12GB seems to be the sweet spot for VRAM, but I suspect the real issue is PC devs not really giving a fuck how hit runs on less than their dev kit.

But then a lot of PC gamers seem to think a game should always run at ultra, no matter how good their rig is.

And I will die on this hill: raytracing has been a colossal waste of everybody’s time and money.

Oblivion remastered too. Used a mod to turn off ray tracing outdoors only to make it playable on a 9070 xt. Frame rate still dropped to 20 fps if it rained. Never figured that one out. Gave up after one playthrough. It’s embarassing how many bugged quests there still are.

Every console does that and it’s kinda anti-competitive behavior isn’t it?

Definitely makes it harder for new companies to release enticing hardware, so i’d say so…

That doesn’t make any sense to me.

Lets waste so much manpower, hours of labor, years of development and vice versa so that we can potentially taint the goodwill of fans by taking loss after loss and relying on them buying games they’ll never play on Steam.

Consoles are a bit more careful than this.

Yeah when it’s done well and part of the aesthetic, it’s different.

Labyrinth of the Demon King is another one that comes to mind.

I get your point, but since people claim Steam is a monopoly, then by that logic they have a large swath of data on what counts as a gaming machine to the user base.

I get its not going to compete with a watercooled watt sucker, but that doesn’t seem to be the majority.

As a person that has gamed since 1983: Up until recently I was gaming on a 2013 dell mobo converted to a Core V21 case (that’s a lot of rewiring conversion --thanks dell), and using a CAD GPU.

Then work bought us new laptops with RTX cards. So graphics have improved for me.

Both of those are not hardcore gaming PCs, and this steam machine will probably outperform them.

My point being these were valid systems for gaming by a gamer. Not everyone needs an F1 car to enjoy the ride to work

Agreed, the best selling dedicated gaming system of the last few years is the Switch, which has less power than many phones.

There’s also a Q8400 btw.
That’s what is lying around now the the motherboard is not working.

If anyone knows this is steam. I belive them

That’s not how you compile fast. I mean they exist but better buy a second PC for the price. Or optimise your project, or get a build cache.

Yeah, I get it.
But what if most motherboards were just expected to have 2 slots, you know?
Of course I won’t be switching to Threadripper just for getting 2 CPUs on a single motherboard and have kept the other CPU lying around, thinking of using it for keeping all the storage HDDs, and maybe offloading all re-encoding stuff onto it.

For compilation though, I’m fine with just using my main PC, although I did look into distributed computing options, specially when using my laptop, I think I’m fine for now.

It’s more like a fleeting though that came to me a few times, when I felt like playing a game while reencoding, but was unable to properly set the CPU usage for the encoders in ffmpeg.

Why use the word “claims”? They have the Valve Hardware survey to prove the statement.

Time to get a little homelab ! Like it can encode stuff for days without getting in the way and keep those drives accessible. Nowadays any tiny pc comes with an ethernet port so usually its just plug & play too.

What about a virtual machine with half of the CPU’s assigned?

I was looking more towards something that can use my spare CPU and have enough SATA ports to last a long time.
And while USB to SATA is expected to be inherently unreliable, all PCIe SATA devices I see seem to be problematic in their own right^[doesn’t make sense to have a SATA adapter that goes around corrupting the data in a way that it is hard to detect] (from the reviews). The only one that seemed fine was the PCIe SCSI device, for which, I would be very careful, making sure I don’t get a fake.

Then the available motherboards having >6 SATA ports seem to all be high end ones, which doesn’t make sense considering I am trying to save some money.

What’s the spare CPU?

Maybe an old mobo with 6 sata can be found for cheap.

I totally agree with the sata (or raid) cards.

The spare one is a 5600X which was previously in the same motherboard before I switched to a 5800X.

I am considering getting a B550 motherboard once I have the funds, but the number of SATA ports is kinda low. My current one is X570 with 6 ports.

I am not planning on RAID for now, as I don’t really plan on ever having enough for redundancy, but I definitely want to be able to use the system for any and every task I can program to control via a local SSH. So definitely going with a full distro, like Debian or sth, and not a NAS specific thingy.
I can even make use of my old Radeon 4650 for a display while setting it up.

The 5600X is a beast IMO, I had a 2600X IIRC that my kid now has, very good CPU, I understand why you’d like to compile with it .

I also remember mobos were kind of bad, like 2 RAM lanes and few connectics compared to how it usually was “before”.

I made sure to get one with 4 slots (still haven’t managed to use them all though) and good component cooling.
Thinking back, getting the G version would have done better, but I didn’t intend on swapping with a 5800X back then.

Now it’s just about getting the right parts to accompany the CPU and RAM I have lying around. And the HDDs of course. The Toshiba one ended up having an undesirable delay, meaning I would have to go with the Seagate ones priced 50% higher.

And then a router not having a backdoor.
Hopefully I can find one with OpenWRT without having to choose ASUS.