Fluxmaven

I'm still young and dumb so burnouts > maximizing tire life

Separate summer and winter tire setups will always be better for both scenarios than running "all seasons". The Falken RT615K+ I have on the Miata have that same low temp warning so I have a set of snow tires on the stock wheels for the colder months even though I rarely drive the car in actual snow. As fun as it is, I just hate having to wash the salt off immediately. Unfortunately the spare wheels with snow tires I had for the wagon wont fit over the brakes on the moostang. I have Pilot Sport All Season 4's on the stock wheels. Once those wear down, I'll put a set of Blizzaks on and get a separate set of wheels with summer tires to run the rest of the time. Obviously having multiple sets of wheels is a lot more cumbersome if you don't have a garage. With a wall mount rack and some tire totes, they are pretty unobtrusive though. I have a couple sets hanging over the spot where we park the push mower. I'm intentionally not washing the E30 before I sell it so it can be a "barn find"

Imagine paying money for discord messages just go get a bunch of my drunk ramblings and pictures of elephants

I will give credit where it's due. EK is very good at a few things. Marketing/branding They actually advertise They sponsor a lot of builds/content nice packaging They have staff on popular forums to answer questions Online configurator Very noob friendly suggests things based on desired use case, but also offers an "expert mode" to override and manually select things Quick launch following new GPUs + wide compatibility They obviously work with manufactures to get samples ahead of release to have block on the market sooner They tend to offer designs for all the common AIB models A one brand solution They offer everything from blocks to rads to tubing so you can stick to a single brand Unfortunately they aren't the best when it comes to making quality products or standing behind them. I understand that by being a larger company dealing with a larger volume of product, that you will have more failures. And people speak louder about issues than good experiences. The problem is the horror stories about dealing with their customer support. If they would take pride in their products and just warranty things with no hassle, that would really help their brand image. Nobody gets everything right. To get the best possible loop, you'd end up piecing something together from multiple bands. EK offered an OK option for every part if you just wanted to go to one vendor. Corsair now offers a very similar experience and they did it quickly by outsourcing from well regarded brands to do so. Their fittings are Bitspower, the rads are HardwareLabs (L-series so a bit lower performance than GTS and GTX equivalents). Their coolant was a Mayhems blend not sure if the newer version still is... I've been into watercooling for quite a while and I have used just about every brand from Danger Den to Optimus. I have plenty of EK products and I have experienced a lot of their common issues. Outside of the EK-Pro lineup, I wouldn't buy any of their new stuff.

Lightweight low power cars don't eat through tires very fast unless you are actually tracking the car. This past season I finally came close to killing the RT615K+ on the Miata. I'll find a nice parking lot to drift in and finish them off this summer. I want to get different wheels on the Mustang, but I have a pretty fresh set of Pilot Sports on the stock wheels that I'd like to get some more use out of before I go spend a fortune on a staggered setup.

I'm still in but just the tip this time... One of the two air handlers is out in the house and we're trying to not stress the other unit until we can get it repaired.

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.