Mr. Fox

I don't really have a lot of spare time because of work. I have access to the forum while I work and take breaks to do what I enjoy. I have been in the same industry for more than 35 years. I could end up having to work to age 75 because my retirement nest egg that I have pinched and scraped so hard to prepare for that has lost so much value the past few months, so that will likely end up looking more like 50 years. Find something you are good at and don't hate doing, then do it consistently to the best of your ability and that will take you far. It is difficult to find employees that consistently produce great work, care about their job, are reliable and trustworthy. If you are that way for yourself or a company, you will be successful. The hard part for good employees is finding a good company. They're sometimes as difficult to find just as good employees are. Some are good for a while, then put bad leaders in place and ruin a good thing. I think there is a lot of truth to the old cliche that "people don't leave bad jobs; they leave bad bosses." What I've learned over the years is if you have a truly bad boss, wait a bit if they're not so horrible or abusive that you just can't tolerate them. If he/she is truly horrible, they probably won't be your boss for long unless you also work for a horrible company.

I use Malwarebytes on some of my OSes and nothing on others. I went for probably 5 or 6 years with no antivirus and had no issues. But, I wouldn't recommend it to others because some people have online behavior that is extremel risky even with a robust security suite. For me, using antivirus isn't something I view as being that important.

They should have just swapped it for a new replacement. The fact that they made you send in a new board for "repair" and sent it back not fixed is unacceptable. This puts them into the same class as the idiot losers at ASUS that don't give a damn about customer experience.

Well, I finally got word from Supercool Computer that my order placed on 4/25 should ship sometime today. I am eager to see how well that direct die block works on the 12900K. If it works as well as their direct die block works on the 10900K it is going to be excellent. I should also be receiving the DDR5 water block from Aliexpress soon. I did not like the idea of having a water block on the RAM because it would be really inconvenient having it installed in series with short runs of tubing between the CPU or GPU. However, it should be very convenient and easy to deal with using that EK manifold. I really love how simplified things are using that manifold. It works better than I imagined it would. With each component being separated with its own cooling lines running off of that block it makes working on things so much easier. Removing the CPU or GPU doesn't involve the cooling lines for the other component, and the same will be true for the memory. With the QDC fittings on the manifold, no caution is required in terms of having water drip on the motherboard. If the QDC fittings squirt a few drops of water, the manifold is in an area were it just doesn't matter because there is nothing that can be adversely affected by it.

I found the meaning to "sugoi" using a Google search and agree. They're awesome. Came up empty-handed on this one. Not sure what that one means. Even Urban Dictionary was no help, LOL. I'm not a huge fan of country music... it's ok, and I like the underlying theme generally associated with it, but not my favorite music genre. I absolutely love the message of those two Hardy and Creed Fisher songs and how both of them capture a lot of what is good and right about America that is at risk of being destroyed by a small group of insane, hate-driven, ungodly traitors.

Well, that's not good. Seems like these clowns suck as bad (maybe even worse) as ASUS when it comes to lousy customer service. It is really disappointing. I do like the Unify-X more than I expected to, but I may avoid MSI going forward if this is an example of what can be expected if you need to make a warranty claim. This is an example of inexcusable incompetence and truly lousy customer service from MSI, and companies that mismanage their business this way deserve to go bankrupt. I don't remember what the problem was with your board. Seems like they should just be swapping it out with a replacement. This should have been resolved in a week or less, at most. It is totally unacceptable how long this is taking. I really hate how expensive EVGA Dark boards are, but this makes me think that they really are the only company that deserves to get our money. They are the only company in this space that I know of that handles warranty service in an honorable, timely and customer-centric manner. The LED for the reset button on my tuning panel has stopped working. While it is annoying, the device itself still works. But, I probably should reach out to them about having it replaced for no other reason than an experiment to find out if they are going to give me the same degree of run-around they are with your situation. Here again, this is something I would expect them to just immediately offer to send me a replacement part, no questions asked, with a return label. They can hold my credit card info just in case I don't return the original part or lied to them about what is wrong with it, and I am totally fine with that. They deserve protection from dishonesty and that protects them while taking care of the customer need immediately. If they tell me I have to send in the entire motherboard package or even just the tuning panel and wait for them to do something I am going to blow them off and never buy anything from them again. But, then I will complain about their unacceptable crappy service in public places whenever I find an opportunity to plant seeds of doubt about buying their brand in the minds of potential customers.

One of he most valuable tweaks/hacks that often gets overlooked is eradicating Windows "notification" functionality and nuking Action Center. I find notifications to be an extremely annoying part of Windows. It makes it have that crappy smartphone feel to it, and I don't even like notifications on my smartphones... they are generally obnoxious and no real value to them. Windows Push Notification services are also a bloated waste of system resources. Micro$lop makes disabling this trash very difficult for the average user. I have always hated balloon notifications in Windows 7 and disable them in Group Policy, but they are very mild in comparison to the incessant nagging crap that happens on W10/11.

Wait, what? MSI still doesn't have things sorted for you? How long have these peckerwoods been farting around with this now?

Thanks. I will check it out. Chris Titus is great, but sometimes, probably somewhat out of self-preserving necessity considering his audience, less destructive than I tend to be. For example, not recommending to disable Windows Update. I do that before allowing a system to connect to the internet. I also totally remove/destroy Micro$lop Defender Security. You don't give kids dynamite to play with unless you hate the kids.

Another masterpiece from Brother Tom... This Japanese senior citizen heavy metal band always amaze me every time I watch this video. I don't have a clue (other than YouTube closed captioning) what they're saying, but these old men really do kick butt. I think this band celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2019.

That is certainly a kind and considerate way of putting it. 😄 Being accurate would require violating forum rules

Be sure to get her StartAllBack. It is the Winduhz 11 version of StartIsBack and it makes it a WHOLE LOT less aesthetically repulsive. It will make the taskbar and Start menu totally normal/nice looking again, just like StartIsBack does for Windoze 10. StartAllBack is dirt cheap and I'd pay a lot more than what it costs to not have to live with the disgusting look and feel.

You should still see an improvement in FPS performance with the more powerful GPU even if the CPU is causing a bottleneck.

Can you post a few photos of your BIOS menu options for core clocks? F12 will let you save screenshots of BIOS to USB.

That probably lends itself to application stability.

Yes, sadly it is. We are surrounded by it and common sense is getting harder to identify. And, all I have ever known from AMD is varying shades of mediocracy or outright disappointment. They will randomly get some things right and do a nice job in one area, but drop the ball in other areas.

I think what we often overlook is the fact that most of the CPU, GPUs and motherboards that are sold are NOT enthusiast products. I only want the enthusiast products and have no interest in wasting my money on consumer-grade trash, but that is not the norm. We are outnumbered by people that just want something that works OK, gets the job done without any effort on their part, and doesn't cost a ton of money. If Intel can produce GPUs that compete in the lower and middle price range and simply get the job done for consumers and "normal" gamers they will be successful. Even if they are not the most powerful GPU option available, they're still going to be a WHOLE LOT more powerful than the integrated graphics trash, and many discrete graphics solutions that most people are content to use. Some gamers are still very happy and satisfied using very old products that are extremely slow compared to the products we are using as long as their games are playable and no drama is involved.

I am going to take a wait and see attitude toward it. We don't know what the pricing is going to ultimately look like or what kind of overclocking potential they will have. If Intel GPUs end up having overclocking potential to the same or similar extent their CPUs do, it might not matter so much if the "stock" performance is medicore like a 3060 or 3070. For the typical gamerboy, I don't see where that needs to be an issue. If the price is right and it runs like a 3060 or 3070 it will be good enough for all practical intents and purposes and what will matter more to them is how cheap they can get it. For example, if we look at the comparison between Intel and AMD processors, AMD might have a minor performance edge in some things running BIOS defaults and stock clocks. But, they really suck at core and memory overclocking. As soon as you punch the throttle on the equivalent Intel CPU it opens a can of whoop ass on the AMD CPU. If an Intel GPU can have the living crap overclocked out of it, then it might not matter that much if the stock performance isn't anything to write home about. I find that to be a lot more prefererrable than something that runs nice stock but sucks at overclocking. Stock performance isn't really that important to me. I care more about how far I can push it. That would be very refreshing for GPU experience since GPU core overclocking really sucks for both NVIDIA and AMD, and has been a sucky experience for Turing and Ampere. Take the 7960X and 7980XE as extreme examples. You could push them to a 100% (double stock clock) overclock. They performed like an entirely different product when you put the pedal to the metal. If you can push an Intel GPU core clock to even 50% higher than stock, the overclocked performance might stomp the life out of what we are used to seeing with overclocked NVIDIA and AMD flagship GPUs today.

Far and away my favorite products, of unmatched quality, but no longer within an acceptable price point for me to view it as a viable option. The value is just too difficult for me to identify. Being a very late arrival to virtually every launch is also an issue, even if money were no object.

LOL. Too funny. Maybe what they meant, and failed to properly articulate, is that their drivers don't suck as bad and remain in a perpetual semi-stable beta state like AMD graphics drivers. With a few random exceptions, their drivers have been a mess for as long as I can remember, and their firmware is equally perma-botched.

I use the Chris Titus debloater script and he is about to release a new and improved version. Video below. Should be out soon.

He did show the "unlock" command. If the IC itself is write protected at a hardware level then the answer might be grabbing the soldering iron and installing a new blank chip on it and programming it using the software for flashing AMD cards. I certainly would not have a surprised look on my face about them going Nazi on something that is supposedly for enthusiasts given the fact that they are generally anti-overclocking in their approach to things. It certainly wouldn't be the first time that enthusiasts got sold a bill of goods, and definitely it won't be the last.

Oh ye of little faith. With great coldness of GPU cores great things are possible. The secret to the gold is hidden in the cold. Since turdbooks are air cooled what you need to feed your laptop is freezing cold air. Have you found a place to purchase fans that rotate in the opposite direction? I don't think I've ever seen any that you could buy that spin the opposite of normal.

I played around with the longer and more challenging versions of TM5, but I haven't really found a need/benefit for it. Some people are really anal about their memory running under max stress for days with no errors. I haven't identified a need to be stressed out about it. I don't recognize the GUI for MemTest Pro. I have MemTest Pro, but it doesn't look like that. That kind of looks like OCCT. The MemTest Pro I have is very plain-looking test on gray, like CPU-Z or the other RAM Test GUI. Is that a different brand that uses the same name, or is "RunMemTestPro" the actual name of it?