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We are a very small, tight knit community that started as a cast off from the original NBR forums which were already dying to the point they shut them down in totality. Those forums at one point were so large and influential that representatives from the major laptop makers would frequent them on the regular for interaction and feedback but with changing market conditions, social media and other means of delivery coupled with niche and specialized laptops dying out and being replaced with thin fast and cheap laptops the writing was on the wall. You can't blame laptop makers for this as they simply go where the $$$ is and the vast majority of consumers have zero desire to tinker with their laptops and just want them to work, with good battery life and be light and portable. Every year, we saw true DTRs dying off and those original representatives basically abandoning NBR till all that was left was Clevo and their last somewhat true DTR based on desktop chips was their 12th gen hybrid 15.6" model (Clevo NH55) which did poor enough to signal the end of DTR anything as we knew it with interchangeable CPUs and GPUs. The first real death stroke was Nvidia basically abandoning MXM and upgradeability standards. ----- A community such as this is only as good as the enthusiasts who still have a passion for some older hardware and many of those, myself included, have moved onto more modern laptops because all the modding in the world will not approach the power modern models provide. The best you can do with modern laptops is look for models that at least have or offer the possibility of flexible BIOS so you can at least tune your hardware. Prema still offers his BIOS services on some models commercially followed by MSI which still has their excellent unlockable BIOS options. Dell/Alienware does offer some limited options as does Asus. You can also look to make mods to the actual cooling system itself from something as basic as upgrading the thermal interface material to modding the actual heatsink and fans themselves along with the chassis to improve air flow. Good luck!

Hello everyone! Do you want to upgrade your old laptop MXM GPU? But you can't since the newest RTX Turing, Ampere and Ada aren't working with your eDP display? I have the solution for you! The backlight mod to enable eDP display for your MXM card! Finally the mystery was resolved on why these cards don't display in our eDP laptops. Every cards from Turing to Ada generation, from brands like Aetina, Adlink, PNY, ZRT, Enbik and X-Vsion will work with this mod! What was the issue with these cards then? They were all lacking 3 essential pins. These pins are used to power on the panel. They are called backlight pins! Without them, your screen stays black, even if you have eDP or DP signal in the right video port. The solution: Making a solder-less mod, a flex FPC cable that allows to power the 3 backlight pins with ease! Version 1 manufactured (out of stock, finished). New: Version 2 manufactured and available! The 3 backlight pins are set in 23, 25 and 27 pins of the MXM slot and the MXM card. What we're trying to do is to power the backlight pins using the 3.3V from the pins 278 and 280, that's it! The flex cable is going to be insulated and will be able to handle high temperatures! I'll use double-sided insulated tape for the back side of the backlight pins, to secure the installation. Where can I get one? You can purchase them online, I'll even give a PDF file for instructions. https://ebay.io/m/4vy02C We can finally have an RTX 4080 or an RTX 4090 in the master slot of the MXM and output thru the main eDP display! Clevo P870 with dual RTX 4090? P570WM with an RTX 4090?! P775 with an RTX 3080 Ti?! Will work with (for MXM slot that allows eDP or DP on DP_D and cards that lack the backlight pins) RTX A3000, A5000, A5500 (XVSION), RTX 3060, RTX 3070, RTX 3070 TI, RTX 3080, RTX 3080 Ti (ZRT, X-VSION, Enbik) RTX 4050, RTX 4060, RTX 4070, RTX 4080, RTX 4090 (ZRT, X-VSION, Enbik) RTX 3500 Ada (Aetina), RTX 5000 Ada (Aetina), RTX A4500, RTX 3000, RTX 4000, RTX 5000 (Aetina, PNY, Adlink) (Tell me if I forgot some cards) Brightness native control works only in my P570WM with 4080 and 4090 if the vbios is set to eDP out. Sleep mode and saving modes work. New: The brightness will work on other laptops using the backlight mod v2 PWM module. Working on: Alienware M17X R4 120Hz (PURE-UEFI) Dell Precision M6700, M4700 (PURE-UEFI, NO OPROM LEGACY) Dell Precision M6800 and M4800 eDP version, Dell Precision 7710 and 7720 Clevo P570WM3, Clevo P775, Clevo P870, Clevo X170 Potentially Potentially could work on HP ZBOOK G5 17 and HP ZBOOK G6 17 Disclaimer, Requirements! - This mod can work with laptops that have the eDP set to DP_D and has the backlight pins assigned in 23, 25 and 27 pins in the slot - The BIOS of the laptop shouldn't have any whitelist - The BIOS should be in pure-UEFI - You need to have an eDP display that supports DP 1.1-1.2 (2011-2013 laptops) at least for RTX Ampere and Ada GPU - You need to install/edit EDID data for RTX 4080 and 4090 from X-VSION/ZRT Because the VBIOS set the DP_D eDP to disabled and which results to a non-PnP data being initialized everytime you start the laptop ___________________ After a lot of research and some testing with soldering, that's the conclusion to the solution! Thank you!

For the past 6+ years I have used my own desktop PCs for work and now I will be using a company-issued turdbook for work. I repurposed my dual Acer 4K 160Hz panels for the work PC since I will be needing the massive screen real estate for work. I grabbed a 40" Samsung Odyssey G75F 5120x2160 180Hz WUHD monster on sale at Micro Center for $638 (model LS40FG75DENXZA) and it seems pretty great so far. It doesn't like the 4090 and neither does my ASUS 4K 120Hz monitor. I have to lower the resolution to not have a BIOS or Windows Boot Manager black screen (same problem using the ASUS screen with 4090) when using DisplayPort. Something about 40-series firmware and high refresh rate 4K on DisplayPort is glitchy. There are many examples of people complaining about this online. Using HDMI 2.1 it functions flawlessly. The 5090 doesn't care whether I use DisplayPort or HDMI.

We opened this forum so that it can be a soft landing pad for those who still surfed those forums could still mingle. Personally I wanted to keep in contact with those of like mind in hobbies that I also enjoy. Forums have become fragmented over time especially for laptops as manufacturers become more and more locked down both on software and hardware. The identity of the forum may change over time as a result. That being said we are able to keep the forum relatively light in cost so as a result we are comfortable keeping it alive effectively forever. You can always PM me if you have questions or concerns I do try to be as fair as possible in moderating.

The main problem is, that this community has rather few members and not everyone left is tinkering around with their laptops anymore. Like me for example. Normally, i only login once a week, because there is not much interesting activity. This is not, what NoteBookReview once was. Unfortunately. In addition, there are not many models on the market available, that can be used for modding. Almost none with current hardware. Which makes such a forum really difficult to maintain.

Hey everyone! Still rocking the same system. My 5090 has been strong! Hard to think its already been 8 months since I got it. 6 months of that has been shunted for 1200w. It has been getting rung out hard though. I essentially lost interest in talking about this hobby and just been using it for work/gaming daily. 😆Something has pulled me back in to talking about the hobby though. I suppose I needed a break from the daily PC discussion lol. On another note, tonight I flashed my Acer Predator 4090 18" laptop to some random unverified Asus 4090 Laptop bios from techpowerup, and this thing picked up tons more performance. I am able to pull 175w steady in games, I could never do that before, usually 150-160w before. So, I checked my bios, and apparently my bios was the 1215Mhz clock/ 1590 Boost. And the bios I flashed to now is a 1590 clock/ 2040 boost. My GPUz said mine was a 175W bios, so thats why I never tried this before. So, I flashed out of curiosity. And it's just blowing the doors off of the prior bios that was on this Acer Predator. I am not really sure why. But I can run another +250Mhz on the core. It is really odd. Anyways, hello everyone!

The stock voltage is 1.15v and the stock power is 600w. The XOC vBIOS is publicly available on tech power up and is 2001w, which further unlocks voltage and memory another +1000 over other 5090s. Some nice individual over at OC.net PM'd me the extra special HOF tool for even further voltage, LLC, and switching period control. Basically the same as the old KingPin tools. Ordered the HOF 5090D IceMan waterblock on AliExpress. Figured the card is pretty rare and any future owner will def. want the ability to put it under water to take advantage of the voltage and power limits.

Just scored a 980Ti for 50 bucks on ebay. Not really anything to write home about, except that it appears the owner was not aware that it came equipped with the morpheus 2 aftermarket heatsink which can't be sourced for anything less than 250-500. Obviously not going to spend that much on just a heatsink so I'm quite happy with the purchase. It's going to be a busy winter this year :)

I do! I'll snag a picture when I get home :)

What's up everyone! I am sorry I have been away for awhile. I am trying my hand at YT and hopefully build a large enough following to get sponsored by a CNC maker or continue to build my reserve to buy one. I haven't had the urge to upgrade any of my PC's to the latest and greatest (although I am thinking about the 9950X3D). I came across some local listings on a 5090, that weren't exactly deals (used, still above MSRP). The days of great used hardware prices are dead - people want 80 to 110% of their purchase price, and with new cards closing in on their MSRP's, I don't know who is buying used at these prices. I think that if Intel releases the B770 and it's under $400, I'll pounce on that card. I only need something good enough for video editing and CAD. I hope you and your families are doing well. I'm back here fully, doing my normal lurking.

I had some time to play with the threadripper platform and tried a PBO with scalar 2x and -10 on all 96 cores, went from 119k to over 153k 😄 But the second try it shutdown 🤣 Still have the 1200w PSU 1U inside that the case came with so i think this is the weak link..i need to mode the case, cut it so i can add Bquiet 1200w ATX PSU titanium but dont have the time for the work right now

Getting 1,000+ FPS is something I have never experienced before. Below is Ark Ascended doing just that on all low settings and 1080P. 6000c26 with 65k tREFI, all tuned to the max with 2167fclk. My son took a picture of me with my phone while I was in the bios breaking things (So posting it here! lol. 😂 )

Sometimes this is why I love this hobby. O it's no supposed to work Intel? Lets see about that.

Maybe someday I can be bothered with Memory tuning, but its not going to be today, or tomorrow, or the day after :) I enjoy overclocking to yield tangible gains in gaming. Looks like PCIe Bifurcation works on my Aorus ITX x570. That being said I had to scrunch up the ribbon cables so much for the test that I think it was rendered non-functional. The 7900 XTX wouldnt show up at all and the 3090Ti was misbehaving quite severely reporting the link at PCIE 2.0 But it POSTed! so thats progress of a sorts. Got a shorter ribbon (60mm) so hopefully that works i'll test this weekend.

Grab it before its too late😁 Remember its an limited edition. MSI RTX 5090 Lightning Z GPUs listed on eBay for almost $27,000 — limited edition graphics card demands 500% premium from resellers As you can see... The world is filled with stupids. I'm sure there is some out ther that are willing to pay $27K for the Lightning.

https://www.overclock.net/posts/29562444/ What grade are you in? Are your classmates really mean to you, or is it a parenting issue?

While I missed the boat on the best pricing for 8000MT+ RAM, I am happy I spent the 150 to 180 for each of the nine 4TB NVMe SSDs I got over 2025. I went nuts on the Acer GM7000 SSDs. I did a quick calculation, I have over 100TBs in SSDs (spread across 8TB, 4TB, 2TB and 1TB drives) in operation. If I were to buy them in today's prices, I'd have to spend over 30K. Damn! I guess being a frugal data hoarder has it benefits once in awhile.

I've applied for a lot of jobs I am ideally suited for and could do with my eyes closed that have not worked out. Ageism is illegal, but it is more real than anyone wants to admit. I have one that looks even better that I have my third interview for today that I pray works out and it would probably end up being the best one I have applied for. The one that looked promising that you referred to is not off the table, but the President wanted to see how how the financials looked for 2025 and how January revenue looks before adding a new c-suite resource to staff. On the WireView Pro... when you get around to it, this screenshot might be useful if you run into any complications getting Windows to correctly identify it. I think the key is manually installing the driver in Device Manager, immediately powering off and unplugging the PSU long enough for the board and everything attached to lose power. It appears there was some sort of delivery failure. I replied and it shows to have been sent, but you evidently cannot see the reply on your end. Thanks for checking on me, brother. I really appreciate it.

Happy New Year everyone.

Merry Christmas, everyone. Blessings to all of you.

Merry Xmas and happy holidays to all! It bit funny and ironic we just talked about your adventures with Best Buy.....good luck! Two observations on the yellow tip again: If it were black, you wouldn't be able to see even the mild scorch marks. Companies should start including these in white or yellow for clear visibility of scorching. I still suspect there are plenty of black connectors out there already with scorch marks. You just can't see them. The bottom row strikes again with the weaker, [ ] design which I posit is susceptible to physical stress and speeds up the cycle as they are heated up and in conjunction with the physical stress are pulled ever so slightly open making them even more susceptible. --- These connectors really should not be physically stressed at all and the weaker the design (like MSI's bottom row array) the more the stress can cause meltdowns in conjunction with migrating imbalance of amps over time for various reasons.

Merry Christmas to all my extended family in this thread!!! Now, I am in a bit of a dilemma. Bestbuy has the Prime 5070 TI for $749.99, brand new. I just spent that on the "Like New" card from Amazon. I am going to cancel the card from Amazn and begrudgingly buy from Bestbuy. Here goes nothing....

So I ended up snagging a pair of V-Color 9600 2x24GB DDR5 off of eBay new from a seller I've dealt with before In today's market conditions, couldn't beat the price of $489.99 plus I had two coupons for eBay (basically, "you haven't shopped us in a long time!" coupons) for $15 off and $10 off respectively. I was able to use both of them knocking it down to $464.99 for a total of $495.80 shipped and with ebay rewards, that knocks another $15 off of it making it $480.92 to my door. Am I doing backflips? No, but much better than those G.Skill sticks that would have been $650.40 to my door.....still..... This is *exactly* why I try to avoid new platforms because once I start it gets ugly real fast. 🤣 Remember 11th gen? I was just going to pick up a 11700k and the cheapest Z590 board and use my dirt cheap DDR4 sticks to "give it a whirl." Within 4 months, it is several 11900k's binned, Asus Z590 board and EVGA Z590 along with multiple kits of DDR4.... I'd like to say I won't end up binning some 285k/290k chips, but that would be most likely a big ole fib....🤣

Regarding 5090, still have some telegram bots reporting new drops and prices, yesterday was a founders 5090 drop from nvidia directly on their website for 2099 Euro. Got the notification and went on the site. Got one in the shopping cart but after like 5 minutes of thinking if I need it, I decided to close the website. Every game I play like battlefield 6 or stalker 2 works perfectly on the 4090. So it just a waste of money for me. Also went to the website like almost 40 min later and they were still available, tried to put one again in the cart and it went through, I was against one click to order it and closed again. So it looks like the market is saturated a little. Also got this baby to play with. Nice looking card😃. An oldie but still packing a punch with those 32GB HBM2 memory for larger AI models. Will try some qwen 2.5 and Llama bigger ones on it

Sold my Z890 Apex and 285K to @win32asmguy Paid for and shipped to them this afternoon.

I haven't uploaded a video in a long time. Now that I finally found stable settings I wanted to save a permanent record for myself and help anyone else that feels like they are spinning their wheels. Moving from Intel to AMD overclocking is more difficult than moving from Windoze to Linux. Maybe (just maybe) there is something in here that would be useful to Brothers @jaybee83 or @Raiderman

A little preview of what I'm building next Sage 621e

Sometimes I feel like I make the worst decisions. Found this card brand new from a small shop in Florida.

So I finally have a formal staycation lined up for christmas time, first time in maybe 6 years...So naturally I have some work lined up lol 2x GTX 690 w/ accelero xtreme 1x ATi HD 5870 w/ accelero xtreme 2x GTX 280's (1x w/ accelero xtreme) 2x 9800 GTX's w/ accelero xtreme (Having to modify, doesnt line up perfectly) 2x ATi HD 5970's (1x accelero xtreme) 1x AMD R9 280X TRI-X 1x AMD R9 390X TRI-X 1x ATi 4870x2 Reference 1x GTX 295 Dual PCB 1x GTX 970 MSi Gaming 1x RTX 3090Ti 1x 7900 XTX Red Devil (Never Finished) 1x GTX 1060 3GB (Reference) I might pick up a few more GPU's if the price is right. Thanks to @Mr. Fox's writeup I'll likely start to pick up some of the water cooling equipment so I can put the 7900 XTX and 10850K (also courtesy of The Fox!) under water and get a bench built around that next to my Daily Driver. Luckily I am still working more than I sleep so picking these parts up should be more than plausible... If you guys have any 3rd party heatsinks for older cards feel free to reach out, I seem to have a fascination with accelero xtremes :)

Hahaha, the PRO 7995wx is good even Overkill for what is needed it but it was an offer i cannot refuse😆😆. Was in holiday and didnt have time for it. Still need to optimize and rearange Cables inside, got a 9100 Pro2 TB for that Pcie gen 5. Need more ram and also gpus. Ignore the gtx1050 , it's only for tests. I will need to get an riser 90 degree to fit the gpu inside. But I love the mainboard, Asrock wrx90 ws evo, went with it because the other wrx90 is from Asus and I despise them. More expensive as the asrock and full of problems .Reddit and forums are full of them. STUPID Asus wants over 1k euro for that mainboard and still cannot make it work. The Asrock is incredible, so many options, bulid like a tank, a lot of connectivity, bmc remote management is superb. And it booted and did the whole diagnostic and memory training in under 3 minutes. That's good for a complicated platform like the threadripper.I love it. Use case it will be my homelab brain. Will run a gazillion VMs because Cores are plenty and I will also start Local AI training. Still need to decide on gpus..maybe I will get some Rtx A series ore Rtx Ada for it.

*** Here is a praise post to offset the many (often justifiable) complaints we see posted in social media. *** I have been a NewEgg customer for about 25 years. In spite of some of the horror stories, I have never once, that I can recall, had a bad experience with them in spite of hundreds of purchases. My Z890 Apex was $549.99 with a $269.99 Crucial E100 2TB NVMe included as a "free gift" not a combo sale. It shows that way on the invoice. They are priced separately and the $269.99 deducted as a "discount" on the invoice. I received my order on Tuesday of this week. The Z890 Apex is now available for $399.99. The customer service AI bot told me it was not eligible for price match because it was a combo. I spoke to a rep after the bot said no. The rep saw the issue and issued me a $150 refund in the form of a NewEgg gift card. No begging or arguing. He said it was not a combo, it was a free gift (agreed with me) and is eligible for the price match because it was within the 7-day time window.

I recently acquired a 2024 Asus G14 as my 2020 G14 has been folding itself in half since it got crushed in my accident (it's gotten really bad now). I know I've said I hate Asus with all of my guts, but this particular laptop popped up for super, super cheap all because the glass over the screen has a hardly noticeable hairline crack in it... and I just like the form factor of the G14 from a mobile x86 device standpoint :handsup:. Yet again, I can safely say I've never purchased a brand new laptop lol. I'll be making a write up on it shortly because it's a strange device and the way mobile processors and GPUs work now is very confusing from a tuning standpoint. There are too many moving targets now, and I don't know how to hit all of them yet, but I know given enough time and insight that I'll be able to hit all of them. The learning process has been quite fun. The bloat was horrific though. Luckily it is saved by G-Helper, which is also another factor of why I wasn't entirely opposed to getting another Asus device. Getting rid of the cancer is tough, but once you eliminate it, you never have to look back with G-Helper. I was able to break some HWbot records that I saw over there, so here soon I'll go and steal the (hopefully) entire leaderboard for the 8945hs. I also plan on 3D-printing a case for the 2020 G14 to turn it into a portable desktop for a family member. Once I do that, I plan on stealing the leaderboard for the 4800hs. Luckily there's a lot of crazy software out there to torture the mobile Zen 2 CPUs. Rant:

Well, now this is a nice new feature added to the latest update of Winaero Tweaker. Does the same thing as the script I have been adding to the right-click menu. Just check the box and it's ready to use. Very awesome.

I think the vBIOS has to support it. If it does not that might be why there are no examples of it having been done on numerous other video cards rather than just a select few.

Not sure if it'd work on other mobos, but i bet there is a generic tool out in the wild somewhere. What happened to memory prices? Chip shortage? I've a brand new unopened 2x16gb Trident Z5 6000mhz rgb kit, and feel extremely wealthy! 🤣

I started having weird little freezes with my main rig about a month ago. I caught the flu and was down for the count for 10 days and did not care about my computer, but getting back to D2D usage and just very random little issues. On the 17th the errors went into full tilt hardware errors overdrive: That was when I pulled my 5090 to swap into my Ultra rig and it had no problems and my main rig "calmed down" a bit without the 5090 in there. Still, something was up. Pulled out good 'ole AIDA full suite stress test, no problems. Pulled out OCCT and ran extreme tests on every sub system no problems. Ran OCCT combined extreme and started getting random errors every different run within 5-60 seconds: "VRAM failed," "GPU failed," "memory failed" and even "CPU failed". Each run was a crap shoot which error I would get so I was pretty sure it was the EVGA P2 1600w that was slowly failing and then suddenly took a turn for the worse. Installed the MSI AI1600T tonight and combined passed with flying colors. As a checksum, hooked the EVGA P2 1600w to the Ultra Rig with the 9070xt and OCCT combined crashed and burned on it too with the 9070xt. Bonus was seeing transients on the 9070xt hitting 600w+..... Getting the AI1600T couldn't have come at a better time.... EVGA P2 1600w has a 10 year warranty so it will be interesting to test the "new" EVGA for an RMA.....might as well get an RMA for a dead/dying K20 keyboard I have in the closet too from them. wasn't worth the postage to send it back but combined with the PSU probably worth the round trip.I tossed one of their wireless mice that just died a bit ago. Shoulda held onto it to toss in there too for an RMA...... Wife's EVGA K20 keyboard is still going strong and she beats the crap out of that thing playing WoW..... MSI AI1600T is gorgeous.....too bad you'll never see it in this Phanteks case. Good thing is switching to a single 12v2x6 run and the way the cables are thinner and braided meant easier runs and management. It has a USB-C to USB connector to the MB, but you need to run MSI Center Bloatware to access the features and yeah, no thank you. I'll use it as is. Almost in final boss form ( need to make a few cuts to the brackets for the DDR5 fan): ----------------------- Yeah, that was a pleasant surprise on the Ultra when running the original MSI octopus connector directly vs through the WVP2. I'll take every bit of coil whine reduction I can get. Definitely going to go back to 800w Matrix as my daily vs just testing but I also want to test the 1000w Lightning. Nothing wrong with the gigachad, but I'm leaving a lot of the 1.125v cap on my card on the table with the 600w variants. One thing I learned during the Pandemic was to scroll on by comments and positions that make zero sense. Better for your mental health. Politics? Religion? Absolutely stupid takes on tech? Scroll Scroll Scroll! I feel bad for family and friends that sit on forums and social media for hours on end just arguing. You won't walk away feeling better and you will carry that luggage with you for an indeterminate amount of time. Most forums and groups I quietly extract nuggets of useful information and absolutely refuse to engage in any type of flame wars. It's just not worth it. I didn't join OCN till 4-5 years ago, so I have no idea what it was like during its heyday. I am not. I'll have to give it a whirl. I'll have to check, but outside of outliers that heavily favor X3D (IE Fallout 76), Arrowlake is solid at 4k IMHO. I was a little bummed they cancelled the 290k. I was tempted to pick up that nice 285k over on the OCN forums that is delidded and 9200 C40 certified to play with.... Arrowlake felt a touch like Rocket Lake and almost a prototype calm before the big storm coming. I'm expecting big things at the end of the year from Intel. At least almost all of the XOC bios files are out in the wild now to play with so that's a plus....unless you're an FE owner or an Asus/Suprim AIO owner. As for the 9070xt? Marketshare tells us if given a choice, gamers will pick Nvidia all day everyday still but with 5070ti prices through the roof, 9070xt is viable....if priced properly. All the market conditions in the world won't force gamers to exceed a certain price point. I knew the writing was on the wall when Newegg started lowering their 9000 series prices a few weeks ago. Either lower the prices or get stuck with a glut considering 9000 series has been on the market for almost a year and 5000 series for over a year. Many who wanted them have bought them. Same theory applies to ram prices. You can jack up the prices all you want, but all I'm seeing is plenty of stock, eBay kits priced lower than the MSRP ones not moving and Newegg and MC now offering bundle deals. Nevermind the price of many things overall has gone up in this economy. Comparing my grocery price history today vs a few years ago and it's a bloodbath. Comparing many items on subscription on Amazon and prices are up easily 10-15% overall if not more. Prices in restaurants is so outrageous now and/or shrinkflation we eat at home now or do pick up orders to avoid a savage 20%-23% "recommended" tip (remember when 15% was considered generous?) Good times!

I sure hope so (return of Intel and back to HEDT and more PCIe lanes). This has been the longest amount of time I have ridden an AMD donkey. It is the first time the experience was respectable and not plagued with functionality issues, yet with overclocking being my primary source of computer satisfaction it feels so lackluster, mediocre, subdued and limiting in comparison to what I had grown used to with Intel. I've also heard some very bad things (like no longer having "unlimited" power and current options in the firmware) and want to see how those things shake out before calling it a win for Intel. My start date for the new job is 2/23. I'm excited about that. My 90-day unpaid "vacation" has been a real test of faith. As an added blessing, (thank you Lord,) it will be a compensation upgrade, so as long as the new Intel prices are not too off the rails NVIDIA-level stupid and the performance rumors turn out to be true I will likely be looking to make the move back to Team Blue. I'm not going to shoot until I see the whites of their eyes. In an era where lying and misrepresentation are normal marketing tactics, early adoption isn't very smart. Since Linux developers seem to not be hardware junkies and early adopters, it usually takes a while for Linux support to surface as well. Since Micro$lop Windoze is no longer my OS of choice that also needs to be looked at before leaping. I fully expect that there will be no driver support for Windoze 10 and the feces OS (Winduhz 11 ) will likely be the only OS supported. One step forward, two steps backward.

Not everyday I see the editors/writers from Pcworld use their brain. If you buy Razer’s insane $1337 mouse, I will be very disappointed in you I remember the first time I bought a Razer mouse. Inside the box was a letter printed on fancy vellum paper. It opened with, “Welcome to the cult of Razer.” It appears that this isn’t just a cheeky marketing slogan, Razer means it genuinely. Because only brainwashed cult members would pay $1337 for a mouse. It is, in a word, repugnant. In a more accessible word, it’s greedy. In a more all-encompassing and entirely appropriate word, the Razer Boomslang 20th Anniversary Edition is bullshit. Razer is taking pre-orders for the mouse in four days. If you buy one, and I want you to imagine this in the most overbearing and judgmental dad voice possible, I will be very disappointed in you.

The least they could do is pretend they love us and say nice things while they are choking us and pulling our hair.

Hey Guys! On the z490-h for now until the replacement motherboard arrives. I have also acquired the GPU risers to split the x16 lane into x8 so I can do 2 GPU's off the single lane via bifurcation. 3090Ti will be coming out of retirement to some degree for Lossless Scaling but in the interim I did test it conceptually with the 3090Ti as raster and the 1080Ti as Frame Gen. Seems to work pretty well in the couple of titles that I have tested. Allegedly you dont want the Raster GPU to be fully saturated as it increases the time it takes to send the frames to the secondary GPU. Honestly I am pretty surprised how well it worked given the software's price point. Main game I have tested were Monster Hunter Wilds and Borderlands 4 both games have piss poor engines. I was able to hit 120 FPS in both, B4 did crash a couple of times but I was mucking with the settings as that game cant run without some Scaling or FG. I did also try Horizon: Forbidden West but I should have to the DLC area as its more GPU intensive. For people that dont want to pony up the cash for new GPU's I think this may be a viable option on the table much in the way SLI/Xfire used to be for me in the old days. Nvidia still pisses me off though. If I install 591 driver, 1080Ti doesnt work, If I install latest driver for 1080Ti (581) then the 3090Ti doesnt work. I have to let windows install 560 in order for both to work until I figure out another way to go about it.

I can smell it, too. This gal lets a Jensen in the car. Or, is it a Nadella? They smell the same. And, I can feel it.

It is definitely overclocking season - I am about to take my new purchase (yes, I went the dumb BGA route and got a 275HX/5090 Lenovo 7i Pro laptop) into the snow. I got a great deal on it with 64GB of 6400MT RAM. I kept haggling with the seller and he kept coming back - 64GB of laptop RAM cost around 500 to $600. However, I got it for the price of 2800 (before taxes), my max budget. I am hoping I can sell my old 7i (11980HK/3080 (16GB VRAM) 32GB of DDR4 RAM) for around 800 to $1000 to offset the cost. February is the best time to sell things, because people are going to be spending their returns. My area is projected to get around 21 inches of snow - at 5F (-15C), with a wind chill of -10F (-23.33C). @Papusan I know this snowy weather is tame compare to what you have, but us people (well most) in the Northeast are celebrating. We haven't had snow like this in years, normally our max is 12 inches of snow.

There are some new ones for just $431 on Amazon right now. I hope you get a good one! I actually had to return an Apex to Amazon for absolutely shit tier memory OC. I learned it's definitely possible to get a bad binned board, something I had not experienced before. I really want Intel to drop the ARL Refresh in January since I have vacation and will have time to tinker and bin. But I saw a rumor of a March release which to me is just wild. Why would they drop a new CPU refresh, about 6-9 months before Nova Lake. But maybe the rumor I saw of a fixed IO is the reason. If Intel actually fixed the IO, then we might actually see the latency fixed and there could be significant gains. The rumors of 10-30% gaming gains could be true then. If they fixed gaming that much without huge cache, then Nova Lake with this fix and huge cache could be an absolute monster.

All of my 32GB ECC DDR4 are in use, unfortunately. I do have one W-1290 server that I only turn on once per month with 128GB of 2933MT/s RAM (32GB x4) that doesn't particularly need that much RAM. I only purchased that much RAM to max out the server. They are UDIMMs though. The crazy part is the price for them didn't change. I paid around $850 for the two kits around three to four years ago. They cost the same now. I am starting to realize I only buy RAM during shortages...LOL.

Isn't it infuriating when the bias is clear in these videos for CPU comparisons? Either run default vs default EXPO vs XMP based on actual AMD/Intel speeds or take the time to properly test and OC each platform with similar levels of overclocking. I'm fine either way, but be consistent. The problem is 99% of viewers won't go over the fine print or even care. They run right to the results and move along. One reason I still watch FrameChasers and especially BlackBirdTech is they push max tuning on each so you can actually see the end product if both are OC'd within reason to gather some data for your own analysis.

The new Threadripper CPU’s are so awesome, been doing some reading on those lately. They have improved IPC so much so, that I do not think it’d be even worth picking up a prior gen Threadripper 7960/7970/7980. This is how the new chips stack up in Cinebench. TR 9960X CB R23: 59,000 stock TR 9970X CB R23: 77,000 stock TR 9980X CB R23: 113,000 stock (People with custom loops are overclocking 9980X 64/128 chips to 5.5Ghz on all cores which is just pure insane to imagine how crazy that is and how over the top beastly) Apparently the 9970X is the sweet spot. Now here’s where it gets interesting. These chips can run fast DDR5. People were already pushing DDR5 6200-7000 with the older 7960x/7970x/7980x. The new Threadripper 9000’s run DDR5 6400 natively and apparently the IMC is worlds better. And they can easily handle DDR5 7200 right out of the box. Tuning will probably net you closer DDR5 8000 or more. What a shame DDR5 prices have gone hay wire. Anyways, AMD Threadripper is sick.

@jaybee83 It's a gv100. It's a loaner from a friend so I will just use it for some experiments with LLMs for a while 😀. don't want to broke it as it's still going for good money on ebay.🫣

That Matrix GPU is only good so others can use the vBIOS. The price is extremely stupid and I think it looks stupid, too. 🤣 I have gone pee in my own backyard before. When you have a family of 7 and 3 bathrooms, there are times when you just can't hold it any longer. Now that we are down to 2 people at home (empty nesters) and 2 bathrooms I have not found myself needing to do that for a long time.

That's beautiful and...AND plenty of space for more GPUs to go up on the wall.... 😍