Ja50n

The point wasn’t practicality, it was wanting to know how their performance compares. I want numbers, just calling something dumb isn’t nearly quantitative enough.

I’m curious how Optane performance compares to Samsung’s RAPID RAM caching technology. Optane caches the boot drive with much faster m.2 3D XPoint storage in either 16 or 32 GB sticks, while RAPID uses a chunk of system memory. Optane is only compatible with Windows 10 and Intel 7th or 8th gens, making it untestable for me, while RAPID works fine with my 2600K and Ryzen systems. I would like to know how well the price premium of Optane translates into real world performance gains vs the essentially free (with purchase of a recent Samsung SSD) RAPID mode. Also, can both be enabled simultaneously for even better performance?

I chose a used Retina 13" MB Pro myself, with Core i5. It's been perfect for me, the only thing is I wish I would have chosen 16GB of RAM instead of 8, because you can't upgrade it after purchase.

That seems like a step down to me... Does your setup actually take advantage of the full 144Hz of your current monitor?

Yeah, because I bought a 970, I had to buy a 1080 this round...

Could you get a 1070Ti? That would offer you near-1080 performance for not much more money than the 1070, especially after overclocking.

That is a pretty small upgrade for the cost... are you dissatisfied with the performance of the 1060 in games? And if so, to what degree? Is it just an issue of not being able to turn settings all the way up, or are you experiencing frame rate issues even with settings turned down?

Do you watch your CPU usage during these times? It could also be hidden Windows processes heating up your computer.

With a water cooler, the longer you run a full workload, the warmer the liquid in the cooler will be, so even after you drop down to idle, your temps will be only as low as the liquid temperature, which can be somewhere in the 40-50c range until it cools off.

It would be relatively easy to put a bootable Ubuntu distro onto something like a 32GB USB stick to bring around with you, and most computers these days should be able to boot from it, though some might lock you out with Secure Boot. What specific applications are you wanting to use?

I’m having the exact same situation as described here: Is there a solution now, or will I need an admin to help me too?

If I had to buy now, for a pure gaming rig, it would be an overclocked i5-7600k. If it will be used for other intensive tasks, Ryzen 7 1700, which is very nearly the same cost as the i5 once motherboards are added. Distrust of AMD is going to cost a lot of money to get an equivalent Intel chip that can match AMD's multicore performance... X299 is pretty bad value and i7-7700k doesn't go much beyond the abilities of the i5-7600k... Personally, I'm waiting for Ice Lake, or waiting for my 5GHz 2600K to explode... whichever comes first.