Avacado

It's a good idea. If you are ever in western NC, swing by and borrow my datavac.

30 minutes ago, Sir Beregond said:

Lol, well pointless gen then.

Called it

In before @firedflyone ups everyone.

In

Almost 2 mmH2O on a 60mm thick rad at 1000 RPM, that's impressive. Most fans can't do that at 3000 RPM.

40 minutes ago, Broseph said:

If I remember correctly in the 2023 96-hour event, at least one of the sponsors (EVGA) shipped prizes out directly to the winners, absorbing the shipping cost and logistics of EHW Staff in shipping prizes.  Is it too much of an ask for potential sponsors to do that?  Or if not, I guess I'd rather have a big box of prizes bulk shipped to EHW than to not have a sponsor, if push comes to shove.  Just would be ideal if the vendor did the shipping.

Re: Psychology, I get that too.  I learned about this forum via the F@H Discord community and joined, and it seems like a friendly community with non-existent douches.  There's a few other hardware communities that... feel like teenage fighting and egos (plus the spelling and grammar errors turn me off).  Point is:  EHW does seem like a potential "home forum" for me, as I'm not currently active anywhere on the Internet.  (Also not currently splurging on new desktop builds until the income/life situation gets normalized again).  I do have 2024 plans for a 24U server rack, and I've been on a new pfSense build for 6 months.  Soon will build out multiple XCP-ng servers.  [i]Eventually[/i] (once I can afford the hardware and power bill), I'd like to go nuts on a 4U GPU folding farm beast, so EHW seems like a good community where I'd be accepted (and a place to share homelab/server porn).

I'm rambling.  If push comes to shove as a newbie here, I can do $10, but any more at this time is a bit much for my life situation.  But also only if there's no legal issues with paying for prizes or calling it a raffle, etc.

Instead of a $10 for entry, could it be a $10 if the winner wants to claim their prize?  I'm trying to think of what's fair vs. what would get the most participation and fun factor to attract new people to the EHW community.  Asking a complete outsider to donate perhaps leaves a poor first impression to EHW, but I *do* understand the significant personal expense in shipping out prizes if a sponsor bulk ships a box of prizes.  What's the right balance?

I think 96 hours (4 days) or 120 hours (5 days) are a good sweet spot for annual contest.

Agree with earlier in the year (e.g. February) over spring.  I'm in the Southeast USA currently, and it gets to summer temps pretty fast + summer electricity rates.

Valid points. To me, paying an entry fee or essentially buying a raffle ticket instead of specifically paying money to win said prize seems better. Ultimately what I don't want is our vendors thinking we are profiting off of their "free" merchandise. I honestly can't think of a way to collect funds from participants and not make it seem that way. 

Most of of vendors did in fact ship directly  to the winners and that solved this issue, however some did not. I was not told that Cooler Master was going to do what they did (Shipping all the prizes to me). I will make it a point of clarity when asking next month. 

We also did not anticipate the customs duties either. Being American, it's not something that @damricor I have ever experienced before, so we had no idea. 

I still do not see a clear way to do this without anyone (EHW included) paying out of pocket given how this past one went with prize distribution. I will have a clearer picture next moth as I begin to petition vendors for products as to their ability to ship directly and avoid out of pocket expenses for the site. 

8 minutes ago, iamjanco said:

 

What kind of cable do you need? If the pinouts and any connectors I don't have on hand are available, I might be able to make you one.

I'll DM you the details and can take more pics if you need it. There is no specific manual for the key it's self, but it's in the user manual. Looks to be a 10-1 Pin cable. 

E6989_Rampage_IV_Extreme.pdf

3 minutes ago, iamjanco said:

@AvacadoRepublic of Gamers OCD  key?

Sigh, yea. I bought it for my Rampage 4, but sadly, it's missing the cable required for it to function. 

<$100 New, I couldn't refuse.

3 hours ago, The Pook said:

 

ASRock > K8Upgrade-VM800

WWW.ASROCK.COM

---

Socket 754 for AMD Athlon™ 64 and Sempron processors; VIA K8M800 chipset; For advanced Socket754 64-bit AMD Athlon™ 64 and 32-bit Sempron processor; FSB 800MHz (1.6GT/s); Hyper-Transport...

 

 

 

/motherboard/image/k8upgrade-vm800-l1-5f7a4f1e8377c011816404.jpg

ASRock K8Upgrade-VM800

THERETROWEB.COM

---

ASRock K8Upgrade-VM800 is a motherboard based on the VIA K8M800 chipset. Get specs, BIOS, documentation and more!

 

ASRock made a bunch of weird ones, some had both DDR2 and DDR3 (N68C-GS UCC, P43D1600Twins-1394, and P43D1600Twins) and they had a normie version of ^ with both sockets on a single board (K8 Combo-Z)

 

#MakeASRockGreatAgain

K8M800 754  I have one of those

1 hour ago, bonami2 said:

They all in the leak tab of wccftech. And the other pic from asus don't match that one so am not sure

I know, I know, not blaming you, it's just annoying that everything is a leak now

7 hours ago, bonami2 said:

ASUS ROG Maximus Z790 Formula Motherboard Leaks Out: White, Water-Cooled, & Powerful

WCCFTECH.COM

---

ASUS's high-end ROG Maximus Z790 Formula motherboard has leaked and comes with a water-cooled design in a beautiful white-colored exterior.

 

Leak, leak, leak. How is EVERY piece of tech news a leak now? Cool board though. Thats a hard pass for me.

1 hour ago, neurotix said:

Has anyone suggested having prizes from our store maybe paid for by damric or myself alongside the sponsors prizes, or would that create the same negative situation with the sponsors?

I'm not opposed to this, but I would have to bring it up with the organizing staff first. If they did decide to allow that, it would be something that we would want to have in hand before announcing it as a prize. Last thing we would want is to try and coordinate a prize donated by a member after the compo ended. But I personally thank you for considering it.

28 minutes ago, neurotix said:

 

Here's an idea. Why not do like, a year of Premium Gold on the forums and have it available for three people through random drawing? Maybe also do 1x Premium Platinum too? That should probably be free, right?

Bronze might not be a horrible idea, but Platinum is a lifetime upgraded membership. For every "free" membership that we distribute, we are taking away the potential revenue from the site. You would have to ask @ENTERPRISEif that kind of prize is something he would like to do. 

42 minutes ago, CoolGTX said:

Earlier is better in North America, when it is coldest.  However I am not sure how many participants are in other parts of the world, in their warm season.

 

It all depends of your target market & the goal(s) of running the contest, besides a boost to your team's overall Folding standing

 

Prizes, shipping expenses & "Government fees" for cross border shipments ......  would calling it a "Gift" & not a "Prize" make any difference?

 

Shipping in general has gotten way more expensive over the last few years

 

A couple of other ideas, besides what has already been suggested "group funding"

 

 

1) you could limit the award of (some/most) prizes, to avoid cross border shipments & those additional fees ?

 

2) Gift cards instead of items? Though I have no idea if gift cards incur, cross border fees

 

3) Winner is responsible for shipping & government fees ?

 

Last years contest was full of great prizes, however maybe more "ExtremeHW swag" & less new products could still be a great way to motivate participation? 

 

So we learned quite a few things after this years tournament. Luckily most of the participants live in pretty similar lines of latitude and fall under similar seasons (fall/winter). How a vendor labels the item is a HUGE part of how fee's are assessed before delivery and we can only "suggest" they be labeled as a gift. If the shipping agent for whatever vendor fails to do so, we end up liable for those fee's. The second part of that is "Declared Value", a few places have dollar amounts that must be kept below or fee's/taxes are assessed.

1- We tried doing that in small part last year, limiting Cooler Master prizes to USA only because they bulk shipped the items to me, which I then had to distribute out of pocket to all the winners. I dislike holding an event where prizes have to be limited to region based on cost, this is why we are asking how people feel with a $10 entry fee.

2- Tech manufacturers do not issue gift cards that I am aware of. They would also need a proprietary online store to accomplish this. I can reach out to some vendors over the next month and inquire about this as it's actually a good idea. 

3- If we do this, it is no longer a "Gift/prize". They should not have to be paid for by the winner. Last year we had Canadian customs asking for higher duty fee's than most of the items were actually worth.

4- Extreme swag is not manufactured by us and still has an associated cost. We wanted a way to give our members gifts for participating in activities that did not incur a cost to members or EHW in any way. That was at least the plan.....

29 minutes ago, damric said:

Yeah the seller played dumb like he didn't know the difference but agreed to partial refund. I powered this card up today. Voltage caps at like 1130 or something weak and the clock speed barely made it over 1000MHz so blah.

 

@Bastiaan_NL @Avacado you guys hard modding these?

I did some vBIOS modding to increase the voltage limit and I haven't decided if it's worth hard modding yet. Basstian will probably mod all 5 of his

40 minutes ago, iamjanco said:

Ordered it with the Premium Warranty:

 

 

To replace the 34.18 currently on my desk:

 

 

Still waiting to hear back from Dell Support about the 10% Military Discount they haven't given me yet.

 

 

I'm jelly. Now I have to buy one because you bought one...

32 minutes ago, CassieDragon said:

Fled OCN like everyone else because it's pretty dead. Well that and my display name was gendered and I figured out I'm a trans lesbian. These days I do nutty stuff like OCing ram by 50%, modding the snot out of my gear to make it run faster, and snuggling my girlfriends.

Most of my hardware is bodged together one way or another, ex: mobo on Wrath is using a laptop CPU heatsink for the chipset because the fan annoyed me.

I'll let you and our resident gamer girl @Fluxmavenfight to the death for the title. 

15 minutes ago, CassieDragon said:

Banned because I was left unattended with a soldering iron.

Welcome to the forum = BAN!

54 minutes ago, Fluxmaven said:

 

Back in the day I was interested in the Fury X and to see how HBM memory would work out but I did what most people did and bought the 980ti instead 

 

Got this for a good deal because it just has the block, no stock cooler (fine by me since I watercool everything anyway). Also pictured is a G3258 that I picked up in a lot of CPUs. I actually owned a pair of G3258s back in the day and had a bit of fun with them. Now that I'm more into HWBOT I wanted to play with one again for some points. 

Linky poo is broken homeslice

4 hours ago, damric said:

Yeah I know a lot of people are like "pay to play, what?"

 

If this was suggested last year I probably would have been in the HELL NO camp, myself.

 

I knew there could be incidental expenses but they were much more than what I estimated. If you are curious you can pm me but I won't discuss the exact details here.

 

So $10 entry ticket seems like the most reasonable way to do this, least amount of headache for everyone involved. I would envision that it is in the form of a donation to the site that @ENTERPRISE would keep safe. Myself and the other staff would get reimbursed after completion, and any remaining leftover funds would be donated to running this site.

 

But out of curiosity, in the interest of really fundraising for the site, what if we set the entry fee to $20? That would actually be a very effective annual fundraiser. Just a thought, and I wouldn't even think of raising it higher than that.

I agree with Flux on this one, I think $10 is the right amount. $20 is a stretch

I like the February idea, should help with temps. I think I like @Monsterkater's idea of 5 days. I think that a $10 entry free to be eligible for prizes is also more than fair. 

42 minutes ago, Monsterkater said:

As an addition to 1) I was thinking about maybe getting one volunteer per participant's nation, as kind of a one-person distribution center. Seeing that domestic shipping usually is a lot less hassle than sending stuff internationally, I just thought it might be easier to pack one big box per nation and have the prizes be then distributed to the winners via national shipping. Depending on how shipping rates compare nationally vs internationally this might even be cheaper, but I didn't do the maths on that.

Love most of your ideas, the one above is difficult for three reasons. 

1. We almost always have the vendor's directly ship the prizes to the winners (If an option), which should eliminate the need for middle men.

2. If we keep it a "random draw", there is no way to know which prizes will go where. This makes it hard if not all winners of a certain vendor are in the same country.  

3. That would be many points of coordination and EHW does not want to make non-staff members liable for gifts if anything should happen to them.

You wouldn't have happened to update your MOBO bios recently have you?

6 hours ago, Fluxmaven said:

 

@neurotix coming for you bud