They’re all pretty good. Even the Intel cards are pretty good now. I guess, what’s most important to you? If you want maximum compatibility with games, go for Nvidia. If you want better price to performance, go with AMD or Intel. Although, if I were you, I’d wait until AMD and Intel’s next gen. Both are coming (relatively) soon (probably before the end of the year), and will probably be a lot better than what’s out now.
One caveat, if you use or plan to use Linux, Nvidia can present some difficulties, so avoid them.
Actually two caveats, if you plan to use hardware encoding, like you’ll be streaming on Twitch while you play games, avoid AMD. Their hardware encoding is pretty trash. Both Nvidia and Intel are much better.
My current lineup (I know I have a lot of machines, but my wife and I both play games, and I do AI workloads as well):
RTX 3090 (mostly for AI)
Radeon RX 6700 XT (great card)
Arc A380 (for transcoding, but I’ve gamed on it, and it’s great)
Radeon RX 6600 (my main card, just because it’s in my living room HTPC, running ChimeraOS)
I’ve been a web and network engineer for 15 years, and I run a VPN on my own production cluster, but sure man, I don’t understand VPNs.
Again, you do not understand how trackers work. Trackers don’t use your IP address. And unless Google changed it since I worked there, I can guarantee that.
Prove to me that you block etags, cookies, localStorage, and service workers. Prove to me that every request you make spoofs a new user agent string. Prove to me that when you run JS, it obfuscates your screen dimensions and hardware availability. Prove to me that it obfuscates your font list and the available vendor prefixes. Prove to me that your browser adds artificial jitter to your real time clock, cause you can be tracked through that. Hell, you can be tracked through your latency, so prove to me you add random latency to your fetch calls. Prove to me you block media queries, because you can be tracked through CSS.
You are paranoid, and you don’t even understand what to be paranoid about.
Not really. Unless you’re visiting unencrypted websites. If you’re using HTTPS and DNS over HTTPS, your ISP can only see what IP address you’re connecting to, not the traffic.
A VPN doesn’t protect you the way OP thinks it does. It just hides your IP address from the websites you visit. Of course, now instead of one website seeing that you visited it, one organization can see everything you visit.
Basically it just moves your trust from your ISP to your VPN provider. So yeah, if you don’t need that, and you don’t need to get around geo blocks, you don’t need a VPN.
So just make a snapshot, and every time you want a new IP, create a new VM from the snapshot. Or if there’s an option in your cloud provider, just request a new IP.
Whenever you connect to a VPN, you use the same IP address the whole session. You have to reconnect to a different node whenever you want a new IP.
But I feel like you’re just being contrarian here. Your objections aren’t rooted in any sort of actual concern over privacy, and I don’t think you really understand the systems you’re using. In other words, you’re just being paranoid.
Then we agree that’s the only advantage. So your original reply is wrong. A cloud VM running self hosted VPN protects you exactly as much as a commercial VPN with regard to the website you’re connecting to.
What personal information do you think the VPN is blocking? Like, exactly. Precisely what information do you believe the VPN prevents a website from seeing about you?
I understand the difference between first and third party cookies. You said you were trying to prevent the website from tracking you. A website’s cookie for its own domain is first party. If you block that cookie, it’s harder for them to track you, and also you can’t log in.
Your IP address is not very useful for tracking you.
Residential IP addresses change often.
They’re usually shared by a family or organization through NAT.
You will often have different IP addresses throughout the day as you switch between WiFi and cell data.
Your different devices may or may not share an IP address.
The major ad trackers use cookies and etags to track you. They don’t use your IP address.
You think that using a VPN is protecting you from the website you’re connecting to logging that traffic?
No. The website sees the traffic. The only thing they don’t see is your home IP address. That’s not even a useful piece of information for tracking someone. Home IP addresses are usually dynamic.
Websites track you through cookies and etags, and VPNs do not block those. If they did, you wouldn’t be able to log into any websites, and you would always be redownloading JS, CSS, and fonts you’ve already downloaded.
(Copied for convenience, since your comment is duplicated.)
You think that using a VPN is protecting you from the website you’re connecting to logging that traffic?
No. The website sees the traffic. The only thing they don’t see is your home IP address. That’s not even a useful piece of information for tracking someone. Home IP addresses are usually dynamic.
Websites track you through cookies and etags, and VPNs do not block those. If they did, you wouldn’t be able to log into any websites, and you would always be redownloading JS, CSS, and fonts you’ve already downloaded.
If you’re trusting any other VPN provider, then you’re already willing to trust someone. What’s the difference between trusting Proton and trusting Digital Ocean?
If you’re only visiting HTTPS sites then your ISP already can’t snoop your traffic. A VPN gives you very little added privacy.
No matter what you use, you’re really only protecting yourself from your own ISP.
Depends what you’re using a VPN for. If you’re using it for privacy, yeah, it wouldn’t help. If you’re using it for geo locked content, it works great. Or for privacy from specifically your ISP.