Mr. Fox

If you look at the minimum and recommended system requirements on most games, those without ray tracing run great with old hardware (old as in Maxwell and newer) that only those that want to crank up the ray tracing need a high end GeFarts GPU. Most people don't play at 4K. Most PC gamers are console jockeys that figured out there is a better way to live, or old-school gamers that never invited console demons into their hearts. Most of them don't buy high-end CPU, GPUs or 4K monitors, and they don't need ray tracing to have fun playing their games. And, they're happy holding a steady 60 FPS. It is only us in the elite extreme camp that care more about the weapons of mass destruction than the waging of war. We all already know this. I was reminded of it when I tested a couple of games on this chintzy little Zotac 3060 and noticed no difference in gameplay quality than I do using the shunt-modded 2080 Ti monster and 3090 KPE, both of which mop the floor with it in benchmarks.

I'm not seeing it. People say it all the time, but it is absolutely untrue the way I use my computers. The opposite is true. Windows 11 performance is degraded from Windows 10, just as Windows 10 performance degraded from Windows 7. But, I do not allow Windows to make decisions. Maybe some of that is actually true if you allow Windows to control performance and power consumption. I wouldn't know because that's not how my systems operate. Power limits are maxed out and fixed P, E and Ring clock ratios and voltage values are applied in the BIOS, and the Windows power plan has everything maxed out. No need for AI, or scheduling, or power management. I hate that kind of nonsense. It makes every version of Windows run faster with me calling all of the shots, and every new version of Windows performs worse than the one before it.

I am so glad I cancelled my 13900K pre-order. It worked out especially nice since I had to waste my money on a 3060. As it turns out, that is actually a better performer than I expected for a cheap air-cooled Zotac Twin Edge OC. I am impressed with the price vs performance. I bet they are already culling the best samples for 13900KS, LOL. It will be hard watching others romp all over my 12900KS with the extra baby cores, but it will be worth it when I buy the KS. Thank you very much! I will learn how to use it and see what it can tell me about my 2080 Ti. Does a nice job of holding boost clocks for an air-cooled card. Look at the flat-line. https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/80739008 It's SO small. Little midget packs a nasty punch, LOL. I guess I better repaste it and look for a GPU block for it. +200 Core / +1000 Memory on my second run after replacing stock paste with KPX. Maxed out at 59°C versus 74°C with stock paste. (It wasn't one of the waxy phase change pads. Looked like Ceramique paste.) It will be interesting to see how much higher it can go on air. 7th place for my second run... not too shabby. https://hwbot.org/submission/5096251_ | https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/80741291

Nope, not me. Same here. Nothing about the concept was of interest to me. I thought the basis of the concept was a joke, and still do.

An effective marketing strategy is 99% manipulation, and the tech industry wrote the book on that. The remaining 1% is just pure bull crap.

As Brother @Papusansaid. The screws don't need to be tight. They can even be loose. This frame is safer than the stock ILM as far as I am concerned. Once you cinch down your water block you're good to go. You could use Kapton tape to hold the CPU in place while mounting the water block if you wanted to.

It might if it didn't look like a pansy unicorn vomited onto your desktop.

I have two of them and love them. Better than stock for me, about the same as a washer mod, but also doubles as nice liquid metal barrier. Good to have you here, brother.

Do you have a link to download MATS? I Google searched and not finding it.

Sadly, there is a price to pay for stupidity, and all of us reap the harvest whether we are unwilling participants or contributors. The lowest common denominators ruin things for everyone.

Unfortunately, some people are using this piece of trash because they want to, and some because they bought a new PC with this cancer preinstalled. Many of them don't have the skill needed to upgrade to an older version of Windows. Windows 11 belongs in last place because it is an inferior product.

Mr. Evans replied with "I suggest you run MATs on your card. You’re most likely dealing with broken solder joints." I suspect I will find a need to reflow one of the memory chips. I can do that with my hot air station if I am able to indentify that as the issue.

I emailed Mr. Evans to ask if he had any idea what would be the likely cause even though he is not accepting GPUs for repair. I may consider that guy up in Seattle whose videos I posted here a few times. He is an EVGA fanboy like me, LOL. Depending on what it is, it might be something I can fix myself, but I don't know how to diagnose and isolate the cause.

It might still be under warranty, but it has been shunt-modded and I bought it from Brother @Rage Set. I might see if he has a copy of the original invoice and reach out to EVGA and see if they will do an RMA on it. That will take a while and I need it immediately for work. On the chance I could clean up the soldering of the shunt to look right they might replace it. If not, I might try baking it for a reflow and if that doesn't work, somebody on eBay will buy it "for parts only" purposes. A triple monitor setup is best and most convenient for me for work. I use each monitor for a specific task and I don't like Windows snapping (disabled because it sucks). I would have to waste a lot of time resizing windows manually. While the real estate could be the same or greater with a single monitor setup like you have, it would be less convenient for my specific use scenario.

So, I get an involuntary downgrade. I am glad I canceled my 13900K pre-order. I was kicking around the idea of reinstating it, but this unexpected expenditure has taken care of that for the time being. 2080 Ti FTW3 is dead. It started having the "space invaders" artifacts last night and when drivers are installed it shows code 43 in Device Manager. My preference would have been an Intel Arc A770 but I use this system for work daily and need it now. No telling when an A770 would be available. I ordered an inexpensive Zotac 3060 on Amazon. I will be limping along with Intel iGPU and one less functional monitor until it arrives tomorrow afternoon. It's going to be weird trying to work with only two monitors. I have been using three for so long it feels totally messed up. I am glad the iGPU can support two in a pinch. Banshee looks really weird with a bare motherboard and no GPU taking up space. I wish it had that much extra air space in the chassis when a GPU is installed.

Because I am not an avid gamer, I am just now finding out about this. Kudos to Brother @ryanfor starting the thread. I might have known my fellow Crysis fanboy would have done so. I came to start a thread and thought to myself, "Self. Ryan probably already started a thread. Check first." And *BAM* he had! I pay so little attention to games that it took 10 months for me to notice, and the only reason I even know now is because I went to install Crysis 3 and saw it, LOL. Maybe "not an avid gamer unless it is Crysis or Quake" is more precise. I know some didn't like 2 and 3, but I loved them all. Crysis titles are my all-time favorite franchise. There is NOT ONE I do not love and haven't played through a half-dozen times or more. (I am not counting the online one, which I don't even remember because online multiplayer gameplay sucks to me.) I sure do hope they don't eff this up by making it an online MP like they did with CoD. That sucked because I used to be a CoD fanatic, too. Anyhoo... I am super excited about this. I haven't been this excited about a game release since Crysis 3. I also haven't purchased a new release at normal retail price since Crysis 3. This might be my next one. I almost wish I hadn't seen this now. It's going to be something I am impatient for and I would have been better off finding out after launch day.

Thanks. Not too shabby for $80 M-die sticks. I look forwad to A-die becoming common and cheap. That is with only 1.500V and RAM temps stay very low on water or with a strong fan blowing over them. I think the highest I have seen after like a 30 minutes test was like 39-42°C depending on how hot it is in my office. If you don't have at least a fan blowing over the modules they will definitely run too how and start kicking out errors. RAM is very easy to cool and easily overheats when no effort is made. I flashed the Z690 Dark beta BIOS for 13900K (not recommended for 12th Gen per EVGA) and everything seems to work fine. They added some stupid TVB options (it had none before) that I don't know why anyone buying this mobo would care about, but there are also a few more memory tuning options that are useful. This is a pre-stored 7000 profile provided in the firmware by Vince (Kingpin). I normally use the Luumi 6800 profile with 1.475V. It looks great, but my first, only and last ASROCK mobo (Chai Tea) was my least favorite of anything I have ever owned. It was a piece of crap and they have the worst warranty process that I am aware of. I was excited about getting it at the time and extremely disappointed in what a pile of garbage it was. I've never been interested in anything from ASROCK since then. Buyer beware. If you get one, make sure there is a liberal 30-day return for refund policy just in case it sucks, and pray you don't need an RMA after 30 days.

https://hwbot.org/submission/5094454_

Hard to know what the reason for it is or what benefit, if any, it will provide. It could be for something other than memory, or it may even be an unnecessary sales gimmick. Kind of like what Buildzoid talks about with grossly overkill VRM phases on modern motherboards that the OEMs build to try to make their products seem better than others, whether they are or not. Z790 as a chipset is basically Z690, but with an additional 4 PCIe lanes upgraded to PCIe 4.0 speeds. It will not provide anything useful over a Z690 chipset for most of us. They needed something new to sell to people that buy new because new is new. Pure speculation at this point, but there could be changes to motherboard design that improve DDR5 overclocking that are not related to the chipset as much as the passing of time and increased ODM knowledge and learning how to better support higher DDR5 clock speeds and performance.

Yes, that would totally work... absolutely. You could also use nail polish on them to shield against liquid metal. In fact, doing that in conjunction with Kapton tape or a guard would be smart for an extra measure of protection. I really like the der8auer silicon version best. I don't know how long until it becomes available, or if a release date has been announced yet. It looks like it would be convenient and reusable. I think the Noctua version would be just fine for non-conductive thermal compound though. Without something it looks like those notched areas will be kind of messy.

It is certainly better than not using anything, but the fact that it sits on top of the ILM is a bit weird. It would be OK for normal thermal paste. If the image is accurate, it doesn't fit snugly against the IHS like a glove which makes it kind of iffy for liquid metal. I would want to see a much better fit against the perimeter of the IHS and sealed off tighter since there are so many SMDs waiting patiently to be short-circuited by a drop of liquid metal. Maybe the sides could be trimmed down to allow it to fit under the ILM and then you could put a small amount of RTV silicone on the underside next to the SMDs and squish the shroud down onto that. This would make it much safer, with no gaps for a tiny ball of doom to drop onto the SMDs.

LOL... that would be a good reason for it for sure. In order to make that happen, we would need a water block for it, more robust overclocking software tools and a way to mod the vBIOS to remove power limits or a shunt mod. But, I certainly wouldn't mind taking a crack at it once all of those ducks are in a row. Would be kind of a waste of time without them.

If you sell it on eBay you'll get raped on fees, too. If you need to sell it to help fund the 4090 that's one thing. If there were an opportunity to keep it and use it in a second computer, you wouldn't have to take a massive loss on the sale. But, you also wouldn't have any cash to contribute to the upgrade. I am very glad I kept my 2080 Ti FTW3 instead of selling it for that very reason. I am benefitting more by hanging onto it that I would have had I sold it to help offset the cost of the 3090 KPE. I almost did and I am so glad I decided not to. I would jump on an Arc A770 GPU right now, but it can't really replace my 2080 Ti FTW3. So, it would be a stupid move for me to buy one. It would be a decent low-cost upgrade to a 3060 though. I think it is nice to see NVIDIA and AMD getting caught with their pants down on mid-range GPUs. It thrills me to see Intel acting as the disrupter in this space and I do hope the next generation brings similar disruption to the high-end gamer and overclocking enthusiast realm. Imagine an Intel GPU with all of the stupid performance metering limitations removed along with the features the A770 employed to overtake NVIDIA and AMD in the mid-range space. It is remarkable that Intel has such strong ray tracing performance at their first entry into the market with immature drivers. This has potential to become extremely disruptive and that is awesome. https://www.3dmark.com/compare/spy/18697315/spy/31194609/spy/14118181 Hopefully this will change soon... need higher power limits. Nice control panel though.

I'm excited for you and I look forward to seeing your build. I can remember when I went back to desktops and how I became disenchanted with laptops almost instantly. The disenchantment soon turned to loathing. Even though high-end enthusiast desktop parts are expensive, the quality they deliver produces a sense of satisfaction that far exceeds anything a mobile computing experience can offer. That level of excellence simply doesn't exist anywhere in laptop land. Everything is chintzy and pathetic in comparison.

Just use Winaero Tweaker or GPedit.