Max Norde

I'm gonna take the CPU out then and try to get the liquid metal syringe needle between the pins without damaging them.

The only reason I wanted to do it in the first place is the crazy thermal envelope of the Intel chips. I might try some resuscitation attempts tomorrow, but I'm probably gonna wait for the 7800X3D to release. It should pull a lot less wattage in the first place and make direct-die redundant.

Hey there, I recently tried my hand at direct-die cooling and screwed up big time. The temps I got after delidding were awful and I unscrewed and rescrewed the cooler lots of times, trying several different thermal interfaces. One of those was liquid metal (Thermal Grizzly Conductonaut). Somehow a splotch of the liquid metal got on the underside of the CPU and probably in the CPU socket, too. I wiped it off the CPU, but it left some of the pins silver instead of gold. I'm not sure if there's any left in the socket, it's hard to tell. The Debug LEDs on my mainboard light up for the CPU for a few seconds before the system shuts down and does not restart. I don't have another mainboard to test the CPU. Is there any hope or should I just write the CPU and mainboard off as losses? The components in question are an ASRock Z790 Pro RS Wifi mainboard and a 13700K CPU. Right now, I think I'll just wait for the 7800X3D to get released and go Team Red when that happens. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

That sounds like a good compromise. Steelseries Engine really doesn't do anything and could just be ignored. I also have HD58X headphones for when I just want to listen, so I probably won't upgrade my audio. Thanks for the advice!

I try, believe me. But there just isn't anything that satisfies all my requirements. Not having RGB is purely aesthetic so it's not that high of a priority. If I were a braver man, I'd go ahead and rip off the LEDs from my mobo. I only need to do that because there is not any Z390 board without RGB that ticks all the other boxes as well. The RGB curse is everywhere.

If I don't like the ecosystem down the road, I'll just get new stuff. What I'm interested in is which products are the best right now.

Yeah they do, but I still need the software to make changes to it. What I want is to have one program that just handles everything, with all the features present.

Hey there, recently I've been kind of dissatisfied with my peripherals. On their own they're all pretty good, they just don't really work as well I'd want in conjunction. What I have is as follows: Wooting Two Keyboard Corsair Harpoon Mouse Steelseries Arctis 7 Wireless Headset My biggest complaint is that I have to have a program running for each one of them. On top of the ASUS stuff for my mobo. All I want is turn the RGB off and it simply can't stand that I need four separate programs to do so. Ideally, I want to just have one software for everything. That's why I'm considering upgrading to either all Logitech or all Corsair. Does that make sense, though? Will that really make a noticeable difference? Is either iCue or the G Suite fit for doing everything or will they fail me? For your consideration, here's what I've been thinking about getting: Logitech G Pro Wireless Mouse Powerplay Mousepad G815 Tactile Keyboard G935 Wireless Headset Corsair Corsair Dark Core Wireless Mouse Corsair MM1000 Qi Mousepad Corsair Gaming K70 LUX Keyboard Corsair HS70 Pro Wireless Headset If you have another contender for the peripheral manufacturer of choice, I'm open for suggestions.

You're at the same tough spot as me. I was rocking a 6700k and a 1080 for the longest time. It's a tough call because you have to either spend a ton of money or you won't get that much of an improvement. I went the way of spending a ton of money and got an all new system. Timing is also kinda unfortunate. Ryzen 4000 and RTX 3000 as well as RDNA 2 GPUs are on the horizen but all of them arent announced yet. If you accept that in about 6 months, your upgrade won't be the cutting edge anymore, I'd go for the CPU upgrade. The extra threads will make streaming much better. I'm not a streaming expert, tho. With graphics, it really depends on what you want to do. If you want to play Shadow of the Tomb Raider or Monster Hunter World at 120 fps at max settings, you're gonna need a TU102. I would wait for the RTX 3000 series in that case, since you will probably get 2080 Ti performance for way less than the current astronomical price. If you want an upgrade now, I'd go for the CPU and get a GPU later when new stuff arrives.

I downloaded the free trial of PrimoCache and in preliminary testing, that seems to have eliminated the problem entirely with a 2GB RAM Cache. Thanks again.

I'll take a look at RAM-Cashing. In non-gaming use, I barely use any of my 16 gigs. Thanks for the tip, @Applefreak!

Hey there, I got a new system a while back and decided to switch from the tried and true SSD + Data HDD to just one big ass SSD. It's been great for the most part but when I download games on steam, or when microsoft decides it's time to just do some updating while the pc is in usage, I'm experiencing major lag. Programs refuse to load, while I type, the characters appear after a short delay, generally everything feels slow. Except games, those run fine once you load in. I looked at task manager and it seems that the problem is my SSD being at 100% usage pretty much for the entire download. Is there anything I can do limit the usage of the SSD? I don't mind my downloads being slower if it means my system won't lag. My SSD is a 2TB SATA Patriot P200.

I've been on a journey the last couple of weeks towards building my dream system and I thought I'd have taken the last step and finally met my goal when I installed my new noctua fans for a totally silent build. Then, disaster struck. Literally the next time I booted up, my 2080 Ti started making coil whine noises. Never in the two weeks I had the card already have I heard it do that. I've run tons of stress tests, had long gaming sessions and benchmarked the card over and over. It's a Zotac 2080 TI Twin Fan with an EK Vector water block on it. The water block was also already installed for a while with no noise issue whatsoever. Is there anything I can do? Will taking the card apart and reseating the thermal pads help, maybe?

I bought a new rig I’m very excited about, I’m still waiting for the graphics card, but all the other parts were delivered, so I put it together to figure out the CPU overclock so I can dive right into my games once the GPU arrives. I got a 9700k since I will only game on it, paired with a Dark Rock 4 (non-pro). I thought that the cooler would be plenty, but alas, temps under synthetic load reach high 90s and 5GHz is unstable. What is my best course of action here? Should I go with a beefy AIO water cooler instead or maybe get an NH-D15?

I replaced the bottom of the case because it was damaged, supposedly by a drop. I'll see what an IT engineer I know thinks when I meet him next. Thanks for the advice!