Mr. Fox

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.

If it improves benchmark scores I will use it. If it does not I will not. Don't give a hoot about the "security update" nonsense.

The difference between peace of mind and piece of mind is the latter always comes free. 🤣

https://hwbot.org/submission/4997815_mr._fox_aida64___memory_read_ddr5_sdram_111730_points

One thing we know about Frankie-boy. Whatever he is selling, it is the best. Even when it ain't. 'cause that's how Frankie rolls. But, that's not unique... lots of his peers in the industry do the same. And, their followers accept what they are told, and that's how the sheeple roll. Friendly reminder: Frank... Thou shalt not bear false witness.

Chris Titus has his new tool available now. https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ (although the old one still works, this is the newer debloat tool option).

Also use the Chris Titus Windows debloat script and run that, remove Cortana, OneDrive and any of the other worthless trash that you can live without. All of that worthless rubbish steals CPU clock cycles and makes your computer run slower. https://christitus.com/debloat-windows-10-2020/ Hey, Chris Titus has his new tool available now. Use this link instead of the one above if you want the newer tool https://christitus.com/windows-tool/ (although the old one still works, this is the newer option).

It looks like the Accelero might be discontinued now, which would make your comment about sourcing one make more sense to me now. I could see how that would give it a collector's item status. It is strange that I have never heard of it before. It would be sad to think a truly excellent product had a short life span if it was simply because Arctic didn't put enough effort into marketing. I know that people who like CPU air cooling really dig the huge tower air coolers and this equivalent monster for their GPU would be something a lot of them would be really excited about if they knew it existed. It looks like the guy that did that video might be a relatively new channel. His oldest video is less that a year old and he has only 225 subscribers. Seems like a nice fellow. I found he had this installation video as well.

Have you seen this? Looks pretty impressive for an air cooler as well. Very similar idea. https://www.newegg.com/black-raijintek-0r100022/p/2T3-0007-00004 Also stumbled onto this... interesting. (Edit: appears this is a concept, but not a real product yet.)

Could be. I have never seen him before. It is crazy that his GPU memory is hitting 100°C with that massive back plate. Edit: I searched for other YouTube videos on the Accelero Xtreme IV and there are not very many. If it works Xtremely well, it is unfortunate that Arctic didn't send out review units so that more people would have the opportunity to know about it.

I had never heard of it before. I found this video. If this is an improvement over stock thermals, that certainly is scary. Seems like liquid cooling is the only solution that makes good sense for a GPU that runs that hot.

It would make sense if they presented it as an "overclock" or "Super" (I don't like NVIDIA's choice of words here, but it's in the right train of thought) rather than a new/different product. Pretending that it is something new seems more deceptive. Nobody is going to complain about paying more for a "superclocked" GPU, and they already expect to pay more for that. We gladly pay more for binned CPUs and RAM that have been tested and validated to run stable at higher clock speeds. Same thing here.

No, I have not. Since the Green Goblin moved to DCH drivers and no longer support traditional drivers I am no longer testing new drivers. I hate the DCH feces and will avoid using them for as long as I can. I don't spend a lot of time gaming, so it is rare that I have to care about Nazi game developers buildiing crappy titles that force you to use a newer driver to play the game. I am fine with "suggestions" but using force is just messed up.

While all of the issues relating to inflation and governmental mismanagement are real and causing tremendous harm to all of us due to incompetent leadership, that has nothing to do with a "new release" of basically the same product with a higher price tag. The issue is not the price, but the "new" product that isn't new, offers nothing compelling, and doesn't legitimately qualify as an upgrade anyone should want.

This will also be helpful. Apply the "Extreme" profile and manually add bloat Services to the list as you deem appropriate. The defaults for the Extreme profile will improve performance without any tweaking. https://www.sordum.org/8637/easy-service-optimizer-v1-2/ Also use the Chris Titus Windows debloat script and run that, remove Cortana, OneDrive and any of the other worthless trash that you can live without. All of that worthless rubbish steals CPU clock cycles and makes your computer run slower. https://christitus.com/debloat-windows-10-2020/ I highlighted what I run. I disable updates, but you might prefer to allow security updates only. (That doesn't matter much to me.)

Shut down all of the programs that are open and kill all of the unneeded Windoze bloat Services, set Cinebench.exe to run in realtime priority and your best yet score will be even higher. All of the junk that is running slows things down measurably.

I never expected anything worth having to be cheap. I didn't expect everything to be overpriced garbage though. Expensive stuff that is good is good. We expect to pay more for good stuff, because it's better. I just don't expect to pay a lot for trash. I don't like trash even when it's free, LOL. (Crippled is one definition of trash, but the list of what belongs in that bucket is massive.) And, I don't expect to pay excessive prices for everything regardless of whether or not it's any good. The good stuff is excessively overpriced and severely out of scope with what you receive in exchange for your money, and a lot of the "high end" stuff is crippled now. I farted around with the Supercool direct die block for a few hours today and decided it's more trouble than it is worth. I am pretty sure if I spend enough time getting the cold plate to fit right it would work great, like the one does on my 10900K, but I got tired of sucking the water out of it with a vacuum cleaner. After the third time I was like, "Fox, what the hell are you doing? And, why?" I can put up with inconvenient design when it works well and produces pleasing results, but I'm not seeing that. It should have just worked right out of the box. The temps were not horrible, but they should have been better than with an IHS and they were not. Not good enough to justify the hassle, that's for sure. I did not try sanding down the CPU side of the cold plate because the tabs or "wings" on the sides where the ILM presses down are already extremely thin and if I remove some of the material they might end up being too thin and bending under pressure. Plus, when you buy something special, you expect it to work right. I am losing interest in modding things other people have made that are supposed to be awesome (which is why you buy it in the first place) in order to get the results the product was expected to produce when it was purchased. (See my last post above about "trash" LOL.) I think I am going to order one of those ILM replacements and call it good since I am not benching much any more. If someone comes up with a bare die frame for 12th Gen that allows me to use a normal water block, I'll grab one if and when that happens. I lapped the stock IHS and put it back together with KPX on the top side and I'm done for now. Considering it's not liquid metal on both sides of the IHS, the temps are actually very good. As usual (for me) the stock IHS works better than the aftermarket copper IHS on a desktop. The aftermarket IHSes have only been better than stock for me on a laptop. Yup, and now more than ever, Macro$lop is going full Hitler on things. They already have WAY TOO MUCH control on what people can do with their "rented" computer tech and it's only going to get worse going forward.