I was looking up PC controller prices and found this… $136 off?! $136 WOULD BE TOO EXPENSIVE IF THAT WERE THE ENTIRE PRICE, LET ALONE $735.
I don’t care if it’s made of fucking unicorn farts, why the fuck should it be that expensive?
Also aparently xbox controllers are now like $250. Who the fuck is paying more than $50 for a controller lmao wtf has gaming become.
Fuck that noise, I don’t care if it performs like shit, I’m buying a shitty ali express controller for $10 instead lmao.
Gamers delenda est. :gamer-gulag:
It’s ridiculous how extremely expensive electronics can get at the high end for massively diminishing returns on performance.
The other day I put together a part list for what will end up being my first ever desktop pc. With each and every part I researched I was so surprised to learn how god damn expensive it all is. For the most part, I didn’t choose the absolute highest end, enthusiast grade parts. But it is going to be a high-ish end PC because I’ve literally never played a video game at more than a stable 40 fps before. And also I wanted to go all out knowing I’m probably not going to upgrade a single thing for like the next 8 years.
All in all, I’m going to be putting away 20% of my paycheck toward this for the next six to eight months. I guess the good news is some of these parts might end up being much cheaper by the time I order anything.
I was vainly hoping that GPU prices would come down with the crypto bubble burst, but when I think about it it’s not like the manufacturers would willingly give up those juicy profit margins they’ve been seeing for the last couple years.
Definitely, choosing a GPU was the worst of it. It really looks to me like Nvidia took notice of how easily scalpers were selling RTX 3000 series GPUs for astronomical prices and then decided “well shit, if anyone is going to scalp our customers, it might as well be us now that we know people will still buy these things no matter how expensive they are”
I wanted to get something around the 4070ti price range, but felt really hesitant about the 4070ti’s 12gb VRAM and cut down memory bus width. So then I started looking at AMD GPUs and decided the 7900xt would be amazing with its 20gb of VRAM. But after doing some research I found AMD GPUs are pretty much just toys for gamers and get absolutely blown out of the water by Nvidia GPUs for productive workloads, especially in AI.
Since I wanted to do some tinkering with AI, blender, video editing, all that good stuff, it looks like I’ll have to go Nvidia. But that just leads me back to my original dilemma since those tasks eat up VRAM even more than games do. So it’s starting to look like my only option is an RTX 4080 or a used 3090/3090ti. I really don’t wanna pay 1200 fucking dollars for a GPU, but there are so few options.
I have the same problem, I’m forced to buy Nvidia for Adobe stuff.
Idk why AMD doesn’t go after the professional or server graphics card market. They’re just picking up gamer table scraps. They need to revamp graphics completely, like they did with their ryzen processors that actually get bought by data centres.
Maybe Intel will eventually get to the point of being good for productivity. I wouldn’t get their GPUs because I like my old games, and they didn’t figure that out because they prioritized optimizing new games.
lol do software programs really need more than 8 GB of VRAM? I can play pretty modern games on my 5 year old computer with 8 (and 8 GB of normal RAM, although that’s getting stretched even more), although it’s definitely getting up there towards being full when playing a game. I don’t use video editors or machine learning stuff though.
I think people tend to really exaggerate what they “need” in terms of computers. Computers are extremely fast. And software is designed to work with limited resources. I find that the biggest memory hogs are web applications because they’re so poorly written and don’t care about performance at all (and have to be single-threaded). Any desktop program other than a web app in the browser or Electron desktop application, will probably work fine. I have 8 GB of 2133 MHz main RAM (you can get upwards of 64 GB of 8000 MHz RAM now) and applications still work perfectly fine.
The used ones did go down I’m pretty sure, and I also heard like last week that they are finally making some nice mid range cards - the 4060ti is selling for $400, and there are some new pretty good budget cards well under that price as well.
The 4060ti is between 150% and 180% as good as the 2080, which cost $1000 five years ago (and stayed there, it was probably 1000 dollars or even higher like 2 years ago)
gaming peripheral are so funny like consumer electronics is already 90% bullshit but gamers will pay hundreds of dollars for bargain bin quality.
Steelseries cheap stuff is very good, I’m not sure why you’d bother with the more expensive stuff
Yes Steelseries is great. I also like the mid range Logitech stuff. They don’t fuck around. Quality control is great.
Corsair has some nice mid range mice, but they are defective a LOT.
Razer is mid range to expensive, and they have nice mice, but I will never buy another one again. The software crashes literally 2-5 times every single day for no reason, same story on 4 different computers. So 2-5 times a day your mouse sensitivity will suddenly reset to something completely fucking different in the middle of a game. And you can’t just quit! You can’t end the task, there are 10 or 15 tasks running for Razer and about half of them bring each other back online when they go off. Very hard to reset this garbage.
It also creates a new settings profile every time it crashes. Dog shit. Buy a keyboard or headphones from them, if you don’t need to custom configure them, but never a mouse, never.
If anyone here has Razer and problems with Synapse, I created this amazing macro shortcut in windows that I put in the Task Bar right next to the shortcut for Synapse. You create a shortcut and go to Properties > Shortcut and look for the text field called “Target:”
Paste this in:
C:\Windows\System32\taskkill.exe /f /im "Razer Central.exe" /im RazerCentralService.exe /im "Razer Synapse 3.exe" /im "Razer Synapse Service.exe" /im "Razer Synapse Service.exe" /im "Razer Central Service.exe"
All that does is End Task on every Razer thing simultaneously so they can’t claw themselves back. That turns it into a 5 times a day click+click instead of basically having to shut down your game and restart the whole computer or see if you can outrun Task Manager
synapse is the worst. I got a wireless headset that would constantly want to install it and run at startup. I returned that crap and got an equivalent steelseries.
Ohhhh yeah that reminds me, like maybe a year ago, there was a thing where if you plugged a Razer mouse into any Windows machine it would automatically upload Synapse and install it as Admin which let you use the fucking file explorer within the installer to open PowerShell as Admin and take over the computer. Amazin’. Just a fucking digital bump key
I always buy the cheapest Sennheiser (or now Epos after the rebrand) headset and it always serves me well. Weighs nothing so it’s practically impossible to be uncomfortable. Always a great mic. And adequate sound. Real AUX, none of that USB stuff in my headset, thank you very much.
For controllers I always go genuine Xbox… currently using a second(?) gen Xbox One controller, but I bought that for 70 bucks, years ago, I would definitely not pay 250. Also recently bought one of those Nintendo guys, it’s missing analog triggers but it has motion, it’s a pretty good controller if you don’t need analog triggers.
I’ve spent half my childhood playing on crappy controllers, and I’m not going back.
Yeah as soon as I could afford good gaming peripherals I switched to like, the near top of the line gear - not like weird overpriced boutique stuff just the newer top end shit mostly. Stuff that I can make last.
I grew up using a fucking Mac for gaming and had a shit keyboard, cursor acceleration, and a puck mouse. Literally swinging the reticle repeatedly over the target and timing each shot instead of just aiming and shooting. It’s like a musical instrument, if it can’t do certain shit or isn’t reliable, you can’t really practice past a certain point.
Anyway headphones.
I got some really weird Sennheisers for my PC, that I love. OK I really fucking hate Bluetooth, it often sounds like shit, Windows likes to just break it for some reason, it doesn’t have enough bandwidth to make a mic headset sound good, and worst of all, it often fucking doesn’t work while charging??? For some reason??
So I got Sennheiser’s RS series TV hearing RF headphones. I just deactivate the bass/treble boost feature designed for hearing impairments. Ok so:
- Real good sound quality
- Comfortable
- Long range - range is limited by the FCC but these things go far through my place
- No annoying goddamn BEEP when going in and out of max range - this means you get tiny interruptions in the sound, when you’re at the edge of the range, instead of every little momentary hiccup having a long BEEP. BEEP. on either end of it.
- No fucking bluetooth pairing
- Recharges by placing on the stand
- If you forget to charge them, you aren’t fucked! They open up and it’s just two AAA rechargeable batteries. So occasionally I’ll just swap em. Amazin’
- Replaceable earmuffs for when you destroy them with sweat. 10 bucks every few years.
- Optical cable to the transmitter. Alllll digital baby.
- There is also a toggle switch that lets you use an analog cable.
I recently started using the 3.5mm jack option with two splitters so that my wife and I can use real time, zero-delay audio monitoring of each others’ microphones in order to actually hear each other while playing games with others in discord, while we are next to each other. No maddening self-echo for us, and none for the people online. I just switch from optical to 3.5mm and now I’m hearing her mic. If my voice gets to her mic I can’t tell because there is no sound delay. Beautiful.
You pretty much had me sold but I need a mic. :deeper-sadness: The only things I really want is a wireless headset with metal bands connecting the speakers after snapping several sets of gamer trash.
Headsets can be a good easy/cheap option but like, wireless headsets inherently sound like shit due to Bluetooth compression.
It’s often more expensive to get separate items but they can be nice- people will hear your voice very clearly.
I have used two setups- one I really liked was using a micless headset and an Antlion Modmic. You stick on or superglue on a little neodymium magnet mount to your headset that holds a little wireless mic, which can be charged during use if it does run out of battery. I broke that mic though :(
So I bought a friend’s old Blue Yeti and attached it to an arm. You kinda gotta get an arm and turn the gain low, or everyone will hear your keyboard and mouse and room and AC and breathing etc. That shit is also really nice.
A big part of why I got these is because I make YouTube and TikTok videos, and it makes the voice recordings not sound like dog shit.
