3 hours ago, tps3443 said:

 

I like to think about the 4090 compared to the 4080. My experience was a substantial upgrade very nice boost in games. Everyone with/without a 4090 talked about it, and thought it was +$400 more well spent going for the $1,599 dollar 4090. Now consider the 5090 is also +$400 more than 4090 but an even larger upgrade than that was. 
 

I’m beginning to seriously question if anything is ever good enough for me or most people. When we all had 3090’s, and the 4090 came out, we complained because the 4090 was too damn good. It was so fast with frame Gen it made the 3090 instantly obsolete (Nvidia was no friend to us gamers because our 3090 is obsolete now) But now the 4090 owners complain because that didn’t happen again. I don’t think we can ever truly be happy with high end hardware no matter the product they give us.

 

I really don’t think any company or product can fit the bill for what we actually want that would make everyone happy and sing praise lol.  All we can do is waste our money, convince ourselves into buying the GPU, then we sing our praises about the things that are true. 

I never think in terms of FE pricing because I have no interest in FE cards, and especially not the current design with the fragmented components connected by ribbon cables. That is totally unacceptable to me. So I do not think it is accurate to say the 5090 is $400 more than 4090 when you look to the AIB options. That is also not a great comparison because nobody manufactures 4090 anymore. I think if they did, and it was priced to value the 5090 would not sell well because it is not priced to value. Everything else in the Green Goblin's product stack is a piece of trash, but still grossly overpriced and a poor value.

NVIDIA has everything so stinking effed up with the GPU market right now that I don't believe that it will ever be capable of returning to normal. They are anti-competitive, deceptive and maniplulative and they sell products that reflect that mindset on top of being grossly overpriced or a poor value. Being better than the alternative is not good enough because of their disposition.

You are right to question whether anything is ever good enough. I think that is very much the case and that's where I am, especially with video cards. Nothing is ever good enough for PC enthusiasts and overclockers because of the degree of nonsense with control and manipulation. NVIDIA has created this problem by deliberately screwing us all and being bold about it. Their behavior has adversely affected everyone, including those that do not purchase NVIDIA products.

To be clear, I do not like AMD. I don't like how they do things. Most of what they do is a little bit goofy and often not the best approach. However, they have become the lesser of evils. NVIDIA and Intel are capable of being better than what they have become and should be held accountable for bad decisions. AMD is the best they have ever been and seem to be putting forth the effort to do their best. Sometimes doing your best isn't enough, you have to do what is required. NVIDIA isn't doing their best or what is required. They are screwing everyone and are not even ashamed of themselves.

As much as I miss EVGA and wish they hadn't thrown in the towel, I think they were smart to do so. Nobody wins when NVIDIA is involved. They realized that before anyone else did. I think the only way this will get fixed is for NVIDIA to end up losing massive market share and ending up on the brink of bankruptcy before they will pull their head out.

2 hours ago, johnksss said:

@Mr. Fox Not sure if you know this but.....

 

The Best Computer Store in Phoenix, AZ

 

The Wait Is Almost Over – Micro Center Grand Opening Coming in 2025! Micro Center is coming to Phoenix with over 25,000 items in stock and the industry’s best customer service. Phoenix, get ready to experience Tech Heaven for yourself—stay tuned for opening details!

 

https://www.microcenter.com/site/stores/phoenix.aspx

 

You might be able to rent that 5090 yet!!

Hallelujah!!

Best news I have heard in a long time! Thanks for letting me know, Brother John.

2 hours ago, tps3443 said:

I wonder how the 5070FE with MFG compares to 9070XT though. This seems like a feature I’d want. People pick on it, but It is a great feature. Going from 60 real frames to 240 fake frames looks and feels so much smoother. 

9070 XT has frame generation and it's much better than prior generations of RDNA. Same for ray tracing. NVIDIA needs to be minding their P's and Q's or they're going to find themselves in the same kind of trouble Intel did. Being asleep at the wheel isn't going to work out as well for NVIDIA as it has for a long time.

55 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

Retailers will alway benefit from the ignorance of consumers. Those with the least knowledge are some of their best customers. They buy the garbage that people in the know will not, and because they do there is a market for it. Sadly, they are not in the minority.

Ignorance has consequences.

Punchline: "nvidia is just too busy  drowning in money and Michelin star cunnilingus to care about making a good product at this point  in fact it's in their financial interest to make a  product that consumers don't want to buy at this  point so that they can reallocate all that wafer space to AI chips they can sell for 10 times the  price so with that all I have to say is Nvidia has been dragging their balls in our face for way  too long and don't get me wrong I love balls in my face as much as the next person but for 4  years it's getting real stanky and gross please please Nvidia stop"

Retailers will alway benefit from the ignorance of consumers. Those with the least knowledge are some of their best customers. They buy the garbage that people in the know will not, and because they do there is a market for it. Sadly, they are not in the minority.

22 hours ago, jaybee83 said:

Lets see how it compares to Doom 3 and Doom 2016 🙂 

Check out this free mod from GOG for DOOM 3: https://www.gog.com/en/game/doom_3_phobos

1 hour ago, electrosoft said:

Uh oh! Time to test one against your two other 9950x's?

 

I must admit, I'm still on the fence about maybe ordering a 285k instead and building out for comparison. I wish a decent (SP85+) would pop up for cheap to take the binning out of the process.

Yeah, I am seeing higher CPU benchmark scores and better memory performance from a number of 9950X3D owners (like 49K+ in CBR23) so I thought I would investigate. That hasn't been the case in the past, as the X3D CPUs are primarily intended for gaming, which obviously is not a major driving factor or something that motivates me.

1 hour ago, electrosoft said:

One being a 9950X3D to properly take advantage of these 8000+ kits.

Mine is arriving on Tuesday.

2 hours ago, electrosoft said:

 

I like the tool less design of the heatsinks along with the 90 degree lock down fasteners for the SSDs, but obviously they need proper QC. I've never received a MB with them floating ever (knock on wood).

 

I agree. The Strix boards have always proven to bring the heat and strike a pricing balance (in the Asus inflated stack of course) price wise. You get a lot of the upper tier functionality along with SP rating.

 

Hopefully this works out.

 

 

Those heatsinks look a lot like TG heatsinks which are excellent and that price is nice.  I sold off all my lower tier sets (6000, 6400, 7200, 8000 2x16) and I have just one set of 6400 along with my TG sticks. Might pick up a set. They are less than half what I paid for the TG 8200 sticks last year.

 

G.skill heatsinks are atrocious but the worst I've ever encountered are still the Patriot heat blankets. TG heatsinks are the best I've encountered so far and they look slick with their circular logo on the front.

Agree with pretty much everything you said. 👍

Yeah, these are really good memory modules and incredibly affordable. They were recommended by gupsterg at oc.net.  I had never heard of the brand before, but I was watching a YouTube video earlier today where they were used. They look very good, too. There is a little design decal (triangle) on each corner on one side that I believe are covering screws that bolt the halves together, so the heatsinks should be easier to remove than most. The only thing I don't like is the "KingBank" name on the sides of them, but I would prefer that all brands would leave their branding off of them. I don't like that about any brand.

I have a tracking number on the mobo,, so I should have it pretty soon.

45 minutes ago, Papusan said:

@Mr. Fox Here's the thing.... We had something similar with older Win 8/8.1 and Windows 10. If you run benchmarks and the processor maxed out at 100%. This smart ass operating system from Redmond figured out that you weren't using the machine if you weren't touching the mouse and hence started up collecting telemetry, maintaining the OS and then sending the data back to Microsoft's servers. Only because the OS think the machine wasn't in use when you run benchmarks. 

 

Maybe it will be the same with the new Win 11 build, but with baby cores running to collect your data (the P cores is disabled while Microsoft gets its share of your data/privacy). No in Hell Microsoft is able to do this correct.

 

Windows 11 25H2 Introduces User Interaction-Aware CPU Power Management

 

These adjustments may include lowering clock speeds and voltage, extending time spent in deeper C-State sleep modes, and disabling high-performance cores while leaving low-power cores active. This approach aims to optimize energy consumption without compromising system responsiveness.

If that was not enough evidence that they are evil bastards with nefarious intentions that deserve to die, see this bull crap... Nasty finger salute to them. May their financial and personnel resources be forever inadequate to achieve success and their loss of stock investors debilitating.

All items sold now.

5 hours ago, electrosoft said:

@Mr. Fox have you tried seeing if your 9070xt can handle adrenalin's fast memory timings settings yet? I suspect when you block it and cool those hot modules down, it may work if not already.

Yes, it works fine. I have it enabled by default since the day I received it.

Update on the X870E AORUS Master with the loose NVMe heatsink damaging things. No replacement from Central Computer yet, but here is what I found out. Mine was not the first one. I encouraged them to open the box and examine the replacement. I told them I had no reason to think it wasn't like that before they shipped it to me. The box had no damage and did not appear to be handled roughly.

The reason I do not have a replacement is all of them (over 20) were unboxed and found to have similar problems. They're going to have fun dealing with Gigabyte on this. Apparently Gigabyte is not latching them securely when they leave the factory, or the latch is coming loose during shipment. I am actually surprised that this does not happen more often. The silly trend with the toolless NVMe heatsinks that all brands are implementing is an invitation for this kind of shipping disaster to happen. God forbid that a gamerboy would ever have to touch a screwdriver to remove a heatsink. That's way too much to ask of the point-and-click kiddos livin' la vida loca in 2025.

I spoke to their RMA rep today and they are going to send me an X870E-E Strix instead. I confirmed before agreeing to it that it DOES NOT have the same design defect as the Apex and putting my Sabrent Quad NVMe card in the bottom X16 slots won't castrate the GPU with X8 bandwidth. Should still work at X16 as long as I only install the one NVMe PCIe 5.0 in the slot above the GPU, ignore the other two and the two PCIe 4.0 chipset NVMe slots at the bottom of the mobo can be used with no effect. Two of the three PCIe 5.0 NVMe slots (those below the GPU slot) cannot be used, which is pretty much standard for all X870E thanks to AMD's obsession with mandating wasted PCIe lanes on utterly worthless USB4 crap that I don't care about. (Not sure where Intel, AMD and NVIDIA are finding idiots for product design engineers, but stupid seems to the the new normal for those employed in that vocation.)

Strix mobos have almost always been decent for me, so I am OK with the compromise. Just send me the dog-gone motherboard so I can move on and be done. My new 011D XL EVO is patiently waiting for it.

https://rog.asus.com/us/motherboards/rog-strix/rog-strix-x870e-e-gaming-wifi/

I bought this KingBank kit. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DSZPHLCX?th=1 - very inexpensive

It is not advertised to have an EXPO 8400 profile, but lo and behold, it does. @jaybee83

I can't do 8400 with my CPU but it runs stable at 8200 with custom timings. Nice to not have the rainbow puke eyesore. tPHYRDL is matched. I bet it would handle 8400+ on the Gene or Apex. This kit performs pretty much identical to my G.SKILL 8000 TridentZ Neo EXPO 48GB kit. A bit slower than Neo 32GB 8000 kits, but to be expected with 48GB modules due to looser timing requirements.

The heatsinks are A WHOLE LOT BETTER than the G.SKILL heating blankets.

I will continue to do some tuning/testing on the Master and the Strix (once I have it). If it turns out to be a reliable kit then I will probably buy another one and sell the G.SKILL rainbow puke sticks just for the reason to not have to install any kind of bloatware to correct the rainbow puke rubbish.

1 hour ago, electrosoft said:

I've been playing around with OC'ing this 9070xt and I'm not seeing much.

 

GB cards come out of the box OC'd fairly well with boosting to 3ghz. Pushed to a ~-75 UV and PL to max, it's pulling 360w+ with spikes over 400w for a whopping gain of......1-2fps.

 

The hot spot is toasty though and the gaming OC is actually one of the smaller 9070xt cards out there. It would qualify for an SFF build too.

 

I actually lost a few fps in performance with the 25.5.1 drivers vs 25.4.1. I did just install 25.6.1 so I'll give them a whirl later.

 

That behavior mirrors mine almost exactly in terms of clocks, watts and performance. I often see a few higher FPS using a -75 UV with the power limit left to default rather than maxed out power limit.

It looks like the Alphacool CORE block for the Gigabyte Gaming and Elite GPUs will be available mid to end of July. It is in production but not yet available for purchase.

5 minutes ago, johnksss said:

I keep trying to tell you, it's Nvidia blocking the performance.

100%. That's what they do. They do it at the hardware/firmware level and they can do even more with cancer drivers. They've always been that way. I still remember and resent their clock-blocked crap on notebooks about 10 years ago using drivers. If you wanted to play games that required the new driver then you were SOL on overclocking. Very scummy.

I think all off-the-shelf GPUs that are not a K|NGP|N or Galax HOF are going to suck and fall short of their potential to some degree. The Astral we can all buy will never be all it can be with the firmware that it comes with, just as a K|NGP|N or HOF fall short with stock firmware. They are all gimped and only the Chosen Ones get special firmware for publicity stunts. The rest of us are never gifted with an opportunity to compete with the Chosen Ones because it's all rigged, planned and designed for publicity stunts. The rest of us get to practice soldering skills and are forced to rely on warranty-voiding hardware mods to try to make up for crappy firmware that comes from the factory on the overpriced lipstick on a pig products we buy in hopes of getting our money's worth.

1 hour ago, electrosoft said:

lol, you do know we're just teasing ya @tps3443 right? I consider you a friend, and I know with my friends we constantly joke around with each other. 🤣

Yes, I am sure he does know. He has to know he is our buddy and we think very highly of him. But even so, sometimes a guy feels like an underdog if everyone has a different opinion. The important thing is that a person doesn't change his opinion based only on what others think in order to have their approval or feel accepted in the echo chamber, but it is OK to change it because you have changed your mind as an exercise of your own volition. 

46 minutes ago, tps3443 said:

5090FE is fine man. If I didn't like it, I would not keep it that's for sure lol!  I had a 4090 Gaming OC and @johnksss that thing was cheap as hell, flimsy, light weight, and loud as hell with bad coil whine, but not this card, this card feels nice and premium and heavy etc. So, it's okay for $1,999.99  (People do try to convince me that my own GPU sucks though, they do not like it, that I like it I guess 🤣) Last I checked, Astral+Block = $4,000, too much for me to afford. But at least they perform TOP NOTCH once you water block it, flash it, and solder it.. Yes, the FE's have weak coolers; I cannot hold that against it. It's going on water/shunt anyways. I mean, your Astral is probably faster than an RTX Pro 6000, but that doesn't mean it's better than one.  FE's have weak coolers but not weak cores. Definitely an acceptable GPU for the price tag and performance. 

Card scores perfectly acceptable for a stock cooler, hot, non-shunted 5090 FE. Plenty of other 5090's that cannot hit these numbers out there, and this is the hottest one you can buy. 🥵


NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 video card benchmark result - Intel Xeon W-3175X Processor,ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC. ROG DOMINUS EXTREME

I'm glad you don't care what other people think. That is how it should be. It only matters if it affects them and this doesn't. The fact that you like it is all that matters. There are some people that make their decisions based on what their friends think is best or coolest, (without anything else to base it on,) which is really dumb.

2 hours ago, jaybee83 said:

 

thx for the headsup, ive actually tried those in the RGB version (lights manually switched off for daily operation and stress testing, i just go with the RGB version for higher resale value), but no luck on my mobo.

 

BUT

 

the four additional kits of the G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB DDR5-8000 F5-8000J4048F24GX2-TZ5RK arrived yesterday! This is the 1.35V sku, there is also a 1.30V sku under the same model number, which is the kit that ran 8000 stable in my previous testing.

Im now testing the 8 sticks individually and so far i havent found an upper limit for the first stick LOL. DDR5-8400 running well, upping in 100 Mhz steps 🙂 Will update you guys once i know more 😄 

Ofc im aware that with two sticks the frequency limit will be lower, but this nevertheless already bodes well. First time ever ive even seen anything boot up and run stable at 8100 Mhz or above on my mobo 🙂 

Yeah, I think I am going to return this kit for a refund. It performs quite well but I cannot stop it from erroring out. So far every Intel XMP 48GB kit I have tested on the AORUS B850 Elite, X870E Master, X670E Gene and X870E Apex has not been capable of being stablized and every EXPO kit has. I think I am going to stop wasting my time with XMP. Something is off with the XMP profiles that isn't good for Ryzen. What is weird is if I have stable setting with an EXPO kit and replace it with an equivalent XMP kit the stablity is gone even with the same manual memory tuned setting. I can't really explain that. There is something different. The 48GB EXPO kits are also harder to tune than 32GB EXPO kits.

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

I am testing this kit on the AORUS Master since they claim DDR5-8600 support. I suspect these will easily support that if the motherboard and CPU are capable. Bonus: No rainbow puke and no bloatware needed to kill it.

 

@jaybee83 this just booted and ran fine with the Intel XMP-8400 profile. The only adjustment I made was maxing out tREFI and turned off GDM/PMU manual to 0. I didn't touch voltage or anything else on the memory. Even the latency is good for no tweaking and sloppy default XMP settings. Now I am going to see what Gigabyte AI Snatch does. I just discovered that. Let's see if it is a gimmick.

What do you think about the black tubing @Papusan versus clear? (I already know your answer.) I think this turned out quite nice. Very industrial and pseudo steampunk looking with the black and chrome with white LED.

I am testing this kit on the AORUS Master since they claim DDR5-8600 support. I suspect these will easily support that if the motherboard and CPU are capable. Bonus: No rainbow puke and no bloatware needed to kill it.

2 hours ago, Papusan said:

 

He did some changes to his pc. + maintenance. Aka he did a few disconnects of the trash cable. Once he should start use it the Astral monitoring showed imbalanced amps. Total out of specs. He bough new cable and everything was well again. Just show how unreliable this tiny trash is. Aka saved by the Astral monitoring. nvidia should have done what Asus did with the ROG tax and implemented monitoring of the power pins/rails. Maybe they don't like critics of Nvidia?

Everything would be so much better if NVIDIA would just admit 8-pin legacy PCIe power connections are better and recommend their AIB partners go back to it. But, they'll never do that. It is hard to respect people or companies that cannot admit that sometimes change is not good and demonstrate unwillingness to correct their own mistakes. Pretending to be right when it is obvious to everyone they are wrong makes them unworthy of respect.

1 hour ago, Papusan said:

 

Looks like NVIDIA moderators removed the post. What did it say?

2 hours ago, electrosoft said:

Signal RGB is *almost* perfect for controlling all my devices. For some odd reason, it appears it won't work with AMD GPUs? It controls my Steel Series, Razor and Asus devices perfectly. Luckily the 9070xt has minimal RGB on it.

 

 

Give Argus Monitor a try. It works for RGB and fan controls on all of the ASUS and Gigabyte motherboards I have used it on. I disable all of the drive and temperature monitoring, system tray temperature icons and other things I do not care about (I have HWiNFO64 for that). The UI looks a little bit dated, but the important thing is that it works well for me for controlling the fans and RGB headers. It also does not need to stay running once the settings are applied.

In spite of my high ambient temps, (30°C/86°F water) this BarrowCH RAM cooler does a nice job, especially considering it is not a direct touch block. After 30 minutes of TM5 the temps were the same at about 3 minutes of TM5 with the stock garbage heating blankets, and I couldn't run more than about 5 minutes until TM5 would start spitting out errors and the modules were close to 62°C. I just couldn't see spending over $100 for another IceMan direct-touch RAM block. The 4-DIMM version has to weigh a ton as the 2-DIMM version is insanely heavy.

The water temperature gauge on the RAM block also matches exactly my Thermaltake meter.

On 5/18/2025 at 1:07 PM, Mr. Fox said:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Item #3: Intel Core i9 14900KF - $375 + Shipping

 

14900KF (SP104_P116_E82_MC88) w/ lapped Copper IHS SP Rating Photos

(the MC SP is a screenshot saved from when it was in an Apex since Strix has no MC SP)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 5/18/2025 at 1:07 PM, Mr. Fox said:

SP104 CPU - Lapped Copper IHS

Only item remaining is the 14900KF (SP104). Everything else has sold. @YoungChris at oc.net is interested but having to scrape up the cash. It's not being held for him. First-come, first-serve.

I've got a WireView and WireView Pro that I am not able to use any longer. I sold the Gigabyte 4090 that one was used on and the other one will not fit my 4090 Suprim with the new Alphacool Core waterblock. (It did fit with the Byksi block.) I will probably list both of them and the MSI 4090 Byski block. If anyone is interested before I list them drop me a PM to let me know.

1 hour ago, electrosoft said:

In Intel's defense, the E-cores on arrowlake are much better than RPLs but I still want a proper P-core only CPU. You might be right in the pursuit of Xeons.

^^^ This ^^^ AND, Hyperthreading. Super-retarded that they did away with that. In fact, this is the primary reason I went with an AM5 build. Had Core Ultra 285K not been missing hyperthreading I am 99% certain I would have bought A Z890 Apex and 285K instead of 9950X. They screwed themselves extra hard on that one, and customers have spoken loudly with their wallets. Overall, I still think Intel has a better platform than AMD and I am sad they've screwed it up by making stupid choices. (Why does it seem like I am saying this frequently about all brands now? Because they are all idiots. None of them deserve our support at this point, only our wrath.)

On 5/18/2025 at 1:07 PM, Mr. Fox said:

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Item #3: Intel Core i9 14900KF - $375 + Shipping

 

14900KF (SP104_P116_E82_MC88) w/ lapped Copper IHS SP Rating Photos

(the MC SP is a screenshot saved from when it was in an Apex since Strix has no MC SP)

------------------------------------------------------------------------

On 5/18/2025 at 1:07 PM, Mr. Fox said:

SP104 CPU - Lapped Copper IHS

Only item remaining is the 14900KF (SP104). Everything else has sold. @YoungChris at oc.net is interested but having to scrape up the cash. It's not being held for him. First-come, first-serve.

I've got a WireView and WireView Pro that I am not able to use any longer. I sold the Gigabyte 4090 that one was used on and the other one will not fit my 4090 Suprim with the new Alphacool Core waterblock. (It did fit with the Byksi block.) I will probably list both of them and the MSI 4090 Byski block. If anyone is interested before I list them drop me a PM to let me know.