Mr. Fox

https://hwbot.org/submission/5304418_ https://hwbot.org/submission/5304441_ | https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/96574037

I know it is not "free" and there is no reason you should incur the expense personally. It is a modest inconvenience for those to enjoy being part of this community. Those who contribute the most will be the ones that run out of space fastest. The whole thing is just a mess. I think the majority of people are not using the ugly stock pigtail and I don't think we have the ability to truly understand numbers or assess fault beyond the flawed engineering of the 12VHPWR connector. If Cablemod did not exist and everyone was using the ugly stock pigtail adapter, it is possible the number of failures would be similar. We don't know what we don't know. All we can do is make assumptions and best guesses and do our best to connect securely and monitor the quality of the connection to be confident the cable is staying fully seated/inserted during normal use. I am using the stock 12VHPWR cable provided by Corsair with the PSU. I thought it was reported that the new design would be backward compatible with existing first-generation 12VHPWR connections, but apparently not.

I have the same problem with images. I have to upload everything to have the image hosted elsewhere, or link images I posted in another forum. I do not believe it is a "Cablemod problem" per se. It seems like it to some people because they are the biggest and at the center of attention, but not based on their QC. The design of the connector is flawed and leads to random examples of melted connections, and the biggest number of them involves the largest aftermarket manufacturer. I think the reason the ugly NVIDIA pigtail adapter is so short is that it minimizes heat with more cables carrying the current most of the length of the circuit and the load is distributed more broadly. I suspect it was designed that way on purpose because it was too late for the Green Goblin to admit it made a terrible engineering mistake after making it the new standard and shipping GPUs that incorporated it. Yeah, as soon as I have a few hours with nothing better to do I am going to bathe these in paint thinner so I can pull the heat sinks off and get them under water. They're 25-30°C cooler under water than they are with a fan blowing on the stock heating blankets. So, the Redmond Retards are gearing up to molest everyone with Winduhz moving to the cloud with a monthly subscription. Knew it was coming, because they're dishonest shysters. Glad I started getting comfortable with Linux some time ago. There is no way in hell I would pay these imbeciles a monthly fee to use their trashy trash OS. They can bob over and kiss my unwashed bobo.

It may not improve the connector enough to matter, but SIG getting involved and calling for a redesign highlights the fact that the original design is flawed and creates an unnecessary degree of risk for melted connections. I personally do not think the brand or connector matters, it's just a garbage design defect that is too small, too weak, and too easy to not be fully seated or work loose over time.

This is only using 1.350V on the memory. Surprisingly, it passed memory tests without errors even though it hit 64°C in the process. I've never seen memory pass stability tests at that temperature. If I overclock the memory more it gets heat-related errors at a lower temperature. I think maybe the sloppy loose tRFC and tREFI might be what allows it to get this hot without erroring out. I know the sloppy timings help it run lower voltage at the sacrifice of higher latency.

No, not interested. Although that would be better than flushing money down the toilet on an Alienware pile of excrement. I understand why some people think SFF is cute. It would need to serve a legit purpose that warrants compromises. Loving it only for its cuteness sucks. Dawid has an entertaining new video involving a Shuttle SFF PC from Amazon.

Well, we answered that question, as Brother @tps3443already knows from our text thread. For the benefit of everyone else... Not only no, but hell no, LOL. HUGE GPU performance hit with PCIe 4.0 X8 versus X16. Fast storage is nice, but not nice enough to sacrifice that. No way, Jose. I will stick with Gen 3 or Gen 4 storage speeds. https://www.3dmark.com/compare/pcie/401976/pcie/401972 For a person that does not really need or care about GPU performance and actually needs fast file transfer speeds more than GPU performance it would be worth it, but that is not me and probably not most people I know that are like me. PCIe Gen 4 NVMe performance is good enough.

My motherboard has PCI Gen 5 built in as well but for some reason Asus didn't make that work. Only the two PCIe x16 slots support Gen 5. The m.2 slots do not, unless maybe you have nothing in the x16 slots and are using integrated graphics LOL. Look at your documentation closely. You have to read the fine print in the Asus documentation to find out they kind of slipped us a Mickey on Gen 5 implementation. That said, I'm totally fine running them at Gen 4 speed. It's not going to make any difference in real world normal use. I think the Bykski blocks come with the backplate as a standard now. Both of mine did. Yeah that's awesome that you have PrimoChill/Bykski USA there. Hopefully you can just walk in and look around and buy what you want and walk out with it. That would be sweet!

I think it is a standard, at least with Award AMI BIOS, and not an ASUS fault. All brands I know of use F8. What would be best is for ASUS to do the right thing like EVGA and provide the BIOS option to always show the BIOS boot priority menu at POST if you want to (like I do) and you don't have to press F8 for that. When you press F8 after that it should take you the Windows Boot Manager menu. Here are the speeds you can expect if you can use it at Gen 5. I can't because I am not willing to sacrifice something else for fluffy SSD benchmark scores. The Apex requires use of the add-in card in the second X16 slot for Gen 5 storage. The M.2 slots on the motherboard are Gen 4. If you install the Gen 5 card in the PCIe X16 slot, then the GPU gets cut down from X16 to X8. How 'bout NO to that. But, the SSD Gen 5 speeds are nice if you don't care about your GPU gets its resources slashed by 50%. [spoiler: T700 review coming soon... stay tuned] That is a Bykski block, or a copy cat counterfeit version of one. Even the letters embossed on it on the right side are a dead-ringers that looks like both of my Bykski blocks. I like my Bykski parts. They're all good... blocks, fittings, RAM jackets... no complaints. You can get Bykski parts from PrimoChill right there in your own back yard. PrimoChill is Bykski USA from what I can tell. Same physical address and web site looks like the same designer. I am assuming they will allow walk-in purchases, but you should check. The G.SKILL 48GB DDR5-8000 kit is a good silicon sample. Much better than the defective 48GB DDR5-7200 kit I RMA'd. I have not taken time to do any tuning myself. This is the profile that brother @tps3443uses with his 7200 kit. Below is the stock XMP profile with the memory clock bumped from 8000 to 8200 (no other changes). So, I am sure there is some wiggle room for performance tuning, especially that sloppy loose tRAS over 100 clocks. I ran my tRAS at 42 clocks at 8200 and 32 clocks at 8000 on the Dark. I'd like to see that down to at least half what the stock value is. 128 seems absurd.

The F8 command takes effect on the BIOS boot selection menu before the hand-off to the OS. After the hand-off to the OS it takes effect on the Windows boot selection menu. In both cases it is "boot selection" menu. If you are getting the BIOS boot menu you are pressing the F8 key one or two seconds too soon. If you have additional boot options items--like another OS or Macrium Reflect Recovery--it will pause on the Windows Boot Manager selection menu for a few seconds. You can set it to "wait for user selection" (my preferred option) and it will sit there forever waiting for you to instruct it what you want it to do. EVGA also has that pause and wait option available for the BIOS boot menu. I really love that feature and always enable it. It shows me all of the Windows OS boot managers and Linux, and bootable USB drives, and the option to enter the BIOS Setup, and waits for me, the Master of the Universe, to render my decree. It is sinful that not every BIOS has the same option available to enable. It should be mandatory to offer that option.

What a stupd person. How do the chosen get away with being so dumb? Windows Update most likely. That's usually when I get the gay blue tiled crap resurfacing. It's easy to fix the boot manager menu at a cmd prompt with admin rights. I'd be more worried about what you can't see that probably got effed up. bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy The SSDs are review units from Crucial. Thus, I will be posting a formal review on them soon.

You choose either NVIDIA or AMD when you download POP_OS iso and it pretty much just installs and everything works as expected. The only real tinkering I have needed to do it make it look acceptable with a GUI that closely resembles Windows. I do not care for Unity desktop environment (GUI) at all. I find most desktop environments that are not aesthetically similar to Windows to be repulsive and won't even try to use them. Pop OS has a slightly tweak version of Unity (Ubuntu) desktop. Gnome can be tweaked and it is not as unfamiliar to use as Unity. Almost everything I have tried on Steam works with installed using Steam's Proton Experimental. Lots of games that are supposedly Windows only have worked extremely well for me on Linux. Titles that are purely DX12 might be a problem. But, most games can use DX11 or Vulkan. I think like one title out of more than a dozen Steam titles that I tested would not work on Linux. Standalone games that are not on Steam and do not rely on a game client like Steam, Epic or Origin, can usually be set up to run using Lutris. Lutris is a Linux game front end for Wine and it works quite well. It was kind of tricky for me to figure out how to use it at first, because I didn't know what I was doing and messing things up. I am far from a Linux expert. There are probably a lot of people here that are. While I probably know more than the average Windows junkie, I am just a hack that figures things out as I go because I'm fed up with the nonsense the idiots at Micro$lop are dishing out and I want an alternative. I definitely don't like Micro$lop anymore and I do not appreciate the bucket of digital filth Windows has become.

That looks pretty awesome. I sure hope they join the ranks with overclocker-focused components. I came very close to buying one of those Bifrost A770s that @electrosoftmentioned. I still want one, but don't need it. Had I not gotten the 6900 XT from you, that Bifrost A770 is what I would have purchased.

Thanks, bro! I like almost all kinds of music, but heavy metal is, without a doubt, my favorite. I find symphonic and Viking metal to be very intriguing, just because they are so different.

I like First Person Shooter games a lot, but I probably play games less than 10 hours a year. I don't usually have time for it, and when I do have time I prefer to spend it benching rather than gaming. Benching is like a game to me. You do not need a 4090 for gaming if you have a 3090, or even a 3080. Certainly nice to have a 4090, but need and nice are often used inappropriately as a synonym. Some people don't recognize that want and need mean two totally different things, LOL.

A good 4090 is nothing short of amazing, but even the cheapest model is a very poor value. All new GPUs are a poor value to be honest. The 4090 is the king of performance and the master of poor value I love my 4090 Suprim, but when I remember that I paid $1800 for it I regret having been so frivolous and unintelligent. We are blinded by our sickness, and that allows them to get away with screwing us. They know that and take advantage of our foolishness.

I believe you are correct and I am expecting good results. Delivery was delayed until tomorrow due to a mechanical failure. I was able to get it stable at 7800 34-44-44-44-42 and 480 tRFC. That is 1000 MT/s more than the Z690 Apex was capable of, but a far cry worse than how well these sticks perform on the Dark mobo. At only 7800 it is still better than most motherboards can do. It is definitely good enough to keep and not RMA, even if it goes into my work PC and the Dark goes back on the open bench. I like it enough and it performs at a level that a replacement might not. I think I am in a good place where I can choose the better of the two for benching as opposed to only having one impressive motherboard and one that is disappointing. I want the RGB to work and be set to white. I like it white. It looks fantastic with white lighting. So I am trying to get the RGB to work right so I do not have to disable it to stop the rainbow vomit circus clown $---show. I will only install Armory Crate on my crash dummy OS that allows Micro$lop cancer updates with a fresh Macrium image ready to fix any mistakes. Putting it on an OS that you want to perform well is a stupid mistake because it won't if you do. It worked once and the next time I turned on my computer it won't load anymore. It opens for like one or two seconds and closes. I am using OpenRGB, but that is extremely risky is you have RGB memory. It can (and often does) brick the SPD on RGB memory modules. It happened to me three times before I figured out what was causing it, and I found dozens of reports of the same on the internet when I begin trying to figure out what was wrong. You have to disable memory RGB sensors in OpenRGB to avoid disaster, and use G.SKILL's software for the memory lighting. I could never get Armory Crate to work on either of the two Z690 Strix mobos or the Z690 Apex. It worked a few times and stopped working on the Z490 Apex. It is sinfully unethical, unprofessional and disrespectful to customers for them to release such a sucky, worthless, broken piece of trash. Their customers deserve to be treated better, but it seems apparent that they do not think so and don't care

Yes. That is true. Kingpin GPUs have binned chips and I believe the OC Lab HOF do as well. You get superior build quality and cherry picked chips, so it is worth the extra money. The bling is just stupid crap that adds cost for children to feel special, even though they are not. Asus should start by fixing all of their broken garbage software. There is not one piece of software for their products that functions correctly. Everything (literally) is broken... Armory Crate, AI Suite, TurboV Core, the original Aura software. They bundled Aura with Armory Crate, made it UWP filth (a very grievous and tragic show of poor judgment) and on top of that it won't even function for most people that try to install it. AI Suite and TurboV Core won't work on any version of Windows 10 past like 1803 or 1909. ASUS software is bloated to a degree that defies the imagination. Armory Crate is probably the most flagrant example of bloated digital feces the world has ever seen. Besides not even being functional most of the time, it adds dozens of background services and more than 1,000 registry keys. It is truly a cancerous piece of malware that you can't even use 90% of the time because it won't launch, LOL. Edit: GPU Tweak still works. I have to give credit for that since I did not. So, "almost all of their software is broken" LOL.

Asus has been an overrated "more bark than bite" poser in the enthusiast space for a few years now. It's unfortunate they they are going to be the only real player left in the game now with EVGA bowing out on motherboards. Galax HOF products, while pretty amazing, are too difficult for most people to acquire due to no direct purchasing access and limited availability to count them in the mix. Galax (HOF) and EVGA (Classified/Kingpin) have been the only two companies demonstrating serious and genuine effort to produce unmatchable superior products for overclockers quite a while. All of their competitors are focused on making gamerboys happy. MSI has the potential to rise to the occasion to bridge the gap. I hope they come out with some really serious threat products equivalent to the HOF and Kingpin brands. The quality of their flagship products is good. I wish they would release a Z790 Unify-X. That is a really killer board. The Suprim GPU is also awesome, although they could have done some more overkill things with it than they did... such as releasing a voltage override tool like the Kingpin and HOF offer. The Unify-X was a "more zing than bling" product that they should be very proud of. The focus on rainbow puke and gimmicky crap is just a smokescreen to obscure mediocrity.

I can guess, but the guesses suggest something untoward and nefarious about reviewers that call garbage good.

On a different note, here is the review I promised. I love this thing. It's awesome. Sabrent 4-Drive NVMe SSD to PCIe 3.0 X4 card (EC-P3X4) Product Review | ExtremeHW Sabrent 4-Drive NVMe SSD to PCIe 3.0 X4 card (EC-P3X4) Review Discussion Thread

The silicon lottery is very real. It affects all brands of motherboards, CPUs, GPU and memory. The G.SKILL 8000 memory I ordered will be here on Friday. The Apex may behave differently with that memory. Delivery got delayed by a day with UPS due to a delivery vehicle mechanical failure. NewEgg in SoCal is usually next day delivery for me. I do not doubt the overclocking capabilities of the Z790 Apex, but it is an inferior product in terms of overall design, build quality, firmware and software support. That said, I am not ready to give up on it yet. The sad reality is EVGA has decided to stop doing motherboards, too. So, ASUS, as unacceptable as I find them to be as a company, is the only real alternative in my mind. That is not a good place to find ourselves in. Returning the Apex and buying a Z790 Dark won't necessarily be ideal because of EVGA's decision to exit the market. With EVGA out of the picture, I'm going to have to get comfortable with plan B. ASUS is plan B. Kind of like my effort to replace Windows with Linux. I tend to be a "rip off the band aid" kind of person. It won't hurt after it stops hurting. Get it over with and not have to fret the tragedy tomorrow holds in store. Embrace the pain now rather than anticipate it, LOL. Z790 offers no tangible benefit over Z690. Intel (by their own admission) added nothing to improve performance. They eliminated Optane support and repurposed the PCIe lanes that were tied up for Optane to support Gen 5, which won't be relevant until Z790 is obsolete. The only reason some Z790 motherboard are better is because the OEMs stopped burning calories on Z690 because they were focused on selling shiny new Z790 motherboards. The Unify X was awesome, but they don't make a current version of it, unfortunately. Gigabyte doesn't offer anything acceptable. Building a better thermal solution might have eaten into profit margin too much. Most consumers won't even notice the PCH is on fire unless they see flames or smell smoke, LOL. Yes, you are correct. The Unify X PCH ran extremely hot. It was easy to address by enabling ASPM in the BIOS so that the PCH chip wasn't running full tilt 24/7 with a lousy heatsink. ASPM being disabled is the new normal. EVGA addressed it with a top notch thermal solution to keep it cool, whereas ASUS and MSI have not. The fact that your PCH is running cooler might be the BIOS settings I am using. When you send me your CMO file to test, it might make mine cool down.

Windows is a terrible mess and getting worse. I would encourage you to explore Linux and use a desktop environment like Cinnamon, as it is the easiest and most closely resembles what you are used to with Windows. Plasma is a close second. A really easy solution is to use POP_OS and then install Cinnamond Desktop Environment if you don't like the POP_OS GUI. (I despise it and won't use a default Linux GUI like Unity. It needs to closely resemble Windows aesthetically or I hate it.) POP_OS is very suited for gaming systems with good AMD and NVIDIA GPU driver support baked in. The developer of POP_OS (System76) is a major Clevo laptop distributor and custom desktop builder. They built POP_OS to be their own in-house OS for the systems they sell, so you know it's going to be good. There are Linux distros that are not free. They generally have a free variant with less support. Red Hat (RHEL) has Fedora, but I think I heard it was going closed source. But, that doesn't matter because what the paid versions do benefits those that are free and vice versa. Running older hardware in your scenario is perfect. Linux mostly has issues with bleeding edge hardware, and I do believe it is because the people that are most influential and involved in Linux development do not have bleeding edge hardware. I also believe most of them are not avid overclocking enthusiasts or gamers, so excelling with those endeavors isn't high on their list of priorities and may not even be within their technical skillset to address. It might take longer before some things function properly if you have the newest hardware available. It took a while before Linux understood my 13th Gen CPU and initially a lot of things like CPU and memory clock speeds were misreported.

Thank you for the kind words. I am humbled by them. I am not special in a way that anyone else could not be equally special, only deliberate and committed to producing the best product that I am mentally and physically capable of producing. It might not be common, but absolutely should be normal or ordinary. It is unfortunate that it is not. I am, indeed, blessed to have had bosses that appreciated my personal sacrifice, commitment and effort. Having had a couple of bad bosses before, I know that not everyone is fortunate enough to have a good boss. There is some truth to the cliché that "people don’t leave bad jobs, they leave bad bosses" but it really does fall on the shoulders of the company. After all, they promoted a "bad boss" and allow an unfavorable culture to exist. The bad boss is merely one of the outward symptoms of a bad company.

OK, got Linux up and running on the Apex. Everything Windows used to be that was right and good. I have a hard time deciding whether I like Cinnamon or Plasma better. They both have their pros and cons. Easily switching between them at will on the login screen is something that sets Linux apart. With the clowns at Micro$lop you get to choose anything you want as long as it is what they want. Control-Freak Gestapo Bastards.