u/keeppoise

Api bills started getting stupid the past few months, like genuinely looking at my monthly spend and wondering if i am doing something wrong. Decided to run my own tests on chinese models instead of trusting whatever chart someone posts on twitter that week.

Deepseek, qwen, kimi went up against my normal claude/gemini/gpt rotation. Glm-5.3 got added this week when i finally got around to the new release so its early days for that one.

The spend gap is wild. Quality gap exists of course but its not anywhere near what the pricing makes it look, especially on iterative stuff where i am running the same task 5 times to get it right.

Closed models still win on hard reasoning most of the time. Once a prompt gets complicated with a bunch of conditions stacked deepseek and the older chinese ones start fumbling somewhere. Glm-5.3 actually held up better than i expected, felt closer to opus on a few of my tests but i will need more time before i say anything strong.

Claude and gpt still get my real work. Iteration heavy stuff just makes more sense on the lighter side because i am not burning premium tokens on a model to write the same function 4 different ways.

Would rather read other peoples actual usage notes than argue about charts at this point.

I am in search for the perfect balance between portability and screen quality with my travel gaming set up. My current loadout includes the Steam Deck, a compact dock, a controller, and a high-capacity power bank. I've been using it to clear out my backlog of games, running through titles like Hades, alongside heavier 3D titles like Cyberpunk 2077.

I kept seeing YouTube reviews hyping up portable OLED displays for handhelds, some of them seemed a bit absurd for that kinda cost (at least for me). I focus on what is more within my budget with a 16-inch OLED panel with a 3K (2880x1800) resolution and a 120Hz refresh rate.

The visual jump from the Deck's built-in LCD of course is undeniably better. The color displays, such as contrasts and the blackest of black make the particle effects and shadows look fantastic.

There is one thing that most reviewers don’t mention though, it is that the battery drain is aggressive. Pushing a 3K OLED screen from a handheld console really drains the battery and the Deck runs a bit hotter as it tries to output the signal while powering the display.

What I did to fix this is to run a screen using a dock with substantial power pass-through. Use 65W+ charger plugged directly into the dock so the monitor has ample supply. As a docked, plugged-in setup, the OLED works great. This set up might not work if you are only planning to play on the plane with no actual power supply.

What do you think? Is the visual upgrade worth being tied to a wall outlet for you guys?