St. Nick

As long as the world you are burning is figurative or in minecraft you are probably fine.

Are you buying FE cards or board partner cards. Because you'll need like 6 8 pin cables if your running 2 3090 AIB cards. Almost all of them so far are 3 per. even some 1000w psu's don't come with that many. though I think that AX1600i actually has 10 XD

I don't usually pick favorites but G-skill earned my business for ram for as long as I use computers. That limited lifetime warranty is no joke. I had some memory issues on 10 year old DDR3-1333. I figured well it has been running 24/7 for the last 6 years so it's really no surprise. I almost bought some cheap value ram for it and then remember ohh right. G-skill has a lifetime warranty on ram now. Lets send them a mail just for fun. I didn't really expect much to begin with. But to my pleasant surprise a very nice rep responded to my mails. They asked me for a proof of purchase and whether I still intended to run that system or was taking this as a chance to do some upgrading and I explained I was still using the old system as a NAS. Now I originally bought that system from a local shop build for me, just because I liked the idea back then of having 1 place to go to if it broke. But the place that build it went out of business about 2 years ago. I still always kept the receipt though so well I send that over. They got back to me within 2 hours and told me it would take a bit of time to source a new kit of my specific ram because they weren't making it anymore. He asked a few more questions about my current build and not only did I, after about two months, receive a new set of the old DDR-3 ram (without having to even send in the old sticks for an RMA mind). As an apology for the wait time they also send me an identical set of the ram I was using in my main rig. (Trident Z Neo 3600 cl16) that arrived 6 days after my first contact with the rep. For a 10 year old product that I honestly felt that had served long and hard enough... that is some impressive customer service imho.

Honestly, the founders edition cooler this time is an absolute wildcard. The thing is literally mostly heatsink fins. Purely looking at the design, the AIB cards may well be left behind if all that matters is the thermal dissipation capacity of the FE cards. Airflow on those cards is gonna be huge with that blow through design. It looks promising but the biggest questions will be how loud the fans will be, how that altered airflow will affect the thermals of other components in your system and whether or not those fans have the static pressure to take advantage of it. It could be better then AIB designs. Point being it COULD. With such a cramped PCB the GPU itself may get great cooling and all the other components on the cards may be so close together it will create problems elsewhere. We just don't know yet but the card design in interesting and different and this might be the year the FE is king for thermals. It's a big question mark. So discounting it based on how the 20 series preformed isn't exactly the smartest idea. It is not the same.

I'm afraid not, Even if there was data like that with the pandemic there is no way to tell how production figures have been affected.

What may get me to buy that FE 3080 this time around? Every board partner model revealed so far doubled down on the RACE CAR DECALS NAME EVERYWHERE and GAMERY ANGLES WITH ALL THE RGB AND NONSENICAL HARD EDGES look where the FE's just look... straight elegant by comparison. I have a gigabytre gaming OC right now, but this: Is definitely not the way that I feel that design should have gone. Humpback whale cards? Nah thanks i'll take the funky founders edition half blower half blow through fan design.

I mean... Technically you could get one of those 500mm PCI-E riser cables and put a PCI-E M.2 Caddy card on the end of it but... I dunno, might be hard to route and all.

Waiting is definitely your best option right now. We have no more answers then you and anything we say is a guess at best.

We honestly have no answers for you at this time. NVIDIA threw up a HUGE spanner in the works with RTX I/O. If and i stretch the IF (However with the PS5 using a similar technology it is likely games WILL go this way) in the future games will mostly bypass the CPU as the GPU loads assets from an SSD. Does that mean any Gen 3 PCI-E NVME SSD will be enough? Or will we need Gen 4 SSd's to get the best performance. Will the fact an X570 board has a gen 4 link to the chipset matter a lot here and make it much better then even b550? We don't KNOW, but it might. And thats what makes it REALLY hard to recommend something right now.

Moonzy: My biggest caution with future proofing is that it generally is taken as BUY THE PERFORMANCE I THINK I MIGHT NEED IN 4 YEARS. NOW. Rather then making a system with headroom for upgrade ability. We all take for granted that getting an M-Atx board with 2 dimm slots and 2 4 gig dimms is a dumb idea if you say your gonna GAME on it. We tell people all the time DON'T DO IT. Yet this is future proofing. We also tell people, Buy a slightly roomy good quality PSU so it doesn't blow up in your face and you can upgrade your GPU at least once in the upgrade cycle. Also essentially future proofing. Deciding how much CPU you need now though? That's a harder one. Buying a 3700X in case you need more cores in the future is future proofing. But so is 'I'm buying a 3600 now, because I will probably flip it and buy a zen 3 CPU in half a year". Why people usually get triggered by it is that many people get so lost in future proofing that they buy an imbalanced system because 'I might need the performance later'. And then we have our unpredictables, Technologies like RTX I/O which now have people questioning WILL we need all that CPU power for gaming later? And sometimes future proofing makes people laugh hand over fist at the people questioning them. I am pretty smug now that I bought an X570 Board with a 3600 9 months ago 'because I'mma upgrade later!' and many users here told me NO GET B450 TOMAHAWK MAX! But I'm sitting here with my X570 board and gen 4 SSD going, alright bring it on NVIDIA! However at the same token, i spend a good 6 of those past months thinking 'You know, I should have listened I spend a whole lot on a shiny Gen 4 SSD and it is doing Jack all for me.' Future proofing is, basically, Buying things you might not need and can't properly justify to yourself because of a 'hunch' or a 'want' because we can barely predict whats coming out in a month let alone in 4 years. Telling people not to gamble with their hundreds even thousands of dollars... well I can see both sides of the argument.

No, sorry! the 3600 is not an APU. It needs some form of GPU just to be able to display an image!

Good call, it has been added!

You'll likely be fine with that 650 watt power supply too. It's a pretty decent 650w and that 2700x is not as power hungry as the 10900K that the 750w recommended on the 3080 is for. And Nvidia did leave themselves headroom on that too. Buying a 1000W psu is just overkill that's not needed at all.

Also keep in mind that the recommended wattages accounted for an RTX 3000 series card paired with a 10900K. And NVIDIA did give themselves ample headroom so that even lesser quality PSU's could run a system with an ampere card and that CPU without redlining the PSU under load. A good quality PSU of 550w or 600 could probably drive the setup too. It is after all a recommended and not a minimum spec.

It's according to the presentation '1,5 times faster then the Titan RTX' what exactly that means? It has the Vram size but faster, more of all 3 kinds of cores and yes is cheaper. Seems like a good bet it will outperform a Titan RTX but we are all still guessing no matter what. At least until someone puts them together and tests it.