PCGH-News: Miners are selling a lot of GPUs, Quake is celebrating 26 years, DIY PS5 Slim, Intel Arc A380 in the test

Self-built: PS5 becomes a 2 cm thin Waku PS5 Slim

Sony’s Playstation 5 is among the chunkiest consoles the company has ever made. The electronics group from Japan usually decides to launch thinner versions of its consoles a few years after the release. A Youtuber called “DIY Perks” didn’t want to wait that long and let his creativity run free by assembling his own “Playstation 5 Slim”. This not only shrunk the console, but also provided it with a water cooling circuit. Compared to the PS5’s 92mm thick Digital Edition, DIY Perks took down 72mm from the console and shrunk its PS5 Slim to 20mm. This is only slightly thicker than a DVD case. Of course, to get to this level, a lot of content from the Playstation 5 has to be unloaded, so that the mainboard is ultimately left over. For those including flash memory and VRMs, he made a full-cover water block and heatsinks for other components like the GDDR6 chips. Meanwhile, the case of his PS5 Slim is made of copper, which is said to have a higher value than an entire Playstation 5 console. The power supply is provided by a power supply unit with 750 W. This should be able to achieve up to 62.5 A per 12 V, which is enough to supply the DIY PS5 with water cooling.

Big GPU sell-off: Miners and internet cafes offer cards in live stream auctions

The graphics card rummage table is currently being opened by miners, as the cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Ethereum have meanwhile recorded massive losses in value. Therefore, the GPU miners want to get rid of their graphics cards as soon as possible. This can sometimes be seen in China and South Asia, where miners and Internet cafe owners now have hundreds of their models for sale. Some of the latter stocked up on mining cards during the corona pandemic, when the Bitcoin price rose sharply at the same time to compensate for the losses caused by a lack of customers. But now the day of parting seems to have come for them too. According to reports, miners from China and internet cafes in South Asia are putting up a number of their graphics cards in auctions, which are then streamed live. Models like the Geforce RTX 3060 Ti should be available for prices between 300 and 400 US dollars and thus below their RRP. The dilemma is great, as crypto miners are now faced with a difficult decision: either sell the graphics cards as quickly as possible in order to keep at least part of their profits, or continue mining in the hope that cryptocurrencies will recover . With Ethereum, the change from the so-called Proof of Work to Proof of Stake, which is to be completed between the third and fourth quarters of this year, must also be kept in mind. Proof of Work is based on GPU performance in crypto mining and would thus become obsolete. Chinese miners and Internet cafe owners have apparently opted for the first option and are getting rid of their graphics cards. In addition to the Geforce RTX 3060 Ti, for example, a Geforce RTX 2060 should also be easy to find under its RRP. However, anyone who wants to buy such a mining card should note that such cards are of lesser value simply because of the previous intensive use. At the very least, those cards sold through auctions should be labeled as former mining equipment.

Happy birthday Quake

Quake 1 celebrated its birthday this week. The backstory, so to speak, began on December 10, 1993, when id Software uploaded the shareware version of a new game to the University of Wisconsin’s FTP server – and this title, called Doom, sets the benchmark: It’s one of the first first-person shooters, offers revolutionary 3D graphics including fully textured surfaces, makes multiplayer games via network popular, allows large levels thanks to binary space partitioning and incidentally invents the deathmatch. On June 22, 1996, 26 years ago, the first game based on the Quake engine was released. The Quake engine is the first 3D game engine that uses three-dimensional characters instead of two-dimensional sprites. The entire game world based on the Quake 1 engine consists of three-dimensional data, and lightmaps and dynamic light sources are used instead of static lighting.

The milestone Half-Life and its highly popular multiplayer modification Counter-Strike, which is still the most played multiplayer title on the Internet decades later, are based on the first Quake engine. In this respect, too, Counter-Strike can be traced back to id Software’s 1996 masterpiece: The shooter was not only technically groundbreaking, it also made multiplayer duels via LAN or the Internet really popular. The developer of the Quake engine, the company id Software, for many years made a large part of its turnover from licensing the engine, which it originally developed for its own games. It was similar at Epic Games with Unreal. In the meantime, the engine called ID Tech still exists and currently exists as ID Tech 7, but is currently only used in Doom Eternal.

The best-known developer at id was John Carmack, chief developer of the id engines and in the 1990s and 2000s the equivalent of Tim Sweeney from Epic. In 2009, id Software was taken over by Zenimax and has not been independent since then. Carmack himself joined Oculus in 2013 as a virtual reality frontman, but retired from there as of 2019.

Intel Arc A380: Beaten by Radeon RX 6400 in first test

We’ve been waiting for Intel’s Arc Alchemist desktop graphics cards for some time, now the publication is slowly approaching. At least in China, the first tests of the A380 Proton from board partner Gunnir have appeared. In this, the Intel counterpart to AMD’s Radeon RX 6400/ 6500 XT and Nvidia’s Geforce GTX 1650 / RTX 3050 with a Core i5-12400, a B660 motherboard and DDR4 memory is tested. In the full configuration of the ACM-G11 GPU, the A380 has 8 Xe cores, 6 GiB GDDR6 memory on a 96-bit bis and is clocked at 2.45 GHz in boost on the GPU. Only the 16 Gbps modules from Samsung are operated at 15.5 Gbps. According to the first benchmarks in synthetic titles, the Arc A380 can keep up well with the entry-level models of the competition and places itself between the Geforce RTX 3050 and the Radeon RX 6500 XT. It achieves a score of 5,170 points in 3D Mark Timespy, while an RTX 3050 scores 6,250 points.

This places it above the still extremely popular Geforce GTX 1060 6 GiB, which averages 4,523 points with the same CPU. In Port Royal, however, the Arc A380 only gets 947 points, while the Geforce RTX 3050 gets 3,534 points. However, the gaming tests reveal that Intel still has a lot of work to do with the drivers for the Arc Alchemist models. The Arc A380 fails to deliver on popular titles like League of Legends, PUBG, GTA 5, Tomb Raider, Forza Horizon 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2. It is beaten in every single game by the weakest AMD and Nvidia models, and the lead that the Radeon RX 6400 and Geforce GTX 1650 have been able to achieve is sometimes more than 20 percent – in other tests from China it does appear not quite as bad, but a clear gap to the RX 6400 cannot be argued away.