Mr. Fox

It varies but it is often in the low teens and that is when it becomes extremely annoying. Can't touch anything without getting zapped and I have to use hair spray to keep my hair from looking crazy. It is higher than normal right now inside my house and it is 34%. Anything below 40% is considered abnormally low. Outside it is 24%. We get our mail delivered at a cluster box around the corner. If it is at night that I go to the mailbox, I frequently get an ESD arc that is 2 to 3 inches long when I go to insert the key into the mailbox and it is audible, like a bug zapper (not as loud, but you can hear it). It is not painful, but it is always startling even though it has happened to me many hundreds of times. It happens during the day, too. I mentioned at night because you can see the bright flash from the arc easily after dark.

Unfortunately, I think you might be right. I have considered making life extremely inconvenient by doing something drastic like that. It affects more than my computer stuff. It even blows light bulbs on lamps fairly often. I walk up to a lamp and reach for the knob to turn it off and it zaps it hard enough that it blows out the bulb. Happens to both LED and incandescent.

Yes, I got it from Brother @Rage Setnot too long ago. It has been interesting. It's a pretty decent GPU all things considered and I am glad that I got it from him. It was good that I got it in the manner I did. I now have no desire to investigate 7900 XTX. It satisfied my curiosity about AMD GPUs in a more favorable way than 5950X did on the CPU side. It has basically an identical Byksi block at my 4090 Suprim. It is hard to tell them apart other than the power connectors. I picked up a 13700KF to hold me over until 14900K drops. I will either pick up one of those or snag a good deal on a used 13900KS when early adopters start dropping them after upgrading to 14th Gen. I run things bare die. No chance of shorting or anything wrong at the hardware level. I confirmed it visually. Nothing was disturbed physically. Everything was working fine. I received the Z790 Apex. Swapped CPUs and had both systems working. The motherboard, CPU and water block and RAM were removed as a complete assembly a few weeks ago and set on the shelf to wait for the Dark Base Pro 901 to arrive. I used the 5000D Airflow case to build a complete PC from spare parts (Strix Z690-E mobo) that I sold. I took the assembly off the shelf and installed it on my homemade open bench (photo above) and the problem was present. I am pretty sure it had to be a severe ESD zapping or a power surge. Something external and nothing related to mods. ESD here is horrible with the extreme dry heat. ESD has killed numerous LEDs and this is my third sudden unexplained CPU death in 3 or 4 years (first on this platform, twice on 10th Gen). It could have been zapped while removing the assembly from the old case or while setting this up. No idea when, only know the point of discovery. ESD is so bad here that sometimes when I leave my desk and return and go to touch the mouse or keyboard the first time it zaps me hard enough for all of the LEDs on the keyboard and mouse to go dark and the monitor goes black for 1 or 2 seconds. A few times in the past couple of years (maybe explaining the CPU deaths) the ESD was so bad it caused my PC to reboot like hitting the reset button. Here is another interesting observation for anyone that might be experiencing something similar. I thought is was a sketchy 4090 issue, but it seems to be monitor related. I was having random black screens on the system with the 4090. Almost never in Windows, usually at POST or in the BIOS. It seemed like the 4090 was going into a power saving mode. If I entered the BIOS and did nothing and let it sit idle on a screen it would sometimes go black after a period of inactivity. This was with the 165Hz 1440P IPS Acer Predator monitor I have owned for a long time. I now have the 6900 XT connected to that monitor. It has happened a couple of times with the AMD GPU. It has not happened once in several weeks with the 4090 connected to my 144Hz AOC 1080P IPS monitor trio. So, maybe my monitor is glitching out. It is weird that it does not ever happen in Windows. In fact, when the glitch occurs the screen can be black during POST and start working when Windows loads. So, while it does seem like it might be power/utilization related where the monitor goes to sleep, it occurs with both GPUs when the video output signal is at its weakest point.

So, looks like I got a decent bin on the 13700K. I wonder what the SP ratings look like? I haven't done any tuning yet. Just grabbed some numbers that I was pretty sure would work unless I got an extra bad sample and *boom* they worked.

The new normal for technology is to make the products fragile and less than durable with a targeted lifespan just slightly longer than the manufacturer's warranty. They want the products they sell to fail so they can sell more products. They rush things to market with known engineering defects in hopes that it opens up the opportunity for them to sell a revised version with the defects corrected. So potentially doubling their money off of each customer sucker. Being one of the first to purchase any product that is new to market demonstrates a lack of wisdom, or a failure to employ good judgment. It's always better to watch somebody else struggle with broken trash than to be numbered among them. Some of these things (like that thing) I would not want even if it were a free gift. I've got no use for trash like that. If I wanted to have a sucky game experience I can already do that on my smartphone for free.

LOL. I'm not inclined to spend more than MSRP even for a silicon lottery winner. AMD and Intel have an utterly worthless warrant that says overclocking voids the warranty so basically they have no warranty. Silicon lottery winners die more often than crummy silicon samples, or so it seems. No point in paying more. Just jack the voltage higher and enjoy rag-dolling the crap out of it. If it lives, great. If not, chances are it was going to die for no explainable reason anyway. I've had this happen 3 times in the past 3-4 years. Just stops working for no apparent reason. In the end it's all gonna burn, so it doesn't matter. At least it's not BGA dung. Toss it and drop another one in.

Yes, absolutely. The choice between warranty and a CPU that runs cooler and overclocks better is a no-brainer. Warranty is worth sacrificing. I only care about the initial warranty and return policy in case the place I buy it sells me a piece of trash lottery loser.

Thanks. I will wait for the guy on oc.net to get back to me. If his is still available I made a full price offer and the SP is a little bit better than the one that died. That's too much money. Same price as local Best Buy on the 13900K. If the guy does not respond within the next hour or so (I sent him a PM almost 10 hours ago and he has not been on the forum for 7 days) I my just grab a 13700K from Best Buy for $375 and wait for 14900K to drop.

I hope not too but I don't think so. It's just a very unfortunate coincidence. It looks like I was drunk when I typed out that post. I'm going to have to go back and edit it. I was falling asleep at the keyboard and made quite a mess of it. What I find so strange about it is that nothing was wrong when I took the motherboard out and set it on the shelf with the CPU in place. It never even booted once when I tried to power it up. I'm almost thinking it has to be some kind of power surge or ESD related thing when I first turned it on or something like that. Because nothing other than plug-in electrical connections and memory were disturbed. CPU and heat sink were not disturbed. ESD here is absolutely insane due to the low humidity. I can't find any outward visible evidence of an issue. None of the contacts on the underside are discolored and I have examined the die closely with a powerful magnifying glass. There's no sign of hot spots, chips or cracks. All of the SMDs on the CPU are intact. Visually, everything looks normal. I do not get a "00" Q-code and no hanging during POST. I initially thought it was a memory training issue. It behaves like one. Maybe it is the IMC that died. The CPU does get warm with power going to it, but the Q-codes never stop cycling. It booted instantly with the Celeron CPU. Anyhoo... here is my homemade open bench I am using while waiting for be quiet! to send me the case. I have about $15 invested in this, including the piece of black walnut that I bought at Home Depot to use for the GPU's PCIe bracket to attach to. It's a cheap $10 steel monitor stand from Amazon with the EVGA PCB and standoffs included with Dark motherboards attached to the monitor stand. I actually like it. It works perfectly for this. The leg heights are adjustable and the lowest height provides just the right amount of clearance for the PSU to sit on the desk under it.

@jaybee83yes I have had overall good resuls with TeamGroup DDR5. Better luck than I normally do with G.SKILL. @Talonsorry to hear about your 13900KS. My 13900K is dead now and I have no idea why. I had sold my Z690 Apex and 13900KF and had been waiting for the Dark Base Pro 901 case to ship from be quiet. Since I received the Z790 Apex and installed it, the Z690 Dark mobo CPU had been sitting on a shelf. Everything was working flawlessly when I stopped using it. Today I made an open bench because I am tired of waiting for the Dark Base Pro to ship and wanted to be able to use the Z690 Dark. I got everything set up and when I turned it on for the first time I found it will not complete POST. It just keeps cycling through Q-codes. After taking it out and examining everything I found nothing wrong. I put it back in the socket and tested again, thinking maybe it was not seated correctly and no change. I dropped in a Celeron CPU in to see if everything works and it does. I put the 13900K back in after testing with the Celeron and same outcome. So, I am using the Celeron until I can get another 13900K. I PM'd a fellow on overclock.net about one he has for sale. Waiting to hear back.

OK, my T700 product review is live. This is my sixth one. @Raidermanhow are yours working out? Crucial T700 PCIe Gen5 NVMe M.2 SSD Review | ExtremeHW.net

Yep, I can do that as well. I tested Windows 7 on the Z790 Apex by installing one of my Macrium Reflect images and everything seems to work okay except for the 4090. It really sucks that current generation graphics cards only get driver support for the latest cancer operating systems from the Redmond Mafia. Had AMD done the right thing here it probably would have been enough of a compelling reason for me to flip from green to red, but they took the coward's way out and bowed before the altar of filth like Intel and NVIDIA. The degree to which the tech industry is controlled through conspiracy and fiat is truly repulsive and reflects poorly on the self-anointed masters of zombie muppets.

Well, it was 114°F today, but it has finally cooled down to a brisk 104°F just before 11:00 PM. Tomorrow will be hotter. Great benching weather, especially for a laptop. 😆 Newer is always better newer.

Don't do it, bro. Be smart. You'll end up regretting it because it will have all of the limitations that laptop have by design. It might be more powerful than what you have now, but it will be limited and frustrating. Just keep the laptop you have when circumstances demand using a laptop (which are few unless you travel for business) and enjoy the excellence, flexibility and frugality of building a desktop. Other than motherboard, CPU and GPU once the desktop is built everything else can span many years of service, unlike a laptop. Trust me, once you make the switch you will not even want to turn on your turdbook any more. It will become too disgusting and disappointing for words. At least if you are anything like me that will happen. I literally hate laptops now. I have one. It's adequate when using a laptop is unavoidable. I don't use it unless doing so is unavoidable. Sometimes I do not even turn it on for more than a month.

Thanks. I will have to check that out when I have a working system to run the 6900 XT that I got from @Rage Set. I am waiting for be quiet! to send the Dark Base Pro 901 case for review, so the guts from my second desktop are all in a big box waiting for the case to ship. I have heard good things about the Amernime drivers.

I am good with that. I really liked how long it lasted with Skylake and Skylake X. Sometimes (usually) stability and continuity are more valuable than change purely for the sake of change. I enjoy improvements to existing technology as much or more than I do introduction of new technology. It was truly amazing how much performance Intel milked from 14nm over time. I know a lot of people were bothered by it, but I was not. It made for extremely reliable products. It took what felt like forever for AMD to catch up and they (Intel) moved to 12nm when they had to do so to maintain their performance crown.

You already know this, but it is actually part of my plot. I believe that in order to validate my contempt for filth I must have a firm basis for the hate and a knowledge of why everyone should hate it equally, and communicate that in such a manner that it will cause disruption, discontent and breed the same strong sentiment in others. That's how you undermine nefarious schemes and overthrow corrupt leaders. You teach others to rebel and lead them into hating the filth as much as you do by exposing them to the foul stench. You can't easily convince sheeple that something is a piece of trash if you haven't been marred or scarred by its trashiness and show them how scummy it is, and make them feel stupid and ashamed for embracing it. Kind of like the importance of knowing your enemy. That makes your adversary easier to exploit and unexpected headshots fired at point blank range leaves no survivors. But, I also know there are some people whose stupidity is so deeply rooted that they just can't be fixed.

Off topic here, but possibly of interest. Outlook PRE. Check it out. I just discovered it totally by accident when messing with something else. For every good and nice thing there are at least several that are not. You guys know how I feel about ASUS garbage software. It's fancy, but extremely broken and will often not even function. This digital feces will install fairly consistently for me on an unmodded crash dummy OS. It is unfortunate that they have made it such a grotesquely bloated piece of trash. If it were not it would actually be nice. Look how much system resources this piece of crap uses just idle on the desktop. Un. godly. When I used Revo to uninstall it, last time it removed nearly 1500 registry keys. Isn't that just insane? Why can't they give us a good old win32 TurboV Core and bring back the old win32 Aura utility that just works without sucking the life out of everything it soils? They can. Maybe I should rephrase that and ask, why don't they want to give us software that just work? UWP filth sucks. Yes, that is a rhetorical question and we already know the answer is because they are idiots.

I haven't seen that issue before. Are you trying to use the latest but not greatest version of the turd OS? Maybe try an older version in the 21H2 family. 22H2 is poo-poo-caca. With all of the things the Redmond Reprobates are effing up left and right, once in a while there is a small glimmer of intelligence that emanates from the posterior orifice where there brains are stored. But, in order to be entitled in harshness, one has to give credit when credit is due. Otherwise, you will just be mistaken for someone that enjoys complaining. Here is something they just did that I really like. The Windows Mail app, which I haven't liked since they changed it from Outlook Express to Mail, has been revamped. Outlook PRE is what they call it, and it is very similar to the current version of Outlook (which is the only email app that I actually like). If you configure the Mail app and see the slider in the upper right corner to "Try Outlook" (or something similar) turn it on. Be happy. They actually did something good for the first time ina very long time. But, don't hold your breath or let them know you like it or they'll screw it up, too. @Papusan

I generally do not do anything that consumes 64GB of memory, and unless you exhaust the available physical memory, or approach that threshold, I do not believe it will measurably affect the computing experience. If you are doing things that consume all of your available memory and become dependent on a swap file, that is going to noticeably degrade performance. I am all for the idea of having a lot more than what is needed. Always better to have excess than not enough. That said, if the amount of RAM or the DIMM configuration impairs my memory overclocking, then I am not OK with it. So, I would not be OK with installing 64GB of RAM unless it overclocked equal to or better than 32GB or 48GB. But, that is because my main interest is overclocking. If my primary interest or business needs were content creation or something like that, I would likely feel differently about everything else being secondary to overclocking.

Missed you little brother/daddy. Thanks for stopping in to let us know that you're still kicking it. Hope all is well with fam.

Does your new AMD GPU have Windows 7 functionality? What is it like? Show Us Your Linux Desktop Linux Gaming Thread Start with something extra-easy. Zorin OS is probably the best for a Linux newcomer to dip their toe into the water and have an excellent experience. I would start there. Linux Mint with Cinnamon Desktop also closely resembles Windows appearance and functionality. It is also generally easy to install. Not as easy as Zorin, but also not hard. Many first-time Linux users start here and have a good experience. If you want something that is easy to use and install that DOES NOT resemble the look and feel of Windows, then the easiest is probably going to be POP!_OS. This OS is developed by System76. The are a Clevo reseller and build custom desktops that ship with their Linux distro. The distro is a rock-solid performer that is stable and reliable. It has to be for them to put their name on it and ship it with their new systems. But, I absolutely hate how the GUI looks. Not only does it look and feel nothing like Windows, the color schemes and wallpaper and what-not are about as ugly as they could get. I know some people like it, but some people liked Windows 8 and some like Windows 11, so I digress. Edit: You post right before I did, @ryan As you can see, Zorin was my top recommendation. When you run Zorin from USB in try-out mode you will be given the option to install it. When you start the installation it will detect Windows and give you the option to install it along side Windows. It should walk you through how much space you want to give Zorin, etc. It will resize your Windows partition according to the instructions you give it if you choose to install it on the same drive as Windows. It also has built-in NVIDIA and AMD GPU support and hybrid graphics support, so it should work fine for your laptop.

Windows 7 has worked flawlessly for me, in a few cases with modded drivers being required, up to the following points: Intel Z690 and AMD X570 Intel i225V LAN RTX 3090 RX 6900/6950 XT Intel 7265 WiFi Newer graphics, LAN and WiFi have no working driver support. I don't know what generation Intel HD graphics lost support, but I don't care because I have never used an iGPU for anything. I am not sure at what point mobile graphics lose support with driver mods. There is a possibility Z790 might work using the same drivers as Z690. I haven't tested it. There is not only a lack of driver support, but most of the OEMs are moving to the UWP Gonorrhea distribution model, so there are some things that don't work when software is required. (Armory Crate is one example of that. It does not work with older versions of Windows 10 either. Bastards.) Linux has never been more important than it is now. The mentally handicapped Nazis that have always hated Linux are doing things that will only further its adoption by people who are unwilling to bow down and worship at their altar of filth. You can use the nowat hack to eliiminate the need for Windows 7 activation. It just removes Windows Activation Technology (thus the name "no wat") from the OS, LOL. Works great.

Exactly. I run 6 different versions of Windows, plus Linux. It is like having a different wrench for each size of bolt. Using a pair of pliers or a crescent wrench doesn't work as well, and it messes up the bolts when your tool slips. And, when I say I like one version more than another, there is a reason for it. It's not just me throwing rocks at the newer garbage. It is because newer IS GARBAGE. My installed operating systems, listed in order of preference from greatest to least preferred: KDE Linux with Plasma (1TB NVMe on Sabrent Card) Windows 10 LTSC 2019 (50% of 1TB NVMe on Sabrent Card) Windows 10 LTSC 2021 (50% of 1TB NVMe on Sabrent Card) Windows 11 Pro Lite Plus (1TB NVMe on Sabrent Card) Windows 11 Pro Ghost Spectre (1TB NVMe on Sabrent Card) Windows 11 Pro - Full Cancer Version (512GB NVMe on DIMM.2_1) < Crash Dummy OS* Windows 11 Pro - Full Cancer for Work (512GB NVMe on DIMM.2_2) < Crash Dummy OS* *has ASUS Armory Crate and all the UWP/update filth the Redmond Reprobates vomit onto it Additional Drives: Crucial T700 2TB NVMe - Benchmarks (M.2_1 on mobo by GPU) Crucial T700 2TB NVMe - Game Drive (M.2_2 on mobo by PCIe x16_2) Intel 660P 2TB NVMe - Game Overflow (on PCIe x1 card under GPU) Samsung 840 EV0 1TB SSD - for Macrium Images (SATA) Hitachi 4TB HDD - for Data Files (SATA) ASUS DVD-RW - for Windows 7 install with 6900 XT and whatever uses optical discs (SATA) All of the OSes, including Linux, are installed on this single-NVMe card first, set aside while the next OS is installed, and then later all are installed in their respective places. This way each OS has its own boot loader and does not rely on a boot loader resident on another volume. Any can be removed at any time without affecting another OS. I then use EasyBCD to the first drive in my BIOS boot priority to "link" all of the other bootable OSes. Linux (GrubEFI) adds all of them automatically, so if I boot the Linux drive I can load any version of Windows or Linux from the Grub Boot menu.