Snakecharmed

I should have taken a picture like last time. Looks like it's been a little over a year since I went from 12 to 14 TB, but I upgraded my hard drive from a 14 TB Seagate BarraCuda Pro to an 18 TB Seagate IronWolf Pro that I got for $160 factory recertified and then applied a $10 coupon to bring it down to $150. I do a fair amount of photo/video editing and usually keep the raw source files because I can. I also keep the old drive as a physical backup dating back to the drive swap date and have it around until I buy the next drive. I secure erase and sell off any older drives, so I have a 10 TB and a 12 TB drive that I'll be selling off soon. This is my first IronWolf Pro drive and it's surprisingly quiet. I was worried about it approaching Seagate Exos or HGST Ultrastar noise levels, but it's perfectly acceptable at arm's length away from my ear, no louder than the BarraCuda Pro at idle, and even quieter at seek. I also needed to buy a new USB-SATA dock because my old dock apparently maxes out at 16 TB because it would not read the new 18 TB drive at all. With the new dock, I somehow managed to not fully seat the USB 3.0 cable into the port on the motherboard back panel, so the entire file copy was done over USB 2.0 fallback. What should have been an approximately 11-12 hour operation took 70 hours. This is how the new drive performs over SATA. USB 3.0 via the dock measured similarly after I properly reseated the cable. It maxed out at 40 MB/s sequential with the loose cable.

How you feel about each artist's situation versus their body of work is entirely up to you. I've never truly had to deal with this because I don't especially care for any of the acts that have been mentioned in this thread. In some cases, I dislike some of the artists you mentioned like Diddy and Cosby for their role in their respective industry and never cared for their artistic work in the first place. However, a lot of people don't care about this seeing as how Chris Brown's fan base didn't crater after what he did to Rihanna. I have only one Michael Jackson song in my playlist of nearly 4000 songs, and I hardly ever hear it anymore because the odds are against it being played, and it's nowhere close to one of my favorites anyway. I have no desire to play it on repeat or otherwise feature it more prominently than it is. That leads me to the next point. There are too many artists and acts out there to explore, so unless one of them has performed an all-time favorite song or something like that, they're naturally going to fall out of favor over time anyway. If bad news about them comes out later, I'll be less inclined to revisit the old catalog, but I'll have already moved on to a new artist who conveniently doesn't have that baggage and we can either start the cycle all over again, or more likely not, because most people aren't garbage humans like Diddy, Cosby, or Ian Watkins. There are only two celebrities I can think of where this internal dilemma ever remotely crossed my mind. The first was Aziz Ansari, but even then, I wasn't a massive fan of his, and nonetheless, the scrutiny he faced was the Weekly World News of the #MeToo movement, written by a total hack of a reporter with no journalistic integrity. Aziz was an awkward date, not a Louis CK, and nowhere in the same universe as a Harvey Weinstein. The second is Will Smith. Before the slap though, he did enough other crap over the years to make me lose respect for him. While I don't actively seek old episodes of Fresh Prince, there are some iconic moments from that show that don't go away even though I think he's been a spineless tool in the years after The Pursuit of Happyness and I Am Legend. How often do I go out of my way to re-watch old TV shows and movies though? Practically never, so it's a moot point. There's too much media out there to roll with any particular entertainer for life. I've dropped bands for lesser, non-felonious reasons, and each time I ended up discovering something I enjoy more that I probably wouldn't have found otherwise because there's a finite amount of time in life to enjoy a virtually infinite catalog of entertainment. It doesn't have to be an active endeavor to seek out a replacement for your listening or watching time either. It just happens.

Thanks for everything you've done to build the EHW community, E. I appreciate the time and dedication you've put in to making this place what it is, and wish you the best going forward.

Nobody really cares about this CPU anymore, but I found this both funny and sad. The new 7600X3D at $300 performs better in games than the $380 7900X3D. The 7900X3D was a compromise chip that leaves both the gaming and productivity camps underwhelmed, all for more money than either a 7600X3D or a 7900X. AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D Beats Ryzen 7 9700X "Zen 5" at Gaming WWW.TECHPOWERUP.COM With German retailer Mindfactory.de listing the Ryzen 5 7600X3D, European hardware reviewers are beginning to put the chip through its... Ryzen 5 7600X3D im Test: AMD hat einen neuen Effizienzmeister! WWW.PCGAMESHARDWARE.DE PCGH hat den AMD Ryzen 5 7600X3D getestet. Was der kleine Bruder des 7800X3D leistet und wie effizient die CPU dabei ist, hat uns sehr...

I've read rumors that the 9000 X3D chips may bring something different to the table this generation. I'm not sure what that would be, but the obvious candidates would be more, faster, or dual-CCD 3D cache. They're in a situation where they pretty much have to bring something different to the table or else this generation really is the AMD Raptor Lake refresh.

Since it doesn't outperform the Phantom Spirit 120 SE, it's kind of a lame duck. Perhaps the 140mm fan can push a little more air over the VRMs, but it doesn't really do anything else better and it has a bigger footprint. I ditched the stock Thermalright fans on my Peerless Assassin 120 SE from day zero. It's all about using their heatsink. Even with a pair of premium fans, you'll make out way cheaper than a Noctua NH-D15 G2 and land somewhere between a stock Thermalright and an NH-D15 in noise and cooling performance.

Someone made a comment buried in the depths of the video comments that an AMD rep said on a podcast that these 24H2 kernel updates would be coming to Windows 10 as well. I didn't check the podcast to verify it myself. However, Windows 10 is faster than Windows 11 for gaming right now. HUB tested this three weeks ago. None of this does anything to help Zen 5 on its own though. Zen 4 gets a similarly significant boost. Their performance in Windows 11 24H2 might even finally catch up to 10 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 now.

Blokada 5 on Android, although I may switch to sideloading the AdGuard APK at some point. ReVanced for YouTube and whatever other apps it supports if I ever install those in the future. I don't believe in relying on apps available in the Play Store to deal with ad blocking. That's the last place I would go to find ad blocking solutions, and mobile web versions of popular apps are generally decontented.

The problem is that the damage is already done. This is why rushed product releases do more harm than good. AMD No Man's Skyed themselves. Also, if the Moore's Law is Dead leak is true that the Zen 2 team that got put in charge of Zen 5 worked off of their old codebase rather than Zen 4's, there are some bigger idiots in that company than I thought.

I think the 5950X and 7950X comparison is a total system comparison which favors the 7950X disproportionately, but even when thinking of other generational changes within the same platform such as Zen 2 to Zen 3, or even Zen to Zen+, they all represent a bigger uplift than Zen 4 to Zen 5. As it is now, Zen 5 is as meaningful in performance as the Raptor Lake refresh. That's not where AMD needs to be right now considering they still haven't overtaken the Intel 14th gen counterparts in all workloads with Zen 5. Intel handed this generation to AMD on a silver platter with their operational negligence and perhaps unsurprisingly, AMD completely fumbled it. I've seen speculation that something is very wrong with scheduling in Windows because Zen 5 does seem to be consistently stronger than Zen 4 by double-digit percentages in Linux.

9950X reviews are out today. One thing of note that I am very displeased with is the stupid requirement for Microsoft Game Bar on the 9950X and 9900X. Why the heck is core parking for gaming necessary with this CPU when it wasn't with the 7950X and 7900X? I have IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021 partly because I don't want that extra garbage in my Windows installation. It can stay out. Looks like the only upgrade path for me on AM5 if I don't want to keep yelling at a cloud is a used 7950X. The 7800X3D isn't viable because I haven't had the time to play a real game in the last year and a half that I've had this AM5 build, but I have done a fair amount of production work. And from Hardware Unboxed, to illustrate what a pathetic generational uplift the 9950X is over the 7950X, this is a reminder of what the 7950X accomplished over the 5950X:

I should clarify that I don't mean a willful or intentional laziness, but more that this isn't a choice that most users care to spend time and energy on these days. As consumers, we chose this some time ago and allowed unchecked momentum to build with the new leader out of convenience. Search isn't a choice anymore like AltaVista, Yahoo, Lycos, HotBot, Excite, or Ask Jeeves was. Google seized on the opportunity of being better than the competition at the time and they built an entire ecosystem around the search engine. Once that was established, despite whatever missteps they made with peripheral projects like Google+, they could roll up everything into the search: Google Reviews, Maps, News, Calculator, and scraping data to starve content creation platforms except for Reddit. In turn, they helped bury or squeeze out Kudzu, Yelp, MapQuest, and others, and now it's a feedback loop whether it's search or consumer services. People use Google because the competition is weak, but Google also leverages their platform to weaken their competitors. Yahoo's the only platform that has come remotely close to assembling an ecosystem like Google, but what's left of it today is paltry and it's really on the strength of only a couple of assets that aren't as tightly integrated: Sports (including fantasy sports) and Finance. The problem is their search is an afterthought. Also, their timing was never right to have made anything out of the IoT era. You could argue that they've had awful or at least underqualified leadership between Jerry Yang and Jim Lanzone. The brand only has strength in Japan, and that's because it's a separate business entity. Everything else that has any kind of minor mindshare in the search engine space today is a niche or operating in an adversarial market: DuckDuckGo (privacy), Bing (propped up by Microsoft/Edge), Yandex (RU), Baidu (CN).

There are a number of similarities in a rotten company culture not focused on product and engineering between Boeing and Intel. It's just that Intel's missteps don't come with a death toll and they haven't undergone a serious divestment of their business units yet. Their hubris led them to litigate and market their way to the top, but they don't know how to act when they get punched in the face. Breaking the Spell: Social Experiment - Intel WWW.GAMEREACTOR.EU Breaking the Spell: Social Experiment - Intel video https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/content-details/794505/core-truths-how-the-latest-technology-is-not-always-what-it-seems.html

I'm still trying to get over what an utterly stupid codename "Beast Lake" is.

By that, I think they mean most users are exceedingly lazy and trust the household brand name by default, even when said brand name recommends glue as a pizza topping and rocks as part of a balanced diet because they scrape Reddit and the Onion for data to keep users on their search results page. Google AI search tells users to glue pizza and eat rocks WWW.BBC.COM Google has defended the answers given by AI Overview, describing them as "isolated examples". Google search is very versatile, but it isn't so unbelievably good at search more than it ensures that other search engines will never gain the traction to compete. I can still put together search strings in Google that yield useless results because the subject matter is too esoteric and they can't rely on scraping subreddits for everything. The devious and harmful part of what they do is finding ways to keep users on their search results pages regardless of the search query, even at the expense of taking away traffic from the actual content creators.

Going back in time to the aughts, there was always a forum involved in terms of my active participation. I went from PCPer when I had my Athlon XP-M build to OCN when I had the Sandy Bridge build, and then of course here after the VS BS. For industry news, AnandTech and Tom's Hardware were the OG news sites for me. There were also a few others I kept in the periphery when it came to hardware reviews, like Guru3D and TechPowerUp. I also browsed the OCN news section before the VS XenForo fiasco. Nowadays it's VideoCardz and Tom's when I care to look up the news, but usually, GamersNexus news recap videos serve as my entry point in my YouTube subscriptions, which I then use to branch off to Hardware Unboxed, der8auer, and JayzTwoCents. I can't watch LTT anymore after Linus's antics and LMG's various acts of bad business buffoonery in recent years. GN also led me to Louis Rossmann, whose advocacy for right-to-repair and right-to-own have been sobering for staying on top of underhanded anti-consumer trends in the industry. I ended up reading a bunch of Reddit threads for information when I was dealing with the coil whine issues on this motherboard last year, but I don't care much for the community of any subreddits. There's an absence of critical thinking skills throughout that site. All I can say about the discourse there is at least it's not the Wccftech comments section.

I'm glad GN is holding Intel's feet to the fire. Intel's statements were very weak.

I'm guessing it's a script not loading correctly that's badly screwing up the page layout. The page looks blank but it's really just stretched. I took a scrolling screenshot of the issue. It goes away after a refresh.

I see your edit now and I appreciate where you're coming from. I'm not saying nor suggesting that it's garbage, nor am I trying to discourage you from trying to refine your work. I'm sorry if it came across as overly critical. As an enthusiast, I would want to learn why a professional would or wouldn't do things a certain way. Design is neither wholly driven by feeling nor technical accuracy, but like any skill, hobby, or profession, one has to master the fundamentals before they can justifiably bend the rules. Otherwise, it just looks like an unforced error that weakens the overall product. It doesn't help that designing with text is a lot harder than many people think it is. Branding especially is a minefield. Regarding the circle, the stroke is jagged. It flattens out at 0°, 90°, 180°, and 270° and there are noticeable steps everywhere along the curve. If you're working in a raster graphics program, anti-aliasing needs to be turned on so that doesn't happen. Otherwise, it's not going to look good in print either. As for the text, look at how the letters in iamjanco's text on the arc aren't stretched. Each character maintains its rectangular form. They aren't wider on the outer edge than the inner edge and appearing to have a trapezoidal stretch. This is where vector tools give you more control over text on an arc. If you were working with a vector of the EHW.net logo in a vector design tool, you could have avoided stretching that as well. I wasn't being snarky about GIMP either. It's simply not the right tool for designing with text, and the same applies to Photoshop as well. Your ability to control text will be extremely limited in a raster graphics program compared to a vector one. Whether ENTERPRISE cares about the integrity of the logo is up to him, but I'm saying that simply isn't done in the branding and marketing world. It opens up the door for others to modify your logo in other unapproved ways, which dilutes the strength of your logo and brand. There are a whole host of other legal issues that come with that as well, especially if trademarked, which is why I caution against doing that in-house because you don't want the first-party to encourage third-party misuse. If you look at any company's branding guidelines, you'll find a primary logo, a handful of secondary versions for specific usage scenarios, and about 35 examples of impermissible modifications that the marketing department will come down hard on you for.

You're free to disagree. I'm not knocking your effort either. If anything, I'm pointing them out for you to understand where you can improve, but there isn't much to dispute in the scope of a professional design critique. There's a reason why top shelf graphics designers are in the positions they're in even when the profession as a whole is a lot less lucrative than it used to be. Every designer worth their salt would have noticed the same things I did.

As a designer who is not taking part in this effort, I'm going to offer the following feedback: Corporate branding guidelines universally disallow the manipulation of their logos because that dilutes the integrity of the logo and the brand. In other words, bending the EHW.net wordmark would never be permissible if it were under the care of either an in-house marketing department or a professional third-party agency. The circle is badly aliased. There's a noticeable and unsightly stretch around the outer circumference of all the circular text. In addition, the tracking of the motto looks forcibly compressed as do the characters themselves. The stars in iamjanco's example exist for readability purposes because it's jarring to flip the orientation of your text 180° while reading along the arc without a visual break. Also, as for general advice, don't use a raster program to make and manipulate logos. If you don't want to pay for Adobe Illustrator CC (and I can't blame anyone for not wanting to), then try Affinity Designer. GIMP is not a serious design tool, and it's even less appropriate for what should be vector designs.

This is when I realize I'm grateful for paying no mind to interior aesthetics. It certainly would have added extra expense to my build. If I had an aquarium-style case, you bet I'd feel obligated to make it look good inside too. Instead, my case is to the left of where I'm sitting, placed inside of what would have been an enclosed space in my desk if I didn't open up the back and leave off the front door. My only considerations for running wires/cables are to avoid creating unnecessary airflow obstructions beyond what I can reasonably manage. I have no idea how tedious it is to match PCB colors, ARGB LED lights, and fans while still ensuring that the components are all good quality and perform well. Circling back to the original question, it's likely a combination of factors and it's not universal for everyone who overspends on a motherboard. It's partly: Ignorance possibly fueled by bad word-of-mouth or influencer advice (Maybe those bar charts that exaggerate 1% differences aren't that helpful when people ignore the context.) The aesthetic tax The tendency to overrate your needs in a hobby where there are more product choices than rules I've seen the specs of a few baffling builds where the user created an easily avoidable bottleneck with their choice of components like an absolutely dreadful SSD on a workstation board. I hesitate to draw a broader conclusion beyond ignorance (some of it willful) when we share a world with Wccftech commenters, the likes of whom have brain-dead pissing matches about why AMD/Intel having the best gaming CPU matters when 1) none of them can afford it, and 2) if you have anything resembling a serious gaming rig, you're going to be GPU-bound anyway.

One other thing that I just thought of was that a few years ago, motherboards with insufficient VRMs being paired with the more power hungry CPUs were a big deal, so the general advice to spend more on a board might have been a hedge toward safety. Either way, I don't think suggesting a higher-tier board is necessarily made with performance in mind as much as it may be some other factors to ensure that there won't be any other types of issues with the build. The same thing tends to happen with PSUs and it's why you see some people thinking you always need 1300W now. Sure, if it's a POS that's rated 69 Plus Wood...or a Gigabyte.

Sir Beregond nailed the main points. Here's a few more unorganized odds-and-ends that come to my mind on this topic: Regarding features, one thing that Steve of GamersNexus has ranted about in recent times was the disappearance of the 7-segment display from all but the highest-end desktop CPU boards. With how AM5 was with DDR5 memory training and the excruciatingly slow boot times early on in the platform's lifecycle, I sure would have liked to know what the hell was going on because there were times it sure seemed like my settings caused a system hang on boot. On a couple of occasions, they did, and it took me way too long to recognize it. Back when I was more budget conscious than I am now, I went for the obvious candidate CPUs for big-time overclocking that didn't need to be on premium motherboards (Athlon XP-M 2400+, i5-2500K, i7-2600K). I had to think back to some of my old overclocked builds on a budget to remember what a higher-end board would have gotten me, and it was usually I/O. Not even the generation of technology like PCI-E 4.0 vs. 5.0, but the number of back panel USB ports, USB headers, PCI/PCI-E slots, SATA ports, and even fan headers. And yes, especially in the case of the $80 Albatron Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset Socket A board that I used with the Athlon XP-M, I ran out of I/O a number of times. Fast forward to last year, and 10+ back panel USB ports was one of the earliest requirements I had while board shopping. Every (more) affordable AM5 option fell short in that area. Speaking of PCI-E 5.0, that immediately ruled out the B650 for AM5. Last year, any respectable B650E motherboard started at $300 and X670E at $400. None of the boards I really wanted were part of any Micro Center bundles either, so I ended up going with this sussy baka Asus board, which I wouldn't have bought if I didn't effectively get it for $80. Also, what later turned out to be my ideal $300 B650E board—the ASRock Taichi Lite, the most affordable B650E with a 7-segment display and is otherwise better than this ROG board in every way—didn't come out for another half a year. I generally wouldn't buy a high-end board on a budget, but the issue of cheaper motherboards screwing you on I/O options is very real. That's why I felt comfortable buying a damn Z170 board for the i3-6100 build I did for my parents back in 2016 when by any logical means, I should have gotten an H110 board instead. I just didn't want to deal with the adapters, hubs, and other crap like what I added to their previous nForce 570 Socket AM2 board or my old 8th gen i5 Intel NUC that I gave them to replace the i3-6100. As it's already been said, none of this is necessarily gamer territory either. Gamers migrating from consoles need this stuff the least, and that's the audience you were building PCs for not long ago. I don't consider myself a gamer, my lack of free time to play games since last year notwithstanding. This is more power user, overclocking enthusiast, or some other EHW motto territory.

Ever since Nadella took over Microsoft, they've been in an echo chamber about how great their ideas that have no respect for customer privacy are. The insane part is that their user base has such a high concentration of enterprise customers.