electrosoft

I like your nuclear option logic, "If we dial it all in, push everything to the wall even if it is going fukushima then it can compete and blast a 7800X3D" 🤪 The way the 7000 series uses memory and how the 5000 series uses memory especially for gaming is much different this time around. Before, you could almost set even 3200 CL20 with a 5800X3D and it was so cache focused/dependent that scaling it up to 3600/3800 CL15 did not net much in terms of gains and if instructions / data fell outside of the cache performance would plummet where 10th and 11th scaled like a bat out of hell and ran consistent. 7000 can actually scale well with frequency but moreso with tighter timings much better than 5000 so if you're going to "tune" Intel you "tune" AMD too. Will it scale as well? Nope, but where it does scale it takes advantage. Maybe take a look at the OCN 7000 X3D forums especially domdtx's work (resident AMD gaming tweaker who was also bringing the heat with his 5800X3D and 5950X rigs) and you will be surprised at how much AMD can scale with overclocking, memory frequency scaling and tight timings along with gaming benchmarks. Newsflash, AMD has "golden" chips too! 🤣 After having run my own tests, you will literally have to pull together an outlier setup for Intel to consistently match AMD's X3D chips if that. This is on average as there will always be games that favor each CPU. While I don't have your binned 14900k and setup, my 13900ks 8000 tuned 5.7 and it was able to hang in there overall. I didn't even get a chance to tune my 7950X3D yet but did use my 6000 tuned A-die settings and the 13900ks was fighting hard to get that WoW win (where it naturally shines) and was just decimated in Fallout 76. I mean trounced. The immediate take away vs the 5800X3D was seeing so much scaling and improvement in gaming runs dialing in the memory and running proper 1:2:3 sync. To me, 13th and 14th gen are tweaker chips paradise 🙂 and OOB vs OOB AMD really has the lead so there is this misnomer that X3D chips "rule everything" which is false if you know what you're doing. Once you really start dialing in each platform things get much MUCH tighter and competitive in a good way. If you need a chilled/dd, hand picked 14900K ultra tweaked 8400+ DDR5 pushing 5.9+ uncapped 13th/14th gen chip to beat AMD sometimes, is that really a win? (I'm ribbin' ya here bud!). I still might pick up a 14900KS though. 🙂

Bro, you crack me up. 🙂

That is atrocious in every way possible and might be one of the worst 14900k chips I've ever seen.

Arctic, like all companies, follow the money and what buyers want and the bean counters must have seen their RGB AIOs were selling well enough to the point to "extend and embrace" RGB even moreso in their AIO line up. I'm ok with RGB but outside of targeted builds, I do not go out of my way to light up my case like the 4th of July. All I've heard are good things about Kryonaut Extreme. I tended to shy away from them ever since that run of bad Kryonaut batches along with just being outclassed by other pastes but I might have to give them a try again.

I'm a hustla baby! MSI sponsored video sends him a whole bunch of items. He opts to personally keep the case (which he was fawning over at CES) and 1300w PSU for his own custom build (and future review video to satisfy sponsors). Other items bought by discord members. Hawks his custom binned memory kits he will have up for sale (and used in the review). "Game recognizes game and you're looking awfully familiar" -JayZ

I went through some of these issues back in January 2023 before AMD broke their drivers even more for WoW and you could kinda get it going for testing in DX12. For AMD, the microstutters are more prevalent in DX12 titles but they seem to have DX11 overall on lock except for, well, WoW. I found the fix was to lock power, clear cache and cap fps in RT and have M$ power plan set to high power / max performance along with a minimal (drivers only) install and nuke as much low power state BS as possible (That's what that registry mod does). That stupid defaulting to low power sleep states has been around for years. I remember it with my 5700xt and nuking it. In AMD's defense (sorta), I had no problems in Fallout 76, Hogwarts, Diablo IV and more once all the above steps were taken. Well, hopefully third time is the charm but as this won't be targeting WoW, that will remove a lot of the issues. I will be installing and testing WoW of course though and see how it is 3-4 months removed from my MSI 7900XTX and 12+ removed from my XFX 7900XTX. I can't remember the last time I picked up a white GPU though. Mix it up and go for something different. I also know it will fit in the Cougar Dust 2 ITX case while every >=330mm GPU will not (as I found out with the MSI 😞 ). Yeah, if a 14900KS is on the horizon this is what started to happen with the 13900k and 12900k later cycle chips. Just garbage bins with a few bright spots here and there. The problem is they have juiced this node so much that there are truly garbage chips passing as "ok" even moreso. So many SP92/93 chips or even SP95 chips with 1.504 6ghz vids and the SP scores are only being pumped up by better E-cores. What does the V/F curve look like? How's the 5800mhz? Your luck, it will have a lights out awesome IMC. 🙂

State of World of Warcraft running on AMD cards, particularly 7000 series: AMD forums: https://community.amd.com/t5/drivers-software/crashing-with-world-of-warcraft/m-p/647797 Blizzard forums: https://eu.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/video-driver-crash-in-world-of-warcraft-with-amd-video-cards-7900-xtx-on-directx-12/475734/262?page=2 Still a hot mess crashing left and right as always. It has been 13+ months since I first started testing 7900XTX cards in WoW, and the problems have actually gotten worse! Two things: This 7900XTX I picked up is not for WoW I played tonight for 3hrs on my 4090 and smooth as butter as always.

Nitro+ and Asrock Taichi 7900xtx are my two favorites hands down this generation If price is no object and I'm picking completely on cooling, PCB and design but just about every 7900xtx card is good except for a few with known hotspot issues (Asrock 7900xtx Phantom, Powercolor Red Devil early batches come to mind). Reference cards can run rather toasty but they are very compact. I ended up picking up a used Powercolor Hellhound Spectral White 7900XTX from a really trusted seller over on the OCN forums (I've purchased from him numerous times now) for several reasons: The price ($740 shipped) <---most important I wanted an all white or white leaning theme for this build as it will be a mecha/Robotech type build. It is one of the smaller 7900XTX cards in length (320mm) It is one of the quieter models under load Everybody I've asked who has had one (black or white) has hit 3000mhz no problem And lastly, it is a 2x PCI-E lead card and it will be going into an ITX build with a case and SFF PSU that only has two leads. This is now my 5th AMD card (6600XT, 7900XTX, 7900XTX, 6700XT, 7900XTX) and third 7900XTX.... AMD ME 🤣

Glutton for punishment update: So I purchased another 7900XTX..... ....it will be here next week. I'm sorry. 🤣

lol 4080 Super > 3090 so it is a move up just not as BIG of a move. 🙂 As for AMD, who ever said AMD has no security problems? That's the Apple faithful who beat their chests about Apple security and when it is compromised they cry, "OUTLIER!!!" 🤣

LOL....I'll believe that when I see it! With your love of performance and pushing max everything, I can't see you moving to an AIO for your main rig like.....ever. I'd take some of that action lol. If MCSP is establishing a baseline IMC voltage requirement, at what memory frequency/frequencies is that used for testing? If their testing caps at lets say 7200, it quickly loses its efficacy pushing higher frequencies especially 8000+. If they go in there and cap out at even lower frequencies (5600/6000), then it really would be more useless than it already has shown to be in many cases. Less burden on the IMC can correlate to less SA voltage requirements.

I still haven't played Starfield yet. I am giving it the CP2077 treatment and waiting a full 6 months+ for patches galore as we've already seen a ton of improvements since launch. I got D4 from a promo when I picked up an RTX card but other interests pulled me away but I do plan on getting back to it. I'm sitting on a level 28 Druid.

I wouldn't keep an SP98 if it's my hard earned money buying it. I'd want an SP100+ and prefer an SP102+ but as you say DD/Chiller can close the gap on a lot of variance but using that logic I guess even an SP93 is a keeper since you're going to pop the top and chill it down lol.

Ouch, hope this doesn't turn out like your rash of bad luck a year or two ago when you had multiple parts die and we all put distance between ourselves and you so the bad juju didn't transfer. 🙂 With a 14900KS possibly on the horizon, you could have waited but I don't know if I could sit there and stomach a dead system due to a CPU. With the 14900k binning as it has been, pray for an SP100+ chip, expect a sub SP100 that will be worse than your SP117. Things get decent >=SP102+ for 14900k chips. MC ratings have routinely proven to be the most unreliable for 14th gen.

Hopefully it boots in another system. In that scenario, I think I'd prefer the motherboard to be faulty not the CPU as the motherboard still has the MFG warranty on it. At least it wasn't the SP117 golden chip. Good luck!

I've been there before lol... I think that's one reason I've asked to go get a standard 360mm/480mm AIO to come back to reality in the past and watch some of your chips come crashing back down to earth. 🙂 The only way you will truly know how your chip stacks up under completely normal conditions is to run it as such and not outlier setups with chilled water / custom loops and delided/DD. You're a lot closer this time around @tps3443 having not delidded your chip (yet) but you're still running on custom water chilled. Plunk down $100-150 and keep a 360mm/480mm AIO around for a reality check. An added bonus is you can also compile "real world / normal" results to pit against your chilled awesomeness. You would have a whole set of "OOB on a standard AIO" before vs "Chilled / DD" after (and all the progression steps in between). You would show not only good samples of silicon but how they shine in every scenario. Heck, pick up a couple of air coolers too to really flesh out the results! In summary, there's just no way you can downplay the importance of custom / chilled water in any capacity when presenting benchmarking runs. It really is a game changer. I wouldn't mind seeing a return to that look again! I love the grey metal and that black back ground for the MSI logo with the red. They can update and use this design anytime!

This. @tps3443 actually run OCCT, chiller off, water normalized to room temp, auto/default voltage (literally reset the MB) and see what the SP107 nets you.

"Those extreme clocks appear to come at a cost. The alleged Core i9-14900KS processor draws around 410W (as observed by @TechLevelUp), which is an enormous amount of heat to dissipate for a pseudo mainstream processor. In the past, only HEDT chips have flirted with such power use." I mean....sheesh..... When your CPU starts to draw has much as your 4080, 7900xtx and even 4090 in many scenarios.....

Looking forward to your SP117 13900KS results and glad to see you got the new PCB.

Gigabyte is known for slapping on some monster size air coolers on some of their cards. I said it before and I'll say it again. While I do not care for their motherboards, their GPUs are solid. Remove the idiot factor of users not using a sag bracket/GPU standoff when your eyes can clearly see monstrous sag with some of these behemoths, and they are very solid. Agreed. If you have it to spend on LUXURY items (IE, not needed but for personal enjoyment) or can properly budget it without paying any interest, go for it. If you don't, then don't and address your financial priorities/responsibilities. I refuse to pay interest on anything. If I can't afford it, I don't get it. I even buy my cars outright. A house is a different scenario though but even then.... I thought sticking with the KPE 3090 was the smart move if you're not getting a 4090. Outside of some scenarios, patience usually provides the optimal rewards. My dad always said, "the more you feel rushed to buy or especially someone rushes you to buy, the more you wait." and I've always used that approach when purchasing anything and it has only failed me a few times in life (IE, something that is clearly an already killer value and I should have just bought it immediately versus waiting). Funny about the house. We used to own a monster sized two story + basement house w/ a pool and once my daughter grew up and moved, we downsized to a double wide for efficiency and it has provided insane savings across the board versus a house with much less square footage to clean and upkeep and a cozier existence for just the two of us. My wife's parents did the same thing over 20yrs ago. They sold the family home and moved into a very nice double wide. We have discussed maybe meeting in the middle and getting a small rancher but the ease and convenience can't be beat. Be prepared for much higher costs and upkeep across the board.

LOL..... x 1000. 🤣 This is why I like you @tps3443 always easy going and funny with comic relief material for days. 🙂 But in all seriousness, get the 4090. If/When I get a 5090, I will have used this 4090 for over two years and extracted maximum value. If you get a 4090 now with Blackwell looking more and more likely drifting into 2025, you will get well over a year or more from the 4090 with options to spare how you want to address the 5000 series. Looks like sound logic to me! 🤣 Two for the price of one....engage!

I'm shocked....shocked I say! /s It just continues to double down on the "corporations are not your friend" mantra.

Yeah, it seems $1720(MC) and $1800 (NE) is the new "entry level" pricing for 4090s now. Many of those cards were $1600-$1650 on launch. Microcenter and to a degree Best Buy will always show you want the fair MSRP current pricing is in the US. Newegg and Amazon are just garbage with even Newegg getting in on the scalping (aka supply/demand). MSI Suprim Liquid 4090 was $1749.99 at launch and it is now $1939 at MC $2299 at Newegg (shipped by but sold by....odd). Best Buy has many models listed at their original MSRP but they are never in stock. The only ones that come into stock are the pricier models or models that have had their MSRPs increased. Newegg is just scummy with their opportunistic price gouging even shipped and sold from newegg. They continue to grossly inflate their prices even compared to other sellers. I said it before and I'll say it again. Amazon has the worst search engine ever created. They need to overhaul it stat.

Well..... At least you know that plug/unplug rating wasn't a myth...... 😞 But it just continues to show what a trash design the 12VHPWR really is in its current form. Hopefully next gen they make some serious course corrections. AMD was smart to stick with the 2-3x 8-pin connectors. Nothing will truly be in line till we get to consistent stock of $999 cards and $1599 cards. Outside of the FE on the 4090 (which appears from time to time when the dance to the GPU overlords is performed JUST RIGHT), that might be a thing of the past even the lower tier cards as even on Best Buy prices are up on cards that actually come in stock. As for the 4080 Super, I expect the $999 cards to eventually align properly as this initial rush abates.

I'm sure someone out there thought you dropping ~$1300 on a blocked 7900XTX was nutso too thinking a 7800xt should have been enough. 🤣 An unfortunate truth but what remains consistent is choice. You're not forced to buy top tier unless you want to and hopefully you're not pushing yourself into debt over what is a luxury item. We all have our luxury thing(s) we choose to indulge. Some enjoy travel. Some are foodies. Some like fine wines and spirits Some like fancy cars. Some like fancy houses. Some spend crazy money on Golf or sports. Some like fancy clothes and shoes (apparently some spend 10's or evern 100's of thousands on sneakers). And on and on.... ....then there are those of us who like computer hardware. 🤪