Mr. Fox

Massive improvement. Before it was hitting 100°C with the blower on it even after a repaste and new pads. Well worth the $80~ paid for the brand new GPU block. Now I need one for the 9070 XT. Fits nice and looks good.

I just today received the 3080 Turbo block that I ordered May 16. The 9950X3D trash specimen was shipped back to Amazon on 6/13. It was going to Las Vegas. It has been sitting at the UPS destination hub since 6/16 and hasn't moved since. UPS shipments to places like Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego from Phoenix are usually delivered the day after UPS receives them. When I had to send back the broken AORUS Master motherboard to Central Computers (NorCal) I sent it next day air. It took 6 business days for delivery. I think DHL has stopped accepting shipments to Canada due to some first-world Canadian crap taking place. So there seems to be some sort of turmoil happening with shipping services. Is it a full moon?

It is very common for gigantic companies to be mismanaged from the top down. We see it frequently in the largest companies. Airlines are one of the most frequent examples. I just hope we don't end up having a bunch of libtards playing the "too big to fail" card like they did with auto manufacturer bailouts. If a company can't survive without government subsidies it needs to die. And, we need to help it die, not prolong the agony. Keeping a mismanaged organization on life support and allowing it to continue losing money only to keep jobs intact is an idiotic plan. Companies that are mismanaged to that degree probably have a mismanaged workforce as well. Same applies to worthless government agencies with employees that do nothing (often incompetent and unqualified) and serve no useful purpose in the grand scheme of things. Kill it. Nobody is "owed" anything. Not my problem. Stop wasting my tax dollars. Let me keep my money and use it for something that is actually important and beneficial to me. DOGE really shook things up in a good way and I hope it keeps going. Intel needs to make it on their own or die. I hope the government does not lift a finger for any company like Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Micro$lop, crApple... now or ever. My mom, God rest her soul, was half Native American (Choctaw) and upon reaching the age of 2, she and her brothers were tossed into the Devil's River (South Texas) and told to "swim or die" by my grandfather. They swam. No instructions required. No assistance provided. It scared the crap out of them, but the fight to survive was greater than the challenge. My grandfather knew that and my mom and uncles never forgot it. My grandpa would go to prison for that today.

Well, this was kind of interesting. As I wait for Alphacool to drop a GPU block for this 9070 XT (late July ETA) and ponder the absolutely ludicrous uncorrectable personal furnace hotspot temps that Radeon GPUs are world famous for, I notice something. With my tower on my left a couple of feet from my left arm and no side panel installed I notice an abnormal amount of air blowing on me with unusual velocity and volume when running Time Spy. The stream of air is blowing from a gap in the heatsink fins. Essentially a 1-inch square hole with no obstructing fins and directly over the middle fan. So, I grab a razor blade and carve myself a plug from a chunk of foam rubber. I wedge it in there to neatly plug the hole and now I have about 10-12°C lower hotspot temps running Tme Spy. I wonder how many (and for how long) Radeon GPUs have had suckier than necessary hotspot temps due to similar heatsink design flaws. There is not much they could do in terms of adding a few extra rows of fins because the gap in the fins is where heat pipes turn and change direction, but changing the design of the shrouid or even just designing a black rubber or plastic plug to keep the air from taking the path of least resistance and losing all of the static pressure through the gaping hole would make a world of difference. Put a cork in it, dumb-dumbs! 🤣 And, speaking of GPU blocks, my Alphacool block for the ASUS 3080 Turbo blower GPU (an even worse hot mess and noise-maker than the Radeon) is due for FedEx delivery tomorrow. I think I will use that while waiting for the 9070 XT block. It is amazing how much more heat and noise air cooled parts dump into your living space. I never noticed because I have water cooled almost everything for such a long time. Computer life is a whole lot less annoying with everything water cooled.

That is some wicked bass jamming. That song reminds me very much of this one for that reason.

We (enthusiasts) are definitely outnumbered by those that don't know, don't care, or exercise restraint when it comes to spending. While I think cost per FPS is valid and something to pay attention to, where we mislead ourselves or rationalize purchases is by thinking in terms of "I am paying for an upgrade" when we should think strictly in terms of "I am buying NVIDIA's current best GPU. Is their pricing in line with what the flagship product was last year, or am I getting screwed?" This should be the primary basis for the purchase decision rather than size of the uplift over last generation equivalent. The size of the performance uplift doesn't matter in the context of needing a new GPU. They need it to be priced based on what it is, not how much better it is or is not. If you think in terms of how much you are paying for an upgrade, an upgrade from what? Where one person measures is different than another. And, that could go the other direction and the price change would need to be smaller for those whose upgrade would be smaller. And, we know they wouldn't want to operate that way because it would be right.

If Starfield is a game that can use as many cores/threads that the CPU can provide as opposted the the typical game that chokes on too many your HEDT setup might be getting better than normal results for that reason.

Cliff notes: clock speed is still king when the core/thread count is equal, and sometimes even when it is not equal. mama mia!

Thank you, China.

Absolutely. Same here. They work well and last a long time, too. Are all of them black? I think that is really smart.

Thermal Grizzly products are pretty great overall. For 200x200 pads of that quality the price seems reasonable to me. I think that is generally true of the pricing of most of what they sell. It's never cheap but always good quality and appropriately priced.

I think Intel has problems created by poor leadership and bad choices they have made at Intel that have nothing to do with the global economy. Even if everything was peachy on the world stage I think they would still be in exactly the same boat. I hope NVIDIA is next. They need to be pulled off of their high horse.

TSME has plants in the US already. They are building a new one here in Phoenix. We have Intel, AMD, TSME and Motorola plants in the area in and around Phoenix.

Yeah, that has pretty much been the non-scalper price since launch day. Everything is overpriced, but anecotally it seems the Elite is slightly better than the Gaming OC. The whole PC enthusiast space is in a sadder state than I have ever seen it. Things have been circling the drain for a long time. Things started to get crappy with the crypto-craze and have never gotten better. It has never been so difficult to find satisfaction with the products available for purchase across all brands. I am having my first and only acceptable experience with AMD products right now. While I have to admit that it is not thrilling, it's nice to not be enraged by the magnitude of the unacceptableness I found in prior generation Ryzen and Radeon products. They have come a very long way, but overall still prefer Intel and NVIDIA when all things are as they should be. The problem now is that nothing is as it should be. AMD is still rough around the edges and it still seems like their target market is cost-conscious gamerboys and not overclocking enthusiasts. Setting aside preferences and product superiority, I feel like I am done getting screwed with overpriced NVIDIA crap and I'm probably not going back to Intel until they ditch the smartphone core filth. It feels like everything is crappy and compromised now, so shopping based on price is probably the only intelligent approach to take at this point. I don't think I would be particularly happy with anything available for purchase right now. The best things we can buy now are grossly overpriced and lackluster, representing the poorest value and shoddiest engineering and QC that we have ever seen that I can remember. Overpaying to get something awesome is not ideal, but I resigned myself to that reality. You didn't feel like you were getting screwed as hard as we are now and getting something that was actually pretty awesome helped in terms of dealing with the undesirable pricing. But things have gotton worse. Overpaying to get mediocre crap (the current state) is unacceptable. It is sobering to think that the bad new days we are living in right now might later be viewed as the good old days. Just thinking about it that way is a bit gut-wrenching. On a cheerier note, the bare die temps on the 9950X are still pretty amazing. Look at what nice load temps, even with my hot ambient. This was the peak during two back-to-back passes of CBR23. @jaybee83 I found my old screenshots from the Gene. Here they are next to the other screenshots. Interesting to see the variance between motherboards on the two SP118 CPUs. This doesn't inspire much confidence in SP ratings for Ryzen. Neither does what I have heard about the SP rating being reported higher if the BIOS is flashed with the CPU is warmer. I'm not sure whether putting as much stock in it as Intel makes good sense on AMD. Seems a little sketchy and unreliable to me.

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. The whole concept that mobile computing is built around is perma-broken and undesirable to me now. 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.