Building a gaming PC

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By the way, if you can wait until next year, you can get 14nm Broadwell CPU instead of Haswell. It might even become available in stores this year still.

The inevitable GTX 980ti is also coming in the near future,

Even so, that setup should play anything you throw at it for the next 2-3 years and that's only on max settings.
 
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Is there an estimate for the 16nm chip? I'm waiting with my new computer as close as I can to TW3. If this chip is expected to be released a month - give or take - after the game's release it might be worth the wait. If it's significantly better. I have no clue what it means.
 
Is there an estimate for the 16nm chip? I'm waiting with my new computer as close as I can to TW3. If this chip is expected to be released a month - give or take - after the game's release it might be worth the wait. If it's significantly better. I have no clue what it means.

There is nobody who can produce the 16nm chip for them. They cannot even get 20nm fab capacity. 14/16nm fabs other than Intel's captives won't be producing for another year. nVidia will be far down the line for available capacity when they are.

"Estimates" would be in the character of wild guesses at this point. 2016 is optimistic. I would not delay a purchase beyond your need date in expectation of technology that doesn't yet exist.
 
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In the best case scenario, their next series (GTX 10xx or whatever) might use 16nm chips. But when they'll be coming - no idea. By "wait" I meant if you have a high end GPU already which will be enough for a while still and you aren't in a rush of buying something new. 16nm should be a good step in reducing power consumption (GPU is the major part of it). Less heat is also a big factor.
 
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@Gilrond No, they can't. nVidia can't buy 20nm production, much less 16nm. That's the reason we have 28nm Maxwell instead of 20nm. The only public 20nm fabs are booked solid with SoC orders from Apple and other customers who are much bigger and much more important than nVidia. That's all TSMC is going to make in 20nm for the immediate future. And the only 16nm or 14nm fab that isn't an Intel captive isn't going to be in production for another year.

I wish AMD had a 20nm GPU design. They could eat nVidia's lunch if they had one, because they can get 20nm production through GlobalFoundries. But they've been pushing APUs and dual AMD64/ARM CPUs.

Whatever "potentially available" means, it's meaningless where I come from, which is where you have to buy product you can buy in commercial quantity now to meet current needs. Chasing vaporware, might as well tilt at windmills.
 
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It's not clear why, at least from your explanation. Not enough time or too many orders booked before them? If capacity isn't an issue, why would TSMC deny any such orders?

All of TSMC's 20nm capacity is taken up with too many orders from too many customers who get priority over nVidia. Apple's the big one; there are others. And TSMC is making only SoC chips in 20nm, not GPUs.

This is not a fair queuing process; it doesn't matter how long nVidia has been trying to book production. The big fish eat first, then they get seconds before the little fish get the bones.
 
May be Nvidia should follow Intel's method then and build their own factories. It's quite an expense of course which Intel handles because they are huge.
 
May be Nvidia should follow Intel's method then and build their own factories. It's quite an expense of course which Intel handles because they are huge.

It's an enormous expense and delay. The next 20nm or less plant will probably cost $10 billion and take two years to get running, if they started building now. And it's a mismatch for nVidia's business model and for their management, which knows nothing about building or running a fab.

Intel can do it because they're ginormous and they've been doing it longer than most of the forum members have been alive and they still do it best.
 
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And what about others, do Qualcomm use their own factories?

No, most buy from TSMC and others. And most of them aren't at 20, 16, or 14nm technology. Qualcomm just started sampling 20nm product. Qualcomm is also more than six times the size of nVidia. The big fish eat first, and the little fish starve.

nVidia got screwed, royally, by the Apple-Samsung fight. Apple pulled their chip business from Samsung, took it to TSMC, and disrupted the whole chip market. Not that Samsung is any help with Maxwell, because they can't manufacture 20nm anyway.

Starting a semiconductor fabrication business in current technology is about the most expensive thing you can do short of starting a war or a national space program.
 
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Apple pulled their chip business from Samsung, took it to TSMC, and disrupted the whole chip market. Not that Samsung is any help with Maxwell, because they can't manufacture 20nm anyway.

If there is so much demand, TSMC or whoever else has the means can always build more factories, which I guess will eventually happen. Demand is probably also growing even from each individual company like Apple, so it should make sense at some point.
 
Sure. And they will. It just won't happen anytime soon. Even if they had a complete new fab in blueprints and "shovel ready", it would take two years, minimum. Witcher 3 will be old news by then.

This is also probably neither the time nor the place to speculate about it, but Moore's Law has to run out eventually. Two or three more generations after 14nm will be down to 5-7nm feature size. That's where gates are going to be 1-2 atoms thick and 10 atoms wide. Probably the next step after 14nm will have to be stacking; that's why it's already on nVidia's roadmap.
 
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Sorry to interrupt but I'll hijack this PC building thread to ask Asus Strix GTX 970 owners what they think of their card. I ordered an MSI GTX 970 4G a few weeks ago from Amazon.com and I'm still waiting for it to be processed (probably a huge list of back orders) but I just noticed the Asus is available for the same price.

All the reviews I've read favor MSI and I have personally had excellent experiences with MSI video cards. This is kind of a big deal for me since I only get a new GPU every 3 or 4 years and I would be replacing an MSI GTX 560 Ti :)

So... comments?
 
Sorry to interrupt but I'll hijack this PC building thread to ask Asus Strix GTX 970 owners what they think of their card. I ordered an MSI GTX 970 4G a few weeks ago from Amazon.com and I'm still waiting for it to be processed (probably a huge list of back orders) but I just noticed the Asus is available for the same price.

All the reviews I've read favor MSI and I have personally had excellent experiences with MSI video cards. This is kind of a big deal for me since I only get a new GPU every 3 or 4 years and I would be replacing an MSI GTX 560 Ti :)

So... comments?
I'm on the same boat. Waiting for my MSI Gaming 4Gs to arrive.

Not an owner of the Strix but what I've heard the only real advantage the MSI model has over the Asus one is a beefier power delivery system. So if you're into overclocking you should definitely go with the MSI model. If not, you might as well get the Asus Strix.

Also, the Strix model has a backplate unlike the Gaming 4G model.

EDIT:

If I remember correctly @Kinley has the Strix GTX 970. You should ask him. :)
 
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Sorry to interrupt but I'll hijack this PC building thread to ask Asus Strix GTX 970 owners what they think of their card. I ordered an MSI GTX 970 4G a few weeks ago from Amazon.com and I'm still waiting for it to be processed (probably a huge list of back orders) but I just noticed the Asus is available for the same price.

All the reviews I've read favor MSI and I have personally had excellent experiences with MSI video cards. This is kind of a big deal for me since I only get a new GPU every 3 or 4 years and I would be replacing an MSI GTX 560 Ti :)

So... comments?
If you only upgrade your GPU every 3 or 4 years, then I suggest you wait for the next line up. I say this because 970 and 980 run cooler than the 770 and 780 and 780 ti and require less power, but they are not that much faster than those cards. And biggest problem is the 4 GB memory of the cards, since there is a trend of games requiring more and more GPU RAM to run. The GPU RAM requirements are ridicules and it's probably because of bad optimization, but it doesn't matter wether it's bad optimization or not because you want to play the games anyways and it is what it is. I think we'll see a true increase in raw processing power of the cards and possibly higher GPU RAMs in the the next line up.
 
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