Mr. Fox

You can usually tell by the part number on G.SKILL, but the speed is also a dead give-away in most cases. The rated XMP speed is a reflection of the capability of the memory IC. So, you won't see Micron or Samsung memory kits above 6000-6200 because that exceeds their normal functional capabilities. It is almost guaranteed that above 6200 is SK Hynix M-die or A-die. Anything in the 6400-6800 range is SK Hynix, usually M-die up to 6400. Above 6400 usually Hynix A-die. Samsung can generally be speed rated up to about 6000. Below 6000 it could be anything and it really doesn't matter what it is because you're shopping for cheap parts and don't care about overclocking or performance tuning in the low-budget product category. There is that point of possible overlap in the 6000 realm. TeamGroup Delta is SK Hynix and they advertise that is the ony IC they utilize.

If maxing out the frequency is not the objective or the platform prevents it, M-die is actually better because you can run it with tighter timings than what is possible with A-die. Especially tRFC (in the low and mid 400's) and tCKE (in low single digits, like 5 or 6).

I am not 100% positive, but I do not believe that EXPO has anything to do with the brand of the IC. I believe it is an AMD standard like XMP is for Intel. If I am not mistaken, EXPO means it has an "AMD XMP profile" available in the SPD that is optimized for AMD. I think you might find memory modules with an EXPO profile using Micron, Samsung or SK Hynix ICs on them. Samsung B-die DDR5 performs well and is stable up to around 6000-6200, maybe even 6400 with golden sample memory chips. SK Hynix is preferred due to the much higher memory overclocking capacity, like 7200 and higher, that it offers.

When the reviewers are all calling foul it is definitely a time you want to pause and pay close attention. It is either true and the product is garbage that should be avoided; or, they are all part of a very carefully orchestrated conspiracy intended to cause harm to the subject under review, or its manufacturer. This is highly unlikely in the context of a product review. If that many say it is no good, or a poor value, then it is probably true. They have a lot to risk personally by presenting the unvarnished truth. Probably to an even greater degree with what they present in a negative light because--whether it is true or not--they want to portray an image of unbiased professionalism. Without that they have nothing to offer anyone. In a political or social popularity scenario where we find self-anointed thought police with an agenda, the latter is entirely possible or maybe even highly likely, because success of the agenda itself, not public opinion about the messenger, is the end game.

The markets, and those competing in them, continue to shrink. That unfavorable condition relieves the players of the need for need for urgency or feeling of obligation to produce something better or of more excellent quality than their competitors. This is especially problematic when they have no competitor. It's not really a monopoly. It is merely a situation where nobody else is interested in participating. That is sad and scary for anyone buying the product. I consider most reviews (written or video) to be largely entertainment content, not entirely different than the talking heads that like to think of themselves as journalists and news casters. I accept the entertainment on face value and decide what, if any, of the information contained in the review is worth being noted or counting as fact. More often than not the "news" or "review" is a presentation of personal bias surrounded by bits of information carefully assembled in such a manner as to manipulate the opinions of those attempting to digest what they have just read, watched or heard. The information I value the most is the negative or obscure details that are conveniently omitted by the mainstream because they would adversely impact the agenda they are peddling. We see this constantly in the technology realm, as much or maybe even more than the political and social realms. Professional reviewers do not want to have to find a new way to make money or receive free products that somebody might like to have. They're smart enough to know they won't be asked to review more products if they expose all of the flaws or take a critical view of the products they are provided for review. That's why I don't do beta product testing for Dell/Alienware any more. They wanted validation more than objective criticism and attention drawn to defects. They never said that, but it was obvious when the products stopped coming when the defects were identified, called out as such, and well documented. Probably selling at a loss, and writing off the loss on taxes, to eliminate the liability of having products rot on warehouse or store shelves. The longer the inventory stales, the lower its value falls. Taking a small loss now is better than a large loss later. Or, perhaps an inaccurate representation of profit margin being smaller than it actually is. Or, maybe some of both.

@tps3443is correct. The Z690 MEG Unify-X was, and still is, truly amazing. I wish they would have released a Z790 version of it. I think the bottom line is they probably decided they did not need to, for the following reason(s): Z790 doesn't bring anything new that is worthy of mention. Intel eliminated Optane support that hardly anyone cared about, and freed up the PCIe lanes for PCIe 5.0, which nobody benefits from currently. It's a new feature with no practical application. There was zero performance improvement with Z790, except to the extent that OEMs diverted their efforts toward selling the new product. The chipset doesn't offer anything in terms of performance enhancements (per Intel). Z790 boards are better purely as a result of the OEMs burning calories on their shiny new mobos. MSI is not focused on the overclocker market. They are a gamer brand first and foremost. The Unify-X still overclocks memory better than 99% of the high end motherboards on the market. It smokes 4-DIMM mobos. I wish MSI would get more in tune with the overclocking crowd. With EVGA leaving the niche, ASUS is really the only serious player at this point. With no competition in that realm, ASUS is more likely to get worse, not better. The Gigabutt Tachyon is a piece of garbage. It is only a smidgen better than the defectively engineered Z690 Apex. If my understanding is correct, it maxes out between 7600 and 7800 with good A-die samples. So, actually that is more than a smidgen better than Z690 Apex, but not in the same league as the Z690 Dark, Z790 Dark or Z790 Apex. I do blame them, and that is appropriate. The issues I had were not brand-specific. Some brands were worse than others, but the issues were widespread and totally AMD's fault. Some brands managed to minimize the issues through their own efforts, while others elected to ignore the AMD flaws and it was left up to AMD to try to fix their mistakes. And, AMD didn't really fix anything. 65K Cinebench R23 score and 700W+ power draw, while thermally limited by air cooling. Imagine this on chilled water or LN2.

I used to have that issue frequently with the X570 Crosshair. It is very frustrating. Between that, the USB drop-out issue and having to turn off the PSU off and on again about a third of the time before the board would power on I felt like I was going to lose my mind. How much of that was attributable to AMD or ASUS incompetence I will never know.

She is, indeed. Interesting video to go with the song. Sometimes hitting rewind is good.

Definitely not good. That one post gives me nightmare flashbacks about the Z490 Apex that died and destroyed my cherry 10900KF when it went belly up. This one is kind of stating the obvious, LOL.

Same. No issues at all after years of torture. It's just horrible that EVGA is basically giving up on their niche. I am really disappointed about it beyond words. While I am most satisfied with the Apex, I think there is a good chance I will end up sticking with the Dark K|NGP|N for overclocking. It seems better. The Apex takes more voltage and run hotter, and seems less stable at higher frequencies. They are very close, though. Luumi thinks so, too... @ 11:42

That last one is for @Papusan

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.