Looking quite promising for Alderlake. If the benchmark leaks from a couple months are indicative of performance (of their higher end skus) they're in for a winner for this year. Particularly, the single core scores which is will put this on top for gaming and overall.  If they priced similarly to their current lineup, this would put Intel back in the game. It'll be interesting to see how AMD will respond with their refresh lineup with V-cache.

Also kinda shocking (pun intended) that Gigabyte won't admit that their product is faulty and instead try to trying to pin it on reviewers testing methodology. I mean peoples feedback and returns on huge retailers should have been a big enough of a red flag.

Count me out of Gigabytes future products.

Congrats, Yuri.

To all Zen owners, this is of interest:

New Ryzen Chipset Driver Patches Security Vulnerabilities
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ryzen-chipset-driver-critical-security-fixes
A new Ryzen Chipset Driver update was released yesterday, version 3.08.17.735, that patches "critical security flaws" in the Platform Security Processor driver. AMD has not revealed the exact details of the security flaws that were patched, but we presume they could be related to a couple of current AMD flaws.

Right now, AMD has two vulnerabilities affecting all Ryzen based CPUs listed on AMD's website. One of these includes a Speculative code store bypass and floating-point value injection vulnerability, which can cause Ryzen CPUs to leak data when processing overwritten instructions when the CPU processes incorrect floating point numbers. The second vulnerability also relates to data leakage, called the Transient Execution of Non-canonical Accesses. This vulnerability can allow data leakage when the CPU executes a non-canonical load and stores those numbers with just 48 address bits or lower.

We're not completely sure these are the flaws AMD's new PSP driver has fixed. But either way, it would be best to update your Ryzen chipset drivers to this new version to insure you aren't exposed to unknown vulnerabilities. Especially when AMD classifies these security flaws as "critical."

You can download the latest driver here.

Nice!

Do you have a datacap on that or is it unlimited?
How many TB do you usually download per month?

Techpowerup checked how much only having 8 lanes slows you down, by comparing 8 lanes of PCIE 4.0 with the same amount of lanes on PCIE 3.0, 2.0 and even 1.1.: https://www.techpowerup.com/review/amd-radeon-rx-6600-xt-pci-express-scaling/

The result is... a whole lot of nothing, really. On average at 1080p, where the drop is the largest in most cases, having to resort to PCIE 3.0 instead of 4.0 costs you a whole 2% of performance - and that's both rounded up and with 2 outlier with Hitman 3 (13.5%) and Death Stranding (6.8%). In most cases, the difference was barely measurable, let alone felt. Going from DDR4-3200 to 3600 has probably a higher effect on the FPS than having just 8 lanes of PCIE, 4.0 or otherwise. 

In fact, even just using PCIE 2.0 would only result in a 7% performance drop (again mainly due to the outlier), and only PCIE 1.1 where the difference was really felt and the average performance drop was 17%. By extrapolating the curve, they come to the conclusion that PCI4.0 x16 would have added that whole lot of 1% to the performance average, so really nothing to lose sleep about.

That being said, there's no guarantee that it will stay that way. It could be that in the future, those speeds could in fact really bottleneck enough to be truly felt. But that probably won't be before a couple years down the road.

How long is the Geekbench test?

If it's short enough, then it could have been performed completely or almost entirely under full boost, which is only marginally slower than on the K models. This is also one of the reasons why I take Geekbench results with a giant grain of salt, as they are pretty far removed from reality half the time.

Yea it will be interesting to see how it releases. If Alder Lake S and Zen 4 Vcache are similar in performance, I'd certainly get Alder Lake S because of it's DDR5 and PCI-E 5. Especially since PCI-E 5 will probably last you the entire console generation. (Even PCI-E 4 will but GPUs are really getting huge uplifts in performance so in the PC space, it will be interesting).

And yea, I am not gonna buy any Gigabyte products ever again. Their X570 boards initially had tons of boot bugs thanks to the way they implemented their Dual BIOS nonsense where sometimes, it would boot into the wrong BIOS and wipe all your settings. Then their 3000 series launch had some faulty wiring issues that caused the pins in the power connector to pop out. And now this?

Just essh.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/3080-3090-3070-gigabyte-eagle-gaming-oc-vision-power-connector-concerns.18900176/

The winning company this gen seems to be Asus. Some of their products might be overpriced but man, I have yet to see any of them have problems. Hell even their TUF series which are their "cheaper" ones have higher quality components than some of these higher priced Gigabyte/Evga FTW3 ones.

Congrats, Yuri.

To all Zen owners, this is of interest:

New Ryzen Chipset Driver Patches Security Vulnerabilities
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ryzen-chipset-driver-critical-security-fixes
A new Ryzen Chipset Driver update was released yesterday, version 3.08.17.735, that patches "critical security flaws" in the Platform Security Processor driver. AMD has not revealed the exact details of the security flaws that were patched, but we presume they could be related to a couple of current AMD flaws.

Right now, AMD has two vulnerabilities affecting all Ryzen based CPUs listed on AMD's website. One of these includes a Speculative code store bypass and floating-point value injection vulnerability, which can cause Ryzen CPUs to leak data when processing overwritten instructions when the CPU processes incorrect floating point numbers. The second vulnerability also relates to data leakage, called the Transient Execution of Non-canonical Accesses. This vulnerability can allow data leakage when the CPU executes a non-canonical load and stores those numbers with just 48 address bits or lower.

We're not completely sure these are the flaws AMD's new PSP driver has fixed. But either way, it would be best to update your Ryzen chipset drivers to this new version to insure you aren't exposed to unknown vulnerabilities. Especially when AMD classifies these security flaws as "critical."

You can download the latest driver here.

Isn't that what they are doing now?

Nice!

Do you have a datacap on that or is it unlimited?
How many TB do you usually download per month?

Flat fee, not cut of sales. Unless Steam started doing the whole "host your game, pay monthly and we get 0 option". 

Saints Row reboot shown at Gamescom

I don't know.. looks like trash :/ Why does everyone need to looks like Fortnite players/nerdy hipsters. These are gangsters, no?

Wheres gat?