electrosoft

The A$uS tax is alive and well and even growing..... Top gear MSRP from Asus.... $450+ for an AIO.... $1k+ for a MB.... $700+ for a PSU $3359 for the Astral fits right into that pricing.... MSI is trying hard to be like Asus lately too with their pricing..... Damn right it is..... Still holding onto that SP109 14900KS because I know it can do 59/45/50 all day everyday for gaming on an AIO..... it has my 9070xt capped out in WoW at 1440p quite nicely on the wife's system. I'll probably never let it go and have it drive the wifey's system for quite some time. I might pick up an EVGA Dark Z690 or Z790 to fully complete her "Ode to EVGA" system when they are dirt cheap because I will say having run that 14900KS tuned on a Z790i lightning with TG 8400 DDR5 for quite some time tuned that DDR4 with the same 9070xt is now noticeably inferior even tuned 4000 CL15 or 4200 CL16 tight. --------------------------------------------- Dude is always hustling to sell his bundles or "PC Optimization classes" Monthly fees to join his discord.... Plenty of other tiers: $10/$20/$40/$75 per month $750/yr tier also gets you access to his PC Optimization class.... Or the class on its own for ~$400..... FC 48GB or 32GB DDR5 kits for $500..... $100 "another chance" to get unbanned from the community if you were banned.... MAX fps build lists with affiliated links.... $500 consults on your hardware..... Sheesh, dude is probably making a killing. Expect merch sooner than later on top of it. Still watch his videos though.... 🤣

Which config did you go with? That thing looks like the Alienware 18 on steroids! I didn't know about the G4 BS for 2DPC Ultra laptops....yuck. Yeah, not doing backflips over the gpu score. Problem is Acer (yet again) went with a lower power variant. Temps are.....ok on the GPU but the performance is not great overall. It is going to chug at native resolution though 1600p is going to bury it. It is meant for 1080p with modern games. There is a lot of bloatware installed so I'll be giving it a clean install to wipe all that away. To make your image post, use the "Direct Link" option to copy and paste.... Here is a "cold" run first on boot with the Acer. Unlike your system with a wide variance, ALL my cores are within 10c of each other (88c-98c) with most of them pegged at 98c both E and P cores. So for your system it looks like a heatsink/thermal application issue definitely. First run ~33k still around 145w cap: by the third run, score is down to 26k and falling....

@1610ftw had a chance to run this 16" Predator Helios through some quick paces and you'll feel better (or not) to know it is a monster throttling hotbox too with the 275HX testing with CB23 thermal throttling and only scoring 31752 pulling ~145w hitting 101c..... Mobile 5060 scores lower than my old mobile 3070ti in the NH55. The Acer users the 85w 5060 variant. Not sure how I can reconcile the OLED 2560x1600 resolution with a 5060 in there.....

I like how Daniel readily admits the 5090 is the worst of the worst value wise (it is by far), but I also see the argument when you're in the 5080/5070ti segment of the market. Using MSRP, the difference is 33% not 56% vs ~15% performance difference. Basically, if you can't afford or won't pay the outlandish price of a $2k+ 5090, you either get a 9070xt/5070ti or if you want the absolute best not called a 5090 or overpriced 4090, you suck up the law of diminishing returns and get a 5080. It's funny how everyone screamed bloody murder when the 4080 was $1199.99 MSRP, but some how this time around AIB prices inflated upward and it was ok for months on end due to demand. Prices will continue to seesaw up and down (more up when able) until consumers simply stop buying on a lot of these cards. I'm perfectly content with a 5080FE/5080 priced at $999 along with a 5070ti at $749 and 5070 at $549. I went over this before. Same or lower pricing and better performance than last gen with more features. I'm not happy with the price bump of the X090 FE series from $1599 to $1999. That's sleight of hand robbery and the AIBs are flat out robbing you with a gun to your face. Still boggles my mind people are paying $1750 for Astral 5080s.....

I know intel is struggling, but their GPU department and in certain markets the Ultra CPUs are also bringing the heat. Just that quick, Intel caught up to AMD in the handheld market with the Ultra 7 258V trading blows with the Z2 Extreme and overall matching it.... I still stand by my assessment if you remove gaming from the mix (and even then it is a decent gaming chip), the Ultra series are damn good. Tuned up, and they game really decently too.

Long time no see! How ya doing bro! Agreed, 5080 is absolutely not an upgrade in any way, shape or form over the 4090. Only path forward is a 5090. I just need it closer to $2k to make my common sense switch move to the "off" position. It flicked back on with the Astral just in time.... Yeah, those temps are crazy high for only pulling 142w unless you got the worse silicon sample known to mankind.... Refresher, here is my Alienware 18 pulling 170w and topping out at 68c: I do have an Acer Predator 16s Helios 275hx + 5060 for eval that arrived a few last Friday I just cracked open for comparison but that core differential is not normal unless like I said you ended up with a dud CPU sample. I know @win32asmguy was pulling over 200w in his unit. @Talon what is a sample spread on your desktop 285k? While voluntary, one thing I do like about Steam Survey is it just asks permission to scan your hardware to participate. It isn't self reporting which would greatly skew the data. AMD has stated several times they can't keep up with demand with the 9070xt so while Steam is one very large valid metric due to established users, we must entertain other reasons why AMD isn't showing up while also accepting Nvidia owns 93% of the overall PC gaming market as a harsh reality. Hopefully AMD keeps plugging away and chipping away at Nvidia like they did Intel and now look at Intel? In the tech sector, not innovating and resting on your laurels will leave you with the fishes. When Apple abandoned them back in 2020 I knew they were in trouble after refreshing skylake to death but behind the scenes I guess we didn't realize how bad things were slowly going. Alderlake was a breath of fresh air, but then it was back to super hot and heavy CPUs with no real innovation and just adding e-cores for another 2+ years while AMD continues to innovate and then we got Arrowlake which while it may not be a gamers delight is NOT a bad chip design and still games well enough. Novalake HAS to deliver......Intel has one last gasp to be relevant.... I would never have guessed Intel would be in this position 10 years ago wow..... For social media steam stuff, I don't really participate in any of that and kept myself hidden at all times.

There is no meaningful benefit but there are personal benefits mainly overclocking and playing with new hardware which I have no problems embracing along with games. I have three categories of hardware: #1 Personal enjoyment (Play hard, eventually sell trying not to bleed too much) #2 Work/Money makers (Work, write offs, covered ) #3 Both (Best of both words if possible) Think about how much you will save simply by having waited this long. It is mind boggling to think this card was up to MSRP $3200 at one point and people bought it. They have to be kicking themselves just a bit having overpaid $800+tax. If I had held onto that Astral, I would be eating myself up inside at this point. 🤣 I'm holding strong after the Astral debacle because I know a 5090 is a pure play toy for me. If it drops to $2200 or below especially with a good priced open box around $2k, I might jump back in. At $2400 + S&H, that's $2572.84 after tax which is closer to 3k than 2k and still 33% more than I paid for my 4090 Liquid. This 5080 for $825 makes it hard to stomach paying 3x more for ~50-60% more performance but...BUT as that price inches closer to $2k, it becomes basically a straight swap for my 4090 Liquid sale price and I'm probably going to dive back in.....🙃 Since it is $2399.99, I expect some open boxes to adjust down to $2159.99 (10% off) or lower.... If this is the bottom of the barrel for pricing, I'm more than content to carry on with my 5080. Wife is absolutely blown away with the 9070xt as she's reached that silky smooth level of performance and display capped more often than not even fully opened up to 4k max RT max at 1440p.

I think the 9070xt is an absolute banger of a card for MSRP. I really expected more market penetration to be honest. Hopefully that changes but the sheer domination of Nvidia in gaming which has just grown since the 3000 series is downright scary. I opted to keep the 9070xt to keep it in the family and return the 5070 I like it that much. Still my recommended card for WoW up to a 5070ti and depending on system and cost even vs a 5080 for WoW. Unfortunately it just doesn't bring the heat in Fallout76 compared to Nvidia. X3D+Nvidia rules the roost for Fallout76. I would have stuck the 9070xt if I hadn't had the chance to pick up an MSI Shadow OC 5080 for $825 shipped to my door. Having a blast with the Astral vbios for benching. ------- Speaking of falling prices, Zotac 5090 Solid OC $2399.99 new out the door on Newegg: Considering launch MSRP was $2261.99 and this card at one point was $3200 MSRP we're heading in the right direction. It's only ~6% over launch MSRP.....

I would be all over a 9950X3D on steriods with dual X3D..... Are you really comparing a single german retailer which moved ~2k GPUs total in that list versus the Steam established user database of 132 million monthly active users and ~69 million daily users? Really? 🙂 Even accepting not everyone participates in the survey, still.... common man! 🤣

Looking at the Steam July survey data, Windows 11 absolutely dominates Windows 10 ~60% to ~35% 16GB wins with ~42% but 32GB is gaining speed with ~35% 6 and 8 core CPUs dominate the chart with ~29% and ~25% respectively As for GPUs.... The only other desktop GPU that comes close to the 4.44% of the 3060 (which went UP +0.02%) is the 4060 with 4.20%. 9070 and 9070xt have yet to gain enough traction to not be classified as "other" Highest rated discrete AMD GPU? 6600 with 0.88%...... 🫢 Intel ARC finally getting its own listing at a whopping 0.25% but zero discrete variants.... Meanwhile 5070 (1.28%), 5080 (0.62%), 5070ti (0.60%), 5060 (0.57%), 5060ti (0.56%) and 5090 (0.21%), have all made enough penetration on Steam to have their own percentage listings with the 5070 dominating every other GPU in the 5000 class. ------------------------------- I spent the last several days running tests between the 5080 and 9070xt and with the newest drivers on both, I'm switching back to Nvidia. The newest Nvidia drivers are much smoother, getting better fps and fixed the sporadic RT issues. A lot of that lower threshold chunk is gone so I'm sticking with the 5080 for now. $825 was a KILLER price with a bang for buck that crushes everything in sight including 5080/5090FE pricing and being able to run the Astral 450w vBIOS makes up for the 5080FE Fail not being able to cross flash vBIOSes on the FE cards. The transition in motion. MSI 5080 to my system and now my 9070xt to my wife's to replace her 5070FE and the 5070FE goes back to BB tomorrow. She also gets a clean install and recert on her components. With the 9070xt, her display will spend its time locked at its max 165hz 1440p in WoW. I'll turn RT off to basically leave her running silky smooth everywhere capped out. I was going to upgrade her PSU, but I forgot I had put a Seasonic 1000w in there a few years ago.... 9070xt will be running on the wife's tuned SP109 14900KS @ 59/45/50 on air as always. Chip is a beast and running just as well as it did when I picked it up over a year ago tuned properly for AIO duty.

Was fortunate enough to pick up a used MSI Shadow 3x OC 5080 for $825 shipped. Currently running the Asus 5080 Astral vBIOS. Zero coil whine again. I'm seriously starting to think it is the triplite + 1600w EVGA I installed at the same time in August 2022 that is helping out more than I realize. The odds of scoring ~12 GPUs in a row both AMD and Nvidia tested with various MBs and CPUs in the mix all producing low to no coil whine can't be a massive streak of luck. 🤔 It's pulling more and scoring more in WoW and fps have gone up by ~17% in my testing spot (that's good for anything not a 5090) vs 5080FE at launch: 5080 FE at 99% 4k Ultra max scoring ~122fps stock launch drivers: MSI 5080 Shadow 3x OC running Astral 450w vBIOS stock 577 drivers scoring 143fps: Driver refinements also adding in too. I could always install launch drivers and see how they compare to really differentiate the two.

3090 vs 4090 vs 5090.... that 3090->4090 uplift was crazy but 5090 is still good too.... @Talon Jarrod really loves the Acer Predator Helios 16S 275hx + 5070ti ...... 🤣 5070ti is capped to 115w as is the CPU to ~95w and a 230w PSU tops comes with it. It scores lower across the board vs similar, bigger, stronger versions of that same combo. Curious to see what the 5060 version has in it and what it is capped to on the GPU when it finally arrives.

Happy anniversary @Papusan! You are right, time does fly by. 35 years is a wonderful milestone! Slow down and smell the roses and enjoy every day with your loved ones.

This is exactly what I was implying/asking in one of my posts. What changed? It went from serious restrictions to a personal meeting with Jensen at the white house to even less restrictions on Nvidia than even the Biden era and trump literally singing Jensen's praises at an AI summit. What changed?

Agreed, MSI 4k panel just ended it for me along with apparently a poor panel overall. The IPS panel on their lesser model seems to be better. The $5k sticker price also is a deal breaker and like he found out in the review, the fans can have a mind of their own and are aggressive. ECO Mode helps a bit though. In the overall scheme of things, we're talking not much of a difference between the 4090 and 5090 mobile when the CPUs are allowing a last gen GPU to catch up and make it a wash with a current gen GPU. Hopefully the OC options on the Alienware will be decent or at least enable XTU. I agree. I still very much like Jarrod's reviews and he's my go to for laptop reviews now hands down. It was just that instance of most likely OEM/Intel pressure or restrictions causing him to eliminate any 7945HX3D gaming results in his comparisons because he did include 7945HX3D results in his other graphs just not gaming.

X3D laptop dominance overall on average at 1600p: When you have the 7945HX3D + 4090 basically matching non X3D + 5090 laptops in gaming and then winning 1% lows against all of them accept the 9955HX3D + 5090 model. Again, it makes sense why Jarrod conveniently omitted 7945HX3D results numerous times when testing the 5090 models for gaming benchmarks. I asked a few times why with no response....I lost a lot of respect for him about that. He's right about the keyboard on MSI's though. Steelseries is average at best. I greatly preferred the NH55 keyboard and the Alienware keyboard Then again, I think Apple's Macbook Pro Mx 16 series of keyboards are garbage too.

I'll take a look later when I get a chance to really play with it hopefully sooner than later. Not really sure it needs any type of repaste atm but we will see. For example, just recently had the chance to meaningfully put the Raider through the ringer from top to bottom with the new July BIOS and newest MSI Center to get the fans under better control but it may need a repaste/PTM because the CPU runs pretty toasty. On the other hand, this Alienware is running ice cold in comparison. Even in full overdrive mode pulling as much as it wants, it caps out at ~170w, temps cap out at 68 and it scores 38368. Compare that to the Raider w/ a 285k out of the box needing some love. Overheating like crazy, pulling 200w+ and only scoring ~35k in R23. Could be cooling, TIM and a bit of silicon lottery at play on my end. Timespy balanced with fans not even really reving up CPU topped out at 80 pulling ~102w and GPU topped out at 62c pulling 175w. Real test is when I settle in for an extended session of WoW and FO76 where I expect the Raider to beat it clearly in WoW and flat out trounce it in FO76 because of X3D and FO76 ideal combo is X3D + Nvidia. I would need overheating/high temps to even want to repaste with the temps I'm getting. Running in balanced and gaming, I am just gobsmacked at how quiet it is even with the 5070ti pulling 175w. Just seems odd that before recently meeting with trump, trump wanted to break up Nvidia, enforce pre-existing restrictions from the previous admin (which was an addition to his term one restrtictions) and add more down the line. But after the meeting? Singing his praises, lifted pre-existing H20 AI restrictions and is buddy buddy with him including at a recent AI summit....why is that? So which is it right now in this scenario? Is Jensen the problem? trump the problem? both? Maybe a bit too much anti-china sentiment? It isn't logical or objective thinking to think you can just shut down a country economically with a blunt instrument like China which is massive. Looking at Jensen's background, he barely spent any meaningful time in Taiwan before moving out of the country with his family as a child. I wouldn't attack him on his upbringing or origins, but corporate greed? That's fair game.

Looking around this Alienware's BIOS and it looks like it has some overclocking functionality. I flipped the switch to see if it was enabled and it is so that's the next fun time seeing how stupidly cool this CPU runs even in overdrive mode. Dial in the CPU and AB and see where this modest 5070ti (aka 4080) can go. No option to disable BIOS updates (just option to disable downgrades), so for now I'll have to put a stop to that through update settings.

I've been dual booting for years now with originally RH and then mint and using Kali as needed for work. I prefer a pure Windows environment when needed and a pure linux environment as needed but I can see also using Linux primarily and Windoze in a VM too. Point is to use Linux whenever possible IMHO and WIndows whenever necessary.

I agree. I had their old chunky black models years ago and tablet mode was the way to go with Windows 8. I then tried a Surface Pro 7 back on 2020 and it was better but still nowhere near the seamless perfected iOS (now iPadOS) at the time. So five years pass and I'm test driving the Surface 12 2025 and first thing I look for is its "tablet mode" and it's not there so now it just feels like an odd Windows laptop that can't run a crapton of software out there. On it's own, it is just like I said "clunky"

Good 9955HX3D vs 275HX shootout. As expected, X3D is a beast. Figures considering 7945HX3D w/ 4090 is beating 5090 equipped systems in gaming benchmarks on the regular to the point Notebookreview AND Jarrod conveniently omitted the results from their 275hx 5090 initial reviews. Jarrod has done it multiple times now. I'm sure they'll be back for his 9955HX3D reviews 🙄 Their 275HX is getting 39603 at ~210w in CB23 but those are some great temps at 78c. @win32asmguy what are you getting in R23?

Intel needs something for a 2025 refresh...... On the other hand, this is classic Intel seeing as the 12900KS, 13900KS and 14900KS were all just binned chips with slightly higher clocks.... Might as well call this Ultra 9 285KS Edition.... @tps3443 was thinking of shunt modding his Acer Predator 4090 18" Maybe this will push him over the edge to truly unleash the beast to see where it lands in comparison?

Alienware pulling 175w on 5070ti GPU in Balanced mode: Alienware pulling ~170w CPU in Overdrive mode:

Yeah I watched this last night. I absolutely refuse to use Armory Crate. Last time was on the wife's system and pure laziness setting it up decided to give it another chance. She kept getting stutters and freezing in games and random BSODs. It was a clean install and the only difference was Armory Crate. I removed it and everything went back to working like normal. I installed it again as a test and the crashing and game issues returned. This was with as minimal of an install as I could get on there for RGB controls. I ended up just nuking the whole thing again and used SignalRGB and smooth sailing since. You definitely need AWCC to control the power modes. Balanced is king. CPU is almost to max and the 5070ti pulls 175w. I didn't even know a 5070ti could be rated this high. I thought it was 140w. In Overdrive mode the CPU pulls 170w+ and the GPU drops down to 140w. Everything just stays so cool. Hardware wise, Dell knocked it out the park this time but I agree with the forced updates. I'll have to check to see if there is an option in BIOS to disable BIOS updates. The redesigned AWCC isn't that mad or intrusive. What is intrusive is all the other Dell custom software crammed on there as always. The 5070ti in there performs like a 4080 mobile even down to the benchmarks. I used an Asus Strix 18 with a 13980hx in it and a 4080 before so performance is good. It can't touch the MSI A18 Raider's 23k+ 4090 Timespy with it's 18k+, but still gets it done. I wish they offered an 18" version of the Hydroc. I see it will have a 9955HX3D option soon which is nice! I expect the 9955HX3D to come in like the 7945HX3D and rule the roost..... 9955HX vs 275HX is a wash. Both are fantastic mobile chips:

Usually antagonizing and/or inflammatory post, even steeped in some truth, are frequently removed. Sometimes you have to know your audience and think about what you're saying and how it is presented. I say this not even knowing exactly what you posted 😁