Nicholas Maccarone

is, suffers from not enough vram. I never thought id be depressed about PC gaming, but I nearly gave up, money has been tight since buying a house...

I finally turned on the Main PC that's been sitting since March, loaded up a game for testing was met with even worse, 34 fps max, my gut twisted, I started to dive deep, fresh windows install....nothing.....re-seated both the CPU and GPU, new thermal past on both (had to re-use the coolant which I know prob isn't good but cant afford it)... also nothing changed.

I started to search the f$$%en dark web for answers at this point... after almost 2 weeks and literal 1000 reedit posts, I finally found a similar problem, which was posted 8 years ago about overclocking numbers (I know not my issue) but I figured heck why not, followed everything in his video (which was a different CPU but same x299 platform and gigabyte board) and loaded up a few games, and all of a sudden I hear the PC fans kick up (CPU temps got pretty high for water-cooling {60c} ) But CPU was hitting almost 90% usage, GPU hitting almost 80% usage, and every game I launch hits almost 110 fps (without v-sync) I nearly teared up..... My dream PC sitting for nearly a year, and it was bios issue (I've never touched the bios I don't care about overclocking) but this fix wasn't even about overclocking Its still running its intel defaults and boosts. this issue was about some random bios tweaks about energy efficiency and voltages.

I've tried Overclocking with-in windows with intel's xtu and even downloaded some awesome stable overlocks that boosted my Cinebench scores A LOT but didn't effect gaming. Now I'm sitting here just shocked to the core, as stated in my last post in Jan, I built this PC to last, it was still top spec in 2020, and I've been almost gaslite this entire time about having to upgrade... Well FINALLY I can enjoy my PC, I'm again in shock thinking how Flippen outdated my system is now, holy cow, were 5 generations of CPUs, 2 generations of GPUs behind. But I'm prob going to run this PC for as long as I can.

If anyone has been in a similar scenario as me, running x299 platform, which thinking about it now, probably a very rare platform to be on in 2025, here is the video that saved my build from collecting dust.

23556, crazy that the i5 12600kf, if it was fully unlocked and overclocked, could hit 20,000, for $200 cpu...wow.

My old VR pc with the 1080ti and i7 6950x in Helldivers managed 50 fps in my ship and would drop to 20 sometimes on some planets, this little pc it can managed almost 70 fps average, such a huge difference.

at 9ms, CPU was at 87% usage, GPU was at 60%. Of course I understand my CPU is legit 6 years old at this point, but I CAN NOT accept that games that ran at 60 fps ultra LOCKED are now running poorly, 48-55fps. I can accept new games not running well but this has me so upset that I have a system that is my dream build, custom water-cooled and now I'm screwed into upgrading which means I'll have to spend more on an upgrade since I need a new water-block. But now I'm really cautious, I know 13,14 gen had there issues, 12 gen is cheap atm but what if they do the same thing with the new core ultra CPU's without the hyperthreading and games will eventually run horrible on 12-14 gen CPU's... Looking back at the generational improvements, the i7 4790k, i7 6700k, i7 7700k, i7 8700k, i9 9900k, i9 10900k, i9 11900k, all had a small 5-11% increase, then 12 gen was almost 40% 13 gen was 30% above that, and 14 gen was 30% above that.... This just has me so crushed and defeated.... The ONE time I can truly say, I wish I just waited one more year to do my final platform upgrade.... Also I'll always miss the really cool 8 channel memory, just made my system look so cool.....