electrosoft

Unfortunately once you apply LM and it soaks into your copper it is hard to impossible to get back your original copper luster outside of sanding it down through all that soak. I am not a fan of LM in laptops anymore except on delidded CPUs under the hood between the die and IHS. I'm very pleased my repairs replaced the original heatsink with a brand new one and no LM soak. As for temps.... Two reasons here: #1. The "uneven bits" of hardened material are causing pairing issues. You will need to sand that off. #2. The overall pressure on the die either from the pads and/or the fixed depth screws. You can replace the fixed depth screws with manual ones you can hand tighten to get better pressure but those uneven bits will need to be addressed. I ran into the same issue with my original ZtecPC which had previously been a LM model on both the GPU and CPU. I had to file/sand bits off the actual CPU IHS too along with the heatsink. I used very fine grade sand paper to take it down.

Papu to the rescue as always with the links. 🙂

Got my X170SM-G back today. Absolutely loved the tech (Matt) assigned to it. Friendly, knowledgeable, in constant contact and this wasn't his first rodeo with X170SM-G units. He is the type of tech you hope gets assigned to your repair. After further diagnosis, both the Motherboard AND GPU were shot. I had asked to get rid of the K5 Pro gunk of death if possible. Ended up replacing the motherboard, GPU and heatsink (yay no more shiny former LM spots to deal with). Also returned it to 100% thermal pads (no K5 anywhere). He was also kind enough to send back my bad 2080 Super too. I wish all techs were like this. I swapped back in my Golden 10900k and it booted right back up to my original Raid 0 (256GB x 2) diagnostic install. Bad news is no Prema on the replacement board so I'll have to contact him on that but considering @ssj92 bought a new (ish) X170SM-G from them and no Prema or Prema listed on their site for some time it looks like they may not be doing setups/flashes with Prema anymore. Since it has a new heatsink, it doesn't have any of the original mods on it which is fine. I don't miss finding little tiny globs of LM from the initial config from ZtecPC in all types of hidden nooks when they switched it back to traditional paste. The way the unit looks, I'd almost think parts of the chassis are new too. It looks great! FYI the new old stock 2080S they ordered from Clevo direct is dated December 2020 so that gives you an idea of when Clevo started to ramp down production of cards most likely.

Your hotspot should be around ~76 and GPU around ~65: If your temps are that out of bounds, try switching to a thicker thermal paste not LM. The problem could be contact issues and if you don't have an optimal pairing LM and it's very thin nature is a liability instead of an advantage. For LM to truly shine you need to make absolute sure your pairing is tight and optimal and on laptops that is sometimes hard to achieve.

Well NorthridgeFix did a repair on an Aorus 4090 whatever you can extract from this video:

The Aorus Master line is their top of the line air cooled models. I actually love the LCD screen and build of them. That was the 3070 I had and it ran crazy cool and no whine. I'd be curious to see if they bump it up. I wonder if it uses the same PCB as their Waterforce line of hybrid cards? https://www.newegg.com/gigabyte-geforce-rtx-4090-gv-n4090aorusx-w-24gd/p/N82E16814932556?Item=N82E16814932556&Description=4090&cm_re=4090-_-14-932-556-_-Product

Can't argue with this. It is good to see cards coming into and staying in stock. The other day it was the Gigabyte 4090 in stock all day at Newegg. Now, hours later, the MSI 4090 Liquid X is still in stock sold and shipped by NE. On Best Buy it took 4-5 hours to sell out of the 4090 TUF. I even had a Strix 4090 in my cart before I jettisoned it for its $2k price point. Just nice to be able to add and even buy various 4090s fairly easy now and we're not even to my February 2023 check in prediction. 4090 models routinely coming into stock at NE 4080 all in stock at NE 4070ti all in stock at NE 7900xt most in stock at NE 7900xtx still barely in stock (if at all) at NE. If this was the Crypto boom times all of these would still be out of stock and gone in seconds. That list looks about the same for myself too especially top two which were my original US picks. No Zotac for myself. Definitely like the Colorful (and Neptune 4090). ROG 4090 is nice too just not at $2k.

With your setup, I'd love to see you push a 4090 at 1440p and 4k to see if it can bottleneck your CPU.

In the end, a bottom barrel 4090 is $1600. How you choose to pay an AIB tax is on you but both Hybrid and air cooled ($1799 / $1719) are going to cost you even if you niggle over a $100 here or there the cards are expensive (and don't forget your friendly sales tax). And of course there is always the "Well I wanted it so I'm buying it," factor (See: KPE 3090TI) and life is too short to fret sometimes and meant to be enjoyed in the moment. I was reminded of this recently from a loved one who passed away who told me, "Life is short. Eat the cake. Take the Trip. Buy the toy. Never shy away from leisurely pursuits. Enjoy life." I pinch pennies everywhere else and try to maximize buy/sell of hardware to offset accepted losses of liking tech; but I know what brings me joy in regards to my leisurely pursuits and it's tech so when able I hit the buy button and enjoy it in the here and now even as I weigh the pros and cons before, during and after. 🙂

Obviously. 🙂 I'm the one who has said time and time again over the years, regardless of the SP throw it on a bench and test it. The fact remains that KS chips overall are better than K/KF chips with a lot of cross over as I alluded to earlier a few days ago and the iGor's labs chart just confirms. Also remember he had no access to Malay chips either which are popping even better....poor iGor. 🙂 I know you paid a pretty penny for your binned chip and I know it can hurt a bit to see a "Special" edition come out that pushes yours down on the "special" chart with people popping open KS chips that are monsters but just think in the fall this whole cycle repeats again with the RPL refresh. Enjoy your chip bro! 🙂

I just got my X170SM-G back from repair today for a bad GPU and still under warranty. I haven't fired it up yet but I think about the state of throw away laptops often. If my laptop was out of warranty, regardless of a bad CPU, GPU or forbid soldered on storage or memory (shudder), I'm out an entire laptop. I can't get in there and just replace the one, single bad component or bin my CPU where variance unit to unit can be pretty staggering.

Igor's labs overall findings for SP ratings: 13900KS chips are overall just better than 13900K/KF chips. If I was in the market for a new 13th gen, I wouldn't even bother with a 13900K/KF. I'd go right for a 13900KS every time. Every. Time. Your chip is good. A top 2% 13900k but it has been invalidated from overall top bin with 13900KS chips which pushes it down to top 10% which is still admirable and with your outlier setup you're getting good results. Enjoy it. 🙂 It happens. 🙂

I was just contemplating picking up one of these in 2TB capacity but with the newness of it held off and said "Summer '23"....ack. I'll just reiterate my overall displeasure with my 7900XTX for my use case. It did boost to 3ghz running Superposition and scored above average in Timespy vs other 7900XTX out there but RT was garbage and gains just weren't there in FO76 and WoW. Locking everything down outside of their own limited OC tools is the icing on the cake. A lot of issues pop up with RT enabled from dismal performance to weird stutters I couldn't fix and RT enabled definitely turned on the "coil whine" switch after a week or two of testing. Odd issues with Z590 was the icing on the cake.

Yeah that's a nice, beastly config. With all the BIOS refinements (especially from XMG) and a new unlocked BIOS in the works from @Sergey Muratov and company the future is bright! Good time to get in on the action. 🙂

Best Buy currently having a massive drop of 4090s. Hasn't happened for weeks. Camp out for the next 30-60 and refresh. Cancelled the MSI Trio and re-ordered another Suprim X with discount and rewards total price = $1594.33

Awesome to finally see it purchased and in action, thanks! Do you have hard data of your original heatsink vs the newer/beefier heatsink in regards to temps? I'd be curious to see the original heatsink vs the new heatsink (no water) vs the new heatsink (water engaged) if possible. I know getting those fans under control is always a blessing. 🙂

That's not bad and above average both P and E cores. As @Papusan now time to test it. Over on the OC forums, KS chips are popping with >=120 P cores on a much higher frequency than K/KF chips. Lots of cross over. You end up with something like this ~(P Cores) ~K/KF 97-------------------------123 ~KS 113-----------------------132 So you still have a chance of landing a KS that is worse than a K/KF but what you don't have is landing an absolute bottom barrel KS like K/KF chips that will at worse run like a decent 13900K/F but will barely be a KS sometimes. Depending on where you're pushing it, see what 5.8-6ghz can do. What does the V/F curve look like? Overall KS chips on average are flat out better than K/KF. I know @Falkentyne had set some baseline criteria for testing 13900KS chips along these lines:

I wish this was a 13900k lol. It's just my original 12900k overclocked from 4.9 all core to 5.3 all core and that is where it hits a wall. I am going to go back in and do per core to see how fast I can get 1-3 cores topping out. I'm seriously contemplating finishing out my parts list to do a small loop and a delid. I want to see where this 4090 bottoms out in WoW and like I said before, I haven't even reached end game which is just brutal on CPUs. I'm CPU bound just in questing zones.

Still CPU bound but 12900k 4.9ghz vs 5.3ghz all core = 138fps vs 133fps average along with static spot 130 vs 140 along with an overall increase to 1% low and max fps. Still bouncing off of 100% During flight point tests and GPU never gets past 90% utilization versus the 7900XTX and 3080 10GB which were locked into 99-100% the entire time. I'm sure a decent 13900ks would bring it home since WoW likes single or at most dual core frequencies at best.

The boards are identical so a block for the air cooled model would fit the liquid cooled model too fortunately. I just didn't realize till just now there are two different versions of the Hybrid model.

Suprim back in stock in NE: https://www.newegg.com/msi-geforce-rtx-4090-rtx-4090-suprim-liquid-24g/p/N82E16814137779?Item=N82E16814137779&Description=4090&cm_re=4090-_-14-137-779-_-Product&quicklink=true Looks like MSI makes *2* versions of the Suprim Liquid. Liquid: https://www.newegg.com/msi-geforce-rtx-4090-rtx-4090-suprim-liquid-24g/p/N82E16814137779?Item=N82E16814137779&Description=4090&cm_re=4090-_-14-137-779-_-Product&quicklink=true Liquid X: https://www.newegg.com/msi-geforce-rtx-4090-rtx-4090-suprim-liquid-x-24g/p/N82E16814137759?Item=N82E16814137759 Liquid X is their "OC" model apparently:

Congrats! What config did you go with?

Depends on the title and settings but RT is here and will continue to grow in importance and adoption. Do you need RT to play a game? No, but then again you don't need high graphics settings or resolution either. If just playing the game is the standard, set it to 720p, low everything and have it run on almost everything from the last 10yrs. For example, when I was in between cards a few years ago, I was limping along with my GTX 1060 playing at 4k in WoW on low settings. Playable? Yes but visually an eye sore compared to how it can and should look for the full immersive experience and lush visuals. When I got my KPE 3090 and installed it and cranked everything back up it was like night and day for enjoyment and beauty. A month or so on that GTX 1060 just dialed in how I like to play my games. I want everything presented as intended by the devs no compromises when able. Unreal engine 5 is going to be the backbone for a vast majority of games and it is all about RT along with Raster. Even new games built from the ground up are setting a foundation on RT. Older titles are getting overhauls with RT enabled features where able. But like I said, if just being able to play the game is the high bar, you can dial everything down to the lowest settings, drop the resolution as low as it will go and play on a tin can. 🙂

I think I saw that chart before but could not find it again, nice! Crazy the difference in board quality and design. MSI, Asus and Nvidia are really top of the heap. Ouch the MSI Gaming Trio X is significantly worse than the Suprim overall...(eyes the cancel order button). Asus TUF is literally dab smack in the middle. MSI with the Suprim literally followed Nvidia's lead on their FE but just beefed it up even more. Based on my findings in WoW and the 7900XTX being on the near same level as a 3080 10GB in RT (76fps vs 75fps), I am not surprised. I expected much better from the 7900XTX. I retested with the newest drivers yesterday and exact same performance. To add insult to injury the 7900XTX was having all types of problems performing in my Z590 Strix board with all types of pauses and stutters. I popped the Strix 3080 10GB in there to check and it was smooth sailing. Both with their own clean installs. In the defense of AMD, performance varies widely depending on title but even at its best case scenario the 7900XTX delivers ~3090-3090ti RT performance. A fairer shootout would have been the 7900XT vs the 4070ti and then the 7900XTX vs 4080 but the fact still remains the RT performance of AMD has improved but the next gen RT performance of Nvidia just crushes it.

I had a Gigabyte Aorus Master 3070 and that card was a beast. Ran cool, no coil whine and overclocked like a champ with good memory so I am good with their GPUs. Their motherboards on the other hand.... Asus and MSI seem to be the coil whine champs this time around but my Liquid Suprim X 4090 is crazy quiet. It takes >~220fps to get it to start making any type of coil whine noise. I managed to snag an MSI Gaming X Trio OC 4090 from BB with discount and BB 5% rewards = ~$1495.39 total in my hand the other day only because a local (ish) store had one in stock sitting in there. When all is said and done it is ~$415 cheaper than my Suprim X 4090 which when I contacted Newegg they said would allow a one time return for full refund (since I've literally never returned anything to Newegg ever in 20yrs) so I'm tempted to pick it up and give it a whirl. It is ~1hr away drive so it is sitting there waiting for me till Feb 1st while I mull it over. It has the same PCB as the Suprim but with cut down phases. I really like this Suprim a lot but I also like $415 in my pocket too (Well, $400 calculating gas there and back).