Mr. Fox

Sometimes (often... usually) older stuff is better.

The only reason(s) I bought it are dual memory slots (memory overclocking obviously matters a LOT) and for the SP-rating. It is the only ASUS motherboard that is good at memory overclocking, so it's the only option that makes sense. I struggled with the idea of using my money to purchase anything from ASUS because I despise them as a company. I could have purchased another Z690 Dark for half as much and had a better product, but I want the ability to check SP ratings. In the grand scheme of things that is really stupid and I should know better. That's why I hope it turns out OK. More often than not, I end up less than happy with ASUS products. I've never been unhappy with an EVGA product (yet). Date of manufacture on the label is 3/2023, so about 90 days ago.

@ryanyes, Sabrent SSDs are fine and so is just about everything else they make. I don't remember ever seeing anything they made that was not good. My review is not on those, but on a PCIe add-in card that allows you to install four additional NVMe drives in a single X4 PCIe slot. @Papusanthat is great news. Family being close together is a wonderful thing. My wife and I are blessed to finally have all of our children and grandchildren living here now. No more 1500 mile each way trips to see grandbabies is also welcomed. That sucked.

I received it today. I will probably install it this weekend. If it works well I will be satisfied. It sure is ugly and feels extremely lightweight, flimsy and cheap compared to the Z690 Dark. I don't mind the silver parts, but the white PCB looks kind of goofy. If the Apex performs equal or better, then the Z690 Dark will be going into the be quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 when they send it to me, and it will be my work PC. I sold the 13900KF, 5000D Airflow, Hynix M-die and Strix Z690-E and EVGA PSU to a good friend in New Jersey for the price of the Z790 Apex (literally). For $700 before tax, it had better be good, LOL. I feel really bad for anyone that paid that much for a Z690 Apex. They got screwed real bad. I just pulled the Z690 Apex out of the 5000D and moved the Strix into it. Will do some quick testing to make sure everything works before I ship it out tomorrow or Saturday. He will install his 360MM AIO and 1080 Ti when he gets it. I just finished helping him build a new one with a 7000D Airflow, Z690 Dark, 13900K and 4090 Suprim Liquid X. This one I sold him will be his "work" computer. I am wrapping up a review on the Sabrent 4-NVMe PCIe card (it's awesome) and then I will be starting a review on a couple of the new Crucial Gen 5 2TB NVMe SSDs. The Dark Base Pro 901 is probably still a few weeks out. Will post links to all of them as they are done.

Thanks. I hope it turns out good. I will be happy if it does. I should have it tomorrow.

I have had that happen on some of my older videos. It's really stupid and reflects an unfavorable mindset of the people that do it. They are so concerned about not getting paid for one of their songs playing in an amateur's YouTube video that they block it and file a copyright strike. Those are the kind of "artists" that I boycott. Their lives are guided by greed and they don't deserve to have their music played.

It looks like the video is not available because of some kind of copyright, it's blocked. Isn't that just so silly?

Thanks, brother. I intially placed the order with Provantage. It was listed as "special order" and they came back two days later and told me it is no longer available. It was listed as "backordered" on NewEgg for $50 more than Provantage ($699.99 vs $649.00). I was able to load it into my cart, but not able to purchase using the NewEgg Visa card or PayPal. I input my AmEx card and viola, I was able to complete the purchase. I got an email saying the ETA was unknown and I would not be charged until it shipped, but 24 hours later I have a tracking number for the "sold and shipped by NewEgg" option. I honestly didn't expect that to happen. Delivery is scheduled for Thursday. I'm not even ready for it, LOL. I was hoping the timing would be closer to when the Dark Base Pro 901 is expected. I don't think they are even in retail distribution yet. The ETA on the case delivery is "within the next month or so" at this time. The SP rating is a useful tool. Although not a 100% accurate indicator of a good CPU, still very useful and the belief in its usefulness held by many adds an element of intrinsic value to the brand in spite of their shortcomings in other areas. If not for the SP rating feature, I probably would never purchase another ASUS motherboard. The inconsistency in their QC and warranty practices, and the poor track record I have had with their flagship mobos, gives me a fair bit of anxiety about the purchase (thus my comment about hoping to not regret it). I always feel compelled to have a backup part handy on standby when I am running an ASUS-powered system due to my low confidence in their product reliability. The fact that the more affordable and equally attractive Strix Z690-E 4-DIMM motherboard overclocks as well as the 2-DIMM Z690 Apex (both CPU and memory) paints a pretty grim picture of the amount of effort, or lack thereof, that goes into their insanely expensive flagship motherboards. The EVGA Z690 Dark is much better in nearly every way. The 2-DIMM options are limited and I have no interest in owning an overclocking crippled 4-DIMM motherboard. The Apex and Unify-X are both in the shadow of the Dark, with the Aorus Tachyon being the least desirable of the four 2-DIMM mobo options available for Z690/790 chipsets. I wish the SP rating, and the associated algorithm that calculates it, was not a proprietary feature on ROG motherboards. It would be wonderful (for everyone except ASUS) if you could drop a specific CPU into a ROG, EVGA, MSI or Gigabyte motherboard and have it spit out the same silicon quality score.

*Sigh* Asus, Asus, Asus... what to do with you clowns... Speaking of that, I sure do hope I don't regret this. Sometimes good judgment escapes me and my personal stupidity is undeniable. It has to be better than the Z690 Apex abortion I am using now. I almost bought another Z690 Dark (the smarter idea) but I want the SP-rating capability and 2-DIMM overclocking capability. The Z690 Apex is a generally defective product that just doesn't satisfy my expectations with its lackluster performance. I'm gritting my teeth and crossing my fingers. Just got the tracking number from NewEgg. I am planning to put Z690 Dark inside of the be quiet! Dark Base Pro 901 case when that arrives, retiring the baby-sized Corsair 5000D Airflow that has always been too small to like, and putting the Z790 Apex on the open bench. That is assuming it performs equal to the Z690 Dark, otherwise the Apex will be used on my work computer... TBD. If they perform equally, the Apex is notably smaller and weighs a lot less than the Dark mobo, so it will be easier to manage on the open bench. @tps3443

You know I do. It's only like in my top five best games in the history of games titles. I do not have a 4K monitor.

@RaidermanI think you were interested in this at the good price. It is $49.99 again. https://www.newegg.com/evga-z15-rgb-kailh-speed-silver/p/N82E16823953007

Yes, I remember that post. That is a terrible idea. Make it harder to tell the cable is not properly seated. Stupid people should not be allowed to create anything. DDR5 is very weird in some ways. If I don't get the memory overclock close enough to where it needs to be it causes other weird and totally unexpected problems. For example, if I make the timings too tight it might boot fine, but all of the NVMe drives disappear and are not visible in the BIOS unless I loosen the timings or add more voltage. On the surface it seems totally unrelated. Did you try giving the memory more voltage? Sometimes just a measley 0.050V (50mV) on memory voltage is enough to mean the difference between not working or non-functional and stable.

That would be wonderful (huge lawsuit and recall). I agree the problem is the latch. In the purest sense, the problem is the connector because the chintzy latch is part of it. That's why I suggested the screws. Either solution (yours or mine) would work equally well. Even better, incorporate both larger size and screws so it literally can't come loose. We live in a world where "bright" ideas (that actually aren't) causes solutions to problems that don't exist, or create new problems in the process of fixing an old one. The proverbial cure being worse than the disease. There is no place where this is more apparent than technology. Everyone is in a rush to get rich selling solutions to fake problems or inventing new gimmicks that nobody actually needs. Technology is always interesting, even when the logic behind it is flawed and driven by an irrational agenda.

They should redesign the 12VHPWR connector completely, and stop using clips. If they would use one screw on each side (like an old VGA cable) so the cable CAN'T move until the screws are removed the problem would be solved. The design is inherently flawed. This is NVIDIA's abortion. I agree with Jay's observations and comments in this video. I do not believe the issue is CableMod products. Interesting that 70% of the burned GPUs are from one brand. I do believe CableMod is doing the right thing, even though they technically don't need to. I have a ton of respect for them.

None that I can identify in the past 2.5 years. Government has a knack for breaking and ruining everything. If you want something to get totally effed up, regulate it and put the government in charge of it. It doesn't take long at all for it to get FUBAR'd. When government itself is FUBAR'd then the situation becomes even more desperate. A lot of those in the list seem less than moderately free. They're not China, North Korea or Russia, but not a model that I would point to as being good or desirable. When you have a demented brain trust that embraces the idiotic idea of "new world order" and a "uni-government" or "one world" model, you're going to end up with a global mess and a social, economic and moral crisis that will be broken beyond repair. Back on topic... There is a pretty massive variance in silicon quality among memory modules. I personally think it is worse than CPU and GPU silicon quality variance. I literally cannot find a retail DDR5 kit that functions as well as the cheap generic M-die and A-die modules. Without exception, every fancy new retail A-die kit I have purchased had been inferior and got RMA'd, and that was mostly true with the M-die. That doesn't mean they are all garbage, only that lots of them are and I haven't been able to purchase a good quality retail A-die kit that was worth keeping. It's very discouraging to find so much trash being sold for a premium. The TeamGroup Delta 7200 kit that I have in my work computer is one of the better samples and even that falls about 400 MHz short on its overclocking ability with 100mV more voltage poured onto it. And, the XMP profile has timings that are so sloppy they might as well be programmed for 6800. There is no point in even trying to use them in my benching beast. They're just not cut out for it. (This kit did not get RMA'd because I purchased it used, but it would have been otherwise.) This is what the expensive kits are supposed to do, and so far I haven't purchased one that can. And, it's not due to lack of trying. They're just selling lots of compromised garbage. @Custom90gtdid you get your green sticks yet?

AI + telemetry forms the perfect storm...

I totally get what you're saying, and I agree that what's happening is problematic. It is corrupt and nefarious by design, and a product of wicked invention for sure. But, it's not a legitimate example of free enterprise or a free market. It is an example of an industry that enjoys all of the benefits of operating in such an environment, but abuses the privilege and manipulates circumstances in surreptitious ways to enhance their ill-gotten wealth at the expense of all who are willing to accommodate them.

Yes, totally. They should be required to unlock the bootloader even on brand new devices on launch day. They have no legitimate right to block anything. They can void the warranty if you brick it, but it's otherwise none of their business what happens to it as soon as someone purchases the product. It no longer belongs to them and they should not legally be able to interfere with the use of it, regardless of what that use entails. OnePlus as well as Google phones. That's why I own a OnePlus phone. But, you need to buy a generic one some place like Amazon. If you buy a phone from one of the cellular Nazis like AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile or Sprint it will have their special cancer.

My wife hates it when I state the obvious, but I still do it because I enjoy listening to my own sermons. In case it is not obvious for some reason, I am a ultra-conservative, Christian anarchist that is generally of the opinion that less government in our lives means more prosperity, happiness and healthiness. Government (any government) should exist only to enforce laws enacted by the people and provide a formidable and aggressive military force to protect the freedom of its citizens and the private property owned by them, and control the borders and territories of the nation it is hired to serve. When they assume a right to do anything more than that, it is a servant that needs to be fired, and its rule is an illegitimate, overreaching, derelict government that no longer serves a useful purpose. Our current government is the worst in our nation's history, and the current incompetent and exceedingly corrupt administration is a joke that has made us laughingstock to our enemies and allies. The EU rules its citizens subjects by fiat, and while we aren't there yet, we are headed in that direction. I hope we can stop it before it is too late. Americans used to consider dictatorship an evil form of government. Somehow we have lost sight of that. Probably a symptom of stupidity becoming normalized. Trump was hated and maligned by a minority because he was a wealthy businessman that sought to restore order and had no respect for the uniparty mafia and its media stormtroopers. He, and the majority that support him, still strike terror in the hearts of the uniparty mafia, its zombie sheeple minority, and they are still scrambling to misappropriate taxpayer-funded resources to prevent him from being reelected.

Macrium Reflect image. https://www.techspot.com/downloads/5442-macrium-reflect-free.html

OK, latest beta of HWiNFO64 has a bug. Brother Martin will fix it in the next build. https://www.hwinfo.com/forum/threads/hwinfo-v7-47-5135-beta-released.8970/#post-40604

Yeah, it seems like we can have anything we want as long as we are willing to accept what is being offered and pay more than the product is worth. And, it is starting to seem like almost everything (regardless of who made it or what brand it is) is broken garbage. The tree-huggers can ram the electric cars up their tailpipe. To be blunt, I think EVs are an extremely stupid money-driven gimmick. They add no value and I am not interested in reducing my use of fossil fuels. The US already does more than their part and until all other countries are jumping through the same hoops the idiot environmentalist hoaxes are making us jump through, I'm not willing to lift a finger to contribute to their stupid nonsense. The harder they push, the more I want to drive an older vehicle with a huge, inefficient gasoline or diesel engine, just to spite these idiots. They can kiss my battery shiny hiney.

One of the comments I heard (not verified) is that AMD is more restrictive than NVIDIA in some ways and EVGA historically bucked the system and did things their own way, which was usually better. (Anecdotally, that being one of the sources of friction with NVIDIA.) From my understanding, which may not be accurate, one of the reasons EVGA took so long to release an AMD motherboard was AMD's insistence on trying to control the layout and limiting what is allowed in the firmware. ASUS addressed it by having a very confusing BIOS with standard AMD "features" that potentially creates conflicts along side ASUS's more advanced way of doing things. That sometimes caused unexpected behavior. When EVGA did eventually release an AMD motherboard, the firmware environment and functionality closely resembled what their customers preferred about EVGA's Intel motherboards. Severing ties with NVIDIA, in part, because of their control freak approach to things and artificially limiting performance, made the idea of partnering with AMD like jumping from the frying pan to the fire. My conspiracy theorist nature (that exists because human beings are naturally evil and selfish creatures) causes me to wonder if one of the reasons EVGA bowed out was the 12VHPWR cable being a mandatory NVIDIA design defect. EVGA produced one GPU that used it (3090 Ti). I suspect they saw trouble on the horizon and ultimately decided that they did not want to not be part of that problem.

Time to start shipping the FBI leaders that refuse to answer these questions to Gitmo and waterboard them to extract the truth. The evil clowns protecting our illegitimate, senile, corrupt president and his family of criminals are domestic terrorists and deserve to be treated like terrorists. They should be stripped of their rights as American citizens due to treason and spend the rest of their lives in prison. I know a lot of people don't like Ted Cruz (puzzled why to be honest) but all he does is ask totally legitimate hard questions that the corrupt traitors always refuse to answer. Their job is to serve and protect, and they are an utter embarrassment to our nation.

EVGA just knew how to build GPUs, period.