Mr. Fox

If everything else works as expected, it's probably just Cyberpunk 2077. Doesn't it have a reputation for being buggy/crappy anyhow? Does the benchmark behave the same as the chapter you are trying to play?

Well, I finally got the kit. UPS had some kind of service issue and it took 8 days when it normally takes 2 days. Easily handles 8400 with very tight timings and only 1.510V. No doubt it will handle 8600, maybe more. I ended up only shelling out $117 for it because I had a NewEgg gift card from them giving me a price match on the Gigabyte 4090. This is really a huge improvement over the garbage 32GB XTREEM 8000 A-die kit that I RMA'd some months ago. I don't have them on water yet. TeamGroup brags about the stock heatsinks, and I they are just a little better than the worthless heating blankets the others have, but I am not overly impressed with the temperatures. They are very heavy. They weigh close to as much as the G.SKILL sticks with the waterblocks on them. But, they still hit about 45°C in TM5. Really solid performance though. Team T-Force XTREEM 48GB (2 x 24GB) 288-Pin PC RAM DDR5 8200 (PC5 65600) Model FFXD548G8200HC38EDC01 @tps3443 I hope you snag one. I sure do love both of my 4090 GPUs. The Suprim X is an awesome choice.

A small piece of good news. Hopefully it will escalate beyond distrust into rejection. I'd love to see all the companies that are invested in it lose their financial hind ends to the extent that it makes the cryto crash and dot com busts of prior years look like child's play.

I have several saved Macrium Reflect images of Windows 7 that I can restore when I play with the 2080 Ti Waterforce GPU. I am going to have to do that again soon. What holds me back is the knowledge that every time I do that it makes it easier to hate Windoze 10 and Winduhz 11 than I did before. It is hard to respect a scurvy outfit that produce such trashy trash. The only nice thing I can find to say is that it is not Mac crap. It's not April 1st yet. My ears were telling my brain something different that what my eyes were.

Why not Micro Center since you have access to more than one location?

I hope the majority of them are equal to or better than the one I bought from Germany. It's a very good CPU, but it's definitely not worth $750 without a guarantee or assurance of receiving a sample of quality equal to, or better than, the best of the best 14900Ks that have been sold so far. Getting one that is no better than a decent 14900K is unacceptable due to the price premium. They should all be golden samples from the top 10% or not be sold as a KS. If that is not what happens, then it is a ripoff/scam being charged cream of the crop prices for something that isn't. I'm skeptical now because the three that I RMA'd were absolute trash samples. Might have just been bad luck, but I have my doubts. If you get one, I hope it is an awesome sample.

Agreed. And, because of that it makes AI even more dangerous than it otherwise would be. AI is not sentient, doesn't have a need to "get along" or act in a civil manner or live by the rules we (most of us) do, and should, live by. Sometimes we don't, and there are plenty of intolerant zombie human beings. Thankfully not the majority even though it feels like it sometimes due to a vocal and militant minority. AI is like an intolerant zombie human being that had no sense of decency to begin with, and then matters were made worse by having a lobotomy by a self-taught brain surgeon. It doesn't help matters knowing that those among us that are the least worthy of trust, respect and possessing the lowest standards of decency and ethics are the depraved goons feeding their skewed garbage and personal biases to the AI under the auspices of it being accurate information, wisdom or truth.

The things that suck about computers suck for us all equally. It doesn't matter what our personal preferences are. AMD, Intel, NVIDIA... ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, ASRock... all of them have their pros and cons and all suck as much as they excel. It all boils down to who one thinks sucks the least. They are all muppets that lick the boots and smooch the posterior of the Redmond Retards, which automatically disqualifies all of them from being viewed as good companies. We have each other and our friendships are the most valuable element of being PC enthusiasts. The silicon lottery is brand agnostic and takes no prisoners. As long as the silicon giants continue to sell trash samples on the same shelf as the good ones, and AIB OEMs sell crappy products with inadequate QC and lousy warranty service and support, a large percentage of us will end up getting screwed with trashy tech that doesn't live up to what we were lead to expect by fanboy shills.

That is very true. Reviewers are usually fanboys and there is always a way to build a case for a particular brand by selectively choosing what your favorite brand is best at and omitting information where they are not. You can pick any brand you want and do that. Same applies to "news" to fit a narrative with bits and pieces of information that, while accurate, is incomplete, out of context, or distorted, and that paints a picture that is the exact opposite of truth. It's called "spin" and it is unfortunately the new normal. HWBOT leaderboards are a good way of getting a big picture view. I think that is good advice. But, it's only especially useful for guys like us, that care about overclocking. Many of the fanboys think overclocking is dead and the only thing that matters is stock performance. Guys like us don't care about stock performance. It's irrelevant to us. We only care about how well it overclocks and what the overclocking does to the results. It's OK for stock performance to be the only thing that matters if you don't care about overclocking. It is OK to have dips and stuttering, and suck at ray tracing when you don't care about those things. It's not accurate to declare a winner based on limited information that excludes the measurements that are unfavorable. All that said, "birds of a feather flock together" is a natural thing. It is not a bad thing as long as the flocks do not turn on one another, become enemies and try to destroy all who are outside of their flock. We all have our personal preferences, but shouldn't take it personal if someone thinks our baby is ugly. And, the person that thinks that our baby is ugly probably shouldn't tell us what they think unless asked. It's OK to be honest, but weaponizing honesty is not OK. The only reason to do so is to be offensive. Smart people can find and look at numbers that matter to them, connect the dots they care about, and decide for themselves. Sheeple follow the flock they like most and gives them the most warm fuzzy feeling.

I would love to see how a crossflow (axial) fan works in a PC. I have a crossflow tower fan in my office and it is amazing. Moves TONS of air. This is what most central air conditioning and swamp coolers use for a fan. They turn slow, make little noise compared to a radial (conventional bladed) fan, and move tremendous volume of air. Too bad this is only a SFF. Would be nice to see something similar in a full tower kit with 360, 420mm radiators or even just sold as a standalone chassis fan.

Have you tried Double Driver? If not, check it out. It's awesome. I have been using it for several years with only good experience from it. It does what you are doing manually with a couple of mouse clicks. Once you have all of your drivers installed, use Double Driver to back them up with the installer option. The next time you do a clean install just run Double Driver on the backed up drivers and it installs everything for you from your backup. And, that's without the software and extra garbage payload that a normal driver installation often includes that you don't need. It's only the core driver files. When you make the backup, exclude GPU drivers. The driver backup can be used on other computers with the same hardware as well. You can also use the backed up drivers to slipstream them into a Windows ISO mod.

Awesome. I'm glad that you took the time to evaluate that and come to your own conclusion. I almost never let Windows Update install drivers. (I don't let Windows install most updates if I am honest about it, but especially not drivers.) They are often inferior. The latest WHQL drivers are frequently not the greatest. In fact, WHQL means nothing to me at this point. It's a worthless designation as far as I am concerned. Sometimes WHQL drivers are the least stable, and worst performance, but they are the only version the Redmond Reprobates have been paid a ransom fee to stamp with their seal of approval.

Not me. I think I'm good for now. I think it would be difficult to find one better than my SP117 13900KS. My SP102 14900K is decent, but even that one is inferior to that SP117 monster CPU. The P/E/MC are all super good on that one. The SP102 14900K has great P cores and MC, but the E cores are nothing to write home about. Still waiting for Amazon to refund the garbage 14900K. I returned the 14900KF last week and already got that refund, but the 14900K that they have had since 2/19 is still pending.

Some of the whiners were raised by parents that didn't require accountability, performance or obedience and didn't discipline bad behavior because they were too worried about what their woke yuppie friends would have to say about it. Sparing the rod almost always spoils the child and produces adults that are losers. Maybe a couple of public caning sessions would whip them into shape.

I have one of these. It is very sturdy. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09SCYSFP9?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details&th=1 Please of space for the huge case (can go even higher) and room for the pump and rads on top.

Yes. Both. No to both.

Hi, brother. Crazy busy day at work, and went out doing stuff with Mrs. Fox after work.

Exactly. If you do it when you have spare time, only because you want to, or because you have something that might be useful to someone looking for your content, it removes all of the stress that makes it a chore. My videos that have the most views and likes are things like laptop teardowns, BIOS settings and how-to videos. Product reviews are worthless to most subscribers. They are only interesting and useful to those thinking about buying that product. And, the amount of effort that goes into the product review makes it unenjoyable, not to mention often being worth more than the purchase price of the product. Calculated based on an hourly wage basis, unless the product is worth at least $500 chances are very good you're not coming out ahead financially if you view your time as having value. Even when the product is free to you as the reviewer, your time is being donated for pennies on the dollar.

Thanks for this. Even though I am a subscriber to Stephen's channel, I never saw a notification. Typical of YouTube to do that with small channels, like his and mine, that are not making them gobs of money. When you combine all of the little channels together, YouTube is making money off the channels in the aggregate, but the channel owners are not benefitting. I left a comment for him. I forgot how I used to look when I was packing a bunch of extra weight. I was pretty "husky" as they used to say.

That looks great. Nice job. You will likely need more tubing once you get the manifold installed as the two short runs to/from the CPU block will need to be longer to reach the manifold. It looks like you have enough space to attach it to the front panel fans using the brackets they provided. I'm guessing the fan in the middle. You could maybe also attach it directly to your pump out line with a rotary fitting with male G1/4 threads on both ends. They're probably just idiots. It seems those are more common that they used to be, especially the hateful kind of idiots.

There is a lot of misinformation in the media, and social media, including YouTube. Some is deliberate agenda-driven propaganda and some is just pure ignorance on the part of "experts" and "influencers" that don't know what they don't know. The end result for people that believe everything they hear is the same. They are no less stupid than before they heard it. But, they believe lies and follow wrong advice. Some people still run Furmark and swear it is safe. So yeah, kids... run Furmark to test your GPU and run Prime95 to test your CPU. It's good for both of them. Do it often. It has to be safe because they show it on YouTube. Here is what about 10 seconds of Furmark looks like on my Gigabyte 4090 using the Galax HOF XOC vBIOS with 1.100V. If you haven't heard any GPU coil whine, just do this and you'll hear it. LOL.

This manual has English pages. From what I can see in the instructions it is made like the EK manifold and the lines on it have nothing to do with the flow path. It looks like in are on one side and out on the other. The end ports are in and out. You connect lines going out of the manifold to each peripheral on the side where the water comes into the block. The water returning to the manifold connect to the side where the water leaves the manifold. They have diagrams in the manual showing what I just described. I think the lines on the outside of it are purely an aesthetic and not relevant based on what I see in the manual. https://download.alphacool.com/legacy/1020140_1020139_1020138_Distro_C5_C3_C2_Manual.pdf The e-cores are not anything to get too excited about. They're not capable of withstanding Cinebench R23 above 4.7. At 4.8 all E-core it errors out. The E-cores are a little weaker than my SP117 13900KS with SP97 E-cores. But, it seems like a really solid CPU sample. It definitely needs a delid and bare die. It runs very hot with the stock solder and IHS. It hits 105°C and thermal throttles at 5.9 all P-core in Cinebench R23 even though the voltage around 1.250V. Chilled water at 16°C isn't enough to keep it cooled down at P59x and E47x. It errors out in Cinebench R23 at 60x all P-core unless I pore on the voltage and then it thermal throttles. I suspect a delid and bare die will solve that issue. In "normal" workloads it seem cool and stable enough to run P60x, E48x. Cinebench is just too much load for the stock solder and IHS.

It was shipped on 2/19. USPS received it from DHL on 2/26. It was delivered today. So, yeah, stupid how long it took. Looks like it sat in a shipping container in Germany for 4 days and then sat at USPS/Customs in NYC for 3 days. 12 days total. That is a very strange manifold. If the lines on it indicate the flow pattern that is going to possibly be awkward to use. It might not be depending on how you are going to install it, but trying to get a visual of it in my head it seems weird. Everything is linear with the EK manifolds. One row of ports is inlet and the other outlet. No crossing over or right angle turns like that. Did you buy that one because it was less expensive? If it is split in the middle with the two ports next to the "O" being connected and the two next to the "L" being connected, then maybe that will be fine. Maybe the lines on it are purely aesthetic and not an indicator of flow path? I look forward to seeing what it looks like installed and how you found out the flow path works.

CPU from @snakeyes111 finally made it here from Germany. All is well.