Mr. Fox

For the same reason I question any benefit to a dual CCD X3D CPU unless you only care about gaming, and if gaming is what you do and care about then just buy a single CCD X3D. Having the second CCD needing to be managed by Windoze is an Achilles Heel. The Winduhz scheduler needing to be in control of anything is like a bad apple spoiling the entire barrel. Relying on the OS to do anything is always a bad idea. Almost guaranteed it is going to suck if it relies upon Windoez to do anything in order to make it work.

Time will tell...

I took the plunge on the latest "irreversible" BIOS update and the Strix seems to be working fine with the latest UEFI cancer.

Even though they can buy a used one for $1500 they prefer to pay an extra $1000 (plus interest) to NewEgg so they can finance it and spread it out over time. Death by 1,000 paper cuts. That frees up their cash to buy dolls and action figures to set on top of the GPU to compliment the rainbow puke when they get the GPU.

They clean them up and sell them as "NewEgg Refurbished" on their own web site.

Do it. The worst warrant to have is the one that is expired. If you buy it things will probably be fine and you won't need it. If you do not, chances are pretty good that Murphy's Law will find your wallet and the cost will be greater than the price for the extended warranty. It is good that it includes accidental damage coverage. That makes the price even more attractive. For 3 years' peace of mind I think that is pretty affordable. For the record, that price for a 3 year warranty is about what a 3 year extended warranty cost was 10 years ago.

The only reason I have 9950X systems now is because I wanted something new and the 15th Gen "Core Ultra" product line is more of an undesirable mess. 13th and 14th Gen Intel CPUs are awesome. As long as you manually control the clocks and voltage and stay away from eTVB you should have no issues with degradation. Set a high LLC to normalize voltage and avoid the high idle and low-load voltage swings and spike. No need to use special performance-killing "intel failsafe" profile if you take control of things.

It truly is a situation of having to choose from undesirable options. There are no good options in the current hardware generations.

That is an absolutely great trade-in value considering that is almost new MSRP for that GPU. But, if something seems to good to be true it probably is. There is an underlying motivation that we are not seeing and I can just about guarantee you that it is ultimately not going to be for the benefit of consumers. Someone else is going to benefit from it, not NewEgg's customers. It's not a generous gesture of goodwill. NewEgg is playing the auto dealership scam. Give you more than your trade-in is worth and then more than make up for it when they screw you six ways to Sunday on an overpriced new car. If it were a legit thing they would cash you out for $1600 nstead of giving credit on a new GPU purchase. Plus, it's still not enough money to offset the extreme overpricing of the 5090. I think stock has "stabilized" (aka sales have stagnated) only because people that would have wanted a 5090 have figured out they are getting sodomized and decided to not pay twice what one is worth. That describes where I am at with it. Do I want one? Yes. Am I willing to buy one? No, absolutely not. You're basically spending what it would take to buy two 4090s without getting double the performance and only having one GPU left in the end. That sucks real bad. If it was priced to value I would buy a 5090 and keep my 4090 to use in my second PC or have it on-hand as a spare. So, what seems like a good deal on the surface is still a truly horrible deal and the high trade-in price is probably nothing more than a desperate attempt to move stock on overpriced 5090 cards that are going to start losing value because not enough people are willing to take a shot in the heiney hole to have one. What I think might happen, or at least what I would like to happen, is AMD is going to launch another flagship that sells for half the cost of a 5090, runs like a 5080 or 4090 and all of these $3000+ abortions are going to suddenly not be sellable unless they slash the pricing 30% to 50%. I really hope that is what happens. It's exactly what NVIDIA and the greedy AIB partners deserve to have happen to them. They need to be pushed to the edge of the bankruptcy cliff. Not over, but close enough to scare the crap out of them. It needs to hurt so bad and hurt for long enough that they will not want to try it again any time soon. They don't care about us, so we need to stop caring about them. Our actions need put them into self-defense/survival mode. Those that will be hurt the most will be the poor unfortunate suckers that already drank the Kool-Aid and paid absolutely insane prices for a 5090. Does this mean I like AMD now? Nope. It doesn't and I don't. AMD sucks. But, putting up with their mediocrity and face-melting hotspot temps and slow VRAM is a better alternative than getting screwed. Look back over the months that have passed since 5090 first launched and take a talley on all of the missteps and shenanigans that have taken place. Besides not being worth it monetarily a lot of stuff was totally botched up. And, we still have the sucky 12VHPWR NVIDIA arson PCIe power connectors.

Happy Father's Day brothers. I hope those of you that are and/or have a dad enjoy celebrating the privilege and honor.

Winduhz has been a broken effed up piece of crap in every iteration that followed Windows 7 and the latest abortion has brought us an unprecedented degree of half-assed trashiness and filth.

If we are lucky their investors will decide they hate them and stop investing in computer technology. Then the companies wanting to get rich from AI won't because they won't have any operating capital available for dumbass ventures like AI. I'm totally OK with the idea of no new products coming to market from NVIDIA for 3 to 5 years. They can just lower prices and keep sellinng what they've already released. I could see some real benefits to that. It would be wonderful to get 5 years of service out of a flagship GPU before anything newer and better dropped.

I do not ever remembering caring so little about NVIDIA as I do now. I really do hope they get what they deserve. It will be really bad (for them) if they do. They have earned whatever misfortune comes their way.

So @Papusan Alienware is partnering with Lego to make the kiddos happy. Disgusting. If the 9090 XT is real I will probably buy one.

It's quite the day we live in. Besides it being a 21st Century Sodom and Gomorrah we buy more snake oil than anyone could possibly use during the course of their life. Consumers are generally regarded as an expendable commodity rather than an important customer. Lies and misrepresentation are a means to their end. Our happiness doesn't matter and neither does earning trust or respect for as long as we keep paying for their mistakes and continue allowing them to screw us over. These circumstances are not limited to PC hardware manufacturers and software developers, but it feels particularly bad in this realm because it matters to us. An example of snake oil is the ASUS Nitropath technology. I mention it only because it is something new that nobody continued talking about after the initial marketing campaign and hype train heralding it as a beneficial hardware feature. There aren't many boards that have it. This Strix does have it and I am seeing no evidence that it exists in terms of functionality. I can't find anything negative or postive to say about it because there is nothing to see other than the marketing hype that was devoted to it. I think I will put this on the back burner until Microcenter opens here. Then the only thing I will have to care about is the 40 minute drive each direction to give them back the broken trash rather than having to ship the trash back and wait for a refund. I'm probably going to seldom ever buy anything online again that is important or expensive after they open.

Yes I did select defective as the reason for return. I am not sure if I am going to try another. Maybe. I have lost my curiosity for now and $699 is a lot of money for something that might offer very little in return.

I wish I could even say that. Constant freezes and random blue screens in Windows even using BIOS defaults. Every time I tried using a web browser it would freeze. I read on ROG forums some other owners were experiencing the same after updating to the latest BIOS, but I tried the most recent and two prior BIOS versions and they were the same. I have no idea why it is not functioning correctly. If I had to take a guess, there is something not right with the 3D v-cache. Within 5 minutes of moving it from the Strix to the Master motherboard to determine if it was the CPU or the Strix mobo the Master locked up with the only changes after clearing the CMOS being disabling TPM and Secure Boot. Everything else default. So, same misbehavior on both motherboards. I could get it to do some things without freezing and I suspect those were things that didn't try to access the v-cache. Just a guess, but at this point I am past caring or trying to solve it. Clearly there is something wrong with it. Attempting to overclock the CPU and RAM simply increased the frequency and severity. I put this note in the box with the RMA. Hopefully it doesn't become someone else's problem. RMA Ref # -------------------- 9950X3D – SN# 9MN7550P50134 This CPU is unstable. I spent 3 days struggling with frequent lock-ups in Windows and random blue screens. I did two clean installs of Windows with current AMD chipset drivers, tried four different memory kits and tried three most recent BIOS versions for the motherboard, used BIOS defaults and tried different tuning options to correct the problem. This CPU was purchased as an upgrade for my work PC. I moved the CPU to my personal (non-work) computer and the instability issues followed it to the new host computer. It might not be a good candidate to sell to another Amazon customer.

So @jaybee83 below are the SP ratings for one 9950X and the 9950X3D. Whenever I have a good reason to disturb the CPU in the AORUS Master I will drop it in the Strix for screenshots unless I can find those I took when that CPU was in the Gene. After spending many wasted hours with it, trying three different BIOS versions, two clean installs of Winduhz and four known excellent and stable memory kits, and almost wrongly concluding the Strix was a piece of trash, to be certain I put this 9950X into the Strix in place of the 9950X3D and the immediate and overwhelmingly obvious conclusion is the 9950X3D is a worthless and extremely disappointing piece of trash. I am sending it back to Amazon for a refund. In spite of its acceptable SP120 it overclocks poorly on CPU and memory. It cannot run tight memory timings at any clock speed and it constantly freezes or throws BSOD in Windows with any memory overclock above 7600. Latency is horrid and I could not tighten things up enough to get below about 62ns in AIDA64. So, it is as worthless as teats on a bull to me. Cinebench R23 scores are about 5000 points less at matched clock speeds. Highest R23 score I could get was a bit over 42K and Windows froze when I tried to take a screenshot of it. Clock-for-clock it is a slower CPU, not faster. And I don't give a rat's ass about how it plays games. So @jaybee83 your Hero motherboard might be totally stable at 8000+ RAM speeds if your 9950X3D is as much of a piece of garbage as this dungheap that is going back to Amazon. Curiosity box checked now. Don't care about X3D just like I didn't care before I got curious. Horrible product if you like overclocking. Absolutely not worth $699 by any stretch of the imagination. To borrow the expression from Steve at GN... "a waste of sand" from AMD. Maybe I drew a short straw in the Ryzen lottery. Not going to waste any more calories on it. Buh-bye X3D turd CPU. So glad I didn't already delid it. Also glad I didn't wrongly blame the Strix for sucky overclocking. It's actually very good and almost a match to the AORUS Master. Gigabyte is still beating ASUS on motherboard design and features. The only benefit the Strix has that the Master lacks is a questionably useful SP-rating. In terms of performance they are a tie. Things are as they should be. Scores are essentially identical to the AORUS Master.

You are right. All of us are brainwashed at one level or another. We've been conditioned to think and act a certain way, often without any awareness. Submiminal messaging is extremely powerful and nobody is smart enough to never be affected by it. Some are easier to fool than others. The difficulty of disassembly is an issue with the newer design of FE cards, but that has never been a deterrent to most of us. My greater concern is the durability or added fragility that often follows the added complexity of design. When a change introduces complexity or reduces reliability it often lacks enough value or benefit to justify it.

You would be surprised how many people do not know that. Only works with FAT/FAT32 (no NTFS). Off-topic... saw the new John Wick movie last night "Ballerina" and it was awesome, just like all John Wick movies always are.

I will. You know you can just press F12 in the BIOS to take a screenshot and save it to USB rather than using a camera. This Strix has the same features as the Apex. That BIOS Q-screen thing with the mobo map. Also has eCLK (asynchronous BCLK) like the Apex and AORUS Master.

Thanks. I will have a closer look tomorrow. My 9950X3D is SP120 as well. I just got the Strix build put together and have about 2.5 hours to sleep before work tomorrow. No problem running 8000 C36, but still need to tune it. First distro plate I have owned. I like it, but getting the air out of it was a little bit tedious. It was very noisey when it had tons of air in it. Now that most of the air is worked out, it is cranking out some decent flow (318-320 L/H). It started out less than half that rate. Top and bottom rads both push/pull. I purchased a second set of KingBank 8400 and will probably sell my G.SKILL 8000 EXPO kits (3 of them).

@jaybee83 I forgot to ask, what is the SP rating on your 9950X3D CPU and what was the SP rating our your 9950X? Do you have any BIOS screenshots showing the V/F curve on them?

If everyone would be smart and say eff ewe to companies selling $3400 5090s and $1200 9070 XTs there would be no companies selling $3400 5090s and $1200 9070 XTs. They'd be selling them for what they are actually worth and making a reasonable profit in the process. They have priced them based on how much an idiot is willing to pay for them. Too many people have issues exercising self-control, restraint and prudence. They are driven by their desires more than intelligence. They know this and they are exploting this flaw in their humanity.