Etern4l

True in principle, but given the cost of the motherboard it's not the end of the world, comparatively speaking (although I'm sure you would argue the opposite ;). Possibly more problematically, this solution only supports 4K at 60Hz (or at least that's the most capable dongle I could find). Also to be fair, I'm not sure if there is any space left on the mobo backpanel. 2 NICs 3 or 4 USB-C ports, audio, WiFi, reset/flash buttons, I don't know how many USB-A ports, a lot. Basically most boards are a compromise of some sort, a lot depends on what you need one for. I'm sure there are some with HDMI or DP ports connected to the iGPU, but that would be about the last thing on my priority list.

The guy is a bit of lucky nutjob. Why the hell did he even buy Twitter in the first place? Spent $44B because he likes to twit (but probably shouldn't) it seems. I thought he was supposed to be investing time and money getting people to Mars, or is that proving too hard now? Let's hope NASA doesn't put too many eggs in that basket.

No probs with the Z690 although I had to get an USB-C->HDMI adapter.

The situation is further exacerbated by the sheer size of those cards, meaning cables may have to be forced into potentially unsafe angles or the case won't close.

The seconds are very handy, it's baffling why such a basic limitation exists in Windows. It's one of those things I guess. The conspiracy theorist in me is suggesting this could be because seeing seconds fly by might make users more conscious and anxious about the time wasted watching ads... Sounds plausible, actually.

Good luck with the new board, sounds like it should help. My experience with DDR5 overvolting has been very negative. An apparent success for a day or two followed by crashes. When that happened, I just had to return to XMP and actually step down the timings a notch to stabilise it. This is with 32GB Fury Beast modules, so I guess particularly hard.

I am not sure that experience pre DDR5 carries over. This is extremely finicky. Also, the definition of OC success depends on the criteria. A stable couple of h of benchmarking and gaming is pretty low ceiling, I could clock my RAM 400MHz higher and it would likely be stable enough for that. Long term OC stability is much tougher to achieve. Maybe it's different with AMD, and could well depend on the mobo and the kits. Early adopters land. Fun fact, OCability of my RAM degraded after cooler installation, probably co-incidental, but who knows with this RAM.

Err? You should be able to, especially if it's on the approved list. Diverging from the XMP spec and playing around with voltages is more of a gamble, as common sense would dictate. Anyway, DDR5 is terribly sensitive and hard to achieve stable OC with in my experience, especially the larger kits. @cylixMy question is: what's the lowest stable setting that works? If nothing does, especially across multiple kits then obviously the board is bad. Get an MSI or an EVGA and return/RMA this. I was looking at the Gigabyte Aero and it def looked like a subpar performer in the RAM OC department. Just look at their max supported OC and approved memory kit list. Edit: also make sure the bluescreens are not due to something else, CPU OC or UV could be two reasons obviously.

Well, it's kind of like a rolling release, but with little control over the upgrade process, and very little in terms of the ability to customize the black box proprietary OS. I'm sorry I even brought up this comparison lol

They might eventually go to gamers if bought by scalpers, the question is when and at what price. Saying that all the cards immediately went to the rich gamers potentially creates a false impression of immediate demand from real customers. Rich gamers probably already have a 4090, why would they buy a 4080? BTW some of these Ada consumer cards might be of interest to non-gamers too, the 4080 probably not so much though. Decent availability in the UK, prices start at $1600 for the cheapest Palit Meanwhile Amazon themselves decided to jump on the 4090 scalping bandwagon... over $19k, not bad

Do we know who bought them? Gamers or scalpers? BTW the FE is available from Nvidia store, in case anyone wants it. Apparently even scalpers don't lol

Would agree to a large extent, the question is: who or what is going to enforce that. As others noted, if free market is the only regulatory force, then retailers actually don't care about any of this queuing "nonsense", they are happy to sell in bulk to scalpers. Shortages work in their favour and can be used as a justification for bumping up prices, sort of scalping at the source. Going further up, Jensen has the cheek to talk about profit-maximising inventory management strategies to investors. Clearly, he doesn't care about the little retail guy. With Apple, things are different - they are the world's greatest premium retail brand and they do have a strong customer care ethos. Dell, for all their faults, also allows customers to place orders for remote delivery. Amazon took a step in this direction with their invitation system for PS5s. Indeed, the EVGA system turned out to be a joke - got an email 6 months later: "sorry, we are dissolving the queue". Clearly, some sort of consumer protection is required here. I think part of the problem is that these shortages are just concentrated around graphics cards and consoles, so the legislators are not in a rush. If these were major fuel or food shortages, the state would step in right away. I would assume many countries have some legal provisions against war-time profiteering already, BTW let's hope we won't get to find out how they work in practice.

Scalping constitutes criminal activity in my mind. It's not really excusable as "capitalism". Scalping occurs/ed in communist states as well. Retailers setting prices above MSRP is one thing, very different from scalping which is characterised by a complete economic redundancy. These are just middle-men adding negative value (increased prices, presumably higher shipping risk, no support, often no return rights). It's also baffling and inconsistent that some forms of scalping are illegal or subject to restrictions, even in the US - notably ticket scalping, while other are not. The definition of scalping would be rather straightforward: unauthorised resale of retail goods as new at a profit. No quotas. It doesn't matter if you steal one candy, or raid a warehouse - you are still a thief, it's just a matter of magnitude and applicable sentencing if found guilty. Now, in theory things should regulate themselves, however, the theory is obviously flawed and thus rather quite extended periods of market disruption occur, which scalping clearly exacerbates for no reason. One of the benefits of legislation would be that it would force retailers (including Nvidia and their store!) to implement anti-scalping measures. Those wouldn't completely eliminate the activity, but together with the criminalisation, would likely curb it. I don't really see a downside from the consumers' perspective. Of course, were I involved in a little scalping on the side myself then it'd be a different story..

Sure, Ngreedia does what's best for them. The guilty party here are the people purchasing goods from scalpers. If not for them, scalpers would go bust really quickly. Some legislative action and robust enforcement would be in order too: https://www.eurogamer.net/us-lawmakers-announce-bill-to-prohibit-bot-scalping-of-high-demand-goods ... however, I'm not going to hold my breath. With no government legislation in place, however, Ukie told Eurogamer it could only recommend that consumers "stay patient... refuse to buy from scalpers and... buy from a trusted retailer" for the time being. The Stopping Grinch Bots Act... doesn't sound like serious legislation to be honest.

Common sense would dictate that if error rate > 0 then replace the drive immediately.

Unfortunately, those people probably know what they are doing. They can count on a sufficient pool of idiots in the general population. The life of my family would have to depend on it for me to pay off one of those pests. Again, Nvidia is complicit in this, as surely they are well aware of the problem, and they are self-evidently happy about it. Before people start making excuses for them: while they are not responsible for the entire distribution network, but they are responsible for their own online store.

Sorry if this is obvious, but you can prevent Windows update from updating drivers by a simple Local Policy setting. Speaking of Green Goblin/Ngreedia - how long has it been since the 4090 release? I haven't seen 4090 FE availability in Nvidia store even once. Yet eBay is chock-full of FEs from scalpers. The fact that Nvidia has taken no steps to prevent this (e.g. the subscription service EVGA offered during the mining shortage) puts them in the same category as those scalper lowlifes.

Ouch, that's pretty extreme hardware bondage and abuse. The connector got bent pretty hard. But at least the photos are reddit / social media worthy...

That's better than nothing I guess, but if a 5 W/mK paste is a top performer then indeed the number is meaningless with respect to traditional pastes (and 74 vs 79 W/m2K probably doesn't matter either). BTW I wonder why W/mK and not W/m^2*K - I guess they wanted to keep it simple or something. My guess is that a lot of the "difference between different pastes" we see in reviews is just due to application variance, especially when it comes to laptops with their poor heatsink geometry and pressure. Anyway, I doubt any relatively recent traditional paste is significantly better than say SYY or Phobya. The question is whether to go with a decent traditional paste or LM.

Re RAM cooling, I bought this gizmo called Corsair Vengeance Airflow. Silent and 8-10C lower temps.

That sucks a bit, but at least you didn't damage the CPU. TBH It wouldn't surprise me if they did master it, since it seems like such an extremely trivial and obvious thing to do given the power involved, and contrasting the challenge with the overall complexity of the CPU manufacturing process. Maybe they didn't care before but with 8 more cores and powers exceeding 300W some manager finally approved an extra $1 (we'd assume, but who knows, perhaps it's $2) spend per unit on a better soldering process.

Thanks for sharing although sadly it would be hard for people in US/Europe to validate this. No reputable reviews, and looks like limited availability outside of India. The only thing to go by are some anecdotal reports/Amazon reviews from Indian customers. Perhaps the product is very new, and/or the company is not very good at accurately measuring W/mK (but kudos to them for posting the 5 result anyway).

I don't think you have understood what I've been saying. While it's clear that the W/mK numbers provided by manufacturers today are noisy, they are not necessarily useless. The relationship is not that simple and linear though. However, by way of a trivial example, when I see a 5W/mK paste like the dirt cheap "Deepcool G40", on which I get Google hits mostly in India, I have enough data to be deeply skeptical. Not having any W/mK data at all on some pastes if of course worse than having the noisy data.

Sorry, catching up: is this the one? https://www.moddiy.com/products/Honeywell-PTM7950-SP-Super-Highly-Thermally-Conductive-PCM-Paste.html Apparently that's a stock paste used by Lenovo... Hmm.

Sounds like an elaborate excuse to me. Simply state the number, and give precise information regarding the testing conditions. Be a market leader, and other manufacturers will be expected to follow. This would be better than no information. As @Papusan said, withholding the information suggests there is an underlying performance issue. Case in point, I would not think Noctua pastes are market leading. Ideally though, we would have some independent testing for this. The benefit would be that we'd have a number representing expected thermal performance independent of application scenario and conditions.