Talon

Unfortunately I failed to read the highlighted part after reading the first part. Sleep deprivation on launch day, or just plain oversight on my part. Either way I figured the PCIE lanes usually never needed additional power and supplied 75w by SPEC. Unfortunately Asus seems to have built it differently this go. I don't see this on any other manufacturers boards so this is certainly something different.

I'm only seeing it on Asus Z690 boards. Looks like Hero, Extreme and Apex all have it. I wondered what it was an quickly read the manual when building the rig. And like I said if you quickly read it, you will think it's only for utilization of a few PCIE cards. It wasn't until I saw the 12v rail voltage and then managed to put two and two together. Also I'm seeing another notebook-review forum, are we headed to that one?

RTX 3050 Pee Shooter Results -- EVGA card with Gigabyte vBIOS for slightly higher TDP. Good enough for #1 with a stock 12900K lol. https://www.3dmark.com/spy/26066916 @Papusan When you build your Z690 Apex rig, this is NOT optional as the user manual may lead you to believe... I finally discovered why my shit was black screening/crashing under load randomly. I thought I had figured it out, but somehow after I returned from training it's reared it's ugly head again. I again swapped to a low power RTX 3050 card and crashing gone. Ran for hours no issues. I put my 3090 KPE back in and immediately crashed in almost any game. I lowered the power limit to 50% and played for hours. So it has to be PSU? I contacted EVGA this afternoon and they agreed PSU and issued me a cross shipped PSU. Upon further digging I notice my 12v rail is dropping to as low as 11.3v under load. WTF? Surely PSU then... Then I remembered when I built this rig that connection was something new. If you read the Asus manual quickly you may think this is only necessary to hook up when trying to utilize numerous PCIE cards. Nope read further and it says that unless you connect a GPU PCIE cable to this you will have issues with a stable 12v rail. After I connected this cable, 12v is rock stable and no more crashing randomly. What a ridiculous design that I've never seen before.

Trident Z5 6400 CL32 delivered. XMP booted on my Hero board without issue. Stock run of AIDA64 is nice. Latency is still high but stock sucks, can't wait to see how high I can push these. The Samsung sticks were pretty garbage. These are confirmed SK Hynix as read out from CPU-Z on my sticks.

Just picked up the 6400 CL32 sticks from G.Skill. Plan to keep the better of the Corsair SK Hynix vs the G.Skill stuff. Can't let @Papusan have all the fun. Edit: The old forums were there this early morning, and now officially dead. RIP. ☠️