Talon

My only issue with Asrock boards is the lack of features in the BIOS. EVGA was the same way, but I found most of EVGAs menu to have exactly what you needed at the same time. Also they leave their BIOS unlocked and you can easily modify and unhide all menus in literally minutes using online tools. But I still think I'm going to go Asrock Taichi OC Formula if I pick up a Z890. The OCF boards are usually always great and if they can manage godlike DDR5 OC like they have with the Z790i Lightning at a reasonable price they'll have a winner. Asus is just getting too expensive for what they have. Will see on launch day or as it gets closer to launch. Maybe Asus will have some killer new feature with the Apex that I want.

Wow I had no idea that board could BCLK OC! They don't advertise the hyperblck engine on that board.

Yes you can use XMP if you have a non-K chip. But Non-K chips on 12th and 13th gen are VCCSA locked. I believe you're limited to .95v on VCCSA which greatly limited DDR4 OC, but not such much DDR5. 14th gen has VCCSA unlocked and full tuning available for non-K. To BCLK a 12th gen chip (only 12th gen can do this) you have to have a board with an external clock gen and it will force an earlier unlocked microcode the moment it detects you want to BCLK OC. It will like boot, then reboot the proper microcode to prevent a non-boot situation that typically happens when you attempt to push BCLK above 103Mhz or so. Honestly 12th gen BCLK is fun, taking that locked down chip to well above 5Ghz all cores is a blast and reminds me of when OC was great. I'm keeping my BCLK boards for this reason. Will eventually be able to get the chips dirt cheap and can punch them hard when they are cheap and don't care if they fry lol.

For the price you paid, it's probably going to be what you expect. Memory OC was unfortunately about what you'd expect from a 4 dimm Z690. I'd say expect to max out 2x16gb around 6400-6800MTs if lucky. If you have some 2x32gb A-Dies around, those will give you the best results easily. Dual Rank 2x32 A-Dies are the way to go with a 4 dimm board. But at the same time, I don't think I ever tested this board with a 13900K or newer with better IMC. I also didn't test with later BIOS revisions that might have improved it a tad. I'd say it probably is about where I said though. The board supported BCLK OC on non-K 12th gen, so it can be a bit of fun. I no longer have the board as I gave it away to a cousin who was still rocking a Z370 and 9900K. He is still using the board with a 13900K and is very happy.

NIce! Where did you pick the 13900KS up from?

Edit: Nevermind found your post. Good to hear they took care of it quickly. I've personally never had an issue with Asus service. Always a quick/painless RMA with them.

Intel is not going to sell their most profitable sector of their company. Qualcomm doesn't have the money to buy it anyways. Intel will sell off their fabs or other sectors long before they sold client CPU. But I do agree Intel will change, I think ultimately they will end up fabless just like AMD and Nvidia. Once that happens, the floodgates will open and silicon prices are going to skyrocket. Samsung, and GF won't be offering leading edge nodes. TSMC will be able to set whatever market price they want.

I think Intel is going to end up going the way of AMD. They're going to be forced to sell their fabs. Taiwan is giving TSMC huge government subsidies, far bigger than the US CHIPS Act that has to my knowledge delivered $0 to Intel thus far. Apparently Intel is asking for the money as they are building fabs, but the government isn't releasing it. In the end, I think Intel will sell their fabs to TSMC or other company. Intel and AMD will be using TSMC for their chips, and just imagine what CPUs will cost us then. But I guess that is what people want, everything I read is negative Intel, and almost cheerleading for their demise. I wonder how they're going to feel when their CPU is 2 or 3x more expensive than it is today.

I knew there was a bug with TimeSpy CPU. Exactly why I've given up on TimeSpy. One run will be good, next run crap. I have noticed that with 1591, the entire OS feels smoother/snappier. It could be totally placebo though.

I won't attempt to compare the two OS and I'm aware you can strip down the OS with custom ISOs to get better performance but I can't bring myself to use them for my daily rig. I tested a stripped down OS on my laptop and saw good gains in some tests. But for me, I can't use that and trust the sources. This new 24H2 does seem to be somewhat lighter weight than 23H2 which did seem to have a lot more going on in the background. Although my install was pretty old and bloated, and had gone through a couple boards (I know, I know..) Task manager shows 0-1% load at idle which is great to see.

I've been testing 24H2 ever since news of the performance uplift for AMD and some for Intel. I put it on an external USBC drive/install. No issues were noted and I picked a tad bit of performance in some apps and games. Gears 5 was the only one that showed major improvements for me so far. But overall the OS just felt snappier, smoother animations/transitions. It just felt less laggy compared to 23H2. I just installed it on my internal drive, did a long needed OS wipe this afternoon. Getting everything up and running now.

You know I have vacation in Oct for a couple weeks. I’ll be at Microcenter on launch morning lol. But honestly I’m not so sure this is going to be as great as I had hoped after seeing the leaks. My 14900KS at stock and undervolted with good dual ranked memory is almost as good or better than the result we saw. I know it’s just Geekbench and gaming could be great but meh. That won’t stop me from wanting to get one and tune for max perf.

Just downloaded it myself. With my 14900KS with latest 0x129 Microcode BIOS, default performance 253w profile, and -110mV Core and -50mV L2 it compiled without as much as a hiccup. Unfortunately too many are using the old BIOS and are either scared of a BIOS update, or think they're on the newest BIOS because they put out so many that said "Intel defaults". Intel really needs to do a better job with a public campaign that sends out emails to consumers via their retailer.

He hasn't updated his microcode. The comments on Steam show that after users updated their BIOS, the crashing stops and they can compile. Unfortunately so many don't know how or won't update their BIOS.

It's hilarious to hear people scream about Intel power consumption for their flagship high core count CPU, then you look at the latest Ryzen flagship on a cutting edge 4nm node pulling the more or less the same power and producing less FPS.