Mr. Fox

Sweet! Fun weekend alert. 🙂 Waiting for delivery still. But, the map shows the truck in my general vicinity. Probably will have it in the next hour or so.

It helps a little bit, but not nearly as effective from pipe-to-pipe as direct contact with the cold plate and radiator. Anything extra you add will create mass and give an extra path for heat to travel even if it is not as effective as you would like it to be. It is important to have something on the cold end of the pipe to avoid heat saturation. But, even if you can't due to lack of space it will either help a little bit or take longer for the part you are trying to cool to overhead. This is really good news. I am glad that is happening. The reason people want to hang onto Windows 7 as long as they can is because it is a better product, more stable, more pleasant to use, and because purchasing a new product that is inferior isn't an attractive proposition. It is extremely disappointing that they are incapable of producing a new product that is better and desirable to anyone except for those addicted to variety and newness even when it is not better. It doesn't reflect well on Micro$lop. I sometimes go for a year or more without changing my desktop wallpaper because I place greater value on controlling my experience and knowing exactly what to expect than I do random newness and variety that serves no useful purpose other than a feeble attempt at entertaining myself. For me, the extended support is not super important. I haven't installed any updates released since 2015 except for the absolutely mandatory things like SHA and KMDF. I only install those because a few software titles and drivers won't work without them. Otherwise, I would not even install those. "Security" is not found on my list of priorities.

If you can avoid stacking heat pipes you will get better results. If you can take that one unpainted heat pipe on the left and attach it directly to the cold plate the cooling will be much more effective. It looks like there is enough space between the black heat pipe and the screw spring arms. I am not sure exactly what you mean about the air gaps between the heat pipes on the stock heat sink. If you are referring to the air gap between those soldered next to each other, that is not a problem. Air gaps would be a problem in places where solder needs to attach the heat pipe to the radiator, cold plate, or another heat pipe if you are stacking them. That is only because you can't stick two pieces of metal together with solder if they are not touching one another at the point of soldering. You could if you were brazing with a torch and filling the space with brass, but you can't get the heat pipes that hot without destroying them. And, heat pipes and radiators are difficult to heat for soldering. They are designed to eliminate heat, which is why using an oven to melt the solder paste is the best approach. You get everything heated to the same temperature with no place for the heat to go.

Everything relating to turdbooks is totally retarded now and most of the reviewers whose focus is laptops are schizophrenic imbeciles that can't locate their posterior using both hands. When the majority of the sheeple are psychotic and reprobate to the point they are head over heals in love with rubbish and don't having any awareness of their own ignorance, it leaves little or no basis for hope to the minority that have retained possession of mental faculties such as common sense and ordinary intelligence.

LOL... It is not a reliable benchmark as we all know. However it is influenced by everything in the system. If you look at the individual component areas you can see that the drives are the thing influencing the score. If I disable drive letters on all of my drives except for the boot and os drives it goes down to the 72nd percentile because I have some mechanical hard drives and I run Windows 11 on a little 256GB nVME attached to a 1x add-in card because it doesn't deserve to be a permanent part of my system. The CPU and GPU are off the charts crazy good when you look at the component-level scores. The slow drives pull the score down.

Hopefully the memory will be here tomorrow as the tracking update says it will be. Here's the benchmark some love to hate, LOL. https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/53908389 And, an old one... 7980XE and 2080 Ti https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/27314580

You definitely need to remove the paint for soldering. Solder will not stick to paint properly. You can use a 200 or 400 grit sandpaper to remove the paint. You do not have to remove the old solder as long as there are no lumps or bumps that would interfere with the heat pipe making complete and solid contact with the mating surface. You can sand the old soldered surface so it is completely flat and smooth. You cannot use solder paste to fill up air gaps between parts if the surface is rough because it is flux with tiny suspended solder beads and the parts have to fit together securely with no air gaps between the mating surfaces in order for the solder paste to work. You should also use c-clamps to hold everything securely in place while melting the solder paste. It is best to use an oven to bake/melt the solder paste. Keep the temperature low (just above melting point) and you can leave it in the oven longer. If you overheat the pipes they will swell and ruin everything. Allow it to air cool to ambient temperature. If you cool it off immediately in cold water it could fracture the solder. I hope that make sense the way I described it. Edit: if you have access to a sand blaster (or other media blasting) that is faster and easier than sanding off the old paint. That is what I used when I was experimenting with custom heat sinks. It makes a nice surface for soldering and for repainting. Using sandpaper requires a lot of elbow grease. I think it might not be normal paint. On the heat sinks I was playing with it was very difficult and tough to remove by sanding paper. It may be powder coating rather than ordinary enamel paint.

I am not far from the NewEgg distribution center in SoCal. Straight shot for FedEx and UPS on I-10 and usually have my orders the next business day even on the FedEx or UPS Ground delivery. Looking at the history, it seems the delay might have been UPS not receiving the package from NewEgg for two days, although it did arrive at the Goodyear, AZ UPS distribution hub too late in the day this morning. I am guessing that is what the "late UPS trailer arrival" means. They are normally already on the road at the time the trailer arrived. Had it not taken so long for it to get from NewEgg to UPS it would/should have been here on Tuesday, or Wednesday.

You could likely build a more powerful desktop for the same if not less money and have something special rather than another cookie-cutter turdbook.

I guess the "late trailer" is the latest popular excuse for slow delivery service. It was originally Wednesday, then Thursday (today) and now Friday. Order was placed on Sunday. With rare exceptions, I always wait for the prices to drop to about $20. I never intentionally purchase any game that is only online multiplayer and always look into a game title to confirm it has an offline single-player campaign. If it doesn't, then I don't want it. It don't enjoy multiplayer and I don't want to have to rely on an internet connection to play by myself.

That is very true. I cannot remember the last time a new game was released that interested me. I have spent more than an hour searching several times since the end of last year and I already own what I am interested in, but Steam has literally nothing available that I find even remotely intriguing at this point. They have tons of stuff in genres I don't care about in the slightest and they are overrun with chintzy and unimpressive indie crap that should be freeware for people running dual core processors and integrated graphics.

The memory delivery got pushed out until tomorrow by UPS for unknown reasons. So hopefully I'll have an update to share by tomorrow evening.

@Talon your BIOS version shows A62U2 with a build date of 6/14/2022. The A60 I downloaded is A60 with a build date of 6/29/2022. @johnksss what does your BIOS show for the latest BIOS version and build date you flashed?

No, that is no longer present now. When I discovered the 1.435V cap I immediately went there to enable it and found it missing. The preview of the auto values in gray text is also missing. I presume because the SPD was damaged. Will know tomorrow for sure once the replacement memory arrives.

Yes, I always go into the BIOS and reset firmware defaults for everything before flashing after making sure I saved my old profile to USB in case I want to go back to the old firmware. I do not use that user-XMP thing either. I looked into it to see what is involved and it did not make any sense to me. With the ability to save complete BIOS profiles that cover everything, including things totally unrelated to overclocking, it seems more like a silly gimmick than a useful feature to me. I do set the memory XMP profile first and tune from that point, at least until I have it dialed in. Then I write down or screenshot everything and start over without using the memory XMP profile. I also start with the voltage higher than I expect and gradually go down until I get errors in testing or no boot, then go back up a bit. Not remarkably different the CPU or GPU overclocking other than all of the timings that take time to get dialed in. I got an update from UPS saying the Vengeance kit should be here for sure tomorrow, so we shall see if installing that solves the dilemma. These are what I ordered. I wanted to get them on Amazon, but delivery would have not happened until Sunday from Amazon for some reason, and the price was identical. CORSAIR Vengeance 32GB (2 x 16GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 6400 (PC5 51200) Intel XMP 3.0 Desktop Memory Model CMK32GX5M2X6400C38

Well, this is not the first time we saw that with the Unify-X. Remember my first one when the first mobo was brand new? I guess flashing MSI firmware is an unsually risky matter that should be avoided when possible. There was no error of any kind and the flashing process appeared to occur normally. I don't normally even consider firmware updates, but with DDR5 being new and evolving technology, the temptation exists where it normally would not.

I may do that. I will have to reinstall the original heat sinks and RGB diffusers and hope they don't have a problem with that (or hope that they not notice). Then I can sell the replacements (or hold onto them as backup parts) unless the Vengeance 6400 kit I ordered is inferior. Luumi seems to be a fan of them. I had actually ordered this kit once before and returned it unopened for a refund because I changed my mind about wasting $350+ for a potentially very modest (at best) performance improvement. Ditching the RGB crap will be a special bonus feature, LOL. I deliberated selected Vengeance versus Dominator because I do not want the RGB. (Price was about the same.) OK, that is good to know. Thank you for checking that. The erased XMP profiles, modified product name on one module, production date and other modified data that shows in AIDA64 and CPU-Z are definitely an issue and not the same on both memory sticks. That is what I originally discovered before trying to look at the SPD using Thaiphoon Burner, so there still seems to be an issue with memory firmware modification. Of course, this is subject to verification when I receive the replacement memory tomorrow. I am crossing my fingers and hoping it is not something that the flash caused to go haywire with the mobo. Yes, unfortunately. If it were not for that problem the memory would still function the same as it did before other than the information and labeling data being messed up and XMP profiles missing. But, the 1.435V limit is a huge impediment. I was running 6800 CL30 with 1.475V stable as a daily driver memory overclock and the 1.435V limit is capping me out at 6400 CL30. If I try to set anything manually higher than 1.435V is resets to Auto. The discovery of the issue was immediate after flashing. On the first boot after flashing A.60 I was greeted with an error message that said "memory has been changed" and I do not see that message after flashing. When I entered the BIOS after seeing that message to apply my custom settings is when I discovered the missing XMP profiles and 1.435V cap applied. When you look at the SPD in the BIOS, it is also different there for each memory module and the XMP info does not show in the SPD viewing it in the BIOS. In fact, you cannot find anything anywhere in the BIOS where XMP is mentioned.

Flashing was not an issue. There are no errors in flashing and it completes successfully. The problem is that BIOS vA.60 erased data from the memory SPD on both memory modules. The system boots using a DDR5 default memory profile that is part of the BIOS firmware and not using the firmware that used to be on the memory. I do not have any way of flashing a stock SPD or XMP profile onto the DDR5 sticks. I can overclock the memory and set manual timings but the voltage is limited to 1.435V which limits the overclock threshold to 6400 with some errors due to insufficient voltage. The BIOS default is 1.435V max and the memory SPD controls anything higher than that.

Yes. The motherboard has a dual BIOS. Moving the switch to the older BIOS position, the problem is the same. I also tried reflashing the new BIOS and previous BIOS twice on the BIOS switch position I use as the default and nothing changes. I am almost positive the BIOS flash corrupted the memory SPD firmware for that reason. The only other possibility is a hardware failure, and that is unlikely since everything was fine until I flashed the BIOS. I do not think doing that would affect hardware.

I just noticed that besides the data that is either erased or unreadable in the SPD that what remains doesn't even match. Hopefully will have the Vengeance DDR5-6400 modules tomorrow or Thursday. At least I am able to use the computer still. Very weird. @johnksss

Hopefully not worse memory latency than Ryzen already has. That will be interesting. Their DDR4 latency is nearly double what it is for the same generation Intel platform. If it gets any worse that will be ridiculously horrible.

The EK Quantux Velocity² is nice looking. It is made specifically for LGA-1700. I got this from Titan Rig open box for about $40 below retail. It works better than the OptimusPC Foundation block and has a MUCH higher liquid flow rate. The OptimusPC block is a lot more restrictive. Temps are close to the same, slightly better (3-5°C lower core max in Cinebench). The only downsides are the back of mobo installation and fixed position of inlet and outlet. It fills the empty space between the VRM heat sinks and memory.

Hmmm. It does work. Look... seems like it wiped out a ton of stuff on the modules. Not just the XMP.

There should never be any reason whatsoever for a motherboard BIOS flash to write anything to memory SPD. That is a big no-no. That said, I know one of the "features" of DDR5 is the ability to create your own XMP profiles and save them to the extra empty space. And, you do that within the BIOS. In this situation that part of my BIOS is non-existent now. There is NOTHING on any menus about XMP or custom user XMP profiles. It is totally gone now and AIDA64 doesn't see that on the memory modules either. I wish I knew someone with a DDR5 mobo that could insert these sticks for testing, but I don't know anyone nearby. If it did screw them up, I will keep them and use one of them for BIOS flashing so it doesn't ever happen to the new memory. My Strix Z690 is a DDR4 mobo, so I can't try swapping them. I will have to see if Thaiphoon Burner works with DDR5, but I don't think it does. If it does, then I can fix them.

I struggle with the same thing. I am not a negative person at all. I am always positive and a glass is half full kind of person. However, I'm not going to pretend things are peachy when they suck. It is very difficult to be positive about a lot of things right now. Tech is one of those things. We expect it to get better in time, not worse. In some ways it gets better, but it is like one step forward, two steps backward more often than it should be.