To everything - turn, turn, turn

So, I sold my old rig. The one I wrote about in the Z270X-Battlemage post.

Seeing it go was bittersweet, even if I got a fair price for it. The Battlemage I got as much as I paid for it, the 16GB of DDR4 RAM probably about what I paid for it, and the 500GB M.2 SSD I probably got double the original price for, but that in itself shows how bad the market is now.

In my current build, the Battlemage really got to shine. I don’t even know how to categorize it. I would say it was on the high end of the mid-level cards, but at a low-end mid-level price. Letting it run on a modern platform really allowed it to come into its own in gaming. The 12GB of VRAM, along with the modern architecture, really let it work as a graphics card for the average gamer, running Cyberpunk 2077 on fair settings at a smooth, stable framerate, even on Linux.

But I was frustrated with it, more because of the gap between potential and reality. The slow software improvements, the fact that Intel dropped the whole consumer GPU roadmap, and that they seem to have no interest in the consumer space. The rumoured next card series, which I understand were to be (C)eleste and (D)ruid, are probably cancelled or at least shelved for the foreseeable future.

My current rig I built to be as open, ethical, and Linux-friendly as possible within my budget. That meant avoiding hardware from known scummy actors like ASUS and MSI and going for a motherboard from ASRock, a processor from AMD (with only two companies in the space, choice is mostly an illusion, but whatever). I would have liked a Noctua fan, but at 7x the price I paid for this excellent Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120, I could not motivate it.

The case, a Lian Li Lancool 216, is also a compromise. I would have liked a Fractal Design, but again, at double the price, it was impossible to motivate.

All-in-all, my current rig, while full of compromises, has excellent character and performance. For me, that is a lot of the fun of building computers, not just throwing money at the problem until everything works perfectly, but rather getting something that punches above its weight on a budget.

AND THAT is why the GPU market is so depressing at the moment. The options are extremely few and prices are high. Being on Linux, my only options are AMD or Intel. For AMD, there are basically only 9060s and 9070s. You cannot reliably find any 7600s in stock, and when you can, they are overpriced. Intel cards have crept up in price. Now they are a bad compromise for the poor instead of a budget alternative.

Despite the frustration I had with the Battlemage, I was considering the Sparkle Arc A380 6GB Elf. Knowing the limitations and market segment, it would have been an interesting holdover card to use until the market recovered. It is just capable enough to carry modern workloads, and despite the lack of fan support for Linux and other issues, using it for a year or two and then migrating it to my media server was an interesting prospect.

However, at about two-thirds of the price I paid for the B580 and a third of the price of a new Sapphire Radeon RX 9070 GRE 12GB Pulse? No, at that point I might as well invest in a “full” card.

Today I am running my old GTX 970. Nvidia sucks, Nvidia on Linux sucks hard, and legacy Nvidia on Linux sucks triple!

BUT the card works.

It’s noisy in a way that stands out compared to the rest of the components. The software is troublesome. Still, I played some Black Mesa, Angels Fall First, and tested a little Mount & Blade: Bannerlord. The fact that this card can still hang in a modern workstation is actually amazing and shows just how overhyped the performance chasing of the last few years has been.

The future

So what am I going to do?

I have my GTX 970 up for sale, but I can’t really motivate buying a new card before I get rid of it. There are some cards on the second-hand market. Many are horribly overpriced compared to a new card, but you can still find okay stuff. Sadly, most of them are also noisy, and that is my biggest pain point.

I didn’t used to care about noise, my old computer sounding like a jet engine, but having become used to running silently, it is hard to go back.

Maybe the market will recover, but if it happens, I suspect it will be a slow, gradual return to sanity. It won’t be the GPU makers coming back to the consumers, hat-in-hand, asking forgiveness. They will slowly increase supply, milking the pent-up demand for every €uro they can.

In other news: AI has peaked

So all the AI companies are calling for governments to regulate the AI business. This is not some altruistic move for the good of humanity. LLMs are not getting much better, no matter how much compute or AI-generated content we throw at them, and to keep the illusion alive that there is still space to grow requires something to blame.

Hopefully the politicians here in Europe who still maintain the option of choosing don’t fall for the bait. Then the whole rotten industry can come crashing down and wipe a hundred billion trillion worth of monopoly money from the pretend market.

Microsoft realized the prize they where paying for copilot chat, enshitifying the model and then introducing daily caps on usage, and randomly saying answers can only be shown on Edge. I feel like i have done my part to drive this shit into the ground, arguing the model endlessly about old TV shows. Anything for my own amusement to get them to burn tokens.

Normal people are already paying with their savings, environments, and pensions for the AI bubble, so just let it all burn.

Nowhere to run, it's all undone
Everything burns, everything burns
I'll watch you fall down, I'll drag you facedown
Everything burns, everything burns