Mr. Fox

Everything has become a touchy subject lately. Creating division is probably part of some greater plan that nobody wants to believe could be real. Merely mention the name of any politician, regardless of the context, and somebody(ies) are going to get butt hurt about it and start attacking other people that they believe are being critical of a person or group they tried their best to choose as being the lesser among evils at the polls, LOL. The world is not a happy place for anybody to live in right now. I'm glad we have each other and our PC passions to distract us from the mess.

Yup. It was sad that it had to die. But, I totally get it. TechTarget isn't a charity. If I were the owner I also wouldn't have wanted to continue spending my money to support something that served no useful purpose, produced no income or benefit for the furtherance my business. It would have been nicer and a more positive reflection on the company had they been more flexible in allowing ownership of it to pass to another entity or group that wanted to keep it going. Que sera sera. Life goes on.

This is also relevant in the context of GPU prices and the ability of anyone that hasn't recently lost any wealth they have earned, and the ability to replace it, to purchase a GPU. When it costs +100% more to gas up your car and +30% more to purchase basic necessities like food, guess how many people ain't gonna be buying a shiny new GPU unless they can put it on a credit card and take 10 years to pay for it?

Talking about real life actual things that have happened to us personally is not politics. It is a documented life event and the person that held political office at that point in time is also. Trump did impose tariffs on China, The companies being charged them passed the added costs to the end user. Historically extreme inflation and damage to my retirement accounts came about based on decisions made by his successor. If we lose the ability to publicly complain about our lives being damaged by decisions our leaders make that directly affect us and are well doumented, we may as well as live in China or North Korea.

Part of it is supply and demand got messed up by the crypto money from nothing craze, and part of it was corporate greed and probably some artificial manipulation of supply and demand to power that greed. And, NVIDIA basically having a one-horse show for more than a decade, with consumers (me included) being stupid enough to pay asinine prices to get what they wanted instead of tell them to cram their silicon garbage where the sun don't shine. It is interesting to note that with crypo values plumetting, the supply is much better and now the prices are moving back the right direction. I hope the cooling off period that occurred due to unavailable product and hyper-inflated prices causes an overabundance of supply and they end up having to sell stock at a loss to move it. It would definitely be a just reward.

I know I care a whole lot more about rate at which my retirement is being systematically destroyed than I do about how much GPUs cost. I was already going to have to work until probably age 75 before I could afford to retire, and at the rate these clowns are causing my 401K and IRA to hemorrhage it might end up being 85 now. My nest egg had begun growing at an impressively healthy and unprecedented rate until the regime change, but the Socialist Party has messed things up pretty bad for me. I hope there is an opportunity to repair the damage before it's too late. About a year ago it used to cost me $35 to fill the tank on my Ford 500. I filled it up today and it was $80. What wonderful "progress" for America. GPUs don't seem too important right now. Luxury items tend to take a back seat to basic necessities. That might bring GPU prices down, too. You can't buy groceries or drive to work with a GPU.

https://www.overclock.net/threads/new-12700k-build-i-was-told-100-to-use-win-11.1797876/post-28982208

LOL. For a few seconds I was like, "wait, what is this all about" ...then it clicked... Good one.

Yeah, he nailed it. If you're a "normie" that is frightened of tuning a computer or just a click-and-run jockey with no interest or skill, buy it. The captured comment (screenshot below) seems evident about AMD in general, they just went to the extreme to make this CPU worthless to every performance enthusiast on the planet. Even their "unlocked" CPU suck at overclocking. Whether that is due to intent or incompetence is anyone's guess. No thank you. No thank you.

The enthusiast-grade consumer CPUs like 10900K and 12900K are ideally suited for multi-purpose workloads, including gaming. You can overclock them, run them stock, undervolt them... a lot of flexibility that is not available for locked-down peasant-grade CPUs with fewer cores. That said, you can also overspend and hurt your results if you go overboard on the CPU. It is not uncommon to see better gaming performance from CPUs in the 6 to 12 core range. When you start going above 12 core/24 thread the gaming performance tends to often go the opposite direction. They are certainly more powerful, excellent for benching and severe demand CPU workloads, but they are not ideally suited for some games that get easily "confused" by the excessive core/thread count available to them.

Spending gobs of money on high end hardware for gaming is truly foolish and unwarranted. There will always be random exceptions of shoddy coding of games (software) that requires an inordinately strong CPU or GPU to perform well enough to not be a miserable experience. For all intents and purposes, anything between, and including, a 1070 and 3060 is more than enough juice to have a pleasant gaming experience if you tune the settings to match the hardware correctly. The exception is an abnormally heavy use of ray-tracing. The high-end enthusiast parts are useful for other hobbies, like overclocked benching and e-peen competition, but gaming isn't a hobby that warrants the added expense. I also agree that it is very difficult for me to spot a huge difference (sometimes any difference) in how a game looks while moving from low to medium, or medium to high/ultra. If I have to pay close enough attention to the subtle differences, then I am nit-picking rather than enjoying playing the game. Things like hitching and stuttering are far more noticeable and visually harmful to the gaming experience than things like a few extra jaggy edges, subtle improvements in texturing or a few extra sparkles here and there that nobody other than a photo-realism snob cares about. My favorite pets are the ones that belong to someone else. I do prefer cats because they eat less and are lower maintenance, less dependent on attention from their master, less messy and can be left to take care of themselves outdoors if you go out of town on a business trip or vacation. As long as they have water, they'll eat bugs, mice, snakes, lizards or whatever. I like both cats and dogs and enjoy their companionship as long as they are gentle and well-mannered, but not fond of the added responsibility and expense of caring for pets. We have two cats now. I love them, and they're good kitties, but often wish we didn't have them only because pets of any kind are an added hassle I can happily live without. I tend to place much greater value on my property than I do the pets/pests that can damage the property. If they damage any of my important stuff, I have to resist the urge to kill them to ensure it never happens again. I think that all aggressive pets need to be euthanized. If they cause harm or injury to humans or other pets, that warrants death. Having the monitoring features is useful when the information is accurate. But, definitely not at the expense of sacrificing performance induced by the bloatware supporting it. If you have to use resource-sapping bloatware to output the sensor data that kind of negates the value of the monitoring features. At best, you are left with an extra task of having to monitor or manage the systemic impact of the monitoring software overhead.

Yeah, they are good. I used to listen to them too, and totally forgot about them. Thanks for the reminder. 🙂

The picture of the kitty with the sunglasses is what sold me. It doesn't need to perform well as long as I have that.

I am really happy with these bare die temperatures. This is three back-to-back runs of CBr20.

TechSpot has a couple of good deals right now. Adguard Lifetime Family Plan (9 devices - PC and mobile) - $29.99 ($100 discount) https://store.techspot.com/sales/adguard-family-plan-lifetime-subscription I won't use my phones or computers without this. It is an excellent crap-killer. Micro$oft Office Pro 2021 Lifetime License - $49.99 ($300 discount) https://store.techspot.com/sales/microsoft-office-professional-plus-2021-for-windows I snagged three of these the other day.

Here is a thread where we can share good deals on software and games that we stumble upon, so our friends can benefit along with us. Ready... set... go.

Thanks. 🙂 The more, the merrier. As long as temps don't get in the way of having more.

I am not sure what country he is from, but our world in general is in an unusual amount of turmoil and there aren't any places left that don't suck for one reason or another. If he is in Russia, Ukraine or an affected neighboring country, he may not be able to respond or he may have more important things to think about.

Both look fantastic. I wish I had the extra dough on hand and I would have gladly taken that nice KS sample off your hands and upgraded Banshee with a Strix D4. I am looking forward to seeing what you do.

Considering that I have ordered a Supercool Computer Direct Die block for the 12900K, I figured I might as well go ahead and install the one I had and never used for the 10900K. So, now Banshee is running bare die. Before/after posted below.

I have not. I have seen it featured on some air cooled video cards, but I have not seen an option for aftermarket fans to select a direction of rotation. I assumed they are standard and rotate clockwise. Interesting idea, though.

Maybe something for thermal management. A thread for memory tuning would make sense, too.

That doesn't surprise me at all. Ryzen CPUs suck at overclocking and their GPUs have sucked at overclocking since Radeon 6000 series. Azor has always been a traitor to PC enthusiasts. A good salesman knows all of the right ways to lie to get the sale. It is the perfect marriage of sucky hardware with "Chief Architect of Gaming Solutions" focused on providing crippled trash for the kiddos to get their gaming itch scratched. No need for the product to be any good as long as it plays games OK and costs less than Intel and NVIDIA. It makes sense that consoles are powered by AMD "DNA" because they do not need to be special or do anything impressive as long as they all behave the same and require no knowledge or skill on the part of the end user. Consistency: Push the button, pull the chain, out comes chocolate choo-choo train. "AMD silently gave the Radeon RX 6400 a retail launch last week. However, TechPowerUp's review of the Radeon RX 6400 purportedly revealed that it lacks overclocking support, meaning there's no way for owners to boost the Navi 24-based graphics card's performance." "The Radeon RX 6400 initially targeted OEMs, but AMD eventually decided to unleash it for the retail market. The graphics card apparently performs like Nvidia's three-year-old GeForce GTX 1650 from the Turing days. According to TechPowerUp's results, even the Radeon RX 570, which debuted in 2017, is faster than the Radeon RX 6400." Perfect solution for Alienware and XPS, Omen and Legion branded gaming trashboxes. On sale now at Walmart. Hurry kids!!!