Mr. Fox

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?

Nice to see you, bro. Happy you're here. So sad about EVGA. Things immediately took a bad turn in the world of PC enthusiasts the moment they walked off the stage, and I do not ever expect things to be as good as they were when they were disrupting status quo with their overclocker-focused world-leading motherboards and video cards. They had no match in terms of product or service delivery excellence, and probably never will.

I think any "pledge" to do the right thing made by Google (or any other technology company for that matter) should be taken with a grain of salt. The notion that any of them are interested in doing the right thing for anyone other than themselves is downright laughable. They're going to do whatever they think will make them the most money regardless of whether or not those things are legal, just, respectable or beneficial to society as a whole.

AMD graphics cards need to be able to deliver equivalent or better ray tracing performance and offer a feature set on par with or greater than NVIDIA, at a better price, in order to gain meaningful marketshare. One of the reasons things are goofed up in GPU world is because NVIDIA doesn't have any serious competition.

That would be nice and appropriate. I stopped reading as soon as I saw it was for laptop CPUs. Zero interest in turdbooks. The iGPU in the 9950X isn't really suitable for anything other than the most basic display output. Very poor 3D rendering and weaker than the lame Intel iGPU in the 13900KS/14900KS.

That will/would be impressive. I am not sure I can believe that until I actually see it in the hands of an actual end user or some unbiased third-party reviews. I did not read the entire article. Hopefully it is not something only for turdbook processors. The results on unreleased products that we have seen published by AMD, NVIDIA and Intel are always suspect. I hope it is accurate.

I think Elon is awesome. I think the world would be a better place with more people like him and none of the woke haters that like to rag on people they hold a totally irrational hatred toward. Some people are just easily influenced by the nonstop assault of lies and disinformation they feed themselve from the big media circle jerks and social media zombie sheeple horde. I think all EVs suck and I want nothing to do with them no matter whose name is associated with them. The fact that the vast majority of normal people feel the same way will hopefully help to ensure the failure of the nonsensical agendas that are the driving force behind it.

The way I enjoy gaming, one of the things I appreciate most is the solitude. I don't enjoy online multiplayer. I probably play games no more than 12 to 16 hours, maybe 20 hours, over the course of a year. When I play it is usually in a binge with only a few larger blocks of time scattered throughout the year. Almost always (with very rare exceptions) a linear FPS title when I do. Gaming is something I enjoy doing partly because the way I do it does not involve interaction with people, and I like it that way. No open world, strategy, RPG or MMORPG... just run and gun single player campaign. While I own several hundred game titles there are probably less than 15 that I have played through to the end and a few that I have played through several times because I enjoyed them so much.

Yes, with a dual CCD CPU like my 9950X there is a significant improvement in memory bandwidth running at 8000 and the 2-DIMM configuration is more elegant (cleaner signal, shorter traces, less VDIMM needed, etc.). Single CCD there is not as gigantic a difference in bandwidth. Probably because with more cores and threads it saturates memory bandwidth and bottlenecks memory performance with the memory clocked at 6000-6400. I just received the IceMan RAM block. Delivery from AliExpress was super fast (like a week). It is my second IceMan RAM block. Also have a Supercool direct touch RAM block. Both are outstanding. I prefer the IceMan RAM block just because I like how it is designed a little bit better. (Same is true of the IceMan direct die CPU block. Supercool works great but the design is lousy.) The stock excuses for a heatsink that memory manufacturers use are pure trash. Any memory kit will improve thermally by simply removing the worthless heating blankets and running them bare chip. They are made to look nice and provide no functional benefit. The best stock heatsinks I have seen came on my TeamGroup Xtreem 8200 memory, but even those are not good enough. The were super heavy, but they still got heat-saturated during high stress scenarios and unable to do the job a heatsink is supposed to do. Because they were thick and heavy, they took longer to cool down than the flimsy trash sheetmetal heating blankets. Edit: I decided to leave the magnetic black trim off this time so that accessing the screws did not require removing the fittings. The black trim looks nice, but not worth the extra effort needed. RAM temps are 1°C higher than the water in the loop.

The firmware was rubbish on the Taichi so the memory latency was too high. I think they fixed that issue. But, the Taichi PCIe lane distribution sucked big time. The bottom PCIe slot could not be used. If I put my Sabrent quad NVMe x4 card in the slot it cut the GPU to x8. That critical design flaw made it an instant fail for me... unacceptable. It was very disappointing as I expected the Taichi was going to be awesome. It wasn't. The Carbon was a really nice motherboard, but MSI firmware was pretty messy. They would fix one thing and mess up another. Per CCD manual overclocking was broken until their current A23 BIOS and they hide menus for things like individual SATA port configuration, how long to wait and display the BIOS boot logo for entering Setup and other similar things that should not be hidden. (This same issue exists on my Z790i Edge and it seems to be the MSI way of doing things.) The Carbon did not have an issue with using other PCIe slots cutting the GPU to x8. The trade-off there was you could not use the PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot under the GPU. Populating that with any NVMe (Gen 3, 4 or 5) cut the GPU to x8. You could only use the one PCIe 5.0 M.2 slot between the CPU and GPU and the two other M.2 slots (Gen 4). So, I was able to use the Sabrent quad NVMe in the Carbon no issue. Going 2-DIMM is the only way to fly anyhow. 4-DIMM configurations are kind of sucky unless you care more about maxing out your system with slow memory. Although it is only PCIe x1 on the Gene, I am still able to use the Sabrent quad NVME in that slot and the SSDs work fine (slower of course) and the GPU maintains x16.

It's really the only way to fly IMHO. Two of my three desktops use external cooling systems with large rads (NOVA and MO-RA) and multiple D5 pumps and nothing but tubing, fittings and waterblocks inside of the cases. Last purchased: New - X670E Gene to tide me over until I can replace it with an X870E Apex. (The X870E Carbon and X870E Taichi were both returned for refunds.) Used - GTX 1080 Strix 11GB/s for $142 (Replacing RX 590 as a spare GPU for unexpected needs, and also for a few HWBOT points since I skipped 1080 and went straight to 1080 Ti when 10-series was new.) New - another IceMan Cooling direct-touch RAM waterblock kit (love these things) Other than its mATX size handicap, the Gene is a very nice enthusiast motherboard.

I am still here and I am still interested in participating in the review program if it continues. Did the WordPress and YouTube accounts transfer over to you as well @pioand @LabRat?

Congrats @pioand @LabRat and thank you for carrying the torch. @ENTERPRISE thanks for setting them up for success with a running start. We wish you the best, Brother.

I will still be here, too.

It would be very sad to lose this community. @ENTERPRISEwe wish you the best in all that life has to offer. @piowe won't hold you to anything, but you would have our support if you decide to carry the torch.

But... I didn't care until it affected me and others like me that do not like it. Hopefully Intel doesn't turn out like Micro$lop; meaning every new product release is crappier (less performant, less reliable, less autonomy, more restrictive, more bloated, more illogical and uglier to look at) than the product that came before it.