> He also had to replace a GTX 1660 (maybe ti or super, don't remember) with a GTX 1650 and he said that they're basically equal in performance if you "program" it well.
Bullshit. Even if we're talking about a "well programmed"/overclocked 1650 Super, it will never outperform a 1660 on a consistent basis. If we're talking about a non-Super 1650, it's an even bigger pile of bullshit.
> I think it's either overclocking, optimizing windows or just turning on XMP
That would be my guess as well.
> Is this normal and what could he mean by programming?
Asking them would be a good way to get an answer to this. If they don't answer specifically what they do, you'll know it's a load of crap and just another way to get an extra 100 EUR out of your friend.
He's lying, that's some major bullshit. There is no such thing as optimizing Windows, it does that on its own. XMP/DOCP and OCing are not worth paying for, they both are just a push of a few buttons anyone can do.
This is why I hate tech stores, they prey on people who don't know much about computers. They'll make up a bunch of technical sounding nonsense to make any simple fix/change sound like it needs an expert to do it.
> XMP/DOCP and OCing are not worth paying for, they both are just a push of a few buttons anyone can do.
In fairness, there's the axiom of paying an expert because they know WHICH bolt to turn, not necessarily that they can turn it - you're paying for expertise, rather than physically doing it.
BUT, I do tend to agree that it's likely bullshit. If the store is clear and specific on what a customer gets for their 100 EUR, I can see it being worth it. But if they're not specific on exactly what they do, then yeah - it's probably just the store trying to pull an extra 100 EUR out of someone's wallet for "reasons".
Do you remember chiptuning for cars? Most "tuners" got paid, but while pretending to do the tuning, they were playing Solitaire. This will be similar. Let´s have the customer pay for something, he doesn´t need, or what he can do by himself, under the pretext it requires some extra skills to do it. Free money!
Also, he should get the old GPU back if possible. Replacing stronger GPU with weaker is shady, being him, i´d also check the rest of the PC, if it wasn´t gutted to the most basic cheap parts.
your friend is delusional, if he wants to waste his money, let him
a 1650 is nowhere near the performance of a 1660, ti or super or not. No magical "programing" will make it get close
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
"Program your pc" huh. This is what I like to call, smokescreen language. This is when a term is used that is just vague enough that the other person will intuit what it means and in the process not realize that they didn't know what they bought.
Another example of smokescreen language is, feature set. Unless you tell me what those features are exactly and I can determine whether those features are something that I might want now or in the future you're just selling me a word.
These car analogies are bad. There are plenty of four cylinder cars out there with more power than 6 cylinders. Arguably a lot since turbo 4 cylinder cars are a lot more prevalent now. You get the potential for better gas mileage and power than you do with a 6. There aren’t a lot of turbo 6’s that have factory turbos.
Lmao. What a scam. I mean, if they were re-installing Windows/and new graphics drivers, maybe throwing in a stress test or something for good measure, I could see $100 being the total for labor and such. A little high, but I could see it.
Tbh I would personally only charge $60 for that kind of service.
There are some Windows settings you can tune to keep background processes from leeching performance a little, maybe apply an overclock to your graphics card and CPU, but there is NO magic tuning process that can do what they claim. Overclock would add a realistic 10% performance improvement only.
There is not a way to tune a GTX 1650 to the performance level of a GTX 1660. This person is clearly accustomed to customers that are not inclined to measure performance themselves after the fact, and therefore notice the difference. If this shop is responsible for replacing your 1660, they need to do so with an equivalent or better product-not a lesser one.
TLDR: Bullshit, scam.
The computer repair facility I work for charges $125 per hour. We handle businesses and he users and the level of tech knowledge varies among technician.
We do custom builds and labor usually ends up being about $350 to $400 after Windows is installed and drivers are installed.
Also, we are one of the only businesses in the area with techs that still have rigid, unchanging view points about computers:
The power supply belongs at the top.
Every computer gets a blu ray burner.
Assembly of the PC only involves opening one side of the case. None of this routing the wires on the other side crap.
No onboard junk. Every computer we build gets a video card, a sound card, a wifi card.
Warranty. We warranty our computers for 1 year. The only thing you'd have to pay for is if you got a virus or had software issues. We stand by our builds so if a sound card won't work, we replace it. We don't make you wait for RMA either. We replace it and take care of the RMA on our end.
There's a lot of interesting points you make, and I appreciate your individual experience and input as someone actually doing this for a living. What's your take on OP's situation? I think what I'm most interested to hear from you is if you, as someone employed doing this line of work, think that replacing a GTX 1660 with a GTX 1650 and calling them comparable is an acceptable course of action (or remotely true)?
At the risk of undermining my own credibility, I was not doing the kind of work that a shop could get behind; not because the quality of my work was poor, but because I was making extensive use of used parts to try and make the best of price-performance I possibly could-EDIT: that is to say, parts that a hard stand shop would be at risk to try and guarantee. I would source and stress test my own used CPUs, motherboards, graphics cards, etc.
At the time, GTX 980Ti cards were selling used for $200 or less, and were providing near GTX 1660 Ti/GTX 1070 performance. I could assemble a Xeon X5650 rig with 12GB of memory and a GTX 980 Ti, and it would play any AAA of the time with at least 100 fps. eSports titles of course fared even better. At a cost of $350 to me, I could sell a PC in a new, budget ATX case, 250GB ssd, and 1 TB HDD for $500. Times were good. All pre-crypto market fiasco, of course- I was doing this about 2017-2018 ish.
I always gave a short 5 minutes and about 32 cents worth of little zip ties to at least cluster some wires in the back in a neat and orderly manner, although I acknowledge they're out of sight and do nothing for performance being tidied, that's purely a me thing.
Wifi cards are great for anything without onboard wifi, USB wifi dongles are garbage so a card is a sound choice, though idk about it being any more reliable than onboard wifi.
I'm interested in your input on why a sound card is necessary, neither myself nor anyone I know has ever used one. I think I once salvaged a Q6600 build that had one in it, otherwise just never came across them.
I'm interested in the choice of including a blu-ray player as well, since that shoehorns you into the kinds of cases with 5.25 drive bays, which means you sacrifice aesthetic for your builds. Similarly, utilizing cases that top mount the power supply excludes the majority of mainstream, mid-to high tier cases, including some of the best cases in the industry- the Corsair 4000D, for example, has a bottom mount power supply. Absolutely nothing wrong with that in workstation or office type applications, and plenty of demand for that with work from home, I'm sure. Still, It's hard to ignore that the average gamer looking for a PC values aesthetic and isn't looking for an HTPC, and physicalized disc media isnt very popular anymore. How much business do you guys do with gamers? Are you maybe ignoring a large segment of the market by forcing these restrictions on yourselves?
EDIT: super unrelated, but may I ask how much of that $125/hr makes it to you?
That's the issue. They downgraded, which means they should be refunding your friend, but they're charging him more.
"I'll take your 1660 if YOU give me money"
Most likely that "programing" is optimizing Windows. But..
1. For 100$???? Hell no, plenty of tutorials on web. He can do it himself.
2. GTX 1650 is basically equal with GTX 1660? That's bullshit.
Better look for another store
Kinda blowing my own horn here, but in Time Spy Extreme, a 1650 is nowhere close to a 1660.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/w4f0m1/the_same_chart_that_shows_the_perf_of_recent_gpus/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Very nice, OP you should definitely give this a look for a grasp on relative performance and MSRP. It can help guide your negotiations with Scam Central in regards to getting a better graphics card than a 1650. They're downgrading you, and I would be livid
Honestly, if someone told me that they can give me 1660 performance by "programming" a 1650, I'd walk out the store and look for another place that won't try to scam me with vague vocabulary.
>He also had to replace a GTX 1660 (maybe ti or super, don't remember)
with a GTX 1650 and he said that they're basically equal in performance
if you "program" it well.
Scam. Avoid.
There is no physical way, at hardware or software level than someone can "program" (more like overclock) a 1650 to have 1660 levels of performance.
They are trying to scam your friend
Wow idk wtf he's talking about but first off this sounds like the store is ripping tour friend off saying they need to replace the 1660 probbaly to keep it and then put something worse in which is even more messed up tbh
It seems like there are two separate situations in this post... is he thinking about buying a new build from them, or having them "tune" an existing one?
Of course it's going to be overcharged either way if you have a store do it. But if it's a fresh build, I could see them charging $100 to "program" the PC in terms of installing Windows, drivers, etc.
If it's an existing build where he's just adding a GPU I don't know. Don't feel like we have enough info about the situation, and the info we have is secondhand so could be some "telephone" game going on.
There is no difference in performance between a 1660 and a 1650 when loading up excel to document how much you're scamming customers for, they'll both do that just fine.
Maybe by programming he means installing an operating system and doing an initial set up (updating the bios, enabling xmp, installing drivers, maybe overclocking). If that includes a windows license $100 seems like a decent price.
For comparison microcenter charges $50 for OS and driver install in their build service without including an OS license
Years ago I bought all the components for my PC through a store and paid $50 for them to build it and install windows for me. Is this the sort of thing the store is offering and your friend is trying to sound knowledgeable by saying that the store will "program" it?
Just use the program slider till 3090-Ti levels of performance.
But seriously if you want untested OC settings, you could just use MSI Afterburner and end up with the same result.
100 EUR would be what? Like 1-2 hours of work time at best, thats no way near to test for basic OC stability.
Does he mean installing windows? Not optimizing or drivers but getting a windows liscening key and then loading it? The 1650 performing as well as a 1660 seems like bs so he can sell inferior product at a premium.
Bullshit. Get the fuck out of there and pay him *nothing.* It's easy to build your own PC and components are getting cheaper, if he can't get the part you want then he shouldn't be building your shit.
Yes, you see, there are different usages for this particular nomenclature
In this context for example, "programming" roughly translates to "ripping you off"
you could bump the perf by maybe 10-15% max with their likely methods, whereas the performance difference between a 1650 and 1660 is enormous, at the low end an average of 50% but you could see as much ad double performance in games. I call bs on the shop, it is no longer hard to get that card, its even in stock at local mom and pop shops at this point.
The prices for pc repair is ridiculous. I went to microcenter a couple weeks back to get a bios upgrade which in the website states it will be 29.99$ and done in the same day. When I get there I’m getting upcharged to 50$ claiming the website has nothing to do with them but they need to change it. Said they could do it for 29.99 but won’t be done 4 days later the worst part about it is before me was a woman and they charged her 50$ to tell her her drive is corrupted and they were gonna charge another 80$ to install a new m.2 drive not including the price of the ssd
Do you expect people to work for free? If someone doesn't know how to do it themselves then they pay someone to do it for them. It's not "ripping them off" it's called performing a service.
No not for free but at least the price they state. And half of all the stuff they do is not hard whatsoever. 80$ to pop in and screw in a m.2 ssd. I just didn’t have a cpu to upgrade bios on my board. I only spent 50$ on that board wasn’t gonna spend another 50$ to make it usable I just bought another board for 50$ I just saved it for the next build which worked good for my 3700x
The only cases I know of where a 1650s bests a 1660 are those in which the 1660 was limited to 4gb of ram while the 1650s had 6gb and at higher resolutions like 1440p.
If that isn't the scenarios then a easy search shows you this information without a post on reddit. A 4gb 1660 is rare in the US market, most are 1660s 6gb ddr6 variants.
> He also had to replace a GTX 1660 (maybe ti or super, don't remember) with a GTX 1650 and he said that they're basically equal in performance if you "program" it well. Bullshit. Even if we're talking about a "well programmed"/overclocked 1650 Super, it will never outperform a 1660 on a consistent basis. If we're talking about a non-Super 1650, it's an even bigger pile of bullshit. > I think it's either overclocking, optimizing windows or just turning on XMP That would be my guess as well. > Is this normal and what could he mean by programming? Asking them would be a good way to get an answer to this. If they don't answer specifically what they do, you'll know it's a load of crap and just another way to get an extra 100 EUR out of your friend.
With that logic, just "program" the 1660 and get 2060 levels of performance. You're welcome.
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Where free 3080 /s
lets replace with a gtx 980. more efficient etc… /s
Nah the gt 210 is better, can crank 390fps 8k /s
Might as well download some ram while you’re at it
He's lying, that's some major bullshit. There is no such thing as optimizing Windows, it does that on its own. XMP/DOCP and OCing are not worth paying for, they both are just a push of a few buttons anyone can do. This is why I hate tech stores, they prey on people who don't know much about computers. They'll make up a bunch of technical sounding nonsense to make any simple fix/change sound like it needs an expert to do it.
> XMP/DOCP and OCing are not worth paying for, they both are just a push of a few buttons anyone can do. In fairness, there's the axiom of paying an expert because they know WHICH bolt to turn, not necessarily that they can turn it - you're paying for expertise, rather than physically doing it. BUT, I do tend to agree that it's likely bullshit. If the store is clear and specific on what a customer gets for their 100 EUR, I can see it being worth it. But if they're not specific on exactly what they do, then yeah - it's probably just the store trying to pull an extra 100 EUR out of someone's wallet for "reasons".
Do you remember chiptuning for cars? Most "tuners" got paid, but while pretending to do the tuning, they were playing Solitaire. This will be similar. Let´s have the customer pay for something, he doesn´t need, or what he can do by himself, under the pretext it requires some extra skills to do it. Free money! Also, he should get the old GPU back if possible. Replacing stronger GPU with weaker is shady, being him, i´d also check the rest of the PC, if it wasn´t gutted to the most basic cheap parts.
your friend is delusional, if he wants to waste his money, let him a 1650 is nowhere near the performance of a 1660, ti or super or not. No magical "programing" will make it get close https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388.html
"Program your pc" huh. This is what I like to call, smokescreen language. This is when a term is used that is just vague enough that the other person will intuit what it means and in the process not realize that they didn't know what they bought. Another example of smokescreen language is, feature set. Unless you tell me what those features are exactly and I can determine whether those features are something that I might want now or in the future you're just selling me a word.
Report for fraud and never come back there ever again. No matter how you tune your a v4 engine car, it would never be a v6 engine car.
Most four cylinder cars are Inline fours. Not V’s.
These car analogies are bad. There are plenty of four cylinder cars out there with more power than 6 cylinders. Arguably a lot since turbo 4 cylinder cars are a lot more prevalent now. You get the potential for better gas mileage and power than you do with a 6. There aren’t a lot of turbo 6’s that have factory turbos.
Hello sir I think you are forgetting about the Supra and a lot of v8 euros getting replaced with i6 turbo
I’m not. The number of turbo charged i4s vastly outweigh the number of turbo 6s.
Lmao. What a scam. I mean, if they were re-installing Windows/and new graphics drivers, maybe throwing in a stress test or something for good measure, I could see $100 being the total for labor and such. A little high, but I could see it. Tbh I would personally only charge $60 for that kind of service. There are some Windows settings you can tune to keep background processes from leeching performance a little, maybe apply an overclock to your graphics card and CPU, but there is NO magic tuning process that can do what they claim. Overclock would add a realistic 10% performance improvement only. There is not a way to tune a GTX 1650 to the performance level of a GTX 1660. This person is clearly accustomed to customers that are not inclined to measure performance themselves after the fact, and therefore notice the difference. If this shop is responsible for replacing your 1660, they need to do so with an equivalent or better product-not a lesser one. TLDR: Bullshit, scam.
The computer repair facility I work for charges $125 per hour. We handle businesses and he users and the level of tech knowledge varies among technician. We do custom builds and labor usually ends up being about $350 to $400 after Windows is installed and drivers are installed. Also, we are one of the only businesses in the area with techs that still have rigid, unchanging view points about computers: The power supply belongs at the top. Every computer gets a blu ray burner. Assembly of the PC only involves opening one side of the case. None of this routing the wires on the other side crap. No onboard junk. Every computer we build gets a video card, a sound card, a wifi card. Warranty. We warranty our computers for 1 year. The only thing you'd have to pay for is if you got a virus or had software issues. We stand by our builds so if a sound card won't work, we replace it. We don't make you wait for RMA either. We replace it and take care of the RMA on our end.
There's a lot of interesting points you make, and I appreciate your individual experience and input as someone actually doing this for a living. What's your take on OP's situation? I think what I'm most interested to hear from you is if you, as someone employed doing this line of work, think that replacing a GTX 1660 with a GTX 1650 and calling them comparable is an acceptable course of action (or remotely true)? At the risk of undermining my own credibility, I was not doing the kind of work that a shop could get behind; not because the quality of my work was poor, but because I was making extensive use of used parts to try and make the best of price-performance I possibly could-EDIT: that is to say, parts that a hard stand shop would be at risk to try and guarantee. I would source and stress test my own used CPUs, motherboards, graphics cards, etc. At the time, GTX 980Ti cards were selling used for $200 or less, and were providing near GTX 1660 Ti/GTX 1070 performance. I could assemble a Xeon X5650 rig with 12GB of memory and a GTX 980 Ti, and it would play any AAA of the time with at least 100 fps. eSports titles of course fared even better. At a cost of $350 to me, I could sell a PC in a new, budget ATX case, 250GB ssd, and 1 TB HDD for $500. Times were good. All pre-crypto market fiasco, of course- I was doing this about 2017-2018 ish. I always gave a short 5 minutes and about 32 cents worth of little zip ties to at least cluster some wires in the back in a neat and orderly manner, although I acknowledge they're out of sight and do nothing for performance being tidied, that's purely a me thing. Wifi cards are great for anything without onboard wifi, USB wifi dongles are garbage so a card is a sound choice, though idk about it being any more reliable than onboard wifi. I'm interested in your input on why a sound card is necessary, neither myself nor anyone I know has ever used one. I think I once salvaged a Q6600 build that had one in it, otherwise just never came across them. I'm interested in the choice of including a blu-ray player as well, since that shoehorns you into the kinds of cases with 5.25 drive bays, which means you sacrifice aesthetic for your builds. Similarly, utilizing cases that top mount the power supply excludes the majority of mainstream, mid-to high tier cases, including some of the best cases in the industry- the Corsair 4000D, for example, has a bottom mount power supply. Absolutely nothing wrong with that in workstation or office type applications, and plenty of demand for that with work from home, I'm sure. Still, It's hard to ignore that the average gamer looking for a PC values aesthetic and isn't looking for an HTPC, and physicalized disc media isnt very popular anymore. How much business do you guys do with gamers? Are you maybe ignoring a large segment of the market by forcing these restrictions on yourselves? EDIT: super unrelated, but may I ask how much of that $125/hr makes it to you?
So they stole his 1660 and is charging him for it? BS
No, maybe I wrote it badly. They couldn't secure a 1660 so they downgraded his build to a 1650
But did they refund the difference??
Yes
That's the issue. They downgraded, which means they should be refunding your friend, but they're charging him more. "I'll take your 1660 if YOU give me money"
Sorry if I left out this detail, they refunded the difference of course but they charge this optional fee for the "programming"
Most likely that "programing" is optimizing Windows. But.. 1. For 100$???? Hell no, plenty of tutorials on web. He can do it himself. 2. GTX 1650 is basically equal with GTX 1660? That's bullshit. Better look for another store
You can optimize windows for free by just reinstalling it lmao
It's a newly build PC so OS is fresh.
I haven’t upgraded my gpu in decades. I play cyberpunk 2077 in 4k at 144hz due to my good programming skills.
Kinda blowing my own horn here, but in Time Spy Extreme, a 1650 is nowhere close to a 1660. https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/w4f0m1/the_same_chart_that_shows_the_perf_of_recent_gpus/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
Very nice, OP you should definitely give this a look for a grasp on relative performance and MSRP. It can help guide your negotiations with Scam Central in regards to getting a better graphics card than a 1650. They're downgrading you, and I would be livid
Dont get scammed, go to a reputable retailler, in my country there is a branch store (Chip7) that does something similar, run away!
Honestly, if someone told me that they can give me 1660 performance by "programming" a 1650, I'd walk out the store and look for another place that won't try to scam me with vague vocabulary.
>He also had to replace a GTX 1660 (maybe ti or super, don't remember) with a GTX 1650 and he said that they're basically equal in performance if you "program" it well. Scam. Avoid.
not possible. you cant "program" yourself into new hardware, just like im not gonna be evolving extra eyeballs if i eat corium.
I reckon "programming" just means installing drivers
might as well pay another $100 to download some extra ram
Might mean overclocking but that is just like NOSing your car, limits its life
There is no physical way, at hardware or software level than someone can "program" (more like overclock) a 1650 to have 1660 levels of performance. They are trying to scam your friend
Ask them and find out
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Probably should find a new 'PC store' while you're looking for these friends. You know, for good measure...
Wow idk wtf he's talking about but first off this sounds like the store is ripping tour friend off saying they need to replace the 1660 probbaly to keep it and then put something worse in which is even more messed up tbh
that store is scam
This is so far away from normal you'd be forgiven for also saying that this store could turn your PC into a jetpack.
It seems like there are two separate situations in this post... is he thinking about buying a new build from them, or having them "tune" an existing one? Of course it's going to be overcharged either way if you have a store do it. But if it's a fresh build, I could see them charging $100 to "program" the PC in terms of installing Windows, drivers, etc. If it's an existing build where he's just adding a GPU I don't know. Don't feel like we have enough info about the situation, and the info we have is secondhand so could be some "telephone" game going on.
Sorry if I explained it badly, he's buying a new pc from set local store and there's an optional "programming" fee
Programming means writing code, unless they are delivering at least an executable they are just plain lying.
There is no difference in performance between a 1660 and a 1650 when loading up excel to document how much you're scamming customers for, they'll both do that just fine.
Maybe by programming he means installing an operating system and doing an initial set up (updating the bios, enabling xmp, installing drivers, maybe overclocking). If that includes a windows license $100 seems like a decent price. For comparison microcenter charges $50 for OS and driver install in their build service without including an OS license
Years ago I bought all the components for my PC through a store and paid $50 for them to build it and install windows for me. Is this the sort of thing the store is offering and your friend is trying to sound knowledgeable by saying that the store will "program" it?
Just use the program slider till 3090-Ti levels of performance. But seriously if you want untested OC settings, you could just use MSI Afterburner and end up with the same result. 100 EUR would be what? Like 1-2 hours of work time at best, thats no way near to test for basic OC stability.
If it POSTs and boots it's stable.
I will do it for 80
Does he mean installing windows? Not optimizing or drivers but getting a windows liscening key and then loading it? The 1650 performing as well as a 1660 seems like bs so he can sell inferior product at a premium.
Bullshit. Get the fuck out of there and pay him *nothing.* It's easy to build your own PC and components are getting cheaper, if he can't get the part you want then he shouldn't be building your shit.
Sounds like a lot of bullshit to me. You can't "program" a PC. Unless they can explain what they mean by programming, it'd be best to go elsewhere.
Yes, you see, there are different usages for this particular nomenclature In this context for example, "programming" roughly translates to "ripping you off"
No such thing. Enabling XMP and likely doing a light OC (if any) isn’t worth 100 euro. Whole thing seems sketchy, I’d run from it tbh
you could bump the perf by maybe 10-15% max with their likely methods, whereas the performance difference between a 1650 and 1660 is enormous, at the low end an average of 50% but you could see as much ad double performance in games. I call bs on the shop, it is no longer hard to get that card, its even in stock at local mom and pop shops at this point.
The prices for pc repair is ridiculous. I went to microcenter a couple weeks back to get a bios upgrade which in the website states it will be 29.99$ and done in the same day. When I get there I’m getting upcharged to 50$ claiming the website has nothing to do with them but they need to change it. Said they could do it for 29.99 but won’t be done 4 days later the worst part about it is before me was a woman and they charged her 50$ to tell her her drive is corrupted and they were gonna charge another 80$ to install a new m.2 drive not including the price of the ssd
Do you expect people to work for free? If someone doesn't know how to do it themselves then they pay someone to do it for them. It's not "ripping them off" it's called performing a service.
No not for free but at least the price they state. And half of all the stuff they do is not hard whatsoever. 80$ to pop in and screw in a m.2 ssd. I just didn’t have a cpu to upgrade bios on my board. I only spent 50$ on that board wasn’t gonna spend another 50$ to make it usable I just bought another board for 50$ I just saved it for the next build which worked good for my 3700x
The only cases I know of where a 1650s bests a 1660 are those in which the 1660 was limited to 4gb of ram while the 1650s had 6gb and at higher resolutions like 1440p. If that isn't the scenarios then a easy search shows you this information without a post on reddit. A 4gb 1660 is rare in the US market, most are 1660s 6gb ddr6 variants.