Quoting: slaapliedjeHa, I have been far too lazy on all my builds to bother overclocking things, my systems in general run fast enough to where I doubt I would notice. Back when I used to do it, for some reasons it always felt slower.
It is like buying third party parts for an old 302 Boss, you end up with it performing worse than the stock parts!

Same here, but buying a 3600 MHz DDR4 RAM and only having 2133 MHz... It's almost half! I couldn't let that pass :D

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Quoting: aokamiI'm going to upgrade my FX-8350 for a Ryzen 7 Gen 2 as well, haha.
Would you go with a X570 motherboard ?

Well, I finally bought my new CPU: Ryzen 7 3800X (only 50$ more expensive than the 3700X).
So I went with the X570 eventually, and honestly, for now, I can't complain.
To support it, I took the Asus X570 TUF-Plus motherboard and some 16 GB of Corsair RAM @ 3600MHz.

Be careful: and I think this is true to any motherboard supporting DDR4, the base RAM clock is 2133MHz. DO NOT increase the memory frequency from the BIOS "Advanced" menu (I did that, got a permanent black screen and thought I bricked my machine), instead, use the "Ai Tweaker" menu and change the memory frequency there. I don't remember exactly but it was very simple in the end, one thing to change, like "Best frequency" or something, and it worked out-of-the-box.

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Quoting: Patola

Quoting: CreakNote on the Steam Controllers: I have 2 Steam Controllers at home, hoping I would find them useful one day, but honestly, after testing with my PS4 controllers (and even despite the lag), I really don't see what's good in them. They only work if you launch Steam (or, once again, a user-space application), and even with that very few games actually work. I tried with a few games like Alien: Isolation, Overcooked 2, Team Fortress, and it's always a bit clunky.. it feels like it's just some kind of not so good keyboard emulation (I had to boost the "mouse" sensibility to the max in Alien: Isolation for instance in order to have something playable, eventually K+M was so much more enjoyable).

No, you don't need Steam. I don't use the steam driver even under Steam - I prefer to use sc-controller because I find its features much better, and I have 132 configuration files for my games there (in the case of Star Citizen, I have two configurations which switch between flight mode and walking mode).

The Steam Controller is amazing and yes, it's great for playing Total War games too.

Well, that's why I added "or a user-space application".

All these comments made me think that it could make a very interesting video to understand how it is used by advanced users! (@Liam, maybe? since I know he also loves his Steam Controller).

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I'm always a bit puzzled about controllers on Linux.. Why do they all need a user-space driver to be installed (except for the PS4 controller)? Can't it be included in the kernel and call it a day?

Other than that, I just paired my PS4 controllers using a basic Bluetooth dongle and it was recognized out-of-the-box on Fedora 31, no tinkering with config files, nothing to install, nothing to compile, no need to launch Steam to make it work, it "just works".

Only flaw: it has some lag. But I wonder if that is coming from my machine or my Bluetooth dongle. Do you know a good Bluetooth dongle I could buy?

Note on the Steam Controllers: I have 2 Steam Controllers at home, hoping I would find them useful one day, but honestly, after testing with my PS4 controllers (and even despite the lag), I really don't see what's good in them. They only work if you launch Steam (or, once again, a user-space application), and even with that very few games actually work. I tried with a few games like Alien: Isolation, Overcooked 2, Team Fortress, and it's always a bit clunky.. it feels like it's just some kind of not so good keyboard emulation (I had to boost the "mouse" sensibility to the max in Alien: Isolation for instance in order to have something playable, eventually K+M was so much more enjoyable).

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As a GNOME user for *a lot* of years now, I'm very happy to see these improvements! GNOME is really getting better and better. YMMV, but from what I've seen, most of the time, people disliking GNOME tries to use it with the same Windows paradigms in mind (all the apps must be visible on the desktop in a taskbar, using the mouse a lot, prefer a menu of apps instead of using the global search).

At some point in my career, I had to use OSX and, though I hate Apple for a lot of things, their UX is very often on point. And this is especially true for Spotlight: one shortcut to pop it (Cmd+Space) and search EVERYTHING from here. As you get used to it, you could almost don't care where you put your files (I can't though.. it disturbs my OCDs ;)).

GNOME simplifies that even more: hit the Win key, and start searching. Apps are sorted by most recently used, so if you hit <Win> then "f", you'll get firefox. It's become such a habit that I don't even wait for the animations to finish, it take literally less than half a second to launch an app, how awesome is that?

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Quoting: Eike

Quoting: CreakAs your post has been up-voted as well, I'm intrigued why single-core performance is the major sell point for you?

According to measurements with actual games, single core performance is very important. My guess is that there's a main game logic process which runs on a single core and needs quite some power. Other threads are used, too, so you do need enough cores as well. This was especially pointed out for the Ryzen 2000 generation which lost on real games performance against Intel.

I understand that and you're completely correct, but if you buy a CPU now, I'd say it is for a few years. By the time, these benchmarks will probably change (because of the reasons I listed).

But if you plan to change your CPU every year, I agree this would be the best choice..

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Quoting: dubigrasuI do have an Intel CPU now, but when the time to upgrade comes I'll buy the one CPU that gives me the best single-core performance, what brand doesn't matter, I don't have an allegiance with either of them.
I know we're seeing more and more games taking advantages of multiple cores, but for the moment the single-core perf is what I look for.

As your post has been up-voted as well, I'm intrigued why single-core performance is the major sell point for you?

I know for certain that game studios are improving their engines to take advantage of the increasing number of cores in today's CPUs. Of course they won't release games that needs 16+ cores since no current consoles have it, and even in the PC world, players with this kind of CPUs have a very small market share (less than 0.1% ). But 4 cores is now the norm (50%) and 6 cores is not far (21%), while 8 and 12 cores are already slowly increasing.

Considering several points:
* Intel still has a high market share (79%)
* Intel CPUs have low core count
* AMD CPUs have high core count
* AMD is starting to increase its market share
* Intel will clearly try to compete with AMD with high core CPUs (when they'll figure out 7nm)
* And finally, we can put so much transistors in just one core, thus the increase of the core count we see

I would say future is more multi-core than single-core. Maybe I'm projecting too far though :D

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Quoting: GuestSince RDNA2 will support Ray Tracing does that mean we can use it in games like Quake 2 RTX or Metro Exodus or would those games need to be patched to work with AMD?

From what I understand, there are no standardized extensions for ray tracing, NVIDIA added their own drivers extensions in Vulkan and OpenGL (see https://developer.nvidia.com/vulkan-turing ). So I doubt AMD will use the same extensions. That said, I'm sure with AMD entering the dance, some standardization will happen. It is a frequent pattern in the world of 3D drivers.

Quoting: aokami

Quoting: CreakI was sure I was going to switch my old AMD FX-8320 for a Ryzen Zen 2 somewhere this year, but I wasn't completely convinced with the AMD RX 5700, though thought it might be a good replacement for my RX 480... I think I'll do my CPU upgrade and wait a little to see the RDNA 2 GPU selection!

I'm going to upgrade my FX-8350 for a Ryzen 7 Gen 2 as well, haha.
Would you go with a X570 motherboard ?

I'm unsure about that.. clearly PCIe 4.0 is the future, but X570 adds yet another (cheap?) fan and thus yet another possible source of noise. Since I don't do video editing, I know I won't need the extra bandwidth PCIe 4.0 offers. So in the end, I'm torn. I guess it will eventually depend on the price of these motherboards too.

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Quoting: soulsource

Quoting: rkfgWhy do you think AMD is more secure? Sure, their CPUs/chipsets don't have these exact Intel technologies but they have other things that might be vulnerable. Also, many of those CPU data leaks were not Intel-specific.

I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Platform_Security_Processor

To be fair, I'm pretty sure Intel must also have a division dedicated to the security of their CPUs too. I'm not convinced AMD CPUs are flawless, it's just that they get less researches since they have less market shares (especially on the servers). Though I'm definitely glad to go full AMD on my machine right now :D

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I was sure I was going to switch my old AMD FX-8320 for a Ryzen Zen 2 somewhere this year, but I wasn't completely convinced with the AMD RX 5700, though thought it might be a good replacement for my RX 480... I think I'll do my CPU upgrade and wait a little to see the RDNA 2 GPU selection!

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