Leaderboard

I have been on quite the adventure the last few days. It all started off, as you may recall, with me getting a Core i9 14900k in May. That led to me being dissatisfied with my GPU performance, which ultimately resulted in me breaking down and buying this: RTX 4090 ftw! I had carefully measured to make sure it would fit in my case, so I was very excited when it arrived and ready to install it immediately and start gaming. It did not fit in my case. So! One 2.5 hour round trip to Wichita later and I have this baby: Corsair 5000D RGB mid tower. Plenty of space, has the nice panel in the back to hide all the power cables, really a nice upgrade that was a long time coming, my old case was like 15+ years old. Anyway the new case can let you control the front fan colors with the temperatures of your system components. Neat! So I started setting that up and uh oh, turns out my CPU is regularly getting up to 100C during regular gameplay. Guess my CPU fan isn't cutting it. No problem, I can solve that! Cooler Master MasterLiquid 360mm water cooler! Hooray! That'll keep my CPU nice and chilled out. The water cooler arrived this morning, I installed it before work (didn't have to be in until 10:45 today), went to check how my CPU temps were doing and... it won't post. Go to work pissed, because by that time was out of time. Came home, did extensive testing, and determined that the entire B memory channel on my mobo was dead. Slots A1 & A2 both work, but putting anything in either B1 or B2 causes it to fail to post. As you are no doubt aware, the PC can only access one RAM stick per channel at any given time, so while putting sticks in A1 & A2 gives you the same total capacity as A1 & B1, it effectively cuts the speed in half. This is unacceptable. Which brings us to my most recent purchase, made only minutes ago: New motherboard and 32GB of DDR5 RAM, set to arrive Sunday. So anyway, basically I wanted a new CPU and have ended up replacing every single part in my PC except for the power supply and one fan (the rear exhaust). To close, I'll leave you with a comic:

Damn, that sucks... Yeah, I'm with you on the performance. I'm not super satisfied with the way my 3080 handles demanding games (especially at my ultrawide's native resolution) and it's been tempting to upgrade now that I can afford to drop that kind of money on a whim. I guess I'm better with money than I thought, though, because I just can't bring myself to upgrade yet since this build still feels fairly new (and the GPU was the last component I added, too). The 40-series also didn't feel like a significant enough upgrade but the 5080 is going to be tempting... Then again, I haven't really been playing any demanding games lately.

I ordered that CPU like a week before hearing about all the issues, and I specifically chose it because I didn't want to have to replace my mobo too... *Edit - As for the 4090, I have no justification besides the fact that several games came out recently that I've been very frustrated with the performance of my old card, and I got tired of waiting for the 50 series to be announced (it'll be next week now that I actually bought one). I am at least confident that once this PC is *working* I shouldn't have any trouble running games at least until the PS6 comes out.