EightyDuce

Pretty sure you don't want to open the "silver envelopment" as it is the pouch that contains the chemistry of the battery cell. Also a little hard to tell from the pic, but the battery looks a little puffy, if so, that's a spicy pillow and you really shouldn't be cutting into it. Looks like a 1S (single cell) lipo battery. Track IR runs off of USB so likely looking for 5V output. If it wasn't dead before cutting into the pouch, it's definitely dead now. Don't hook it back up to the charger.

Double check you have the latest drivers installed for all of your hardware. I would recommend trying something like SDI (snappy driver installer). It will search for missing/out of date drivers for all of your hardware. It is vetted and open source. https://www.snappy-driver-installer.org/ https://sdi-tool.org/ I'm not affiliated with SDI, but have used it for several years and it has been a lifesaver for finding up-to-date drivers for components that are often overlooked or have conflicting generic windows drivers installed.

My only guess that makes any sense to me is that they just wanted to rip the bandaid off in one go, instead of leaving it in and dealing with complaints as problems from lack of updates start cropping up.

Now they need to unbrick Win 11 24H2.

Really not much more to add to what has already been mentioned. I would say 9800X3D. Seeing that your projected upgrade path is a 6-7 year plan, longevity of the platform/chipset isn't much of a concern as at that point you should be upgrading that anyway. 64Gb is plenty right now. In the grand scheme of things RAM is cheap and can be upgraded when you do your next upgrade. M.2, any reputable brand PCIE4 (no significant benefit to PCIe5 speeds right now) unless price is negligible. I'd prioritize capacity, something like a 2-4Gb. GPU is where your biggest gains and losses will come from. Current situation is a mess and only NVIDIA and AMD know if/when/how things will change. This is where the 6-7 year plan will suffer. That's 3 generations of GPUs. I would honestly get a 5070Ti now and do incremental updates as you go rather than blowing your wad on a 5090 now and hope it lasts the 6-7 years.

This is 100% anecdotal, but I went from a system M.2 and two other M.2s for programs including DCS to a single PCIE5 4Tb for OS+DCS and an additional 2Tb PCIE4 M.2. The on difference I noticed is slightly decreased load time.

I'll be honest, it's been a month or so since I've upgraded to 24H2 and Q3 via VD+ethernet (I couldn't get consistent results over WiFi); but I can't tell any difference in clarity with VC1 @200Mbps Godlike preset locked st 72Hz. The only two things I miss about my G2 is the downside of a super narrow sweetspot in combination with fixed foveated rendering. With such a small sweetspot I didn't notice the blurry peripheral on the G2, now with the Q3 I stopped using FFR because the full screen sweetspot makes the downsampled peripheral extremely distracting. That and the ease of plug and play with the display cable connection. I probably won't try another wireless headset. Really wish Pimax wasn't such a s.ht show with QC, I don't mind spending the money for premium hardware but I also expect quality QC...at this point, Pimax just isn't there.

It will not be fixed in the next patch. WMR is dead. I also didn't have luck rolling back from 24H2 and had to do a clean reinstall. You will have to find a 23H2 image as the latest build from MS includes 24H2. Your other option is a non-WMR headset. I have since moved on to 24H2 (provides a noticible boost in gaming for me over 23H2) and a Quest 3. It was good while it lasted.

While crypto isn't as much of a demand as it previously was, AI craze isn't going anywhere anytime soon and demand for hardware is only going to increase. By far the largest bottleneck is TMSC and its ability to produce sufficient wafers to satisfy all orders. There are a ton of things that utilize the same or variation of the same manufacturing node and the majority is more than likely being funneled into enterprise/server/AI hardware as that's where your biggest ROI is. Gaming hardware at this point accounts for a small fraction of sales while taking a disproportionally large chunk of silicon to manufacture. For example, lets take the 4090: it has a 609mm^2 die the same as the Quadro RTX6000. 4090 MSRP is $1,699...Quadro RTX 6000 MSRP is $6,799. Even at inflated street price, they would have to sell 3 4090's to equal a single RTX 6000 sale. While the 4090s would easily sell, you could take that silicon and make 3 RTX 6000's and easily sell them for $20,000. Yes, there is some margin for the silicon that doesn't meet the spec for an RTX 6000 so it get's "cut down" to a 4090, but overall the math should be close enough as I don't think every 4090 is a failed RTX 6000, but rather an intentionally cut down "good" RTX 6000 die. This is unlikely to change with Blackwell. Same goes for AMD and their MI series. But I'm not an economist or a hardware manufacturer and have zero inside knowledge of the inner-workings of this system. Just doing some napkin math while on the outside looking in.

The demise of Windows Mixed Reality with the 24H2 update was pretty publicly known at this point on this forum and others. The options at this point are Windows 10 or download or build a 23H2 version of Windows 11, which is what I did, and disable feature updates.

Well, good or bad, seems that they were in stock for about 20-25 min; would be curious to see what actual stock numbers were across retailers. My brother grabbed a 9070XT from Newegg to replace his 3070, maybe I can get him to try DCS for me. order was canceled by newegg, he's now driving to MicroCenter. HUB reported that they heard from retailers that AMD is kicking them $50 rebates to bring MSRP to where it is now, suggesting for potential increase in price down the road. IMO that would be a bad move and would likely wipe out whatever good social capital they make with this launch.

Unless AMD does a pretty big pivot from what they've saying, I wouldn't expect a 9070XTX. AMD have said since RDNA4 was announced that they aren't targeting high-end with it. If RT performance is a priority, then your best hope is to snag an nVidia card at MSRP or pay inflated scalper price. If RT isn't a pivotal, then nearly 5070ti raster performance at half price ain't bad. They aren't going to topple nVidia, but definetly a strong showing at the time when nVidia keeps stepping on their own *beep*.

Think You're going to be hard pressed to find discounted 7900XTX, not sure where you're seeing discounts. In the US they are all well over $1000. Assuming 9070XT keeps MSRP, you're getting 88% of the performance for half the price. null

While I don't see this all of a sudden propelling AMD marketshare, it's definitely a strong step forward if the supply and peicing hold up. They're not going to sway NVidia diehards or those interested in specific titles in which nVidia has a clear upper hand but I would definitely think its enough to get the general public to take a strong second look, especially when considering street price and availability of 50XX cards.

We're a few hours away.... Until then: nulltimespy graphic score: 9070xt over 30k 9070 over 26k 7900xtx 30.5k / 7900xt is 26.5k / 4080s 28.5k / 5070ti 27.7k / 6800xt-7800xt 20k

Hopefully the rumors regarding retailers stockpiling 9070(XT) since December are true and there is enough initial stock to keep things in check.

Best case, it falls somewhere in between 7900XT and XTX for few $100 less. We will know in less than 24hrs.

Interesting about the GPU boards, I guess they we forced to make improvements for 40 series. The PSU thing I was aware of and its a shtshow; would never buy a Gigabyte PSU. All that being said, based in my own personal experience, I wouldn't hesitate to buy a Gigabyte GPU or motherboard... Until they give me a reason not to.

What is/are issues with Gigabyte? Legit want to know. I've got a Gigabyte 4090 and 4070, but both have been rock solid.

Yup, you're right. Had a brain fart and confused MSI and Saphire.

From the the avaliable info there seems to be a mix of standard 2x8-pin and at least one MSI Saphire card using 12VHPWR. While 12VHPWR is not without issues, if plugged in correctly and there is headroom between TDP and connector rating (~600W) shouldn't be a problem.

FSR4 ball is in ED's court to implement. Not sure what DCS has now, but FSR3.1 to FSR4 is doable per AMD. As for VR, I don't know that state of AMD in VR at this point, but in 2D 9070XT should be significantly more powerful than 2070S. Easily enough to beat 2070S w/ DLSS enabled and has double the VRAM. Something else, AMD typically has more headroom for OC as NVidia Boost algorithm squeezes pretty much all the performance there is and any gains are greatly limited by power limit and have large diminishing returns (power draw vs performance). Edit: Ofcourse this highly depends on street pricing/availability.

Very much going to depend on street price and availability, though I expect availability to be better than NVidia. Unfortunately for AMD, they are so far down the market/mind-share that it's a hell of an uphill battle for them. Would be nice to have a strong FSR4 performance. I hope 9070XT does well (9070 at $50 less makes no sense). Sadly, many people just want AMD to put pressure on NVidia (bring down pricing and increase avaliability) so that they can buy an NVidia card. Given availability and MSRP pricing, 9070XT ($599) to 5070Ti ($749), I'd wager majority would pay $150 more to get the 5070Ti.

Convolutional Neural Netwrok. Upscaling tech used in DLSS prior to transformer model being introduced in DLSS4.