Yea, the rumours have it that the "Super" variants are the new "Ti" so we will see what happens when Nvidia releases a 3070 Super and a 3080 Super.

Least with last gen, a 2070 Super replaced the normal 2070 while giving you 2080 levels of performance. I am hoping that the 16GB/20GB of Vram rumours that are supposed to come with Super Variants are true but you can never really know with Nvidia. At the very least, I'd like a 3070 Super with 16GB of Vram to really kill off the 6800 as a 3070 Ti isn't all that great.

We will see in a few months though but yea, the days of affordable PCs are over. I remember how back in highschool, I was able to build a really good gaming PC with highschool money. These days tho... That ain't happening...

Just sold a Radeon RX 580 for $700 AUD. More than twice that I originally paid for it... (Thanks miners!)
Tis' going to fund a 6600XT I think so I can do some overclocking and testing.

Times like these I am glad to be a firefighter.

I still have my Voodoo 2's.
At the very least if they can drive up demand for retro gear... I will happily make a profit.

They can still be affordable.

Often I see people neglect to consider Zen2 CPU's because Zen3 is new and shiny... When in reality you could get the venerable Ryzen 5 3600, overclock the mc'shit out of it... And you are probably looking at a 20% performance difference from the stock 5600X at worst... And here you can get a Tray 3600 for $239 AUD verses the 5600X at $420... I don't know about you, but the 3600 makes far more sense.

DDR4 is cheapish... 32GB of DDR4 3600Mhz Ram for $260 AUD is about the same price I paid for DDR3 at it's lowest-price point over a decade ago.

SSD's are getting larger and cheaper, DRAM-less SSD's are not the same old rubbish they used to be with some that feature decent low-latency, high-speed SLC caches.

GPU's is where the shit gets spastic sadly... But if you play the market and sell your 2017 GPU's for a pretty penny, you can use those funds to purchase a new GPU to make the financial impact less severe.

Wouldn't you be better served getting a 6700XT? Or do you just prefer the 6600XT's class of GPUs?

This isn't for my main Ryzen PC... That has something far shinier.

It's for the old 3930K PC which had the RX 580, it gets a new GPU every few years around the $400-$500 AUD mark, whatever provides the best performance in that price bracket... And well. The GPU market is up shit creek, so the 6600XT is it. - Still a massive increase over the RX 580 though.

But with the market the way it is, perfect timing to sell the RX 580 (Which I got in 2017) and get a "free" upgrade essentially, got my moneys worth.

Yea makes sense. I'd also consider a 3060 as that might be cheaper and also has 12GB of vram or a 3060 Ti as that's around the same price bracket but will give you a lot more performance. But 6600XT if you can find one for a good price would indeed be a massive jump compared to a 580 so it will be happy gaming either way.

Though I was kidding (for now), the thing is, voxels and RT go hand in hand perfectly, much better than polygons and RT.

I always come back to that Tim Sweeney (EPIC) Gamasutra interview from 7-8 years ago in which he said they would need around 25-30TFLOPS for fully voxel worlds...we're almost there...

It will happen, don't rush it! Let RT become the norm and then wait for the next big jump that will be voxels. Besides, you can already experience it with Teardown, so you know it's coming.

Now, I wouldn't put much weight on Sweeney's words. We (at least I) don't know the conditions for that to happen. Did he had 4K in mind? And RT? Because those two factors will raise the remand for more compute power.

Or with the Novalogic games, starting with Comanche (1992)

He meant fully voxel world, where pretty much everything can be destroyed - I don't believe Teardown is the the first to do it, but it probably has the smallest voxels to date - cause eventually it boils down to that, how small can they be to go toe to toe with details of current polygon words. Personally, I wouldn't mind several years of blocky visuals, if we're to see drastic changes in how some of the games are designed, which fully destructable/interactive worlds would bring.

Some news

Microsoft: You Can't Get Around Windows 11 Requirements

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-says-you-cannot-ignore-windows-11-requirements

“Group policy will not enable you to get around the hardware enforcement for Windows 11,” Carley said in her recent webcast. “We’re still going to block you from upgrading your device to an unsupported state since we really want to make sure that your devices stay supported and secure.”

Carley did qualify that she knows “it sucks” if your recent, capable build can’t upgrade, but said that Microsoft’s rationale is to “keep devices more productive, have a better experience, and better security than ever before so they can stay protected.”

While I am sure people will find ways to get around it... Come on MS...

AMD's Most Efficient CPU: Ryzen 7 5800 Non-X Review, Benchmarks, & Power

It's able to keep up with the 5800X in gaming and falls behind in some production workloads. It's not as good of an overclocker as the 5800X but still gets very close. Of course, only OEMs get this cause AMD doesn't care about DIY space anymore and instead, would rather sell you the more expensive stuff. Least if we had the 5800, the performance would have been impressive all be it slightly slower than the X version but probably would have costed less. Instead we get the 5700G which gets gimped by being stuck on PCI-E gen 3 and significantly less cache and generally less performance. Remember guys, even Intel sells the lower end non K skus to DIY. What does that say about AMD? Least the X series are starting to get discounts.

Mark Cerny has bought the Western Digital SN850 for his PS5. So if you are looking for an SSD to get... Now you know which one! Realistically, a 980 Pro and others should work as well as long as they have a heatsink that fits. But the SN850 has an optional heatsink that is guaranteed to fit.