Something Random

[sedrosken]

I'll be 24 in July, and I just signed a lease to rent a room closer to where I work. Not a house, or an apartment -- a room. Property values are getting that ridiculous down here, I found the best deal I could ($850/mo including utilities, others are ~700-800mo with separate utilities) and took it. I'm thinking right now I might bounce around renting rooms until I have enough to put down on a house, and have my car paid off -- hopefully the bubble bursts by then -- and then once I'm not specifically saving for a goal, I can start kicking stuff in the retirement account. I don't even want anything extravagant, I'd take a trailer on a pad as long as it was verifiably mine. I guess what I want more than anything is just stability.

Really the smart thing to do for a car would have been to find an older Toyota than I ended up with and saved until I could afford it outright. But at least I didn't get shafted too badly -- for a car of its age, mine is in really good shape, and my monthly payment isn't that bad, though I am on the hook for 5 more years -- the term was 66mo. And, of course, the prices are even worse now. I could probably sell my car and make money off the deal.

My cousin and I were going to go in on a 2br apt. together but he bailed wanting a "better deal" when we were already getting a break on rent compared to other 2brs in the area. Better that I found that out when I did than 4-5 months into the lease and he just disappears. I grew up on SSI disability so I like to think I know the value of a dollar better than most my age but the cost of living down here compared to back home is just so much higher it's like after all the calculations I actually make less now than I did then, right now I absolutely cannot afford to live alone, whatsoever.

And is it just me or do we have another financial crisis brewing, too? Awful lot of "bubbles" popping up.

 

[Mercutio]

I currently share my home with a couple young women around sed's age who would otherwise be homeless. One of them I call my quasi-SO; she's staying at least until she finishes her degree. The other one is just "wintering" here since she normally lives in her car by choice.

Getting proof of income and passing a background check to get $1000/month lease on a studio apartment is damned near impossible right now for far too many people. My town just build a bunch of luxury apartments that cost $1900/month for 2 bedroom units, and while that amount might make sense on the north side of Chicago, I live just outside Gary, Indiana, where it would be laughable if I didn't see people moving in to those units.

My apartment is essentially rent controlled. The rental rate has only gone up 10% of the last 15 years. Since I have more space than I need, I'm more than willing to share it. I do recognize the frustration. It's common to a lot of my young friends, especially since almost none of them have provable income.

 

[Handruin]

I'll be 24 in July, and I just signed a lease to rent a room closer to where I work. Not a house, or an apartment -- a room. Property values are getting that ridiculous down here, I found the best deal I could ($850/mo including utilities, others are ~700-800mo with separate utilities) and took it. I'm thinking right now I might bounce around renting rooms until I have enough to put down on a house, and have my car paid off -- hopefully the bubble bursts by then -- and then once I'm not specifically saving for a goal, I can start kicking stuff in the retirement account. I don't even want anything extravagant, I'd take a trailer on a pad as long as it was verifiably mine. I guess what I want more than anything is just stability.

Really the smart thing to do for a car would have been to find an older Toyota than I ended up with and saved until I could afford it outright. But at least I didn't get shafted too badly -- for a car of its age, mine is in really good shape, and my monthly payment isn't that bad, though I am on the hook for 5 more years -- the term was 66mo. And, of course, the prices are even worse now. I could probably sell my car and make money off the deal.

My cousin and I were going to go in on a 2br apt. together but he bailed wanting a "better deal" when we were already getting a break on rent compared to other 2brs in the area. Better that I found that out when I did than 4-5 months into the lease and he just disappears. I grew up on SSI disability so I like to think I know the value of a dollar better than most my age but the cost of living down here compared to back home is just so much higher it's like after all the calculations I actually make less now than I did then, right now I absolutely cannot afford to live alone, whatsoever.

And is it just me or do we have another financial crisis brewing, too? Awful lot of "bubbles" popping up.

What bubbles are you seeing popping up? I doubt the housing market with pop like you're hoping and what financial crisis is brewing? There's corrections happening but those are a bit expected. Nothing indicates a crisis in the horizon from what I've been paying attention to.

 

[jtr1962]

I doubt the housing market with pop like you're hoping and what financial crisis is brewing?

Historically over the long term housing prices keep pace with inflation. Right now depending upon where you live they're as much as 5 times as high as they would be had they kept pace with inflation over the last 40 or 50 years. Long term that situation isn't sustainable. We're in a game of musical chairs now with housing. People are paying ridiculous prices, and hoping those prices continue to rise so they feel they didn't overpay. You don't want to be the person left standing when the game is up (i.e. owing more on the mortgage than the house is worth).

We could pass regulations to get investors out of the residential housing market. No reason REITs and the like should be buying single family homes, then renting them. Those homes were built for people who want to own where they live, not to make already rich investors even richer. You could have flip taxes to keep people from gaming the market. By that I mean buying a couple of homes in an area, turning one into a McMansion to increase home prices in the area, then selling them all in the short term at a quick profit. Maybe tax capital gains on homes owned less than 5 years at 90%.

Of course, zoning laws have to be changed to allow increasing supply but first let's get out those who artificially manipulate the market to their advantage. $1,900 a month apartments in a place like Gary, Indiana is ridiculous. Even in NYC, those kinds of prices are ridiculous. My parents were able to rent at something like $30 a month when they started out. That's $300 a month in today's money. I'd love to know who is paying these prices. Like I said earlier, apartments in NYC averaged 75% of my take-home pay 30 years ago. If I correct my pay back then for inflation, then compare it to current average rents (about $3,000 a month), rents are about 125% of take-home. Like I said, who is paying these prices? A lot of people make $50K or less. Eventually the market will correct. Prices will drop to historical values adjusted for inflation. That means my mom's house will drop from maybe $875K to $250K. Houses in more expensive areas might drop by 80%. Rents will follow a similar pattern. But whether this will happen in 5 years, 10 years, or 25 years is anyone's guess.

 

[jtr1962]

I currently share my home with a couple young women around sed's age who would otherwise be homeless. One of them I call my quasi-SO; she's staying at least until she finishes her degree. The other one is just "wintering" here since she normally lives in her car by choice.

I'll probably do something like that after my mom passes. I honestly won't need the money, but I'll have more space than I need and would welcome the company. It'll also be nice helping out people who otherwise wouldn't have a place to live.

My apartment is essentially rent controlled. The rental rate has only gone up 10% of the last 15 years. Since I have more space than I need, I'm more than willing to share it. I do recognize the frustration. It's common to a lot of my young friends, especially since almost none of them have provable income.

The new normal may well be people staying with their parents well into their 30s, even 40s. It's been the normal in NYC for quite some time. Prices here have been crazy for over 3 decades. Now it's happening in most of the rest of the country.

 

[sedrosken]

Successfully moved (in one trip, no less, but I cheated by enlisting the help of two other vehicles) on Friday. Aside from pulling both biceps because I really ought to have stretched before picking up a 90lb CRT television, and generally just being sore, I'm alright. I can finally use the L-shaped desk I got off of Facebook Marketplace some months ago -- I didn't have the space where I used to live, and thought I was moving relatively soon when I bought it, but it sat in the garage for some months instead. It's actually accidentally the perfect size -- my retro setup fits in the corner, my main setup is along the long side, and I have the short side as a general work area, be that for actual working from home with my laptop, disassembling myriad electronics, or even paperwork! It's a little embarrassing to say, but with this bedroom I actually have more room to myself than I probably ever have.

I bricked my OpenWRT TP-Link router almost immediately by attempting to do a factory reset, and then trying to flash the factory firmware. I'll keep it around in case I ever get ahold of an SPI flasher and get bored, but for now, I'm on my backup -- the router I was using before, a Netgear R6250 that I'm trying to build up the courage to install DD-WRT on so I can hopefully decouple the LAN from the Wi-Fi client bridge and have my own subnet, as I could do on the TP-Link with OpenWRT before I did a dumb thing. As to why I'm looking at DD-WRT -- The Netgear uses a Broadcom SoC and those have limited support at best under OpenWRT, while Netgear cut a deal with the devs of DD-WRT to give them firmware blobs. I initially switched routers because while the TP-Link was slower (having a single-core SoC and 64MB RAM vs the dual-cores and 128MB of the Netgear) it also had a much stronger wireless signal, having real antennas.

I also finally set up the NAS I took from work -- I didn't manage to get the fleet of 4TB drives I wanted, but the 2x2TB that were already installed and another 2TB I pilfered (with permission) from work made for a small-ish mdadm RAID5 I could toss stuff on. I of course extensively stress-tested all of the drives before setting up the array -- with two of them being so old (2012 mfg. dates) I was concerned, but it turns out I needn't have been, because they were practically new -- less than 500 power-on hours, and even after a few laps of badblocks not a single one was reporting any sort of error or reallocated sector event. IO performance is roughly what you'd expect. On larger transfers I can almost hit 85MB/s! But generally I get around 35-50. Perfectly fine for bulk storage.

Being that I need such bulk storage -- on an array with 3.4TB free after formatting, I now only have 1.3TB remaining -- but that the rate of change is so slow (I think it's grown maybe 500GB in the last 2 years), I guess this'll do at least for now. Hopefully by the time I need more I'll have a decent amount of money in my pocket and can actually budget for a real solution!

Samba setup was a little more annoying being that I also have to account for DOS/WfW3.x/Win9x clients, and SMBv1 is slowly being removed from the codebase. I'm not sure if I'll leave Plex on there -- it's annoying to work with, I have to rename half my stuff, and it misdetects a lot. I'm hemming and hawing over maybe installing and configuring an FTP daemon, I don't have anything that explicitly needs it per se and it's a pain to configure but when it's useful it's very useful. I also installed a HTTPS proxy for older browsers that can't do TLS1.3. I may also opt to setup iSCSI, but I'm unsure if I'm really ready for that.

 

[Mercutio]

Moving is the worst.

When my roommate moved in, I was the only person willing or able to help her. She's barely 5 feet tall and weighs just a touch over 100lbs, so I wound up filling a moving van more or less by myself. I live in a third floor apartment. It was an unpleasant sort of time. She currently has a full sofa and a queen bed in a room I would not have guessed could hold both of those things, especially not with her boudoir and mirror, but with a lot of patience, we made it work. Being 46 years old, it only took me about three days to recover from all that. It was basically double leg day.

I am a big believer in Moving Karma. Help people move and people will be there to help you. This actually worked for me during the last two moves that I made, and I do kind of swear by it. I have a serious mistrust of movers. Too many nice things disappear when strangers are handling your stuff.

Since I move infrequently, I have a related concept: Cleaning Karma. There are enough OCD/Adderall (/possibly other powder-fueled but I don't ask about that) young women in my life who owe me favors for things like helping them move that I can usually rope one or two people who are way better at organizing things to come and spend a day doing the things I'd never even think to do, like dusting the tops of ceiling fans or removing the pile of old hard drives on my desk to a chest of drawers designated for spare parts.

Ages ago, I told someone that Western Digital drives are best suited for construction material. Right now I actually do have two stacks of retired 2 - 4TB drives that just happen to fit very nicely between my floor and the underside of my desk. They're wedged in tightly enough that they're not going to fall over unless I deliberately pull one out. I call it an accent statement. And, since sed might ask: These are drives that probably ran constantly for years on end. You wouldn't want 'em.

 

[jtr1962]

Moving is the worst.

I wholeheartedly agree with that sentiment. This is coming from someone who last moved 43½ years ago when they had far less stuff (seriously, how much stuff do 15 year olds have?). As far as I'm concerned, my next move will be when they carry me out. The house is paid for, I have more than enough room, I like the area.

Kind of weird thinking you were a toddler when I last moved.

Being 46 years old, it only took me about three days to recover from all that.

Yeah, it gets harder as you get older.

I did this last year when I was nearly 59. Really fun mixing 64 bags of concrete, hauling the mixed cement from near the garage to the yard, pouring it, smoothing it, etc. In case you're wondering what it's for, I'm going to put a shed there. My brother needs the garage, so I have to clear out stuff from there. And I want to clear out all my father's junk from the basement. A 9'x11' shed should do nicely.

Anyway, most of my body dealt OK with doing this. But having CTS it took my hands probably a month to completely recover, or at least recover to the state of relative decrepitude they were in prior to starting the project.

 

[Handruin]

When I moved to my house about 3 years ago I paid a company to help move and it was well worth it. I've helped a a bunch of friends over the years and they've helped me but we all kind of agreed that after we turned 40 we hire someone when we move.

The things they get me tired/sore are the home remodeling projects.

 

[Mercutio]

Remodeling projects and yard upkeep are the best reasons not to own a home in my opinion. Every time it snows, I'm thankful I'm not the one out dealing with it at 5 in the morning.

 

[jtr1962]

As strange as it sounds, some people actually enjoy those things. My mother loved gardening. My brother loves remodeling projects. I liked doing all the concrete work in the yard (borders, paths, patio), even if was murder on my hands. Not thrilled about shoveling snow, but with climate change that's less and less a concern. On the plus side, it forces me to exercise in the dead of winter when I'm usually not getting enough other exercise.

The other nice part about a house, at least if it's detached, is you don't have to worry about making noise or doing things that might disturb the neighbors. In an apartment building, just me walking around at 3 AM might elicit a knock on the door from the people downstairs complaining about my footsteps. Or the TV might do the same.

Then there's the issue of getting vermin if some of the other tenants are slobs. The roaches in the housing project were a big factor that caused us to move out.

I would never live in an apartment again even if someone paid me.

 

[Handruin]

The good thing is that remodeling is optional so if you're content with your living space there's nothing you need to do just like an apartment. The best part though is you have the option to do what you want whenever you want versus renting a place and good luck getting a landlord to remodel.

The yard stuff can be a pain but it's never been even close to enough of a reason to not have my own place. I look at it as good exercise and a chance to be outside. I have a battery powered snowblower and it's easy enough to manage the property with it.

 

[sedrosken]

I never minded shoveling snow or yard upkeep. I didn't particularly enjoy it but I didn't particularly hate it either. Either one gives me a chance to put on some music (louder, in the case of yard work) and do something mind-numbing while I think about how to get around whatever problems I happen to have at that time.

The bad part of owning a home is that you can't point a finger at the landlord when, say, the water heater goes. You're on the hook for that. And coming from a family that could never really afford to have an emergency fund, that sort of thing is a concern, even when I'm likely to be able to break that pattern.

 

[Handruin]

You're right that home ownership doesn't end with paying for the price of the house, it does need planning for upkeep and things that will eventually fail. Even in an apt you pay for that in rent costs that unless if you're in some kind of rare and special circumstances that price increases for most people (myself including from when I rented for years) over the years.

Even with the ability to point a finger at a landlord, most are going to solve the issue in the cheapest way possible and maybe not even the most ideal or convenient for you. There's tradeoffs for both like anything in life.

 

[sedrosken]

Finally nutted up and installed DD-WRT on my router, and then fought with it for another couple hours to get it just-so. Turns out I did not want client bridge mode -- I wanted just plain client mode since this way the router uses whichever radio is configured for it as a WAN connection instead of bridging the two networks together entirely.

 

[LunarMist]

The older you get the less you want to do anything yourself. Ideally you will have money to pay people to do all that stuff.
I never self moved, but in the late 80s and 90s when I was stationed all over the place I could only take about 70kg or risk leaving it behind.

 

[Mercutio]

The older you get the less you want to do anything yourself. Ideally you will have money to pay people to do all that stuff.
I never self moved, but in the late 80s and 90s when I was stationed all over the place I could only take about 70kg or risk leaving it behind.

LM is clearly a CIA Operative.


My folks moved their entire home by themselves at age 66 and 67, including an antique 10' grand piano that's probably worth a decent chunk of what a home is worth as it is. And there were stairs involved. My dad still does all the upkeep on the exterior of his home, still works on his cars and keeps up on home improvement projects as well. It's just how some people are.

I'm big on DIY projects within my realm of expertise, but that realm does NOT include cars or home improvements. I stopped at drywall and being able to change a tire.

 

[jtr1962]

LM is clearly a CIA Operative.

The kind that takes out people the US government deems "inconvenient". All joking aside, in my first year of college I was eating dinner in the dining hall by myself (as usual, BTW-didn't really make any friends) and had a strange person sit down across from me. Not a student. He started by saying "we" have been watching you for a while and think you might be perfect for some "special" work. I asked what exactly was it about me that made him think this. His answer was that I kept to myself, seemed pretty robotic and emotionless, and learned very quickly. My next question was how do you know all this? "We have our ways". Obviously I was thinking "spy" or "assassin" was what the kind of job he was alluding to, but of course he couldn't say it. Next question: "Would you be willing to leave school immediately so we can start?" My answer-"Not really. I'm not one who likes leaving everything familiar to me. Trust me, whatever you're offering won't work out. Plus you're very vague about exactly what you're offering me here." Didn't say a word after that. Just left. Never saw him again. I'll guess the correct answer to his last question would have been "When do we leave?" I could imagine some rich kid looking for adventure whose parents are making him be a dentist or lawyer might well have jumped at something like this.

I'm sure the government gets a lot of its covert operatives, assassins and so forth this way. These aren't exactly jobs you advertise for. Instead go to top colleges and profile people. They probably look for people who could fit in easily in most places (check), who keep to themselves (check), who seem cold and emotionless (yeah, I was back then), who learn very quickly (check), who seem physically up to it (check), and who might be willing to spend their careers without putting down roots or attachments (he got that part wrong big time). Still, I might have missed out on being James Bond for real, although from what I heard that kind of work isn't as glamorous as the movies make it out to be.

My folks moved their entire home by themselves at age 66 and 67, including an antique 10' grand piano that's probably worth a decent chunk of what a home is worth as it is. And there were stairs involved. My dad still does all the upkeep on the exterior of his home, still works on his cars and keeps up on home improvement projects as well. It's just how some people are.

I'm big on DIY projects within my realm of expertise, but that realm does NOT include cars or home improvements. I stopped at drywall and being able to change a tire.

Everyone has their thing. Hats off to your parents for moving at that age.

I've done most things around the home, but I'd say electrical work is the thing I find the hardest. Pulling cables through walls, cutting holes for outlet boxes, etc. just sucks. I usually finish a job with my hands all cut up and dust all over the place. On rare occasions when I can just mount everything on the surface with conduits it's a lot easier.

I'm eventually going to do a DIY solar installation. I'm doing it on the garage roof. It's enough surface area. I'd also a lot lower and safer than the roof of the house.

 

[LunarMist]

LM is clearly a CIA Operative.


My folks moved their entire home by themselves at age 66 and 67, including an antique 10' grand piano that's probably worth a decent chunk of what a home is worth as it is. And there were stairs involved. My dad still does all the upkeep on the exterior of his home, still works on his cars and keeps up on home improvement projects as well. It's just how some people are.

I'm big on DIY projects within my realm of expertise, but that realm does NOT include cars or home improvements. I stopped at drywall and being able to change a tire.

No, I was always a civilian.
There is nothing wrong with any physical activity such as moving if you enjoy it.

 

[Mercutio]

Some day there will be a Batman who can turn his head.

 

[LunarMist]

Might it be meningitis? At least get an x-ray.

 

[sedrosken]

I had the epiphany that, with all my bulk data offloaded to the NAS, the only thing keeping me on Windows on my personal machine was games. Well, that and iTunes for syncing my iPhone, but I can run that in a VM when I need to. And since I don't really game much anymore -- and what I do play semi-regularly runs fine under Linux either directly or via Proton, I figured "why not" and spent an afternoon dialing in an install of Devuan on my main PC. Since I'm taking it out of a server role, I decided a name change was in order, as well.

 

[Mercutio]

Games running on Linux have gotten a LOT better but something that annoys the crap out of me are games where the base product is available but none of the extras get released for it. Battletech for example doesn't have some of the DLCs it should. Turns out the game runs fine in emulation anyway, and I do understand that they're building a game that might only be played by .5% of their user base, but it's very common to see. At least Proton works a lot of the time.

Unrelated matter in the spirit of the earliest posts in this thread: Big ups for the Taco Bell Fiesta Veggie Burrito. I was a big fan of the Seven Layer Burrito and there's a $2 item that's basically the same thing.

 

[Handruin]

I was surprised how well my M1 Mac plays games even through emulation. I enjoy playing Factorio often and it runs well.

 

[sedrosken]

I mean, I typically keep it to 'boomer shooters' anyway (UT99, Quake III, Doom, Halo CE) since I can pick those up on really short notice and get a few rounds in before I get bored and shut it off, and my friends tend to keep them installed for impromptu deathmatches but it's also nice to see very Microsoft-centric games like Age of Empires II Definitive Edition working. Ironically a regression in the codebase somewhere means that one of the games that historically never gave me much in the way of problems, Killing Floor 2, no longer starts, but I expect that resolved probably by the next time I get the urge to play it again.

I mean, I also have a huge library, over 400 titles on Steam alone, so I never have a shortage of stuff to ease boredom with, even if I still somehow manage to find myself bored from time to time.

 

[Handruin]

Boomer shooters?

 

[sedrosken]

Name for a subgenre of shooters that follow design conventions of the late 90s for FPS -- either level-based Doom/Quake style action or an Arena style like in UT or Quake III Arena. Halo technically doesn't qualify but I throw it in anyway.

 

[Handruin]

I grew up on those games but I'm not a boomer. Haven't heard them called that.

 

[LunarMist]

I thought a boomer was somebody born between the end of the 2nd world war and the end of the 1950s.

 

[Handruin]

1946 -> 1964

 

[LunarMist]

Well, they changed it later to get more body counts. LOL
The boom ended about 1958 when the economy tanked and people reduced the reporduction.

 

[LunarMist]

The speakrs were so tinny that I never heard any booming from 1990s computers.

 

[Handruin]

Those were some tiny speakers in the cases back then.

 

[LunarMist]

Whatever happened to the Dudering guy? I recall he had some scheme to strike it rich before the pandemonium.

 

[Handruin]

I haven't seen him on SF in a while. Hey @ddrueding are you still around?

 

[jtr1962]

1946 -> 1964

That's the technical definition but I'll go with Lunar's definition if you want to define a generation as having similar values and characteristics. Those born in 1960 or later tend to be much more like generation X than like the boomers. The baby boomers became the hippies in the 1960s (whom I thought were weird), the yuppies in the 1980s (the greed is good mantra), and lately a bunch of senior citizen Kens and Karens complaining about how lazy millennials are, along with a bunch of other stuff. They've also been called Generation Greed for their propensity to have laws and policies made which benefit them, to the detriment of future generations. I really have nothing in common with them despite technically being part of that generation. I think we should redefine it as 1946-1959. Generation X would be 1960-1980. Oh, and I'm tired of hearing the boomers talk about how wonderful the 1950s were. Maybe if you were a middle class or higher white male, but for most people the 1950s sucked. The boomers ended up becoming MAGAs in 2016, trying to recreate their idealized version of 1950s America.

 

[sedrosken]

I grew up on those games but I'm not a boomer. Haven't heard them called that.

It's common among younger people to differentiate them from shooters following a more current design paradigm -- also related to Gen Z and Alpha's tendency to call anyone older than them boomers. As in, "okay, boomer" and such. I happen to find the term hilarious despite its inherent inaccuracy so I use it.

RE: Late boomers acting more like Gen Xers -- My mom was born in '62 and she definitely has a lot more in common with my dad (1970). I think it's pretty standard for later iterations of a generation to bleed into the next one -- millennials born in the mid 90s before the cutoff for Gen Z for example have a lot more similarities with us than with the earliest members of their generation for another example. I definitely think you're right as to new lines needing to be drawn, there -- maybe Gen X from 1960 up to about 1975 and millennials from 1976-1990, Gen Z from 1991 to 2005.

 

[sedrosken]

Downgraded from the 3700X back to the 1600AF -- it just suits this board better first off, the VRMs were NOT happy trying to adequately feed enough power to the 3700X to keep it boosting at max. Second, I just don't really use the extra power the upgrade afforded me outside some applications I honestly don't do much work in -- compilation and media transcoding chiefly, and I tend not to undertake those tasks without ample patience and time in which to do it anyway.

I'm trading this CPU to a friend of mine for his GTX 1070 SC --he needs the extra cores in VRChat, which he occasionally has trouble with the physics aspect of still, whereas I need just a little more oomph for 1440p high-refresh games, which I've actually been finding myself playing lately!

My RX480 is quite... tired, I suppose. It's fine, completely stable at stock voltage and clocks, but it gets hotter than I'd like despite being cleaned and repasted as a result of its prior history spent mining Ethereum before I obtained it -- its ASIC quality is rated by GPU-Z as an abysmal 71.6%. It'll be an excellent first GPU for my cousin, who only plans to run Fortnite and Minecraft at 1080p on it, but I need something a little stronger and more stable myself -- I've been having issues with the AMD drivers again, and again it's a specific version that works with my particular configuration and no other and I'm just tired of it. I don't know if it's just me, but drivers have NEVER been ATi OR AMD's strong suit. Even in my vintage machines, I don't ever seem to have significant trouble -- hardware failure of my 6800 Ultra aside -- out of nVidia, whereas ATi is almost always a crapshoot.

 

[Mercutio]

Even in my vintage machines, I don't ever seem to have significant trouble -- hardware failure of my 6800 Ultra aside -- out of nVidia, whereas ATi is almost always a crapshoot.

AMD's drivers are better on the Linux side and yes, they've always kinda sucked for Windows.

On the other hand, my life-long experience with nVidia has involved under-specified fans that would kill cards. To this day I still don't trust anything with an nVidia GPU that's not on a dual-slot cooling solution. There was a point in time when Dell was sticking low-spec video cards in everything and every time a Dimension something-or-other crapped out it the fix would be to swap in some other cheap POS GPU.

 

[Handruin]

That sounds more like an issue with the various GPU manufacturers or integrator's like Dell taking liberties with designs to cheap out for profits versus an nvidia issue. AMD went through a phase of releasing GPUs that were considered ok to run at 100C on a single fan (Hawaii). I've had very good luck over the years with all my nvidia GPUs (around 10), many of which ran full-tilt 24x7. They are by no means perfect but hardly a bad choice assuming you pick a decent manufacturer. If your goals are Linux or Mac, sure it's less than optimal.