Talon

I've got the Pro 7 Gen 8 coming this week, hopefully by Wednesday or Thursday direct from Lenovo. After the Rakuten cash back, 5% off coupon and other work discount I managed to get mine for around $2500 out the door, tax, shipping and their 3 year premium warranty with next day on-site repair. Will update with my thoughts and testing.

Honeywell PTM pad works fantastic for direct die application. I’ve been using it on my Omen 16 for over a year and temps haven’t gotten worse a single bit. Core to core temp differentials are tight and it provided for me near LM results with no risk. I also put it on an AMD 6750XT and had huge temp improvements there as well. They do NOT work well on desktop CPUs. My hypothesis is that the IHS does not get hot enough to “melt” the phase change thermal pad. Where direct die gets hot and will melt it. This melting is necessary as initial temps will be terrible! When you first install it expect horrible near thermal shut down temps. This is completely normal as the pad is thick and needs thermal cycles to Melt and meet optimal thickness. This can take 20 minutes of load/cooling, a few hours or a day to reach full potential. I’ve found a couple hours and it will be a max potential. It will never need to do this again, only on initial application.

Returned. None available to swap with. Asked them to just order me one or put me on a list and they can’t. So dang annoying. Now I’m back to the F5 squad as this laptop seems to be pretty popular given the specs/price compare to the rest of the pack. And 18” screen has now ruined me. I just could not accept 2 decent large dead pixel clusters on a brand new device. I saw someone else got them. I’ve had it happen on a few laptops and usually a swap gets you one without. Right on about about the silicon. This one seemed pretty cherry. Over 33K in a laptop at 172W and not thermal throttling is pretty crazy. I already miss it and want it back lol.

It's a Strix 18 with 4080/13980HX. Honestly a pretty incredible deal for the package overall. Unfortunately I have to return it in the morning as mine arrived with 2 dead pixel clusters/dirt under the display right next to each other almost top/center area. Pretty annoying TBH. But the display itself is pretty incredible and for 18" display area, 6-7lbs isn't bad at all. Too bad it's all BGA, but damn this thing is fast for a laptop. Now I have to wait for BB to get another unit in since they're sold out. I wish they would let you order a replacement and keep current until then, but nope.

@Mr. Fox you got a 4090?! Awesome. Which model? Sorry haven't jumped through the backlog of pages I have here. Picked up a new BGA toy.

A single cable out of the many thousands they've likely sold does not equal not good. The cable was not fully seated, plain and simple. It's been proven and tested to be the cause of the fried cables. There is a reason why the issue has mostly disappeared after those findings were shown, and the masses figured out they needed to seat their cable. This guy stated he was regularly checking the cable over a couple of months and likely managed to finally not seat it fully.

Will do, I'll update in the thread. At this point I am convinced getting 8200 stable is my weaker IMC on this particular CPU I have in the board. I think it's like a 67 MC or lower. I'll test with a 77MC and see if that gets 8200 or higher stable. I had a black screen until OS load issue with this board and Asus boards until Nvidia released a vBIOS firmware update to fix that issue. Never had an issue since, and that firmware was released by Nvidia within a couple weeks after launch of 4090. I believe it was only when using HDMI to my OLED TV since my regular monitor never had any issue. EDIT: I forgot to add I have a 4090 FE in the Dark setup. I've definitely seen the whining! Expecting a 4-dimm board to perform like the 2-dimm setups when pushing the edge is just ridiculous. They make the 2-dimm setup for a reason. EVGA was pretty slow to get their A-Die running properly, and I felt like giving up on their board, but I'm glad I still have it. I have Talon2020 as my name on EVGA forums.

Thanks!!! This BIOS is SOLID for me so far. Finally got 8000 CL36 with my green dies and a terrible IMC stable. Going to test 8200, maybe even swap in another chip to see if I can get it stable. Very happy with 8000 CL36 though. Happy to see EVGA still supporting this board and getting A-Die on track finally.

My chip is a total DUD. I've been testing it for the last couple of hours and this thing is pure trash compared to my 13900K. Of course I got a really decent "K" sample at P SP115. This chip overall is SP104, of course no idea if those are 100% comparable but the more I test I actually think it it might be. At first I didn't think so because I am able to pass 56x CB23 at vmin 1.128 which my 13900K passed at 55x, but my 13900K did this stable. Once I put the 13900KS under a 10min test it failed eventually, sometimes within a few min to sometimes towards end of test. Even then I heavily reduced the undervolt and same thing which is something I've never seen. I think it has to do with the temps going up and causing more instability. Super odd. Y-Cruncher at stock voltage stock clocks manages to crash! It hits 100c under my 420mm AIO, pulls 360w and crashes the test lol. Of course this is unlimited power, but still, something I've never seen. My 13900k can pass this test no problem at above stated voltages. I think it's going back to MC and I'll swap for a different chip or just return it all together.

@electrosofthttps://skatterbencher.com/arc-oc-tool/ Get busy! I am keen to know if this really unlocks any real OC potential. I honestly want to go buy an Arc A770 just to tinker a bit.

Damn that is really incredible!

Actually more than half of the 4070 Ti models prices are within $50 of MSRP, yes that includes Asus. https://www.microcenter.com/search/search_results.aspx?Ntt=rtx+4070+ti&Ntx=mode+MatchPartial&Ntk=all&sortby=match&N=0&myStore=false 3/13 cards are $799 and more than half are within $850.

Finally got around to rebuilding my living room rig with my Z690 Dark yesterday, flashed latest BIOS, but unfortunately still stuck with 7800 CL36 as max stable for my green PCB A-Dies. Might tinker a bit more, but I think it's just where the road ends for me with that board. It could be that if I used my other 13900K I would have better results now as the MC score is lower than my main rig's 74 MC, at least that's what I gather looking at Igor's findings. https://www.igorslab.de/en/intel-13th-gen-raptor-lake-binning-over-500-cpus-tested-part-1-i9-13900k-and-13900kf/6/

Feel better soon man.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234820297885?hash=item36ac61649d:g:d~gAAOSwd49jmffi&amdata=enc%3AAQAHAAAAoFkTM%2FWnDgV746xonmuhcKehwoIoRqyNuQ8ZiKJe7DrUEgErU3LIoDoNDONtDwpxKpRpCCM%2Bk3uMRe9oWKVOOI%2B2odGCBP63TOAGT%2FA0YC1mxDMJi21aFrDo%2FBccdREYGcrOoSAk%2BPuFsJrJyacvNtZB5FgRiR%2BrG2oD7JeA6Hm6CBKQios%2BgNsT1Nbxyt54eGYn9M78JEo4NzOdk9EjYEI%3D|tkp%3ABk9SR-jppt6jYQ People are actually paying $1450 for a freaking 7900 XTX reference card. LOL. 🤦‍♂️

Excellent! I hope to get my Z690 Dark built again this week/weekend. I've been down for the better part of this week with the FLU. Thought I had COVID again, but turned out to be FLU A. The kicker is that for the first time in a long time I got the FLU vaccine and then I get a nasty bout of it for the first time in years. Yay.

Its just a quick test, definitely not a stability test at all lol. But if it can't even handle the clocks being set at the desktop, it ain't gonna handle them under any load. Then of course you have to check for error correcting kicking in and scores regressing even with high clocks.

It's the second Zotac MSRP 4090 I've seen that easily hits 2000+ VRAM. Another guy I know can do +2200 on his Zotac.

6.3Ghz, Jesus that is insane. My theory on the Intel Raptor Lake Refresh is that were going to see higher clocks, more cache?, and likely lower power overall due to DLVR that was fused off by Intel even though it was there originally. Asus has left DLVR in the BIOS in case of "future chip support". Well, now that we know Raptor Lake Refresh is inbound, it would seem Intel plans to use DLVR for desktop refresh.

Picked up an MSRP Zotac 4090 for my brother last week from Microcenter. Managed to reserve one online when a single one popped around 1030pm. Picked it up the next morning. His shitty MSRP Zotac boosts higher out of box than both my Strix OC and FE card at 2775Mhz stock. Had him do the desktop VRAM test today on the desktop and he was able to easily max out the +2000Mhz VRAM slider in MSI Afterburner with no issues. We got him the 2 year warranty and the card has a dual BIOS so will be flashing that crappy 450w limited vBIOS soon. The VRM while shit should not have any issue pushing 500-600w. Kinda crazy how the cheapest of cheap-o cards gets the silicon gold VRAM. This should not be the case!

4090 is 37% faster than AMD's best. Not good for us wanting a 4090 Ti sooner rather than later. Looks like AMD isn't competing at the high end this gen. Nvidia 4080 is more power efficient than the AMD GPU. In certain situations it pulls insane 100w at idle desktop. AMD drivers at their best. The performance is neck and neck in normal rasterization. Then the 4080 smashes the AMD GPU in Ray Tracing and that didn't even include DLSS 3.0 and Frame Gen which AMD has no answer to yet. Yes I know they "announced" FSR 3, but a stated release date of 2023 is vague, and no idea the kind of support it will see by that point. Considering the $200 price difference MSRP vs MSRP, The AMD card just ain't worth it IMO. That coil whine lol.

RIP The Hype.

Yes it's true. This has been widely reported over at OC.net. Plenty of users found out these new 2gb ram modules like to be warmer to an extent vs cold. They can't clock as high once they get too cold.

Shame to hear about your memory OC. My Strix OC card does +1800 or +1900 before it crashes/freezes the desktop. Can't remember right now. My FE MSRP card does +2200 before it freezes at desktop. Golden memory does +2000 or higher with average seemingly around +1400-1700 from what I've seen on OC.net.