Mr. Fox

I am sorry that happened, brother. Did they let you go for financial reasons? The company I worked at for 6.5 years let me and about 15 other people go due to a slump in business volume that lasted more than 6 months. It was unavoidable for the company, but still terrible for those it affected. It took me about 90 days, about 200 applications and many interviews to find another job. The only time in my 40+ year work history that I changed jobs where it wasn't a self-betterment decision and on my terms. God provided for us, but it was still a pretty demoralizing experience. I'd love to have an Alphacool block on my 5080. As much as I hate air cooling, I just can't get past the idea of paying $300 for a mass-production GPU block. Even the cheap ones (Barrow and Bykski) are similarly overpriced and not worth the asking price.

New BIOS from ASUS added new memory overclock settings (tCCD_L, tCCD_WR and tCCD_WR2) that basically seems do nothing whatsoever. BIOS 2304 seems OK for me. Changed "Auto" to the recommended 21-84-42 but found no change in performance noted using my daily driver settings. Haven't tested my max OC with the chiller, but I don't expect any change. I guess it must be better just because you can adjust new settings that do nothing. Kind of like a fidget toy for computer geeks.

They found it easier to make money screwing a quarter as many people four times worse per sale. As long as it looks fancy, or just plain goofy, and has RGB an idiot is going to buy it (likely using high interest credit) no matter how hard they are getting screwed. Form over function. Ice cream for all the kiddies.

Well, I am glad that it turned out OK on the Jeep from a legal perspective. The Astral is a joke by most measurements. They are just overpriced cards with a fancy cooler. They do not have binned core or memory and their stock firmware has nothing going for it. I'm glad you didn't waste money on an Astral. I am 99% certain you would have gained nothing for the extra cost.

Garbage. Also a creative scammy way to help their cartel brothers financially because the sheeple will also need a new PSU or a special new power cable for a new motherboard. The wickedness of the PC hardware bastards has no limits. Totally unnecessary changes that nobody asked for and nobody needs and no consumer benefits from that fabricates an unmerited necessity of an additional purchases.

How are things going Brother @Papusan? This song is for you, bro. Listen to and read the words.

That absolutely sucks. Unforgivable. The only end users they are treating right is RTX 6000 owners. Bastards. I wonder how long it will continue to be available from the Micro$lop Store Whores? This also sucks...

At this point it certainly seems that the quest is to identify the least undesirable option because none of them are good. The best plan might actually be to chose nothing and reject all of the options. What I would love to see is an aggressive wiper malware that specifically targets and destroys all AI source code in all platforms across the globe, and that it would spread like wildfire, uncontrollable and utterly destroy all of it and financially obliterate the companies backing it. Google Gemini, Chat GPT, Grok, Claude, LLaMA, CoreWeave, Baidu, Qwen, Tencent, ByteDance, AWS, Accenture... aIl of it FUBAR'd and unrecoverable, along with the money wasted on it... totally destroyed, permanently corrupted, unusable and nothing salvageable, and no resources available to rebuild with.

That sentiment has not changed. It was too much then and still too much now. The current prices are untenable and any gamer paying current prices for a new 5090 GPU is bereft of common sense. They either have so much money they have lost the ability to think rationally about their purchases, or they should not be trusted to make any important decisions about anything that requires average intelligence. Radeon remains rough around the edges and hard for me to get overly excited about as an overclocking enthusiast, but 9070XT is undeniably the best bang for buck gamer proposition that exists. That excludes any models sporting the petite arson connector. Those should be viewed as undesirable trash. It defies logic that they were able to sell any of them. The most compelling reason for buying a Radeon GPU is the avoidance of that trashy abortion power connector.

Have you tried using Lossless Scaling for 3DMark benchmarks to see if it works?

Not as hard as justifying the purchase of a 5090. The cost of two brand new is still less than the cheapest 5090. The 5090 offers less value per dollar than any other PC component in the history of personal computers. Current pricing is reserved for the mentally insane.

I love it when big tech companies suffereing from AGS (AI Glorification Syndrome) fail and lose gobs of money. Good job, Micro$lop. I hope it hurts more and causes more long-term damage than they are willing to admit.

@tps3443 since you just did a clean install, you might as well do it again. The latest release of Rufus nukes a ton of Micro$lop's bundled feces prior to installation. https://rufus.ie/en/ Changelog Version 4.14 (2026.04.30) Windows User Experience improvements: Add a Quality of Life option, to disable Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other Microsoft forced nuisances Add a Silent installation option, that automatically, and WITHOUT PROMPT, installs Windows on the first detected disk Add an option to copy SkuSiPolicy.p7b to the ESP on installation (please refer to KB5042562 for more info) Add tooltips for all the dialog options Add limited support for El-Torito UEFI image extraction (Mostly for Dell BIOS update ISOs) Improve error report when the user tries to use an image that resides on the target drive Improve the UEFI:NTFS partition label to make the install media more explicit during Windows Setup disk partitioning Improve support for Bazzite and other Fedora derivatives that don't follow EFI conventions Improve detection and exclusion of the new Bitdefender hidden VHDs Improve reporting of GRUB and Isolinux MBRs Fix potential errors during creation of Windows To Go media, due to the use of new versions of bcdboot Fix errors with local accounts that start or end with whitespaces

Rufus update just rammed an ice pick into the gonads of the Winduhz 11 Cancer OS. But, it's still a piece of crap and smart people choose something better. https://rufus.ie/en/ Changelog Version 4.14 (2026.04.30) Windows User Experience improvements: Add a Quality of Life option, to disable Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other Microsoft forced nuisances Add a Silent installation option, that automatically, and WITHOUT PROMPT, installs Windows on the first detected disk Add an option to copy SkuSiPolicy.p7b to the ESP on installation (please refer to KB5042562 for more info) Add tooltips for all the dialog options Add limited support for El-Torito UEFI image extraction (Mostly for Dell BIOS update ISOs) Improve error report when the user tries to use an image that resides on the target drive Improve the UEFI:NTFS partition label to make the install media more explicit during Windows Setup disk partitioning Improve support for Bazzite and other Fedora derivatives that don't follow EFI conventions Improve detection and exclusion of the new Bitdefender hidden VHDs Improve reporting of GRUB and Isolinux MBRs Fix potential errors during creation of Windows To Go media, due to the use of new versions of bcdboot Fix errors with local accounts that start or end with whitespaces

I am glad it was something "expendable" that is not affecting your core system. Enjoy that nice Zotac 5080 Solid OC GPU now. That was a good one to buy. Are you keeping both or sending back the new one?

I bet that was the problem. I hope so. If that fixes it I suspect you are going to find some other things that are mysteriously working better than they used to. You might even find games and YouTube videos seem to run smoother. Failing USB devices have caused me headaches more than once. Sometimes subtle glitches and sometimes outright malfunction of the entire system. I think they must sometimes develop a short internally. I also had a USB webcam that developed an issue that caused weird problems when it was connected.

Ah ha! Crossing my fingers and hoping that does it. Very possible. That would be a very good problem to have if you are going to have one. I bet the USB hub inside of the monitor has a problem. I used to have an Acer Predator 1440p monitor that developed a similar problem after a couple of years of working fine. Even with nothing connected to the ports, just the cable from the PC to the monitor, it was frequently freezing and making the Windows hardware disconnect and reconnect sounds. It was randomly changing between working to "code 43" in Device Manager and causing stuttering in games and just web browsing or playing YouTube videos. Once I disconnected it everything worked fine. What clued me in was the Windows sounds alerts for hardware disconnect and reconnect and when I opened Device Manager and saw it happening it was instant confirmation.

What if you put your son's GPU in your system and run the same test again? Is your system PCIe Gen 3 or Gen 4? Did you try to manually set the max for that in the BIOS already? It is interesting that it seems to require the passage of time for it to occur. Like something has to reach a certain point. I am wondering if maybe one of your memory sticks is bad. Maybe try one at a time and see if one is messed up. Since you ruled out the NVMe, if I were going to take a wild guess at this point, it would be one of the sticks is bad and the system works until data reaches that one stick and then it's over. That's were I would start at this point. Might not hurt to check the temperature of the memory modules at the point of lockup. Probably won't see anything but checking never hurts. That is a good suggestion. It might show something relevant.

Hopefully that is it. If you only had a single drive attached to your system that will make it easier to test for sure since you only have the one potential culprit. I had a 4 TB TeamGroup NVMe that failed back when I still owned the Z790 Apex. It was causing lockups and before I could figure out what the cause was it got worse and wouldn't even let the motherboard power on. It was like it was unplugged from the wall. Pressing the power button did nothing. No signs of life. As soon as I removed it everything returned to normal and I had it replaced under warranty.