*Official* NBR Desktop Overclocker's Lounge [laptop owners welcome, too]

They should have shut you down after the first question. Not really sure why they were entertaining the thought to begin with.
Me is Intels business and since people are using it to hack Microsoft or the bios, it kind of makes it their business as well.
But then, that is only speculation on my part as I can't really speak for what's going on behind closed doors.

 

The underlying purpose of the Intel ME seems to be for the express purpose of giving more control to control freaks. It is technically an unnecessary layer of firmware from everything I can see. We never needed it before, and I'm pretty sure we don't need it now. They need it to play god and impose restrictions that help them stay in control, and that's about it as far as I can see.

 

Have you look at it?

 

I'm not sure what you mean. I think it was somewhere in the middle of Sandy Bridge, or maybe it was Ivy Bridge? It worked fine without it. Adding it offered zero value to me. I remember being unhappy when Alienware added that crap to the BIOS, and I have never realized any benefit from it that I am aware of. But, there might be some way I am benefiting from it that I am not aware of.

When Prema was working on the BIOS mod for the Tornado F5, the ME region of the BIOS got bricked a couple of times and having no ME firmware was inconsequential to use of the system or the using the BIOS. Everything worked the same without it. The first time it happened it took me a day or two to notice the BIOS didn't have any ME information, LOL.

I'm not aware of any reason it is actually "necessary" but it sure has the capability of screwing things up. Probably there to facilitate functionality of stuff like Secure Boot, VM support, SGX, disabling execute bit for some types of malware, remote system management and other garbage I don't want or need on my enthusiast products. I understand there are important business cases for some of this stuff, but I sure don't need any of it. Taking it to the next level and using its functional capabilities to exercise control over what I do with my stuff wouldn't be cool under any circumstances.

 

Intel Management Engine Introduction: Built into many Intel-based platforms is a small, low power computer subsystem called the Intel Management Engine (Intel ME). This can perform various tasks while the system is booting, running or sleeping. It operates independently from the main CPU, BIOS & OS but can interact with them if needed. The ME is responsible for many parts of an Intel-based system. Such functionality extends, but it's not limited, to Platform Clocks Control (ICC), Thermal Monitoring, Fan Control, Power Management, Overclocking, Silicon Workaround (resolves silicon bugs which would have otherwise required a new cpu stepping), Identity Protection Technology, Boot Guard, Rapid Start Technology, Smart Connect Technology, Sensor Hub Controller (ISHC), Active Management Technology (AMT), Small Business Advantage (SBA), Wireless Display, PlayReady, Protected Video/Audio Path etc. For certain advanced/corporate features (AMT, SBA etc) the ME uses an out-of-band (OOB) network interface to perform functions even when the system is powered down, the OS and/or hard drivers are non-functional etc. Thus it is essential for it to be operational in order for the platform to be working properly, no matter if the advanced/corporate features are available or not.

Intel Converged Security Engine Introduction: The evolution of Intel Management Engine into a unified security co-processor, running x86 code under a Minix-based Operating System. It was first introduced in 2015 with the release of Skylake CPUs working alongside 100-series Sunrise Point Platform Controller Hub (PCH). The CSE hardware can run Management Engine (ME) 11+, Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) 3+ or Server Platform Services (SPS) 4+ firmware. So there are a total of three families of CSE-based firmware: CSME (CSE ME), CSTXE (CSE TXE) and CSSPS (CSE SPS). The CSE hardware is also capable of running other types of firmware such as Power Management Controller (PMC), Integrated Sensor Hub (ISH), Imaging Unit (iUnit), Clear Audio Voice Speech (cAVS), Wireless Microcode (WCOD) etc.

Intel Power Management Controller Introduction: Handles all Platform Controller Hub (PCH) power management related activities, running ARC code on top of the CSE hardware. PMC administers power management functions of the PCH including interfacing with other logic and controllers on the platform to perform power state transitions, configure, manage and respond to wake events, aggregate and report latency tolerance information for devices and peripherals connected to and integrated into the PCH etc. It was first introduced in 2018 with the release of Coffee/Cannon Lake CPUs working alongside 300-series Cannon Point PCH.

 

Yup, exactly what I remembered, only more detail. Totally unnecessary except for the extra crap that not everyone (hardly anyone) actually needs. Didn't need it before, and don't need it now. But, dependencies have been created around it to fabricate the impression of necessity. Control, control and more control. But, we're stuck with it now. Too late to go back. AMD doesn't need it and doesn't use it, but they need help in plenty of other areas.

 

So why not just turn it off? And it should have no effect on your system at that point right? Or that wouldn't work?

Sent from my SM-G955U using Tapatalk

 

@Falkentyne turned it of on his Msibook (total removed). From what I could remember it run into a mess. He got help from Win-raid.com to fix it back.

 

I do not know of a way to turn off the ME firmware. I don't think it can be. The drivers don't need to be installed in Windows, just as the Intel DPTF drivers did not need to be installed. I think part of the issue now is that the ME firmware and drivers have created some dependencies. But, it is what it is and we'll just have to deal with the crap as it comes. I never should have "upgraded" the BIOS. That's my bad. Broke my own rules about fixing things that aren't broken, LOL. I should have waited until it was necessary for 9900K support, which probably won't matter to me now with a change of plans. Didn't know they were going to slip me a mickey.

I guess it's really not a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Still runs like a top with 2 sticks up to 4200 (or with 4 up to 3800) and I'm ready to go for quad channel 4000+ when I switch boards and CPU. Whether they replace the board or not, I think I just need to let it go and not make the same mistake next time. A normal person would be more than happy with it even as it is now and I am just mad about taking a ~200MHz step backwards on my RAM clock speeds with 4 sticks installed.

Yeah, it's like a rat's nest now with all of the dependencies they have created. I think the UEFI BIOS is structured around it more than it used to be. I suspect that is even more the case with laptops.

 

Have you asked the guys on Win-raid for advices?

 

No, win-raid could not fix my notebook. Even Prema's advice couldn't fix it. Even MSI's own official flasher couldn't fix it.

Svet had to make a modified flasher for me with his own tools which reflashed a FPTW64 backup of my bios, with ME version 8.xx.3399 i forgot but it ended with .3399, maybe 11.8.3399 but Svet supplied the ME version himself and found a way to force it to flash).

 

No, I have not. I think the issue is nothing is actually broken. There is just something different about the latest ME version. My system still works fine, but it's memory overclocking limit is a little bit lower with 4 sticks of RAM installed with the new ME version. Had it been that way all along I would not know anything changed. The only reason I know it's a new behavior is because flashing the latest BIOS with the latest ME caused an immediate change that was obvious on first boot with the XMP 4000 profile applied with all 4 sticks in their slots.

With 2 sticks installed it is no different than it was before. In fact, with 2 sticks installed the memory performance is slightly improved over what it was with 4 sticks before.

Yeah, the ME is in a protected region and it can be a real bugger to fix it you mess it up. It's unfortunate that they have gone to such great lengths to make it so secure. I really hate that kind of nonsense.

And, I am not going to do anything to void the warranty on the motherboard. ASUS was very specific about that and would be looking for an excuse to do nothing. If I were going to keep it and upgrade to 9900K I would not care that much, but since I am going to be upgrading to X299 and want to sell it, the warranty needs to be left intact.

 

Some basic settings that would need to be changed before accessing the ME although there are a few other things as well to do.


Or get some one to dump their board using FPT, but you would want to get the whole bios dump. But you would need to of course dump yours using the same method. So that you get a complete backup.

 

ME can't be downgraded(without any side-effects) Prema himself said not to do it. Downgrading might result in another brick. That's the reason Prema updates BIOS/ME pretty late than most for absolute stability.

 

Signature updated. More to follow, probably around the weekend.

Machete is shipping to @ComputerDaddy and will be chopping his way through the Florida Everglades around the same time the Punisher is showing up to start kicking ass and take names in the Arizona badlands.

I'm sure I will be picking Brother @Johnksss's brain on the i9 stuff. Special thanks to Brother @Trafficante on the special pricing on the CPU and Apex mobo gift. Both of these fine gentlemen are always a blessing to me and this community. Life would kind of suck without them.

 

Congrats man, just gotta buy the just now officially announced 2080ti though too! (Sept 20th)

 

Maybe, but certainly not at these retarded prices. Let the gouging begin! I'll wait until the early adopters and impulse buyers are done getting screwed over on these ludicrous prices and grab one (or two) when they run out of whacky tobaccy in another 6 months or so. That's about like paying Kingpin GPU (or inflated laptop GPU) prices for plain old ordinary GPU quality. Um, no thanks.

 

Yep, and besides, these new GPUs are all about ray tracing and the tensor cores, so I don't think they offer tons more conventional GPU power than Pascal - they do when it comes to ray tracing, but not when you have ray tracing turned off. It's an exciting architecture though, I watched the 2 hr NVidia presentation live today (I posted about it in the NVidia Thread). A game changer for including ray tracing in games, but it's not an uber powerful GPU apart from that, next generation after Turing is probably where we see big gains in general conventional computational power as well as an enhancement from what they have learned about RT & Tensor cores from their Turing implementation - that's my hunch for the future. I'll probably jump on the next architecture after Turing, I don't think Turing can run Ray Tracing at 144 fps, and that's my thing, no point for me in this architecture otherwise.

 

It should be pretty sweet to see what these numbers look like in quad channel.

There's a chance I might skip it and buy/mod another matching 1080 Ti SC2 for SLI when the prices bottom out to make room for RTX cards.

 

The dude flaked out on me, so I am going to have to try to sell it again to pay for the CPU.

 

I can't understand why people do that.

 

I've got my RTX 2080 Ti on preorder from a few different places actually. I have an Nvidia dual fan founders card on order in the first shipment and I have 2 at my local Microcenter. One for the Asus card and another for the EVGA Ultra. I might go with the EVGA Ultra this time and probably cancel the Nvidia order. Microcenter lets you reserve without any credit card or payment.

 

I wish we had a Microcenter here. In a metro area as massive as Phoenix, it's kind of weird that we do not.

 

Frys?

 

Yup, there are two of those. But, I prefer Microcenter. Whenever I travel to a town with one I always go in and wander around for a while. Fry's is decent, but they have a lot more stuff I don't care so much about. Microcenter seems more focused on PC tech.

 

So new GPUs heh? Pretty exciting, tensor cores coming to consumer....

Hope the supplies on 2080 TI isnt too bad. The microcenter near me only let me preorder initially one card per SKU...... guess these guys learned the drill from the pascal launch LOL.

@Johnksss should I expect you to have these on sub zero around early October? Pretty excited to see how Turing react to temperature.

 

Nah, i'm going to wait and see what happens first. I had 2 pre ordered, but removed them.

 

Yeah a lot of people are doing that. I kinda just want to buy something and call it a day. I been going on without a proper GPU for a few month. Tired of the wait. Already run my math and it shows buying a 2080 TI at release is considerably better value for me than buying a discounted 1080 TI and wait for better pricing in 4 months. Probably canceling one card but keeping the other. We will see.

 

Not so sure about that since you can get a 1080 TI SC for 647.99 and open box for under 600.00.

 

I just got it up and running. Have to figure out a few things. Like why the default BCLK is 103 MHz instead of 100. And, what settings to use for the DIMM.2 to not have a RAID device in Device Manager. All I did here was set 47x for all cores and XMP and AHCI.

 

http://hwbot.org/submission/3924104_mr._fox_wprime___32m_core_i9_7960x_1sec_375ms

 

Woa, 5Ghz on 16 cores! How much power does it suck on say wPrime or CB15? RAM latency is quite high in comparison to your previous, (which I remember was about the same as mine), but that's to be expected with the mesh interface between all those cores, rather than using the ring bus of CPUs like 6700K / 8700K - I think that's one reason why those many many core CPUs are not the best for gaming currently.

 

https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...4487403&cm_re=rtx_2080-_-14-487-403-_-Product

$904 no tax or shipping for the 2080 with a $200 SSD. You can sell the SSD, and probably only pay around $750 out the door for the 2080. Not a bad price considering it will beat the 1080 Ti most likely in regular gaming and knock its socks off in anything ray tracing. Buying a 1080 Ti this late in the game doesn't seem to make much sense. Although you do give up 3gb of VRAM. Which unless you're gaming at 4K won't matter too much. 1440p gamers will be upgrading long before they max out the 8gb.

 

You are not thinking like normal folks on a budget. Who do not care about bleeding edge.
That would be the difference here.
I do agree with you, but then i like to "waste" money on new tech from time to time.

 

I still need to sell the 1080 TI a few months down to switch to 2080 TI.

1080 TI or TITAN V's is simply not able to achieve my visual fidelity target at above 45fps. As much as I am willing to put up with 30fps, I still really really prefer 45fps or higher. I basically need something thats 10% faster than a TITAN V OCed. I was getting around 39FPS on a TITAN V OCed so roughly 10-15 percent improvement will do.

Its hardly the price vs performance option but I mean, when you are buying higher end GPUs, thats assumed. Its not something I particularly absolutely need to have but its nice to have.

 

I'm speaking majority, not the handful of folks like us who are on a different path. Not everyone in the world agrees with our logic or reasoning behind spending loads of cash on parts that will be out dated in a few months.

But I do get what your talking about.

Or just buy one for 789.99+ tax and skip the hassle of trying to sell more stuff.

 

LOL done. I pre ordered the $749.99 version with no tax and overnight shipping. No tax no selling no fuss. So now I have a 2080 Ti preorder through Nvidia, 2080 Ti preorder through Microcenter and now a regular 2080. I can cancel them anytime prior to launch. Something about this $750 price tag is tempting me. I will wait for leaks and benchmarks closer to launch and decide. I may not NEED the Ti. I've been using my laptop 1070 power modded hooked up to my external 1440p screen and honestly it hasn't been terrible. Maybe I don't need to have the top end. The 2080 will surely give me back my 1080 Ti experience + margin and offer me ray tracing for visual fidelity when FPS don't matter as much. Hmm decisions decisions. Also hearing rumors of a Titan coming later with full chip around $1500. I would be pissed off to pay $1300 only to have the Titan release at a later date.

 

What rumors? I dont really care much for the full chip performance but might as well as see it.

 

Love it! LOL

Man, there is nothing wrong with a 1070. I gamed on one for quite some time. Did not have any real issues with it all. And besides....How many people really care about you bragging about how many frames you are getting in game, when your KD is .23 and you're getting killed by kids on netbooks? LOL

@tgipier @Talon

Humm, a Titan sounds more interesting than a TI

 

I never think in terms of playing games though. I play probably 1 hour of games for every 50 hours of benching, maybe less.

I have a lot to figure out yet. I am surprised the Rampage BIOS is not as robust as the Maximus X in some ways. I cannot find anything to enable SPD write access (needed for Thaiphoon Burner and XTU memory timings to work) and a couple of other things.

I finally figured out the DIMM.2 thing. The documentation is lousy, but it seems there is a CPU side and a PCH side and I was using one 960 Pro on each side. As soon as I put both on one card and moved it to the PCH side the issues I was having went away, along with the RAID device in Device Manager with no drivers (code 10).

Brother @Johnksss are you able to use Thaiphoon Burner on X299? Is the Molex connector near the front panel audio header for extra power to the PCIe slots? There are some undocumented accessories in the box that I may send you pictures of to see if you know what they are for, as they are not mentioned anywhere in the manual and it is not obvious to me from looking at them.

Definitely going to need chilled water or cold air ducted to the radiator for 5GHz in Cinebench or wPrime 1024m benching. Ambient temperature water cooling ain't going to fly at 5GHz and up on 7960X, LOL. It's fine for stuff like 3DMark benches though.

The 7960X and 1080 Ti are also approach 1000W in 3DMark 11. It's enough for now, but that 1kW PSU definitely won't even come close to being enough for a second modded 1080 Ti.

 

Ha, right, that's why I was balking at 5Ghz on 16 cores, I couldn't quite imagine the insane power draw in something like wprime or CB15 - yes, so to hear you say you need chilled water for those tests, I can believe that!

 

Why would I need Thiaphoon burner on an Apex? This is a memory enhanced motherboard.

Yes, extra voltage to the pcie when running more than 1 video card.

If you post them I can probably tell you what they are.

 

Yeah we will see. Would be nice. To be honest, the extra cores and memory bus arent going to make a difference.

I want a titan turing with 24gb of vram though because that would be the first affordable, consumer solution to 8k gaming.

 

Again. That depends on your point of view interms of affordable. And if that card cost more than 400 or so dollars.... Most are going to say it's not affordable.

 

Fair point. I was comparing relatively to the only other option. Which is 2 x GV100s at 19k.

 

Tis is true. And If I were rich, 19K would be a steal.

 

Yeah me too. I would be buying GV100s to bin hahaha.

 

To modify the RAM. I built my own XMP 2 profile and it works fine, but I can't change anything now since TB doesn't seem to run on this platform. So, there was a subscription renewal flushed down the toilet, LOL.

Have you found a version of AI Suite that will actually run on this board? The version on the CD doesn't work, and neither does the version for download from ASUS. Those I had already downloaded for the Maximus X are also non-functional. It seems to be broken on W7 and W10. It's handy for in-OS fan control changes. I crashes on launch, or refuses to launch, depending on the version.

 

Here is an example. Pretty awesome. Sure beats the crap out of that awesome 8700K sample I have thoroughly enjoyed. If I didn't want the money from the motherboard and CPU to put toward the cost of a water chiller, I'd build another desktop and hang onto it.

https://valid.x86.fr/fm17fg



It's weird having one computer. I think the last time I owned only one computer was like around 2003. I might buy a refurbished ZBook with a socketed Haswell 4800MQ CPU for a backup system to avoid BGA filth. I despise HP products, but it's hard to find cheap laptops that are not BGA, and that seems like a good option for about $300 in spite of it being made by HP.

 

Yeah, so 306 base system watts at idle, increased to 954W when testing wprime32 - so that's 650W going to the CPU package at load (not counting idle CPU power consumption and PSU efficiencies). Well, that's a lotta Watts!