Fluxmaven

Welcome! A lot of our members jumped ship from OCN to come here, myself included. Unfortunately you couldn't escape Pook and Avacado since they are here too.

Good to have you around. Joe speaks very highly of you.

Throwback time. My first bike 1972 Suzuki TS125 Enduro. I've had a handful of bikes since this one and go back and forth about getting another street bike. Honestly think another 2-stroke would make me the happiest. Might have to get a tiny trailer and a 90s RM125 to pull behind the Miata. and just the tip of my first car. 1976 Dodge Aspen SE coupe. I was the only kid in my high school parking lot with an 8-track player. 2nd biggest purchase of my life back then was saving up for a sweet Pioneer deck and new speakers for it.

I'm a fan of Thermalright. I'd go with a fanless and rely on case airflow. Those puny little fans on the others will either move almost zero air, or make a ton of noise. That Gen 5 slot placement on your Ace is really nice since it would be in the path of intake airflow on most cases, and a RAM fan would also get some air on it. Not an issue with your setup, but an issue I see with a lot of motherboards is that they put the only gen5 slot right above the primary 16x slot where people stuff a huge GPU... So those m.2 coolers with the side fan would be pressed right against the backplate of the GPU in a lot of builds. In that regard, the Graugear you linked would probably perform the best for most people. Curious to see how the review turns out. Those m.2 waterblocks that have been a gimmick all these years, might finally be starting to make sense

Nah, but I'll drive it down to Asheville and we can pick up your sister/cousin in the backwoods of NC. Stephens hooptie drives itself so we divert all of our attention to getting rejected by women

Meanwhile... I got really drunk Friday night so I spent most of Saturday being hungover and didn't work on any of the cars. I did drive both of them to do other errands and still might manage to wash at least one of them today Edit* I washed 1.5 cars.... Moostang got actually washed out in the alley. Mi-otter got the front half washed off. I back it into the garage, so I just washed the front half off since I got some overspray on it with the foam cannon. I'd have washed the whole car but the top and windows were down and I didn't bring the keys out with me.

Growing up in the forum era, it kills me that nearly all forums have died and were replaced by garbage facebook groups full of people asking the same questions every day because they have no idea what a search bar is. ExtremeHW has risen from the ashes of forums past to provide us with a safe haven of knowledgeable people that love the hobby and are always willing to help. I'm extremely thankful for all the amazing friends I've made on this site. Many of which I'd actually interacted with on another site which must not be named. that said, I'd never met up with and went on adventures with anyone on the internet (outside tinder) prior to EHW. Love all the friends I've met on here and look forward to many more years of disrupting the enthusiast PC space with our presence.

I'll show you some hardware to get excited about... Back to the topic on hand... Between the confusing name change and thread counts, I'm expecting AMD to be the hero this gen with 9000 series. Which I will likely buy. I also don't get as excited about hardware news these days. When we finally broke away from quad core CPUs, I was blown away. Now high core counts are just expected. Before people call me some AMD shill, I was almost exclusively Intel + Nvidia for the past 20 years and still own 3x more Intel CPUs and 2x more Nvidia GPUs than AMD.

Brother, you wanna talk questionable life choices... I can talk for hours As for on topic stuff for the thread... Might actually install something from the mountain of parts I've accumulated tomorrow. UPR catch can on the Mustang and if I'm feeling really frisky the new downpipe... Either way I'll probably wash that and the Miata.

Yea I need that autocross alignment for best overclocking results

Picked up a Ryzen 7000 delid tool. It didn't exist, and then was sold out back when I owned a 7900X so I just lapped that CPU. I have a 7700X and 7800X3D currently. Not sure if I'll delid either of these or wait for 9000 series to come out but I've got the tool and the direct die bracket is on the way for whatever I decide to use it on lol. Also just got the notification that my camber plates for the mustang were delivered

I have met him, and while he is a pretty shady character, he's right about Blitz. I've used it many times and also recommended it many times Blitz just takes the guesswork out. You can do the same thing with a bit of vinegar (diluted with distilled)... Flush, then use a bit of baking soda with distilled to bring the PH balance back in line. Usually aiming for around 6-8. Blitz kit comes with basic PH test strips and a chart to determine the value. I'm sure you can get the same thing in the pool aisle at Ace hardware. @pio take one of those fittings to the hardware store and see what size tubing they fit. I had dumped all of those fittings from the boxes into my fittings bin and just grabbed 6 of the same size so IDK if what's printed on the box is the actual size of them. They should be either 10/16mm (3/8" ID, 5/8" OD) or 12/16mm (7/16" ID, 5/8" OD). In hindsight, to make this all a bit more easy to figure out and budget friendly for expanding the loop, probably should have just went old school with barbs and clamps. I doubt Ace will have EPDM tubing in an appropriate size. Likely it will just be some clear PVC tubing. All of which will get cloudy over time, but it's cheap so you just swap it out every once in a while.

In Fluxmaven Now that it's consistently hot out, probably won't fold much. Last year I was willing do suffer once a month, not really the case anymore.

I also use a 48" OLED as my main monitor with a smaller graphics tablet/monitor below (22" 1080P). This arrangement already stresses a 3090 enough trying to maintain 4K120 in modern games. What size monitors are you trying to run? 32" is the absolute minimum I would consider for 4K panels. reason being you can't run 100% scaling smaller than that and actually be able to see anything. If you're running a bunch of 27" monitors you end up needing to run higher scaling for things to be legible. So you're wasting a ton of GPU horsepower just to have slightly better text clarity and pixel density. For 27" displays, you'd be better off just running 4x 1440p panels. Even if you used 32" panels... I'd just get one bad ass 4k panel for the main and 3x 1440p panels for the rest.

I'll help you wash it next time I come over. Actually I need to go wash my car... Made the mistake of parking under a tree and a bird I must have angered in a past life got all his homies to come * on my car.

I'm still young and dumb so burnouts > maximizing tire life

Separate summer and winter tire setups will always be better for both scenarios than running "all seasons". The Falken RT615K+ I have on the Miata have that same low temp warning so I have a set of snow tires on the stock wheels for the colder months even though I rarely drive the car in actual snow. As fun as it is, I just hate having to wash the salt off immediately. Unfortunately the spare wheels with snow tires I had for the wagon wont fit over the brakes on the moostang. I have Pilot Sport All Season 4's on the stock wheels. Once those wear down, I'll put a set of Blizzaks on and get a separate set of wheels with summer tires to run the rest of the time. Obviously having multiple sets of wheels is a lot more cumbersome if you don't have a garage. With a wall mount rack and some tire totes, they are pretty unobtrusive though. I have a couple sets hanging over the spot where we park the push mower. I'm intentionally not washing the E30 before I sell it so it can be a "barn find"

Imagine paying money for discord messages just go get a bunch of my drunk ramblings and pictures of elephants

I will give credit where it's due. EK is very good at a few things. Marketing/branding They actually advertise They sponsor a lot of builds/content nice packaging They have staff on popular forums to answer questions Online configurator Very noob friendly suggests things based on desired use case, but also offers an "expert mode" to override and manually select things Quick launch following new GPUs + wide compatibility They obviously work with manufactures to get samples ahead of release to have block on the market sooner They tend to offer designs for all the common AIB models A one brand solution They offer everything from blocks to rads to tubing so you can stick to a single brand Unfortunately they aren't the best when it comes to making quality products or standing behind them. I understand that by being a larger company dealing with a larger volume of product, that you will have more failures. And people speak louder about issues than good experiences. The problem is the horror stories about dealing with their customer support. If they would take pride in their products and just warranty things with no hassle, that would really help their brand image. Nobody gets everything right. To get the best possible loop, you'd end up piecing something together from multiple bands. EK offered an OK option for every part if you just wanted to go to one vendor. Corsair now offers a very similar experience and they did it quickly by outsourcing from well regarded brands to do so. Their fittings are Bitspower, the rads are HardwareLabs (L-series so a bit lower performance than GTS and GTX equivalents). Their coolant was a Mayhems blend not sure if the newer version still is... I've been into watercooling for quite a while and I have used just about every brand from Danger Den to Optimus. I have plenty of EK products and I have experienced a lot of their common issues. Outside of the EK-Pro lineup, I wouldn't buy any of their new stuff.

Lightweight low power cars don't eat through tires very fast unless you are actually tracking the car. This past season I finally came close to killing the RT615K+ on the Miata. I'll find a nice parking lot to drift in and finish them off this summer. I want to get different wheels on the Mustang, but I have a pretty fresh set of Pilot Sports on the stock wheels that I'd like to get some more use out of before I go spend a fortune on a staggered setup.

I'm still in but just the tip this time... One of the two air handlers is out in the house and we're trying to not stress the other unit until we can get it repaired.

I bought an A770 at launch. Every time I put it on the bench it's improved a bunch with driver updates. I was planning on finally using it regularly in the streaming rig, but they still haven't fixed the high idle power usage. I replaced it with a 4060 and it's better in every way. Uses less than half the power under load, sips at idle, and it can actually run Folding@home. I really want the Arc cards to do well as we could really use a strong 3rd option to shake up the market. Outside of AV1 transcoding, I don't really have any use for the current Arc lineup. Hopefully Battlemage brings us a decent bump in performance.

One of the things that's stopped my from buying a 42" is what to do with my 48" CX that I'm using now. I already have a 75" in the living room and a 49" in the bedroom. I don't really want strangers from marketplace coming to the house and no longer have a vehicle it will fit in to meet elsewhere lol. I also hate 32:9 ultrawides for everything other than the racing sim.

Looking pretty promising. My main rig is still getting along fine with the 5900X but I'll wait till the X3D stuff comes out to think about upgrading. It'll be between a 9900X or a 9800X3D depending on how the real world benchmarks look once both are out. Or I'll get swayed by some crazy Microcenter deal and end up with both