Mr. Fox

It is lapped. I think there is enough difference in height between the top of the IHS and the frame for me to border it in Kapton tape. If there is, I am going to do that just to avoid any remote chance of corrosion with the aluminum frame. I put it back together using the same application of KPX that was on it before and temps are fine. No issues that I can see so far. Maybe tomorrow I will replace the KPX with Liquid Pro.

I like this. Looks like a great thing to use with liquid metal. It is aluminum, but it is anodized and should hold up fine.

Yeah, well... although they probably are not even aware of it, where PC technology is concerned it sucks to be them, LOL. I am happy to be numbered among the elitists and not one of the miscreant sheeple herd. Nice for them that ignorance is bliss. 😉 I'd rather have nothing than embrace the filth that they want.

Good luck with that. The silly turdbook jockeys are all locked up on their retarded fetishes that make no sense apart from the fact that they are in love with anemic trash incapable of supporting anything that remotely resembles awesome. It's humorous that some actually claim to be enthusiasts. It is beyond sad that some people that prefer desktops have been brainwashed by the lowest common denominators.

You can probably pick them up fairly cheap. They are too old and weak for practical gaming, but still very benchable. Paired with current CPUs and RAM it is not too difficult to steal all of the HWBOT gold from the record-holders back in the day when those GPUs were current.

Yakima and especially Spokane get snow every winter, and sometimes lots of it. But, Tri-Cities, Hermiston, Pendleton not much most of the time.

Yes, humidity is something I dislike no matter what the temperature is. I am not fond of extreme heat, and prefer colder climates, but I do like the extremely dry part of living here. ESD and the wildfire risks aside, the low humidity is nice in most aspects. Humidity exaggerates everything, and makes the cold feel too cold and the heat feel miserable. I really enjoyed living in Southeastern Washington for many years because there were four seasons, but it was high mountain desert with low humidity, seldom any rain or snow. But, winters were very dry and cold. In my opinion it was the perfect climate.

Yes, it does help. Unless you have a whole house humidifier you would need a few small ones.

Yeah, too funny. 100% accurate, too. I often have to go to the bathroom to wet and comb my hair prior to a teleconference at work because my hair will be doing stupid stuff like his daughter's hair was doing in the video. It looks ridiculous if I do not. The climate where he lives is very similar, but it is hotter and even lower humidity here. Where I live is very similar to Death Valley, CA. It is not even summer yet, but today it is 102°F (42°C) and 10% relative humidity. Next month we will start to see our overnight lows higher than the current temperature.

Yup, in the AZ blast furnace. And, although I don't remember seeing Jayz video, that is correct. Simply adjusting the position of my posterior on my office chair can be enough to generate an ESD event. Or, moving from a sitting to standing position can do it, too. I often (more than once a day) sit down at one of my computers, touch the keyboard and watch the screens momentarily go black as they recover from the ESD.

The static electricity is hell on electronics, including light bulbs and LEDs. If I go to my mail lockbox after dark, sometimes I can see an arc jump 1.5 to 2.0 inches from the key to the lock. Where it can actually be funny is when I reach down to stroke the back of one of my cats in the dark and it looks like a dozen tiny bolts of lightning running through their fur as I run my hand across their back. They seem oblivious to it unless I zap their face or nose, and they definitely don't like that.

Welcome to my world. An unlimited supply of sand, sun, extreme heat, dust, snakes, scorpions, spiders, termites and static electricity. It is difficult to understand why it is such a popular place to live with so many things that are symbolic of death and destruction.

Yes, that is a really good price. Good luck with the sale, bro. The tech hoarder inside of me wants to buy it just to have on hand as a spare part, but I do not need it. The 10900K is my favorite non-HEDT processor. This modern trend with big/little, chiplets and CCXes is stupid rubbish. Go big or go home.

The problem with most thermal paste reviews or "showdowns" is they are difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from no matter how diligent the entity is that is performing the comparison. In the simplest of terms, thermal compounds are nothing more than thermally conductive gap fillers. The first problem is that such reviews are almost always done using desktops with heat sinks or water blocks that fit extremely well. No conclusions can be drawn in terms of their application on something as sloppy as a notebook computer. There is tremendous variance in fit between models and brands, and the wide variety in quality control, (or the evident lack of it,) makes it likely for two identical laptops to behave differently. A thermal compound that works fantastic on the laptop for Bobby might totally suck for Jimmy even though they both own the same exact product. The second problem is a showdown only gives you an understanding of how well a thermal compound performs on one machine at the time of fresh application. You have no clue, and neither does the tester, if the temperatures are going to be the same, better, or worse in a few days or a couple of months. The only way he would understand that or have any way to demonstrate it is if the exercise took several years to complete because you allowed a couple of months of data collection per product. Nonetheless, results are going to be all over the board among individual end users. Now, these product comparisons do provide value to the extent they demonstrate how well a thermal compound works when first applied in controlled circumstances where there are fewer opportunities for errors caused by variables such as fit and application. The ultimate test of which thermal solution(s) work best rests on the shoulders of the computer owner using a specific machine under unique circumstances. TL;DR: YMMV. The best one is the one that works best. If your temperatures are truly good, be happy. Don't over-think the situation or start a new religious technology cult based on it. Most notebook owners can't say that because theirs are not. Whether they even know or care how their system is or isn't performing is another topic.

I believe the appropriate target market for the Razer turdbook is the same as this product...

If anyone has issues with BenchMate 0.10.9.2 not functioning (it hasn't worked for me for a while on LTSC 2019) I finally got fed up with the developer doing noting about the problem and figured out what was messed up on my own. It's fixed now. What is weird is the prior version (0.10.8.0) installed and worked perfectly. My solution is posted here: The official BenchMate support thread | HWBOT Community Forums This is what it was doing to me before I fixed it. When I looked in the BenchMate error logs it was not finding the driver file, and it was because BenchMate setup wasn't installing the drivers in the folder where it is supposed to install them. (The installation always appeared to complete with no errors, but apparently that was not the case.) The reason I was seeing the error telling me "The driver file is not accessible" is because it did not exist where it was supposed to exist.

If something seems too good to be true, chances are great that is going to be the case. It certainly was for my 5950X experience. Things looked good on the surface, or when looking at benchmark screenshots, but that was about as far as it went. In practical application, the ownership experience really sucked. Perhaps they only speak of single thread performance because the high boost clock does not work with all core overclocking, or the temperatures are so far out of control that the only way you can do it on all cores is with LN2 (same as Ryzen 9 5XXX). And, yeah... that mickey mouse PBO wuss overclocking nonsense was/is definitely for the birds. With stock and aftermarket software, or using the BIOS, it was never all it was cracked up to be. The other thing is, whatever the clock speeds are, even if they are much higher that last gen, those clock speeds instantly become the new normal. They're no longer special... they're normal and expected. If I can't extract another 500MHz or so on all core on what I buy, then it's not worth a damn. It still sucks at overclocking, and isn't worth buying. About 75-90% of the pleasure I derive from owning a high end CPU or GPU is contingent upon the ability to overclock the crap out of it and have something remarkably better than the gamerkid mama's-boy trash. Maybe they recently figured out what real overclocking looks like. Or, maybe Frank Azor (who doesn't know) has effectively tutored them on how to cleverly represent things so they appear to be the way you want them to appear. Time will tell. But, we will still be left with having to rely on marketing hype and fanboys like last time and that didn't work well for me. We mostly heard and saw what looked good on the surface and the stuff that wasn't so good, or was worse than it sounded like it was going to be, was not evident until it was too late to undo the mistake.

Emasculating a product so it can sport specs that it cannot properly support is never an honest approach. When something is sold on the basis that it is awesome and unique and it is neither, that stands as evidence on face value that the company selling it is dishonest and cannot be trusted. Companies doing that is the new normal, and those that do deserve any financial misfortune that comes their way because of it. I actually wish such misfortune on them.

Yes, me too. I uninstall it completely with Revo. Edge, Skype, OneDrive all go bye-bye using Revo and I use a script to eradicate Defender. That may soon be difficult without breaking things with Winduhz 11 because they are going full spaz Stasi on some things. It really is unforgivable and a Mac-ish dictatorship way of operating. I find that unacceptable in every way.

A fitting one-word response to Windows 11 is...

And, 12+ months after that a 4090 Ti KPE with no water block, LOL. I was contemplating making my approach going forward to only purchasing used parts, but if this is a glimpse into what the future holds for Kingpin GPUs they might not ever be considered one of the options for new or used. Not having a water block available is an extremely damning thing, for which there is no possibility of recovery. If they were smart they would sell exclusively the Hydro Copper model and skip the stupid hybrid thing enitrely.

Wow. What a great reason to avoid purchasing a 3090 Ti Kingpin card. I am already predisposed to avoiding them in the future with only one readily available option, grossly overpriced, and not the best one. If there is going to be no Hydro Copper available for it, then it would be an utterly worthless product to me. While I have no intention of purchasing a 3090 Ti, I would be super pissed to find out after buying a Kingpin card that there was no plan to offer the water block.

My pumps and fans all run full speed 24/7. I don't own any loud fans (by my definition of loud). Can I hear them? Yes. Of course. Are they obnoxiously screaming at me and interfering with my work that involves at least several hours of video conferencing every day. Nope. There are a total of 26 120mm PC fans running full blast within 6 feet of the webcam microphone, and it is a sensitive mic. They are very low decibel white noise that become an obscure element of my environment, and nobody on the other end of the video conference can identify the fact that they are running. No one has ever asked or complained about background noise. The pumps are another story entirely. If I turn the fans off, unless I am deliberately paying attention the sound of the pumps isn't even noticed. Running at full speed, the pumps are simply too quiet to draw special notice of the sound they are making. And, I have a total of five D5 pumps running within a 3.5 foot radius of my head. Having a quieter pump that pulls less power is a non-issue. They produce no more noise than the sound of the air coming through the vent in my ceiling when the central air conditioning system is running. If the inconsequential amount of audible sound the pumps emit when running full blast were an issue for me, I would have other serious audio bondage issues that might warrant being addressed by a mental health professional. The fans and pumps on my external cooling system are powered by their own ATX PSU. When I go to bed my computers are turned off and I flip off the power to the external cooling system as well. The difference in "noise" between that being turned off versus on is so small that I sometimes forget to turn it on before powering on the computer and the only thing that reminds me I need to turn it on as well is the beeping of the flow indicator complaining about the 0 liters per hour flow rate.

It is really sad to see what has happened with laptops... very unfortunate.

I am entirely self-taught as well. I have no formal training in technology. I know a lot, perhaps freakishly lots, about the things that interest me and became something I had a passion for, and very little about the things I don't care about. I enjoy the luxury of refusing to learn about the things for which I am biased against because I don't have to care in order to perform the responsibilities of my job. (Obviously, I do not work in IT or I would not be afforded such a luxury.) I generally take the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach to drivers and firmware. Firmware updates have become downright dangerous due to draconian focus on security, and some OEMs are even posting disclaimers or warning against flashing firmware they provide. If the system is performing to my satisfaction, I generally do not update firmware unless there is evidence of a performance or feature enhancement that is important to me. I never update my computer firmware for the purpose of enhancing security or patching a vulnerability. I do drivers basically the same way. If a new driver fixes a problem I need fixed, I will use it. If I see a performance benefit, I will update to the newer driver. Where that usually happens is when I notice that someone with the same hardware I am running gets consistently higher 3DMark scores than I can achieve running the same clock speeds. I will look at the driver they are using and install that driver to see if I obtain similar improvement. That doesn't happen very often. It seems like enthusiasts find a driver that works well for them and they stick with it because it works better. It is not often that a new driver will improve performance. The opposite is more often true. I almost never update drivers because a new one is "more secure" or because it fixes a vulnerability, unless it also improves performance. If it impairs performance at the cost of improving security, then I refuse to use it.