Mr. Fox

This is kind of interesting.

It's true. We are a largely brainwashed global society that has been fed so many lies that much (probably half) of the population is unable to discern between right and wrong, fact versus fiction, etc. And, they don't want to because it requires too much effort. Social media has made it worse because the social media moguls control the narrative to suit whatever nonsense fits their agenda. Stupidity has been normalized, along with an irrational push to normalize a ton of other things are are very abnormal. People tend to pick a side and go with it based on nothing more than what is popular among the people they think want to be associated with.

I don't think I have ever seen a 4090 FE available for purchase before. All I have ever seen is "sold out" at Best Buy.

That is a REALLY good price for the Trio. Would be hard to resist it. Thank you. I had not seen that the AMP has 24+4 versus 14+4. Great info. That is a big difference and probably a good reason for me to continue to reject the notion of possibly settling for a Trinity version some day. It would not matter if I were only buying a GPU for playing games. The only reason I would consider buying a 4090 is so I could overclock the living crap out of it, so I would want something that is less likely to fail at the sole purpose I would waste my money on it in the first place.

Yeah, I agree. While I am not a fan of the Gigabutt brand, that question has crossed my mind as well. I thought maybe these were junk and had lots of issues, but my impression from some quick research is that almost everyone that owns one loves it. In fact, I saw many posts that suggests that owners of this model 4090 and Zotac are among the most pleased 4090 owners. The thing I think I like most about this GPU and the PNY models is how nondescript they are. Not much in terms of bling or weirdness, just a plain jane plastic shroud covering a heat sink. That may be why they are not selling fast. Maybe too many people want the gaudy-looking coolers and lots of rainbow puke, so they pass on the plain-looking options? Some of the more expensive cards are having issues and suffer from very loud and annoying coil whine and it seems like many of the owners of this GPU and Zotac 4090s bought them as replacements for ASUS cards with severe coil whine. This 4090 and the PNY 4090 seems like they are easiest ones (usually the only option) to find in stock versus other options. So, I expected to see a lot of negative comments from owners. I couldn't find any. All seem pretty darned happy. Anecdotally, it seems like the most complaints are from the owners of the most expensive models. Another anecdotal observation, that may or may not be accurate... it seems like there is no meaningful difference between any of them. Aesthetic features aside, it seems like a simple vBIOS cross flash would essentially make most of them exactly the same in terms of functionality, with little or no difference in physical hardware at the PCB level or performance. So, which cooler do you think looks best is the first question to ask, and if you are going to block one, does it even matter what you buy? Mostly cookie-cutter gamer junk other than vBIOS/TGP changes? The Zotac Trinity has been frequently available on Amazon for between $1700 and $1850 sold and shipped by Amazon. I could have purchased one 10 times this week had I wanted to. But, the AMP AIRO is missing in action. Almost never available and always at a stupid price. Again, other than a vBIOS/TGP difference that could be cured with a cross-flashed vBIOS, I am not sure there is actually any real differece.

Either NewEgg got a bunch of these in stock or nobody wants them. They are allowing up to 5 per customer and the price is a tiny bit less insane than normal. They have not disappeared quickly like they usually do. This has remained available for three hours at the time of my posting it. GIGABYTE Gaming (GIGABYTE) GeForce RTX 4090 24GB GDDR6X PCI Express 4.0 x16 ATX Video Card GV-N4090GAMING OC-24GD Interesting that even with new pads and paste and max fans 95-100°C hotspot is status quo on those GPUs. That is certainly enough to abbreviate the lifespan of a GPU. Those are unhealthy turdbook-grade temperatures. The damage shown at 14:10 is pretty scary looking. Whatever is causing it is obviously not good.

I was a diehard ATi fan back then. My kids all had desktops I built for them. I had many happy hours with my four sons playing Quake, Quake II and Unreal Tournament on the home LAN. My daughter never really got into it, but she had a PC to do girl stuff with. Not sure what the girl stuff was, LOL.

It doesn't matter how crappy laptops get. The sheeple will always fall in line and comply. The companies selling trash know this.

Well said. I totally agree with that. I think it is spot on. 👍 Seems like human nature is to make a federal case from every anomaly and fabricate an impression of crisis from fringe exceptions. That said, there is a secondary element to it that is inescapable. The new connector design is flawed and poorly conceived to the extent that it makes the possibility of failure due to human error magnified. Even if you know of the problem and solution, there is the possibility for human error or unknown factors to lead to a truly unfortunate outcome. By unknown factors, I mean the cable gets disturbed in such a way that the connection becomes compromised without the user's awareness. It is unfortunate that more thought and intellgence was not employed before the change in design was deployed. GPUs with multiple 6+2 pin connectors are much less likely to experience the same problem because power delivery is handled through more than one conduit. If one of the two or three connectors is not fully seated, the additional 8 or 16 connection points reduce the amount of resistance and stress experienced by the one cable with the poor connection. The new design limits the conduit to a single point of connection and creates much greater risk for resistance and overheating to occur. There is only one shot to get it right, and if it's not right there is potentially going to be hell to pay for it. This was an example of change for the sake of change, for the sake of creating the need for something new to sell, for the sake of making more money. It was not a change born of necessity or need. It was a demonstration of collusion, greed and an irrational need for the Green Goblin to take control, and make itself the center of attention as an agent of change and disruption of the industry. NVIDIA is getting caught with their pants down. Poor judgment seems like a popular trend.

It doesn't need to perform well, run cool, or hold boost clocks as long as desktop screenshots are impressive and marketing materials convey a positively crafted story to please the kiddos. Optics are job #1. It's all about selling. Results are optional, and achieved only by accident.

One always have to be very careful with Amazon and Newegg to only purchase products that are sold and shipped by them and not resellers. It's a roll of the dice what the return policy will be if you buy from a third party vendor selling in their marketplace. One of the things that gives me pause is what anecdotally seems like a normalization of performance and limited ability to overclock enough to distinguish yourself on a leaderboard. If this is true, it kind of defeats the primary purpose of me wanting one. I'd never buy it with gaming being the primary purpose. I do that too little for it to matter and both of the GPUs I own are more than capable of providing a very gratifying experience when I do. I also remind myself that it's not a one and done. I don't want air cooling and I don't want hybrid. So that means added cost for a waterblock and I don't want to use the crappy short pigtail so it means either a PSU upgrade or a fairly affordable Cablemod replacement. So, whatever I do requires additional costs to have what I want, how I want it.

You're welcome. I am glad that you're getting results as good as I am. Be sure to post in the BIOS update thread. There are a lot of whiners with Classified boards complaining that their 4-slot mobos don't overclock the memory as well as the 2-slot Dark, Apex or Unify-X motherboards, and some are expecting their low budget Samsung B-die to overclock like Hynix, LOL. What is your forum name at EVGA Community? It looks like there are 3 or 4 "Talons" over there and I can never figure out which one is you. Some 4090 owners are having no-POST/BIOS freeze issues, some with black screen issues until Windows loads (no video in BIOS), with the GPU installed. Some kind of weird vBIOS firmware conflict. What GPU are you running? Have you had any issues on the Dark mobo with it?

To build on the reality of consumer stupidity and ignorance, here is a repost of my comments in EVGA forum. People keep griping that EVGA is not updating IME or providing new ME drivers, which is utterly retarded. EVGA actually allow disabling Intel ME in the BIOS, but they are oblivious to that benefit that other OEMs do not offer. EVGA also leaves it unlocked so you can easily flash an old ME version if you wish to do that. Most OEMs do not allow it to be disabled/enabled in the BIOS at will, or downgraded to an older firmware version. There is no tangible benefit to updating Intel ME firmware or drivers, or Intel Chipset "drivers" (which are not actually drivers at all). There is no point in EVGA updating it either. An Intel ME firmware update will not improve performance, but has potential to impair performance through the worthless watchdog timer. This can be disabled in the BIOS and ME drivers omitted because it serves no valid functional purpose on a consumer product unless they are using vPro. It is designed for use in an enterprise environment and as a backdoor access point that can be exploited by hackers, Intel and Micro$lop. For this reason it is often disabled on government computer systems. DISABLE INTEL’S BACKDOOR ON MODERN HARDWARE Intel’s Management Engine At the end of the day you're better off with a bricked ME than a functional one. The behavior and stability of your computer will be unaffected, but it might be more secure.

I know they absolutely do not care, but at least they are going to hear it.

I am feeling kind of proud of myself. I had several opportunities today to purchase "not from reseller/sold and shipped by" Zotac and MSI Suprim 4090 GPUs today between $1700 and $1800 on Amazon and NewEgg (including one just about 10 minutes ago). While I was tempted, I said no to checking out, emptied my shopping cart and walked away. 12 equal payments with zero interest wasn't enough to change my mind. These would have been easy payments, but when I considered the cost per month it seemed like more money than the degree of pleasure I would derive from having it. The lure was definitely very tempting though. I think I would be lucky to get 90 days worth of benching fun out of it before it no longer served any useful purpose for me. It is probably good that I do not have a Microcenter here or I would likely be doing a "free road test" right now knowing I could bench it a bit and get my money back if I changed my mind.

I can't remember now, and don't really want to. Maybe someone else knows and can give you some sound advice. That said, a P870 is a whole lot better than a P7XX.

Why not LTSC 2019 (1809)? It has less cancer. Just use a normal ISO and run the script to destroy/remove Defender and then use CTT debloat script and you're good to go. It will cut your life-sucking services by about half and be similar to Windows 7 overhead. The modified ISO files are often very buggy and I don't use them. And, the end product isn't any better than doing what I suggested.

Yup... a big... fat... stinkin' GIGO... feeble minds produce feeble products

Limited to a great degree, but 99.9% of all overclocking is something I do in the BIOS anyway. I almost never change anything working within the OS like what was often necessary with a laptop due to lack of BIOS controls. The problem I have had on the Strix mobo was not with overclocking. It was Linux not being able to identify or report accurately on the CPU clock speeds. It was/is working perfectly on my EVGA Z690 Dark and not working at all on the ASUS Z690 because their implementation of ACPI is all buggered up and not talking to the Linux kernel. I am happy to have found a workaround for the incompetence of ASUS. Given your occupation, what you would likely find even more amazing is the fact that, with very rare exception, almost every game title on Steam that is "Windows Only" runs flawlessly on Linux using Proton Experimental. In many cases the DX11/12 titles run better on Linux using Vulkan, even when it is "not supposed to work" it almost always does. Green With Envy is better than MSI Afterburner. I do not know if there is an AMD solution for GPU overclocking, but it is very good for NVIDIA.

Things are finally starting to fall into place. I was beginning to think I would never get the ASUS motherboard to function correctly on Linux like my EVGA motherboard. ASUS is such a pain in the butt sometimes. CPU seems to be functioning correctly now. I used Linux all day long for work yesterday. Once I figure out how to get Micro$lop Office working correctly on Linux, I might finally be able to kick Windoze to the curb. Everything is just so much cleaner without a trashy OS.

OK, I finally got the turbo issue sorted on the ASUS mobo.

The possibilities are limited only by their incompetence and lack of concern for the importance of producing a good product. This is 2023, so they rely on end user stupidity and the deception of frequent buggy patches and change only for the sake of change to be mistaken as something useful and beneficial. The exact opposite is true.

I do not need to even try to imagine this. It is my normal modus operandi. OS updates are especially unimportant and easily the fastest and most effective way of increasing the possibility that your system is going to be effed up in one or more ways.

Basically a rerun of the scenario between 12900K and 12900KS. Anyone planning to buy a 13th Gen i9 CPU that is not a KS would probably do well to limit their selection to 13900KF to avoid bottom-of-the-barrel silicon. The best 13900K samples will likely be branded as a 13900KS.

I do not like either of them, and the latest versions of them are less desirable than the versions they replace. In that respect, Winduhz 11 is a downgrade that is true to form and consistent with the way things are headed with Android and ChromeOS.