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Comment by bcraven | Hacker News Reader

https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/Steam-Hardware-Softw...

Gamers only, but that's not a bad selection imho

The Steam Hardware Survey is an incredibly valuable resource, what with it being freely-available, constantly updated, and sourced from a population that makes its sampling biases generally easy to identify and understand. It and the Backblaze hard drive data are almost unique in how they provide real, large-scale data about computer hardware.

It's interesting how you can practically tell how many people have a specific processor nowadays (12 core = 5900,7900,9900x, 14 core = i5 14600k, 245, 20 core = i7 etc)

Pretty cool

It has his flaws though and is somewhat archaic. I emailed Gabe about this a while back but got no response.

Gosh he must've been busy with something

No it is not, it just shows what Chinese bot farm emulators are configured at the moment.

Why would any bot farm complete this survey?

They're not, it's pulled from the application.

The user (or bot) doesn't have to provide the hardware information, but does have to provide consent for that information to be sent to Valve. Bots have no strong reason to prefer "yes" or "no", but if you have to implement code to handle that dialog box, answering "yes" might be seen as the more human-like behavior.

Thanks, 35.15% on 32GB as well, getting there

I believe most consumer CPUs only have 2 memory channels w/ 1 memory controller so unless they're using 64GB UDIMMs (which I believe do exist as of this year) then gamers seem limited to 64GB total ram (2x32GB) unless they want to drop their ram frequency.

For example a 9950x3d officially supports 2 sticks at DDR5-5600 but 4 sticks at only DDR5-3600. [1]

I had a friend run into this issue on AM5 when he was trying to use 4x32GB DDR5 on his gaming PC.

[1] https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/desktops/ryzen/90...

There have been 48GB dual-rank DIMMs for about two years now, so 96GB using two slots and operating at high frequency has been an option. But even 64GB is still somewhat overkill for a gaming PC, putting you more into workstation territory.

2x48GB is also like $250. Cheaper than weekly error margins for high end GPUs. It just don't make sense not to max out. Felt smoothness in OS, likely from disk cache, is also noticeable when "extra" capacity is removed.

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