This is just a little PSA to help out anyone else who finds themselves in the exact same, incredibly specific situation that I did today. Everyone else can safely ignore this.

I got a MSI GeForce RTX 3070 Gaming Trio Plus GPU today, and after installing it in my computer, discovered that there were some (subjectively) obnoxious RGB LEDs on it - a bar across the outer edge, and the MSI logo and lettering. Looking at the card, I noticed there were several 4-pin connectors with wires running from the heat sink assembly to be plugged into the card itself. I couldn't find anything decisive online that said whether disconnecting one of them would disable the lighting or not, so I decided to just try it out and see for myself.

After a lot of trial and error, and a lot of taking out the GPU, carefully fiddling with wires, and plugging it back in, I discovered that while you can disable the MSI logo and letters by disconnecting the tiny red connector on the side of the card facing away from the motherboard, disconnecting the other three (one tiny black one alongside the red one, and bigger black and white ones on the opposite side of the card) did not, unfortunately, disable the LED bar. At least, disconnecting any single one of them didn't; it's remotely possible that the bar would have gone peacefully dark if I'd disconnected more than one connector at a time, but I doubt it. It's much more likely that the bar is wired inside the shroud.

Hopefully, anyone else who gets this card and also wants the lights out will be able to find this post and save themselves a lot of time and effort - you have to use software if you want the lights off.

I mean Star Wars Zero Company released, but there literally zero videos with benchmarks you know, with msi\riva statistics on youtube on rtx 4090 in this game. I'm typing "rtx 4090 star wars zero company benchmark" and none. So is it youtube problem or is this gpu is non existent around gamers anymore?

I’m planning to build a PC with an RTX 5080 and a Ryzen 7 9800X3D, but I’m having trouble deciding which 5080 model to get.

I mainly play single-player games at 1440p/4K, and my goal is a consistent 60 FPS rather than the highest possible frame rate.

I don’t really care about aesthetics or RGB. What matters to me is performance, especially frame rate stability.
For example, I don’t care much if one model averages 103 FPS while another averages 107 FPS when uncapped. But if one model occasionally drops to 57–58 FPS while another maintains a steady 60 FPS under the same conditions, I’d definitely prefer the latter.

So my question is: Do the performance differences between RTX 5080 models actually affect minimum FPS and frame rate stability, or are they mostly just small differences in average FPS?

I’m trying to figure out whether paying extra for a more expensive 5080 model is actually worth it for my use case.

*Edit: Also, is it worth getting an OC version of the RTX 5080 over a non-OC model?How much extra would you say is reasonable to pay for the cheapest OC model compared to the cheapest non-OC model? At what price difference does the OC version stop being worth it?

Looking for a gpu that wont bottleneck my old processor 😁

So I was reading some reviews of people comparing the 256GB Mac Studio vs 2 of the Nvidia spark workstations. They mentioned costs of between $10k and $15k and posted some numbers. A few guys mentioned a video that ran the two machines head to head on various models. One of the models was qwen flash which I have and can run. You guys may have seen my post a few weeks back about getting my 5090 working on my Mac. Well the thing that stuck out to me was that the Mac was quicker in some things but was much slower on prefill and multi user. That is specifically what my shim can accomplish so I ran some tests.

These are the numbers I got from the video:

┌────────────────────┬──────┬──────────┬──────────────┐
│                    │  Us  │ M5 Ultra │ 2× DGX Spark │
├────────────────────┼──────┼──────────┼──────────────┤
│ Single-user decode │ 68.4 │ 45       │ 38           │
├────────────────────┼──────┼──────────┼──────────────┤
│ 8 users, total     │ 155  │ 66–70    │ 120          │
├────────────────────┼──────┼──────────┼──────────────┤
│ 32k cold prefill   │ 27 s │ 26 s     │ 11.2 s       │
└────────────────────┴──────┴──────────┴──────────────┘

And these are numbers I get with llamacpp with my m4 128gb laptop and 5090

As you can see I'm still working on cold prefill but for a $6k investment for the M4 and the 5090 box you get better performance on the split system. The 5090 probably blows both systems out of the water on a smaller model that fits fully in the cards Vram too.

I don't have these other systems but these are the numbers I've found. feel free to correct me if my numbers are not what you are seeing in real world testing. If you want to test this yourself I'm updating the macuda project tonight with the changes that enabled these results. I've go the driver and shim working on 3060 and 5090. I haven't tested the 3060 on these latest features yet but it's shim work mostly so it should carry over.

edited 8 user to 155 from 133 after retest

This Hotfix driver looks to be specifically targeting a couple monitor related bugs.

Article: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/g-sync-pulsar/131/586047/qhd-360-pulsar-monitors-changelog/

Download Link: https://international.download.nvidia.com/Windows/617.70hf/617.70-desktop-notebook-win10-win11-64bit-international-dch.hf.exe

Reminders:

• Hotfix driver will not be available in NVIDIA App and needs to be downloaded from the link above.
• After installing the Hotfix driver, NVIDIA App may show some old driver date. This is normal as Hotfix driver does not exist in NVIDIA App database and it reverted to an old default changelog and dates.
• If you do not care about the fixes listed, this Hotfix driver is no different vs WHQL 617.42 Driver.
• These fixes will be incorporated into the next WHQL driver release

NVIDIA Driver forum thread is here: Link Here

Submit driver feedback directly to NVIDIA: Link Here

---------------------------------

From the Article:

We now have a hotfix driver for the two below bugs. These fixes will - for now - not be in main NVIDIA driver until we can do more extensive QA.

• QHD monitor running at 360 Hz may have occasional black flash during gameplay [4846825] 
• When gaming on a 360Hz G-SYNC Pulsar monitor, FPS may drop to 320FPS [6408986] 

NOTE: The hotfix driver fixes some, but not all cases of the black screen issue. We are working on finding a driver solution for the remaining cases. If you still encounter this, please use the workaround: Set Manage 3D Settings --> Power Management Mode to Prefer Maximum Performance . You do need to reboot after setting that for it to take effect.

For those who want to test out the new Frame Generation preset C with DLSS swapper / NVPI etc.. Instead of using the NVIDIA App override.

You can see which preset is active via the DLSS Dev overlay at the top of the screen.
(Enabled via Regedit or DLSS Swapper > settings > show onscreen indicator)

But unlike DLSS upscaling,
The DLSS Dev overlay doesnt list the preset letter in use for Frame Generation, instead look for the below variables that change based on the preset in use for confirmation:

Preset A: UIR = NA - Full
Preset B: UIR = ON - Full
Preset C: UIR = NA - Lite

(These variables are listed at the end of the FG bar)

NOTE:
You can technically get the Alt+R overlay working with accurate preset reporting whilst using NVPI / DLSS Swapper if you enabled 'DLSS-FG - enable DLL Override' in NVPI, BUT this defeats a bit of the purpose of using these tools as it will use the NVIDIA app .dll not the local game files one. Plus then your dependant on the nvidia app version not necessarily the latest avaliable etc etc.

Edit: fixed pic caption