fhein

As a programmer (though not in the games industry) I can inform you that the vast majority of sw companies operate by the "the fastest solution is the best solution" principle. If they have developers who already know Unity it's a pretty big expense to have everybody learn a new game engine, and the management would need to be convinced that using Source is going to lead to a corresponding increase in sold copies of their games.

I think a 650 W PSU should be enough for a workload of 490 W idle. Please, correct me, if I am wrong.

You mean 490W under load, right? One would hope that your computer uses less than 100W idle, otherwise it's going to get toasty in your room :) I would say this depends on how much cheaper a 650W PSU is, and how likely it is you'll upgrade your GPU. It really sucks saving up for a ridiculously expensive new GPU and then realizing you also need to fork out an additional €150 to replace your fully functional PSU. On the other hand, going from 650W to 850W might double the cost of the PSU, and it would be a waste of money if you don't buy a high end GPU in the future. For PSU, check out https://cultists.network/140/psu-tier-list/ .If you're buying a decent quality unit I wouldn't worry about efficiency loss from running at a lower % of its rated max W, I doubt it's going to be enough to be noticeable on your power bill.

I've always had Nvidia GPUs and they've worked great for me, though I've stayed with X11 and never bothered with Wayland. If you're conscious about power usage, many cards can be power limited + overclocked to compensate. For example I could limit my old RTX3080 to 200W (it draws up to 350W with stock settings) and with some clock speed adjustments I would only lose about 10% fps in games, which isn't really noticeable if you're still hitting 120+ fps. My current RTX3090 can't go below 300W (stock is 370W) without significant performance loss though.

If you have any interest in running AI stuff, especially LLM (text generation / chat), then get as much VRAM as you possibly can. Unfortunately I discovered local LLMs just after buying the 3080, which was great for games, and realized that 12GB VRAM is not that much. CUDA (i.e. Nvidia GPUs) is still dominant in AI, but ROCm (AMD) is getting more support so you might be able to run some things at least.

Another mistake I made when speccing my PC was to buy 2*16GB RAM. It sounded like a lot at the time, but once again when dealing with LLMs there are models which are larger than 32GB that I would like to run with partial offloading (splitting work between GPU and CPU, though usually quite slow). Turns out that DDR5 is quite unstable, and I don't know if it's my motherboard or the Ryzen CPU which is to blame, but I can't just add 2 more RAM. I.e. there are 4 slots, but it would run at 3800MHz instead of the 6200Mhz that the individual sticks are rated for. Don't know if Intel mobos can run 4x DDR5 sticks at full speed.

And a piece general advice, in case this isn't common knowledge at this point; Be wary when trying to find buying advice using search engines. Most of the time it'll only give you low quality "reviews" which are written only to convince readers to click on their affiliate links :( There are still a few sites which actually test the components and not just AI generate articles. Personally I look for tier lists compiled by users (Like this one for mobos), and when it comes to reviews I tend to trust those which get very technical with component analyses, measurements and multiple benchmarks.

It's not that bad. Of course I've had a few games that didn't work, like CoD:MW2, but nearly all multiplayer games my friends play also work on Linux. The last couple of years we've been playing Apex Legends, Overwatch, WoWs, Dota 2, Helldivers 2, Diablo 4, BF1, BFV, Hell Let Loose, Payday 3, Darktide, Isonzo, Ready or Not, Hunt: Showdown to name a few.

I mean everything is still speculation regarding the Index 2, there have been a few patent applications filed but noone knows for sure.

At least for the time being, Valve seems to be one of the few large corporations which most of the time seem to have customers' best interests at heart, while other large corporations tend to have more of a history of screwing their users over every chance they get. And while SteamVR on Linux isn't great, there are at least some efforts being made. Pimax Crystal Light seemed like another good option on paper, but there appear to be severe quality control issues at the moment, and IIRC it requires a buggy Windows-only driver to work. Somnium VR1 looks great but the price made it a no-option for me.

As far as I know there are no headsets that don’t require an account

For me the important part is that the headset doesn't require a specific account. As long as I can use it with multiple ecosystems there isn't a singular point of failure, for example if the manufacturer stops supporting it.

If I had to buy a headset right now then I'd be leaning towards an Index, but it's a few years old now and price is basically unchanged (though in practice it might be seen as a relative reduction, since everything else has gone up). There's ofc. some speculation about an Index 2, perhaps around the end of the year, but if you can't wait a second hand Index might be a better value option than buying one new.

For LLMs it entirely depends on what size models you want to use and how fast you want it to run. Since there's diminishing returns to increasing model sizes, i.e. a 14B model isn't twice as good as a 7B model, the best bang for the buck will be achieved with the smallest model you think has acceptable quality. And if you think generation speeds of around 1 token/second are acceptable, you'll probably get more value for money using partial offloading.

If your answer is "I don't know what models I want to run" then a second-hand RTX3090 is probably your best bet. If you want to run larger models, building a rig with multiple (used) RTX3090 is probably still the cheapest way to do it.

Hopefully, yes. But I'm sure MS and some hardware manufacturers salivate at the thought of being able to create a completely locked down computer platform. I own neither, but aren't both iPhone and Playstation users locked into the manufacturers' respective stores? Those seems to be perfectly legal in the EU.

Kan ju också tillägga att EU har lagstadgat om ersättning vid försening av flyg, ifall det inte är allmänt känt. Flygbolagen kan ju förstås göra sitt bästa för att inte betala ut något men det finns ingen anledning att skämmas för att försöka få tillbaka lite pengar. Vet ju att många svenska gärna undviker konflikter så det är nog många företag som kommer undan med allt för mkt :) Finns iaf mer info om vad som gäller för flyg t.ex. här: https://www.hallakonsument.se/varor-och-tjanster-process/dina-rattigheter-vid-forsenat-flyg/

I bought Ryobi, only a cordless drill (18v brushless) and lawn trimmer, a long time ago and I've always disliked them. Wanted to replace them with something like Makita/Metabo/DeWalt, but in the end it felt unnecessary to spend that much money for something I only use a few times per year, even if projects become more fun if you have tools you like.

I was researching which line of power tools to buy a while ago.. Many said Parkside was very good value for money, and a good buy for anyone who only used their tools infrequently.

What kind of issues do they have? I've used gtx970, 1080, rtx3080 and now 3090 and I've never had any issues worth mentioning.