Mr. Fox

That's great news.

That seems a bit far-fetched since it uses shared system memory and that would be much slower than the 4070 VRAM. I guess we shall see if/when it happens.

Just a suggestion, but I would recommend moving away from the opportunistic boosting of the preferred cores and lock them all down to what is stable and adequate voltage for the "not-preferred" cores and then the better cores will be cruising on easy street. I think the preferred core boosting is part of what created the mess they are sorting out.

Sometimes being future proof has the undesirable implication of holding onto status quo and a normalization of "meh" products. That is looking like what AMD is serving for dinner now. Socket longevity can be good or bad, depending on what happens (or doesn't happen). Sometimes moving onward and upward is better, but we see plenty of examples that newer is frequently not better. This just means that taking a "wait-and-see" approach is always the smartest way. Much smarter than listening to marketing propaganda (lies).

Yes, I agree. It should address it fine. If you go back to the early overclocking threads at oc.net and ASUS forums, Falkentyne and Robert Sampiro threads, they were saying setting IA VR Max to 1700mV to limit spikes, but that is too high even if it did come from Intel. You might even be able to set lower, like 1450mV or even 1400mV, depending on what core clocks you are setting. It will be interesting. Now I just have to muster the desire to mess with it. I always love it after diving in, but as I get older I find I dread the idea of diving in before I do. Maybe because I know the rewards are smaller than they used to be. I'm defintely a reward ≥ effort and cost for something to be worth doing type person. That is part of the reason I no longer have any interest whatsoever in making turdbooks less turdy. Huge effort with minimal reward. That sucks. In the end it is still a compromised pile of crap. I believe you are totally right. There are way too many 14th Gen silicon lottery losers to set the voltage limit lower. There would be too many that need more than 1.500V or need to be clocked under spec to use less than 1.500V. Update: Gigabyte RTX 2080 Ti Xtreme Waterforce conversion to Xtreme (air) Received the air cooler and backplate from AliExpress today. I do not have the 12-pin to 4-pin adapter cable they sent in a separate package yet. I will need to wait for that to swap out the fan wiring harness before installing it. These parts are brand new OEM, not used pulls. This will be a massive upgrade over the GTX Titan Black (Kepler) GPU in the legacy SFF build. They even included a package with all of the OEM screws and stock thermal paste.

Exactly. And, safety aside, using 1.500V to 1.550V on a water cooled CPU just isn't feasible. It will get too hot and thermal throttle with voltage levels that high, even with a delid and bare die. That just creates too much heat to remove through such a small die. Contrary to the modern myth, shrinking die size has some negative strings attached. Even using chilled water and bare die cooling a CPU running that much voltage in a workload like Cinebench is no small undertaking. This should explain why performance is not being impacted. If someone owns a CPU that needs 1.500V to 1.550V to run stock or eTVB boost clocks it is a silicon lottery loser than needs to be RMA'd. It will never be a good CPU. I am happy that, at least for now, Intel is going to leave the possibility of overrides in place for those playing with sub-zero extreme cooling. Otherwise, a 1.550V hard cap would ruin everything for them.

That makes good sense because they were also originally saying that you should cap your VR max to 1.700V, which used to be Intel's safe maximum. That's just way too high.

@electrosoft I will have to wait for a BIOS update for the Z790i Edge, but using the Windows MC that Brother @Prema provided I can increase the VCCSA to 1.225V now without a hard freeze, so it does look like it may at least improve the SA bug. Will need it in the BIOS probably to know for sure if the SA bug gets eliminated. This is up from 1.190V, so not a lot but still more. I did test 1.250V and it will pass Cinebench without a lockup, but not AIDA64 memory benchmark without locking up. Maybe if I feel motivated enough tomorrow I will yank that CPU from the Edge and see if the SA bug is gone when installed in the Encore. Hopefully the effort to find out will not prove to be a waste of time.

Same and confirmed. All the same settings as before. No change in performance, voltage or thermals. Can't tell any difference at all. Now I question if there actually is any. Seems there is nothing whatsoever, but may be because of how I manually overclock almost everything and remove all limits. I will check to see if it affects the SA bug now on the CPU that has it. MSI has not released this for the Z790i Edge WiFi motherboard yet. So, I can't check for an SA bug fix using the Edge mobo until they do.

Not need to reply. I checked it out and see it is two separate downloads. That's great. Question: Does this change MC in Windows only? I flashed it, rebooted. BIOS still doesn't show 129. It shows whatever very is set. I use 11F, but there is a menu with other versions available. 129 is not in the list. But, when Windows loads AIDA64 shows 129. Edit Answered my own question. Booting into another OS on the same system AIDA64 shows 11F, so it does appear to apply 129 to the OS only. After applying the MC update in Windows it seems nothing is visibly different. Power draw, voltage, watts, amps... all exactly the same values in a Cinebench run. Micro$lop doesn't charge extra for Winduhz 11 being a sucky piece of crap. It is a free service they are happy to provide.

Nice to see you brother. Hope all is well with you. So this microcode update can flash only the microcode without the ME if you want to omit the ME update? If that's the case, then I won't update any of my BIOS on any my four desktops. I will just test the microcode on one of them first before deciding whether or not to apply it to the other three.

If you need fan control for your laptop, see if Argus Monitor will work. It works excellent for my desktops and even includes RGB controls that work for GPUs and some motherboards. I have not tried it on my Dell Precision yet because I rarely ever have a reason to use a laptop, but I am planning to the next time I have a reason to use it. I believe they have a trial version that you can test to see if it works before you buy. All of the motherboard control centers are the worst software imaginable. Armory Crate, MSI Dragon Center and Control Center, Gigabyte, ASROCK, Tong Feng, Alienware and Clevo all have universally horrible software support products. It seems like the laptop versions might be a little worse, but I won't allow any of their cancer garbage to be installed on my desktops.

All turdbooks are disgusting. I cannot identify any circumstance where I would be willing to purchase a modern notebook. They are all loathsome rubbish and detestable objects that stand as examples of human stupidity. This just adds a new dimension to the already-unacceptable rubbish that further reinforces the already-unlikely possibility that I would consider wasting my money on any of these trashy products.

Yes, that remains the same. They make the newer ME available for any fool that wants to flash it, but it is not bundled in the BIOS. I have never updated the ME on the Edge and I would never update it on ASUS if they didn't bundle the filth. It really sucks that ASUS does this. I really do not like many things about ASUS firmware. The menus are nice, but they do a lot of idiotic things. The way their motherboard have to "re-flash" firmware to another area when you flip the switch on the motherboard is absolutely idiotic. Dual BIOS should actually mean dual BIOS, not their hybrid abortion version of that. EVGA was the only motherboard manufacturer that has done everything right for a very long time.

If that fixes it, I might move the CPU in the Edge over to the Encore and put the 13900KS in the Edge. Their VF curves are almost the same, very close, but the 14900KF in the Edge with the SA bug has slightly better E-core and lower Cache voltage needs. If I remember correctly it can run the E-cores at 49x stable and the 13900KS caps out at 48x on E-cores. I only moved it to the Edge since the memory is air cooled and running it above 8200 is thermally not ideal. Unless something has changed, MSI still does it the right way and you have to deliberately download and flash the ME firmware if you want newer. They do not bundle the ME filth in their BIOS to form a cancer cocktail. Hopefully, that has not changed. ASUS really needs to stop doing that and add a BIOS menu option to disable the ME, because it is utterly worthless and contributes zero value to anything from a consumer perspective. If nothing else, it impairs security and never has anything to contribute in terms of improving performance. It should no longer even exist.

OK. I might test it on the Encore as a crash dummy. The MSI Edge will be last, if ever, since it does not have dual BIOS and if downgrading is not possible it will basically become worthless to me if I do not approve of the firmware changes.

Cinebench scores are the same?

My concern is that something undesirable might be permanent with the firmware update. If I do not like it and cannot undo it I will be super ticked off and have to replace the motherboard if downgrade is not possible. I am not worried about the SA bug (does not matter in the grand scheme of things) or the "problem" they are trying to fix. I am curious to see what it does, bit skeptical and cautious.

Hey Brother @Papusan here is the latest. Hurry, because newer is better. Tell all of your friends on Facepoot. 🤣 https://rog-forum.asus.com/t5/intel-700-600-series/raptorlake-resources/m-p/1034564/highlight/true#M24284

We have already seen your impressive tuning skills. I haven't seen many AM5 owners that can do what you do with the memory tuning on that platform. But, even with your incredible talent in play the results from the platform are generally not equal in terms of read, write, copy and latency at the same clock speed. That's the platform, not your well above-average abilities with it. Nice to see most of them are standing behind what they sell. Many (maybe most) of the customers that buy their PCs would never own it long enough to reach the time limit. But, offering it may bring most of them back when they are ready for an upgrade.

I guess that depends on how much headroom, where the road ends and if one is happy with the destination. The path being long and wide is kind of nice, but only if it leads to the place you want to go to. A one-hundred fold increase sounds impressive, but the end result is different starting from 1 than it is starting from 2.

People that prefer Intel won't care about what AMD brings. People that prefer AMD won't care what Intel brings. People that don't know what they don't know will believe those that they choose to believe or be extremely confused. $100 or $200 in price probably isn't going to change anyone's mind one way or the other unless they don't know anything and don't have a preference. Some people (the smart ones) decide everything based on what their experience was before and they don't forgive and forget bad experiences, or not very swiftly. Nor should they. They learn from their mistakes and are not keen on repeating them. Others have no experience and form a preference based on what someone else tells them they should think. Then there are those that have only had one experience, it was good, and they don't know what else is out there. And they don't care. They do not want to rock the boat and maintaining status quo is safe and easy. Most people treat products the same as politics. Everything is generally black versus white, light versus darkness, good versus bad, right versus left, God versus Satan, Conservative versus Liberal, Republican versus Demoncrat, etc. And, that's perfectly OK. At least you know where you stand with them. And, that is certainly better than not knowing. Those that hide in the shades of gray are the dangerous ones that will kill you when you're not paying attention. They don't choose sides and can't make up their mind about anything. They are confused, clueless and careless and easily influenced. Yeah, he shouldn't be writing for a tech website. I agree. He definitely is not a PC enthusiast, that's for sure. If he thinks he is, then he is a poser.

The punchline...