Mr. Fox

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.

Looks like B&H finally has stock on 9070 XT and for not-scalper pricing. This won't last long. It's the only model available. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1872844-REG/asus_prime_rx9070xt_o16g_radeon_rx_9070_xt.html

For the same reason I question any benefit to a dual CCD X3D CPU unless you only care about gaming, and if gaming is what you do and care about then just buy a single CCD X3D. Having the second CCD needing to be managed by Windoze is an Achilles Heel. The Winduhz scheduler needing to be in control of anything is like a bad apple spoiling the entire barrel. Relying on the OS to do anything is always a bad idea. Almost guaranteed it is going to suck if it relies upon Windoez to do anything in order to make it work.

Time will tell...

I took the plunge on the latest "irreversible" BIOS update and the Strix seems to be working fine with the latest UEFI cancer.

Even though they can buy a used one for $1500 they prefer to pay an extra $1000 (plus interest) to NewEgg so they can finance it and spread it out over time. Death by 1,000 paper cuts. That frees up their cash to buy dolls and action figures to set on top of the GPU to compliment the rainbow puke when they get the GPU.

They clean them up and sell them as "NewEgg Refurbished" on their own web site.

Do it. The worst warrant to have is the one that is expired. If you buy it things will probably be fine and you won't need it. If you do not, chances are pretty good that Murphy's Law will find your wallet and the cost will be greater than the price for the extended warranty. It is good that it includes accidental damage coverage. That makes the price even more attractive. For 3 years' peace of mind I think that is pretty affordable. For the record, that price for a 3 year warranty is about what a 3 year extended warranty cost was 10 years ago.

The only reason I have 9950X systems now is because I wanted something new and the 15th Gen "Core Ultra" product line is more of an undesirable mess. 13th and 14th Gen Intel CPUs are awesome. As long as you manually control the clocks and voltage and stay away from eTVB you should have no issues with degradation. Set a high LLC to normalize voltage and avoid the high idle and low-load voltage swings and spike. No need to use special performance-killing "intel failsafe" profile if you take control of things.

It truly is a situation of having to choose from undesirable options. There are no good options in the current hardware generations.

That is an absolutely great trade-in value considering that is almost new MSRP for that GPU. But, if something seems to good to be true it probably is. There is an underlying motivation that we are not seeing and I can just about guarantee you that it is ultimately not going to be for the benefit of consumers. Someone else is going to benefit from it, not NewEgg's customers. It's not a generous gesture of goodwill. NewEgg is playing the auto dealership scam. Give you more than your trade-in is worth and then more than make up for it when they screw you six ways to Sunday on an overpriced new car. If it were a legit thing they would cash you out for $1600 nstead of giving credit on a new GPU purchase. Plus, it's still not enough money to offset the extreme overpricing of the 5090. I think stock has "stabilized" (aka sales have stagnated) only because people that would have wanted a 5090 have figured out they are getting sodomized and decided to not pay twice what one is worth. That describes where I am at with it. Do I want one? Yes. Am I willing to buy one? No, absolutely not. You're basically spending what it would take to buy two 4090s without getting double the performance and only having one GPU left in the end. That sucks real bad. If it was priced to value I would buy a 5090 and keep my 4090 to use in my second PC or have it on-hand as a spare. So, what seems like a good deal on the surface is still a truly horrible deal and the high trade-in price is probably nothing more than a desperate attempt to move stock on overpriced 5090 cards that are going to start losing value because not enough people are willing to take a shot in the heiney hole to have one. What I think might happen, or at least what I would like to happen, is AMD is going to launch another flagship that sells for half the cost of a 5090, runs like a 5080 or 4090 and all of these $3000+ abortions are going to suddenly not be sellable unless they slash the pricing 30% to 50%. I really hope that is what happens. It's exactly what NVIDIA and the greedy AIB partners deserve to have happen to them. They need to be pushed to the edge of the bankruptcy cliff. Not over, but close enough to scare the crap out of them. It needs to hurt so bad and hurt for long enough that they will not want to try it again any time soon. They don't care about us, so we need to stop caring about them. Our actions need put them into self-defense/survival mode. Those that will be hurt the most will be the poor unfortunate suckers that already drank the Kool-Aid and paid absolutely insane prices for a 5090. Does this mean I like AMD now? Nope. It doesn't and I don't. AMD sucks. But, putting up with their mediocrity and face-melting hotspot temps and slow VRAM is a better alternative than getting screwed. Look back over the months that have passed since 5090 first launched and take a talley on all of the missteps and shenanigans that have taken place. Besides not being worth it monetarily a lot of stuff was totally botched up. And, we still have the sucky 12VHPWR NVIDIA arson PCIe power connectors.

Happy Father's Day brothers. I hope those of you that are and/or have a dad enjoy celebrating the privilege and honor.

Winduhz has been a broken effed up piece of crap in every iteration that followed Windows 7 and the latest abortion has brought us an unprecedented degree of half-assed trashiness and filth.

If we are lucky their investors will decide they hate them and stop investing in computer technology. Then the companies wanting to get rich from AI won't because they won't have any operating capital available for dumbass ventures like AI. I'm totally OK with the idea of no new products coming to market from NVIDIA for 3 to 5 years. They can just lower prices and keep sellinng what they've already released. I could see some real benefits to that. It would be wonderful to get 5 years of service out of a flagship GPU before anything newer and better dropped.

I do not ever remembering caring so little about NVIDIA as I do now. I really do hope they get what they deserve. It will be really bad (for them) if they do. They have earned whatever misfortune comes their way.

So @Papusan Alienware is partnering with Lego to make the kiddos happy. Disgusting. If the 9090 XT is real I will probably buy one.

It's quite the day we live in. Besides it being a 21st Century Sodom and Gomorrah we buy more snake oil than anyone could possibly use during the course of their life. Consumers are generally regarded as an expendable commodity rather than an important customer. Lies and misrepresentation are a means to their end. Our happiness doesn't matter and neither does earning trust or respect for as long as we keep paying for their mistakes and continue allowing them to screw us over. These circumstances are not limited to PC hardware manufacturers and software developers, but it feels particularly bad in this realm because it matters to us. An example of snake oil is the ASUS Nitropath technology. I mention it only because it is something new that nobody continued talking about after the initial marketing campaign and hype train heralding it as a beneficial hardware feature. There aren't many boards that have it. This Strix does have it and I am seeing no evidence that it exists in terms of functionality. I can't find anything negative or postive to say about it because there is nothing to see other than the marketing hype that was devoted to it. I think I will put this on the back burner until Microcenter opens here. Then the only thing I will have to care about is the 40 minute drive each direction to give them back the broken trash rather than having to ship the trash back and wait for a refund. I'm probably going to seldom ever buy anything online again that is important or expensive after they open.