Etern4l

My guess is they will, but in general I find all this surprising. I could kind of understand occasional QC issues (although not really when it comes to water cooling rather expensive equipment) if they were a budget brand who are forced to cut corners here and there to deliver at an aggressive price point. On the contrary, seems that EKWB, a rather expensive brand, are big on marketing - Apple-grade packaging and huge reviews with hand written notes from the owner delivered by the likes of Linus, Jay etc. That's where at least some of the QC money must be going.

@Talon What curing process did you use for PTM7958 paste? I've read recommendations of 15h air curing which is a bit painful, hut also dubious. Doesn't sound llke a very practical process in an industrial setting. The shills can help them take some newbies, but they won't fool the regulars. A quick look through posts on OC reveals the typical commentary around EK is "err, get something better".

Anyone tried PTM7958 paste? What curing process did you use? I've read recommendations of 15h air curing which is a bit painful.

It's second-hand stuff so who knows why it is the way it is. Could have been a dud from the beginning, or could have taken some hard to spot damage at the hand(s) of previous owners. The fact that it was supposed a 2022 model but isn't tells us a lot about the seller.

Socket fail for sure, although looks like newer boards come with a better variant. No potentially destructive contact frame gimmick required.

Cool, that's all I could realistically hope for. Was worried the answer would be: Micron "S-Die"? Forget it! :)

To make it more concrete, my SK Hynix M-Dies (presumably) 4x32GB are working at 5000 CL30, way below their rated CL40. Would we expect Micron RAM to match those timings?

Speaking of SK Hynix M-Dies, how would we expect to rate Micron RAM operating in the 5600 CL40 range? Better or worse?

Why are you pursuing this particular mobo?

Nice. My MSI boards have this imprinted. Both S/N and rev number indicative of the year of manufacture.

Sorry to hear. Now we know the reason for the attractive price... Was that advertised as a 2022 variant? @Mr. FoxI have yet to contact MSI about the bent pins on the 2021 board (thanks Amazon for selling me that in July 2022 BTW). I hope they are not as bad as Asus, but clearly there is no warranty claim to be made. I do wonder though if they would fix it for a reasonable price, or whether it's a waste of time altogether.

All worthy features, but at $10K listed price for a 64GB RAM config this looks like a cheeky attempt at shamelessly raiding the bigger corporate accounts.

One more thing: there was a time when some strategic purchasing of AMD CPUs was kind of required to maintain the balance of power... well, this time around I would say the good folks at Intel need all the help they can get :)

Played around with that, and people elsewhere seem to recommend, but I don't need it. Best results so far with just straight up voltage overrides, not really seeing temps above 80C unless in CB23. Not ideal for single core use though, which I don't care about.

Well, that's kind of what Intel chips do as well, rigtt? They will try to achieve max boost freq, unless ratios are dialed down. Is it not possible to reduce max turbo clocks on the Ryzen platform?

Unless daily driver is meant to primarily drive gaming, a CPU with more cores would be of benefit, says Steve: Looks like the oversized cache works well just in gaming, and seemingly little else, where the precious die space is much better spent on extra cores. That's just how I feel about the latest laptop offerings lol Right, but would I be able to significantly UV an AMD chip?

I mean I am not sure you need to undervolt any Intel CPUs for gaming at stock with a reasonable AIO. The main reasons to do so would be being power efficiency conscious, planing to put the CPU under heavy sustained load, or benching on an AIO lol BTW Interesting to see the 13900KS score above 13900K in some 1080p games, I guess many are still single-thread heavy. https://www.anandtech.com/show/18728/the-intel-core-i9-13900ks-review-taking-intel-s-raptor-lake-to-6-ghz/9 Regardless, it looks like the mega-cache is really hard to beat, although people made good points in the comments section - those tests were conducted using ridiculous memory: SK Hynix 2x16 GB DDR5-5600B CL46 I didn't know such a slow memory was a thing. A typo? At any rate the slower the RAM, the more exaggerated the benefit of V-Cache will be. In practice, most gamers these days can run 7000+ RAM, on an Intel system at least, and this would go some way towards reducing the benefit of the large L3 cache.

Yes, the areas where the X3D CPUs test ahead of Intel is a reasonable argument to me, although in practice I would ask how overclockable/tunable those AMD chips are. I would assume not very much, but I really don't know. The 13900K on the other hand can run 8%+ faster in CB23 with just an undervolt, although not sure if that would translate to gains in gaming, and of course overclocks are achievable as well. I also see good Igor did not include 13900KS in his benchmarks, which is both telling and disappointing.

As above. Only true regarding stock. For some reason, probably because they have super-stringent stability requirements, far beyond what's needed for gaming, or even serious work, Intel have time and again decided to ship power hungry CPUs that can be immediately undervolted and transformed into very different devices (I don't believe I ran my 13900K on stock settings even once). A 13900K after tuning is an unrecognisable beast scoring 40K+ in CB23 at 85C or so (OK, with a slightly spruced up AIO lol)

"An Intel Core i9-13900K needs almost twice as much electrical energy for a similar gaming performance, which is meanwhile tantamount to total humiliation. Even the slightly better variances and percentiles do not help much anymore, that is just the way it is and cannot be changed. " Sponsored review, bad translation from German, or the guy is an AMD fanboy, alternatively an idiot. It can be changed fairly easily, and most people experienced with Intel CPUs know that. I welcome any AMD CPU owner to try and achieve 40500 in CB23 at 235W... very bench stable, but not heavy production stable (that required the power to be raised to 255W). Any gaming would be absolutely fine.

I do wonder though how many "average gamers" really game on desktop PCs as opposed to consoles, and frankly laptops. Just by the fact that someone built their own PC, they are no longer an average gamer in my book, even if they mostly use the PC for gaming. I also question whether a pure gamer would even care or notice any out of the box issues with the 13900K. I imagine very few games would push the CPU at stock settings past 200W. But it's true though that Intel systems should be better out of the box, way too much voltage. Takes a bit of understanding of the various voltage regulation functions to get things right here. On the other hand, there are those auto-tuning tools as well, most of people here I imagine never bother with. I've only tried the automatic "gaming mode", available in the Ez mode of the MSI BIOS once, and recall not being too impressed in CB23, but that's not what that's for, and perhaps it's not that bad in actual games. Asus has some "AI" tuning as well. Intel will probably address the voltage issues by re-enabling the new voltage regulator in RPL (such that things run better out of the box, although the potential for gains from manual tuning will likely be reduced) and calling it a groundbreaking 2023 refresh :)

You know what, I will just wait for these to show up on Amazon. Just went through a mini-hell with a large PC/component reseller. Memory was showing up as "in stock" for next day delivery. They changed the order to "dispatched" but carrier tracking showed they didn't actually deliver the item to the carrier. They were asking me to wait 3-5 days for an investigation to complete, as they are checking CCTV etc. lol. Possibly just stalling until resupplies arrive, which I would have probably been OK with, had they just said so. They were refusing to refund for a while, then eventually agreed to it, minus shipping fees.... A seedy shop, in retrospect I've had issues with every second order with them, won't be returning unless there is no other choice. There have been reports in the press about expensive Amazon deliveries showing up as a box of bricks etc. I'd rather take my chances with that, at least I know Amazon support would sort it out in 5 minutes. Rant over.

Thank you, cool. Do you remember roughly how long the delivery took? Would you have to return back to China if need be? Presumably not...

Have people ever ordered stuff from Corsair directly? Any experiences to share?

Intel ME is an interesting topic, thanks for pointing out. Apparently difficult to disable, but possible. Dell sells laptops with IME disabled to the government: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine