Talon

I love that board. Looks retro and cool. I swear I had a board that looked just like it back in the day. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH173B3C?lv=shuf&channelId=500&plpRedirect=mhFallback&th=1 -- CL28 at $440 https://www.newegg.com/klevv-32gb-2-x-16gb-ddr5-6000-pc5-48000-cas-latency-cl30-desktop-memory-white/p/N82E16820101096?Item=N82E16820101096 -- CL30 at $419 with code https://www.newegg.com/klevv-32gb-2-x-16gb-ddr5-6000-pc5-48000-cas-latency-cl30-desktop-memory-black/p/N82E16820101095 --CL30 at $419 with code The CL28 are SK Hynix A-Dies and the 6000 CL30 should also be A-Dies. At 1.35v with CL28/CL30, you should have no issue pushing CL26 at 1.45v if you want to manually tune them. I believe this is SK Hynix own branded ram. I think I'd probably go with the sure thing CL28s as they're probably slightly better binned.

If any of yalls are interested in a really good AIO, I just got the new Noctua 420mm AIO and I'm blown away by the performance of the AIO. I had my Corsair 420mm AIO before this, using the same exact Noctua Fans and Thermal Grizzy Kryonaut pad. I tested a before and after run in CB23 with 300w power limits and the improvement is shocking. Best of all, no longer need Corsair iCUE garbage on my system. Just a clean, no RGB AIO and I love it. Same Noctua 140mm Black Fans, Same Thermal Pad, Same Fan Speed. Noctua 420mm AIO Corsair 420mm AIO I've been on a bit of a spending spree lately lol. Picked up the new MSI MPG Ai1600TS PCIE5 power supply with current monitoring and dual 12v2x6 outputs. Finally running native cables and being able to monitor the current on each pin with my HOF 5090D is awesome. No need for a fancy GPU to do this, I can do it with the MSI PSU and monitor all of it in HWINFO64 and MSI Afterburner. Can also overlay it in an OSD so I can keep an eye on it at all times if I want. Then picked up this Noctua AIO and very happy I did. The cooling improvement and headroom it provides me for Nova Lake is very cool. My system is Nova Lake ready lol. Grabbed the Logitech Pro X2 mouse with haptic triggers. It's a total game changer for me. I've never done better in games and just using the mouse on the desktop with a clean and satisfying mouse click. Also it's basically silent, so if my wife is in the office and I'm gaming, my trigger click is dead silent. No more annoying the heck out of her while I click away lol. Think I need to cool it for awhile lol.

Pass for sure. Sometimes I have to wonder what Intel is thinking.

Exactly why I kept my slightly less performant 5090 core with the Dual 12V2x6 connectors. I think it's almost guaranteed next gen high end will feature 2x of these connectors which is why most newer high end PSUs now feature 2x of them.

I would 100% have called the police and filed a report. After I got into my car and grabbed his license plate. Can’t trust anyone these days. Too many local deals have turned deadly.

270K and 5090 in the main setup and 273PQE and 5070 in the tinkering rig lol. My 9850X3D lives in the living room, now GPU-less 🙁. I do have a B580 brand new sealed from Intel as an RMA replacement that I could put in there if I feel like using it lol. If Zen 6 ends up being amazing and Nova Lake a flop, maybe I'll switch it up and drive the AM5 for awhile.

Just sold my other 5090 Suprim SOC yesterday. The card was actually better than my 5090 D HOF, but I prefer the uniqueness of the 5090 D HOF and the dual power connectors to protect the card. The extra 100Mhz on the core is cool, but meh, I just don't care anymore lol. I bought the 5090 Suprim around the excitement of the 800w Matrix vBIOS but in the end, I don't trust that much over the single cable and the card was barely used. Luckily for me the 5090 cards are insanely priced now and I was able to dump it locally for well above what I paid for it. I doubt were going to get a 5090 Ti, hell at this rate we might never see a 6090 lol. Either way, this generation has been pretty squeezed at this point and it's all pretty boring for me. I've gone back to just gaming and less worrying about my frame rates and tuning. It's a lot more fun lol. Battlefield 6 has been my main lately.

All the more reason Intel is better off shifting towards a foundry only company.

Still using my SP88 overall. It has decent P cores, but weaker E cores. The MC seems OK. I saw Microcenter now has them for $299 and the free game that I don't are about, and I've considered going and picking up a couple more but honestly just might wait till Nova Lake as I'm happy with this sample overall and I doubt I'll get more than 100Mhz on the P cores? Maybe hunt for a godlike MC but even then meh.

Found a brand new factory sealed Z790 Apex Encore for $400 the other day. Went by and picked it up immediately. Not sure why I wanted it, but I think maybe because I love this 273PQE so much I'll probably put it in that board instead? Maybe I'll just keep it and never open it lol. Figured for the price, for a peak Z790 board and being factory new and sealed I couldn't pass it up. And my never ending hardware addiction continues. 🤪

I miss EVGA quite a bit at times like these. Still have my EVGA Nu Audio Pro 7.1, 1600w T2 still rocking hard and hoping EVGA might be able to provide me with a replacement when warranty nears so I can extend it's life, and my EVGA Z690 Dark KingPin which I'll just keep.

Kryptonfly over at overclock.net did this BIOS mod using AI. Imagine that, AI did something useful for a change LMAO. He managed to do the BIOS edits using Claude which is just incredible and crazy. It's still a work in progress, getting into the BIOS menu is only possible on first boot, unless you CPU swap/re-insert 273PQE. This will hopefully be solved soon as it's making tuning/testing things a pain as you get one shot and if it breaks the boot, you cannot get back in until you do the process over again. I'm thinking about just getting a heavy metal pot and resting on the CPU while testing. I think that might work and would make testing much faster. So far I've only tested Battlefield 6, and it works beautifully. All cores boost properly to 5.4Ghz locked which is more than adequate for this chip. Speaking of boost, right now single core boost to 5.9Ghz is not working, but that might just be me needing to change a bios option. Will keep testing. I got a little heavy handed on first boot and wanted to change everything, and it got fussy at either C-States or XMP, my guess is XMP. It might be one of those FSP-M issues where I can only use manual tuning for memory, XMP might be a no fly zone. As long as I can tune memory, this chip will be awesome. So far I've booted 5600 Jedec 2x32gb, which is nicely above the 4800 I was locked to on my Industrial W680 board. Guess I can send that back lmao. Will report further findings as I figure them out. For now though, am loving this chip on Z790.

Sometimes this is why I love this hobby. O it's no supposed to work Intel? Lets see about that.

"Empowered" LMAO.

This looks pretty sick, I especially like that it’s coop.

Remember when they told us that 13th and 12th gen wouldn't work with APO? That is my biggest issue with Intel. They did say IBT has specific silicon "hooks" but I doubt. They said they're looking into bringing it in some fashion to ARL 1. Tells me they're waiting to see how initial sales look before they make that decision.

Being mislead by tech tubers telling you that you have to install 'additional' software was your first mistake. The Intel Performance Package is literally a motherboard driver that you install just like my 9850X3D has Chipset drivers that installs a 3D V-Cache Performance Optimizer and Platform Power Management drivers. No longer do you have to enable anything in the BIOS, it's all on by default, you no longer download the overlay (was never required before anyways) from the Microsoft store as it's all been brough in house, single Intel PPP Driver which installs everything. Intel PPP driver is now on the Intel website as well as your motherboard support page. https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/869519/intel-platform-performance-package.html Intel simply brough it all under one roof now, a single driver that does it all which is how it should have been. It's a great fix. So PPP isn't a gimmick, it's literally Platform Power Management and Optimizations that every single vendor does. I'm not sure how this misunderstanding even started.

https://browser.geekbench.com/v6/cpu/17330779 Geekbench doesn't like me being able to wipe the field of other x86 CPUs like this lol. Can't hurt AMD fanboy feelings. But I absolutely agree Intel needs to stop with the single gen optimization BS. They need to commit to a timeline, say 5 years of guaranteed support for SKU optimizations. It's my biggest gripe with this strategy. I do feel Intel is not going to stop here though with IBOT, I expect multiplayer games will be added soon, especially listening to Robert at Intel speak recently when he very quickly said "not yet". IBOT and the large cache next gen is very likely going to be a big game changer for Intel, they will eventually force IBOT on by default just like APO.

Yep! That 285K might have actually been better than my 285K I am running lol. I didn't really test the 2 fully, but that 285K I sold you did my 8400 CL38 tune, same voltages, ran 40x D2D no issue, and only had a very slightly higher P core voltage and ring voltage. But it still did the same 41x ring and 56x P cores. The chip I sold you also booted higher E core on auto voltages lol. I can boot the higher E core clocks on this chip, but the low voltage V/F stops it from scaling unless I go in adjust the V/F offset for point 8. I think that is mostly a function of interpolation failing, while your slightly higher voltage allows for better interpolation and boots with no adjustments. But ya my 285K can't do 40x D2D unless I run a manual voltage, but I've been gaming on it and testing it for a couple days now and no issue at 40x. If we had a higher ceiling you'd likely be able to go higher since you still have voltage room.

Are you on the latest BIOS? I updated last week and got around to tuning it a bit more. I've found on the latest BIOS, I can now tune VNNAON manually without issue, maybe I always could and never tried. I thought I remember it causing instability when touched around launch and I never tried again. Now latest BIOS, I can push D2D up to max 40x without issue, stable. I just can't use the Asus auto voltage for VNNAON. This sample needs 1.12v instead of auto 1.012v. I had a 285K that could do 40x auto voltage, but P cores were just ever so slightly worse so I kept this 38x-39x auto chip. Now I've been testing and using 40x for a couple days and it's having zero issues. Sure it doesn't amount to much, but more mental wanting to max it out lol. It's honestly a shame Intel has killed off 1851 entirely and 270K Plus will be all they release. My guess with same crap 40x limitations in place. Panther Lake has a very high D2D apparently and they've fixed the latency issues.

Nice results! That board and CPU look like a great value. I'm extremely confused by Intel's decision to delay a Refreshed SKU until that time frame given Nova Lake is supposed to be out later this year. Reminds me of 11th gen and 12th gen. Either they had to heavily bin to get chips able to run the new clocks or they actually fixed some things under the hood. I'm leaning towards heavy binning, but hoping for actual latency fixes that can make the refresh something that will be more impressive over an overclocked ARL chip. I also ordered a 12 core BTL-S chip lol. Mouser had them as out of stock backorder, and I decided I wanted something else to mess around with. The order went through and according to them, they have ordered one from the factory lol. I'll be shocked if it ever arrives, more shocked if it works. 🤞🤞

I haven't seen a A02 version of the board yet. I've only ever seen A01. But I assume that board was returned because of that fact. I had a board from Amazon that was terrible. The Nitro Path Asus is using has made 4x boards viable now. I wish they would have done some magic like that for the 2x boards. $300 for a Z80 AYW and 265K, absolutely insane.

I always thermal grizzly PTM sheet on the core. No pump out, excellent/even temps, and zero risk. Stock had a PTM pad as well. I’m super happy I was able to fix the memory temps. I figured it’s either a heatsink design issue or bad pads. Glad it was fixable with quality pads.

Decided I wanted to repad my RTX 5090 HOF VRAM as the memory temps are atrocious since I got the card. Even with an undervolt and gaming at 500-600w, the memory temps would climb to around 82-84c which is a bit toasty for me. My old TUF ran around 70c on memory temps under load. I for some reason though the pads were 1.5mm and so I ordered some thermal grizzly advanced minus 8 pads. Turns out they were actually 1.0mm (still tried them as they compress decently). They were just too thick and the core wasn't getting good contact and it was hitting 86c lol. Tore the card down again and tried some old 1.0mm I found in my closet collection. These were absolutely shit, worse than the stock pads. Hitting 96c on memory temps with good core temps. Thought I was out of options and was just going to put it all back together with the stock pads. Decided I would try my spare Asus TUF 5090 pads I had on a spare heatsink I had purchased (long story). Luckily the pads were all in good shape and I was able to easily remove them for use on the Galax card. They were also 1mm and super compressible. I applied the pads and booted up with my fingers crossed I wouldn't need to tear the card down again. These pads are amazing, my memory temps now peak around 66-70 under 500-600w gaming loads with better than ever core temps. Finally this card is running awesome with the air cooler. I still need to break it down and to full water, but I'm waiting for my rebuild with Nova Lake later this year lol. I'm planning to finally swap PSU, coolers, the works at that time. I figured I'll go water then. TLDR; the Asus thermal pads used on VRAM is actually some super quality stuff which is why their memory temps are so good compared to other brands. I think MSI also uses similar pads as their vram temps are also amazing and slightly better than both my Asus and Galax card.

LOL yep! Same exact PSU. I RMA'd with MSI and they sent me back that brand new ATX 3.1 version.