As we were discussing the other day, my Astro's are 16 year old and on to their third generation of console but being wired they seem to just keep going and going. But it would be nice to go wireless and retire my current Astro's and de-clutter the bulky set up I have for my PC for one headset to rule them all. I'm in no rush though so will wait until release and a lot more in depth reviews to drop before deciding.
I don't expect a miracle jump in performance, although my 980 really struggles with pretty much every game now sadly.
Googling some benchmarks of the 2070 it can use high to ultra settings in games like Far Cry 5, Forza Horizon, Shadow of the Tomb Raider etc. and maintain over 60fps. So hopefully it should be quite a noticeable jump in performance. Some of that will be down to VRAM too, 8Gb is the minimum I’d go for these days as games are getting chonky ao your 980 was probably having to do some VRAM management which definitely wouldn’t help game smoothness.
7 hours ago, Spacedeck said:
If I do end up with his PC, I'd plan on putting this PC in a smaller case for the daughter to use. Unless the MB and GPU wouldn't fit a smaller form factor case?
The motherboard is ATX form factor which means you can’t go too small but you can get some pretty small atx cases. Motherboad sizes are easy as the case will say what if they support it or not. It’ll just be some googling to make sure the 980 fits too.
So £190-£225 just in those but you could add £40-£50 for the PSU. The motherboard is obviously an older version but if memory serves, the Auros 7 was one of best Ryzen 2000 series motherboards so probably add £50 easy (probably more) but makes it another £100 bringing the current total to ~£300.
After that everything else is “free” with the cooler being pretty good too so another bonus. Drives are cheap these days so they won’t add much but always nice to haves.
For gaming at 1080p that PC should be fine and still hit 60fps at quite high-ish settings.
As for upgrades; yes there would be some easy upgrades. RAM is obviously easy but 16Gb is probably enough unless you’re playing some intensive games. GPU is also easy but for 1080p the 2070 should be enough. The 250Gb NVME drive is small these days but the motherboard has multiple slots so cloning the existing one would be easy (from memory Ryzen 2000 doesn’t have the pci-e lanes to run 2 nvme’s without some performance loss so it would be better swapping it out rather than use 2 but worth double checking as my memory of hardware specs from years ago could be wrong). CPU wise obviously it’s a few years old but the 2700x was the top of the 2000 series and it still holds up well today and I’m not sure it would be worth upgrading but it would be possible to swap it out for a newer CPU as the AM4 socket included 3000 and 5000 series too. You’d need to check on Gigabytes site but the Auros 7 was their top board so can’t believe it wouldn’t support newer Ryzen.
There’s some downsides though namely everything is EOL. Ryzen now uses socket AM5 so you couldn’t go newer than 5000 series. DDR5 RAM is the current where this is DDR4. I wouldn’t put too much weight on these though as that PC should still last for years. It’s just worth noting so you’re fully informed.
So overall is it a good deal? I’m always loathed to answer these sort of questions as so much of what it depends on is subjective but I’d say so, yes.
Stick drift seems to be such a personal thing, my PS4 controllers did succumb to it eventually so I got a PS5 bundle with 2 controllers to have a back up. But over 2 years later and I'm still only using 1 controller yet in the same time period some people have gone through multiple controllers.
As for scuff, I haven't looked in to them though this more due to having modified my standard controller. I bought the PS4 back buttons when they came out and switching to the PS5 it was tricky playing without them. So I fitted some ExtremeRate back buttons on my OEM controller not long after I got it and they work well enough. Had I not already got a spare controller and spent the time and money modding a controller, I probably would have gone with the Sony pro controller even if the price does make my eyes water.
Overall it's not the beating of the Steam Deck that the marketing material made out (shocking I know!). Still the Ally has some pros against the Steam Deck though most of the Deck's positives stem from it being a more mature product with a large community supporting it (coming up with controller maps, for example). It will be interesting to see the uptake of the Ally and how it develops over the next year.
Though as Phil mentioned, there's somethings the Ally just can't get around like the lack of track pads. I'd imagine the low wattage performance is also baked in as it seems it's just a limitation of the chip being used which is why the Ally wins at higher TDP's.
It’s a tricky one to compare to the SteamDeck in my opinion. Yes it’s a handheld gaming device but for the performance I’m expecting it to be, at minimum, twice the price maybe even 3x. At that price point the competition then stops being the SteamDeck and becomes gaming laptops.
Still it’s good to have more options and i’ll be keeping an eye on its development.
Cheers @Greboth, I suppose the question is it worth an extra £50 just for a heatsink as that what I was trying to weigh up. Can I add one afterwards if I wanted to?
They're not that expensive are they? Admittedly a very quick google but they seem to be only £10-£20 more.
A solid state HD should consume very little power, therefore a Heatsink is just a money grab that seems unnecessary to me.
It’s more complicated than that though as you can overheat an NVMe and it will throttle performance to cool itself down.
They don’t draw much power but the heat is focused to controller and memory. Constant and large read write operations will overheat a drive without a cooler. Gaming isn’t quite that intensive but the drive will certainly get warm - though warm is actually a good thing. It’s also further muddied that gen3 drives aren’t too bad but gen4 drives get significantly hotter.
If memory serves the PS5 is gen4 so I’d say get a cooler. I don’t know how well the PS5 cools the nvme but the degradation and performance loss is considerably worse if they get too hot than a little cooler.
So I bought my first Steamdeck accessory the other say in a Deckmate. I only went for the basic one as I won’t be vesa mounting the deck or anything like that but I have say so far it’s a great bit of kit.
The base of it is a frame that clips on to the deck with a mounting hole over the Steam logo and also handily comes with 2 memory card slots too.
Which means you can clip in things such as a stand
But the main reason I got it was it includes a sticky mount so you can mount a usb battery bank to the back
And they also include a sticky mount, so even with the battery on the back you can use the stand
Now I just need to find a small usb c cable and I’ll be good to game on the move for 5-6 hours even on modern demanding titles.
Ace that you're getting one mate!....although I think you should keep it just to play your amazing PC games rather than emulate the shit out of old games. 😎
Why do you say that? I’ll definitely be playing regular PC games in the beginning but the ability to re-play old games or play some I’ve missed is something to look forward to.
So my finger may have slipped and ordered one earlier - oh well.
I've been eyeing up one for a while but quite a few games I'd play on it aren’t properly supported but having spent far too much time reading online about people running Windows on it and emulators, it's a hard proposition to say no to so finally gave in. It says delivery is 2 weeks but I imagine they've sold a lot leading up to Christmas and Christmas itself is going to delay that further but looking forward to lunch times in the office next year 😄
I've also ordered a dock for it too, not so much for connecting a screen but being able to use the mouse and keyboard at my desk at work over lunch will be great. I've also ordered an SD card so lots of storage for other games too.
Intel or AMD for a CPU is a little from column A and a little column B. On the top end, AMD releae a new chip and tale the lead, then Intel release a new chip and take the lead then rinse and repeat. More mid-range it gets a bit murkier as I’m not sure on the price to performance.
I’m also not certain of prices in USD but for a similar budget here you could get something like a Ryzen 5600x or Intel 12400 with appropriate motherboard. I’d recommend 16Gb RAM with as fast as you can get, probably 3200MHz at minimum. I’d also recommend getting an M2 SSD as they’re super fast and you could re-use your existing drives as additional storage.
PSU it depends what you end up speccing and future proofing you want to do. Once you have a rough idea of spec there’s plenty of PSU calculators online. I’d guess you’ll only probably need 500-600W at most. Though depending on how long you expect the PC to go for and if it will see futude GPU upgrades, it’s cheaper to spec higher watt one now than have to change in the future. Corsair, Seasonic and SuperFlower are generally the top brands but it does depend on specific models.
Case, I’m sure you could re-use the existing one as not much really changes in cases design except for the addition of tempered glass and generally a reduction in hdd bays. So up to you on if you want to switch cases.
GPU, I’d imagine you could get a RTX3060. Dependong on USD pricing and if you don’t want a case, you might be able to go for a 3070. Though even a 3060 is 4x or 5x faster than a 480 so would be a massive improvement.
If you go on PC part picker you can spec a PC and share a link for us to look at. For some reason, on my phone, it defaults to UK so can’t put a US build together.
You really should, the default settings are (were) nowhere near the recommend ones in that article and it looks so much better.
If nothing else, you definitely should look up the game settings as, like most modern TV's, the default is to have all the motion smoothing, sharpening etc. on which ruins response time.
Reading about this on other discussion boards, quite a few people said they were already using ExtremeRate back buttons. So I thought I’d give them a go and so far so good.
If you want to be able use L3/R3 or the touchpad button on the back buttons you need to do some soldering. Otherwise it’s basically disassemble the controller, replace a couple of ribbon cables and put it back together with their back on.
I went for the 2 button version as only really care about jump and duck being. I fitted it yesterday in about 40 mins and only tested everything works but so far so good.
I was only thinking the other day while playing OW2 that I miss my back buttons. But that price is steep!!!
Though it could be worth it in the long term. I went through 6 ps4 controllers and all went in the bin due to stick issues. If I could have spent £20 on new sticks rather than £60 a controller, it would have saved me £240. So suddenly the price, along with the extra features, doesn’t seem so bad.
It’s ludicrous to think 2 GPU generations ago I built a whole PC with a 2080 for less than these cost.
Logically I can somewhat understand the price increases, there’s no getting away from the raw manufacturing costs have gone up 20%-30%. But the thought of spending that much 🤯
It’s a shame as I was considering a 40 series up grade but looks like I’ll be keeping my current card for a bit longer.
it does make me wonder why they haven't made a kind of 'budget' graphics card that could be very marketable right about now
'Budget' isn't the problem though, the RRP of GPU's honestly isn't too bad with a 3080 only being ~£100 more than a 1080. Third party manufacturers have always been more but the problem is that even the "budget" ones are £150-£200 over RRP with some getting close to double RRP. Yet a lot of cards are out of stock because people are still buying them. So make an actual budget card, or price as such, when you can double your profit on all your cards.
To follow on from James' comments about monitors, 2k/1440p/QHD (different names for the same thing) are the sweet spot right now in my opinion especially if you're also looking at higher refresh rates. It's obviously game dependant but RTX3090's can push 4k at over 100fps on average but you'll see dips in to double digits still. I think some of expectation over resolution is due to referring to them by only one edge, so some people think 4k is twice the resolution of 1080p but as the pixel count on both edges double, 4k is 4 times the resolution of 1080p which is why it is so hard to get high fps. A 1440p screen though it 'only' 1.8x the pixels of 1080p so still a nice resolution increase but without quite the gpu hammering of 4k. Most of the systems (sensibly) being linked are RTX3080's which on high settings should on most games keep you at or over 120fps on average.
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As we were discussing the other day, my Astro's are 16 year old and on to their third generation of console but being wired they seem to just keep going and going. But it would be nice to go wireless and retire my current Astro's and de-clutter the bulky set up I have for my PC for one headset to rule them all. I'm in no rush though so will wait until release and a lot more in depth reviews to drop before deciding.
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