Mr. Fox

Overdue for a wake-up and update to the leaderboard. 13900KS - multi: 18714.8 / single: 1025.3

Nvidia Maintains Dominance as Sales of Graphics Cards Hit All-Time Low in 2022 | Tom's Hardware WWW.TOMSHARDWARE.COM Sales of Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4090s impress amid decline of total available market. Gamers do not need flagship GPUs to game, and most games can run fine on GPUs that are 2 or 3 generations old. And, there are lots of gamers, some are just kids, that cannot afford to spend more than $1,000 on a GPU. I think that is probably what the Steam survey reflects. I believe it is an accurate reflection of Steam users, but probably not an accurate reflection of GPU sales overall. I spend more time benching my 4090 than I do gaming on it. I spend more time gaming on my weaker GPUs than I do benching them.

The question that the Steam market survey doesn't answer is how many people seldom play games that own 4090. From what I can tell it doesn't appear they've had any trouble selling them in spite of their idiotic pricing. A 4090 isn't needed for a quality gaming experience though. People who care more about gaming than anything else shouldn't feel compelled to spend that much money on a graphics card, especially if they are gaming at 1080p. There's no point in it when a 3060 TI, 3070, or 6900 XT will deliver a satisfactory experience. Unless you're cranking up the game settings to nax on a 4K screen you just don't need it. Might want it, but needing is a different story. I love my 4090, but the price of it sucked and reflected poor value. For 3090 and 3090 Ti owners, 4090 is the only option that offers a respectable performance upgrade in current generation. Anything less (4080 or 7900 XTX) isn't really an upgrade, but more like a frivolous waste of money for something that offers little or nothing.

I ran a 2000W vBIOS on my shunt modded 2080 Ti FTW3 HOF killer, ran 1000W vBIOS on my 3090 K|NGP|N and currently run a 10000W vBIOS on my 4090 Suprim. I plan to volt and shunt mod the 4090. I shunt modded my 3060 Ti and my last turdbook. Since nobody actually produces enthusiast graphics cards, you need to do this for yourself. And, expect to have interference because of control freak roadblocks along the way. It is harder than ever to own what you buy because the people selling the stuff want to own you. PC enthusiasts are a dying breed and the console jockeys are content to put up with whatever hand they are dealt. But, for $500 you can't expect anything special. For $2000 you should, and it for damned sure better be. I think there is a good chance my next GPU may be the top end ARC offering. Unless AMD pulls an unexpected magic rabbit from their top hat, they've got nothing that genuinely interests me. I am not expecting that they will, and it seems like they don't intend to try. If they want to turn the tide they should get rid of pencil-necked executive losers like Lisa Su and Frank Azor and replace them with people that are enthusiasts and understand enthusiasts.

Those are generally not even helpful as much as entertaining.

Thanks for the kind words brother. Have a nice Friday and a good weekend.

Thank you, sir! Have a nice evening.

Read the full review HERE

I didn't know we had a place for that. I might post some of my videos as long as there's a proper category for them.

Indeed. That is the crux of the issue... far too much consumption of system resources. Also kind of useless to have replication of function. If they made it to where the end user could install only the part(s) of the software package that they plan to use, that would be ideal. That would be good. I do not generally have enough spare time for gaming, but when I do it is almost exclusively FPS titles. It is rare that I buy or play any other type of game.

Nice review, brother. Well done. Very thorough and professional. It's unfortunate that you need iCUE installed and running to use features. Corsair should have kept it a simple RGB control software application. The inclusion of so many features and gimmick like the bloated hardware monitoring really sucks. Sadly, the thought process behind the bloatfest isn't unique to Corsair. It seems to be a common form of dementia in the industry, with Armory Crate being the worst example of trash software known to man. At least iCUE is still a win32 app and not a UWP/Micro$lop Store piece of crap like Armory Crate. (At least that was true last time I checked,) I can't imagine spending this much money on a mouse. I never have before and it is unlikely that I ever will. Nobody makes one durable enough to consider it and I find those in the < $50 price range the most intelligent for me. I usually get 1 to 2 years from a mouse before it needs to be taken apart and have new button switches soldered in and I just don't have the time or desire to deal with such nonsense. It's not hard, but it's just not worth the hassle.

Welcome. Glad you joined the party. Better late than never. We will take and the new friends we can get. The more the merrier.

Thank you. I am pleased that you enjoyed the review, or found it useful. In normal use, and probably most gaming scenarios, the reduction in GPU performance would not be impactful. It was definitely measurable though, and would have a negative influence on benchmark scores. I care most about that since it is my main hobby, so running them at Gen5 speed at the sacrifice of GPU benchmark scores is something I am avoiding.

The guy still hasn't responded for like 12 hours, so if I don't hear from him within the next hour or two I may decide to save $150 and get a 13700K from Best Buy to tide me over until 14900K drops. Congrats on the Dark mobo. The best for sure. My Z690 Dark is much better product than my Z790 Apex. ASUS stuff is just chintzy overpriced junk.

Thanks, bros. Now I am on the hunt for a decent 13900K/KF/KS. My 13900K in the Z690 Dark stopped working for unknown reasons. System runs normally with my Celeron test CPU, but the 13900K just endlessly cycles through POST codes when I power on the system. No idea why. I am assuming a power surge or ESD spike or something similar zapped it. Waiting for @Agent-A01 at oc.net to reply if his is still available. Using a Celeron sucks real bad.

Thank you both. Excellent product. Crucial always produces good product. It's awesome to see them bringing something cutting edge and appealing to performance PC enthusiasts to market.

Read the full review HERE,

More cowbell...

Very awesome. All of it. Love. It. And, who doesn't dig gigantic moths and spiders? The dead ones are my favorite.

There was a problem with that yesterday that I believe is resolved now. Nobody else has said anything but I was having the same issue. You might try dumping your browser cache and see if that helps. It's displaying correctly for me now. Hopefully if anyone else sees the same issue they will say something. Thank you for saying something. Thank you for the kind words brother.

Thank you. Yes I agree with you that it won't matter to most people. And I would also love to have four of those to put in it.

Thank you. You're spot on in your assessment, too. Thank you. Yes, I agree about that 2-NVMe limitation. Such a costly motherboard should have offered more... at least 4 (2 on the PCB plus DIMM.2 would have been nice). I really like how M.2 (both SATA and NVMe) drives take up so little space and have no cables or wiring clutter to have to fuss with. Makes for a much nicer, cleaner build if you have enough slots. The added speed of NVMe is appreciated, but I think I appreciate the compact wire-free aspects of them even more than the speed.

Thank you for the compliment. I'm glad you enjoyed it. For anyone that wants to replace SATA with NVMe I think it's a truly killer option. I had a couple of people remark to me that it's too slow but if your extended storage options without it are limited to SATA then there's really no downside. Massive upgrade from SATA. I'm now running eight NVMe and just one spinner HDD for file storage. I eliminated four SATA SSD by using this add-in card.

It is a Gen 3 card so I doubt installing Gen 4 drives would yield any gains. The PCI edge connector is X4. If you put it in an X8 slot I doubt it would run any faster but it would cut your graphics card bandwidth from x16 to X8 on most motherboards. It probably would not affect the GPU slot bandwidth on x299 because there are plenty of pcie lanes to go around.

Thank you. It is a really excellent product. Probably among the most useful system add-ons that I have ever seen. I love it.