have stock or not (unlike most sites), I selected those. Mine was checking every 30 seconds, and my card went on sale at about half ten on friday night.

Ta. I set up some full page ones and they kept coming back with changes that weren't relevant so redid them all with selective items that should only change when it's back in stock/

Yeah, you really need to choose something specific as every time the page loads you'll get different adverts, which will give you an alert. It's also not easy to use sites that don't show something obvious that will change when an item is in stock.

Raid wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 15, 2020 10:57 pm

The bad news? The whopping great RGB bar across the near edge of the card itself can't be controlled. It can't even be turned off. It's permanently rainbow-puke. The software MSI advertises as able to control it just doesn't work, and it interferes with my Corsair peripheral control.

I read elsewhere that someone couldn't turn off the rgb with mystic light or dragon center but had success with this https://github.com/ixjf/MSIRGB

Hope it helps mate.

So the RTX3060 has been announced, and they've designed it to only mine crypto-currency at half the rate it should be capable of.

Because they've also made another card series designed specifically for crypto-mining.

https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digi ... -announced

I appreciate that they're trying to make sure the new cards get into the hands of gamers, but I'm sad to see them cater specifically to a market sector that is turning into an ecological disaster. Crypto mining is supposedly using as much electricity as Argentina. I doubt anyone thinks nvidia give a shit that their products are being bought by miners or scalpers; they're a corporation and all they'll really be interested in is how much money it's making them, but they could have at least made an effort to disguise their intent. Nobody would have believed if they'd called them "Computational Processors" or some other bullshit, but it would at least give them deniability if this ever blows up.

If I understand it correctly they're limiting it via drivers, which obviously prompts the question won't the miners just use older drivers?

Hatredsheart wrote: ↑

Thu Feb 18, 2021 4:55 pm

If I understand it correctly they're limiting it via drivers, which obviously prompts the question won't the miners just use older drivers?

No it's more than driver based I think as the latest rumour is that Nvidia will end-of-life the rest of the 3000 series and limit the whole range in this way.

Here we go.

https://www.pcgamer.com/uk/nvidia-ether ... be-hacked/

Well that's just a red rag to a bull, telling nerds something is "unhackable". They'll have smashed it in no time.

good benchmarking vid if you have a 960 or 970 card (like me)