Mr. Fox

Honestly, I think the owner(s) of the company reached a point of not caring a long time ago and they finally reached a point of not wanting to maintain it. If you look how many years had passed since their last product review, it is obvious that their focus had shifted to IT services. I do not believe they placed any value on the community that was built over nearly two decades of active collaboration.

Thanks, bro. I appreciate it. I agree with your personal preferences. I am more into the monochromatic look as opposed to an animated Neapolitan rainbow puke scheme.

So, I moved the 10900K I was running in my benching monster to my work system. Nice upgrade for it, too. More than enough juice for my workhorse.

I just picked up a nicer 10900K bin. Moved my daily driver from 53x core / 50x cache @ 1.375V to same settings with 1.265V. IMC is also stronger. My 4500 CL16-17-17-30 tRFC 296 RAM clock was bumped to 4600 with no adjustment of timings or RAM voltage. It will be fun to run this bare die with chilled water at 5.5GHz+.

Yeah, the Z690/12900K benchmarks scores are impressive, but I have decided my days of playing guinea pig are over. I am fed up paying lots of money for buggy/broken junk being released as public beta on the bleeding edge. I am trying to make myself just ignore new tech no matter what it looks like until it has been out for at least a year and let other people spend their money on the privilege of being a crash test dummy. I think we have the BGA turdbook jockeys to thank for that screwed up mindset. Nonsense such as it being "normal" for garbage to thermal throttle at 100°C and have CPU/GPU/memory soldered to the motherboard is a prevalent mindset, and it is really messed up. People need to stop forgiving failures and incompetence. They are rewarding the companies selling broken trash by purchasing it.

I don't really care about updates and haven't for many years. I'm still running Windows 7 with only the absolute bare necessity updates for functionality... Things like kernel mode driver framework and SHA signing and NVMe, etc... only what it needs to function. I'm also running Windows 10 LTSC 2019 and LTSC 2021, both with no updates. The Redmond Reprobates can kiss my posterior. I'll do it how I want when I want and I don't care what they think about it, LOL. I've been brushing up on my Linux skills in case the day comes that they no longer have a product worthy of being installed on my hardware. It seems like that might not be too far off in the future. Windows 11 already fits that description... digital feces.

That craftsmanship is amazing. I love it and wish I had the fabrication skill and resources to do the same. I would have to raise it a bit higher on my setup because the Dark motherboards have the VRM heat sink next to the first PCI-e slot. Thank you for sharing the info. I am officially green with envy.

I am beyond impressed. Other than flipping the G1/4 ports on the opposite end, I want that... real bad.

Speechless. Steam punk on steroids. Amazing in every way.

Awesome. Thank you. I will have a look. I am especially interested in how you mounted it. Where did you get that backplate? (If it is answered in your link, I suppose I will find out.) I want one.

Apparently they have been around for a little while, but I had never heard of them until I started Google-searching for options a week or so back. There is not a lot on YouTube. That FrameChaser guy has a few videos, (yes kind of annoying personality,) but they have not done much advertising. I ordered the type with G1/4 fittings and plan to use is in series rather than parallel. I think that will be slightly better for flowrate than parallel.

I sure hope so. Even with the chilled water, the GPU gets hotter than the CPU in most graphics benchmarks and I believe it is because the back side gets hot enough to warm up everything else. I ordered one of the giant full cover thermal pads from OptimusPC to cover the entire GPU under the backplate and that generally helps a lot even without the active cooling. It probably won't be quite as good as an OptimusPC KPE block, but if it gets close and I don't have to spend $600 and wait for 3-6 months I would consider that an acceptable compromise. If I can get a drop of ~15°C with a combination of the full cover pad and MP5 block with chilled water running through it, that will be pretty huge. It will put the core at about 25°C under sustained load at over 800W. Under chilled water cooled to less than 10°C with a scortching hot backplate the GPU core is hitting about 40°C under that load and 40°C just ruins overclocking fun on Ampere and Turing GPUs.

I ordered one of these and waiting for it to arrive. Hoping that cooling the back of my 3090 K|NGP|N will translate into slightly colder core temps for a few more MHz on core. I really want an OptimusPC block, but spending more than $600 USD and waiting 90+ days for it to arrive isn't my cup of tea. (I actually ordered one and cancelled it after waiting 90+ with no hint of an ETA being offered.) I will have to be creative on the mounting because the 3090 KPE is so huge. I will share photos and results when it is installed. GPU-BPC-SERIAL-KIT-CLEAR TOP – MP5WORKS WWW.MP5WORKS.COM

Nice! Very tempted by the amazing benchmark scores I am seeing with 12900K and Rockit Cool having their 12th delid kit out now makes it even harder to resist. I'd love to be running one bare die as I normally do. Congrats on the upgrade, bro. 12th Gen performance is making it hard to sell parts. I've had a brand new/unopened Z590 Dark on eBay and Mercari since Jan 24 with no offers even though it's a crazy good price. I may end up just keeping it and trying to sell my Strix Z490 instead since the gamer kids seems to appreciate mediocrity more than excellence.

Yes, but you need to download the latest version (Sept 2020) from their web site. Older versions will crash with an error message during launch. I fought it and was about to give up when I discovered there was an updated version available for download. That immediately solved the problem. The old license key I had when I bought it when Catzilla was first released worked fine. You can log in to your account and copy/paste it from there if you no longer have the product key. https://www.catzilla.com/download

It is really cool. I wish there were more benchmarks that were equally entertaining.

https://valid.x86.fr/3etxyw https://hwbot.org/submission/4927266_mr._fox_memory_frequency_ddr4_sdram_2355.2_mhz https://hwbot.org/submission/4927259_mr._fox_cpu_frequency_core_i9_10900k_5612.32_mhz

That is true now for me. I used to spend lots of money on cars (custom street rods) and motorcycles (a whole lot more than I ever have spent on computers) and that was at a time in life when I didn't really have the financial resources to support that addiction. Factoring in inflation, I probably still cannot afford to do it on the scale I used to when I was young and wild. Now that I am an old dude, I just want reliable transportation. Nothing fancy as long as it is clean and the AC works. I take care of my cars and generally put over 200K miles on them. That takes a long time because I don't rack up miles quickly. My ride is a 2005 Ford Five Hundred SEL AWD that I purchased for $3500 with under 50K miles on it about 5 years ago. At the rate I am going, it will take me at least another 5 years to hit 200K miles. When Mrs. Fox has something to say about the money I blow on computer crap, I remind her that I could always go back to the more expensive fetish. (I don't let her know I am no longer interested in it, or that trick wouldn't work well, LOL.)

I would love to have a phase change setup. Maybe someday. As goofy as GPUs are now with the absurd room temperature thermal throttling nonsense, it would be more useful for GPU cooling than CPU cooling. Living in the AZ blast furnace, the absence of humidity is well suited to chilled water and phase change. Condensation still needs to be monitored, but it is rarely an issue.

Thank you. This kind of stuff is so much fun. Fast computers are very affordable alternative to fast cars and motorcycles. I don't even care about the latter anymore.

All of my systems are multi-boot and I want each OS to have its own functional Windows or Linux bootloader. I disable the extra SATA and NVMe drives in the BIOS when installing an OS and then there is no opportunity for anything to happen that is inconsistent with my wishes. I then use the BIOS boot selection hotkey during POST to select the OS I want to use. Grub2 does a much better job of handling a multi-boot OS scenario than Windows does, but it is a much better option to control it in a more mechanical fashion that is OS agnostic.

When I really started pushing my 3090 KPE with the 1kW XOC vBIOS using 1.350-1.400V NVDD and MSVDD @ LLC L15, I had to replace the circuit breaker with 20A for my home office because it kept flipping the 15A breaker. My Kill-A-Watt meter will often show more than 1100W being pulled from the wall in Time Spy Test 2 and up to 1200W in 3DMark 11 Test 1 when I am able to keep the chilled water cold enough to keep the core clocks from dropping. Even benching something like Catzilla pulls over 750W.

Sadly, it seems like the magic of everything that was once good and awesome is gone now. That sounds very negative, but I have had more disappointments with tech-related stuff in the past year or two than I had during the past 20+ years. It seems everything is made half-assed, overpriced, underwhelming and unreliable. It has gotten to the point that I don't want to even think about buying anything new as long as what I have is working correctly, because what I buy has a good chance of being a disappointment. And, yeah... seems like most manufacturers don't care about the products, the people that buy them, or their making good on their promises (warranty).

I have been purchasing products from them since they first opened in 2001. I have purchased components to build probably 20 or 25 desktops over the years. So far I have not encountered any difficulties, but I have seen enough examples of bad experiences that I know it happens. I have RMA'd motherboards and memory with no issues. I RMA'd a GPU with no issues. All of the returns were within 48 hours of delivery because I tested the products immediately and if they weren't of the quality that I expected them to be I sent them back immediately and got a refund. I have not tried to RMA anything after more than a day or two of the delivery date. I only buy products sold and shipped by NewEgg. I do not purchase anything from third-party sellers on NewEgg. I have done the same thing with Amazon and never have been given the run-around on a return. Amazon generally refunds my money faster than NewEgg does.

Almost there. Need to shut the system down and let the chiller run to get the water a few more degrees colder so the core clocks will hold better. /img/logo.png Mr. Fox`s 3DMark - Port Royal score: 15967 marks with a GeForce RTX 3090 HWBOT.ORG The GeForce RTX 3090 @ 2250/11402MHzscores getScoreFormatted in the 3DMark - Port Royal benchmark. Mr. Foxranks #31 worldwide and #28 in the hardware class. Find out more at HWBOT. NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 video card benchmark result - Intel Core i9-10900K Processor,EVGA Corp. Z490 DARK WWW.3DMARK.COM Intel Core i9-10900K Processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090 x 1, 16384 MB, 64-bit Windows 10}