Looks solid.

Asus TUF and Acer Nitro are making some really banging price/performance orientated notebooks these days that are hard to beat.

Truth be told, I was tempted to upgrade my RTX3060 notebook, but once I found out the RTX 4060 notebooks only had 2GB of extra VRAM I abandoned that idea, I would still be VRAM limited.

They are great as a secondary machine though for more casual/esports titles.

The Ryzen 7 CPU being a HS part is going to be a very solid performer... I would upgrade the Ram, I feel 16GB is limiting in 2023, but that's just me personally, depends how you intend to use it.

$300 = 277 euro + 19% VAT = 329 euro = $357
$400 = 370 euro + 19% VAT = 439 euro = $476
$500 = 462 euro + 19% VAT = 549 euro = $595

I mean in that they expect the same growth they had during the past 3 yrs, and because of that they've raised the prices, cut the VRAM into two parts per GPU and now rely on DLSS to push some perf forward. You can't expect to keep going up and up, when you're actively trying hard to fuck the majority of us over with these prices and cutbacks, and expect insane growth to just keep skyrocketing, that's not how this works.

Jensen and anyone at Nvidia are perfectly capable of being a typical human who can "expect" something to keep going their way indefinitely, but that doesn't mean to say they will be right.

Even when they came out with RT, we all pretty much have that now.

DLSS, why do we keep championing a band-aid? (being serious, like it or not, without it we actually get shit perf, and that absolutely should not be the norm for what we've been rolling with for 30+ years now).

How am I to ask AMD to suddenly become Zeus and strike Nvidia down with such raw power?. You know nvidia owns 80% of the market and both Intel/AMD are playing catch up, how are they ever going to catch up when Nvidia had so much going for them for years now?. Whenever people say RTX, they think of RT, like that's insanely bad to have that kind of mindshare for nvidia, and AMD/Intel will never have that, not now, not ever, Nvidia won that mindshare from the start by coining their brand "RTX". 

It's like the case of Sony having that mindshare since the PS1 days, they only lost part of it during the PS3 era, but since gained that back near the end and haven't really lost it since, but meanwhile, MS is just losing battle after battle, and you gotta ask "why bother, if it's going to be a repeat on and on?".

I can't help but get the feeling you're pulling this topic into a "give Nvidia it's due kudos", and I'm not really into that sorta thing. Like I get it, you and I own nvidia cards, but c'mon man, the current stack is garbage compared to the 4090, we're relying on a band-aid, the competition can't really do shit, and I haven't been able to get a *good* Nvidia card for years now (I actually have to settle for less, due to the pricing and the stack literally being stacked against me, because I don't have an insanely high wage job, and the recession literally kicking anyone that isn't rich right in the ass).

I don't think DLSS is the reason ppl buy the cards?. My main issue is THEY, Nvidia, are relying on DLSS and you can undeniably see this in their perf metric charts, when it comes to "boasting". I don't care what anyone here thinks about the tech, we don't and shouldn't be praising fake frames or AI generated shit when brute force can't do anything. it means we're solely reliant on DLSS, and that is shit, no matter how you try to spin how good it is, we SHOULDN'T have to rely on it in the first place.

If Nvidia actually gave competitive prices, and the WHOLE stack was objectively the bees knees, then yes, why would anyone bother with the competition?, but that's not where we're at Yuri, the prices aren't great at all, neither is SPLITTING the VRAM in half and trying to sell off the 16gb variants for 100 more a pop, that's bullshit and you know it.

Of course they do what they can, because ppl allow them to, that's why we've got 90 series now, and why the 80 series has been fucked over into no mans land of being the 4070 and so on. I tell you this now, like I have many a times to others before: Casuals do indeed not give a fuck what they buy into, and those with the biggest pockets to burn cash don't either (Why do you think the rich don't give a fuck about the middle class currently fading into obscurity and the poor class getting fucked even harder). I'm price conscious, I was once middle class, I know what's going on and it's shit, and I can't climb back, because the world likes to work that way, so I'm left with getting less and less as a result.

Well the problem is that AMD's "Zeus" moment feels like it was RDNA 2 and now we are seeing their downwards trend. Radeon went from competing against the 90 class which used close to full GA102 die to not only 80 class but a gimped AD103. That's a big downgrade in just one generation. So for me, it feels like that ship has sailed.

I am also not giving Nvidia slack for their Raster performance below the 90 class. In fact I have said multiple times since Lovelace launched that anything below 90 class is not worth buying at their MSRP. Now thankfully we are starting to see some real discounts and bundles. Hinch for example managed to get his 4070 Ti for like $630 while including Diablo IV for free which to me is a great deal since it ends up being more like $560 instead of $800. But the MSRP that Lovelace and RDNA 3 launched in were all terrible and I have said that many times.

As for DLSS, virtually no one other than Nvidia's marketing uses it as the sole reason to buy Nvidia cards. Nvidia using DLSS for their marketing slides shouldn't matter much anyway cause it's all BS regardless of Nvidia or AMD or Intel. I always wait for reviews before coming to a buying decision. Just look at how miss-leading Radeons own press conference about RDNA 3 was. Almost none of their performance claims came true. DLSS is an impressive upscaler and that is why so many people love it. But no one buys Nvidia cards only because of DLSS. They buy it because the competition doesn't offer better "brute force" performance to a significant degree at a similar price point. So you have this situation where Nvidia offers similar "brute force" performance in their price class compared to the competition and on top, you get DLSS, Reflex and Ray Tracing advantages. I don't think there's much of an issue with people loving DLSS because it is that good. The only time it becomes an issue is when they use DLSS to justify buying a significantly lower tier card like how some people buy a 3060 instead of a 6700XT when the XT is much cheaper. That's the only time it becomes dumb.

And Nvidia does offer competitive prices. The problem is the competition isn't competing but rather, Nvidia sets the prices and competition adjusts theirs accordingly. The 4070 for example is close in Raster against a 6800XT/6900XT while being priced similarly. 4080 is close in Raster to a 7900XTX while being priced a bit more expensive. 4070 Ti is close to Raster against a 7900XT while being cheaper. The prices all suck yes but they are competitive prices against the competition. They aren't compelling prices but they are competitive.

In other news...

Asus sure has been on a fuck up streak this year

RDNA 2 wasn't really much of a Zeus moment. We've seen their GPU's for years be "okay". I hardly hear much about AMD's 980ti variant or even 1080ti, it's always been cards like those that were held in high regard, or hell, even the first batch of Titan cards. AMD's Zeus moment was more like years prior to that, and they haven't really taken much back since.

Yes but those discounts should be general lower prices. The discounts are also mostly based on retailers having to cut that loss, not nvidia, that's what I'm getting at with their "cock sure" pricing. Like it's cool we see a few discounts now, but why couldn't we have had this from the start, or hell, last gen or the gen before that?.

I see plenty of folks on youtube suggesting to turn on DLSS, even for benchmarking metrics I see suggested "performance mode" for those with lower tier cards, or quality for those with higher ones. it's not just a marketing gimmick that can be safely ignored, it's one of their biggest features and they make this abundantly clear in their boasted performance bar charts they keep spamming per game release or update. It's not something so small, it's a big deal, but it's a big deal that just so happens to be an undeniable band-aid.

I wouldn't exactly count D4 as a steal of a game, considering this is Blizz we're talking about, with a game that has a BP and cosmetic shop, where most of it's lead staff left before the game went gold, where all sorts of crap is going on at the company, I wouldn't even dream of holding D4 to any standard. Yes it looks shiny for a game, but I care more about the fact that staff are leaving, PVE on OW2 being cancelled, Staff not being allowed to work from home, it all gets super soured, and just because that doesn't affect you now, doesn't mean it won't later (like it did for me and WoW for 2 expacs in a solid row, and I hated it so much).

You want to know the main reason why I'm harping on DLSS so hardcore?, it's because I know Nvidia relies on tech from time to time, then it gets ditched for something else soon after, not 10-15yrs later, like we had done for previous tech advancements. Hairworks for example was lauded all the time I saw it, yet it ran like absolute ass on multiple cards and in the end, it was never really refined to a point where it could be baked in and not cause massive perf degradation. 

I also look at DLSS the same I look at ppl claiming AI will replace VA's, and I know neither should really become a reality, because that's hoping for a short term crux for a problem that didn't even need to exist in the first place. We need VA's for all sorts of media, just like we need actual dedicated hardware instead of an AI "smartly" moving shit about, and then when it's disabled, shit goes to hell.

We can look at regular brute force perf, but it's still shit when you look at what fake frames and slightly higher latency gets you. The brute force should be where DLSS is at, not the other way around, because this means regular brute forcing will now stay behind indefinitely, because of the reliance on DLSS. 

If people didn't care for DLSS, they'd go for AMD. You talk about all these "cherry on top" bonuses, but at the same time you're bigging them up to being goliath techs, but "not needed", like which is it my dude?. if it's nowhere near as important (objectively speaking here, objectively) as you try to make it out to be, then we can all just go AMD, but then you're likely to use the brute force argument, to which I go "DLSS results are better, now what?".

I can't help but feel like this is Steam in regards to Epic, like nvidia is with AMD, only Nvidia hasn't really been as clean as Steam was, compared to the stuff Epic has been doing since they flat out abandoned us for yrs, came back and pulled all this shit.

Epic isn't trying because they never cared for competition, they actually mocked us when they left the platform and came back in such a childish and arrogant manner. AMD isn't doing that, AMD just doesn't have the capital or mindshare Nvidia has, so what hope on gods earth do you have to topple all of that in one generation? (You can't, you absolutely cannot tell me with a straight face that shit is going to magically change next gen, because it hasn't for 3-4 gens now Yuri, don't tell me it will).

Quick question.. for those who've updated their GPU's recently.

Is it okay to slot in a new graphics card with the latest drivers installed from my old GPU? Or is it better to wipe and clean install Geforce drivers, after slotting in the new one. Cheers.

Tech like DLSS is not needed in the sense that Nvidia GPUs can hold their ground against Radeon using brute force without them. Radeon isn't giving you significantly better brute force capabilities in majority of the price ranges. So if the brute force capabilities is similar in most of the price ranges, then you look at well, what other features do each of these GPU vendors have that will sway them to give me their money. And that is where the cherry on top features like DLSS, Ray Tracing and Reflex comes into play because Radeon is worse in all 3 areas. Now if you don't care about those 3 features, then go buy AMD. But when push comes to shove and people are thinking which new GPUs to buy, they would rather get more features if the brute force performance is similar enough.

Also AMD ditches tech too. You mentioned Hairworks from Nvidia but do you remember TressFX from AMD which was the competitor to Hairworks? Neither does AMD. So saying only Nvidia ditches tech years after is pointless cause so does AMD and every other company. Eventually DLSS will also go away. I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft come out with an open source version of a tech similar to DLSS eventually which will kill any reason for Nvidia to continue to support it since it will work on their GPUs along with Radeon GPUs and Intel GPUs. But who knows how many years it till take to come out so it has little to no relevance to people buying GPUs now if the tech comes out say 6 years from now. And when that happens, Nvidia will have some new feature to sway buyers.

And idk if you have been living in a cave last gen but there weren't any discounts for neither Nvidia or Radeon thanks to the crypto boom. Then once that ended, both companies gave discounts near the end of the generation. Granted AMDs discounts were bigger but Nvidia still had discounts none the less. And the gen before that also saw plenty of discounts.

I am not too sure why you keep blaming only Nvidia for using DLSS in their marketing but for whatever reason, you are ignoring the fact that Radeon is also using FSR significantly in their marketing. In my view, I see both Nvidia and Radeon being shit companies just that Nvidia gives more features (and in the case of the 4090, significantly more brute force) while Radeon doesn't hence why I recommend them.

I also don't have any hopes that AMD will topple Nvidia this console gen. That's why I came to the conclusion that the market this console gen for PC GPUs will largely be fucked. Hence why I went out there and bought a 4090 with the crypto money I got. Cause if Radeon is on a downwards trend and Intel is too far behind, may as well get a 4090 in my case and just ride the waves.

I'd look up DDU and get rid of the old drivers completely before installing the new ones.

Ah thought as much. Thanks 👍 Will read up and run before install.

Haven't messed around with drivers tbh for a while.. haha. Want to try and avoid any potentiial issues. Which reminds me.. have to uninstall afterburner too lol.