Sir Beregond

My bad!

Time for you to go raid the LN2 stash across the street. I think @Avacado and @Fluxmaven will back me up on this one.

I like how the box for that first card says it is designed for extreme graphics vs say regular graphics.

Alright. Ya'll want whiskey, tequila, something else?

I've got basically nothing on this year's list.

Thought the refresh was still getting called 14th gen. I could be wrong. The refresh is what I mean.

Here's my mug with a mug.

Motherboard are just in a weird spot these days. Feature wise, the tiering makes no sense anymore. Stuff you used to get on $150 motherboards are now $600 motherboards. As for ASUS. I know they've been in some heavily publicized drama recently, but as far as I am concerned that kinda crap happens with all the big brands whether ASUS, MSI, or Gigabyte every so often. Doesn't feel like anything new to me. As for your own experiences, that's different and I totally understand that. Personally I had a slew of really bad experiences with both MSI and Gigabyte boards around 2007 and 2008 and have run exclusively ASUS boards ever since. Aside from one P55 boards that had some oddities with Crossfire, honestly I've had rock solid performance out of them. And this is ranging from P45, P55, X58, Z97, H97, X570 boards from ASUS. I agree. Honestly as a gaming rig I just went with Gen 3 drives. Gen 4 drives are cheaper now, but I didn't see a point in any tests I saw and you likely won't until Direct Storage really becomes mainstream.

This one was actually good. Its got the Bethesda engine jank (plays like FO3 and Oblivion), however the developers were Obsidian, not Bethesda. It's a good game.

Isn't 14th gen staying on Z790?

They have definitely gotten complacent with certain markets, but I think it's generally the markets where there's currently no competition like HEDT. Have we really gotten any new Threadrippers since Zen 2 for the mass market? Gaming graphics is largely a marketing and pricing problem. I think they've otherwise been competitive performance wise, but definitely playing catchup feature wise and they aren't building good marketing or launch prices around that. That's why RDNA3 kinda flopped initially. I think recent market corrections on the 7900 XT have helped that a lot. Its a great card. It's not a $900 card as much as the 4080 isn't a $1200 card. Ryzen remains very competitive with Intel for the general market. At this stage I'd only go Intel again for the overclocking on a test bench as overclocking kinda sucks on Ryzen. But again that's OC enthusiast versus general gaming or otherwise market. They are doing well there and I certainly like the lower power of a Zen 3/Zen 4 part vs 12th/13th gen Intel.

Going to try to get to this tonight and check out the MSI Cyclone. Been crazy busy all week. What version of Afterburner were you guys using for yours?

My annoyance here is that when you google something, a lot of the results are Reddit threads where someone was asking the same question, or maybe had the same weird scenario you did. Go to click on it and bam, everything is on blackout. Very annoying. I was never a serious Reddit user, though I liked perusing some subreddits and that included using the Reddit is Fun app on my phone. Honestly will probably just use it a lot less and not really care.

Odd config. For what 3700X's go for these days you could easily have done a comparable Zen 3 part I reckon and maybe better than an A520. EDIT: But I don't know what you got your parts for so I could be wrong. I had the wrong price for the 3700X for one. Thought it was $200ish but saw it was more like $110.

I will never understand the point of a $4500 gaming laptop. It's not as powerful as a $4500 desktop. A laptop 4090 is more like a desktop 4080 so again price is dumb, and like you said its really not easy to get every box ticked without making compromises. If you want ultra portable, big gaming laptop is kinda not it, but if you still want to game, then you are looking at something to put on a desk and not so much your lap.

Refurb of one of these:

I'll skip all these baby steps. Let me know when we have the Holodeck from Star Trek. In the meantime I have no interest in wearing a big bulky headset to do my computing. For the Lolz:

Place is full of AI bots and reddit tier members anymore.

Thanks for the tips. I'm just going to be running this on my old 4790k system as I don't have a test bench at the moment or any other modern platforms that aren't locked down under hard tubing in a daily rig right now. Good advice. I followed the rules, but some of my subs disappeared in the last competition I participated in (and after it ended) and that was disappointing.

Sounding like Zen 5 is keeping with 8-core CCX's. Was hoping to see that go up so a 12 or 16 core product didn't have to cross the Infinity Fabric to communicate with each other, but maybe I'll just wait and see what Zen 6 brings.

Nice, really need to pickup that stuff for mine. So you have two screens? What do each show?

So I was looking at the rules, is there a wallpaper I am supposed to use as I can't find it?

Looked fairly clean with the cooler on. I decided to repaste it last night and underneath it sure had a lot of dust gunk. Still need to re-set up my old PC to act as the test bench - i.e. Install a new drive and install W10 on it. Then I guess I need to figure out the driver situation.