Mr. Fox

The SP99 chip is running about the same as the SP98 other than 20°C higher load temps due to the stock solder/IHS. They are remarkably close to one another. The memory controller and ring (and their SP ratings) are higher on the first CPU. Both are one SP point lower installed in my systems than they were in the marketplace photos. I am eager to get it on direct die and see how it does with CUDIMM modules and get those crazy CPU temps under control. At P58x and E52x all core it hits 100°C in Cinebench R23 even though VCore is only 1.375V. What is nice is the VID is almost identical on every single core. There is no meaningful variance in quality among cores, so I don't need to use more voltage to account for weaker cores or tune voltage differences on a per-core basis to account for variance. Here is the SP detail on the first one I bought... Here is the SP detail on the second one I just bought... The Unify-X motherboard is not nearly as capable as the Apex(s) are. It's awesome in most ways except that MSI firmware sucks. It looks fantastic and I love the design and layout. (I think any firmware that is not on a ROG board leaves performance and stability on the table.) I am using the SP87 CPU from @Talon in it at the moment and it doesn't run nearly as well on the Unify-X as it did on the Apex. NGU and D2D and memory overclock capacity are lower and memory benchmark results are slightly reduced. I might sell it and buy another Apex or an mATX board if I could actually find one worth purchasing. A good mATX or ITX mobo is extremely rare, especially on Z890. I wish ASUS made a black and chrome Z890 Apex. About the thumbs... I had arthritic bone spurs in the joints closest to the thumb nail. That was not really causing any issue on its own. It wasn't really painful and I would not have even known about that, but the bone spurs caused ganglion cysts to form on the joint and it was affecting the nailbed, causing the thumbnails to get flattened, rough and ridged. The left thumb cyst got huge (about the size of a pea under the skin) and the right one started growing. So the surgery was to grind off the bone spurs and surgically remove the cysts. (If you just drain them they will return.) They did the left one the first week of last month and the right one on Monday. It hurts like son-of-a-gun, and I have a high pain threshold and seldom complain or have trouble tolerating it. Even the one they did last month still hurts, and range of motion is still severely limited. I'll be glad when they stop hurting and I regain normal function. Hopefully sooner than later. Below is a picture (in the spoiler). Just got the bandage off the right one yesterday and haven't been able to wash off the iodine stains yet. (I can't scrub it or lather it up with soap yet because the incision is still easy to fracture.) Sutures come out Friday of next week on the one they fixed on Monday. Removing the stiches was the worst part. There are more sensitive nerves in the the thumb than I ever realized. Appearance-wise the left one is looking good, but it doesn't feel good yet.

It is that for sure. Greed and self-aggrandizing business ventures are agnostic to anything else with no regard to who it affects. The agenda needed for furtherance of the corporate enrichment strategy is the only thing that matters. Anything else is an inconvenient annoyance and distraction. It doesn't matter where their money comes from or how it is acquired as long as it comes. He is really skilled at peddling garbage, that is for sure. And, he is worshipped by his garbage lovers.

Exactly. And a clown like Cook would be the kind of moron to take that position.

For business-facing markets it is not too far fetched, but hiring that clown for anything that relates to gaming and PC performance enthusiast interests it would be an idiotic decision. Someone like that nutjob would just perpetuate the likelihood of PC gaming and enthusiast interests continuing to be marginalized and no longer a relevant business pursuit. One need look no further than the crApple product stack and the $hitshow that their garbage represents.

Speaking of "dark times" it appears Micro$lop services are down. Everything Micro$lop is down at work. Outlook, SharePoint, OneDrive, Office suite, etc. and I just checked on my personal computer and outlook.com is inaccessible.

We are living in dark times worldwide and things stand to get much worse in the near future. Wickedness is a way of life now. Setting aside all of the extremely undesirable political troubles and inevitable fallout looming on the horizon and focusing on the technology space, a huge part of it is a concerted effort to monetize everything and convert personal computing into a subscription model in every way possible. The big players don't want PC enthusiasts or general computer users to own long-lasting, powerful and capable hardware or locally installed software that allows a buy-once/use forever scenario to occur. We can say we "don't blame them from a business perspective" but the intent is self-serving and nefarious at its root, designed to extract every ounce of revenue possible and make being dependent versus self-sufficient the end goal. I do blame them. It's the wrong path for everyone. This touches all aspects of life in the world we live in. Essentially the same business model as big pharma. Nobody wants cures or permanent solutions. They want lifelong prescriptions that feed the pig for the same reasons that big tech wants lifelong subscriptions. The end user is no longer a valued customer, we are a source of revenue that needs to be captured in perpetuity. No thanks. Hard pass. I do blame them and that business model. It's messed up and unacceptable.

I discovered something else that improves CPU performance. There is an option found on the CPU Power Management Control page that needs to be disabled for maximum CPU performance on Windoze and especially so for Linux. On older BIOS (like I use) it is named "Resource Priority Feature" (sounds like something good, but the "priority" is wrong) and on newer BIOS it will be listed as "HWP Autonomous EPP Grouping" (or something similar to that). It is in the same screen where you disable C-states, SpeedShit and Intel Dynamic Platform Framework crap. This setting allows Windoze to control CPU behavior to conserve energy at the expense of maximizing overclocked performance. Linux is even more aggressive at doing that and the power management crap requires more effort to manipulate in Linux. (Maybe because European countries are more Nazi-like in their quest to reduce power consumption and Linux is far more common in Europe than the US. Just a guess on my part.) Anyhoo... disabling this setting increases my Cinebench scores by about 600 points and also see higher CPU-Z single and mult-core benchmark numbers. Using the same CPU overclock settings, the Cinebench score is consistently in the 48.2-48.3K range enable versus 48.8-48.9K disabled. With the setting enabled, CPU-Z multi-thread is in the high 20K range (always under 21K) and single thread in the 950 range. Disabled, it jumps up to these values.

@tps3443 - try the above to see if it works for Ryzen the same. Leave tWR on Auto and use the formula above to control tWR using tWRPRE. With tWR set to Auto you should see the actual value displayed (48 in the above example) in ZenTimings. Tweaked a couple more settings to drop latency a bit more. I think I might be looking for another 8800 or 9000 CUDIMM kit in a few months. (I am seeing some indications that DDR5 prices might start to go down soon. Hope so.) For the interim, I think I am going to strip the chrome heatsinks off my new Corsair Vengeance 8800 CUDIMMs and put them in the second Apex on water and put these 8400 G.SKILL UDIMMs in the Unify-X (also on water) since it is not quite as good at memory overclocking as the Apex boards are.

It is not remarkably different. Much easier than Ryzen and not nearly as persnickety. Z890 is mostly different on the CPU-side of overclocking. There is more crap like NGU and D2D that comes as baggage with the new CPU architecture. No, I am not planning on selling the 5090. It is in one of my Z890 Apex builds. I generally use that one for benching with the chiller and it stays turned off most of the time. I just dropped a new 270K Plus into the Z890 Apex with the water-cooled 5080. The other 5080 is the air-cooled Prime GPU on the open bench with the Z890 Unify-X. I need to delid this new CPU, but it will have to wait until my thumbs are healed up. I had surgery on both thumbs... left one last month and right one on Monday, and I do not have the necessary dexterity at the moment. My right thumb is still bandaged up with stitches and the left one is still limited range of motion.

They are about like one of the crappy little Minisforum NUC-sized (a.k.a turdbook in a box) "gaming" PCs, maybe a little less powerful but close. The PS5 is just more expensive, more limited in function, less repairable and more proprietary. So, these G.SKILL 8400 UDIMM kits aren't that great. I have two kits of them (one is a spare part for emergency backup) and their rated speed is close to their max capability. 8600 is still pretty impressive for 24/7 stability, but I got instantly spoiled by CUDIMMs now that I have platforms supporting CUDIMM. It doesn't really make any difference in the grand scheme of things though. Measurable in memory benchmarks, but not much else once you go beyond 8000-8200 it quickly starts to be irrelevant for anything other than bragging rights.

I have seen weird glitches like that with some of the 621.XX drivers and I have seen it when undervolting GPUs. I am assuming it is with the GPU running stock with no tweaks like undervolting or overclocking. If it is bone stock, have you tried an earlier driver branch, like 610.XX or 596.XX to see if the behavior is the same? If it is the same across several driver braches, test with a different monitor and different HDMI/DP cable. (I have an ASUS 4K 120 HZ IPS display that has all sorts of weird issues with various GPUs to the point that I only use it as an office TV now.) If it still persists after all of those things then something has to be wrong with the GPU.

Nice to see you, brother. Hope all is well with the family. With mVolt+ there is no longer any need to cross-flash BIOS, shunt-mod or use EVC2 for voltage control. You can change all of those things with software now... just a portable exe file does it all. And, now you can also run the latest DLSS and frame gen on GPUs NVIDIA said "do not support" DLSS and MFG. Yup, on something like a 3060 that would barely manage 30 FPS at 4K now you can do 100+ FPS, thanks to talented modders finding ways to beat and defeat the Green Goblin's lies and shenanigans. DLSS Enabler or DLSS5 Manager even let's you run DLSS on some AMD and Intel GPUs now.

It will be interesting to play with. It was $650, which was more than offset by what I sold the last 270K and 8400 Kit for with money left over. Now I am considering whether to keep or sell my spare G.SKILL 8400 kit. It's collecting dust, but there is an element of apprehension about selling my only emergency backup DDR5 kit. I may never use it, but if I needed it replacing it would be difficult. Hard to source and super stupid expensive. I agree. I love doing that as well. It brings them a lot of joy and what I can give them is always a lot more special than whatever cheap crap box they would buy off the shelf. It was the below combo. Certainly not going to do anything remarkable, but for her low-cost gaming rig it is more than adequate. It was a stubstantial upgrade in CPU and memory performance and plays nice with her 1080 Strix GPU. The kind of games she plays there is no reason for anything more powerful. She is mostly into indie titles and stuff like Fortnite and PUBG. Windoze 11 just wasn't playing nice with the old X79 setup. But, it still works flawlessly on Linux. The 5500F Cinebench score is several thousand points higher than what the E5-1680 V2 (2013) and DDR3-2400 was capable of with its max functional overclock. Just using the included Wraith Stealth cooler on the 5500F, Cinebench temps were only about 79-80°C. I've overclocked it a bit for her (4.6GHz all core) to keep things running crisper. SKU Description QTY Price Per Total Price 348201 G.Skill Ripjaws V 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-3200 PC4-25600 CL16 Dual Channel Desk... 1 $96.78 $96.78 900308 Gigabyte B550M DS3H AC R2 AMD AM4 microATX Motherboard 1 $73.23 $73.23 098681 AMD Ryzen 5 5500F Vermeer AM4 3.0GHz 6-Core Boxed Processor - Wraith Stealt... 1 $59.98 $59.98 Subtotal: $229.99 Tax: $20.93 Total: $250.92 I am glad I didn't throw away the cheap old test bench. I almost did because I did not have any use for it anymore, or so I thought.

The old X79 Gene Rampage IV setup was not working great for the grand daughter that was using it as a gaming rig, so I bought a cheap AM4 CPU/mobo/RAM combo from Micro Center to upgrade her tired system. Knowing I would essentially get nothing selling the old parts I decided to build something useful that I have absolutely I no use for. The old Xeon octacore, 32GB of HyperX Beast DDR3-2400 and Titan Black still has plenty of mojo for a home server. FygoOS (Linux server OS) works really great. Just using spare parts that also have almost no value. Tired old 2TB HDDs in RAID1 with a 128GB SSD used as a cache to speed things up.

CPU-Z fixed their messed up v3 validation garbage. https://valid.cpuid.com/s3apu5dq Glad I complained. Using XOC mode helped and they changed the drive recognition error in CPU-Z from WARN to INFO. https://community.hwbot.org/topic/247206-sneak-peek-at-cpu-z-300-validator-v3/page/3/#findComment-721287 Their detection on other things is still broken. Both of these are disabled on my systems. Code Integrity:Enabled| Fast Startup:Enabled

I love Metallica's music. I had a chance to see them this week at the Sphere while in Las Vegas for other business, but I chose not to. Nobody's music is good enough to be worth the price of a $500 ticket. Period. Sad but True.

The literal definition is an illegitimate child, typically an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy, conceived as a result of a deliberate act of sexual indiscretion between unwed individuals or a non-consensual act (rape). That also fits. The part that does not fit is the fact that a bastard is usually an innocent party whose unintended conception resulted from poor judgment or a criminal act. But, being a bastard might account for them being scummy and possibly for them being greedy if they chose not to rise above those circumstances. I think it is obvious to all of us that being scummy and greedy was an exercise of free will and a deliberate decision.

Hopefully we will both be around for the 50th. I think AI is here to stay. It's useful. I like it and use it. Like anything else, it can be abused and misused for nefarious purposes. It will be. Guaranteed. Probably already has been more than we even know. The same applies to guns, knives and baseball bats. None of them should be outlawed or banned. None of them are bad. Only the people that misuse them are. I do hope that NVIDIA, memory foundries, and all of their bedfellows will get severely burned financially. I do not need or want to be able sell my GPUs for an insane profit. They should lose value and become obsolete like the rest of the parts inside of a computer do. They should lose value the moment the box it opened. It's wrong and messed up that they sell for so many times more than they are actually worth and I hope that ASIC-type devices and other alternative technologies make them an obsolete poor choice and utterly destroy their marketability to be used for AI just as we saw with crypto. I hope that happens very soon and all of the stock bought up by AI farms get dumped and totally flood the market with millions of 5090 GPUs to make it impossible for new GPUs to be sold for prices near their original MSRP. There are probably millions of them sitting in warehouses that are still in factory-sealed boxes waiting for deployment when facilities go online. It would be awesome if they suddenly lost 75-80% of their value because of getting dumped on the market and NVIDIA couldn't sell any new GPUs because nobody needed to buy new.

Well, tomorrow (Sunday) Mrs. Fox and I celebrate 40 years of marital bliss. That does not even seem possible. Where did all of the time go? God blessed me with a good one... better than I deserve.

Hmm, I don't know. Something is off. Clevo had some verey strange things with their firmware and maybe the CPU is not properly recognized. Do you have a normal i7 CPU that you could install for testing to see if the problem is the same? I'm not sure what to suggest at this point. You might need help from @Prema if it is a firmware glitch. Yeah, Windoze and Winduhz is how I refer to Micro$lop OSes now. The slurs are just my personal way of showing them as little respect as they deserve for their crappy products at this point.