installing a 2nd gpu using a pci extension cable?

[inquisitor1]

Well, used 4090's (which have about a month left as the current generation flagship) have stratospheric pricing right now, and I don't expect this to change outright once the 5090 lands (will likely have patchy availability). Guess you've got it as good as you can if you're imposing yourself that limitation.

Disagree with the Ferrari analogy, though. Such a sports car will more than likely increase in price, as its scarcity and exclusivity only increased, but an old graphics card is just obsolete technology.

I dont mind waiting. I find it better to make bigger jumps anyway. so even 3 gens will be fine. its not like I wont be able to edit or play a game. hell im using 1070 now to play some games.

oh, btw, I newest game Ive played is mirrors edge 2016 and now playing a few newer ones...wow, what garbage. whats the deal with all the nonstop unskippable cutscenes and other negatives I can write here. also hogwarts is horrendous. shame on them for releasing such trash.


taking out the price of ferraris and just the performance I meant. its still a good car that can do what it was good at then.

 

[qxp]

I dont mind waiting. I find it better to make bigger jumps anyway. so even 3 gens will be fine. its not like I wont be able to edit or play a game. hell im using 1070 now to play some games.

The Moore's law says that the number of transistors in ICs should double every two years. In the past this was achieved by shrinking features with corresponding increase in clock speed, while simultaneously transitioning to more efficient manufacturing (bigger wafers, for example) which lead to decrease in prices.

Nowadays there are still gains in frequency but they are smaller and you get more transistors through increasing chip sizes, which makes prices go up. So older hardware is not that obsolete.

For CPUs compare an old workstation with 2x Xeon 6148 vs latest and greatest Ryzen 7950X.

On paper Xeon 6148 is obsolete: made in 2017, 14nm process, base frequency 2.4 GHz, turbo 3.7 GHz.
Compared with Ryzen 9950X: made in 2024, 4nm process, base frequency 4.3 GHz, turbo 5.7 GHz.

But a workstation with 2x Xeons 6148 has 55MB L3 cache, 240 GB/s memory bandwidth, can host 1.5 TB of RAM, has 80 cpu threads, 300W power from 2 cpus
Compared with Ryzen 9950X: 64MB L3 cache, 128 GB/s memory bandwidth, can host up to 192 GB RAM, has 64 cpu threads, 170W power from 1 cpu.

So you lose a little on simple compute, you win massively on memory and memory bandwidth and your electricity costs are slightly up. That workstation was expensive in 2017, but now not so much..

Similar with GPUs: RTX 3090 has 1 TB memory bandwidth and 30 TFlops, RTX 4090 has the same 1 TB memory bandwidth and 82 TFlops. It is harder to make use of those 82 TFlops with the same memory bandwidth, while the cost is double. So 2x RTX3090 would probably give you more compute, at a slightly increased power costs.