Mr. Fox

Something to go along with that. EVGA does not offer a cross-ship RMA option on products purchased used or new if that item is not purchased directly from EVGA or one of their authorized sellers. The warranty transfers as you noted, but the only option is to send it in and wait. Congrats on the nice birthday gifts. That was a good gift. Please post some pictures once everything is set up.

While I know that much is subjective and varies by personal taste, I find the Windows 11 default GUI overall to be the most aesthetically repulsive and inefficient to navigate version of Windows to date. The Windows 8.X Start Screen was more unacceptable, but it was the only aesthetic atrocity compared to a list of unpleasant eye sores featured in the latest abortion.

I guess it depends on how you define do better. I think the obvious answer is "no" it can't. The exception would be which OS is better at misleading consumers that remain stupid enough to believe the fairytale that newer is always better. In that scenario, Windows 11 is a lot more effective. Most computer users don't know what they don't know, and their ignorance allows them to live a pathetic life in a state of misguided bliss. That is sad because it requires little time and effort to identify the ways that Windows 11 sucks. The enhancement of performance is one of the easiest myths to bust. It takes more that 6 seconds extra for Windows 11 to run the least taxing ThrottleStop benchmark than it does for Windows 10 LTSC 2019. Degradation of performance is sadly obvious and undeniable. In the examples below, the tests were run just a few minutes apart on a multi-boot system. @Papusan

The Eurocom Tornado F5 and other boutique-branded versions of the same product was definitely an interesting machine. It had several redeeming qualities and all of the elements that would be needed to constitute a paradigm of excellence. This is ironic because it was a "whitebook" product that was superior to the mainstream BGA equivalent piece of crap that received MSI branding. In spite of its admirable traits, it had some very damning artificial firmware-induced defects that largely spoiled it and prevented it from being viewed as excellent overall. Even so, ignoring the defects with origins rooted in engineering incompetence on MSI's part, the form factor made it impossible for me to love it. I have owned about five 15-inch laptops and about nine 17- and 18-inch laptops. In my experience, all of the laptops smaller than 17-inch were impossible to view as quintessentially excellent products. Using a 15-inch always left me with a sense of disappointment because it was simply too small and compromised to generate excitement, enthusiasm or a satisfying user experience.

Indeed. The best laptop money can buy is, at best, a lackluster equivalent of a mediocre desktop.

The sheeple always love the suckiest crap and hate on the better crap. If it is actually good or great they have a total come-undone. They have no ability to grasp the magnitude of their own tragic stupidity.

Sadly, this is true. And, in great part because of how utterly stupid a massive number of the world's population have become. They buy trash with no knowledge or understanding that they are purchasing pathetic garbage on the blind assumption that marketing propaganda is accurate and honest. The same biowaste specimens are allowed to breed and vote, create policy, surrender their children to a system so they can be taught how to become equally stupid and worthless zombies, slaughter the ones they didn't spawn intentionally, and pretend their biological composition bears no relationship to their true identity. So, now we have what we have. GIGO.

When you can take as much as you dish out and come back for more, you have the respect of everyone in the room. It's when the opposite is true that we start running into bigger problems.

Yep, I do not like when they do that. At the very least, there should be a maximum fan speed thermal test and the winner should be the winner in terms of cooling regardless of noise level. People that are annoyed by fan noise and want good cooling results at low fan speeds should consider water cooling if they are still using air.

I'm so elated that I bought something from MSI that I could just poop my pants. At first blush, it looks like MSI might suck just as bad as ASUS does. I guess the ultimate test will be whether they make lame excuses and fabricate lies to shirk their responsibility like ASUS is so famous for. I'm going to inconspicuously mark this motherboard with a unique identifier in addition to the serial number tag and take a butt-load of DLSR photos of things, including the perfect CPU socket pins, and see where this chocolate choo-choo train leads. In technical terminology, this is what one calls "not giving a rat's ass about customer experience or brand identity" LOL. Looks like they have perfected the cure for repeat business. "Thank you for spending your money with MSI. What can we do to make sure you never do it again? We love your money, just not you."

For those that like using air, this may be of interest. It looks like IceGiant took the negative feedback to heart and are releasing a new and improved copper base version that beats the NH-D15 by a little bit. If I were interested in air cooling, I would prefer the look of this product over a typical tower cooler. This is a pre-release prototype so it doesn't have the polished look of the original. While still inferior to a good liquid cooling setup, improvement is always good.

I emailed the sales department and asked them to apply it to my order. Hopefully they will. Thank you.

Drivers can make a massive difference in features and performance. It should be (or has potential to be) fun seeing the performance improve over time as they figure things out.

When I first switched to EVGA from ASUS the BIOS was the difficult thing to get used to, but I really miss it now. ASUS and MSI BIOS has more silly crap on the menus, but the simplicity, functionality and results from EVGA Dark mobo firmware really leaves everything else in the dust. As long as everything is maxed out the way it should be, who give a rat's butt if you can see it on a menu. I know I don't. One less stupid thing that I need to fart around with disabling or maxing out to get the results I want. I also appreciate the fact that their software hasn't been farmed out to the whoredom of the Micro$lop Store like the deplorable filth from MSI and ASUS. Some people need to lose their jobs and a few limbs at MSI and ASUS for allowing that kind of idiotic crap to occur. Comparing their frequent demonstrations of abject incompetent nonsense with the better product quality and much better service and support, EVGA really is a no-brainer for me. I won't pass judgment on MSI until we see how this plays out, but I can't imagine them being any more sucky than ASUS. I certainly hope not. I love the Unify-X mobo. When it works right it is fantastic.

Remember that even guys doing extreme overclocking on LN2 usually don't use anything more than a 120mm fan blowing on VRMs, so that 160-175W should be fine with what you are planning. Even 200W isn't all that much power to need to deal with if done right. I would be surprised if what you are planning doesn't turn out to be more than enough. Hard to say if the heatpipe with no radiator on the cold end would be adequate, but it might be if there is ample air circulation around the heat pipe.

I can see already that the dipsticks at MicroStar are going to give the retarded clowns running the ASUS dumpster fire a run for their money on sucky service. Open a ticket on the web and wait for them to care enough to act. Bastards. I am just not in the mood for one of their clusters right now. I should have done this in the first place, but definitely not very intelligent at the original ludicrous MSRP of $830. Now that the price is $330 less it's worth the extra $50-75~ over the cost of the product I purchased from one of their inferior competitors. It kind of sucks that I am going to lose a couple of M.2 NVMe slots, but I will replace them with SATA SSD (spare parts) with no regrets. Had this been an EVGA failure it would be totally resolved by Monday or Tuesday and I bet I don't even hear from these numbnuts before then. I should be able to sell the free backpack for enough to at least offset the sales tax. If and when MicroStar makes it right then I will have to decide whether to sell the Z690 Strix D4 or Unify-X.

It will probably work fine. VRMs are not as difficult to keep cool as a CPU or GPU, so any way you give the heat a path off the VRM is going to bring improvement. Just a fan blowing on them is enough in some cases.

Here's the latest from 5FDP.

Nice! I need an unlocked vBIOS for my Quadro P5000 16GB GPU that would make it functionally the same as a 1080 (same chip, but not clock and TGP crippled like the Quadro).

I have a P5000 16GB GPU in my Precision 17. Do you know if there is an unlocked vBIOS available for that?

Thanks for the suggestion. I just checked it out. All of the pins look good using a powerful magnifying glass. Also everything really clean. No fuzz, dust or thermal paste on anything. I put everything back together, not overly tight on the CPU frame or water block and still have the same issue... code 55 and the RAM LED stays lit until I remove the DIMM from slot #2. It was certainly worth investigating. I can tell MSI that I already checked that if they ask. Considering the totally random odd behavior I have experienced with this board, this may have been the root cause of it, including the memory getting the SPD corrupted during the firmware flash. What triggered the misbehavior was removing and replacing RAM modules, so that is probably not a coincidence if something is wrong with that slot. A few weeks ago I had this code 55 problem for a few minutes without making any changes, but the system automatically reset and cleared NVRAM all by itself, then it automatically started working again.

I will try that and see if anything changes. I had not disturbed anything with the CPU, but that might not mean anything necessarily.

Well, I guess I am in for some fun now with MSI. DIMM #2 slot seems to have crapped out on my Unify-X. It can't boot with RAM in that slot, only DIMM #1 slot works. I have a gut feeling that this also somehow relates to the SPD corruption that happened when I flashed BIOS A60 over a month ago. MSI just blew me off and said that can't happen and told me to RMA the memory. I hope they don't give me a bunch of crap like they did Brother @johnkssswhen he had his MSI RMA fiasco. I have carefully examined the slot in bright light with a 10x magnifying glass and can't see anything physically wrong with it. There is no debris, nothing broken and no contact pins out of place. I went ahead and cleaned the slot with a lint-free alcohol prep pad and I tested other memory modules. It definitely seems to be a fault with the DIMM #2 slot as far as I can tell. This just started this evening. Corsair sent me some DDR5 for a product review. I ran some tests on it... quite a few actually. I then tweaked some BIOS settings for the RAM, rebooted and it instantly stopped working with Q-code 55 (memory not installed) with that slot occupied. I swapped out the memory for my original sticks and same thing. Any of the 4 memory modules will boot in DIMM #1 slot, but as soon as I populate DIMM #2 slot the code 55 returns.

Brother @Papusan

Maybe his viewers got fed up with his irrational nonsense and gave him a bunch of crap for being an idiot. I didn't get to see it, but requested as save on the Wayback Machine. It might take a few days before it is available, but here is the URL for when it becomes viewable. https://web.archive.org/web/20220818114407/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFY54yUvh_g