Jasper Fox 
"Every GPU VRAM Size Explained in 10 Minutes"
YouTube
Ruby Tails > FWA@Redfuchs I bought an ex-mining 6700XT back in 2023 for a really good price and that card proved to be quite the trooper. Would handle just about every modern-ish game I threw at it and did so for the three-ish years I had it in daily use in my main rig. I still have that card. 
That's exactly why I opted for the 9070XT during Black Friday last year, as I bought that with the intention of having a GPU that'll age gracefully and leave headroom for multitasking. I also knew, from the last crypto boom, that prices were gonna skyrocket in 2026, which they sure did... 
@foxyloon 9070XT?? That's a nice one and should last you for many years!
@Redfuchs That's the hope and plan, hehehe~ So far I've been really happy with it!
I'm very grateful that I had the means to budget for this card too, and be able to buy it while it was damn near MSRP for the first time since it launched. That didn't last long...
Delta Sierra@foxyloon @Redfuchs That's funny, I followed pretty much the same route! Started with a prebuilt that had a 5700XT, upgraded to a 6700XT, last year built a new PC and opted for a 9070XT. But I still have my old computer with the 6700XT as a backup!
I'm doing about 80% of my gaming on Linux now and not having to fool with Nvidia drivers was a huge factor in that decision.
@notthatdelta @Redfuchs The card I had before that 6700XT was a used GTX 1070 that I bought during the crypto craze. It hurt spending $300 on a card that was only going for $90 a year before, but I was running an RX 580 before that and was desperate for an upgrade.
I honestly stabbed that 9070XT into my AM4 machine because I couldn't afford to do a full system upgrade. It's bottlenecked for sure, but not as bad as I initially feared because B550 chipset and PCIe 4.0.
No way I'd be able to do an AM5 build anytime soon, with RAM prices being the way they are at the moment. I'll have to keep an eye out for a prebuilt and harvest the parts from that, I suppose.
@foxyloon @Redfuchs I honestly got incredibly lucky with the timing of my build. The RAM in particular went from $170 to over $800, and the whole rig would cost almost $1000 more to build today.
That's one reason I'm holding on to my older machine, there's no way I'll be able to get replacement parts for the new one...
@notthatdelta @Redfuchs Yeeeep, which is why I basically gave up on having an AM5 build anytime soon. This is exactly why I'm learning how to do board-level repairs, so we can keep these machines alive.
The BGA rework stencil kit I bought just arrived, btw~ 
@notthatdelta @Redfuchs Well, I'm actually considering the ThinkPad because I still wanna keep the original motherboard. (The USB C ports on the X395 board are basically a hotdog down a hallway situation. )
I'm definitely gonna practice on an old GPU first, though. That seems easier to test with minimal swapping of major components.
@notthatdelta @Redfuchs They do, but I'm considering desoldering one of the chips and reinstalling it for practice. That's a much faster way to determine if I screwed something up than to swap an entire laptop motherboard over and over.
As for swapping the USB ports, I don't have a lot of those in stock to replace it with, and I think I'll need actual solder paste instead of the traditional wire solder/flux that I've been trying to use.
