Talon

On 10/19/2025 at 3:40 PM, Mr. Fox said:

Is the voltage and power limit unlocked with the stock vBIOS or you have to source the XOC vBIOS? What is your default voltage max?

The stock voltage is 1.15v and the stock power is 600w.

The XOC vBIOS is publicly available on tech power up and is 2001w, which further unlocks voltage and memory another +1000 over other 5090s.

Some nice individual over at OC.net PM'd me the extra special HOF tool for even further voltage, LLC, and switching period control. Basically the same as the old KingPin tools. 

Ordered the HOF 5090D IceMan waterblock on AliExpress. Figured the card is pretty rare and any future owner will def. want the ability to put it under water to take advantage of the voltage and power limits. 

24 minutes ago, Papusan said:

 

What? Then it looks like the new backplate design for the 5000 series HOF is a lot worse than the 4000 series. And no thermal pads for the backplate? This is sad to see. But glad to see they still continue with no cut out for the backplate under the die chips. And I mean I have never seen HOF cards with melted 12VHPWR connectors. That's good.

 

Here's the teardown of the 4090 HOF

 

Did you test the full speed fan button on the IO shield? What you think about the noise level? 

I tested the 100% fan speed button on the backplate and funnily enough, it's not actually 100%. It's 200-300RPM slower than using 100% fan speed in Afterburner LOL. So the hardware solution is slower than just setting the software to 100%. Super odd but not a big deal either. 

The backplate looks very similar but zero thermal pads, and instead has this plate protective shield over the entire backplate except on the backside of the GPU die which does have a thermal pad. But the rest has no thermal pads on the backside VRM which makes absolutely no sense to me. I guess I'll buy some thermal pads and removal the shield. I assume they did this to prevent shorts with the backplate, but the thermal pad should provide adequate gap that the risk would be near zero. 

19 hours ago, electrosoft said:

Nah bro! Your worst decisions allow us to continue to live vicariously through your purchasing decisions! 🙂

 

Looking forward to your results and $800 over an Astral actually isn't terrible seeing as the XOC vBIOS hasn't shown up for us mere mortals in almost 9 months and counting....

Thank man! Unfortunately until first week of Nov I won't really be able to mess around with the card. Found a waterblock for the card on Ali Express, as I understand they are super rare. Guess I better just buy it as there are only 5 remaining in stock. But to truly max out this card's ability, it needs water. On air I'm able to push 700-800w max before temps become insane. The other thing I've found is the memory temps, even at stock are pretty terrible at around 74-78c. When I push the card they can hit 84c. The cooler itself though can manage to keep 700-800w in check with core temps in 70s, which for an air cooler with vapor chamber is decent at that power draw. I think my TUF OC 5090 card hits around 70s at 600w. 

They used this *mostly* closed off backplate, and ZERO thermal pads. Instead it has a heat shield? So it essentially traps heats in to the card. Makes no sense. I should probably remove the shield and do thermal pads to try and wick heat off the back of the card. 

The card did have PTM, I took it apart to PTM the card, and to my surprise, it already had PTM lol. But the tinkering let me take it apart, which thankfully is quite easy and they use same size screws for everything on the back. The VRM is just ridiculous on the card. 36 phase VRM. 

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

Nice. Great find. I hope you got a good deal on it. Is that a 4090 or 5090? Non-D model?

5090D is only Galax HOF available. Only 100 of these cards were made. I got it for about $800 over an Astral. Which in hind so hindsight is still a terrible deal lol. 
 

But at least it’s semi unlocked and can go to 36Gbps memory. 
 

21 minutes ago, Papusan said:

 

Congrats bro. Both 4000 and 5000 series HOF have a nice clean design. Did you get the Galax XOC software?

 

It just works. Why change to the new and shiny if the old still works bro @Mr. Fox? 

 

Can you DM me the Galax HOF software? I want to see if it works on 5090. 

Sometimes I feel like I make the worst decisions. Found this card brand new from a small shop in Florida. 

1 hour ago, electrosoft said:

Who was it sold by? Right now they're $2449 sold by PCNation. If they were shipped and sold by Amazon you know a reseller snatched them up if they were $1999 which is sad.

They were shipped and sold by Amazon. 

6 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

Looks like my timing was bad on buying a 5090. Should have waited a little longer for prices to fall even further. That's the first "good" price I have seen for an AIB partner 5090. If I was confident I could quicly sell my 4090 for enough to cover the cost of that GPU and a block for it I would grab it.

 

I really like the TUF component aesthetics. The industrial looks is a lot nicer than the ROG gamer stuff. But, the firmware is frequently inferior on TUF components.

 

I never noticed it until just now, but that's an odd vacant space between the backplate and heatsink radiator above the fan on the end. It looks strange. I have seen in some reviews that the TUF seems to run hotter and has a less effective cooler. I wonder if that is why? They should have filled up the space with pipes and fins.

I have the TUF 5090, and it's a pretty great card. No issues to report. I wish I had gotten it at this price! 

TUF 5090 on Amazon for $1999

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0DS2Z8854/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&th=1

7 hours ago, tps3443 said:

BF6 Beta was such a TEASE! The game was INSANE. Now we cannot play anymore!!! 😭I got to rank 10 Can't wait for next weekend. This game needs to launch already! 
@Talon was hitting it harder than me lol. I wish I would have started playing it earlier.  Anyways, it's amazing how useful cover is in this game. And spray someone with a M4 takes a little practice as first. But you can get the pattern down after some practice. GREAT GAME! Game was completely butter smooth. Maybe once per hour you would feel the tinniest stutter, but not enough to care. And it could have been because my frame rate was like sub 400 with x4 Frame gen on. Anyways. Fantastic game! It feels FASTER moving than other Battlefield titles. Kinda like a mix between COD and BF2042. I really like it! 

We can play again on 8/14 THRU 8/17 Can't wait. 

I hit the max rank 20 lol. Man I really do love it, next weekend hit me up and we can squad up if you want. I'm off on Thursday so I'll be locked and loaded for some BF6 action and try to grind hard. I still played BF2042, it got better, but dang if it isn't sterile feeling going back to that after tasting BF6 action. 

5 hours ago, Papusan said:

Intel talk about the changes will come into 2028-2029. I mean that's all too late. AMD have already reached 50% market shares for server chips and for desktop consumer chips (clients/DIY) Intel  even struggle more. Intel have no more time to lose. We'lll see.   

Not quite, that article the other day was based on manipulated data. 

While AMD has definitely gained market share in server, they're definitely not at 50%

I had a feeling HWU results were SUS AF. 

23 hours ago, win32asmguy said:

 

Yeah it does not make sense to omit benchmark data collected, especially considering the amount of time it takes to generate. He did have to completely redo his tests with the laptop 5090 because of the bugged power limit in early drivers.

 

Nvidia is having a rough time selling the 5090 mobile. I am surprised it is not 200W as I have seen it pulling over 30k in Timespy shunted. Maybe a theoretical 9070M would be close enough to make them bump the magical PL barrier up a notch in January!

 

9955HX3D from Eluktronics is supposed to be released next month. I think they are going to try and get as much tuning unlocked on it as possible, along with the new 140W PPT that AMD allows which is much greater than the 100W we got with the 7945HX3D.

 

On another note, I know you had mentioned 285K a few times here and there. Have you looked at any Z890 boards? I was thinking about testing an Asrock Taichi OCF with a 285K and see how it does with the 5090 compared to the Xeon.

If you don't nee the cores, get the 265KF at Microcenter shipped nation wide for $210. Best deal on a CPU I've seen in a long time. 265K is same silicon quality as 285K with 4 less E cores. It's like they downclocked the P cores just to make a new SKU. But My 265K clocked as high, if not higher on P cores than my 285K, and same on E cores. It actually ahs lower latency just due to the design of the chip that cannot be mimicked on the 285K, no matter which E cores you disable.

Tested the shorting pin 2 to ground method that is circulating on OC.net. 

No go. Does nothing lol. I got some jumper wires and shorted pin 2, did absolutely nothing to the card other than turning off my fans lol. 

4 hours ago, tps3443 said:

I would buy a 5090FE, then buy a EKWB waterblock. $2,350. Then I’d shunt mod the card. The shunt cost 💲0.60. Then I would mount the block using Liquid Metal and the original air seal on the FE card for LM longevity. And you’ve got a tiny dinky beast of a GPU. 5090FE only needs 1 shunt soldered VS 2 shunts soldered on other 5090’s. 
 

Zero disadvantage since it’s the cheapest solution. Price to performance is also very good. Not to mention most 2K AIB 5090’s are absolute garbage PCB designs in comparison to a 5090FE PCB. The components used, and the chintzy thin PCB’s on some of these AIB’s is questionable. The higher end 5090 AIB’s are nice. But some of these 2K 5090 AIB’s? Total chintzy. 
 

Not to mention bin quality. This varies card to card. But, I can run 3322Mhz in games with bath water. I know an Astral on chilled water than cannot even run 3,240Mhz, another 5090 IChill can run 3140Mhz in games with same voltage as me using ambient water.
 

If you could hold a FE PCB in one hand, and another AIB PCB in another hand, you’d be amazed. The thickness and build quality is very good would make you think AIB PCB is Dollar General toy. 😊 Once you are ready to sell, remove shunt,  re-assemble with factory FE cooler. Then sell for top dollar since FE’s always pull good re-sale at end of life. 
 

@electrosoft There are two XOC bios right now leaked, due to device mismatch and no modded Nvflash available this bios cannot be flashed to just any 5090’s as far as I know, and you’d have to tear apart the GPU anyways just to flash its bios with a hardware flasher. May as well solder a shunt on and be done faster. But, even if someone could maybe @Talon can flash his Asus TUF since his has the connector. I my self still wouldn’t change anything. Waterblock performance and core boosting performance on warm ambient water more than makes up for this for me.

 

I’m in the shunt mod group. It’s really such an easy mod. If I can do it, anyone can. I have zero soldering skills. I’m not very good at it lol. The end result is AWESOME for any 5090. 
 

 

I took my card out and tried to short the 2 pins but I need some jumper wires as the wire job I tried to make didn't work. So I'll have my jumpers tomorrow to try and flash the XOC BIOS. 

I might just bust out the USB flasher and force flash it instead. 

2 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

They named it 5050 because it is only half as good as it should be. The price is good, but everything else is not. 50/50. Or, maybe it is the level of ownership satisfaction.

---

I finally got my refund from Amazon for the disappointing garbage 9950X3D bottomfeeder silicon sample that I returned. Two weeks is a long time to wait on a $750 refund. But, a better way to buy is coming soon. I can hardly wait.

 

PHOENIX!!! YES lol. I'm out there every now and again when I go to the In-Laws home. Finally! And now I can answer yes to the question if I'll ever move back lol. Phoenix based and have access to a MC if I moved out there again. 

Get your wallet ready lol. It's very dangerous having MC so close by lol. 

Edit: Just saw it's right next to Sky Harbor. Very dangerous for me on short overnights lol. 

9 hours ago, tps3443 said:

#29 HOF 3Dmark with my Founders Edition. 😁

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 video card benchmark result - Intel Xeon W-3175X Processor,ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG DOMINUS EXTREME

Monster card. I've said it before, the FE is my favorite card last gen and still my favorite card this gen, maybe slightly less so with the weird multiple PCBs and cables they used. Last gen 4090 FE and it's brick air cooler was phenomenal. The PCB and the cooler are literally works of art and feel stupid high quality compared to some of these junk AIBs. And the price is right too. 

Nice job!

2 hours ago, Papusan said:

 

 

 

Intel have just determined fire 20% of their semiconductor factory workers staff. Instead Intel prefer buy silicon for their products from their competitor TSMC to cut their costs and increase margins. And now will outsource their marketing team. What will be left of Intel closer to the end of this decade? Intel ain't Intel anymore. Just a brand mark with the Intel stamp on. Consumers can just buy AMD. They all get the silicon from TSMC, so yeah... Intel's new CEO Mr. Lip is in full work modernizing cut Intel into small pieces. 

Intel to outsource marketing to Accenture and AI, resulting in more layoffs

The marketing division has been one of Intel's key strengths since the company began communicating directly with end users with the launch of its "Intel Inside" campaign in 1991. However, it looks like the company will drastically cut its human-driven marketing efforts going forward, as it plans to lay off many of its marketing employees, believing that Accenture's AI will do a better job connecting Intel with customers.

 

How exactly the usage of AI instead of real people can reinforce the brand hasn't been explained yet.

 

Former Intel employees new work tools... Designed in US and made by China🤔 I really hope the US Government won't infuse a huge tariff on much needed sewing machines.

TSMC is heavily subsidized by the Taiwanese government and now apparently the US govt. too. 
 

AMD got rid of their fabs. I think it’s long overdue for Intel to sell theirs off too. All of Intels losses are because of the costs and investment into those fabs in recent years. 

It’s not Intels job to ensure we have home field fabs. If the US government doesn’t care, then Intel needs to dump them. We will all be buying TSMC or maybe Samsung chips in the future. The prices are going to sky rocket. And it’s nobodies fault but our own. 

Also when is the last time Intels marketing was good? I feel sorry for those that are losing their jobs, but when a company is in the red, nobody is safe.

Intel with it's own bLLC (big last level cache) coming with Nova Lake. Apparently it's 144Mb cache tile. Nova Lake shaping up to be a monster CPU for Intel. 

7 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

I can see them being useful for turdbook battery life. I am glad I no longer have much use for laptops. PC life is way better without them. I literally never waste a minute of my life thinking or caring about mobile trash any more. 

 

IMHO these crappy smartphone cores have no acceptable place in a desktop CPU. They need to get rid of them entirely,ditch the chiplets/tiled crap, bring back hyperthreading and AVX-512, and stop burning calories making something stupid better than (not as crappy as) it used to be. 

 

It would take almost no effort for Intel to soundly beat any Ryzen 9 CPU by a large margin and make the gap too wide for any possibility of AMD being able to keep up if they did that. It is already close in spite of the Atom core garbage gumming up the works for Intel.  Being close in spite of them isn't a win for Intel. It is just a lame excuse for a half-assed way of doing things. Close only counts in a game of horseshoes.

AVX512 is coming back to

Nova Lake. Except it’s the next gen called AVX10. 
 

Unfortunately HT is gone I think. 

3 hours ago, Papusan said:

 

Yep, forget those LP E-cores. They won't do much. Then you are left with 48 threads (most of them are threads from the lower perfoming baby cores). AMD make ready an 32 core Ryzen cpu tocompete. That means 64 threads. Or 16 threads more than what you get from the next level of the hybrid mess from Intel. 3 different types of cores means Microsofts engineers need to make magic with their OS builds for Intel processors. That is doomed to fail. Because the power scheduler will go totally wacko. 

 

 

AMD is making 32 core Ryzen? I don't think so. They're changing to 12 core CCD, meaning max 24 cores 48 threads. 

Intel has already got the LPE cores (see useless cores for desktop) figured out. They've been using them since Meteor Lake laptops. I recently had a 285H laptop that had 2 LPEs and they worked only when watching something full screen on battery. They do a great job to extend the life of the battery when just doing media consumption. So not worthless for a laptop. But unless something changes (and it might) for Nova Lake, they cannot be used for heavy tasks, even if you try to force them on. Although, like I said, it might change and they might be usable for Nova Lake desktop. 

But back to the point, it's already been figured out on the scheduler side. Also this is like the 6th gen of disaggregated hybrid CPU for Intel. The scheduler works pretty great at this point, I have yet to see many if any issues with Arrow Lake scheduling. 

Nova Lake with 48 cores, no HT, is likely going to wipe the floor with a 48 thread Ryzen in Multithreading. 24 threads on Arrow Lake already compete with 32 threads on Zen 5. With thread parity, I don't see it going well for AMD. Not to mention the E cores just continue to get better and better each gen. If they do happen to get all 52 cores working together, it won't even be close IMO. 

2 hours ago, tps3443 said:

I never really tried! What is the key entry? 

1. Shut down the laptop. 

2. Hold Fn + Tab and while holding, power on the laptop. When you see the lights on the keyboard light up, count to 2 and release Fn + Tab and begin to mash F2 to get into the BIOS.

3. Go to the advanced settings and look for the second advanced menu on the left. 

If the Advanced menu does not exist, you have to go one step further by creating an Admin password for the BIOS. Once you create the password, save and exit and then shut down and do the above. Now the advanced menu should be there. Be warned there are a lot of settings in there, and not all settings can be tinkered with an recovered from if set wrong.

3 hours ago, electrosoft said:

I am still waiting on Acer to send the Predator eval 275hx+5070ti OLED my way. It looks like they're finally shipping for sale in the US this last week so that bodes well.

I had the Acer Helio Neo 16S AI for about 3 days before I took it right back. The speakers, build quality, and overall horrible thermal design did not justify the price. How on earth Acer managed to make a chunkier, uglier, and less performant device than the Asus G16 is beyond me. 

I went back to my thin and light Asus G14 with 4070 and will ride this gen out I think. Honestly for my needs, the G14 does everything pretty great. Good screen, extremely portable and light, amazing speakers and a halfway competent gaming experience when I want to do some light gaming on overnights in hotels. I'm so over the huge and heavy desktop replacement style laptops personally. Mostly because they're not like the old days. They're stripped of features, and locked down so heavily the costs and weight/size don't justify their existence anymore. I'd rather the thin and light daily driver I can carry around the house, or actually use a laptop. 

The Acer "only" being 5lbs, and sub 1" looked decent to fit the bit for an upgrade at a decent price. Just didn't meet my expectations. I will say though, the 240Hz OLED instead of the advertised 165Hz was a very nice surprise. Also they used SK Hynix 6400MTs CSO DIMMS (laptop CUDIMMS) as well. Shame they locked overclocking down completely, even with the unlocked advanced menus. They literally removed the "overclocking menu" and Undervolt Protection option so you could not tune voltage. Why sell an HX chip, and then remove all of those features while you competitors offer tuning? 

If you guys do want to try and access the BIOS on Acer. 

1. Shut down the laptop. 

2. Hold Fn + Tab and while holding, power on the laptop. When you see the lights on the keyboard light up, count to 2 and release Fn + Tab and begin to mash F2 to get into the BIOS.

3. Go to the advanced settings and look for the second advanced menu on the left. 

If the Advanced menu does not exist, you have to go one step further by creating an Admin password for the BIOS. Once you create the password, save and exit and then shut down and do the above. Now the advanced menu should be there. Be warned there are a lot of settings in there, and not all settings can be tinkered with an recovered from if set wrong.

Oddly you can sometimes also unhide even more settings in different menu trees by hitting CTRL + S while on that menu page. 

@electrosoft I was just curious if he got into the hidden/advanced BIOS on that Acer as I found a way into the hidden/advanced menus without needing to use SREP. A simple key entry on boot unlocks the hidden 'second' Advanced menu on Acers. 

On 3/3/2025 at 7:55 PM, tps3443 said:

Do you all think it is worth buying this extended warranty on this device? It is expiring in a few days. This was an Acer recertified device with a very short warranty. And it is expiring very soon, less than 2 weeks left. 

This extended warranty cost $207 dollars with a promotion through Acer. 

I do not typically buy extended warranties. But, with this being a costly and decent machine and all, I would love to hear input on this. Thanks everyone!

Acer Predator 18”
Mini LED 250hz
Intel 14900HX+RTX4090
32GB DDR5/ 1TB M.2

Did you ever go into the BIOS and unlock it? 

5 hours ago, cylix said:

Ahem hello i am back after some hiatus,family, work and so on

Looks like everyone is rockin 5090 and so on...

 

😜🫠

 

 

 

Benchmark!!! We need them.