Fluxmaven

I bought an A770 at launch. Every time I put it on the bench it's improved a bunch with driver updates. I was planning on finally using it regularly in the streaming rig, but they still haven't fixed the high idle power usage. I replaced it with a 4060 and it's better in every way. Uses less than half the power under load, sips at idle, and it can actually run Folding@home. I really want the Arc cards to do well as we could really use a strong 3rd option to shake up the market. Outside of AV1 transcoding, I don't really have any use for the current Arc lineup. Hopefully Battlemage brings us a decent bump in performance.

One of the things that's stopped my from buying a 42" is what to do with my 48" CX that I'm using now. I already have a 75" in the living room and a 49" in the bedroom. I don't really want strangers from marketplace coming to the house and no longer have a vehicle it will fit in to meet elsewhere lol. I also hate 32:9 ultrawides for everything other than the racing sim.

Looking pretty promising. My main rig is still getting along fine with the 5900X but I'll wait till the X3D stuff comes out to think about upgrading. It'll be between a 9900X or a 9800X3D depending on how the real world benchmarks look once both are out. Or I'll get swayed by some crazy Microcenter deal and end up with both

in fluxmaven

IDK if we'll ever see actual feature parity between AMD and Nvidia. We're at the point where AMD does all the same stuff albeit a gen behind. And that's fine for most people. Sure it's fun to crank the settings in Cyberpunk and go stare at some neon sign reflections in a puddle of water, but at some point you just want to play through your backlog of games. I DO have mostly nvidia cards and I still don't bother with ray tracing. If it weren't for the lackluster Folding@home performance and higher power draw, I'd buy more AMD cards. The GRE will drop to $500 before Ngreedia ever drops the price of the 4070 Super. As it sits, I think it's an OK option for a lot of people.

Anyone that can't adapt to non-standard layouts has soft hands.

I just bought a set of this RAM. I guess only the first edition comes with the optional heatsinks and screwdriver. They sell the heatsinks separately for $30 but only have grey and white. I bought a back memory kit so I'm undecided on if I'll get the grey heatsinks for them. Kind of disappointing that they don't just throw them in on such expensive RAM kits. On the bright side, the 7200 kit worked right out the box on AM5 with a newer BIOS. At some point I'll set aside a weekend to go insane doing RAM tuning and see if this kit can do 8000+ and compare it to my 32GB A-die kit.

Custom loops have a terrible return on investment if you just consider the performance you gain vs the money you spend. You would 100% be better off with that 420 AIO and call it a day. You'll get 90% of the performance of going custom with none of the work of piecing things together and it will be much cheaper. As a point of reference... My old bedroom rig had a delidded 10850K + 2080 on a MORA and it maintained single digit water to air deltas while being virtually silent. Now that 10850K is in a CPU only loop with a direct die block on an external 240mm rad and still performs pretty good. Custom watercooling is a pretty niche hobby, but I personally really enjoy it (hence the 7 custom loops in the house lol). Buying quality components is expensive, but outside consumables like tubing and fluids, most of the parts can be reused for years. I have plenty of fittings and pumps that are a decade old and still in use. I'm usually the guy telling everyone to run a custom loop, but for your goals, I wouldn't say it's probably worth it unless you are interested in doing it for the fun of it. The gains from air/AIO to custom water are much less than the gains from ambient to extreme cooling. Unless you want to delid and run a direct die block.

Since the magical internet money has been up lately and Newegg takes bitpay, I have been buying some random stuff. I'd have rather just had the $7 off my $250 RAM kit, but sure throw in a microSD card I don't need instead 3x 10TB drives for $70 a pop seemed like a good deal to add a storage pool in my backup NAS. Been wanting to upgrade the old 1000w G2 on the test bench. The white cables should make it more obvious when I've got things on the verge of bursting into flames.

It probably seems like I'm sandbagging every time, but I do typically have something going on that prevents me from having everything online at the start. Then the weekend rolls around and I get more stuff fired up. If I could afford to add another circuit or two and a split unit in the office, I could fold a lot more. I have several other modern cards that didn't get fired up due to heat.

@Avacado Surprised I slipped past you there at the end. Although, I know you like to pause folding on the ole 4090 off to watch your "adult films".

We are at the "close enough" to the finish that I'm just gonna hit finish on most of the rigs. It's a bit warmer today and I'd like to have it not be 82f in the office

Half the stuff is still folding from last month. UPS battery in main rig just died so it may not be online if I don't have a spare in stock but I'll have something folding regardless.

Sorry to quote your post from a few months ago but you have a lot of cool stuff in this photo so I had to dig into it a bit. Looks like you have several of the Inked and Screened patent prints framed on the wall. Love those. Audio gear is an interesting lineup. Is that a Schiit Jotunheim? Surprised to see something like that paired with ATH-M50s. Can't tell if that Focusrite is a 2i2 or 2i4 from what can be seen but those are a solid interface either way.