Tech Corner

[anewbie]

I'm surprised that I didn't think about a printer cable; same for many, if not all, drive docks. To me it seems pretty stupid.

Circle completed.

 

[jaylach]

I'm beginning to question my new build. Since I finally managed to get Win 11 booting just fine on my main, even though my Ryzen 8-core/16 thread does not qualify, and my second desktop will get updates for Win 10 until October 2026, I just can't seem to find a logical reason for the new build. Not saying that I won't do it but I think it may make more sense to wait until the second system's update are close to expired. In close to a year's time I would probably end up with a more feature rich motherboard and there will, also, probably be better CPU's available.

Anything wrong with my thinking?

 

[MattW]

Good thinking imo

 

[MattW]

What's everyone's opinion on the Steam hardware announcement?


I'm really liking the look of all 3! especially the Steam frame

 

[anewbie]

What's everyone's opinion on the Steam hardware announcement?


I'm really liking the look of all 3! especially the Steam frame

Depends on two factors:
a) price
b) performance
--
Until we know these things no one can provide a reasonable answer.

 

[MattW]

I can't comment on prices. But the demos/specs I've seen of the Steam Machine and Steam Frame look like they can comfortably run today's titles. They are doing what Apple has done. Making an ecosystem around Steam products and OS.

I'd say the Machine is spec'd quite well. 6x the performance of the Steam Deck.

 

[anewbie]

I can't comment on prices. But the demos/specs I've seen of the Steam Machine and Steam Frame look like they can comfortably run today's titles. They are doing what Apple has done. Making an ecosystem around Steam products and OS.

I'd say the Machine is spec'd quite well. 6x the performance of the Steam Deck.
View attachment 373898

I saw the paper specs but their machine is nothing more than a glorified linux box and as someone who has been buildling linux boxes (and bsd before that) for 30 years the specs as presented are useless to myself. Also some games don't run correctly and/or much slower due to the windows layer (and yes i know they use a glorified version of wine). Besides as someone who refuses to touch the steam deck 6x the performance of 0 is well 0
---
The difference between apple and steam is apple is provides the box top down and steam provides mostly off the shelf hardware mungle together. Yes i saw they are using a 'custom' amd chip though amd does custom chips for either xbox or ps whatever and it is not clear if this is a slight deriviative of one of those chips or something truely new - i'm too lazy to dig into the core - lets just say i'm not a believer but if they price the box low enough it might be the direction i go instead of trying to get my ancient system to install win 11 though i hate to see the loss of 20 years of installed junk. Sides i don't know if the speed up hack for wiz8 will run under wine

More on apple - they also custom design their chip is a bit beyond what we are seeing here. The chip is based off the typical snap-dragon design yet it is far more different - think samsung in house exwhatever and the mediatech chip.

To be honest I think the box would be more 'interesting' if it used something along the line of the apple chip though i suspect then a lot fewer games would run on it or run a lot slower due to the emulation layer.

 

[jaylach]

To be honest I haven't even looked. One thing for sure is that the VR headset is pretty useless to me with my being bli8nd in one eye.

As to the Steam deck I have better. How about a game-pad that fits around my 10 inch MS Surface? It connects to the ports on the right side of the Surface and works well giving me a larger deck.

 

[anewbie]

Bit concern about this - it is a petty corner to cut:

However, Valve is only building UHS-I card readers into these devices. UHS-I is slow compared to state-of-the-art microSD or internal SSDs.
From:

Valve is making microSD cards the next game cartridges

Plug and play.

www.theverge.com

 

[jaylach]

Bit concern about this - it is a petty corner to cut:

However, Valve is only building UHS-I card readers into these devices. UHS-I is slow compared to state-of-the-art microSD or internal SSDs.
From:

Valve is making microSD cards the next game cartridges

Plug and play.

www.theverge.com

I'm just curious as to how much impact a slower SD card would have on one of these units. Would it be likely to actually impact game play much?

 

[anewbie]

I'm just curious as to how much impact a slower SD card would have on one of these units. Would it be likely to actually impact game play much?

It depends on if you play the game from the sd card or install it on the machine's ssd. If you play it from the card and the game is texture heavy (lots of texture reads) then of course it could increase stuttering. Sort of like playing a game from hard-drive vs ssd though i haven't compared state of art hard drive to sd card performance so i can't give a precise evaluation. For playing videos it shouldn't be an issue.

The thing is that we are talking about a very inexpensive portion of the hardware so it seems alike an oversight to do this limited implementation.

 

[jaylach]

It depends on if you play the game from the sd card or install it on the machine's ssd. If you play it from the card and the game is texture heavy (lots of texture reads) then of course it could increase stuttering. Sort of like playing a game from hard-drive vs ssd though i haven't compared state of art hard drive to sd card performance so i can't give a precise evaluation. For playing videos it shouldn't be an issue.

The thing is that we are talking about a very inexpensive portion of the hardware so it seems alike an oversight to do this limited implementation.

OK, thanks for the info.

I sometimes wonder about specs given for game play. Take Baldur's Gate 3 as an example. The system requirements state that it MUST be installed on an SSD yet, just to see, I installed it on a spin drive and then my system M.2. I can't say that I saw any difference but I have a superior video card.

Personally I think the graphics card is really the biggest factor in most cases. For instance, way back when I was running Win Vista, there was a demo for a war type action game which I can't remember the name. The demo requirements stated that a 2GHz. CPU was required and mine was 1 GHz.. I decided to try anyway and the game played just fine. I think what made it work was the video card. I had an ATI Rage Fury which, at the time, was a fairly high level card. When looking at gaming I think the graphics card is really the critical aspect. Does a faster drive and/or CPU have impact? Of course, but I think the video is more important in most cases.

 

[anewbie]

Personally I think the graphics card is really the biggest factor in most cases

Depends on many factor after all 4K gaming is more gpu intensive than 720p .... there is no single answer here.

 

[jaylach]

Depends on many factor after all 4K gaming is more gpu intensive than 720p .... there is no single answer here.

Very true but I DO believe that a strong graphics card can overcome a weaker CPU. Of course this is not true in all cases.

 

[MattW]

I've been doing some reading on the Steam Machine and its specs. It seems Valve has made this with the majority of Steam users in mind. Which I think is a great move to make. SS is the current average specs of Steam users PC's. Compared to the steam machine, they are quite similar if not better. A good upgrade path option IMO. The one thing I noticed was that Display resolution at 1080p made up 50%+ of Steam users. The Gabecube is claiming 4k 60hz with upscaling on. More than enough power for those still using 1080p or even 1440p displays. If I were still running my first-gen Ryzen and GTX 1060 system, I would be considering the Gabecube