Zando_

Yes. The type of games that use over 8 cores don't suffer due to the higher latency.

That's... odd. What are you checking clocks/performance with?

Twitter, Instagram, BlueSky. Pixiv too I think. Some other sites as well. Most of the artists I follow, I do so on Twitter, though that site is slowly going down the shitter due to poor management decisions (there's an ungodly amount of crappy ads and AI spam bots now - especially ones advertising porn - I block multiple a day that follow or tag me). I don't know a good alternative as most of the artists I know of, I came across due to the Twitter algorithm showing them to me, or them retweeting each other's work. Other sites' algorithms seem worse for that sort of thing. If you don't want your images taken without your permission and fed into AI training datasets, be sure to run Glaze and/or Nightshade on your images before uploading them. University of Chicago made them, they're software utilities that make it so AI training algos cannot use your images, or poison the algorithm causing it to quickly become unusable. Glaze: https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/what-is-glaze.html. Nightshade: https://nightshade.cs.uchicago.edu/whatis.html.

How so? It's an older platform than LGA1700... the best chips you can upgrade to are older than the Intel offerings. And it's much worse than a budget AM5 platform, as those leave room to upgrade to current X3D chips down the line.

Not for home users, no. ECC reg/unreg and non ECC have nothing to do with the QVL list though.

With QA reject chipsets and bare minimum VRMs + a half-featured BIOS that may also have stuff that doesn't work even if it is present. They're usable, but not good OC boards if you want to whack hundreds of watts through a Haswell chip. If memory serves my j-bin 5960X was ~350W at 4.5GHz. The Xeons are usually worse bins than the i7s, and significantly worse than a j-bin (specific batch/series of 5960Xs that have above-average bins), so it'll need more voltage to hit similar clocks, meaning higher power draw. Which requires a beefy cooler and beefy VRMs. Folks I've seen with the Xeons often end up running them at 4.2Ghz. A Ryzen Zen+ chip (2000 series aside from the -G APUs) will also do 4.2Ghz, and IPC is similar to Haswell. There's a slight loss due to core-to-core latencies being higher on Ryzen than Intel's ringbus architecture, but they're very close. Zen 2 onwards is much better, and you should be able to get those chips dirt cheap now. You should be able to get a good B450 board for the same or less than a good X99 board. Also worth noting, X99 does not support registered ECC so you cannot use that cheap server RAM. You'd have to use a C chipset which does not support overclocking, defeating the point of the Xeon. You could use ECC unreg, but that isn't any cheaper than normal DDR4, and would run as non-ECC anyways. ^^^ 100%. The 12100 is a killer budget chip already, if the 7500F is even better then . Coworker has an i3 12100, he has 0 issues pushing 1440p 165Hz with a 3060/3060 Ti (I forgot which version of the 3060 he has). If you're purely gaming, the modern 4c/8t chips are nothing to sneeze at.

The CPUs sort of can, but the cost of a good motherboard is too high. No. A couple, I believe 16XX v3 Xeons are overclockable, or it may only be 1-2 SKUs in that line. Ryzen has pretty much killed any value proposition from old Xeons for gaming, you are much better off getting a cheap Zen+ or Zen 2 chip and decent B450 board for the same price (and they'll use the same RAM too so there's 0 price difference there). I like these platforms and use them myself, but they are not a good value vs modern hardware.

That sounds about right. If you set it back to the "all cores" ratio apply mode then it should run all cores at 4.3GHz boost correct? You've changed it to run 200Mhz lower (4.1GHz) when all cores are loaded, that'd be why it's slower.

Hmmm. I can't seem to find what the turbo ratio offset is offsetting. If it's off base clock and you left it at +0 on each core, that would be why the PC runs slower. If it's off the turbo multiplier, then there could be some shenanigans with Turbo Boost that cause it to run slower. That board isn't a Z board and that CPU isn't a K chip (so no unlocked multiplier), usually the best you can do is force the single-core turbo clock on all cores. Which should be what the "all cores" ratio apply mode is doing.

Using GOG Galaxy 2.0 to try and put everything together... Battlefield 2042 is off, I have ~200hrs in that, for some reason it re-counted it multiple times. Everything else looks good: There'd be a few hundred more hours in Destiny 2 as I played it on Battle.net before it moved to Steam. EDIT: Aha, it triple-counted on 2042. The Steam version opens the Origin version of the game, and for some reason Origin counted playing 2042 as playing the trial version of it simultaneously.

It's only a good deal if you'll actually use it. If you want an actual good deal, then that depends on what exactly you're doing with it. As noted you're probably better served with a mainstream platform unless you actually need 52 threads. If you just want a Xeon server for the hell of it, then who am I to stop you. I use HEDT (basically Xeons but without some workstation/server features) for gaming because I think the platforms are neat.

^ Specifically a 240Hz+ one that would compete with modern high-refresh TN panels.

They're used GPUs released 4 years ago. Pretty normal depreciation.

No idea. 12th, 13th, and 14th gen seem to all have the same 20 CPU PCIe 5.0/4.0 lanes + 8 DMI 4.0 lanes downlink to the chipset. So I don't see how they could change something in the BIOS that would cause issues, or why. Lanes on a highway. Add more of em and you get more bandwidth (more cars across the same distance in the same amount of time). Your CPU has 20 lanes, 16 go to your CPU PCIe slots (one x16, or both at x8 if you install something in both slots), 4 go to the CPU M.2 slot. Your chipset M.2 slots, PCIe slots, and most of the board I/O share the 8 DMI lanes. So same as a highway, they get congested when you have more "cars" (things using PCIe lanes) than you have actual lanes. Each of your SSDs is using 4 lanes, so if they're running at 4.0 speeds then 2 of them fill that highway and everything else backs up behind them. Intel/AMD assume most people won't be loading a bunch of high-speed drives so they can get away with this. But I think it's rather stupid given the popularity/low cost of very fast NVMe drives, and the fact that Intel/AMD market their mainstream CPUs to "prosumers", who will be doing exactly this workload regularly. HEDT is unfortunately pretty dead due to the prohibitive cost of current kit + a lot of it being focused on workstation use not people who just need a beefier alternative to mainstream. For reference, my i9 7980XE has 44 CPU PCIe lanes, so I can run an x16 GPU and 4 M.2 drives, all at full bandwidth, through the CPU itself. That's 32 lanes, leaving me with 12 more, though I believe on this platform 4 are stolen by the chipset. Leaving me with 8 spare. And modern HEDT has even more PCIe lanes so it gets rather silly (the current Intel stuff has 64 or 112 PCIe lanes depending on chip). Back on topic, from your motherboard manual, M.2_1 is the CPU M.2 slot. M.2_2, M.2_3, and M.2_4 all run through the Z690 chipset. If there's 2 drive you consistently do large file transfers between, I would put one in the CPU slot, and the other in one of the chipset ones. Realistically other stuff is going through your chipset, so if you're running a transfer between two drives that are both in chipset slots, that's likely why it's choking.

Yep. Mainstream just does not have enough PCIe lanes. Sounds like you're simply bouncing off the bandwidth limits of the lanes you have available. You have an x8 DMI 4.0 uplink from the chipset to the CPU. That's equivalent bandwidth to x8 PCIe 4.0 IIRC, and all drives in chipset slots + lots of your other I/O (USBs, NIC, etc) also go through this. Only takes 2 fast PCIe 4.0 drives running full bore to hit that limit or get very close to it. Thus why it's ok with 2 of them, but once you add a 3rd drive of any kind and load them all, it goes over the bandwidth limit and chokes.

Oh. That's a 360Hz e-sports monitor, not an old 144Hz monitor like you mentioned in the OP. Hardcore CS:GO/similar games players do not care about colors, only refresh rate and response time/input lag. It's likely a cheaper way to get a very low response time monitor vs going OLED.

Sure you're not just seeing new-old-stock TN panels at inflated prices?

Getting the dust out of your PC makes your heatsinks work properly, so it's likely just that. You're also using HWMonitor which can often be inaccurate, so it could be that derping out too. HWiNFO64 is the much better hardware monitoring utility.

990 in the CPU lanes slot, 980 in the chipset lanes. So 990 in M.2_1 and the 980 in M.2_3. M.2_2 is PCIe 4.0 through the CPU as well, but the motherboard manual is not clear on how this is accomplished and whether it'll cause the GPU slot to drop to x8. The chipset has an x8 DMI 4.0 (equivalent bandwidth to PCIe 4.0 IIRC) uplink to the CPU so with OP's setup there shouldn't be any noticeable speed drop with the 980 in chipset lanes anyways.

It's another 240mm of rad space between the two, so it does make a difference. I just think dual 240s should already be plenty, so no need to go double overkill if you have to sacrifice too much. If a case checks all your boxes and clears dual 360s, then that's icing on the cake. The dense rad with the 15mm fans is probably what's killing you on noise. They aren't Noc's quietest fans, especially when spun up to middling rpm, which they'd need to be to get much air through the rad. A low fpi rad should actually be better, as you want to be running low rpm fans to keep noise down, which obviously drops static pressure, making a high fpi rad less effective. HardwareLabs still claims pretty beefy capacities for their GTS rads: I'm not seeking super silence and I got them because they were affordable, so I blast air through them anyways. Don't monitor coolant temps currently so I can't really offer much testing on how they perform with low rpm fans to see if it's close to the claimed numbers. But they are 16fpi and "optimized for sub-800 rpm fans", so they should do well.

What board, what CPU, what's the setting in the BIOS called, what was it set to originally, and what did you change it to? Change any other settings or just that one?

Do not waste space on the 990 Pro installing your OS. The big gains on NVMe drives are for large file transfers, the OS loads a ton of tiny files. The OS doesn't boot any faster off the latest NVMe drives than it does off a decent SATA SSD. Heck on my stuff with a bunch of PCIe lanes/devices (older HEDT), it's actually slower to boot off NVMe (as that uses PCIe) than a SATA SSD. I only have my OS on an NVMe drive for convenience sake.

^^^ For most home NAS/VM use a simple modern 4c/8t chip is plenty, NAS duties are single-threaded and many VMs can even share a single core, depending on the hypervisor you use and what they're doing. Or obviously you can run containers in the host OS or a VM and they'll share whatever resources are available. If you do think you'll use all those threads, it is a solid machine, just keep in mind that it will pull a good chunk of power, and servers can be incredibly loud. Usually you can spin the fans down a lot though, without running into thermal issues.

I play Helldivers 2 at 4K with a 2060 Super, I have everything on med/low and resolution scaling down a couple notches, it still looks great and runs very well. If it's a laptop 3060 then I'm not sure how it compares to the desktop 2060 Super.

I tried Fortnite once 5+ years ago, I think it's changed too much for me to have any useful info on it. Some friends play it together and they seem to have fun, so it's worth a shot. They have a no-build mode too, so you don't have to compete with an 8-year old building the Taj Mahal right in front of you the moment you fire in their direction. Overwatch ehh... the whole Overwatch 2 thing seems horrible from what I've seen. The game was bleeding players before, and 2 added more problems AFAIK so I don't think it's doing so hot. A couple coworkers play Warzone 2.0 (its F2P) and they keep trying to get me into it, but battle royales aren't really my thing so I just mucked around in normal PvP because I got the Modern Warfare 2019 and 2022 games for free (one with a code from a friend who got it with their GPU IIRC, the other I got when I bought my ARC card). Poking through my steam library, if you're at all interested in RPG/MMO games, Star Wars: The Old Republic is F2P. I believe you need to pay to really enjoy the MMO bit, but I've always played it as a singleplayer RPG, the stories are quite good (It's by Bioware, before their goofy stuff with Andromeda/Anthem). I believe I did pay for the premium sub for a bit because I wanted some of the perks, but it's not required to enjoy the story bits, it was just a nice-to-have. The Imperial Agent storyline is especially lauded as a really good one. I had fun with the Agent, my regular good-guy Jedi, and playing a morally grey-ish Sith (not downright "kill people for the fun of it" evil but still a Sith). Poked around as a Republic trooper too. Apparently they just moved to a new developer though: https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/27/23775530/star-wars-the-old-republic-broadsword-bioware. I haven't been on in a while so I don't know if anything changed vs when Bioware was running it. Last I was on they had just updated a bunch of the class system to make it easier to pick and choose what you wanted for your character IIRC. I don't really play many other F2P games, I mostly like open/semi-open world RPG or sandbox games, those are usually too expensive to develop to hand 'em out for free. I get lots of them on sale for very cheap, as I noted above I'm late to the party so they're "old" games now and thus get discounted deeply. I did play Genshin Impact for a bit, it's a pretty nice game but it very, very much wants to get money out of you as it is a gacha game (basically play the lottery for new characters, you can get some for free but most are locked behind the gacha system). If you have a bunch of storage space and want to sink a bit of time into learning how to get mods to work together properly, there's always the ole Bethesda games (Skyrim and Fallout 4 especially) that you can get on sale for extremely cheap, and fix them up into... really anything you want at this point. Some madmen even got cars working in Fallout New Vegas.