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Comment by BillinghamJ | Hacker News Reader

Surprised he went with a 4080 rather than a 4090. The budget would have covered it, and the performance per $ is much better

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Author here.

I strongly considered the 4090, at $500 more you get a lot more performance. (if you can find one). However it mostly came down to this:

1. I'd need a new power supply as well (need 4 PCIe Ports) 2. The power usage is drastically more (I care about this) 3. More heat and noise 4. I don't need the extra performance that much.

So yeah from a value perspective 4090 is a better bet for most people, but after careful consideration I went for the 4080. It's been fantastic so far.

Once you return a $2600 computer, you realize you have $2600 in your pocket. And now you're going to actually do some bang for your buck math to make sure you're wasting money _again_

Both the 4080 and the 4090 are very expensive, but the 4080 is pretty universally considered to be much worse value for money.

The best value for money, though, is money. If the 4080 does what this guy needs, even if the 4090 is better, that's still hundreds of dollars saved. The bar to clear is "is it fast enough for what I need it to", after that it's a luxury spend.

Thank you. I see this all the time where theoretical performance/w or performance/$ purchases are made as if you own a data center. Performance unused is very expensive indeed.

Author here.

Sorry, but your reply is really funny, even if it's a jab at me.

I outlined the reasons for the 4080, full knowing it's drastically less performance than the 4090. I balanced power usage, heat and noise vs how much performance I need.

Doesn't make your comment any less hilarious though.

There was no jab, just a typo. That was supposed to say "you're not wasting" money. But you only get an [edit] link for so long before your comment's permanent.

Is there a site that ranks GPUs by performance-per-$?

Or even performance-per-watt?

Lots and lots of YouTube reviewers give their opinions and various benchmark-oriented stats around this. Gamers Nexus are pretty good in my view (though their videos tend to take a long time to not say a whole lot)

It's hard to express how much I hate when the only source of information is a YouTube video. Discord "servers" are almost as bad.

Is it so hard to make a list? Ideally, a sortable one?

I tend to use videocardbenchmark.net by PassMark, but I'm sure there's more out there.

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