Not quite there yet … from left on surface, 5G internet, WireGuard router, pihole on a Zero W and 4x4 N95 HTPC, plus 1080p projector. When a computer that size (actually smaller, since I don’t need a SATA bay) can outperform my tower, though …
This photo of Meteor Lake shows 16GB of LPDDR5X on the package. AMD’s looking to kill the low-midrange GPU in the next couple of generations of APUs, with Intel attempting to reach parity. And all of this in a fraction of the power envelope of a midrange gaming rig.
Maybe it’s next-quarter-itis dominating the tech press, but these developments feel like they deserve a bit more attention given that all signs point to gaming 4x4 PCs with a wall wart in the next two years. This actually makes Intel’s exit from the NUC space somewhat surprising, but they’ve been shedding products pretty consistently and this may just be a part of that.
I’m in the situation of having a 5-year-old gaming rig that’s still going strong (caveat: I’m a factory/city-builder gamer so an RX 6600 works fine for me at 4K60), and moving into a stepvan in the next couple of weeks and therefore suddenly very aware of power draw, so all of this may be more exciting to me than the average bear, as I could see finally upgrading on account of a dead component in the next couple of years.
Yet there’s still that part of me from college that wants to keep abreast of the latest developments, and as I’ve watched now six desktop Intel generations hit benchmarks since I was the lucky winner of an 8086K, there’s been nothing that really draws a line in the sand and says “this will be the clear new minimum target.”
Intel starting over at 1st gen for Meteor Lake shows they see this finally changing. It honestly could have happened anywhere from introduction of E-cores to the seeming destination of Rentable Units, which have finally popped up outside of MLID. I’ve seen nothing about what AMD’s disaggregated endpoint looks like, even though I’m definitely looking to Strix Halo as where I may be able to ditch the ITX sandwich tower completely. Couple this with swapping out my TV for a native 1080p mini projector (a “maybe” suggestion that turned into having to try one at $40, and wow!), and I could be gaming in a van in fucking style with essentially zero dedicated hardware space in just a couple years!
Anyway, in situations like this, I’ve found that I may have inadequate sources, so I thought I’d see if anyone had suggestions.
This doesn’t make sense. It’s more likely we’ll pack more into a high end device then say goodbye to them in tasks like gaming.
Computing power has been constantly improving for decades and miniaturisation is part of that. I have desktop PCs at work in small form factors that are more powerful than the gaming PC I used to have 10 years ago. It’s impressive how far things have come.
However at the top end bleeding edge in CPUs,.GPUs and APUs high powered kit needs more space for very good reasons. One is cooling - if you want to push any chip to its limits then you’ll get heat, so you need space to cool it. The vast majority of the space in my desktop is for fans and airflow. Even the vast majority of the bulk of my graphics card is actually space for cooling.
The second is scale - in a small form factor device you cram as much as you can get in, and these days you can get a lot in a small space. But in my desktop gaming tower I’m not constrained such limits. So I have space for a high quality power supply unit, a spacious motherboard with a wealth of options for expansions, a large graphics card so I can have a cutting edge chip and keep it cool, space for multiple storage devices, and also lots and lots of fans, a cooling system for the CPU.
Yes, in 5 years a smaller device will be more capable for today’s games. But the cutting edge will also have moved on and you’ll still need a cutting edge large form factor device for the really bleeding edge stuff. Just as now - a gaming laptop or a games console is powerful but they have hard upper limits. A large form factor device is where you go for high end experiences such as the highest end graphics and now increasingly high fidelity VR.
The exceptions to that are certain computing tasks don’t need anything like high end any more (like office software, web browsing, 4k movies), other tasks largely don’t (like video editing) so big desktops are becoming more niche in the sense that high end gaming is their main use for many homes users. That’s been a long running trend, and not related to APUs.
The other exception is cloud streaming of gaming and offloading processing into the cloud. In my opinion that is what will really bring an end to needing large form factor devices. We’re not quite there but I suspec that will that really pushes form factors down, rather than APUs etc.
I thought Apple was on to something with their cylindrical form factor. It’s inconvenient from a mobo perspective, but a central core motherboard, with CPU, GPU, even memory and M2 sticking out like fins. Get the mobo down to segments like 25mm x 250, and stack the whole thing over a massive -like 250-350 mm- low rpm fan would be great for heat management and noise. Heck, put it in a venturi tunnel driven by a 500mm fan.
I guess I’m a bit confused about a lot of reactions here, because at no point did I say towers are going to die, just that for a system for gaming without the need for a high-end GPU, things are looking like miniaturization is finally coming for the desktop.
“I play a lot of games, including new ones, but none of them needs high-end hardware” seems to be a weird place few people will admit to being in on online fora. I don’t care about performance past 60Hz, and my current hardware is more than sufficient to do so. I do not understand the appeal of combat in games and did not buy Satisfactory until the update that had a passive-enemy mode.
But that’s where I’m at. I’m not attempting to extrapolate anything beyond my use case, though I’m aware my needs already far exceed content consumption, which has been covered by iGPUs for a decade at this point.
Heat being brought up as though I’m unfamiliar with thermodynamics is also baffling. I have an AIO for my current rig and wouldn’t dream of trying to do everything on air at current dissipation levels.
But I also have an HTPC that handles everything I need it to and draws 11W during content consumption. Yes, the top end will always need beefy cooling solutions; I feel like what’s being missed is top end has been overkill for me when aspirational future use cases run into the boots-on-the-ground experience as the system ages. Nothing else on the market could rival the performance of an 8086K at $0, so that’s what I have, but I’m willing to admit it’s more than what I needed.
Intel has done a very good job of convincing people that if they needed an i7 years ago, nothing less will suffice in the future (and until AMD finally forced i7s above four cores, that was pretty true). I’ve built a completely new system to gain 34MHz (in the '90s, obviously), so I get the drive to always go for faster and better and bigger … and if people want to keep doing that for bragging rights, more power to them, but I look at people asking if an i9-13900K will suffice with RPL-R on the horizon and can’t help but wonder what the use case is where a 13th gen would crawl while a 14th flies.
The other thing about physical space is we’ve come a long way since the days of the I/O plate being a couple of PS/2 ports, a parallel port and an RS-232 port. I’ve needed six add-in cards before, including a PCI-SCSI card, but I can’t imagine the consumer use cases for full ATX in 2023. Sound and networking are onboard, and insufficient USB ports is to me more a failing on mobo selection than needing a full echelon of x1-x4 slots to rectify that failing. I’ve also had media servers that made a mid-tower feel cramped, but those data now fit on a 2280 SSD.
I went ITX with this build since the HDDs were already offloaded to a server in 2018, bypassing mATX completely.
So my questions are: What peripherals are people using that necessitate so many add-in cards for non-HPC needs that ATX is a must, and why is it assumed that anything less than an i9 will freeze opening Notepad and thus the only power envelope worth validly addressing is that of an i9? Yes, heat needs to be mitigated, but using vastly more power than needed in the first place causes that mitigation need.
I think most of what you have said is true, and I’m glad for it. I will continue to build enthusiast level computers and sit close enough to the bleeding edge because I enjoy it.
What I believe is likely to happen is that serious performance oriented gaming PCs will once again become fairly niche. I sort of bucked against the idea of micro form factor mini PC’s being a valid choice for gamers for a while.
It wasn’t until I saw the youtube video I’ve linked below that I realised something like the HX99G would MORE than fill the desire of most of my friends group in terms of gaming performance, thermals and user experience.
It’s not as small as the APU powered boxes that OP was talking about, and it has a dedicated wedge of silicon for the GPU but it is extremely cheap, extremely capable and seems to run fairly cool whilst being smaller than 99.9% of normal PCs.
My wife recently asked that I build her a gaming PC. She’s pretty casual and doesn’t mind 1080p gaming. All of my spare parts and previous gen hardware has already been put to work in a gaming PC for my daughter so I began the task of speccing up a reasonably decent 1080p gaming build from new parts. I can’t beat the price:performance ratio of the HX99G. Watch the video and see for yourself.
Keeping in mind that this is now previous generation components and a next-gen replacement is almost certainly due any month now…it’s nuts. Not only is he playing current release games at 1080p, in some titles they were happily over 100fps at 1440p, with fighting games even running at 4K without issue.
You and I will happily keep our server-sized monsters, but I know a LOT of people that will happily sit in this lane. The price is right and so is the performance. It’s like a console without so many limitations, as well as being a powerful PC in its own right.
