Etern4l

Good point, there is also a risk of something going wrong with the transaction, especially if we are talking overseas shipping. Can be insured against probably, again extra hassle.

I always spread it no probs, without preheating. Takes a few min. Clearly recall Phobya packaging has a recommendation to spread the paste, comes with a spatula for a reason.

What's your time getting and tuning another CPU worth? Do you need the absolute best or can you settle on a lesser specimen. Will you feel unhappy if the next CPU is not as good? What would you pay to avoid that? Another question: what price would you be happy to sell it at? Feels like $2k? Quote him. Remember people pay tens of thousands for CSGO knifes and millions for NFTs, i.e. basically pixels.

I'm disappointed you didn't respond: "As an American, I rly never let go of top performing silicon 😄 that's not my nature."

As opposed to?

That's great, I would definitely give a new SuperNova a good look in the near future. Hopefully they are just running a bit behind with new boards and other product lines etc. due to the inevitable overall reorg, plus regional product availability may vary as usual.

Just follow the board manual? A2/B2 for me. If that doesn't help check CPU sitting/heatsink pressure - not sure if your CPU is as sensitive as 12th gen where this can def have an impact.

I crossed Asus off pretty quickly too due to the Hero Z690 issue and their handling of it. Their prosumer board, forgot the name - Creator something, is clearly more flimsy and less performant than the MEG ACE. 10GbE was the only thing it had going for it, and that too is apparently based on some dodgy chipset. My concerns about EVGA have nothing to do with what Jensen was saying, unfortunately. I wanted to buy their PSU due to the legendary reliability - suddenly went out of stock/EOL.

Right away there are some problems. First of all, it's often difficult to find exactly equivalent motherboards across brands. For instance, what is this "entry level" $630 single PCIe slot Kingpin equivalent to? I can't see anything in MSI offering for instance. If you are saying that the $860 Dark Kingpin is equivalent to the likes of MSI Godlike, then I will take your word for it, since I haven't looked at those boards. Second of all, do we have any independent reliable (sic!) data on motherboard reliability? I guess not. Anyway, hope EVGA manages to pull through and continue to set industry standards on warranty. More customer choice is always better.

You pay a significant premium for this, so depending on the usage patterns realized reliability of MSI/Asus, the better customer care may or may not be worth it (for me EVGA was out right away with just one PCIe slot on the Kingpin). For a hardcore OCer likely to fry things, paying the premium might make sense (but such customers are generally terrible business for EVGA). At this point, the overall EVGA situation needs to be taken into account as well, unfortunately. Looks a bit like they are closing shop or scaling down significantly. No Z790 mobo for instance, their flagship PSU SuperNova T2 is marked as EOL by some retailers, no new model is advertised etc.

? The leak suggests they are looking to reduce max core count to 22C / 28T in 14th gen. This smells of the 11th gen fiasco.

Doesn't make sense. How are they proposing to sell those cut down "next gen" CPUs? Lower price?

During a recent prosumer mobo purchase research it became clear it's either MSI or Asus these days. MSI won the argument on robustness, features, and memory stability (immediately evidenced by the max RAM speeds they officially support, in addition to supportive reviews). The main feature lacking is the frequently quoted SP rating lol, but then of course we have the Force 2 score to despair over 😉 Has worked a treat for me.

TBH Self-evidently rather unnecessary and a bit misleading, e.g. the m15/m17 models are not listed, even though it was released in 2018. I would suggest merging the two sections back together into "2015+ Alienware Models (13/15/m15/x15/17/m17/x17/ 51m)"

My .02: Phobya Nanogrease Extreme. Immediately blows Kryonaut out of the water, both on a laptop and desktop. Tried CoolerMaster CryoFuse Nano (14 W/mK) sourced from Amazon US on a GPU, looks like a waste of time - minimal improvement over stock.

Would be good to have some alternative to the hard to get but seemingly unbeatable Phobya Nanogrease Extreme. I tried this new CoolerMaster CryoFuze (14 W/mk) on a GPU recently. Meh.

Let's put it this way: it works, but is not bulletproof and could be cumbersome if you want these profiles to work offline (as you might do on laptops, or if you don't want to have pure SMB profiles), there could be a lengthy sync process on login/logout. I personally would not do this for any reason other than general Windows server administration practice.

You can have the same Windows profile on all machines, including app data - that's the roaming profile I mentioned not being in favour of earlier. You would need a Windows Server to run this. Windows won't automatically auto-install software on all devices (that I know of), but there might be some third party enterprise software for that. I wouldn't bother, the key is that all the app data wouldn't already be in place on all devices and get picked up if needed. Of course, if multiple devices are running at the same time, then the question of potential conflict resolution arises.

AMD have some strong 16GB GPU hardware, even the current gen is impressive enough. Unfortunately, their professional software support is no match for Nvdia, or Intel - as same caveat applies to their CPUs. At least they exert a good deal of competitive pressure on Green and Blue teams on the pure gaming end.

"Dear Reciever, This an official cease and desist letter. The content posted on your toxic forum has been painting our reputable company in unduly unfavorable light. We request that the site is shut down immediately. Just as with the original NBR, this kind of negative online publicity will not be tolerated. Should this request be disregarded, we will consider taking appropriate legal action. Sincerely, NVIDIA Legal Team".

Not everyone sees it that way... 😉

Apparently, the problem is specific to the Nvidia adapter, so best to use another cable. Wouldn't stop me from buying one those cards, as I would be upgrading the PSU to one with native 12VHPWR support anyway. The horror has a face – NVIDIA’s hot 12VHPWR adapter for the GeForce RTX 4090 with a built-in breaking point

Well, yes, but this is a bit of a social platform, right? To paraphrase Elon, a town square for geeks lol Additionally, at least with NBR if you googled for info, you'd get correctly directed to a specific page, say 347/29851, so the amount of content in a single thread was not a show stopper. Clearly, the smaller a more focused the threads the better, it's just a question of how to get people to use the forum that way. I started a couple of specific threads and the response rate wasn't great, possibly because people don't have notifications set up on all the subsections - which goes back to the previous point: too many subforums. My last impression from a visit to the AW area was that just one "Alienware" section would be enough. TBH even on NBR, most of it was a museum, with just one "2015+" section barely active.

Phew, as I hoped, it's just the Nvidia Frankenstein adapter though - probably best to avoid using it. The horror has a face – NVIDIA’s hot 12VHPWR adapter for the GeForce RTX 4090 with a built-in breaking point