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Thanks for asking bro Fox. And huge thanks. I'm taking it one day at a time. Now I'm trying to reduce my cigar/cigarillo consumption. I may have halved my consumption from around 36. But it's still way too high even with vaping. I have started vaping with low nicotine levels. I'm also trying to reduce or better said change my (food)lifestyle. Eat more healthy food to try lower the blood pressure/cholesterol. It's way above recommended. This on top of medicines I take for it. There is some big changes so I don't know if everything is feasible/doable. It's now 14 days since I had a stroke, so it will take time. The question is whether I can achieve my goals. It's too early to say. But I'll try.... So small steps each day. But it's hard. Very hard to change how you have lived the last +30 years. Big changes at +60 is hard 🙂

Coming together. Trying to swap over nothing at all from my main build except for the 5090. In case I don’t really care for the platform. Im hoping it exceeds my expectations though, and if it does it’ll be going in to the big case .

If any of yalls are interested in a really good AIO, I just got the new Noctua 420mm AIO and I'm blown away by the performance of the AIO. I had my Corsair 420mm AIO before this, using the same exact Noctua Fans and Thermal Grizzy Kryonaut pad. I tested a before and after run in CB23 with 300w power limits and the improvement is shocking. Best of all, no longer need Corsair iCUE garbage on my system. Just a clean, no RGB AIO and I love it. Same Noctua 140mm Black Fans, Same Thermal Pad, Same Fan Speed. Noctua 420mm AIO Corsair 420mm AIO I've been on a bit of a spending spree lately lol. Picked up the new MSI MPG Ai1600TS PCIE5 power supply with current monitoring and dual 12v2x6 outputs. Finally running native cables and being able to monitor the current on each pin with my HOF 5090D is awesome. No need for a fancy GPU to do this, I can do it with the MSI PSU and monitor all of it in HWINFO64 and MSI Afterburner. Can also overlay it in an OSD so I can keep an eye on it at all times if I want. Then picked up this Noctua AIO and very happy I did. The cooling improvement and headroom it provides me for Nova Lake is very cool. My system is Nova Lake ready lol. Grabbed the Logitech Pro X2 mouse with haptic triggers. It's a total game changer for me. I've never done better in games and just using the mouse on the desktop with a clean and satisfying mouse click. Also it's basically silent, so if my wife is in the office and I'm gaming, my trigger click is dead silent. No more annoying the heck out of her while I click away lol. Think I need to cool it for awhile lol.

Something like that! 😀 This 5090 Astral clocks the same as the 5080 Astral does. That should not happen. Wow!

Sickness? GPS? GPU Derangement Syndrome?

Time to see a Dr for my sickness. 😂 Yep..One of these is a 5090 the other is a 5080. Dual Astral’s. @electrosoft This 5090 Astral maxes out at 1075MV which I’m perfectly happy with that. My 5080 Astral only maxed out at 1065MV which I’m fine with as well, but it just didn’t clock all that well. Anyways, this 5090 Astral is already showing some good results. The 5080 Astral just wasn’t a strong OCer over my Zotac 5080’s even running 20c + cooler than the Zotac’s.. I was seriously expecting the 5080 Astral OC to hit like SUB 3.3Ghz in games on the factory 450w bios.

These 5060Ti’s are INSANITY. This one can run +525 on the core and does not give trouble until +550.

The Quiet bios is far superior to the Performance bios in my opinion on the 5080 Astral. And I can appreciate how ASUS set these two bios up. The quiet bios does not cap max TGP like most GPU’s with a dual bios option would. The quiet bios is 360-450w, and the performance bios is 400-450w. The Performance bios only runs a much more aggressive fan curve, so much so that you can hear the GPU just a bit. That rear fan noise everyone talks about on the Astral’s. Well, the quiet bios still has a 450w limit, but runs a much quieter fan curve. And the card has such an overkill cooler, you can’t even notice it temp wise. So the quiet bios is just better. No need to mess with the fan curves, this bios has them set up well. Im starting to like this card. 😭 May sell the Zotac instead. generate image code for forums

Guys! This deal is insane! It really makes it hard to cope with a $899.99 9950X3D2 right now. 🤨 The 270K Plus is $264.99 on Amazon. That is an insane value. This price for essentially a mix of 14900KS gaming performance and 285K multithreaded performance is unheard of.

I’m putting it together on the test bench with a 480 and a single D5. My cat thinks so many dimm slots are only good for standing on easier. Also, don’t mind my ghetto waterblock mounting. It works!

Yup. Asus going nuts.... This anniversary nonsense need to stop. What anniversary will they try use with next gen cards?🤔 ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 Edition 20 priced at €5,799 or converts to $6,650 +$2200 USD above an vanilla overpriced 5090 Astral or $4500 above 5090 FE. Nice. Can't be done any better. Gigabyte... You need to do much better. $5300 is all too cheap.

Hey sorry I havent been posting, busy season in my line of work its been madness. Still keeping tabs when I have a moment, 60 hour weeks and probably filling in for the overnight shift for a stint. Might be making a move into Engineer role if things line up. @Papusan Sorry to hear about your recent troubles but really stoked you are on the mend. @Mr. Fox is going to need a tag partner to keep these manufacturers honest. I have been thinking about trying to sell my 10850K system again as I would like to get something that is x16/x16 for GPU benching, just been too busy. Now that I have a sizeable slush fund it seems my guilty pleasure is trying to find a 1991 Honda CRX. I have certain designs for my RSX but would "need" something else to use while its being worked on.

Im struggling settling on a platform. My goodness. Now I’m looking at 270K Plus! 😂 I could order like (3) of them, and keep the best. And Z890 motherboards are cheaper as well.

Yeah, after the 5090 Astral I’m tapped, and all the other small losses here and there messing around with 5080’s. So I’m putting these up coming parts on the BB 0% for 12 months, then I can slowly sell off my current stuff to help recoup. 😁 Spending $699.99 plus tax on ram is not smart. I know they are amazing sticks. And the “Want” is STRONG. lol I feel like if I go with those rams, I need the Apex. I may go with these! Also, what do you think about the new Strix Neo board? Is the Hero maybe worth the step up? I’m going to skip the Apex. Cutting cost on ram, and motherboard, allows me to go with a 9950X3D2 over a 9850X3D. I think that’s probably a smarter move. I want to stay at like $2,000 for CPU/RAM/Motherboard.

exactly what bro @electrosoft said, my LFIII Pro with Noctua IPPC3000 fans in push/pull is a beast but im already itching when im seeing these crazy Noctua AIO results 😄 definitely added to my wishlist for a potential future upgrade. for now, im happy with my setup and just glad to be gaming again after months and months of RAM and GPU tuning 😛 CPU is STILL stock aside from the RAM tweaks, couldnt be bothered to OC it yet 😄

Im really curious to test that and see the gains in 4K compared to my current setup. I feel like my current setup performs well. But, I’m considering moving away from the 4K/120hz. It’s pretty big. I still run my 48” OLED Aorus panel. Thing has like 4,500+ “panel on time hours now” lol. 😂 Probably gonna run maybe a 27” 1440P. I didn’t hang on to any DDR5, I would only run one set at a time back then anyways. Other than the set that’s in my son’s rig, he has some nice 2x16GB Gskill 6400 Mdie sticks. I’m sure those can crank 8000+ If I made the switch, I do have a lot of DDR4 Bdie to offload and maybe recoup from. I have a 16x16GB set of Gskill Bdie 3200c14. The 9950X3D may not make sense, so maybe just a 9850X3D would be fine. Is there a significant different with the X870 Apex, and just a regular X870 Crosshair black? I’m not going to run a delid setup. Probably just pretty mild OC. Setup, grab a block, and swap it in to my current case with 3x480MM GTX, 4x D5.

I’m thinking about trying an AMD system, I’m going through BestBuy only for my parts for easy return/exchange options if needed. I’m looking at a 9950X3D2, and a X870 Crosshair Dark Hero, I am struggling on which ram to get. Any tips?

I'm banking on Nova Lake..... --------------------------------------------------------- One of those "hmmmm" videos where the 5080/9070xt/5070ti are close enough to really not make that much of a difference at 4k and I would posit even at 1440p go for the best bang/buck in many situations. With 9070xt's dipping back into the $600-650 range again, insane to pay $1k for a 5070ti or $1200+ for a 5080 unless you want the very best not named 5090.... You just have the 5090 sitting up in the clouds looking down at the rest shaking it's ~$4k head at the commoners.....

Pass for sure. Sometimes I have to wonder what Intel is thinking.

Some progress. Today is 4 weeks since the stroke. The bloodpressure is on the way down. Down from 170-190/95 So the risk for a new stroke is reduced. But my heart rate is awful. Hower around 95-100 due broken lungs😗 The lifestyle change and medication seems to help. But this can't fix my broken lungs. It's what it is. Imagine how many users use cables with load balancing problems.

Well in the process of talking about the Raider A18 value I eventually decided to return it. I found a good deal for a used Titan 18 with 14900HX, 4090M and UHD+ 120hz. The build quality is top notch and the vapor chamber is a good boost above the Raider 18 heatpipe solution. The 14th Gen chip does almost as good as the X3D in WoW with some memory tuning. The only thing I want is to do is downgrade the display to either 1600p or ideally 1200p. I reopened my eBay store and am pretty steadily selling off my excess hardware. This week Nvidia released a hotfix driver that addresses DX12 issues in WoW which has been great. A lot of the problems like the screen going black and slowly rerendering everything after opening the transmog window in certain areas has been fixed.

Bro. You bought the wrong card😀 Why go so damn cheapo? And I know you you love the FE design. Maybe next month the 6000 Pro will go for over 15K. so this will be a damn good deal, LOOL Run and buy, and return that Asus turd🤣 NVIDIA now lists RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96GB GPU at $13,250 You need all 4 of them for your lonely 5090 😀 And Asus should really offer an fire extinguisher in the PSU package charging +$1000. Who said graphics cards was so damn expensive?🤔 ASUS ROG Thor 3000W Titanium III Edition 20 PSU listed at €999, comes with four ROG Equalizer cables for quad RTX 5090 setup The limited edition PSU includes four ROG Equalizer 12V-2×6 cables for four single GeForce RTX 5090 card. No fire extinguisher, though. ASUS has listed the ROG Thor 3000W Titanium III Edition 20 power supply at €999. This is the company’s new limited edition PSU shown during Computex as part of the... I was so sure I seated the cable properly and it’s been running fine for 11 months now. I suppose MSI prevails nonetheless with their extremely high quality adapters :).

This Astral 5090 was an open box from Bestbuy. Not a crazy good deal like your current and previous 5090's though. But much cheaper than new MSRP! I have the card COOKING in a closed case, all (16) case fans are fixed to 20% or 550rpm for complete silence. The card still scored 15,300 without any overclocking or voltage sliders moved up. It has all of the ROP's It likes high clocks It seems to idle at low power 10-13w The cards runs very COOL when pushing normal case fan speeds. No harsh or annoying coil whine. You have to open the case door, get down on your knees, and put your head in the case and listen against the GPU to hear anything and only while (Steel Nomad is running at that it's a very faint buzz) I do not mind that. I am going to be honest about the 5080 Astral, because I was trying to sell it. And I did not want to be just completely ragging on its overclocking abilities too hard ya know lol. Well, if you add even just +270 to its offset, it will lock up in games. Even low power games using only 250 watts or less. It just does not OC well at all. I read the Tech power up review, and they hit 3,312Mhz with their sample, I watched many more YT videos of them cranking out at least 3,240-3,300 in more demanding scenarios with 5080 Astrals. I mean, it's a 5080 Astral running SUB 60c pulling less than 300 watts, and only running 3,165-3,182Mhz. This seemed pretty weak to me. Whereas with this 5090, you can keep adding offset, until you see the core clock just not moving anymore because it's just too warm or out of power, but it's still not crashing on you or locking up by adding more offset even though the clocks are not moving up anymore. That turned me off with the Astral 5080 OC. If it would have clocked good, I would have been fine with it. But I felt like I was double disappointed. #1 I am settling with a 5080. And #2 it does not clock worth a dang. The next issue was it also did not undervolt very well either. So, it seemed weak on both ends of the spectrum.

@tps3443: "I'm going to stick with this 5080 because it makes sense price wise and stuff...I don't really need a 5090...I'm going to just rock this 5080 and seriously I'm good!!" Me: Welcome back bro! I knew you weren't gonna last. 🙂 We all like the halo goodness too much around these parts! Where did ya pick it up? Now you get to sell off the Astral 5080.....again. 🙂 Sounds like a good sample! Let the fun times begin!!

I don't understand why people care where the tech or the parts come from. I just want stuff to be affordable... Who cares who makes it or who designed it? Don't we all win as a human race when we work together instead of competing? I mean I love my country, but this is insanity. Some people are easily duped. Thanks for the good laugh this morning bro @Papusan

Yep! I sold the Zotac 5080 last night. I had a buyer for the 5080 Astral too, and I was going to buy GTZ’s 5090 Gaming OC for $3,000. But I decided, what the heck am I doing with my life right now lol… Let me just keep the 5080 Astral and be happy with it. It’s so tempting to jump on that 5090 though. But, I just don’t really need it. This hobby can be so unhealthy at times. All for the love of PC hardware. 😀 The 5080 Astral OC is awesome. So, it really started to grow on me. And trying to be responsible has taken over. Im over here twitching man, wanting that 5090 like a crack pipe. 😂 But I know after I get it, I’ll probably feel guilty and irresponsible.

https://hwbot.org/benchmarks/3dmark_-_steel_nomad_dx12/submissions/6030518 https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/158573928 RTX 3070 (October 2020) vs RTX 5060 (May 2025) - progress +1.0% https://www.3dmark.com/compare/sn/9354597/sn/14349068

Hey guys. There is a nifty new DDR5 tool available for free during beta. You can export a HWiNFO64 report as XML and import it, then analyze your settings. It will tell you what the recommended changes are per DDR5 standards. I loosened my tRC and tRAS based on what the program told me to change. Speeds and latency are still very good. [BETA] Memory Foundry Pro – RAM Stability Tester & Benchmark | Free Beta Access It also has a built-in benchmark tool.

Exactly why I kept my slightly less performant 5090 core with the Dual 12V2x6 connectors. I think it's almost guaranteed next gen high end will feature 2x of these connectors which is why most newer high end PSUs now feature 2x of them.

That $1k Zotac 5080 was all you needed in the here and now bro! I liked my overpriced Astral 5090, but it wasn't worth the $3399 I paid and remember it went back to BB on Day 59 of the 60 day return window for a good reason. The one I had was a 1.105 and I thought it was decent, but the $2064 open box Ventus was also 1.105v and matched it easily and the $1971 Vanguard 1.125v beat them both but you'll also remember I didn't care when buying because all I wanted was true MSRP. I hope you can return it because outside of aesthetics (I do love the way the Astrals look) and that monster cooler on the Astral 5090, I saved ~$1500 and ended up with a better card. Return it Block that Zotac $$$$ Win! I think I like the retro look because that really was in style back then. You would have to make the whole system retro to lock it in but it is $800 beans and in stock at Newegg. For $800 and aesthetics driving the narrative, I'd snag an open box Godlike or Apex for that price and pocket the difference. Unless there is true differentiation in features, it will be striking a balance between features and price. Greatest weight off my chest was returning that Astral 5090. Nvidia keeps hitting us with the shell game for raw performance uplift while tying to up sell us on DLSS/FG and whatever else they can use to boost performance without giving the middle and lower end of the market true performance leaps. Unfortunately it is hard for me to settle for nothing else but flagship models from either Nvidia or AMD especially with Nvidia and the performance delta between the 090 and 080 the last two generations has been so substantial. I'd like to say I'm going to skip the 6090, but if it provides a similar performance uplift (or more) over the 6080 like the 5090 over the 5080, this is me yet again: -------------------------------- Ah.... I mean, the Astral 5090 was perfection in so many ways except price. If you paid no more than ~$1300 for the Astral, I would keep it and sell the Zotac 5080 if possible depending on what the voltage and capability is on the Astral 5080. Where did the voltage top out? And yeah, that cooler is beefy AF. This generation, Suprim, Astral and Vanguard have the beefiest air coolers for the 5090s and they are behemoths.

I bought this Astral from a Reseller on Marketplace who is local to me. It was sealed in the box. After I handed them the money, I opened it right in the spot to just confirm it was legit. And it definitely was, so I grabbed it. It’s a very nice 5080 though! It’s actually starting to grow on me. 😬 uh oh. 😂 I do like the cooler on it. Man, it runs like 58c full tilt overclock with its default 450w bios. And auto fans. My Zotac 5080’s are pretty good but horribly inefficient idling on the desktop. As a matter of fact, both Zotac 5080’s I tested idled at 30-40 watts. This Astral idles at 10-13 watts. That 5090 cooler on this thing is the real deal.

It is certainly a matter of personal taste, maybe to some degree generational. I do not care for how it looks for the exact reason people that like it do like it. The copper, blue and white colors are why I do not care for it. I would prefer that everything would be black and not have any of the hokey LCD stuff on it. Some people may like it just for the element of novelty in a partially retro aesthetic, but I think modern motherboards are more aesthetically pleasing in general, unless you go with a naked PCB eyesore that has all of the components exposed. Those are universally ugly regardless of when they were made. When you go back to pre-X299 and Z390 days they were not particularly attractive components IMHO and they get progressively uglier as you go further back in years. Why are you selling it as like-new used instead of just returning it for a refund? Did you buy it from a place that has a customer-hostile return policy? I'm sorry you had to find out for yourself why @electrosoft and I have recommended against it buying the more expensive models. There is little or no reason for anyone to buy a more expensive 5080 or 5090 in terms of performance. There are some differences in quality, but they are minor compared to the inflated price of the models with modest differences that yield nothing in terms of performance. If you are going to put a waterblock on one, there is even less of a logical reason to pay for a more expensive model. Ignoring the substantial leap in performance for 5090 over 4090, NVIDIA 50-series GPUs in holistic terms are a pretty horribly overpriced alternative to 40-series in some ways. This is especially true of the SKUs below flagship XX90 models. A 3070 actually performs better than a 5060. The 5060 offers nothing outside of newer software features that NVIDIA made artificially incompatible with past generation hardware. That's inexcusable. But, post-COVID NVIDIA has become a very dishonest, despicable anti-customer company. Feature RTX 3070 (2020) RTX 5060 (2025) Architecture Ampere (8nm) Blackwell (5nm/4nm) CUDA Cores 5,888 3,840 Memory 8GB GDDR6 (256-bit) 8GB GDDR7 (128-bit) TDP 220W 145W DLSS Support DLSS 3.5 DLSS 4 (Multi-Frame Gen)

Agreed 100% Basic safety rules are always in effect (aka common sense). FYI, your sig configs are woefully out of date. Time to update!

I would 100% have called the police and filed a report. After I got into my car and grabbed his license plate. Can’t trust anyone these days. Too many local deals have turned deadly.

Good observation on the status of Ray Tracing: Not a sham, but the actual hardware chops required in raw power just haven't been delivered by Nvidia and many games don't even bother with it or give it token lip service. Feels like the long con from Nvidia to switch reliance to DLSS and FG.... Nevermind the VRAM regression or at the very least lack of progression considering its need for RT and PT.... -------------------------------------- Dude...... Good thing you know what you're looking for in these situations. Next time, tell them you will be testing it on the spot before purchase to weed out a lot of chuff even if that means lugging your son's desktop with you to a Starbucks, library, police safe trading zone, BNN or more to test it out. PCpartpicker shows the cheapest 5090 available right now in stock is $4200. With the market the way it is, any sub $3k deal has to be sus. Anyone who has a 5090 KNOWS it is valuable so selling it for cheap doesn't make sense. Not that it can't happen, but you have to protect yourself first. (HUGS $1971 MSI Vanguard 5090 1.125 Open Box MC special even harder while checking WV2 connections 🤣)

Just sold my other 5090 Suprim SOC yesterday. The card was actually better than my 5090 D HOF, but I prefer the uniqueness of the 5090 D HOF and the dual power connectors to protect the card. The extra 100Mhz on the core is cool, but meh, I just don't care anymore lol. I bought the 5090 Suprim around the excitement of the 800w Matrix vBIOS but in the end, I don't trust that much over the single cable and the card was barely used. Luckily for me the 5090 cards are insanely priced now and I was able to dump it locally for well above what I paid for it. I doubt were going to get a 5090 Ti, hell at this rate we might never see a 6090 lol. Either way, this generation has been pretty squeezed at this point and it's all pretty boring for me. I've gone back to just gaming and less worrying about my frame rates and tuning. It's a lot more fun lol. Battlefield 6 has been my main lately.

New BIOS from ASUS added new memory overclock settings (tCCD_L, tCCD_WR and tCCD_WR2) that basically seems do nothing whatsoever. BIOS 2304 seems OK for me. Changed "Auto" to the recommended 21-84-42 but found no change in performance noted using my daily driver settings. Haven't tested my max OC with the chiller, but I don't expect any change. I guess it must be better just because you can adjust new settings that do nothing. Kind of like a fidget toy for computer geeks.

They found it easier to make money screwing a quarter as many people four times worse per sale. As long as it looks fancy, or just plain goofy, and has RGB an idiot is going to buy it (likely using high interest credit) no matter how hard they are getting screwed. Form over function. Ice cream for all the kiddies.

All the more reason Intel is better off shifting towards a foundry only company.

I do think I’m probably going to shunt mod and waterblock this Zotac 5080. I been holding out hoping some magical 5090 deal comes along. But, I don’t think it’s going to happen.

I’m hopefully picking up an ASUS RTX 5080 Astral OC tomorrow for $1,300 cash. I’m going to try to negotiate a bit once I meet the guy. It’s about a 2 hr drive. But it’s an amazing deal. If the card is terrible for some odd reason, and not worthy over my Zotac Solid 5080, I can always sell the Astral 5080. Those 5080 Astrals are very nice. But new MSRP cost is CRAZY TALK!!! Edit: Anyone playing the game Crimson Desert? It’s actually really good.

I'd say all games benefit from frame gen, but the base framerate needs to be high enough that the latency between you moving your mouse and the action being reflected on the screen is low enough for the game to still feel responsive enough. This varies from person to person, and I'm on the high end, so I still need a base framerate in the hundreds for the game to feel responsive. The base framerate also needs to be high enough to minimize frame gen artifacts. Things start looking really wacky when you try interpolating to 300 fps while having a base framerate of only 15 fps.

I like the QHD option. I saw a FullHD option too on the 18" model but it was only for the 285hx as far as I could see. 9955HX3D would absolutely rip at 1080p but that resolution might be a bit too low. I'll have to put the Raider back on my list as it seems to check all the boxes. The one big hangup I had with it was potentially only having the 4k display option as I prefer QHD or FHD. Nice that MSI is selling directly through BB marketplace so you can get that 5% in rewards too. I figured you weren't going to go cold turkey across the board @Papusan! 🤣 I think that might be my first 5090FE burning up with the original tentacle. He seems to have been doing his due diligence too from leaving it plugged in even during GPU swaps to always giving it a check to make sure it was seated. Hmmm..... No one is safe from this catastrophe of a connector. If only he had invested in a Wireview Pro 2..... 🤣 Nice insight, thanks! (Looks over at shelf with extra Red Devil 9070xt sitting there bored).... I just need to find games I would play that really benefit from FG

Radeon cards are better for frame gen. Lossless Scaling likes them more due to Radeon's higher floating point compute power vs their GeForce equivalents at all performance tiers, which is very important for frame gen performance. This also explains why Radeon cards perform significantly better with Minecraft shaders vs their GeForce equivalents. Both tasks are dependent on floating point performance. So the best setup for dual GPU in games is Radeon + Radeon if your games favor AMD GPUs, or Nvidia + Radeon if your games favor Nvidia GPUs. In either case, the optimal frame gen GPU is going to be a Radeon GPU.

How are things going Brother @Papusan? This song is for you, bro. Listen to and read the words.

So I may try another 5080 model for fun. I sent the Newegg Zotac 5080 Solid Core OC back today. If I could find a white Astral 5080, or maybe the Aorus Extreme WB model for not crazy prices. I had so much fun testing these two 5080’s. Maybe a Giga Master OC 5080. 🥹 @electrosoft the higher voltage card, my original Zotac was the better overclocker in the end. It was weird, on paper the low voltage card looked great at first showing crazy high clocks idle, low power consumption. But under an actual load, the other one would clock higher in actual games, score higher in benches, and it was more stable. Weirdly enough, it also ran cooler by 2c at least. They even had totally different color thermal pads and all. Maybe that had something to do with it. You could see the pads from the side of the cards. One had solid black pads, the other had light gray pads.

I went with the #1= AMD 9950X3D2 (Mouth watering expensive), #2= ASUS X870E Dark Hero (This is the new Hero board with better PCIe release, it was an open box “Excellent” $559. This “Hero Dark” is absolutely NOT worth the regular retail of $699.99 for a Hero board.. 😂 I learned Ryzen is not exactly memory limited from the board with ram, so this swayed me away from the Apex X870 which had a few missing key features that I’d really like to have like 40Gbs USB-c), and finally #3= the (2x16GB) Corsair Dominator Titanium Z30 6000c30 kit. I sourced the kit else where at a much much better price though. I wanted to explain my reasoning behind wanting the Dominator Titanium “Z30” kit. I did some research, and these sticks overclock VERY VERY well. So, this had me intrigued and they were like half the price of the normal MSRP on BestBuy. Also, the very main REASON WAS! The cooling is actually good on these Dominator Titanium rams, I was not planning to water cool my dimms right away. And I know what ram temps are like on DDR5 and getting errors due to temps. I remember my Bdie Dom Platz OCed well, and ran very cool! These should run even cooler. So much back and forward wanting a 270KP, then a regular 9950X3D, then a 14900K or KS, then maybe a 9850X3D. I just said F it… Let’s try AMD, I would like heavy lifting power outside of gaming, and X3D capability as well. Since I do not have a 9850X3D or a 9950X/9950X3D etc; the 9950X3D2 made the most sense in my mind. 😀

His better bin did 8200 so he's looking for 8400+ so good luck. Sugi's 8800 binned unicorn is bonkers good. Also another reason I was hesitant over his delidded one for sale with F&F..... Tempting with the delidded heatsink and offset mount, but not for $800 and SP117. Seems like a good dude, though that loves hardware so +1 on that. Hmmmm, I might have to give the Noctua a whirl then. I've been using my LF II 420 for years now and it gets it done and has held its own against just about everything I've thrown it against so far but it's Noctua! I know Nova is going to be beast.... I'd really go with the G.Skill C26 from Amazon if you're going to be paying that much from BB for those or at least the sticks quoted from @Talon unless you have a crapton of reward points saved up or want/need to use BB credit instead. I also think the 9850X3D is the smart move too. Like you said, you're not into extreme OC'ing anymore. I think you've come back down to my level where I tune and apply a modest OC but everything I do is tuned around D2D stability. You still run custom water though which is nice.

Yeah it’s very tough these days. 5080‘s are taking over lol. Too many of THEM! I did think about grabbing a PREMO 5080 to play with. Maybe an Astral or Master. Newegg has a $240 off promo on the Aorus Master ICE 5080. But that Astral looks great! Would like to try a 1.125v card, and see how that performs. Was thinking if I’m going to ride out on 5080, let’s make it a premium 5080. If you do sell your 5090 that’s it. These prices are insanity trying to grab another. I scour the internet everyday. Microcenter for $3,499+ Tax is probably the best bet for a Gaming OC 5090. That is an insane price you paid! It really is. The AI community has just hammered the 5090’s. It would be great if some sort of forced update crippled the 5090’s performance in AI. Maybe where if an AI workload is detected it only sees 8GB VRAM or something. 😂 I’m looking at eBay flooded with coreless cards and I’m shocked how GPU’s even got here. Could someone tell me what they think about this motherboard? I really like it!

If the rumors are true, we will get a "remastered" 3060, LOL. Maybe instead of 6090 we will get a 4060 in 2027 for those that that want an updated downgrade. If the 3060 rumor is true it will be interesting to see how hard they screw everyone on the cost of a "remastered" 3060. Interesting concept that obsolete mid-range products might become the de facto standard, but likely at a much high cost of acquisition. So, we should probably be expecting around $750 for this, unless you get it on eBay, in which case it will be $1200. If it sounds like I am full of pi$$ and vinegar that is because that is exactly what we are being served, along with a side of feces.