Mr. Fox

@electrosoft is right on the Dell/Alienware extended warranty paying for itself over and over again. It's not likely that you will get the same level of service with another brand. As many things as they do half-assed or poorly, their warranty service is probably still the best. Unfortunate that their products are not the best, but at least you don't have to worry about getting jerked around as much. For every 5 year extended warranty I have owned (from Dell/Alienware) I had parts replaced for free numerous times and complete system exchanges (usually upgrades) multiple times. YMMV when it comes to dealing with scummy companies like ASUS, Acer, Gigabyte and MSI. Getting prompt and good quality service it not likely, but having your out-of-pocket costs covered is still wise.

I used to never buy extended warranties, but anything that is expensive to replace with electronics that you plan to keep longer than the standard warranty is frequently going to pay for itself. Even household appliances. We have purchased expensive Maytag and Kenmore front-loading washers and driers for many years and always purchase the longest extended warranty. Ever time it has paid for itself. The Maytag Neptune washer we owned for like 10 years had the electronics motherboard replaced like 4 or 5 times and the cost of the warranty for 5 years was less than paying out of pocket for it one time. The Neptune drier never needed to use the warranty. We also purchase a home warranty each year and that pays for itself almost every year with a failure or repair of HVAC, kitchen stove, water heater or something else. If you get the better packages they cover normal wear and tear, even for things like your garage door breaking or the garage door opener failing, water heater failing, etc. They cover the parts and labor (or replacement) minus a small deductible, just like an insurance policy.

So many things made today are "disposable" trash products with no parts available. We have often had easily repairable products replaced with new only because the parts are not sold or they are discontinued within a year or two and no longer serviced. The manufacturers only want to sell new products. They do not want to sell any parts to repair what they previously sold. Most people don't buy the extended warranty. That sucks, but the extended warranty allows you to take advantage of their dishonest approach to business. That's the world we live in now.

As far as GPUs go, I am starting to feel like I am even more done caring their screwed up messes than I am with motherboards and CPUs. They are so grossly overvalued that what they have to offer in terms of features and performance no longer matters because the price is so out of scope with the value that it is foolish to pay for it. I am at the point that downgraded seems like the smart thing to do even though it goes against my natural inclination. Gaming and benching are fun things to do, but I would rather just turn down the quality settings and spend a more sane and reasonable amount for something merely adequate than to get screwed over paying out the nose to own the best because the price doesn't scale with value and performance level. If the price and performance do not scale at a similar percentage, or slightly higher on the performance side than the price the product instantly becomes a foolish purchase. If I am going to be dumb enough to spend 30-50% more for the flagship GPU it needs to deliver (at minimum) 30-50% more performance proportionally, in areas that actually matter, than the next best model or it's just a scam and a product that is not worth buying. Paying extra just for the satisfaction of claiming that you paid extra to own the best is simply not a good enough reason to buy it, and not a very intelligent way of doing things.

Hey guys. This could be fun. I have been playing around with AI-generated images. I haven't tried videos yet.

My forum profile photo (below) is one of the fakes I created on NightCafe. Looks pretty good. This is for fun only and I don't intend to put a lot of effort into it. But, I think some folks might really enjoy doing this if they have an artistic streak. Some other samples of what I have done just farting around with a free NightCafe account can be viewed at my profile here: https://creator.nightcafe.studio/u/Mr-Fox

1 hour ago, Papusan said:

Hmmm. Why did jensen lie about 5070 ? Too boost sales from his scam?

Maybe the bigger question is how you can tell if he is not lying. 🤣 Or, when does he ever tell the truth about anything? He seems to enjoy using scams and gimmicks to sell overpriced NVIDIA products.

Here is something different to distract us from Jensen's nonsense.

41 minutes ago, tps3443 said:

Do you all think it is worth buying this extended warranty on this device? It is expiring in a few days. This was an Acer recertified device with a very short warranty. And it is expiring very soon, less than 2 weeks left. 

This extended warranty cost $207 dollars with a promotion through Acer. 

I do not typically buy extended warranties. But, with this being a costly and decent machine and all, I would love to hear input on this. Thanks everyone!

Acer Predator 1
Mini LED 250hz
Intel 14900HX+RTX4090
32GB DDR5/ 1TB M.2

You definitely should. Laptops are very unreliable compared to desktops and the chance that the motherboard will fail is extremely high. You may not be able to buy one and if you could chances are great it would cost more than the value of the laptop. I've seen this happen many times. I don't know why it is recertified but it's not unlikely that it already died once and got fixed, then sold to you. 

If you buy it you might never need it. If you don't you absolutely will need it and wish you would have.

2 hours ago, electrosoft said:

 

Thanks brother! I'm hit pretty hard, but nowhere near like in 2020 where I was out of commission for 6 weeks. Interestingly,  I've been rocking this Oura smart ring for over 6 months now and I've had a head cold here, ear infection there, sinus infection, etc... and it hasn't even budged, but this? First time it tripped a biometric alarm/alert letting me know my body is encountering something straining my body majorly and to shut it down. It has tripped 5 days in a row now except finally today it tripped but said the stressors are now minor but still present.

 

This is the sickest I've seen my wife ever in our 28yrs together. She's been to urgent care twice already, loaded to the gills with inhalers, steroids, antibiotic (secondary infection protection), mucinex, coughing liquid AND pill and we're just watching her pulse ox now. If it dips to ~92 or below (currently 95), off to the ER she goes.

 

-------

 

The artifacting is so odd because it doesn't do it anywhere else. When I had those dying sticks of memory, artifacting and issues were everywhere and eventually I ended up RMA'ing those set of sticks for a new set and all those original problems went away with a replacement set of 2x32GB sticks except WoW which was suffering the dreaded, "The memory can not be read" error which means either the OC is failing or the memory is failing outright.

 

But this issue is just odd as World of Warcraft just goes bonkers with the 5080 and the 5000 level drivers. It's not a deal breaker as I've just been using Nvidia's performance monitoring software as a stop gap, but it is reproducible consistently even after a clean install. Once I'm back to full(ish) strength, I want to get the 9800X3D set up and see what happens.

 

--------

 

I think I can sum up the market right now to me and it is absolute apathy atm. I think I would be a bit more excited if the 5090 was cheaper (better bang:buck) that makes the 4090 and 5080 look like absolutely smokin' values atm (assuming MSRP of course).

 

For the price, I am very curious about the 9070xt and might pick one up if I can snag it for MSRP.

 

 

I'm trying to figure out why this is happening only in WoW and only with AB running. Fallout, Wukong, FF, Deus Ex, 3Dmark, etc...  all work fine.

 

I definitely had a bad/failing set of sticks that was causing crashing/artifacting everywhere and those were RMA'd but this was a timing issue that this is happening now too isolated to WoW (or at least WoW only in regards to my limited test bed of games/benches).

 

Not a deal breaker, as I just use Nvidia's built in tools that work well enough but still annoying.

 

I did notice (after @Mr. Fox noted maybe a clocking issue) that when I run AB, it is locking my clocks to ~2595 when it will normally run 2750-2805 normally for boosting no matter what even after all the updates even running AB stock with just monitoring enabled (except power).

 

I just need to suck it up and platform swap and get it out the way for other testing. I think I'm well enough today to get it started..... 🙂

 

 

 

Man, I will have your family in my prayers for a speedy recovery, brother. Some things like this were an annoyance when we were healthy young people and they hit us harder as we mature, even if we remain very healthy and strong. Our defenses are not as robust as they once were. 

It's a long shot, but rather than assume it is better to ask. By chance have you seen there is an updated version of MSI Afterburner? I did not know until recently because I disable the automatic checking for all OS, drivers, firmware and software updates and never check for updates manually for anything unless I encounter a problem of some sort. I just discovered a week or two ago that there was a more recent version that dropped after RTX 50-series launched.

4.6.6 (Beta5) Released : Feb 2025

I guess it makes sense to see paranoia and performance anxiety to start messing with a person's mind that spent twice (or or more) than a GPU's real worth in terms of its capabilities for nothing more than a perceived "privilege" of acquiring it.  [link] The engineering defects and performance problems those privileged characters are experiencing, or worried about, is probably enough to give some of them a severe case of tachycardia.

1 hour ago, electrosoft said:

 

All of thee above.

 

I just don't have the same zip, zest or pop this generation like before.

 

False scarcity, bad product launches, outlandish pricing (even this generation of laptops are insanely priced) and more.

 

Mediocre gains really and regression in some areas.

 

Meh...

 

I was pleasantly surprised to see AMD returned to a monolithic design with the 9000 series GPUs though....

 

Total skip on the Ultra 9 285 but I could see it being something fun to play around with.

 

Hero w/ 9800X3D is sitting on the table fully setup and tuned ready for the swap, but i'm still rocking the 14900KS rig atm but that will be changing once I kick this covid I brought back with me from our two weeks on the road that has me and the wife laid up atm.

 

I haven't actively looked for a 5090 in weeks but @Talon the whole camping out vibe is so cool. Reminds me of lining up waiting for the first few WoW xpacs when they dropped, speaking of which:

 

Here's WoW still having problems with Afterburner and artifacting/glitching with the newest drivers and newest patch on my system and the 5080 in Dorngal even after a clean install. I'll be curious to see if this goes away or something changes when I swap to the 9800X3D.

 

With the previous 4070 Super installed no problems.

 

Zero issues on the MSI Raider 7950HX3D/4090, Asus Vivobook w/ 3050 and Ultra 9 185,  or wife's 12900k+3080 when running Afterburner/Riva.

 

Sorry to hear that you and the wife are under the weather, brother. I hope it's gone soon and you get back to normal. 

That artifacting looks terrible. It looks a lot like the artifacting that occurs when you have overclocked the GPU too far for stability. I wonder if MSI Afterburner is somehow doing something goofy to the boost mode while it's running?  Strange.

Boy these sure are some crazy days that we're living in with things that are extremely overpriced not even functioning correctly. We had Ryzen CPUs getting burned, Radeon video cards with defective vapor chambers, Intel CPUs getting degraded by excessive voltage and opportunistic core boosting. 12VHPWR connectors melting, updated connectors melting, now Ryzen CPUs burning again, Intel moving to a suckier CPU design, now the most expensive GeFarts GPUs ever having missing ROPS, a mickey mouse performance increase, deceptive and misrepresented marketing, the next newest 12VHPWR power connector version update still melting, and a 50-series FE desktop GPU engineering abortion designed like something made to be installed in a turdbook. Blackwell Blackscreen Syndrome when using MFG, and now crap like this artifacting. We're getting shafted left and right.

I hope that we never look back on this as the good old days because that's not a very encouraging future.

AI is the most useful tool ever for cybercriminals. One step forward, three steps backward.

Security software and OS patches are not going to help. Totally a placebo. 

I hope Intel pulls their head out of their butt next gen and focus on higher core count, returning hyperthreading and elimination of crappy smartphone cores and the retarded chiplet crap. If they release something equivalent or better than 14900KS in terms of core and thread count and overclocking (CPU and memory) prowess this will be my last AM5 setup. If not, then it might still be and I may stop spending money on computers. Reliability is something everyone can appreciate, but overclocking is becoming very mediocre. Without excitement in that area my interest in computers totally vaporizes. 

I was going to jump on an X870E Apex when it drops. I still might if the temptation is great enough. I am having second thoughts because I am not really seeing a lot of meaningful variance in performance on AM5. It really seems like AM5 overclocking (CPU and memory) limitations are more at the CPU design level than they are motherboard design. I think their CPUs reach the edge of overclocking functionality long before the motherboard capabilities start to be exhausted.

We are living in one of the worst times I can remember for PC enthusiasts. Everything is pretty screwed up right now in terms of CPU and GPU performance, with extremely poor monetary value, stunted performance and stunted overclocking. I hope it doesn't get even more sucky, but I won't hold my breath. I suspect it will just continue on a path of regression, with less of what I want at a higher price for less than I am willing to embrace.

15 hours ago, electrosoft said:

(Timestamped)

Gaming is rapidly becoming a joke from every angle (hardware and software). Overclocking is swiftly becoming a joke as well. Computing in general is circling the drain. People love eating unhealthy garbage that makes them sick and purchasing compromised silicon trash so much that all there is to eat is garbage and the only things for sale are trash. The prices for both are exhorbitant. The consumer target markets are the idiots, ignoramuses and fools of the world that have access to money and shouldn't, and those groups of losers seem to have us outnumbered. As usual, we all get to have what the losers are willing to put up with. Idiots with access to money and an eagerness to spend gobs of it on trash really screws things up for the rest of us.

2 hours ago, Talon said:

I am beginning to hate Nvidia, their supply, the games being played, all of it. For the first time in a long time I've been pretty soured by Nvidia. 

Same. My next GPU, whenever that is, will probably be Intel or AMD. I liked my Arc GPU. I haven't ever liked any AMD GPU, so that tells you something right there.  I haven't ever liked AMD CPUs either, but I didn't approve of what Intel did with Core Ultra. So, I said screw 'em and so did lots of other people. It's not awesome, but also not terrible. Just kind of "meh" overall. But, the point is, Intel didn't get any money from me this time, and probably won't until they get their priorities straight and get back on track.

I know none of them care what I approve of, but I get to decide how to spend my money and I am not going to reward them for having dung for brains. I'm hoping (against hope probably) that there are enough people left that think like I do and if enough of us do not approve and make a conscious decision to spend (less of) our money on inferior brands they will have an ephiphany and pull their heads out of their butts, or lose a fortune, tank their stock and start losing investors. It will be what they deserve for being arrogant imbeciles with a false sense of immortality.

It happened to Intel. Nobody ever thought it would. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. NVIDIA is pushing their luck. It can happen to them, too. And, I hope it does... soon. Not so it can benefit AMD. I don't care about that. Just because they deserve it. They need to know what goes around comes around and it needs to cost them dearly with the only thing in the world they care about... money. They need to lose most of it and get a hard reset.

With the burning wuss-boy power cables, missing ROPs, betting everything on fake frame DLSS, AI bullcrap and whatever comes next for their fake performance spoofs, (plus who knows how many other gimps and latent engineering defects are waiting to be discovered,) they'll probably need less help than it would have required a few years ago. I hope we all get to enjoy watching the Green Goblin's lair get burned to the ground together. It doesn't take a big cut to bleed to death. Lots of smaller cuts will do the trick.

We need to stop behaving like lap dogs and start behaving like cunning wolves that hunt in packs, go for the jugulars, and take no prisoners.

7 hours ago, Papusan said:

 

US companies prefer China. And nothing can or will be changed. 

 

Again you see tech companies prefer China over the west or globally. Nothing will change bro @Mr. Fox 

 

AMD has opened preorders for the just-announced Radeon RX 9070 series. The preorders are available exclusively in China for now. The company faces an uphill battle to gain momentum in China’s GPU market.

 

AMD Radeon RX 9070 XT leads over non-XT model in China preorders

 

 

All they have to do is impose the tariffs to go both ways so that China is forced to pay a very high tax on products owned by American companies to purchase products manufactured in China. The US and the rest of the world needs to grow some gonads and completely decouple from China socially and economically and let them implode. They are overpopulated and under-resourced, and ripe for insurrection and civil unrest.

More evidence of incredibly poor judgment from the Green Goblin.

37 minutes ago, Papusan said:

 

 

Spot on from Corsair Team. Straight from the textbook. People think a native 12+4 pin cable is the best choice. But nothing is better than the old 8 pin connectors. There is still a few people out ther that can use their brain bro @Mr. Fox

 

 

 

Being super stupid is the new normal. I am glad that Corsair isn't drinking the wee-wee flavored Kool-Aid.

The mere fact that as many sold at insane scalper prices as there were is a very sad testament to the abject idiocy of the average human being. Passion and desire overtake them and they lose the ability to exercise sound judgment and self-control. In this case the market is being driven by fools and extremely stupid people that have lots of money to waste or access to credit cards, but lack sufficient common sense on how to use either of them wisely.

7 hours ago, tps3443 said:

Great idea! I have a SPI programmer with a Soic 8 clip somewhere from my laptop days, I remember seeing it when we moved in to the new house. I need to dig it up wherever it is. 
 

So, I can flash the new bios and it will only update the bios, and not the firmware? 

It will update the BIOS (firmware) and CPU Microcode (firmware) but probably not the ME or not the EC (also firmware) if you use the SPI programmer. If you flash it normally and then use the SPI programmer the EC will remain on the newer version and generally the Intel ME will remain the same.

2 hours ago, jaybee83 said:

dual bios FTW! perfect for playing around with new revisions 🙂 one of the many reason is went with the Extreme board, one of the very few X670 boards that has two bios chips.

Indeed. I don't know why there are so few AMD boards with dual BIOS. Some aspects of that feel insulting to me. Like mobo manufacturers have the attitude, they're just AMD gamers and casual PC enthusiasts. They won't notice or care. It's downright sinful and inexcusable that a $700 board like the Gene does not. This should be an expected standard feature, like having USB ports and HDMI/DP, on all desktop motherboards and GPUs in all price ranges. Honestly, it should even be standard on turdbooks to have dual BIOS given the hazard that Micro$lop Updates flash (and sometimes brick) the BIOS on laptops owned by dummies that leave it enabled on purpose and noobs that don't know they can disable it.

2 hours ago, jaybee83 said:

no idea if ure already aware of that, but: with Asus its possible to downgrade even "non-downgradeable" bios versions via bios flashback functionality. the USB port for bios flashback is dumb, so it basically just flashes the bios file thats on the stick without any version checks.

 

i was able to downgrade a bios via that route, even though the changelog said that downgrading was not possible (verified that i wasnt able to flash bios the regular way). but bios flashback worked like a charm 🙂 

ASUS does block it sometimes even with BIOS flashback. But most of the time they do not and you can often flash unsigned firmware mods, depending on what was modded. What they do block is downgrading Intel ME and sometimes the EC firmware.

Interesting to see some of the latest AMD X3D chips burning again. I have seen examples of it a few time in the last week or two. I wonder if AMD rolled out a buggy new AGESA and SMU and those that burned are all the same version? Weird that everything was fine and then it was suddenly not OK for few people.

19 minutes ago, tps3443 said:

Should I update my bios +6 years? Asus just released a new bios here in 2025.. 😁 NOPE!!! In all honesty, I hate that once you update you cannot go back.. It really sucks. I mean, you can revert back to an older bios. But you cannot go back to an older firmware like with newer Asus boards. I updated the Bios+FW on my other Dominus Extreme, and I regretted it. I have to say, for such an old bios it gives me no trouble with Windows 11. Part of me wants to try this new bios, but I know there's no going back once I do. 

Don't do it bro. If you really want to try it then use an SPI flash programmer to save a chip dump to a .BIN or .ROM backup and use it to put back the old firmware when you confirm the latest sucks. If you do it that way the motherboard won't have any say as to what gets flashed. I used to do this frequently with unsigned turdbook BIOS mods.

If I am not mistaken using the programmer will not downgrade the Intel ME. You would be stuck with a crappier newer ME version. To avoid that you would use the programmer to flash the newer BIOS and that would leave the better older Intel ME.

That board has dual BIOS, right? You should not flash both chips.

10 hours ago, Papusan said:

 

Each to their own. A xx80 cards with half the cores vs geforce high end cards is just disgusting. Die Size 378 mm² is equal or even smaller than what is used for NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Ti. 

 

Yet another disgusting PSU design choice. No 8 pin connectors for Radeon or Intel graphics cards. But offer dual 12V-2x6 connectors for dual nvidia graphics. Maybe Nvidia have paid for the whole R&D ?🤔 Or maybe they subsidise this model? Damn disgusting PSU design choice for the power outputs.

 

 

1250W PSU and one lonely PCIe (6+2 pin). And that one will go to the MB as well. Thats'''' perverse...

 

 

https://www.guru3d.com/story/mpg-a1600t-pcie6-a1250gs-pcie5-and-mpg-a1000gs-pcie5-new-pcie5-power-supply-line/

 

Who'm should pay above $700 for a xx70tier card? @Mr. Fox ready to open your wallet?

 

AMD FSR 4 might not be as good as expected, far behind NVIDIA and slightly worse than Intel?

 

Whether it is RTX50 or RDN4, after finishing the evaluation, my feeling is that this generation of graphics cards is completely a generation of products for technical experiments. To put it bluntly, it is treating buyers as guinea pigs.

 

 

That will be a great deal for those that prefer (gaming) Jokebook. Because prices will be even worse for the US market. 

Trump's tariff on China is going up to 20 percent

President Trump now says that he's applying an additional 10 percent tariff to goods imported from China, and tariffs against Mexico and Canada will begin in March.

 

Trump has also declared plans to charge a separate 25 percent tariff on chip imports by April 2, potentially spiking prices even higher.

 

If you are in need for etc new graphics cards then it's time to buy it now if you can find one for sale.

I hope he puts a 1000% tariff on all transactions with China... buying and selling. Instant death to GPUs and motherboards assembled in China using parts patented and made by American companies. 💯 Buh-bye China. RIP.

1 hour ago, win32asmguy said:

FSR3/ULTRA

 

Funny how close it is to the 4090...

Yes it is very close. This game benchmark seems more CPU heavy than most as well, so the minor difference might be largely your CPU if the benchmark using more the available cores.

21 minutes ago, Papusan said:

Nvidia in a nutshell...

 

Somebody needs to deliver the message to NVIDIA. Roman and Steve (GamersNexus) are doing that, but the bottom line is NVIDIA don't care. They never have. The difference now is that they care less than they used to.

Hey, Jensen...

On 2/26/2025 at 3:16 PM, FlibbityJibbits said:

Wow, what an enormous price disparity between P4000 & P5000 for the Precision 7720. Under $200 for used P4000 up to $1,200 & only available overseas for P5000. Dang. So P5000 is that good, huh? I've seen various posters state that you shouldn't buy used models of these cards. Just regular buyer beware on used stuff, or is there a specific reason to steer clear of used P4000/P5000?

 

In addition, I thought this thread was mainly about the graphics cards for Dell Precision 7720's & similar. But I see folks mentioning graphics cards that I can only find for PC's/towers/full-size form factor boxes. For example, is there some version of a GTX 1070 made for a notebook? All I can find is this guy doing a GTX 1070 card...no clue where he got it from...on a Precision 7710, but sounds like some light modding is needed...

 

 

Unfortunately, I would not consider any laptop GPU as being a "good product" because they are all overly expensive for what little value and performance they deliver. They are all pretty lackluster products. The high P5000 price is likely a combination of scalping and having an unusually generous amount of video memory. Laptops are designed based on a premise and mindset that high prices, poor value, sketchy quality and compromises are status quo.

Probably the cheapest way to get your hands on an MXM P5000 is to buy a functional Precision equipped with one that is in very rough aesthetic condition for around $500 and yank the GPU from it to upgrade your own. Salvage whatever additional spare parts are worth keeping (or selling) and toss the leftover junk that isn't worth salvaging into the garbage.

Plus it never hurts to have a spare motherboard in your parts stash. It is the part most likely to fail on a laptop.

6 hours ago, win32asmguy said:

 

I can live without 18 inch, but that being said I can carry a portable 16 inch monitor to use as a second display, and would also rip out the force fed high DPI garbage QHD+ display and replace it with a more sane FHD+ 165hz panel that is more power efficient and far easier to pair with external displays at a similar ~100DPI. I think for me QHD+ at a minimum needs to be in a 21 inch laptop panel - otherwise its just too much of a jump unless someone has 20/20 vision and does not get migraines looking at a display for extended amounts of time.

 

This 16 inch is testing stable at 8000MT C38 according to Prema. They do not have CSODIMM modules yet.

Totally get that and agree. 4K is not great below about 27-inch. Text is too small unless you increase scaling above 100% and I do not like anything except for 100%. Increasing the scaling just makes everything uglier because it jacks up too many elements and makes them all out of whack proportionally. Even using 100% scaling for 4K on my 27-inch screen I increase the font size for menus and desktop icon text to make it as easy on the eyes as 1440p. My Precision 17 has a 4K display and I manually change the resolution to 2560x1440 and that works fine. 4K at 100% scaling is horrible on a 17-inch laptop... borderline unusable and miserable. And, I have very good eyesight other than a touch of colorblindness.

7 hours ago, Papusan said:

$100 USD too much. AMD and their partners want a bite of the cake. I wonder how much extra AIB partners can charge extra due AMD won't make own cards. 

 

RX 9070 XT starting at $699. No mid range card should cost $700 USD. And cheaper and slower GDDR6 vram modules shouldn't offer price premium. Rather the opposite.

 

https://videocardz.com/newz/microcenter-lists-radeon-rx-9070-series-rx-9070-xt-starting-at-699-rx-9070-at-649

 

10 minutes ago, win32asmguy said:

 

Yes on their site. It is called launch (or launch heavy which is the one I have with a 10 key). They have a custom designed firmware for the keyboard with very lightweight config software that works on windows and Linux. It also remembers the configuration so no need to even keep the software loaded unless it needs a firmware update.

Looking at it now. I like it all except for the white keys. Not fond of the look of that. How do you like yours? Not a bad price for a durable American-made product that would be used for many years. I do not like TKL so it is good they offer a "normal" keyboard. 

https://system76.com/keyboards/launch_heavy_3/configure

1 minute ago, electrosoft said:

 

Unfortunately they do not offer an 18" version. 😞

 

I've always been a 17.3" or greater type of laptop owner since the Alienware M-ALX 19" was introduced. Only twice did I use a 15.6" model in all those years as my daily driver. Alienware 15 (920mx + 260m on launch) and the NH55 (last gasp DTR'esque laptop).

I have never truly liked any laptop with a screen smaller than 17.3" (as the minimum) and I ended up not keeping anything smaller because I found them extremely annoying and unpleasant to use, not to mentioned being further compromised by the size reduction.

2 minutes ago, win32asmguy said:

 

I wish someone with deep pockets could help get the System76 Virgo Laptop project going again. Its a design that would be fully open source and produced domestically, along with using open source firmware. It would likely only ever be an Intel platform as AMD and Nvidia do not really collaborate on these types of projects that threaten their established OEM ecosystem.

 

Its not much but if you are ever looking for a mechanical keyboard they make a fully domestically manufactured one. I was even able to take a quick tour of their factory in Denver where they have their fabrication machines back when I bricked one of their laptops and needed it to be recovery flashed.

Is that keyboard sold by System76 on their web site, or is it marketed under another brand name?

40 minutes ago, Papusan said:

 

The main problem... This mess won't be only for  electronics and silicon trash. What can't be fixed won't be fixed. That's facts. You can't make a living cutting your neighbor's hair.

I can set aside my fondness of overclocking high-end computers if I need to. Stuff is so crippled now that it is looking like this hobby might be systematically eliminated for us by the idiots making the products we buy.

China doesn't offer anything the world actually "needs" when you stop and think about it. Unless cheap slave labor to make electronics and silicon trash for the rest of the world at the lowest possible cost and the maximum profilt possible is something of a "need" for someone. They bring nothing of value except for cheap labor for the manufacturing of electronics and that eliminates jobs at home. The reliance on them is created and artificial and they are actually expendable. They are reliant on foreign trade for some of life's basic necessities and survival will be more difficult for them.

Without help from the United States and a few other nations they will starve to death because they import most of what they need. Between 2000 and 2020, the country’s food self-sufficiency ratio decreased from 93.6 percent to 65.8 percent. Changing diet patterns have also driven up China’s imports of edible oils, sugar, meat, and processed foods. In 2021, the country’s edible import-dependency ratio reached nearly 70 percent. We should stop giving and selling them what they need to survive.

They are a third-world nation with a few wealthy dynasties and the most evil totalitarian government in the world and the most-polluted environment in the world. As a nation they only possess what they can buy or steal from other nations. I am OK with not having high-end computers and other digital rubbish this is not necessary like camera doorbells and eavesdropping digital assistants and smartphone operated thermostats.