Mini reviews for things purchased last year.
PC: Palit 5070Ti
- Replaced: Palit 2070 Super
- Rating: OK
The 2070S was starting to show its age for gaming, but mostly this upgrade was triggered by not wanting to pay for Adobe Premiere any more. When I’d tried Resolve previously I’d had serious stability issues to the point of renders just failing which I suspect was due to VRAM exhaustion. Plus, while Premiere uses more CPU, Resolve uses more GPU and I hoped this would make it snappy.
It partly worked, I’ve had no stability issues but I still wouldn’t call Resolve snappy, and multicam editing performance is still very poor. If nothing else it will pay for itself in a few years just from Premiere savings.
On reflection, perhaps I should have gone for the 9070XT instead. It wouldn’t be as fast in Resolve but I’m still on proxies anyway. I’ve been experimenting with Linux gaming and AMD has much better support than Nvidia. Whilst the 5070ti does work in Bazzite, I’ve had frequent screen corruption issues in the Steam interface. I also, like the rest of the world, hate the Nvidia power connector.
PC: AMD 5950X + Asus Strix B550-F
- Replaced: Intel 10850K + Gigabyte Z490 Vision-D
- Rating: Very Good
Mini CPU upgrade to go with the GPU change. I think it cost around £150 once I sold the old parts. For that money I got +15% single core, +100% multi-core performance and PCIe 4 support. Plus the Gigabyte board was never completely reliable with my RAM when in XMS mode. Sometimes it would fail to POST, timeout and then end-up back on BIOS defaults. The Asus board has been perfectly solid.
The only thing I’ve lost is Thunderbolt, taking DP Alt-mode with it, so now my mini-monitor needs a HDMI feed.
Since this was so cheap I don’t really consider it a full upgrade for planning purposes, and just intended to get two years out of it. But given what’s happened to RAM prices since then it might end up going the distance.
PC: Asus ProArt PA148CTV
- Replaced: Huion Kamvas Pro 12″ drawing tablet
- Rating: OK
My desk setup doesn’t allow side-by-side monitors so for a 2nd screen I like to have a small monitor below my main. This is useful for Spotify or background YouTube whilst working on the main screen. The Huion tablet was a cheap way of doing this that promised good colour accuracy but it had massive bezels and the digitizer made everything look dusty.
The Asus is better but not amazing. Colour accuracy is good so it has some use as a proofing monitor, but it’s only 60Hz, with no VRR, no HDR.
Perhaps I should have gone for something OLED but burn-in on something that would be a static screen 99% of the time was a concern.
Solid, but expensive for what it is.
TV: LG C4 42″
- Replaced: Samsung 7400NU
- Rating: OK
This was a EOL deal as the C5 series was out. Change was partly driven by wanting OLED and partly as the Samsung was becoming annoying as the internal memory had filled up with dark matter and it was unable to launch apps anymore.
The picture quality is great, no complaints. The apps all work properly. There’s even a decent Moonlight client but it relies on developer mode which is annoying to keep alive, so I’ve given up on it.
My main issue is the audio settings are infuriating. I only ever use headphones or my AV amp but the TV will switch back to internal speakers at the slightest provocation. Amp goes into power saving? TV speakers. Turn off Bluetooth headphones? Back to TV speakers. It also won’t produce simultaneous audio outputs, unless one of those outputs is the internal speakers. It just looooves using the internal speakers.
The only way it’s usable is to set to optical out, split it externally, with one feed to the amp and one to a mini decoder which goes into some wireless headphones. And just don’t have any kind of HDMI connection between amp and TV. This works, but I lose out on the amp auto-powering on.
PC: Asus ROG Ally
- Replaced: Nintendo Switch 1
- Rating: Mixed
See other post.
Lens: Panasonic 14-40
- Replaced: Nothing
- Rating: OK
Slightly impulsive purchase as I didn’t intend to invest more in L-mount stuff. But with some Black Friday shenanigans I ended up paying £95 when the official retail price is £450 and second hand examples are £250 in shops.
It’ll spend it’s life attached to the S9. My plan was for then have the S9 to spend its life attached to my RS3 Mini gimbal, but I cannot get this combination to balance. Or rather, I can balance it just fine but the gimbal refuses to accept it on the roll axis. So I’ll probably end up sticking with the S5 II and 35mm combo for the gimbal and keep the S9 + 18-40 as a B-cam.
The 18-40 is slow, F5.6 is at 31mm but it shouldn’t matter too much for video.
The form factor suits the S9 far, far better than any of my other lenses. It was actually tempting to start using the S9 more generally. But ultimately the lens combinations on the similar sized OM-5 still make a lot more sense, and that camera is better suited for photography.