TVwazhere

Awful lot of off axis glare for not high beams.

Her's a tip some of you can use.

I envy the guys in North America.
 
Living in France, and wanting to replace my F30 328i, I need to add 60k euros of pollution taxes. I wanted that Dark Horse or M3 ...
Oh, and the GR86 is 95k now LOL

My wife and I just signed the purchase agreement on 1.6ac to build a house on.
 

It's amazing what some cleaning and paint can do for looks.

What better way to experience GeForce NOW, than toDAY?

@TVwazherewell i couldn't agree more with you. RGB are aesthetics they won't give you FPS. The spreadsheet is top of the line. You are the best
@TVwazhereare you satisfied with this motherboard. Any observations or suggestions. Btw thanks for your help also and your photo examples 

Reviews came out today, didn't even know this was a thing until then.
 
North XL — Fractal Design (fractal-design.com)
 
Its effectively a longer FD North, which isn't necessary, but for some people it might. Makes the case long enough to support a top 360mm radiator.
 
The rest of it seems to be the same spec wise, front radiator support being a little better somehow. 
 
The FD North supports eATX perfectly fine without interfering with the cable management gromits, having at least 30.5cm of support (I run an X670e Aorus Master in a FD North). 
 

 
Noting the 4 (TG) total 120mm fan mount support listed is wrong, its 6 since there's three front, two top, and 1 rear.

It will fit. 
 
"E-ATX" is mainly a garbage marketing term for any board officially longer than ATX (9.6" / 244mm), the only official board size longer than ATX is SSI-CEB (10.5", which is what the AsRock Taichi is), and SSI-EEB (13" / 330mm) which is "True E-ATX" (it has a fourth set of standoff supports) This photo below shows how much room is with the ATX board, 1" / 25mm will not cause an interference fit and barly cause issues with the rubber grommets.  

Photo Source
 
As a Side note, I purchased the B650E Taichi lite, and saved $150 to get rid of all that "Armor" which does nothing. Literally the same board, and is a decent value at $250-280, but terrible at $400. 

 

It will fit. 
 
"E-ATX" is mainly a garbage marketing term for any board officially longer than ATX (9.6" / 244mm), the only official board size longer than ATX is SSI-CEB (10.5", which is what the AsRock Taichi is), and SSI-EEB (13" / 330mm) which is "True E-ATX" (it has a fourth set of standoff supports) This photo below shows how much room is with the ATX board, 1" / 25mm will not cause an interference fit and barly cause issues with the rubber grommets.  

Photo Source
 
As a Side note, I purchased the B650E Taichi lite, and saved $150 to get rid of all that "Armor" which does nothing. Literally the same board, and is a decent value at $250-280, but terrible at $400. 

 

I don't usually post too much about fussing around with my PCs, but after moving to a new apartment last year and realizing I needed to downsize my home server, CoffeeBox, I finally finished the project! I'd like to share because I'm really happy with how it came out, and it's where most of my folding gets done.

This was the previous chassis, a Fractal Define 7 XL. It sat in my entryway and was fine in the winter (the cables were managed after this photo was taken to not be a tripping hazard), but in the summer the lack of insulation for the entryway resulted in the hard drives running over max temperature threshold. This resulted in me moving it, and led to the moment during the November folding event where the washing machines shook screws out of it and caused a short.



This box pulls a few different duties -- it runs a media server, a bunch of game servers, a discord bot, my personal website, holds backups, acts as a NAS, and runs compute projects for me. Notably, none of these really require the big box, I only went with it because it gave me lots of slots to throw old GPUs in, which has been proving increasingly expensive as electricity prices around here keep going up. It'd be cheaper in the long run for me to just downsize to a more power efficient solution. Between the need for a smaller box, wanting less power consumption, and recent back-to-back boot drive failures (thank you Samsung for your repeated faulty SSD batches, two dead 970 Pros at less than 10% of their TBW rating)...



CoffeeBox 2.0! Roughly a quarter of the size (23.5% of the volume, or 28% with the drive enclosure), faster, quieter, and more power efficient. I kept the same drives, memory, and CPU (Which had recently been upgraded from an i7-8700k when 13th gen had a brief price crash due to 14th gen releasing), but swapped out basically everything else. The most noteworthy migration was from 2x2060s and 1x1080 to a single 4070 Ti super, which should just about triple GPU compute performance at half the power consumption before tuning! It's still on a UPS, but that now sits further away from the machine.



CPU: Intel i9-13900k (power limited)
GPU: MSI 4070 Ti Super Ventus 3X
Motherboard: ASRock Z790 PG-ITX/TB4
RAM: 64GB G.Skill Trident Z5 DDR5-6000
PSU: Corsair SF750
Cooler: Noctua NH-U12A
Chassis: Cooler Master NR200
Drive Enclosure: Sabrent 10-Bay DS-UCTB
Storage: 7x WD Red Plus 12TB, 1x WD Black 8TB, 2x WD SN850x redundant boot drives

Now I just need to figure out if I'm going to wait a few weeks for my linux distro to release a driver that actually SUPPORTS the 4070 Ti Super, or if I'm going to be impatient and add a repo for it...

Picked up a couple of 4070 Ti Supers to add to the Fold. They appear to be most efficient around 2400MHz.
450W 29MPPD Mini Space Heater:

It could be, but the timing is just weird then. Why would contact between the block and the card die right when F@H also had server issues? 🤔 
 
That being said, deep cleaning is almost done, let's see what this does.

Nomads of Driftland The Forgotten Passage is FREE right now on GOG.

Nomads The Forgotten Passage is the scenario pack for Nomads of Driftland(75% Mostly Positive reviews on Steam).
 
Nomads of Driftland is an RTS game initially created as an add-on to Driftland The Magic Revival(74% Mostly Positive reviews on Steam). Since it is significantly different from the base game, the devs decided to release it as a standalone expansion and make it available as FREE TO PLAY on Dec 7, 2020. A couple weeks ago, Driftland The Magic Revival(currently $20), was given out for FREE on Fanatical. Here is that thread.
 
I hope I explained all this so you can understand it because I doubt any of you have actually played any of these. You have time until March 8th, 2024 to claim and keep this DLC forever.

AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D - Ryzen 7 7000 Series 8-Core 4.2 GHz Socket AM5 120W AMD Radeon Graphics Desktop Processor - 100-100000910WOF - Newegg.com

Amazon.com: AMD Ryzen™ 9 7900X3D 12-Core, 24-Thread Desktop Processor : Electronics

AMD Ryzen 9 7950X3D - Ryzen 9 7000 Series 16-Core 4.2 GHz Socket AM5 120W CPU - Newegg.com

Amazon.com: AMD Ryzen™ 9 7950X3D 16-Core, 32-Thread Desktop Processor : Electronics

Discounts look good (though I still wouldn't buy the 7900X3D) but the price drop under $600 for the 7950X3D is nice. it is the lowest we've seen the 7900X3D but we've had the 7800X3D at $349 before and even the 7950X3D at $560, and considering there's the bundle over at microcenter (for the 7800X3D), if you're near one that's the best option
Price graphs (lowest price shown in full):
7800X3D

7900X3D

7950X3D

So last year my friend bought a '88 Fiero Formula.
 
Saturday I got to drive it after helping him work on it for a while.

(photo sourced from previous owner)
 
Coming from a relatively slow Focus ST, this car is isnt quick but wow is it fun to drive?? If you dont mind no power steering and having to cram into a shorter car at 6'3, having the engine behind your head and hearing the N/A v6 behind you while you slam gears is fantastic. 

Don't mind me I'm just testing something.
 
crunchydragonisafakemod.com

Summary
BlueBeam is a industry focused PDF viewer that many who deal with cad or archictectual design utilize as it allows for a lot of work to be done with existing PDF drawings. Previosuly BlueBeam had a perpetual license once purchased. Yet they were not as forver as implied. 
 
These were set to expire 9/29/2023. Those who used to only pay a Maintence Fee (Active support) are now finding that they are being forced to upgrade to  the latest version of bluebeam, which is now an annual subscription, in order to continue recieving support.

The Current update is that as of now you can no longer be activate existing licenses on new machines, even if your old machine died.   
 
Quotes
 
Before

 
Now

 
 
My thoughts
This affects my company directly. At this point only two of the services we utilize as business critical do not have a subscription model, and only one of those two would be unable to remove that ability from us, though they could deny us future updates. The world is continuously getting greedier, and thus more expensive. 
 
Sources
 Me: business email from bluebeam concerning required renewal.
https://support.bluebeam.com/articles/revu-20-below-licensing-faq/

Currently the Arctic AIOs have no non RGB white counterpart and in the US there is apparently no white ARGB 240 rad
Note: the black AIOs section includes ARGB
US deals, Black AIOs
US deals, White AIOs
UK deals, Black AIOs
UK deals, White Arctic AIOs
EU deals, Black AIOs
EU deals, White AIOs
Source - Amazon.co.uk and Arctic Freezer III AIO CPU coolers for AMD AM4/AM5 and Intel LGA1700/1851 launched with big discount - VideoCardz.com

ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 360 - Multi-compatible All-in-One CPU AIO Water Cooler, Compatible with Intel & AMD, Efficient PWM Controlled Pump, Fan speed: 200-1800 rpm, LGA1700 compatible - Black : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

ARCTIC Liquid Freezer II 360 A-RGB - Multi-compatible All-in-One CPU AIO Water Cooler with A-RGB, efficient PWM-controlled pump, Fan speed: 200-1800 rpm, LGA1700 compatible - Black : Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories

Phew I just made it!