Aapje

Pimax posted an official response: I think that it is very positive that they are (painfully) honest about their need to grow as a company. It is hard to change a company culture, so we'll have to see if they can do it, but this video is on point.

Enjoy!

But the memory bus is wider on the 7900 XT. The overall memory bandwidth is higher as a result. However, focusing on these specific differences is not really all that useful, as performance is a complex interplay of various parts.

I think that the short summary is that Pimax has a tendency to promise things when it is far from certain that they can deliver them. And when they can't make good on their promises, they try to cover it up. So I basically agree with Dangerzone when it comes to the customers. Don't put that much trust in their promises, but look at what customers are actually getting. And for the company I would offer the friendly bit of advice to improve massively on this front, because I think that with this course, a big lawsuit when they make a promise they cannot keep, is just a matter of time. It could be company ending. There is a reason why Apple, Intel, AMD and Nvidia are very careful with forward-looking statements, because they all know how bad a lawsuit over this can get.

With 4 DIMMs you are introducing headaches and to get an optimal result you will almost certainly need to get 4 DIMMs from the same batch. So that completely defeats the purpose of building it now and adding more later, because then the risk is high that the new batch is slightly different. There is also zero need if the goal is 64 GB. That can be achieved with just 2 DIMMS.

The Lite lacks eye tracking (and thus dynamic foveated rendering, but is lighter, cheaper and there is no fuss with a battery.

The 7800X3D is typically faster in games, since the 7950X3D has a hybrid design with X3D-cache only on one chiplet, with a high risk of running the wrong threads on the wrong core. The 7950X3D is more for if you have a mixed use case and even then you may need to do extra configuration to make things work the best.

You can always resell the Quest 3 and get a Pimax Crystal Light or such. And right now, AMD has the upper hand when it comes to CPUs, in particular for games. The X3D-chips are pretty much optimal for most gaming needs, while Intel lacks an option for having a huge 3D-cache and makes you pay for more cores to get higher on-chip cache and higher clock speeds. However, games rarely benefit (enough) from a huge number of cores to justify the expense. Basically, you need to pay much more to get an equivalent level of performance if you go Intel. They are also inefficient right now and currently have major degradation issues. Intel are working hard on improving and in a few years they may be much better, but for gaming, AMD is generally the best right now.

BTW, you could have ReadyBoost enabled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost If so, you should disable it.

That is a flash/SD card controller, which connect to the USB bus: https://www.norelsys.com/product/item/4586.html Do you have an SD card or such in the card reader? If so, you can try removing it. You can also see if there is a driver update, or reinstall the driver for the card reader.

Do I spot some licorice? Upvoted for having good taste

I thought that you were referring to the Gladiator given the title you chose, but apparently your issue is with the throttle? It's really hard to give you advice when you spend so little time properly explaining your issue and instead, are mostly raging. Frankly, you come across as a customer from hell and your comments here really just make me feel sorry for the support person that has to deal with you. I think that your problem will be solved much more effectively if you focus less on making angry comments and more on actually giving VKB the opportunity to help.

That's a huge drawback.

Not sure what raging here is supposed to achieve. Companies don't typically provide repair instructions to consumers, but VKB is very supportive of doing repairs or mods yourself. Which is more than many companies. I thought that the rapid fire trigger was broken on mine and requested a replacement, which they sent for free. Turns out that it just got loose, so now I have a spare. Opening up the stick and doing the fix is quite doable on your own if you have some technical insight and otherwise you can surely find a video on YouTube.

Yeah, moving a bunch of generations ahead gets you that nice big boost.

The 9900K is the fastest and newest CPU that fits in that socket. It was considered a top tier gaming CPU for quite some time (although that was also due to Intel stagnating). You could see if you can get that one second hand for a modest price.

Userbenchmark is full of it. It's run by a person with a pathological dislike of AMD, who doctors the benchmarks to make AMD look bad, but that doctoring also messes up comparisons between different Intel CPUs. The 12700 actually has a higher turbo than the 8700: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/126684/intel-core-i78700k-processor-12m-cache-up-to-4-70-ghz/specifications.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/134592/intel-core-i7-12700f-processor-25m-cache-up-to-4-90-ghz.html But the performance of CPUs is about more than just clock speed, but also IPC, cache, IO, etc. A proper comparison requires benchmarks, preferable in the game or type of games you care about. As sukebe said, the 12700 uses a different socket and you need a new motherboard to upgrade to it. If you upgrade your platform, I would currently suggest the 7800X3D, both for the great 1% lows, the low power usage and the platform longevity.

Historic precedent says that the release should be around September/October.

Keep in mind that the B650 doesn't have PCIe 5, while the B650E that LucShep suggested does, so the longevity is a bit less. The price difference is significant, so it's not necessarily a bad choice to get the cheaper one, but just telling you that you know what you are giving up for the savings.

That looks quite good. The site doesn't keep track of whether the RAM fits. But you can make it fit anyway, as the fans are just clipped onto the CPU cooler. So you can just clip them on a little higher. However, I would personally get memory that is not as tall and that is cheaper too, like these: https://pcpartpicker.com/product/QJ3gXL/gskill-ripjaws-s5-64-gb-2-x-32-gb-ddr5-6000-cl30-memory-f5-6000j3040g32gx2-rs5k So you will save some money and some problems. And they tell you do use three separate cables to connect to the GPU, for stability and safety. You will get 4 of those cables with the RM1000x and don't need them for anything else, so that is no problem.

Performance should definitely improve, but you need to benchmark how noticeable it is. You can just do that yourself, because pulling out the RAM should be easy.

Flight simming, especially in VR, is typically quite taxing on the CPU. As you note yourself, you are CPU-limited, which is not great, since being CPU-limited is more likely to result in stuttering or getting halved frame rates. AM5 should last to at least late 2026, so you should be able to do an upgrade to the 2026-generation of X3D-chips and perhaps a later gen, depending on when AMD moves to AM6. We've seen with the 5800X3D and 5700X3D that they gradually lowered prices, especially once the new platform is out, so if you upgrade (some time) after the release of AM6, in 2027 or so, you can probably get a pretty cheap upgrade to get a decent boost. Of course, this is all speculative based on the past and things that have been announced (like the DDR6 release date, which should be the basis for AM6, although there tends to be a decent delay between the two). In any case, I would wait at least a week to see what Computex brings. The new AMD motherboards may bring PCIe 5 to a lower price point. The upcoming B850 boards seem to have a optimal feature set compared to the expected price, when taking longevity into account. The older B650E-boards are mostly the same and are thus also a good choice. Just look at what the prices do for both. Basically, I would look for a board with PCIe 5 for the GPU slot, which should future proof you for future video cards with PCIe 6 on them, because we typically see that the cards have so much PCIe headroom, that it is absolutely no problem to put the GPU in a slot that only support the previous PCIe generation. Yeah, you already have a decently fast computer. The slower the computer is, the easier it is to justify an upgrade right away.

But there would be a better version of FFR, right? Has that been released already?

@Calvin.Pimax Will the new FFR be available right away or later on? Because the proper test would be to compare DFR with both FFR and no FR.