Category - Motherboard

The initial analysis: Detect PC problems at an early stage and get justice in the event of a dispute | Practice

Although my topic has been preached by the old hands in the PC field in forums for decades and is often the approach of any solution to performance problems, the same questions keep popping up from less experienced users. I hope to reach them with this article on our professional platform and maybe there is one or the other info for everyone else [...]


MSI MEG Z790 GODLIKE motherboard review with overclocking and teardown – One board to rule them all

The name GODLIKE has stood for the absolute high-end motherboard at MSI for several generations now, a halo product with all the features you could want, disregarding all common sense. Thanks to MSI, we are one of the first publications to take a look at the flagship Z790 board and determine the benchmark to beat for upcoming tests of Raptor Lake [...]


Intel Core i9-13900K and Core i5-13600K Review – Showdown of the 13th Generation and a 3/4 Crown for the last big Monolith

With Raptor Lake, Intel now also ends the era of monolithic processors. This of course comes with another decent performance boost and it will be the purpose of this review to compare the new CPUs with AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 family. That is definitely worthwhile, because Intel would quite like to have the so-called gaming crown back. The [...]


The big Ryzen 7000 Memory and OC Tuning Guide – Infinity Fabric, EXPO, Dual-Rank, Samsung and Hynix DDR5 in Practice test with Benchmarks and Recommendations

AMD’s new Ryzen 7000 desktop CPUs, based on the Zen4 micro-architecture, still use the same chiplet design as their predecessors, with a few small but not negligible changes. Igor already gave details about this in yesterday’s big review. Today we want to look at how to configure the new CPUs as optimally as possible and for this we [...]


AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and Ryzen 7 7700X Review with gaming and workstation benchmarks- A new era begins with Zen 4 an the new Socket AM5

AMD let us release tests of the four new Zen 4 CPUs today in the form of the Ryzen 9 7950X, Ryzen 9 7900X, Ryzen 7 7700X and Ryzen 5 7600X. We have already reported about it for a long time, but now the necessary test samples are finally materializing in the form of the real CPUs, which can provide answers to the many questions that have been [...]


Motherboards, Qualified Vendor Lists and not working memory kits – How the non-standard can drive buyers to despair

Qualified Vendor Lists, or QVL for short, are probably familiar to anyone who has looked for a suitable pairing of motherboard and RAM kit. Since RAM kits with an XMP profile are not covered by the official specifications of the CPU manufacturers (Intel or AMD), motherboard and RAM manufacturers test the compatibility between their products [...]


One Motherboard, Two Faces – ASUS ROG Maximus Z690 Apex review with Teardown, RAM- & Adaptive Core-OC

Today we continue with our Z690 motherboard reviews, with the Asus Maximus Z690 Apex. Not only the naming convention has changed compared to the predecessor models, because besides DDR5, PCIe 5.0 and the LGA1700 socket, there are unfortunately also a few teething troubles that I would like to address in advance, if not have to. Preface: Silicon [...]


Graphics Card BIOS for Dummies – Frank explains the CHA341 in the video and how to flash EEPROMS by hand in a relaxed way | Retro

Due to the great response to our article "On the hard BIOS-Tour: manual EEPROM flash of a GeForce RTX to bypass the lock with the hardware ID at NVflash", in which we were already able to clarify what Nvidia does not give us this time, our author lays again and even put himself in front of the camera! And it doesn't always have to [...]


News Test

AMD’s Socket AM5 v2 in detail – What is better in Ryzen than in Intel’s Socket LGA-1700 for Alder Lake | Exclusive

Today I turn for the first time in detail to AMD’s upcoming Socket AM5 (version 2), as it will be used for the upcoming Raphael CPUs (Ryzen 7000). AMD consequently changes from the PGA (Pin Grid Array) with the contacts on the CPU to the much easier to handle LGA (Land Grid Array) because of the large number of required (1718) pins. After we [...]


Insights into ATX v3.0, ATX12VO v2.0 and PCIe 5.0 – When resource waste becomes the new standard | Investigative

The race for ever faster CPUs and above all GPUs is now producing such blossoms that even existing standards have to be softened or modified for the new energy waste offensive that soon every end consumer will have to save up for a portable nuclear power plant if they don’t want to be in debt with the energy supplier well into old age. To [...]


Faster than light? Definetely not with the memory – Gigabyte Z590 Aorus Tachyon test with teardown and overclocking

Gigabyte’s Z590 Aorus Tachyon, unlike many other Rocket Lake XOC (Extreme Overclocking)  motherboards, has been available virtually since the platform’s launch, albeit in fairly limited quantities. A 2-DIMM topology optimized for RAM overclocking, ample power supply and OC features en masse are supposed to squeeze out the absolute [...]


Realtek ALC 4080 with sound cuts and random noise also at the line out and after the update – causes and a first workaround!

You can find the Realtek ALC4080/4082, which was already launched in 2020, as a sound solution on many new Intel boards of the middle and upper class and due to a certain feature, which is also due to the saving of Intel SKUs, you get new problems at the same time. The problems with the SPDIF (optical output), which have already been fixed by a [...]


The highest-end OC platform for Intel? – EVGA Z590 Dark motherboard review with teardown and overclocking

EVGA’s Z590 Dark is probably one of the most sought-after XOC motherboards for the current generation of Intel CPUs, not least because of its uncompromising design, legendary reputation and limited availability of its predecessors. Whether EVGA has created a worthy successor with the project name “E599” to also fire Intel’s [...]