*Official Benchmark Thread* - Post it here or it didn't happen :D

[Clamibot]

57 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

I am not sure that I know of anyone that uses Optane. You might be the first. There may be some that never mentioned it. Though I haven't messed with it personally, isn't there a BIOS option that has to be enabled for it to function correctly? Are you using it for caching or for ordinary storage?

 

As a side note, the only real difference between Z690 and Z790 is Intel eliminated Optane technology and used the PCIe lanes for other purposes. They stopped supporting it because Optane never got much traction/popularity.

 

I'm using the 905P as an ordinary storage device. I cloned my OS disk to it. The immediate benefits that were apparent to me were faster load times for multiple programs at once, faster webpage loading, faster hibernation and wake from hibernation, and faster build times for games with Unity.

 

I don't remember there being a BIOS option pertaining to Optane. I'll have to dig around and see if I find one.

[Mr. Fox]

1 hour ago, Clamibot said:

 

I'm using the 905P as an ordinary storage device. I cloned my OS disk to it. The immediate benefits that were apparent to me were faster load times for multiple programs at once, faster webpage loading, faster hibernation and wake from hibernation, and faster build times for games with Unity.

 

I don't remember there being a BIOS option pertaining to Optane. I'll have to dig around and see if I find one.

I am not sure if you configure it for use as an Optane cache that you can use it for storage anymore. Again, I am not entirely familiar with Optane technology, but I can vaguely remember that to be the case. I think there is a way to enable Optane using the Intel RST Windows utility.

[Papusan]

Today's stupidity x 2. First the new SFX PSU from Silverstone. If you have an Asus MB and want a used Nvidia or the newest AMD Radeon graphics card you'll lack 8-pin connectors. Many Asus MB will eat up 3x 8-pin connectors (2x8-pin for the Cpu and 1x8 pin for the MB). Yup, newer has to be better @Rage Set🤔 And you can't use custom mod cables with 8pin power connector with 8pin pigtail extension. Because his modern junk doesn't support it. Stamp... Failure. 

 

SilverStone Intros Extreme1200R Platinum, an SFX-L PSU with 12V-2x6 Connector techpowerup.com

 

And what have Alphacool done with their price strategy? Yup, it's only a fan bro @Mr. Fox But would you pay same price for a 1000 rpm "metal" fan as for a more potent plastic fan that can push 3000 RPM? Hmmm. Today's tech companies is weird animals. 

 

The Alphacool Apex Stealth Metal 120mm has the same price as its 3000 RPM variant in the online stores I looked at, which doesn’t make much sense. Since the Power (3000 RPM) version is also PWM controlled and everything else is the same, build quality-wise, there is no point in getting the lower speed version at the same money. Moreover, airflow is among the lowest in this category (120mm fans with 25-27mm thickness), while static pressure as a max value is low.

 

The Alphacool Apex Stealth Metal fan is a highly quality fan, but what about performance? After the review of its “Power” sibling, I decided to look at the less powerfull member with 2000 RPM max speed, to check how it performs. 

https://hwbusters.com/cooling/alphacool-apex-stealth-metal-120mm-fan-review/10/

 

 

[Reciever]

6 minutes ago, Papusan said:

Today's stupidity x 2. First the new SFX PSU from Silverstone. If you have an Asus MB and want a used Nvidia or the nw AMD Radeon graphics card you'll lack 8-pin connectors. Many Asus MB will eat up 3x 8-pin connectors (2x8-pin for the Cpu and 1x8 pin for the MB). Yup, newer has to be better @Rage Set🤔 

 

SilverStone Intros Extreme1200R Platinum, an SFX-L PSU with 12V-2x6 Connector techpowerup.com

 

And what have Alphacool done with their price strategy? Yup, it's only a fan bro @Mr. Fox But would you pay same price for a 1000 rpm "metal" fan as for a more potent plastic fan that can push 3000 RPM? Hmmm. Today's tech companies is weird animals. 

 

The Alphacool Apex Stealth Metal 120mm has the same price as its 3000 RPM variant in the online stores I looked at, which doesn’t make much sense. Since the Power (3000 RPM) version is also PWM controlled and everything else is the same, build quality-wise, there is no point in getting the lower speed version at the same money. Moreover, airflow is among the lowest in this category (120mm fans with 25-27mm thickness), while static pressure as a max value is low.

 

The Alphacool Apex Stealth Metal fan is a highly quality fan, but what about performance? After the review of its “Power” sibling, I decided to look at the less powerfull member with 2000 RPM max speed, to check how it performs. 

https://hwbusters.com/cooling/alphacool-apex-stealth-metal-120mm-fan-review/10/

 

 

Is that the same fan the Der8auer released a video about? 

 

I like 2150rpm, seems to be a good compromise for my personal use case but I cant lie, been tempted with the 3000rpm for overclocking from time to time. Instead of metal fans I'd love to see a company take a shot at reverse blade high static pressure fans for system builders. Would probably be criticized for noise but considering I have about a dozen fans going in my room I dont really care all that much.

[Papusan]

5 minutes ago, Reciever said:

Is that the same fan the Der8auer released a video about? 

 

I like 2150rpm, seems to be a good compromise for my personal use case but I cant lie, been tempted with the 3000rpm for overclocking from time to time. Instead of metal fans I'd love to see a company take a shot at reverse blade high static pressure fans for system builders. Would probably be criticized for noise but considering I have about a dozen fans going in my room I dont really care all that much.

Same fan model. But this is the slower 2000 RPM model for the same awful MSRP. And all testers outside Igorslab said they are overpriced and not worth the price or price vs performance. And lower performance vs some cheaper fans doesn't make it more appealing. A huge Nope.

[electrosoft]

5 hours ago, Papusan said:

Isn't it cute? Confirmed, Nvidia can sell GPUs with +12% less cores for the same prices. Hmmm.... Wonder how many top binned AD102 dies will go into the Defective version of 4090 for the Chineese market. The newborn 4090 Defective will most likely also go into the Chineese AI Servers. And where will an possible 4080 Ti for the Global market fits into this? @electrosoft😀 

 

https://videocardz.com/newz/chinese-nvidia-rtx-4090d-to-launch-today-with-reduced-tensor-core-specs

 

 

 

Easy peasy, right in between the D and 4080 Super so a 4080ti with ~12416 cores and 20GB of memory on a ~320-bit bus for the low low price of $1199-$1399 (depending on final 4080 Super pricing) 🤣

 

Nice market for those AD102 GPU dies that are seriously defective too. Nvidia lets nothing go to waste. I wonder how many they've built up over the last 15 months......

 

 

[Papusan]

2 hours ago, electrosoft said:

 

Easy peasy, right in between the D and 4080 Super so a 4080ti with ~12416 cores and 20GB of memory on a ~320-bit bus for the low low price of $1199-$1399 (depending on final 4080 Super pricing) 🤣

 

Nice market for those AD102 GPU dies that are seriously defective too. Nvidia lets nothing go to waste. I wonder how many they've built up over the last 15 months......

 

 

 

Remember the 4090 is a very great selling graphics card. And China + the rest of the foreign banned U.S countries stands for 1/3 of Nvidia's Global sales of graphic cards. So not many AD102 dies will go to spill. The question will be.... Will there be enough defective AD102 dies for a global sales of 4080Ti ? And how many of the 4090D for the "gamers" will the Chinese AI companies grab for AI workloads? Hmm.... A possible 4080Ti with ~12416 cores and 20GB of memory need to cost at least $1399 if nvidia want to bother with it. They have done magic (Max-Q) before... So who knows😀

[jaybee83]

17 hours ago, Clamibot said:

Hey guys, I recently got ahold of a 1.5 TB Optane 905P SSD for christmas and have been loving it so far, except for one really strange issue I've been having. The drive is very fast in of itself, but the dedicated Optane drivers significantly decrease performance over the default Windows storage device drivers (my game build times INCREASE by about 27.5%). According to individuals on the Level1Techs forums (which is where I got the driver from), the driver is supposed to significantly increase performance.

 

For anyone on this forum that has experience with Optane, is there a specific driver verison I should be using with the 905P to maximize its performance?

noice would love to play around with an optane drive at some point, just that price per gb is so horrible 😅 how much did u pay for it, if i may ask?

check and see if there are any options in the intel optane panel (dont remember intels toolbox name, but its analogous to other ssd toolboxes) that would need changing. also, have u tried different optane driver versions to see if there is any similar behaviour?

as for bios settings, only thing i could think of would be pcie connection related (im assuming ure rocking the pcie AIC and not the U.2 version?)

 

from my side theres a first failed attempt at installing the custom AM5 IHS. install went fine but temps are worse than before. issue being that ill need to finetune the z height of my arctic LFII 420 AIO, from what i can measure theres a difference of roughly 1.5-2 mm that ill need to account for vs. the stock AM5 SAM. i ordered two additional am5 mounting kits from arctic so i could play around (and destroy) the included parts to check and see how i would ideally bridge that gap. fingers crossed guys! 🙂

[Mr. Fox]

1 hour ago, jaybee83 said:

from my side theres a first failed attempt at installing the custom AM5 IHS. install went fine but temps are worse than before. issue being that ill need to finetune the z height of my arctic LFII 420 AIO, from what i can measure theres a difference of roughly 1.5-2 mm that ill need to account for vs. the stock AM5 SAM. i ordered two additional am5 mounting kits from arctic so i could play around (and destroy) the included parts to check and see how i would ideally bridge that gap. fingers crossed guys! 🙂

I hope you can get that sorted. It would be awesome to see a huge temperature drop.

 

When I delidded the 5950X the temperatures were worse using liquid metal than before delid using the soldered stock IHS and the copper IHS. I believe it was due to variance in chiplet z-height. Using normal thermal paste made the temps the same a before delid, so I essentially gained nothing by delidding and it turned out to be a waste of time and money.

 

Edit: you might try lapping to make all of the chiplet dies exactly the same height.

 

Edited December 29, 2023 by Mr. Fox
suggest lapping chiplets

[Etern4l]

On 12/15/2023 at 10:42 PM, Mr. Fox said:

I remember some people had an emotional meltdown when Trump put tariffs on China. It was a brilliant move and appropriate. Doing business with your enemies and providing them with a revenue stream of any kind doesn't make any sense. China doesn't have the resources to thrive without support from other countries and we should deprive them of anything they need to be successful as a nation. We should stop selling them anything and ban the import of anything they produce. It would mean doing without some things that are non-essential in the short term, but it would end up being worth the sacrifice in the long run. The bulk of what they produce is trash anyway.

 

Yes, but this is a result of Kissinger's myopic laissez-faire policy that America has happily executed for decades, with no shortage of current corporate US cheerleaders including the likes of crooked Musk. The idea was to prevent Russia and China from becoming close allies, a policy which - as we know - is close to a complete failure. Anyway, the word from the shareholders is that the money has been good, which is the American way of measuring success. Yet again we find that naively optimising profits does not always lead to great long-term outcomes.  

 

The genie is out of the bottle now though: they are to competitive, rich, and technologically/scientifically advanced  for someone with an intellectual and moral capacity of the a Putin-loving (likely for a good underlying reason, he is a street-smart New Yorker after all) disinfectant-injecting guy to be able to successfully address the problem without blowing up the Western world. Check this out:

 

China has a 'stunning lead' over the US in the research of 37 out of 44 critical and emerging technologies, new study finds

 

BTW if you happen to visit Walmart, let us know what percentage of non-agricultural items of interest are not made in China (30% apparently) - now imagine all those goods need to be produced domestically in a country with 4% unemployment or all the production has to be moved to other countries. How much time and money would it take, and what would be the impact on inflation? Sure, three cheers for the headline-grabbing tariffs, but need much smarter and broader overall set of policies and a person in charge intellectually and morally capable of delivering them (in a country where most politicians are in the pockets of big business or worse). 

 

Referring back to the current subject matter: is this 4090D thing supposed to convince anyone that Jensen Huang is wholeheartedly supporting the US government policy? It's just a clever ploy to supply China with discounted 4090 units. If the hardware is to be used for science, the 10% lower core count is basically irrelevant. It's a joke, and to any NVidia supporters in the democratic parts of the world: the joke is, or ultimately will be, on you.    

 

Food for thought, good luck to us all in 2024 - apologies for not having anything positive to say on the topic du jour.

[Mr. Fox]

55 minutes ago, Etern4l said:

Food for thought, good luck to us all in 2024 - apologies for not having anything positive to say on the topic du jour.

No apology necessary. There is nothing good or nice that can be said because nothing is good or nice about the world we live in right now. Good and nice are outnumbered by stupid and evil, and we are all governed by the unfit and unacceptable human dross that have lied their way into positions of power and authority thanks to the prevalence of stupidity and evil in the general population.

---

I just ordered a pair of these on Amazon. Looks like they are made similar to the Byski RAM jackets, with a bit of extra character carved into the sides with a design. They will be here tomorrow, so I will share if they are good or not. At $10 for a pair of them it is hard to beat. I wanted the chrome ones but don't want to wait two weeks just so I can have the chrome version... not that important in the grand scheme of things.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CKYPWHQ5?th=1

 

[electrosoft]

1 hour ago, Etern4l said:

 

Yes, but this is a result of Kissinger's myopic laissez-faire policy that America has happily executed for decades, with no shortage of current corporate US cheerleaders including the likes of crooked Musk. The idea was to prevent Russia and China from becoming close allies, a policy which - as we know - is close to a complete failure. Anyway, the word from the shareholders is that the money has been good, which is the American way of measuring success. Yet again we find that naively optimising profits does not always lead to great long-term outcomes.  

 

The genie is out of the bottle now though: they are to competitive, rich, and technologically/scientifically advanced  for someone with an intellectual and moral capacity of the a Putin-loving (likely for a good underlying reason, he is a street-smart New Yorker after all) disinfectant-injecting guy to be able to successfully address the problem without blowing up the Western world. Check this out:

 

China has a 'stunning lead' over the US in the research of 37 out of 44 critical and emerging technologies, new study finds

 

BTW if you happen to visit Walmart, let us know what percentage of non-agricultural items of interest are not made in China (30% apparently) - now imagine all those goods need to be produced domestically in a country with 4% unemployment or all the production has to be moved to other countries. How much time and money would it take, and what would be the impact on inflation? Sure, three cheers for the headline-grabbing tariffs, but need much smarter and broader overall set of policies and a person in charge intellectually and morally capable of delivering them (in a country where most politicians are in the pockets of big business or worse). 

 

Referring back to the current subject matter: is this 4090D thing supposed to convince anyone that Jensen Huang is wholeheartedly supporting the US government policy? It's just a clever ploy to supply China with discounted 4090 units. If the hardware is to be used for science, the 10% lower core count is basically irrelevant. It's a joke, and to any NVidia supporters in the democratic parts of the world: the joke is, or ultimately will be, on you.    

 

Food for thought, good luck to us all in 2024 - apologies for not having anything positive to say on the topic du jour.

 

Spot on post bro. I agree with every bit of it. The blessing and the curse of China though is like Japan many years ago they are grossly reliant on sustained output and exports. You can ever so slowly see the wheels turning for many countries who are exploring and implementing alternate manufacturing partners in other countries (India and Vietnam come to mind) to at least have backups when the shoe drops or start to move more production out of China.

 

I expect an economical squeeze on China to slowly ramp up over the next few years on a much grander scale than what was done to Japan. Will it be effective? It depends on several factors one of them being worldwide corporate greed (including Nvidia) looking at the bigger picture and understand profits have a limit.

 

 

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

I just ordered a pair of these on Amazon. Looks like they are made similar to the Byski RAM jackets, with a bit of extra character carved into the sides with a design. They will be here tomorrow, so I will share if they are good or not. At $10 for a pair of them it is hard to beat. I wanted the chrome ones but don't want to wait two weeks just so I can have the chrome version... not that important in the grand scheme of things.

 

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0CKYPWHQ5?th=1

 

 

Did you order two of them? According to the review, the listing is slightly misleading as you actually will only receive one heatsink in total with each side representing one of the pieces (hence, 2 pieces).

 

They do look very much like the Byski ram jackets on the DDR4 I picked up from you a few years ago (which are still powering the Mrs. rig at 1:1 4133 on that 12900k).

 

 

 

 

[Mr. Fox]

2 hours ago, electrosoft said:

I expect an economical squeeze on China to slowly ramp up over the next few years on a much grander scale than what was done to Japan. Will it be effective? It depends on several factors one of them being worldwide corporate greed (including Nvidia) looking at the bigger picture and understand profits have a limit.

Hopefully we will get another "America First" Commander in Chief back in office and we can really put the hurt on China, seal our borders and restore some of the sanity and integrity we have lost. We should not be sharing knowledge, technology, resources, food, finances or providing any kind of trade or other support to China. TSMC is building fab plants in the US. Intel and AMD have fab plants here. They are expendable. We really don't "need" China for anything, or their chintzy garbage products for anything, and we should start to behave accordingly. They, however, do need us and we should exploit that on our own terms. And, if/when we do, they need to view it as a privilege that they can lose at any moment and with no advance notice. Personally, I think we should act as if they do not exist and sever any and all relationships with them, and allow them to slip back into third-world obscurity again. The planet would be a safer and healthier without them.

2 hours ago, electrosoft said:

Did you order two of them? According to the review, the listing is slightly misleading as you actually will only receive one heatsink in total with each side representing one of the pieces (hence, 2 pieces).

 

They do look very much like the Byski ram jackets on the DDR4 I picked up from you a few years ago (which are still powering the Mrs. rig at 1:1 4133 on that 12900k).

Oh no. I did not. Thank you. I ordered a second kit so now it will be Sunday instead of tomorrow.

---

Huh. This arrived a week ahead of schedule. @Papusanis BIOS v0080 working well?

[jaybee83]

so guys, i think this monster of a "laptop" might peak your interest

 

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/liquid-cooled-laptop-features-amd-epyc-64-core-zen-4-cpu-and-rtx-4080-desktop-gpu-vendor-promises-rtx-4080-super-upgrade-down-the-line

 

@Mr. Fox @Papusan 😄

[Mr. Fox]

Yeah, I saw that a couple of weeks ago, Brother @jaybee83. I don't think even that would be enough to re-spark my interest in laptops. I'm just done with them. Probably forever. Too many corners have to be cut due to form factor. It's a cool idea though, at least for those that can't seem to shake loose from the idea. Laptops are just too disgusting to me now. I'm OK with owning one that is cheap and my expectations are set accordingly. I've got my little sub-$500 off-lease Half-Breed when I need it.

 

I shudder to think how hot that sucker is going to run, even with liquid cooling. There is no way that it will be able to deliver full performance in that package. Power and cooling will both be a problem.

[Clamibot]

6 hours ago, jaybee83 said:

noice would love to play around with an optane drive at some point, just that price per gb is so horrible 😅 how much did u pay for it, if i may ask?

check and see if there are any options in the intel optane panel (dont remember intels toolbox name, but its analogous to other ssd toolboxes) that would need changing. also, have u tried different optane driver versions to see if there is any similar behaviour?

as for bios settings, only thing i could think of would be pcie connection related (im assuming ure rocking the pcie AIC and not the U.2 version?)

 

from my side theres a first failed attempt at installing the custom AM5 IHS. install went fine but temps are worse than before. issue being that ill need to finetune the z height of my arctic LFII 420 AIO, from what i can measure theres a difference of roughly 1.5-2 mm that ill need to account for vs. the stock AM5 SAM. i ordered two additional am5 mounting kits from arctic so i could play around (and destroy) the included parts to check and see how i would ideally bridge that gap. fingers crossed guys! 🙂

 

The 1.5 TB 905P model I got costed $400. It's really expensive😅

 

I wanted to see how much of an impact it would have on my workflow as from what I've seen, it theoretically would significantly speed up my workflow. I spend a significant part of my workdays compiling code and waiting on builds to be made so I can test the games I develop. I wanted more time to actually do software engineering in a day and thus increase my productivity.

 

I'm using the U.2 version as that was the cheapest. I have it connected to my PC through a Startech x4 U.2 to PCIe adapter. The AIC versions of the 905P are a lot more expensive which is really silly.

 

What is this Intel Optane Panel you speak of?

 

Edit: Welp I found out why the drive isn't performing as expected. The x4 PCIe slot on my motherboard is connected to the chipset, not directly to the CPU. I need to go set it to CPU mode first🤣 Ohh I'm a doofus.

[jaybee83]

19 minutes ago, Clamibot said:

 

The 1.5 TB 905P model I got costed $400. It's really expensive😅

 

I wanted to see how much of an impact it would have on my workflow as from what I've seen, it theoretically would significantly speed up my workflow. I spend a significant part of my workdays compiling code and waiting on builds to be made so I can test the games I develop. I wanted more time to actually do software engineering in a day and thus increase my productivity.

 

I'm using the U.2 version as that was the cheapest. I have it connected to my PC through a Startech x4 U.2 to PCIe adapter. The AIC versions of the 905P are a lot more expensive which is really silly.

 

What is this Intel Optane Panel you speak of?

 

Edit: Welp I found out why the drive isn't performing as expected. The x4 PCIe slot on my motherboard is connected to the chipset, not directly to the CPU. I need to go set it to CPU mode first🤣 Ohh I'm a doofus.

 

hum if the connection hasnt changed then why would a driver change make a difference? 

 

1.5TB for 400 bucks is a steal though, when talking about optane!

 

as for the toolbox, should be this one: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19543/intel-memory-and-storage-tool-gui.html

[Clamibot]

59 minutes ago, jaybee83 said:

 

hum if the connection hasnt changed then why would a driver change make a difference? 

 

1.5TB for 400 bucks is a steal though, when talking about optane!

 

as for the toolbox, should be this one: https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/download/19543/intel-memory-and-storage-tool-gui.html

 

Turns out the x4 slot was also running in x1 mode since my 4th m.2 slot shares bandwidth with the 4th PCIe slot😐

 

I disabled that slot and now have to move the drive that was installed there. My drive performance increased significantly after that change since now the slot is actually running in x4 mode.

 

Apparently m.2 slots 2 and 3 will be disabled if I use SATA ports 5 and 6 as well. Some motherboards have wacky designs. This would be the last thing I expected out of my MSI Unify Z590. If they're gonna put the ports there, they should all be useable at once.

 

Edit: Thanks for the help everyone. While you guys didn't directly answer my question about the drivers, you gave me a strong push in the right direction and I was able to figure things out. If anyone else encounters suboptimal Optane SSD performance in the future, this is the fix:

 

Make sure your Optane SSD is connected directly to the CPU (not through the chipset, check your motherboard manual to see which PCIe slots are connected though the chipset and which ones are connected directly though the CPU). Then, make sure the motherboard doesn't do something wacky like limit the bandwidth (like in my case) due to it sharing bandwidth with another slot. Then, install the Optane drivers last and restart your computer. If your x4 slot is running in 4 lane mode, is connected directly to the CPU, and you have the Optane drivers installed, this will maximize the performance of your Optane SSD.

[Etern4l]

1 hour ago, Clamibot said:

I was able to figure things out

 

Congrats! What an insane SSD. And the reliability? 27 PBW! 

 

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/sku/147526/intel-optane-ssd-905p-series-1-5tb-2-5in-pcie-x4-3d-xpoint/specifications.html

 

It's bizarre and shameful that Intel discontinued this gem. What's your real-life usage experience so far? BTW how much RAM does the system have?

[Papusan]

4 hours ago, Mr. Fox said:

Huh. This arrived a week ahead of schedule. @Papusanis BIOS v0080 working well?

Congrats bro Fox. From what I have seen it works ok. But can't compare it with 0070/0071 many others have had sucksess with. I never flashed those versions. Remember the 0070 and forwards need newest IMEI. And I think the bios have it baked in. Maybe waith with the newest. I think its 0801 from Asus support page come with new security fixes https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-maximus/rog-maximus-z790-apex-encore/helpdesk_bios/

 

Ps. The vram nvidia should have used for 4090's.

 

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 SUPER Gets World's Fastest GDDR6X Memory Solution Clocking In At 23 Gbps Pin Speeds, Reveals RTX 40 SUPER Specs Leak

 

We have also come to know that there were indeed plans for a GeForce RTX 4090 SUPER though those were dropped due to the recent sanctions which limit the release of GPUs hitting over 4800 TOPs in China and other regions. Currently, there are no plans to do a RTX 4090 SUPER or Ti GPU but that might change if restrictions soften up in the coming year (which seems unlikely at the moment).

[Mr. Fox]

16 minutes ago, Papusan said:

Congrats bro Fox. From what I have seen it works ok. But can't compare it with 0070/0071 many others have had sucksess with. I never flashed those versions. Remember the 0070 and forwards need newest IMEI. And I think the bios have it baked in. Maybe waith with the newest. I think its 0801 from Asus support page come with new security fixes https://rog.asus.com/motherboards/rog-maximus/rog-maximus-z790-apex-encore/helpdesk_bios/

Thank you. I will avoid v0801 since I do not want "security" fixes. I only care about performance. I will test first with whatever BIOS is on the board from the factory before v0800. If it works OK with the factory BIOS I may skip v0800 since I would prefer to avoid newer Intel ME versions if I can. It really sucks that ASUS goes all Nazi on that stupid crap. I don't even know what version Windows ME drivers are on my work computer right now because I have Intel ME disabled in the BIOS, so no Windows drivers are even necessary. I think the motherboard firmware is like 2 years old, LOL. It just doesn't matter. Intel ME has nothing whatsoever to do with overclocking. ASUS really should be allowing the motherboard owner to make their own decisions about these things like EVGA always did. 😒

[Papusan]

5 minutes ago, Mr. Fox said:

Thank you. I will avoid v0801 since I do not want "security" fixes. I only care about performance. I will test first with whatever BIOS is on the board from the factory before v0800. If it works OK with the factory BIOS I may skip v0800 since I would prefer to avoid newer Intel ME versions if I can. It really sucks that ASUS goes all Nazi on that stupid crap. They should allow the motherboard owner to make their own decisions like EVGA always did. 😒

Maybe start with BIOS 0506. I mean people wasn't happy with the newer BIOS 0507. These two bios versions have the older ME 16.1.30.2264. And I mean the Encore come with this ME version istalled. 

[Mr. Fox]

Just now, Papusan said:

Maybe start with BIOS 0506. I mean people wasn't happy with the newer BIOS 0507. These two bios versions have the older ME 16.1.30.2264. And I mean the Encore come with this ME version istalled. 

I have not installed it yet so I do not know what version it has. The decal on the box show a manufacture date of November 2023.

[Papusan]

1 hour ago, Mr. Fox said:

I have not installed it yet so I do not know what version it has. The decal on the box show a manufacture date of November 2023.

From every new patch note.... "Improved system performance". I can't grasp why etc Safedisk didn't want to explain what's improved in every new bios versions they throw out. So completely avoiding the topic. Oh'well, it's Asus and they don't want to tell more than needed (same with other OEMs). Maybe Intel also have something to say if Asus go own ways. Only those working closely with this brand (the elite and their friends) will have all this info. 

 

On 12/26/2023 at 10:56 PM, Papusan said:

The 4TB WD_Black SN850X NVMe SSD is back to its all time low price at Amazon

The 4TB WD_Black SN850X Gen4 NVMe SSD, with read speeds of up to 7,300 MB percent and with Microsoft's DirectStorage support, is discounted at Amazon at its all-time low price of just $229.95.

 

Here home... Cheapo $372.40 USD. Or +140$ above.

 

I'm not sure you'll get the WD_Black so much cheaper.... 

 

SSD prices predicted to skyrocket throughout 2024

 

And the price hike will apply most of new tech. $664.39 for Core i9-14900. Hmmm, no thanks. The trend goes the wrong way. 

 

Raptor Lake Refresh non-K CPUs are seemingly more expensive than prior-gen models — overseas retailer lists non-K CPUs ahead of launch

[ryan]

change of heart. out with the desktop in with the calculator