2017 Hardware Thread [2]

By the way the trick to see ALL M.2 PCIe NVMe drives in BIOS if you have more than the boot drive, is just switch from AHCI to Intel RST.

Also, doing this will show the M.2's inside of IRST in Windows.
The caveat is: your Samsung(or whatever 3rd party NVMe driver you use) will be uninstalled, as you will be using RAID drivers to view the M.2 NVMe PCIe drive in IRST.

After doing whatever you wanted, if you are not using RAID, you can go to BIOS reactivate AHCI, go back into Windows and reinstall your disk's NVMe drivers.

I have just see this on several sites, when this isn't BULLSh**!
One reason to buy Nvidia

https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meld...n-3908008.html

(using a browser translator)

AMD has subsequently changed the specification of the Radeon RX 560 without informing it. Now manufacturers are allowed to sell even slower cards with only 896 instead of 1024 cores under the same name.
To launch the mid-range Radeon RX 560 graphics card in April 2017 , AMD has specified its Polaris graphics chip with 1024 shader cores. This makes the RX 560 faster compared to the predecessor Radeon RX 460, whose GPU offers only 896 shader cores. Since then, there are also "D variants" (Radeon RX 560D), whose Polaris GPU also contains only 896 shader cores.
Recently, however, appear on the market also graphics cards under the name Radeon RX 560, in their GPUs only 896 instead of 1024 shader computing cores expect. A glance at the specification site of AMD Radeon RX 560 highlights the first: here is the shader number currently with specified "896/1024" - there are thus two variants under the same name. It was not always like that.
AMD changes specifications later

After a short search, it turns out that AMD has subsequently changed the specification website without informing the public about it. Users can easily track this with the wayback machine on the Internet site, archive.org , which archives snapshots of Web sites at specific intervals. For example, the Radeon RX 560 was still specified as a pure 1024 shader variant with 16 compute units on July 13th . However, AMD continues to advertise "16 arithmetic units" publicly - meaning the compute units, each containing 64 cores, for a total of 1024 units.

Seriously? Who is surprised?

I've been acquainting myself with the ASUS sound system.

At first I thought it really sucked, as you had to switch from the Realtek sound manager(for the basic settings) then to Sonic Studio 3 for the EQ.

I mean compared to the "normal" Realtek software.

Wow! Was I wrong.
After messing around a bit, and the found some videos about Sonic at ROG YouTube, I found out how powerful it really is.

I can set individual settings, for any amount of different output &input devices including the EQ settings and their Enhancements.
Plus you can set for individual programs, apps, and software the specific output device, such as Groove & MediaMonkey to my sound bar only, and Skype to only work with my headset, and so on, plus specific EQ adjustments for those programs.

It will take time, to get everything adjusted, nut definitely worth it in the end.

This is an Audiophile's dream:)

Cliff S said:

I've been acquainting myself with the ASUS sound system.

At first I thought it really sucked, as you had to switch from the Realtek sound manager(for the basic settings) then to Sonic Studio 3 for the EQ.

I mean compared to the "normal" Realtek software.

Wow! Was I wrong.
After messing around a bit, and the found some videos about Sonic at ROG YouTube, I found out how powerful it really is.

I can set individual settings, for any amount of different output &input devices including the EQ settings and their Enhancements.
Plus you can set for individual programs, apps, and software the specific output device, such as Groove & MediaMonkey to my sound bar only, and Skype to only work with my headset, and so on, plus specific EQ adjustments for those programs.

It will take time, to get everything adjusted, nut definitely worth it in the end.

This is an Audiophile's dream:)

That "sounds" pretty nice Cliff. It's definitely good to hear onboard sound has come a long way in sound quality. I remember back in the days when on-board sound was a bad name :)

Anyway even though my Gigabyte has a Creative's ZxRi Sound Core integrated into the board, I still would have been using my dedicated Creative ZxR card but for the fact that I moved to a USB dedicated DAC. Here there's no need for any soundcard as the DAC itself handles sound. All it needs is an ASIO driver and USB port.

As for audiophile... I definitely feel the same with my setup. The only thing the DAC doesn't do is multi-channel sound where both my dedicated and on-board cards did. Don't need that though as I mostly listen to music through my headphones when I'm not blasting my powered desktop speakers and its sub

All that said, I've since retired my ZxR card but do have on-board sound enabled and ready to go in case I decide use it for gaming; though I just use the DAC there as well. In the end I may wind up disabling on-board as well since I don't need it.

Cliff S said:

By the way the trick to see ALL M.2 PCIe NVMe drives in BIOS if you have more than the boot drive, is just switch from AHCI to Intel RST.

Also, doing this will show the M.2's inside of IRST in Windows.
The caveat is: your Samsung(or whatever 3rd party NVMe driver you use) will be uninstalled, as you will be using RAID drivers to view the M.2 NVMe PCIe drive in IRST.

After doing whatever you wanted, if you are not using RAID, you can go to BIOS reactivate AHCI, go back into Windows and reinstall your disk's NVMe drivers.

I made the mistake of changing my Sata controller to IRST before I did any installs on the X299, I have since switched it to AHCI. But as long as I know my M.2 is performing at least close to its advertised speed I`m ok with that.

AddRAM said:

I made the mistake of changing my Sata controller to IRST before I did any installs on the X299, I have since switched it to AHCI. But as long as I know my M.2 is performing at least close to its advertised speed I`m ok with that.

Those sticks of gum are pretty quick

CountMike said:

Guys, don't forget to install Samsung driver v2.3, it helped performance a lot. Consumer SSD | Download | Samsung V-NAND SSD

Thanks for that tip, I was using 2.1.0.1611

Dude said:

Those sticks of gum are pretty quick

And chewy