Hacker News Reader

Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

Huh. They're targeting ... people who don't know any better?

I want to see rendering benchmarks (both 1080p/2160p) of this vs external Thunderbolt GTX/1060,1070,1080 enclosures (and AMDGPU equivalents). I mean if it works better and you do a lot of video, then yea, go for it. If it's only marginally better, buy something with a real PCIe slot that's upgradable.

Even business customers should not buy this if the benchmarks don't align. Seriously you're hurting everyone, even if you can afford it. Stop that. Planned obsolescent is terrible. Pay more and buy something you can upgrade, fix and repair.

Throwing out electronics after four years hurts the planet.

View on HN

The value in the ability to upgrade is often misperceived as being worth more than it really is. If you buy something mid-to-top range you are really only going to be able to get a single upgrade cycle out of it out (where there is some substantial marginal benefit for the cost) before the rest of the system starts to obsolete itself. If you watch things closely and the tick-tock cycles are aligned then maybe you get two.

It’s a fun hobby. And if you have the cash to spend on always having the best GPU then you probably don’t care that for $1,000 you only get an extra 10 FPS or so.

These days I can’t even remember how old a machine is let alone what GPU it even has. “Why is this box so slow? It’s four years old? Holy shit, when did that happen?”

Even when I had a rig and was reading Tom’s and Anand daily I don’t think I actually ever upgraded a video card twice. Maybe it happened once? The cycles might have been longer back then, but by the time cards had advanced two generations we were moving from AGP 4x to 8X or to PCI-E or multi core whatever. I could easily just go back in time and buy whatever middle of the road Dell lunchbox was available and just replaced the whole thing every year or two and probably saved money for the same performance.

These days I’ll take a non upgradable whatever it is as long as it has a good warranty.

> The value in the ability to upgrade is often misperceived as being worth more than it really is. If you buy something mid-to-top range you are really only going to be able to get a single upgrade cycle out of it out (where there is some substantial marginal benefit for the cost) before the rest of the system starts to obsolete itself. If you watch things closely and the tick-tock cycles are aligned then maybe you get two.

I don't think that's true in this case.

The upgradeable part would just be an PCIe enclosure. PCIe 2.0 is over ten years old and would still be sufficient for many GPU applications with little performance loss. PCIe 3.0 is eight years old and fast enough that we will likely not see 4.0 for many years in desktops (or mobiles) [also 4.0 needs more expensive materials for all involved planars, so... yeah... not doing that for +-0 %].

It's interesting seeing arguments about how valuable upgrade-ability is, and yet comments like this further outline how upgrade-ability is overrated.

Clearly technology isn't advancing like it used to. I've been running a machine since 2011 when I built it. 15 years ago I maybe would've upgraded every 4 years. Now I'm almost 8 years strong.

Now everyone has different needs, and I think Apple and similar products haven't really been aligned with those needs perfectly, but how much, from now, can graphics REALLY improve, for most use-cases?

It’s never “fast enough.” PCI-E motherboards are actually out now. In three years we will have either PCI-E 4.0 or 5.0 as a standard.

And you’re right—PCIe 3.0 cards out today have plenty of performance for today’s applications. That why you would get a PCIe 3.0 card today. But it doesn’t matter if it’s fixed because you aren’t going to upgrade it.

> It’s never “fast enough.”

Actually that's not true. When PCIe 3.0 was introduced, it took quite some time before the (still marginal) performance improvements materialized. We're talking about a few percent at most in games and benchmarks (many are just neutral) between PCIe 2.0 and 3.0, simply because it's not a bottleneck. For not overly data-intensive GPGPU applications (e.g. video things) I reckon that's the case as well. Yes, sure, there are applications you can run on a GPU where PCIe is a bottleneck. PCIe bandwidth benchmarks, for example.

Don't expect PCIe 4.0 consumer-ish (i.e. what this is about) GPUs soon (2019 earliest). It's wholly unclear whether you'll see any performance improvements at all from that — just look at the bus utilization in games and benchmarks, you'll be hard pressed to see more than 10-20 % (which is precisely why running a GPU on a x8 interface (or 2.0) is not an issue).

If it’s not true then you are actually removing the only major benefit of upgradability all together. Just get what’s available today since it’s fast enough and will be for some time.

I think you misread my original comment.

I was saying that the Blackmagic eGPU in an upgradeable form factor would mean that you get a 200-300 $ (or something like that) GPU enclosure with some electronics in it (Thunderbolt hub, power supply etc.). Then you stick a current GPU into it. This would make sense because GPU replacement cycles are much shorter than the interconnect upgrade cycle. That's why I said that most applications are still fine today with the over ten year old PCIe 2.0.

So just to reiterate: PCIe bus speed is simply not a limiting factor for the overwhelming majority of GPU applications.

Four years ago I bought a desktop gaming PC (I'm normally a Mac user) with the idea that I could upgrade it over the years to keep it current but avoid replacing the whole thing.

Turns out in practice technology changes enough over that time to only leave the case, and perhaps the PSU. The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now. The SSD can be reused but newer technology is much faster.

I don't know what gets saved by upgrading parts rather than the machine. The same amount of electronics are disposed of (or sold on the second hand market)

> The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now. The SSD can be reused but newer technology is much faster.

Unless you got a bulldozer CPU, I don't believe you. I bet that upgrading just the graphics card would give you 90% of the effect of upgrading everything.

I have a Vishera CPU and it is definitely NOT obsolete. If anything it ages much better that Intels due to better multicore support in modern apps.

> The motherboard, CPU, RAM and graphics card are all obsolete now

How is that at all possible unless it was under powered in the first place? Maybe it can't play some of the latest titles at max settings but a 4 year old machine should be able to run just about everything decently.

What's stopping you from upgrading the graphics card? Looks like plenty of high end cards have PCIe3 support. RAM can always be upgraded, though few games will makes use of the 8GB that was pretty standard in gaming PC's nearly a decade ago. A new CPU won't gain you much gaming wise.

Most games target PS4 level specs anyway, which is now a 5 year old machine.

I got the top-end i7 about 5 years ago, it's still fast. I have tried to justify upgrading it many times but I just can't see the benefit in replacing it with something that's just a bit quicker.

I can at least upgrade the SSD and GPU without throwing the whole damn thing out, but even then it's hard to justify.

Well any GPU you upgrade can be used in our next system. That said there hasn't been much movement there in the last 2 years or so since the rx480 came out.

I agree with the ssd, tho. The newer PCIe based ones in the m.2 formfactor areso much faster it feels a bit like a waste to buy a sata SSD.

> That said there hasn't been much movement there in the last 2 years or so since the rx480 came out.

Aren't the Vegas quicker, and the NVIDIA offering has been improving quite a bit over the last 2 years? I might not be paying enough attention, but I'm pretty sure the 1080 ti and 1070 ti's came out only recently.

> all obsolete now

What is it used for?

If you buy Intel, you know beforehand you won't be able to upgrade the CPU, since the socket is changed (intentionally, of course) every generation. But the CPU isn't the issue for e.g. gaming, and upgrading every generation or every other generation largely doesn't make any sense at all with Intel parts for the last eight years or so.

Since you're saying obsolete, you probably bought into 1150/Haswell. It was known this was the last pure DDR3 platform, but you can still get DDR3 memory new, if you need more. So that's not a problem, really. (And it's actually cheaper than DDR4 memory)

Graphics cards can keep up for years nowadays. I've used a midrange-highend card for five years before upgrading; I could still play new games at mid-to-high settings. Graphics cards can always be upgraded in any computer (if the PSU has enough power, which is rarely an issue).

> If you buy Intel, you know beforehand you won't be able to upgrade the CPU, since the socket is changed (intentionally, of course) every generation. But the CPU isn't the issue for e.g. gaming, and upgrading every generation or every other generation largely doesn't make any sense at all with Intel parts for the last eight years or so.

Is it really true that the socket changes every generation? My impression was that sockets changed every 2-3 generations, not every one. Not that that entirely defeats the point, but it expands the window.

Yes. You get one generation (one tick-tock, so for example, Nehalem+Westmere, Sandy+Ivy Bridge, Haswell+Broadwell, though differences between tick and tock are generally not worth it). 1151/H4 deviates a bit here, because Intel fubar'd their roadmap and weren't able to deliver even single-digit advances per revision any more. So H4 now has three generations of chipsets, two of which don't support CFL (Coffee lake).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_socket

Intel seems to change desktop sockets every 2 years now. That includes multiple generations, but 2 years of CPU improvements is not significant in almost all cases. A new motherboard with each new CPU is the likely situation. AMD has supported sockets for longer, and that seems to be continuing.

It is not easy now but you can plan for upgrade of PC and then do it successfully. E.g. If you bought AM4 platform in 2017 you would be able to upgrade. If you bought AM3 platform in Phenom era you could upgrade to vishera/zambezi.

You can upgrade your storage independently, you can upgrade you GPU out of step from other components, you can upgrade GPU more often than CPU without compromising too much. And so on. You can for example keep your soundcard since 10 years ago with some fiddling with drivers. One of my SSDs is 6 years old and while not ideal case it is still much faster than modern HDD and I use it constantly.

What you also mention - case and PSU - those alone cost ~100-200$ each, so worthy saving for upgrade. My seasonic PSU will work for a decade at least, or more.

It is not easy, yes. But possible.

Not really. I use my 4 year old CPU, power supply, memory and motherboard with a brand new geforce 1080. I could also upgrade the memory if I wanted to.

If you upgrade the CPU, you usually have to upgrade the motherboard. That's about it.

Agreed. Built a PC almost 5 years ago and the only modifications I've made have been adding more disk drives. GPU's starting to drag but I hardly game anymore so still works like a charm.

Just upgrade the GPU. Most of your problems are solved.

Upgrade the RAM at the start of a new spec and you'll be fine. CPU/mobo go hand in hand, but you're rarely going to need to upgrade that anyway.

Ever been to a place with a fancy receptionist exclusively running Google Calendar in one browser tab taking up less than 35% of a HUGE iMac screen?

A pretty enclosure can be worth more than its contents, just accept it as a piece of furniture.

I'm sure you wouldn't scoff at PC gaming rigs with pretty flashing LED lights after all.

"Yeah boss I need that $3000.00 laptop"

"and I absolutely need extra graphical horsepower to perform my job"

"but let's get the Razer core and fuck around for days getting it to work instead of buying the one advertised on the apple site because raisins".

Razer Core X is plug and play with Macbooks.

https://www.razer.com/gaming-laptops/razer-core-x

Now if you use a NVIDIA GPU, instead of an AMD one, then you need to do extra configuration.

Can u run cuda with egpus? How about cudnn, etc.?

Their site describes who this is for at great length. I'm not sure where the GP got the 'business customer' idea, it's not accurate.

If it really is quieter than the others, there's a market for that. Quite a lot of eGPU boxes are _very_ noisy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com