Mr. Fox

100%... I have never experienced any real issues with either of them. They look better, work better, perform better than anything that came after them. I'm not sure they are committed to anything--certainly not excellence or the sheeple flock they think they own--but, the people responsible for their atrocities are such demented losers that they probably should "be committed" in a different use of that verbiage. Best solution is to not utilize any of their worthless, buggy "security" trash. Remove Defender.7z

“And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins—and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins.” - Saint Mark, the Evangelist But, hey... it fits the 4-year old socket. Must be good to go. Some features are not working, but that's OK. I saved money. Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I decided to play with the Sabrent M-die some more. Not my best, but still very good.

Yup, exactly. And, their X3D "upgrade" CPU was castrated. Nice upgrade joke. Cookie-cutter garbage for the gamer kiddos. Everyone gets a trophy for participating. One size fits all. Yay. Utterly worthless for anyone interested in overclocking.

It has been a selling point for the underdog, but you're correct. It is kind of a gimmick. As AMD grows toward achieving parity with Intel, I expect that to become a thing of the past. They can't compete on performance without competing on the financial side. It takes money, and that model is a money-loser for AMD and for motherboard manufacturers. Without support from motherboard manufacturers (as we have all seen, they treat AMD less favorably) they will have difficulty gaining parity on performance or financial strength.

I guess the degree to which it matters really depends on what you find the most value in. AM4 kept the same socket for a long time, and so did AM3, but those that kept the same motherboard didn't get the full benefit of generational architectural changes by remaining on an old chipset. That is great for everyone that found value in that. Those that wanted to enjoy the emerging technology to its fullest were in no better place than the typical 2-generation socket pattern Intel owners enjoy. For the most part, the only people complaining about Intel only using a socket for 2 generations are AMD owners. Most folks that prefer Intel have nothing to complain about and don't.

Lot of stupid people out there. Too many, actually. Idiocy has flourished over the past few years and become a force to be reckoned with. It may soon be illegal to be normal, express dissent with stupidity or demonstrate common sense in public. And, if you teach your kids what's right and what's wrong, it is domestic terrorism. Maybe. Probably so. Some Threadripper owners were not so lucky, and I recall at lot of AM4 owners being livid about AM5, in spite of the obvious improvement in the design of everything about it, including the socket itself. Unfortunately, PC tech is frequently a monkey-see, monkey-do realm, especially when it comes to schemes and scams that increase revenue. The more progress (and money) AMD makes, the less likely they will be to do what is right for their customers. Only time will tell.

Spend the extra $100 if you are not planning an upgrade for a few years. If you divide the extra cost out over the time you plan to use it, the extra cost is minuscule, but the extra performance is beneficial. If you change your mind later it will cost you the full price of the better CPU instead of the small price difference today. Plus, if AMD's price drop is temporary you'll lose even more money buying the cheaper CPU.

Thank you. The main reason I kept it is because I can't really do much more with the 2080 Ti FTW3 than what I have already done. I will be able to grab a few extra points using different hardware. The 2080 Ti is definitely a superior GPU overall. My top Fire Strike score with the 2080 Ti is substantially higher. But, yes... for 3060 Ti this is very good. Much better than before the shunt mod. It is still gimped on voltage, but at least the power limits are gone now. The 2080 Ti with the shunt mod, high voltage and 2000W vBIOS clocks quite a bit higher on core and little higher on memory. https://www.3dmark.com/compare/fs/19438829/fs/28914049

Shunt mod FTW! https://hwbot.org/submission/5130408_ | https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/83902699

Yes, that would be correct. Improved IPC and significantly higher clock speeds is too much for the 5950X to keep up with. DDR5 is better. The new Ryzen platform also handles memory a whole lot better in general as well. Not nearly as many functionality and stability issues as Ryzen 9.

Well, I am glad that the only thing messed up is your car.

Sorry to hear that you were in an accident. I hope you were not hurt, and I hope the person that did it has insurance.

In case anyone is interested...

Price reduced to $425 + shipping for members of this forum. I just listed it on Mercari, Nextdoor and Craigslist as well (at a higher price).

That really is dependent on us. As long as we (gamers and enthusiasts) continue to pay asinine prices for their products, they will continue to be asinine in their pricing of the products they sell us. At least 50% (probably closer to 100% if we are honest with ourselves) is our fault for being compliant with our molester. They can't charge inflated prices for products if nobody is willing to buy them. I am still very keen on the idea of settling for less performance and supporting Intel's venture into the GPU space. I hope they end up being wildly successful and extremely disruptive in this segment. If they can keep their foot in the doorway and end up forcing it open wide, I think there is potential for severe distrubance that will be very harmful to NVIDIA's position of dominance, and cause AMD to have to work overtime just to remain relevant.

I still think there is a lot of truth to the old cliche that "clock is king" but one answer to that is more cores, even when the cores are slower. Higher clocks is like a small group of snipers that quickly and discretely take out their adversaries with a single headshot, whereas more cores is like a platoon of foot soldiers spraying a bazillion bullets every direction with a wide swath of destruction. They can't run very fast and they are not precise, but a swarm of bullets is a force to be reckoned with.

Yes, totally agree with that. Even though I don't like the fact that some of them are wussy Atom cores, I can't find any fault in the results. Fantastic performance. But, there is still a part of me that wonders how much performance is being forfeited by their substitution in place of more P-cores. I'm guessing they are cheap to produce and this is a way of delivering a level of performance that stays a step ahead of AMD while not making the product too expensive.

I did that and found the overall experience regrettable. Cinebench scores were nice, but that is probably the only kind thing I can find to say about my misguided endeavor. It was probably the worst waste of money on an upgrade that proved to be a downgrade that I have ever experienced. Apart from my magnetic attraction to mediocre silicon quality, (seldom lucky, unfortunately,) I am very happy with the experience I have had with 10900K, 12900K/KS and 13900K. These are excellent processors, but I still feel like I am getting screwed because of the stupid Atom core crap. Even though performance is stellar, it would be better if they ditched the chintzy E-core crap and made them all P-cores. I think the issue with NVIDIA is that they are an inherently dishonest company that values profit more than doing the right thing, and the issue with AMD is ignorance from the leadership level down. They are essentially posers in the enthusiast space, kind of like the McDonald's of the technology realm.

Congratulations. Long overdue. I really wanted it, just didn't have the means right now. And, to be honest... the "need" was probably questionable. I guess I am going to try another venue to sell the 2080 Ti FTW3. There seems to be no interest here, probably due to the newer NVIDIA and AMD launches. Due to lack of Windows 7 driver support, I don't see myself buying anything newer than RTX 30-series as long as what I have remains functional.

It might be a good time for all of us to take a vacation from all things PC and give Intel, NVIDIA and AMD a massive profit time-out for a few years. I think most of us have what we need to get by for a few years. If one or more of them doesn't survive, then que sera sera. The alternative is, we continue getting screwed. I'd much rather turn the tables on them.

I've never seen an example of a laptop that will automatically apply an XMP profile. That's not to say that there aren't any, only that I haven't seen one. If the functionality is there and actually works, then I don't think it matters what brand. Unless you have a laptop with the BIOS unlocked for memory tuning it's really not going to make any difference what you buy because you won't be able to set anything manually. That would be my first question; does the BIOS even support it? In most cases the answer is going to be "no" for laptops.

Thank you. Same to you brother. In spite of life's ups and downs, there are plenty of reasons for any of us to be thankful.

You are right. I implied that everyone there is a moron. That is not true. There are still some people there that are intelligent... you and me included. While the culture is probably similar or more stupid than overclock.net, I can say the same about Reddit. I hate the platform and a high percentage of the regulars there are batpoop crazy, but there is still some gold to be mined. You just have to sift through the guano to find it.

I seldom visit that place. All of the intelligent people from overclock.net left and started ExtremeHW.net so what remains are... well, you can connect the dots.

Yes, 3DMark is buggy (has been for several years) and it is only an issue now because a few of the prima donna chosen got their "professional overclocker" scores diminished by peasants that were not using LN2. At the end of the day it really is about HWBOT allowing UL's garbage and their solution is to require people that have a card with ECC memory gimp it by turning it on. I also wonder how much incompetence there was on the part of the "professional overclockers" wasting time submitting benchmark scores with ECC enabled. Instead of admitting their mistake, starting over and submitting new scores with the setting turned off, it must be a lot easier to penalize everyone else with a new rule that requires that everyone commit the same mistake by fiat decree, and they hold their rank on the leaderboard without having to earn it. They can then void the submissions that challenged their supremacy.