Origami Cactus

Be very careful trying to compare compute results across generations and relating them to gaming. Since I started paying attention around Maxwell, every generation has come with it a significant uplift in compute performance relative to gaming perf. I've seen this through several generations:
980 Ti and 1070 are about same gaming performance, but 1070 is much faster compute.
2070 is faster than 1080 Ti in compute, but not in raster gaming.
2080 Ti and 3070, similar gaming perf, but in compute 3070 is way faster.
 
I don't know if Geekbench behaves like the apps I used in the past though, so try looking for generation on generation changes in that and see if what I observed holds for that also.

What a coincidence - the 4090 is also roughly 65% more expensive than a 3090 TI on the European market.
Take this offer for example: water-cooled 3090 TI for 1199€ while the 4090 (FE) is supposed to launch for 1949€.

 
 

Tbh ultra is stupid at 4k. Better off using high graphics which is usually very close visually and hard to tell the difference between that and ultra while also having a big difference in performance. Honestly ultra has made 0 sense at basically any resolution other than when you are so cpu bottlenecked that ultra vs high settings makes no difference on terms of performance. 

Stock, if you believed the rumors of the RTX 4090 being 2x-4x faster than last gen then you needed to lay off breathing in the LN2 🙃 lol

The 4080 8GB will probably be double the price of the 3060 though.

No. The official supported frequency for Intel chips is 4800, so anything above that is considered overclocking. From what I have heard, doing 5600 with 4 sticks is very possible - it generally works - but there is no guarantee above 4800 speed for 12th gen.

They can, it's just much harder. I can only get around 3333 on my 4-stick DDR4 get vs 3600 if I only have 2.

There's a large strain that gets placed on intels already bad memory controller with 4 sticks, so it's hard to run past 5600 effectively. It also depends on the board though since the unify x, which is one of the best board for memory oc only has 2 sticks, since at best there would be a noticeable difference with 4 sticks vs 2, and worse case it wouldn't work at all

Are you experiencing a problem with your setup?  If you have a good stable setup with 2 sticks but it gets a bit rocky with 4 sticks, then my first recommendation is to check your voltages.  Try going 3% above what the sticks are labeled as.  So if they are rated at 1.5v, bump them up to  1.55.

PCIe 4.0 isn't decided by a BIOS update, it's decided by the CPU. The 11th gen chip you're putting in will run PCIe 4.0 on PCIe slots linked to the CPU, in this case PCI_E1 & PCI_E3 - these are usually labeled on the motherboard itself. 
Literally lanes, like a highway. The CPU has a limited amount, it's shared between all the devices that use PCIe. So GPU, any other devices that use a PCIe slot, an M.2 NVMe drive (an M.2 SATA drive won't use PCIe lanes), etc.
It does not. Each DDR spec needs a different slot (as the pinout is different they force this to make sure people don't get confused and slot in the wrong RAM), no motherboard can support 2 standards without having separate slots for each. 
Correct, PCIe and DDR spec are separate things. 

Look at your socket on the motherboard, nothing is in the middle to make contact.  The stickers shouldn't effect anything at all.

This is probably only tangentially related to what you meant, but I thought I'd share it. I have a theory that the modern corporate business monster implicitly encourages mediocrity. The better you are at your job, the more it encourages management dumping more and more work on you as well as doing other peoples' jobs as well, all without extra pay. So this burns people out quickly. Everyone knows this, so since hard work isn't rewarded (after all, the real credit goes to your boss' boss' boss' boss) or recognised, it encourages people to not care and to hover around doing the bare minimum to not get fired. If you care, you'll be ripped to pieces. So it encourages people to not be at all emotionally/personally invested in their work, again encouraging mediocrity.

 I think that hard work only really pays off, potentially, in very small start-up businesses where they need people who work hard and care. However, once a business reaches a certain size or age, the incentives for mediocrity increase.

102km today in 4 hours and 29 minutes. Could very well be the last ride of the season. We'll have to see how the weather holds up.
 
Total this year: 2,621km

Took advantage of what seems to be the last vestige of summer before our 8 months of darkness sets in. 101km today in 4 hours 22 minutes. I had my first bear encounter! I've been cycling these here parts for over 20 years, cycled across Canada, cycled through the Yukon and the Northwest Territories, cycled through Banff and Jasper plenty of times, and yet today of all days was the first time I'd ever seen a bear while cycling. It was a small black bear about the size of an English sheepdog. I was enjoying a slight downhill and cruising around 30kmph when I looked to the right and saw the bear looking back at me. I looked behind me and saw it bound across the pathway. Keep in mind, this is within city limits, literally 5km away from my apartment building.
 
Total this year: 2,519km

Right now I'd suggest waiting ~a month to see how Ryzen 7000 and intel 13th gen shake out.
 
One of those is probably a better upgrade path than 12th gen, especially if you're already planning on DDR5.  

Summary
The majority of graphics driver development effort these days, whether from Nvidia, Intel, or AMD, is concentrated on new APIs like DirectX 12 or Vulkan, increasingly powerful upscaling technologies, and particular upgrades for new game releases. However, AMD has been focused on an old trouble area for their graphics drivers this year: OpenGL performance.
Over the summer, AMD released a rewritten OpenGL driver that it said would boost the performance of Minecraft by up to 79 percent (independent testing also found gains in other OpenGL games and benchmarks, though not always to the same degree). Now those same optimizations are coming to AMD's officially validated GPU drivers for its Radeon Pro-series workstation cards, providing big boosts to professional apps like Solidworks and Autodesk Maya.
AMD claims that its new drivers can enhance Solidworks rendering performance by up to 52 percent at 4K and 28 percent at 1080p resolutions when used with a Radeon Pro W6800 workstation GPU. Autodesk Maya performance improves by 34% at 4K and 72% at the default resolution. The size of the improvements varies depending on the app and the GPU, but AMD's testing shows significant, consistent improvements across the board on the Radeon Pro W6800, W6600, and W6400 GPUs, which AMD claims will help those GPUs outperform analogous Nvidia workstation GPUs like the RTX A5000 and A2000, as well as the Nvidia T600.
Quotes
 
My thoughts
Well, that's interesting. Those Performance improvements seem quite nice, especially since these performance improvements are coming to older cards. Good on you AMD. Though it should be noted that these improvements apply solely to OpenGL and so doesn't carry over to macOS as well (since it was deprecated, unless you somehow compiled it on macOS, which I think someone has done). Would've been nice to see them on OpenCL and Vulkan but c'est la vie.
 
Sources
ArsTechnica
AMD - Blog, Adrenaline Release Notes

The drone didn't directly cause the power outage when it collided with the power lines. When Wing reported the incident to the energy provider they cut the power as a precaution and so the drone could be recovered safely. The drone didn't cause any damage to the power lines. Seems like cars crashing in to power poles are more of an issue. (though, obviously if you are flying a drone you should avoid power lines!)
 
We all just need to stop ordering so much damn crap.

Oil from the thermal pads. Quite normal to see and does not affect the motherboard. 
Shouldn't be difficult as you pull the lever up, remove CPU, align new CPU's triangle with the triangle on the socket, insert and push lever down. Reinstall CPU cooler and apply new thermal paste and that's it. 

The bios ver. i P1.90 (the newest one) cpu runs fine in this list the 5600g 45-65w and 5600ge 35w is only listed under the 1.6 bios ver. 

https://www.asrock.com/mb/AMD/B550M-ITXac/index.asp#CPU
 
 

They have been making motherboards for a long time, just they don't get mentioned cause great products will sell them selves.

You used to get those free when purchasing EVGA 'Dark' series motherboards

The chip is fine, the cooling isn’t good. They are not hard to cool 😎

Yeah, there's quite a big price gap between a great 1440p and a better, big, OLED 4k one.
For 1440p I'd recommend MSI Optix MAG274QRF-QD or LG 27GP850.  Both good IPS.
Not asked from me, but still.

I'd wait for reviews to see how they actually stack up before making a purchasing decision.

Send the ram back, get some G.Skill. Many many problems with Corsair and AMD.