Mr. Fox

This is an interesting project. Nice work @pio I need something similar but for Linux. I have been using Linux as my primary operating system for a while now and only run Windows in a virtual machine when using Windows for a specific purpose at work is unavoidable. It runs pretty well because I allocate 8 of my 32 CPU threads and 16GB of 48GB of RAM to the VM, but you can tell it is a little bit anemic on the graphics side of things.

Now that EVGA is no longer making the Dark motherboards, or anything else pretty much, options are limited to equally expensive Apex and the unicorn Tachyon motherboards if you want a proper ATX/E-ATX overclocking enthusiast motherboard. It is very unfortunate and shows how out of touch with reality (and their customers) all of the motherboard manufacturers are. If there were good options available I would never buy a 4-DIMM board. But there are not and we have to settle for inferior overpriced gamer crap.

This is exactly correct. The best memory overclocking motherboards have only two RAM slots. The rarity of them is sad and has an undesirable effect on the pricing of the almost non-existent options. Most of the options available are crappy 4-DIMM boards at all price points.

I was surprised how quickly they were delivered to you. Here are some settings that will either work perfect or put you in the ballpark. With the kit you bought from me, these settings were stable on the X870E Carbon, B850 AORUS Elite, X870E Taichi, X670E Gene, X870E AORUS Master and Strix X870E-E. You can probably dial the VDIMM back to about 1.550-1.570V. Here are some other random samples of stable settings you can tinker with. Hope this helps you find the sweet spot.

For the record, I went ahead and purchased the X870E Apex. I was disappointed for the reason I was worried I would be and the juice just wasn't worth the squeeze. It gives me less than the AORUS Master at twice the cost. Returned it to NewEgg for a refund. It's not what I would consider to be an $800 motherboard in terms of functionality or performance.

I cancelled the order. Upon further research, the PCIe bifurcation is all effed up on the Apex the same as the Hero. No longer wanted if I can't use the PCIe slots except with the GPU slot cut back to X8. Too bad A$$zeus can't get their act together. I saved $300+ and went with an AORUS Master since both of the extra X16 slots are untethered from the CPU and using them has no effect on the GPU. It's really unfortunate that 4-DIMM motherboards are so common and 2-DIMM so rare. Such a waste having the two unwanted memory slots on nearly every option available for purchase. The designers of enthusiast motherboards seem to be universally stupid and out of touch with the people that buy their rubbish. The Master has asynchronous BCLK as well.

It looks like the release date got pushed out another month. Again. I hope it ends up being worth the wait. I have loved owning the Z790 Apex. Best motherboard I have owned in a long time. I finally decided to sell it and the golden 14900KS. I love them both, but they are no longer useful to me since I cannot break any of my high scores or earn any more points with them on HWBOT.

Awesome. Congrats. I really liked the Arc A770 GPU that I had. It was an excellent value. Probably the best price to performance ratio I had ever seen before.

RX 9070 XT (received/in use) X870E Apex (pending)

ASUS A21 baby tower is what I think to be the best SFF case you can buy and also one of the most affordable. I'd have to say it is my favorite and I spent weeks looking at alternatives that were almost entirely a huge turn-off due to the sacrifice of function for form factor to the point that it just wasn't worth it; not to mention anything somewhat interesting was usually grossly overpriced and a very poor value. Second favorite, but borderline too small, is the ASUS AP201. Both will support a 360 AIO for better temps and quieter operation. I've owned both. You can find fancier cases that cost a whole lot more and offer a lot less functionality.

The industry serving PC enthusiasts has basically become nothing more than an organized crime ring that have extortion and collusion as their unspoken core values.

Sorry, I didn't understand what you were looking for, and equally sorry I've got nothing useful that I can share with you. Hopefully someone else can provide some useful advice.

I've never done much BCLK overclocking with locked or unlocked CPUs. The lack of a discrete CPU BCLK generator to allow asynchronous tuning can cause a lot of instability when changing the bus speed of everything rather than the CPU only. The voltage needs of the CPU might not be much different than pure clock ratio overclocking. Years ago, when laptops still mattered to me, I played around a bit with it on my Intel Extreme mobile CPUs and never found anything beyond about 101.00 to 102.00 to be stable. Running games and playing YouTube videos always ended in a BSOD or hard freezes with loud electronic buzzing noises regardless of the voltage applied. Because they were unlocked CPUs there was never much more than modest curiosity in playing with the BCLK. Elevating the core multiplier was easy enough. With a locked CPU multiplier it would have become more of an area of focus out of necessity. I do always bump it about 0.050 MHz so that the clocks I set are always equal or greater than the multiplier. If I set 6.00GHz I want to see 6.00GHz. I do not want to see something like 5.95GHz instead. I also disable Spread Spectrum to help with that.

Maybe we'll all get lucky and they'll start licking postage stamps with anthrax on them.

Are you talking about the overclock.net marketplace and the bad actors posting fake PC part advertisements using hacked accounts of legit community members?