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Both GPU’s are even at 99% And that’s 4090 VS. 7900XTX? Wow, literally.

Only thing good so far about the Apex Encore is the PCH temp ran substantially cooler than my Apex Z790. Not that it matters. But this is one noticeable difference. Below is both boards averages. And after already replacing their thermal pads. Z790 Apex 15w thermal pad 2.5MM thick AVG temp 55-57C. (Gelid ultimate thermal pad from Amazon) Z790 Apex Encore 12w thermal pad 2.0mm thick AVG temp 39-42C. (Cheap Off brand no name Chinese thermal pad from Amazon)

Oh yeah, I don’t do that, never lol. I have always been on the side of “If it runs games, it’s good enough” 🤣. But lately I just do 1usmus for 15 minutes. If it gets through that, it’s gonna run through literally anything and everything. Besides the Apex Encore lol. It’s definitely broke 😂. And that 15 minutes saves me lots of time instead of crashing in games and going through that trial and error I use to do. But some guys definitely go over board. As a matter of fact, I don’t even stability test my cpu at all lol. We all know if something is unstable right, of course we know! 🙂 If it runs Cinebench, and games it’s good! Especially modern games.

Im all for setting a ram OC and using it for gaming and benching and not actually stability testing it. I did it for years, but my Encore can’t do that 🤣. In my case the Encore was so unstable I had to resort to actually stability testing the ram and slowly working up. And physically knowing “ITS actually STABLE” however it was still unstable. I think mine is just broken. And yeah that that Wi-Fi magnet is such a piece of crap it won’t stay on my test bench either. I do kinda like the quick release though, but it looks like more cost cutting to me. I thought about swapping the wifi7 in to my white Apex. But that antenna magnet is really a deal breaker. Crazy how something so simple can effect an experience. @ryan Better just reinstall windows to ensure all the bloat is gone. Then once you get it exactly right, create a back up. I don’t have any Asus stuff installed, I just use my Asus boards with no armory crate. I did not kind the armory crate lite, but my OCD can’t handle anything like that installed. So I removed it lol. And I have already re-installed windows again anyways. This Apex Encore was breaking OSes left and right on me.

Yep I absolutely agree with that! Seeing that Sugi guy run DDR5 8800 stable, and post DDR5 9000, makes me think my white Apex is definitely a top bin it just does things very effortlessly. Because these boards were so uncommon and rare, also makes me think a different type of testing or standard they were held to. I think it’s funny that Asus tried to turn the Apex in to a mainstream product by mass producing them. Yet, this board gets literally “ram right over” by my old Apex lol. Anyways, I hope yours is good at least. Has it been okay?

Yep. You are not kidding. Sometimes we just gotta stop and think, “what in the heck am I doing!” Rinse repeat rinse repeat on this Encore wasting so much time. It swear it felt like this Encore was in the early stages of Alzheimer’s. It kept tricking me over and over again each day. But, I’m done with all that, after I saw the first issue after flashing over to the new bios around 6 hours in. I was done. The white Apex is great. And I’m glad to be back using it. It’s just a solid product! I also swapped the PCH thermal pad for a 2.5MM thick and much higher quality option. The Z790 Apex has always worked with any kind of crazy memory profile. Whether it’s stable or no where near stable. I think I may have gotten a bad Apex Encore. Not a big deal. It happens. This would actually be the first time I have ever gotten a defective or unusable brand new motherboard.

I swapped back to my white Apex tonight. 🙂 she’s solid as a rock. The Encore Apex is a real trickster! It will make you think all is well. And then start causing random weird problems. After 10 days of testing with the pre-included 0220 bios, I decided last night I would flash to Encore Apex 0506 bios. I slowly stabilized DDR5 8000 to 8200 to 8400 testing in 1usmus. Then started using my system for just web browsing after a few hours this was when the weird stuff started happening. Random BSOD’s. And Instability. I re-installed windows again thinking I messed it up from using 0220. And, nope. By 1:30AM I was done with the Apex Encore all together. It felt awfully familiar to my old Z690 Apex with random unexplained instabilities when using DDR5 7200. If I run 1usmus for even just 15 minutes, that system should be good to go for practically any kind of usage especially gaming and light loads.

@Papusan Good news! I used the Apex Encore original 0220 bios for a while now to get a good feel for how it really is. And I struggled to stabilize fast speeds on my 2x24GB sticks. The bios just wasn’t great.. What can I say. Coming from an OG white Apex this Encore has felt weaker. Was it the board? Was it the bios? I did not give up early though, because I also had growing pains on my Z790 APEX white motherboard too. I gave the Encore a solid chance, and I’m glad I did. I just swapped over to the newest 0506 Asus Apex Encore bios tonight, I can say for sure “This bios” is absolutely better 100%. I keyed in 8400 XMP timings, 1.420 IVR TX, and 1.443V IMC, with just an auto SA voltage of only 1.250V and with an increased 131,071 tREFI and it still passed 1usmus 3 cycles the very first try! BAM! Let’s go Apex Encore 😎. Woot woot. (PS: This is using my OG 7200 sticks, I do not actually own the new 8400 sticks) But so far so good! I have slowly stepped up in ram clocks, DDR5 8600 up next. Maybe I won’t have to swap motherboards back after all. @Mr. Fox I’m swapping back to my OG Z790 Apex Vanilla tomorrow. I did get 8400 stable on this. But, it’s really some weird other things happening and making me want to switch back. 🙂 I tried. I do like the board. But, I need reliability.

Ohhhh! Okay okay. Mini ITX? No kidding 😎. This is pretty interesting. Now I’m dying to know if they’d make it through 1usmus. Better get a fan though. 😃

That’s pretty impressive for a (4) Dimm board. You must have a good IMC. Can it run TM5 1usmus 3 cycles with that 8000 XMP? I think it’s maybe a 15 minute test for 48GB. If you’re running the A-Die 32GB sticks, then maybe 8-9 minutes.

@Papusan @Mr. Fox Quick note: It is not $3800. He is selling the 4090HOF GPU and HOF PSU together for $2,800. He is selling a binned Z790 Asus Extreme which is discontinued for $1,200 and all together he wants $3,800 for all (3) items (If you want all (3) items). Also, If I’m not mistaken, his Z790 Extreme is rare these days hence that $1200. (He is also open to a RTX3090 with $1,562 cash on top for the 4090HOF and HOF PSU) @electrosoft He has an awesome Civic Type R RHD, one of the new ones. The car is just ridiculous lol. Anyways, I thought he was asking a reasonable pretty price for the GPU and PSU together. He’s probably even negotiable 😎

Yeah, my 13900KS is only SP104. But on direct die she clocks well above her SP rating! And, it has a really good good good IMC! I love my 13900KS. I have had this KS CPU for a good while maybe like 7-8 months daily usage now. And no degradation at all. Your 14900K chip already looks impressive to me though, seeing that 5,923Mhz 4.7Ghz E-y-cruncher and only 355 watts? 😎 I will bet that 14900K is gonna be a monster on direct die. 😃 I say, delid it and unleash the beast. 🙂

What does your 4090 score in Port Royal?

Technically mine was broken too. But I was able to fix it. That little metal clip will fall off and it’s like a tip sensor almost for safety. So when the chillers ships chances are it won’t turn on.

Holy crap. I had no idea. I’ve googled and all you see is out of country sales on those. Man $600 is amazing too. Didnt @Rage Setbuy one from the guy I got mine from a while back?

@PapusanI got it calibrated. I added one pump at a time to check how much the flow increased. Getting 400+ L/H. 🤯 Adding the 5th pump offered the worst return on flow rate it seems. (3) D5’s looks to be a sweet spot offering triple the performance of just (1) D5. The 4th pump added 70-75% of a single D5, while the 5th pump only scaled about 40-50% of a single D5. I would assume a 6th and 7th D5 would follow this pattern.

That black Hailea is gorgeous. Very rare in the US, being that it’s physically impossible to even buy one, I don’t know how you even got that one! While my chiller is identical with functionally the exact same guts inside etc lol. Yours is actually a real Hailea, which is very very rare in a 110V. I have thought about ordering the Hailea front control LCD on AquaTuning for like $30 bucks, and painting mine black. Then I’d have that same look only a replica Hailea lol. Of course you can find them in other countries, but only 220v variants and probably impossible to even ship here at all. So, you’ve got a nice machine there. I will say mine has been oddly reliable considering it’s used every single day hours on in for like 3 years now, and it was built in 2015 so my machine is gonna be 9 years old soon. Anyways, another thing I wanted to mention. I placed that 80lbs+ water tank on my chiller and it’s much quieter lol. I dunno why, but something to do with being crushed and pressed down very firmly has made it super quiet 😂

So, on my first build with tank+chiller I used short runs of tubing. But it was difficult without having that wiggle room. I need to be able to move the chiller and tank around if I need to drain them or change loop etc. it’s hard to remove 10 gallons of water. It’s heavy, about like 85 pounds. And it just makes it so much easier. Plus, it’s not that much excess. Tubing just goes super fast. Tubes going from PC to chiller are 6ft long. Tubes from chiller to tank are 6ft long too. My desk is 3ft deep, and 3ft tall, and my PC is 1ft off the desk while the chiller is right behind my desk on the floor. That length adds up QUICK! Even with this much tubing I have just a little wiggle room lol. While It may seem like a lot of tubing, it’s not that much.

Congrats!!! You got those good parts! I’m curious how the 14900K is in your hands. Are you gonna delid that?

And it’s still not enough 😂. I have just over 20Ft of tubing on my build, and a chiller that needs 300-750 GPH 😃 I’m not even close to fulfilling its needs. It does work very well though. It needs tons of pressure for best performance when running heavy wattage sustained loads like games. The more you can pump, the better/faster it chills and easier it runs! I got it all up and running though. It blew out all that air in the lines in about 0.003 seconds 😂 PS: I found my air leak!! No more bubbles! 😎 the leaking air was from a section of two tubes I made together as one longer tube.

I know someone who has one with the Galax PSU included. He actually wants to trade for a weaker GPU. He wants like a 3090+$1,500 USD for the 4090 HOF and Galax 1300 watt PSU. I think shipping would be the biggest issue. Because he’s in Malasia. But, he does want to sell. And he’s legit, maybe you can get a good deal on the GPU only. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1733112490342366/permalink/3660462297607366/?mibextid=6ojiHh Send him a PM. Maybe he’d work something out. I got my Apex Z790 from him.

Only (5) pumps going in my build re-do. It might be enough. 🤪

I pulled the CPU, pulled the GPU, and pulled my DDR5. I had something weird happening with the Encore. And I wanted to be sure I could fix it. I was causing all of these issues my self, and with my own janky setup/install LOL. (1) My ram was not fully seated on one end. My ram is all 1 piece being inside a super cool ram waterblock. ( so It’s a tight fit plugging ram in as 1 piece) I pressed them in very good this time, while supporting the back of my baby so it don’t flex on me. (2) My 13900KS had LM droplets all on the substrate. (This can cause problems) not sure why or how. But it definitely does 😉 (3) The PCI-E slot on the Encore is lower down and further away from my ram than on the Apex Z790. This was causing the ram to pull my GPU at a strange angle like this \ towards the cpu and ram lol. My system went down hill very very fast, so fast in fact that it became a code 55 no matter what I did. Even when it was working, and I was first loading in the bios, I would sit on the ROG logo for about 20 seconds before it would let me actually get to the bios. Now, it happens immediately when I post and press DEL. So, that tells me right away whatever was wrong is fixed now. So far so good! PS: I fully lapped my 13900KS die (Like fully lapped it) 🤣 it is as flat as flat can be!! My LM application is superior. And let me tell you. 🤯 it’s freaking awesome.

The Apex Encore has been difficult to manage. I may be swapping back to my Z790 Apex White. That board was much more reliable. I’m having some troubles with the Encore. I get a lot of stuck code 55’s. And it seems just so frail and fragile with my normal memory tuning and memory overclocking. If you get something stable, better just leave it! It is very frustrating. I can go tinkering in the bios with anything at all, and boom it’s broke, gotta start over. I’m gonna try a ram and cpu reseat. Right now it’s code 55 on both bios. Pulling battery clearing CMOS does nothing.

It took ModMyMod’s 8 days just to provide tracking for my order 😂 turns out, they say they have something “In-Stock” but they out source it after you buy it. In my case, I ordered a Aquatuning dual D5 pump top. They turns around and ordered it from Germany and had to wait to receive it, before they could ship to me. I am not really a fan of this tactic. I could have ordered from Titan Rig, who actually had 1 of them in-stock and I would have had it the next day with $25 dollar overnight shipping option. You live and learn I guess. They finally shipped it today though. I just wish they were more honest about their inventory. (WARNING: There may be a long delay, because we don’t actually have anything in-stock lol)