electrosoft

For some context I got the following scores with other cards pure stock: X170KM-G 3060 Timespy GPU = 9025 X170SM-G 2080S Timespy GPU = 11200 But these were with older drivers. I'll have an X170KM-G in this week with a 3070 I'll give a run to compare against someone's X170KM-G w/ 3080 but I expect the stock score to be ~13200 GPU (+/- 200)

I use a jeweler's headpiece with interchangeable lenses for soldering really small microelectronics so I can move and clamp down items as I see fit and put my big noggin into position as needed for optimal viewing.

Jay can be a bit (a lot) sensationalist in his thumbnails and sometimes even in his content in pockets. Just preface it with, "3 power lead versions are ideal for valid overclocking" or a thumbnail with, "3x lead AMD cards are monster OCers!" AMD left the impression the CU / Shaders were going to be more than doubled and when numerous outlets reported it as such they never, ever not even once stepped forward and corrected them. It wasn't till benchmarks and screenshots started to show up right before reviews we realized the 7900xtx was much less than advertised. It took them forever to finally say it was a 4080 competitor which contradicted a lot of their presentation benchmarks which with basic extrapolation put it closer to the 4090. I still think it is a very solid card and has great potential but the results are so all over the map in benchmarks that it has to be a new architecture / driver issue and a lack of maturity. When you have some games barely performing above the 6950xt and losing clearly to the 4080 and others beating the 4080 convincingly and nipping at the 4090's heels that variance is puzzling and troubling. AMD fooled me yet again with their presentation and lack of clarity or correction when simulated benchmarks and fps started to appear. I am not shocked after the 7900xtx launch 4080 sales picked up immediately. Everyone who was waiting to see what AMD had to offer produced a portion of that crowd that decided the 4080 was the better value even at +$200. I'm holding off till Feb 2023. I mean if I see a Suprim X 4090 at MSRP I might break and buy it because I'm only human and the "final" release of WoW DF is putting a beating on my 3080 badly in many spots as I progress at 5120x1440 @144hz. Even the 3090ti wouldn't have resolved these sub 60 dips. I know a 4090 will have it purring along at 120+ w/ RT on and RT on/off is much more noticeable in Dragonflight than Shadowlands. It is meaningful now so I keep it on.

Easy to return and sit back and wait while you continue to absolutely wreck older GPUs for points and fun. Can you do a PR run with and without ECC enabled for comparison on your 4090?

Makes sense since you're going to just throw your own heatsink solution on them anyhow. The price and RGB aren't worth it. Glad to see you testing, pushing and binning various sticks out there to separate the wheat from the chaff for clarity.

So it has been ~1yr since I bought (and returned) my X170KM-G. I picked up another one that should be here next week to give it a, "round 2" treatment and see where it stands in light of both XMGs continued BIOS advancements and access to unlocking the stock BIOS to some degree. I also greatly expanded the launch page posting to address some general concerns and questions for those who find this thread which now pops up near the top on google search.

Ewwww, that's a hard pass. In 4090 land, it is either a Suprim X or a $1599.99 whatever off the shelf. With the way the lottery works even a Zotrash can rise to the top.... Yeah, it looks like the 7900xt might (and should) suffer a hard case of either "4080-itis" or fall victim to the overpriced 7950xt price cuts sooner than later. lol, I continue to love the sheer amount of torture you subject these older generation cards to when they meet up head to head to blazing CPUs and just get wrecked. 🙂 Does that Zotac look like a boat too? $799.99 at a min or even $699.99 but after the holidays and after the initial rush dies down I think we'll see some price adjustments on both sides (outside of the 4090). "The Lovelace RDNA3 wars have begun..." - Yoda

Right..... *wink wink* "Mistakenly" 🤪🤣 https://videocardz.com/newz/galax-mistakenly-announces-geforce-rtx-4090-ti-graphics-card

6000 series uplift was about what? 0-10%? Along with most importantly if your particular program can take advantage of software specific prefetching versus the automated hardware level prefetching so it will vary program to program. These are AMD Mesa3D drivers being used to show the inability to allocate resources (pointer) for prefetches if you're using a first gen 7000 series product. I'd like to see some actively running program reporting realtime stall rate (CUs sitting around waiting for instructions/data) to get an idea of any type of performance left on the table if any depending on program. Assuming this is being done due to some early bugs or driver issues that need to be worked out, If *IF* this can be addressed in a future driver update (the snippet above is a driver level code snapshot), that right there could be a significant boost in performance. On the other hand, if this is software acknowledging a hardware level issue for rev 1 hardware then rev 2 hardware should have nice gains. I'm sure over the next few days (weeks?) We'll get clarity.

Sapphire Nitro+ 7900xtx unboxing...this is my current pick of the AIBs so far:

I keep going back and forth on the 7900xtx but more forward than backwards. I really like the Nitro+ model for air cooled along with the TUF for some reason (go figure) but any 2x PCIe models are automatically sent to /dev/null all 3x models are on the consideration chart. 7900xt is a non-starter in any configuration even with a price drop. As for reduced performance, just like CPUs at a certain point all types of variables start to come into play when you're pushing it to its edge from memory errors to CPU oddly throttling due to need of better cooling. Put it on water or LN2 and many of those problems would resolve themselves. The sheer amount of headroom does really seem to indicate a lot of performance was left on the table and AIBs are going to have a field day along with blocks.

I just checked zTecPCs website and they no longer list or promote Prema on their existing ZtecPC units for sale so at some point for whatever units they have to sell it gets the stock treatment now but it never hurts to ask.

Overall the X170SM-G is less problematic and if you find a way has access to Prema. It can use the exact same array of GPUs as the KM. Remember, X170KM-G was so problematic that Prema abandoned his BIOS development for it if that tells you anything.

Best bet is to wait not only for all AIB models and to see who rises to the top since there is decent headroom but also to continue to work out the bugs and refine the performance. I think a few years from now we will see AMD will have the most driver performance improvements vs Nvidia. My ETA for a potential new card is March 2023. Hopefully some price wars will have moved in by then. Chiplet design is future thinking and this is literally version 1.0. For whatever reasons besides cost, AMD has decided monolithic has hit a dead end like with their CPUs. Time will tell.

Oh then I'm good.... no way I'm heading into Philly area during rush hour traffic. 🤪 Man, that sucks on the scores. 😞 Just wait till after the holidays. If you've gone this long without an upgrade what's a few more months? I won't be buying or doing anything till Feb or most likely March as I'll be on the road for most of Jan, back for a few weeks then right back out for another 2-3 weeks living off my laptop and ipad. Things will settle down around March (in theory) and I'll see about picking up a new GPU. 6600xt should tide you over till late Q1 2023.

So true. 3000 series barely beat the 2000 series as the 2000 series was the last true desktop equivalent on laptops. I don't think we'll ever see the 1:1 DTR days of Pascal and Turing. But with the die shrink and much better power envelope of the 4000 series I expect a major leap in performance this time around even boxed into 150-200w.

Where are you located? Local Microcenter is almost a guarantee tomorrow if you go early. Online? It could be a turd in a napkin...if it said Intel, Nvidia or AMD on the side it will sell out most likely day one. I'm fighting the urge to ride to St David's MC just to be a nosey nelly and see what it will be like.

I never did trust MSI Force Rating to be honest with you...... it needs work. Asus SP has been around for quite some time and once in a blue moon a BIOS update will offer a refinement to the process as data continues to pour in. As for that chip, very nice. 🙂 Silicon lottery in play even with the @johnksss "Zotrash" line up! I wish there was a company that would bin GPUs like SL did for CPUs. This is what I'm waiting on the Fall refresh. I'll sit tight on my 12900k till then.

I just checked both my A380 and A770 builds. A380 is running older drivers and A770 new drivers and I see zero fan controls just fan reporting options.

The "shortage" we are facing now is new product/demand shortage and it will even out like it always does. Sooner than later this time around without previous conditions and a downturn in worldwide market economical forces. I'm not seeing anything different or what is to be expected. I do see Nvidia still hoping to somehow re-catch and ride the wave of the PandoCryptic demand wave. We are seeing first hand what happens when pricing meets a wall (4080 / 7000 series CPUs) and just like that POOF prices come down and/or availability really isn't an issue. In some countries 4090s are readily available. eBay prices for most cards are stagnant and I can go buy just about any 4090 I want right now for ~20-50% markup if so want. Before? 3090's were all above $3k on average and selling almost immediately for over a year+ steady. Right now the only thing truly in "Shortage" is the 4090 and that is still within 2 months of launch and the holiday season and only in certain regions. The situation isn't dire at all. It is a game of Nvidia realizing the market conditions they absolutely loved a year ago are gone and they don't want to let go but they will have to adjust corporate markets/customers or not. We are early into ADA (literally at the 2 month mark) and things can and will saturate. Arizona is more a response to the inevitable end game with China which is not going to end pretty and setting up fall back solutions. There's a reason companies like Apple and others are starting to diversify their chip and assembly options to other countries. This is like Japan in the 80s and 90s but on a much grander scale. Japan was never a military threat...just a massive trade imbalance threat.

Right? As soon as I removed the card from the box and was turning it over and over I was impressed with the build quality and feel in my hands. Installing and booting it up just took it to the next level. I was just on my wife's system helping her with some work configs and I looked over at it just going, "That is such a beautiful card....man...." Let me know if you run into any hiccups. Compared to August drivers with the A380, performance and UI improvements are like night and day.

My takeaway of the 7900xtx reviews I've watched so far..... AMD was perceived as being conservative in their performance expectations. I think they could have went a tad bit more conservative. Nowhere do we see meaningful overall AMD predicted uplifts versus even their own last gen 6900xt/6950xt. On average ~35-40% better than the 6950xt..... Remember when people were extrapolating based on AMD performance charts and had the 7900xtx basically matching a 4090 in CP2077? Yeah.....that didn't age well. 4090 is just miles ahead of everything especially at 4k. It is in a total class of its own. 7900xtx trades blows quite nicely overall and in some situations even competes with the 4090 in pockets. Once you look at synthetics you realize much of it is particular game optimizations giving you the illusion the 7900xtx is more than it is based on certain games. Of course if those are the games you happen to play that purr with the 7900xtx then that's the card for you. The results are all over the map but in classic AMD fashion we will see driver optimizations and updates aplenty especially with this new architectural approach. The variance in performance especially when many comparisons put it barely ahead of even the 6950xt is pretty wide. It is a card that will just get better and better with driver updates ala Intel with ARC. RT improvements putting it in 3090ti land are quite impressive....of course then the 4090 just steps on its throat. Funny seeing power consumption per frame the 4090 and 4080 are much more energy efficient than the 7900xtx. I wonder if the same AMD fans who would just dump all over Nvidia for being so power hungry will be as accepting being on the other side this time? Cost per frame (Raster only) the 7900xtx is the clear winner versus every AMD and Nvidia card out there both Ampere, RDNA2 along with Ada and RDNA3 except the 6800/XT. I see Nvidia addressing that with the 4080. 4090? You want the best you pay for the best. If you have a 3090/ti or 6900xt/50xt class card it is really hard to justify dropping $1000-1200+ on a 7900xtx/4080. Nvidia being Nvidia should have made the 4090ti = 4090, 4090=4080, 4080=4070ti, 4070ti=4070 but greed is good (In my Michael Douglas voice). You know either an ultra expensive 4090ti is in the pipeline or a Titan class based off the same full fat die. Overall, it is a worthy competitor of the 4080 beating it on average in rasterization overall and at least trying to stay on the field with RT. Overall the 4080 is the superior product though. Again, 4090 is off in its own world of domination. Personally? If Nvidia dropped the 4080 to $1k or less, I would pick the 4080 over the 7900xtx. I think overall though both the 4080 and 7900xtx should be around 800-900 tops.

Whoa that is loud! I should have had my speakers down a bit more. 🙂

Looks like PC Specialists, Clevo-Computers and LaptopParts4Less have all EOL/discontinued their NH55 sales. Only one left is Eurocom. Updated the main thread with that and some other stuff from the thread.

Actual, authorized Intel response to someone asking why his new Asus laptop has soldered on memory for the primary DIMM (I kid you not):