LiquidZero

There won't be a big WAN Show segment about this or anything. Most of what I have to say, I've already said, and I've done so privately.

To Steve, I expressed my disappointment that he didn't go through proper journalistic practices in creating this piece. He has my email and number (along with numerous other members of our team) and could have asked me for context that may have proven to be valuable (like the fact that we didn't 'sell' the monoblock, but rather auctioned it for charity due to a miscommunication... AND the fact that while we haven't sent payment yet, we have already agreed to compensate Billet Labs for the cost of their prototype). There are other issues, but I've told him that I won't be drawn into a public sniping match over this and that I'll be continuing to move forward in good faith as part of 'Team Media'. When/if he's ready to do so again I'll be ready.

To my team (and my CEO's team, but realistically I was at the helm for all of these errors, so I need to own it), I stressed the importance of diligence in our work because there are so many eyes on us. We are going through some growing pains - we've been very public about them in the interest of transparency - and it's clear we have some work to do on internal processes and communication. We have already been doing a lot of work internally to clean up our processes, but these things take time. Rome wasn't built in a day, but that's no excuse for sloppiness.

Now, for my community, all I can say is the same things I always say. We know that we're not perfect. We wear our imperfection on our sleeves in the interest of ensuring that we stay accountable to you. But it's sad and unfortunate when this transparency gets warped into a bad thing. The Labs team is hard at work hard creating processes and tools to generate data that will benefit all consumers - a work in progress that is very much not done and that we've communicated needs to be treated as such. Do we have notes under some videos? Yes. Is it because we are striving for transparency/improvement? Yeah... What we're doing hasn't been in many years, if ever.. and we would make a much larger correction if the circumstances merited it. Listing the wrong amount of cache on a table for a CPU review is sloppy, but given that our conclusions are drawn based on our testing, not the spec sheet, it doesn't materially change the recommendation. That doesn't mean these things don't matter. We've set KPIs for our writing/labs team around accuracy, and we are continually installing new checks and balances to ensure that things continue to get better. If you haven't seen the improvement, frankly I wonder if you're really looking for it... The thoroughness that we managed on our last handful of GPU videos is getting really incredible given the limited time we have for these embargoes. I'm REALLY excited about what the future will hold.
 
With all of that said, I still disagree that the Billet Labs video (not the situation with the return, which I've already addressed above) is an 'accuracy' issue. It's more like I just read the room wrong. We COULD have re-tested it with perfect accuracy, but to do so PROPERLY - accounting for which cases it could be installed in (none) and which radiators it would be plumbed with (again... mystery) would have been impossible... and also didn't affect the conclusion of the video... OR SO I THOUGHT...
 
I wanted to evaluate it as a product, and as a product, IF it could manage to compete with the temperatures of the highest end blocks on the planet, it still wouldn't make sense to buy... so from my point of view, re-testing it and finding out that yes, it did in fact run cooler made no difference to the conclusion, so it didn't really make a difference.
 
Adam and I were talking about this today. He advocated for re-testing it regardless of how non-viable it was as a product at the time and I think he expressed really well today why it mattered. It was like making a video about a supercar. It doesn't mater if no one watching will buy it. They just wanna see it rip.  I missed that, but it wasn't because I didn't care about the consumer.. it was because I was so focused on how this product impacted a potential buyer. Either way, clearly my bad, but my intention was never to harm Billet Labs. I specifically called out their incredible machining skills because I wanted to see them create something with a viable market for it and was hoping others would appreciate the fineness of the craftsmanship even if the product was impractical. I still hope they move forward building something else because they obviously have talent and I've watched countless niche water cooling vendors come and go. It's an astonishingly unforgiving market.
 
Either way, I'm sorry I got the community's priorities mixed-up on this one, and that we didn't show the Billet in the best light. Our intention wasn't to hurt anyone. We wanted no one to buy it (because it's an egregious waste of money no matter what temps it runs at) and we wanted Billet to make something marketable (so they can, y'know, eat).
 
With all of this in mind, it saddens me how quickly the pitchforks were raised over this. It also comes across a touch hypocritical when some basic due diligence could have helped clarify much of it. I have a LONG history of meeting issues head on and I've never been afraid to answer questions, which lands me in hot water regularly, but helps keep me in tune with my peers and with the community. The only reason I can think of not to ask me is because my honest response might be inconvenient. 
 
We can test that... with this post. Will the "It was a mistake (a bad one, but a mistake) and they're taking care of it" reality manage to have the same reach? Let's see if anyone actually wants to know what happened. I hope so, but it's been disheartening seeing how many people were willing to jump on us here. Believe it or not, I'm a real person and so is the rest of my team. We are trying our best, and if what we were doing was easy, everyone would do it. Today sucks.
 
Thanks for reading this.

Hi guys
I've completed the following build a couple of weeks ago:
AMD Ryzen 7 3800X (AM4, 3.90GHz, 8-Core) ASUS Rog Strix X570-E Gaming (AM4, AMD X570, ATX) Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070S Windforce OC (8GB) Corsair Vengeance RGB Pro (2x, 16GB, DDR4-3200, DIMM 288) Samsung 970 EVO Plus (1000GB, M.2 2280) Corsair Crystal 570X RGB 2x Corsair iCUE QL120 RGB (120mm, 3x) Corsair Commander Pro (External, 6x) Corsair RM850 *2019* (850W) I've installed the stock Prism Wraith cooler and the temps seem really bad. The CPU temp is jumping between 55-65°C when idle! Frequency goes from 3850 to 4400 constantly as well. So first off, I don't have any OC's applied, just PBO enabled. By reading various OC forums about the Ryzen 3800X it looks like OC'ing this processor is not worth it because PBO is very good. But can somebody explain a AMD noob why the ... a CPU has the desire to boost every second to 4.4GHz when IDLE??? This is beyond me lol. I build computers only every 4 years or so, so I'm a noob, but I've really never seen such a thing, but apparently it is normal?
 
Back to the temps:
55-65°C idle
70-75°C playing SC2 for 3 hours (mostly hovering about 71°C and maxing 85°C once according to HWInfo.
When stress testing - up to 95°C within seconds - so I never really bothered stress testing...
GPU sits nicely at 54°C
 
And here are some other temps, at idle while I'm typing this and have 3 browser tabs open on 3 monitors (HWinfo64 - 6.24). Btw. no idea what Temp 2-5 are, but 2 and 5 also seem high.

 
Regarding case fans. I have a positive pressure setup. 3x Corsair QL 120 intake fans pushing 30rpm higher than the 3x Corsair QL 120 exhaust fans. They run at around 800-900rpm if all is normal.
Temp readings of the installed commander pro probes also look very normal. (Mod case around 40°C and upper case around 42°C).
 
 
So yes, why I came to this forum is to seek your advice. First off, the cooler is driving me nuts. I love the small form factor and RGB, but it is sooo loud. at idle it is constantly around 2000rpm and keeps spinning up and down. I did fiddle with the fan curve and can of course avoid that said jumping around, but with my already off the charts temps, I cannot put the fan curve even lower, so I left it stock.
 
Obviously I'm already considering the switch to another cooler, be it AIO or the big NH D15, but to be honest, if I can get it handled with the prism to get decent temps, I'd rather keep it and adjust the fan curve.
 
What would be my next step? Could it be a Bios setting I missed? Should I try to remove the cooler and put on new paste (I went with the pre-applied one)? If you think that's also not worth it than my next question would be regarding the cooler replacement.
 
Would you go with a Noctua NH-D15 Chromax or the Corsair H150i RGB PRO XT (360)? I would like to get a quite setup, at least when idle. The Noctua would likely be quiter but would seriously mess up my RGB. I'd likely even have to remove the rear fan. The H150 is cool from an RGB point of view, but I'm not sure about the noise and the potential leaking the some users report.
Hope somebody can help me figure out why the temps are so high and if it's necessary on a cooler replacement.
Cheers, ecopsorn
                     

Do a new clean install and don't connect to internet during it until posting to desktop, then connect to the internet via Ethernet/WiFi and install updates of windows before you touch any applications or files.
 
EDIT: Make sure you have the latest media creation tool on a usb drive.
One time it happened to install a 32-bit even though my key was 64-bit pro.