The first Alienware PC I got was left on my front porch in the pretty black box with the big Alienware head on it. Epic fail there by FedEx.
That monitor though… wow. Sorry you had to deal with that.
Personally, if I’m buying a laptop or unusually expensive item, I don’t ship to home, regardless of whether or not a signature is required. Amazon and others make it easy to ship to a nearby pickup location, it’ll probably even get there a bit sooner on average.
That is an excellent, devastating in some ways, review. It reads really spot-on, the notes about market share of high-end cards and how a feature that requires 2080Ti is a long, long ways from becoming widely adopted.
Yeah, and his paragraph near the end encapsulated all my points about pricing. Normal pricing would put the 2080 at $699 (including and accepting the price increase Nvidia added for the 10-series!) and the 2080ti at $899. At those prices, the 2080 would be the same price as the 1080ti, fitting its performance, and the 2080ti’s 30% price premium would match up to its 30% performance improvement.
You buy for the performance today, not in some theoretical future.
Yeah, it’s frustrating. I’ve been wanting to upgrade my 1070, but given the major price jump this generation (and the fact that it mostly goes toward exclusive features of questionable real-world value), I might do CPU/MB/SSD this round and wait for next year on the GPU. I’d probably bite on a 1080 Ti if the clearance prices got down to $600 or so, but it looks like they’re mostly gone, and I never saw one significantly below $700.
Actually, normal pricing and product positioning would put the 2070 at $499 with 1080ti-class performance. Remember, the 1070 was equivalent to the 980ti. The 1080 was much faster than anything available in the previous generation.
Usually, each generation’s x70 offers lower prices for the same previously high-end performance, and each number jumps one down. 1070 == much cheaper 980ti. 970 == much cheaper 780ti. 770 == cheaper 680. 670 == cheaper 580. And so on.
That’s why this generation is selling so poorly. Nvidia renamed what should have been the 2070 to the 2080, and what should have been the 2080 to the 2080ti. And then they raised the heck out of the prices.
The problem is they spent a ton of their silicon budget on ray-tracing, which does fuck all for existing games, so they had to move up the x80ti product, and the 2080ti is a real x80ti product, to launch concurrently with the x80 or they would offer essentially zero performance gain over the previous generation. And then they increased prices largely because they could, because AMD had nothing to compete.
End result is a really unattractive generation for consumers.
So, if it’s unwise to buy the new, and the old is gone, seems like we have two choices. One is to hold on to our existing stuff until it dies, hoping something matures in the meantime. This means no new prebuilts, either, unless you can get one of them that has the older cards (with luck, at a discount, but don’t count on it). The other choice is, well, there isn’t another choice, is there?
Some of the deals on the pre-builts are actually pretty good, even with the 2080s in them. It really depends on what you’re looking for.
We’re in an in-between period right now. In a month or so the 1080ti will no longer be available new, the 2070 will ship in the next couple of weeks removing the 1080 from the market, and sometime in the next quarter Nvidia will unveil 2050 and 2060s as well, removing the 1050s/1060s from the market too.
So right now you can wrinkle your brow deciding between the 1080ti and 2080 but very soon that choice won’t exist. Traditionally the 1080tis would have already disappeared, but Nvidia overbuilt a ton of GPUs due to cyptomining and dumped them on the market. So it’s a bit confusing for the moment.
Any specifics? Most of what I’ve seen–admittedly, after a relatively cursory search online–has been stuff with 1060s (3GB versions), or have some other iffy components, or are really expensive. I’d love to find some reasonable pre-builts with good video cards.
The deals are all expired at the moment but they come and go: Here is an exampleL
iBUYPOWER Desktop: i7-8700K, 16GB RAM, GTX 2080 8GB, 240GB SSD $1684
considering that video card is around 800 that means the rest of it is pricing at around 800, and considering that CPU is, on sale around maybe 280-290, RAM is going down but still spendy… not terrible. I expect to see more of these as the pre-builds sell out of their older stock.
That’s not bad, thanks! I might just look around. No pressing need yet, but always good to see if there’s a compelling deal.
This close to Black Friday / Holidays, and especially if you’re looking for pre-built systems, I’d expect a number of systems to go on sale, maybe not cheaper so much as “free” upgrades. You never know though.
What they’re doing is using the same chip they made for professional and HPC markets and trying to market it as a gaming card. They never made the chip that traditionally would have filled the X80 and X70 role.
I’d go buy a 1070ti right now, but I didn’t plan to build a new PC until after Christmas.
I guess I could plug it into my current PC. Then I might be tempted to skip the full upgrade I’ve been waiting on.
Dang.
Upthread, seems this one:
Yup! That’s it.