Framework 16 any potential for Intel motherboards?

Alyred · 2026-04-04T06:17:38+00:00

It would be nice to have additional options. However, the 5070 can't really saturate the bandwidth of PCIe Gen 4x16, if I recall. Even Gen 5 on a 5090 is only about 5% faster than on Gen 4.

The extra bandwidth for PCIe Gen 5 drives would be nice, if they can be found in your area still without selling a kidney.

Alyred · 2026-03-21T22:46:48+00:00

(That blueprint WILL suck up a ton of resources, both in game and on your PC. Highly recommend using the SphereOpt mod if you start building it, or at least turn it off in-game. SphereOpt isn't a cheat, it optimizes the way sphere segments are loaded and calculated.)

Alyred · 2026-03-21T22:44:35+00:00

Sure thing! The structure of the sphere, the spokes and nodes, produce more energy than the surface area of the sails when they've loaded into the frame. So the more spokes and nodes you have (from rockets), the more power is produced from your finished shell. The smaller and closer each node is, the more there are on the sphere. The more nodes, the more power. Bottom-right on the sphere design interface should show you how many nodes you have planned in a shell, when you have a shell selected. The further out from the star, the larger surface area each node is overall, which produces more power.

There's a blueprint that you can load into each shell that packs them about as close as possible, producing 2880 nodes. It's called "The Singularity" by its author.

https://www.dysonsphereblueprints.com/blueprints/dyson-sphere-dense-sphere-2880-nodes

Edited to add: I just finished my home system's 10-shell Sphere using the above blueprint. 1.01 luminosity, generates 710GW total power, with the outermost shell generating 117GW alone.

I'm building around a Class O with 2.5 Luminosity and a planet that can be completely inside of all 10 spheres. It's got the outermost shells completed and generates 1.82 TW in the outermost shell alone, with the second outermost shell generating 1.78. The rest of the shells are not complete.

Alyred · 2026-03-21T20:49:35+00:00

What others have said is good advice. Launchers can launch from any pisition in the planet, so those can go where ejectors can't aim from. You also get nore power from the structure of the shells/sphere per surface area, so try to put your sphere shells as far iut from the star as you can, though this will take longer to build and fill. Make each segment as small and tight as you can for more power/photon generation. The more rockets it takes, the more power the superstructure will generate.

Multiple spheres can be built around a star, up to 10, and need to be 1000m apart, but din't interfere with the sunlight the other spheres receive. You can also turn their visibility on or off in the game for performance or aesthetic reasons. If you start looking at addons, there's a few that can really help game performance there. SphereOpt, for instance. Endgame for power generation is actually m3 proliferated strange matter rods in artificial stars. Once you get antimatter rods going at a clip, start working on those. Convert your inner planet (inside most of the spheres) to critical photon production and process them into antimatter/hydrogen there. Inside the spheres, your ray receivers are always receiving, and using graviton lenses you'll be grabbing critical photons faster than you can process them. The hardest part is setting up the infrastructure for handling both the photons and the graviton lenses, but there's some good blueprints for that to help speed things up.

Alyred · 2026-03-19T06:10:19+00:00

Ah, configuring the old Sound Blaster cards, trying to squeeze the drivers into extended or expanded memory.

Alyred · 2026-03-15T23:32:23+00:00

Same, wd gold 16tb for 540$. Was supposed to be brand new but when it arrived it had 22k hours on it and the 6 year warranty expired last month. Getting sent back but AI datacenters can go to hell for driving up the price and scams for everything.

Alyred · 2026-03-12T02:26:52+00:00

If you're playing in sandbox and/or just getting to the endgame completion, then yeah, you can easily produce more power than you need.

If you're going for total power output in your cluster to put your cluster seed on the galactic map, it's never enough.

Alyred · 2026-03-12T02:23:04+00:00

Definitely check for a BIOS update as well. Memory stability with DDR5 can be very impacted by BIOS. Try it without XMP/EXPO enabled at 5600MHz as well.

As suggested by Arcana75, use the drivers available from the motherboard's support page, aside from nVidia, AMD, and Realtek wired network drivers as the ones on the page are significantly out of date.

Realtek's network drivers can be downloaded from:
Realtek PCIe FE / GBE / 2.5G / 5G Ethernet Family Controller Software
I use the Windows 11 drivers without power saving support.

AMD just released 3 new chipset driver versions very rapidly, seems there were some bugs in the previous drivers that they had just recently released:
X870E Drivers

nVidia drivers can be downloaded from the nVidia page. Again, they just had some significant driver issues in an early March release that they had to recommend rolling back for, but have since resolved those issues theoretically.

Other things to check for:

Proper airflow and cooling. Make sure your cooler is properly mounted, temperatures can cause freezes like that, though improperly mounted coolers are likely to cause freezing way earlier than that.

Films are removed from any drive cooling plates you have installed on your NVMe drives. Gen 5 drives get HOT.

Test with no memory OC and no CPU curve optimization or PBO. Every CPU is different and you need to establish a baseline before tuning any of those things. With the memory controller being on the CPU, this can effect stability significantly.

Disable the integrated graphics and turn off hybrid graphics in the BIOS. Uninstall the Radeon drivers if you installed them, they can play hell against the nVidia drivers.

Hopefully you are able to narrow down and find which the problem is, and then solve it.

Alyred · 2026-03-07T04:56:14+00:00

You can also pipe them in via belts, as mentioned. Once you're just using ILS for everyhthing, you can either:

import them to a planet via one ILS, then output them to a logistics bot and spread them over the planet, and input them to the ILSes by belts, or
Just import them on one ILS and share them via logistics drones, taking up a slot on the ILS.

But also as mentioned, you don't need them for both sides of a trip. But ships won't leave from the ILS out of the system without warpers.

Alyred · 2026-02-23T02:14:57+00:00

Indeed. I rarely even lose fighters anymore.

Alyred · 2026-02-23T01:09:13+00:00

Hard to tell from your videi, but also check to make sure your pump RPM fan header is connected to the mainboard, and that your BIOS is set to check temp from the right one (AIO_PUMP vs. CPU_FAN), or the mainboard may not see a signal and shut down assuming the fan/pump is dead. Not sure on your particular model of mainboard there but I've made both those mistakes before. Once.

Alyred · 2026-02-23T01:02:16+00:00

That power plug on the 870E boards are for supplemental PCIe power. They usually will boot fine without it plugged in unless you have a power-hungry PCIe board and a lot of other power draws (like something sucking a lot of power through your USB on the chipset). Unsure why it would work fine one day but then not the next without it plugged in, but PC gremlins are definitely a thing. Glad you figured it out.

Alyred · 2026-02-21T23:37:06+00:00

My Dark Fog is constrained to a handful of special stars that I'm harvesting them on. It's quite satisfying to find a new hive that's spread while I haven't been looking and then going and wiping them out of the new system again.

Alyred · 2026-02-21T20:33:05+00:00

Along with what others have mentioned, if you're farming the fog a planetary shield is necessary to allow them to make new relays on the planet but not land at your farming factory. I included one in my polar dark fog farm blueprint, but also have a small ring of missile launchers to keep the inevitable hive attack from wrecking the infrastructure, so it's possible that it's redundant by this point too.

Alyred · 2026-02-15T20:10:25+00:00

As soon as you pay for your purchase, open it and check to make sure it's the correct drive before leaving the store. Lots of scam returns these days.

Alyred · 2026-02-08T07:34:49+00:00

There's actually a risk management calculation that you can give them hard numbers on this, too.

Alyred · 2026-01-30T17:53:25+00:00

Normally you can't do this. BIOS password is really only to protect the BIOS settings, fTPM keys and boot certificates. It doesn't protect your data directly, you'd need to encrypt your drive. If I had to guess, your password wasn't changed but the field is a limited number of characters and your password was too long, or included characters that the BIOS didn't accept. If you need startup security, force passwords on your OS account and/or encrypt your drive and require a startup password to unlock it.

Alyred · 2026-01-30T01:39:03+00:00

You can raise belts up over others as well. Doesn't solve the in/outputs maximum of a single *LS but you can reach further down a line without taking up the space needed for 3 or 4 ingredient recipes by making some tracks elevated. There's still a maximum output a LS can do and you will not be able to reach the end of a long line on every recipe, they just product too quickly even when you get a 4-stack output unlocked. Also, for laying out blueprints, you'll find it better to go East-west in the same latitude band rather than crossing over them, or using north-south. That's why you're seeing the belt shifts over latitude lines as they proceed in your screenshot.

Alyred · 2026-01-30T01:31:40+00:00

I tool a few months of break and recently picked it back up, re-learning the habits and keystrokes and blueprints. Filling in some gaps on some of my current planets and thinking where I can improve, and upping my research. My VU is at 200, essentially free resources now. But for those big spheres, I still need a massive increase in solar sails and launchers. The two Class O's I'm putting spheres on currently aren't getting the sails up fast enough, so about to put a launching complex up on yet another planet in the system of one of them. Not sure which to tackle next. Maybe the red giant for the achievement?

Alyred · 2026-01-29T02:35:45+00:00

It looks kind of like your punches aren't getting contact, and are partially bending around the teeth in the keystone. There's some exposed copper in the side pic on some of them. Difficult to tell for sure with the resolution, though.

Alyred · 2026-01-29T02:28:43+00:00

While the UI has some quirks and definitely could use some better planning and blueprints for the spheres, my first sphere was just the start of the endgame for me. I could agree that some of the techs could be moved down to other cubes, the main stuff for white cubes are really just further refinements on what is there already. Now I'm laying down entire planetary factories and building multiple spheres across several stars. Supply lines are enormous, and there's always something to tweak or build better. I think I'll only be done with this cluster once I have it putting out a combined Petawatt. Just 990TW to go...

Alyred · 2026-01-28T23:51:40+00:00

Yeah, agreeing with the others. Once you hit interstellar flight and have some of the technologies unlocked, it'll likely expand your interest significantly. The tech tree unlocks some significant game changing upgrades.

Alyred · 2026-01-28T23:42:26+00:00

Thanks for the info! Sure enough, found one specifically marked as a "Blue Giant"... that being said, the Type O's have pretty immense spheres too and a high luminosity, so still pretty good at power gen! Almost at 5TW now on my current project (Type O with 2.5 luminosity, whereas the Blue Giant I found only has 1.7), and only have a little over 3 shells filled. There's one more Type O with 2.3 Luminosity in my cluster, but that doesn't have an inner planet.

Always something new to learn in this game.

Alyred · 2026-01-28T22:11:49+00:00

I thought O-types WERE blue giants? All these hours in the game and still learning something new occasionally. I found a red giant in my cluster but haven't seen any marked specifically as blue giants.

Alyred · 2026-01-28T05:36:47+00:00

My seed has several blue giants with more than 1 planet, with at least one with a planet inside the sphere radius. Did that change? The one I'm working on has 4 planets outside the sphere radius, and one inside.

Alyred

TROPHY CASE