electrosoft

I bought my unit used from a very nice board member back on NBR (he's also here if he's lurking right now 😀) so I didn't pay anywhere near retail new. Those who know me here know I never *EVER* buy laptops new. I always wait for used units and then optimize and tweak the snot out of them for optimal performance 🙂

I saved up for an Amiga 500 for in high school. I was lucky to get the color display for Xmas. No way I could ever afford a 1000 but I wanted an Amiga so bad so when I got one I was stoked. It was actually the first platform I learned 68x asm on so many moons ago. My favorite game (don't laugh 😄) was SSI's "Hero of the Lance" since I was a huge Dragonlance fan. I absolutely loved it in every way, shape and form. A lot of coding principles I learned moved easily right over to the Mac.

You end up needing something like a P870TM1 with its monster sized GPU vapor chamber. Absolutely a beast but beautiful.

I think it is also an issue of TDPs being constrained to match thin and light chassis and to help offset overall heat issues of a shared cooling architecture keeping mobile CPUs as cool as possible so they can at least boost as much as possible (which is usually not much). I wish there were options even for 200w+ mobile GPUs and let the OEMs decide what they want to do with it and how. TIM is a key issue but when the heatsink on some systems themselves aren't beefy enough you end up just soaking it faster and the heat can't be dissipated fast enough. The extreme example of this is Apple Macbooks when testing liquid metal on the lower and mid range of loads it provided lower overall temps as the anemic heatsink could keep up with the enhanced heat transfer but once placed under meaningful sustained loads it eventually throttled around the same point it just got there a tad slower. I agree it is good to see certain manufacturers like Asus and others finally creating secure, specialized heatsink pairings to use liquid metal now to eek out as much cooling as possible.

I've always kept a decent laptop and desktop combo for years. You get the best of both worlds. 💯

WOW....I am speechless. I've known you for over 10 years now and I can't recall you ever having such a bad run on CPUs or situations ever.

I voted for Notebooktalk too. It just seemed to make the most sense and still kept focus on the core mission of NBR but now with a fresh perspective and unshackled.

At this point, I would just use it as in its current config unless you absolutely need to populate all 4 slots.

The USB issue was the end for myself. As someone who works extensively with external media that was a deal breaker. 4x8 B-dies ran nice and tight. Outside of AMD purposely backing off of some boosting settings performance was good and you could always manually tune the CPU like Intel. With that being said, I'm like 99% sure I'm going to skip the 12900ks and give the 5800X3D a whirl on a budget board.

Hopefully you get a monster bin! And yeah, that would make three Z690 boards. I like the EVGA approach still the best overall but they are pricing themselves out of my league quickly even with the Classified clocking in at $629.99.

Nice ~12c drop from stock to pads + block! How does the EVGA test compare to mining which really gets memory nice and toasty?

That whole run of bad luck you had was crushing to read @Mr. Fox seriously..... 😪

EVGA Z690 Dark queue is open "only" $829.99..... https://www.evga.com/products/product.aspx?pn=121-AL-E699-KR

For on the go rear laptop elevation I keep a set of these in my bag: https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B08FDDWHMF/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Not sure if Prema is around but @Mr. Fox is alive and active on the forums....

I see value and merit in both big true DTRs and T&Ls. I love DTRs and they will be my mainstay ( because I like to tinker ) till they are grossly outclassed performance wise but I also keep T&Ls around (see sig) because there are situations where I'm not lugging my X170 out in the field or for onsite telemetry or Pi/robotics tinkering. I would also not drop thousands on a laptop with many points of failure that can render it pretty much DOA. GPUs have a higher rate of failure than many of the other components. System boards fail. I've had a few laptops have their GPUs die or their system boards die and I was able to source and replace that one part versus replacing the entire logic board. Soldered on ram and storage does send me into super fits (my Swift 3 has soldered on 8GB grrrr) but I also realize that is me and my preferences. In the end, companies want to make money and when they see market forces at play showing general consumers prefer lighter and thinner along with great battery life AND they can maximize profits? No one can be surprised at the outcome.

Agreed, that's why I always offer to meet if somewhat in the same locale. You get to meet felow techies and cut out the wait, overhead fees and BS.

BAH! Unless you're hitting 5.6ghz @ .0800v running full tilt Prime95 on air in 90f ambient are you really even OCing? Er, I mean nice!! gratz!

I explain it to buyers all the time who ask "Why is ur price so hi lolz?" You end up having to explain to them: Sales tax is automatically collected and remitted. eBay's cut S&H I will take the time if they're nice to explain how a $100 sale ends up being $106-$110 for them w/ tax and ~$87 in my pocket after ebay fees. Now multiply that by a factor of X to reflect the actual sell price before S&H even enters the equation. On the other hand, it's a free market and you're able to sell anywhere from a local flea market to a global platform like eBay but everyone wants their cut. You could sell on Amazon but if you think seller rules can be draconian on eBay, Amazon will kick it up a notch for you for shiggles. The final insult? The new reporting threshholds ($20k now reduced to $600) to the IRS making it a PITA to just be a private seller offloading used items you no longer need so now you have to be even more meticulous with record keeping and filing your taxes yearly.

Ack, so it looks like Prema is DOA for the X170KM-G then??

How bad does the socket look? Do you have some pics?

Sheesh, $800 but it is an almost sure way to not get shanked by a bad chip but the overhead to stock may be much ado about nothing. My p0 9900k beat down my 9900ks on the top end easily but it did run hotter and heavier on the bottom end. If you don't overclock and you have decent cooling (>=280mm AIO), the KS is a big waste of money. You aren't guaranteed to get a cooler running stock chip and I'll be curious to see what they consider the baseline for binned silicon. If I was building a new system with the KS on the market at the time I could see where you might pony up a few extra beans for a bit of certainty.

Looking better, but you're still throttling either power, heat or both. A 10900k should score 16000+ in CB23 at stock. Here is my ZtecPC binned 10900k tested on my desktop board while I zoned in its ranges for optimal undervolting. At pure stock, 214w. It could handle an undervolt to -90 and would pull ~196w max in my X170SM-G before I replaced it with a better binned chip that pulls ~180w max. I would be curious to see how your chip is on a desktop to get an idea of its characteristics to dial it in for laptop use.

I usually run most of my priority benchmarks first thing in the morning as my computer room is pretty cold. If it is a dry, cold day I'll open the window and shut the door and let the room get frosty, set fans to max and let the rad and internals get nice and crisp on the desktop before running. For some of my P870TM runs I put my laptop on the backseat floor of my car and left it outside for an hour before running. Good stuff!

That is AWESOME to read and I'm glad everything worked out properly. I would do the same thing and still offer to send it back on his dime if he wants it. Like you, I've been on both ends when getting or attempting to get scammed and it isn't pleasant.