bkrownd

Sooo...will it come in bubble wrap?

I've had the GU502GV (ROG Zephyrus with i7-9750H and RTX 2060) for a couple months. A couple things to mention... The speakers sound really "flubby" - the low frequencies are either overdriven or cause some resonances that sound bad and vibrate the laptop at any appreciable volume. I'm wondering if others experience the same thing? In Armory Crate you can do custom fan speed ranges, which I use to keep the fans spinning pretty fast because I work at a high altitude site with only 60% sea level air pressure. (less cooling) Armory Crate lets you set the fan speed range up to 123%. (Is that like turning it up to 11?) Ooops, setting the fan speed above 100% was not a great idea - one day the CPU fan became unbalanced for unknown reason and sounded like a weed-wacker. I had to power down the system completely to stop it. Fortunately it worked normally after that. FYI

LOL, I keep hearing how it's just an overpriced 580. Maybe not? Linus made a whole video complaining about how it was just a "480++" and they only called it a 590 to manipulate the market.

I thought a 590 was just a warmed over 580? I run my 590 at 1640 MHz core without any voltage boost.

I'm looking at the 5500XT benchmarks Gamers Nexus released today

Performance in the reviews is right alongside the Rx 580. In that way it doesn't seem like a functionally new product, but these companies have a habit of refreshing the packaging annually just to get the free advertisement from a new round of reviews. edit: I guess I'm having trouble setting aside my initial expectation that it would be at least 10% faster than the Rx 590. The main "feature" seems to be that it does knock 80-100 Watts off the power consumption in exchange for a bit lower performance.

Can you tighten them too much for the plexi with just your fingers, or are silly people taking wrenches to them?

Personally I'd want to avoid plastic and go with a full metal block, but it's your baby. You might do some research into whether either or those blocks is prone to having the plastic crack. I got concerned after seeing a few photos of cracked plexi blocks.

Over the weekend I'm going to be mounting an Eisbaer Extreme Core externally on TOP of my case, sticking up there in the cool breeze, but with my own tubing/fittings and an EK-Velocity block. ? It's a nice looking unit, so I hope it performs well. The Eiswand was just a tad too expensive.

I had my Strix 970 bumped up to 1400 MHz core and +500 on the memory with GPUTweak, before I swapped to a newer card this weekend, but I never pushed it far enough to get artifacts, or tried tweaking core voltage or really stressing it at all. I might try it again a bit more agressively in a second build if I start feeling spendy.

The Halos will somewhat constrict the fan's airflow a bit, and basically you'd get the same constriction for the Silverstone fan ARGB ring. I'm not sure how much difference it makes, or whether it's more/less if the light ring is mounted on intake or exhaust side. I got both of them to try with my Noctuas, but eventually decided to use them elsewhere and leave my Noctuas bare and unrestricted. (The Halos will probably give the better fan lighting effect than the Silverstones, but what I did was mount the Silverstone rings on their own as overhead lighting on the "roof" of my case which works nice.)