u/gargamel314

#1 was me the day before surgery. #2 was 3 days post-surgery. #3, 4, 5, are 14 months afterwards. Yeah, I got some tattoos along the way. I way the exact same as I did pre-surgery.

I apparently had an uncommon version of gyno/pseudo-gyno. Around 8 years old I developed fat in my chest, and it stayed there through puberty, through most of my life until I had it all sucked out at 46 years old. The surgeon said he removed "fibrous gynecomastia tissue" from my chest, they were like egg-sized rubbery adipose tissue that was deep in my chest, and then quite a bit of regular fat. This is permanent tissue that cannot be "burned off" by diet and exercise. Post surgery, I had lost 5 inches off my chest size. It was transformative. But then I started noticing something else.

I've been working out rather consistently for most of my adult life. I started doing home workouts when I was 22, joined a gym at 29, and went fairly consistently until I started building my gym in my basement at 38. Never been obese or really fit either, never really looked like I worked out consistently for the 24 years I did. I've been on TRT for about 4-5 years now. It did a lot of good for me, put a little more pep in my step, evened out my emotions quite a bit, and made me stop feeling like a narcoleptic zombie pretty much all the time, but I STILL never made any progress with my body. I just kept doing it because I always believed if I put in the work, I'd finally burn it all off.

6 months prior to surgery I started paying close attention to my nutrition, put myself in a calorie deficit, and lost myself about 25 pounds of fat by the time I had to go under the knife. (chest didn't shrink any). Since the surgery, I'm having the easiest time losing fat and building muscle than I have in my entire life. It takes me weeks now to see changes in my muscle mass as opposed to months or years like it did. It turns out that "fibrous gynecomastia tissue" was actually a rather efficent estrogen factory that was literally blocking me from making any gains and keeping my fat% higher. It didn't matter how hard I worked, I was never going to lose any of that chest fat, or body fat in general. Now, my body is literally becoming a different body, even though I'm 48 years old. I'm sure the TRT I'm on is helping me out with that, but that chest fat was doing all sorts of things to me that I didn't realize.

I urge anyone with gynecomastia or pseudogynecomastia to pursue this surgery, it is lifechanging.

Just an update: In my quest to get off Windows and find a replacement, I finally landed on CachyOS which works great with Intel Arc, as in, out-of-the-box support. It was the first Linux distro to fully recognize and identify the Intel Arc Pro B70 without referring it to "unknown." Sometimes it calls it Battlemage G31, but hey i'll take that. I did use Gemini heavily to learn how to configure these linux distros, since I started with no idea of what I was doing, the Gemini Pro model actually helped me proble-solve and troubleshoot on different distros.

I'm just sharing my experience for anyone else looking to switch:
I tried Linux Mint Cinnamon based on several people urging me to start with that, and that it used a new kernel which would support Intel Arc. It turns out, Linux Mint Cinnamon absolutely HATES this GPU, and fought me tooth and nail any time I tried to use it or run diagnostics.

I tried Pop!_OS because it seemed to have better support for Battlemage. It's absolutely beautiful, I really liked the interface and how non-Windows it was. Unfortunately, while it gave me less resistance than Mint, it doesn't support VRR or HDR, and I can't stand leaving features on the table.

CachyOS actually had full support for Battlemage right out of the box. I didn't have to fight it on anything. It does require regular use of the terminal, but I am learning, and for the most part Gemini will just give me commands that I can either type in myself or just copy and paste (I prefer typing them in myself, so that I learn how these commands work). Drivers are automatically updated instantaneously. There's no waiting around for a new "release" because it's just kept in a constantly updated state. I installed it on my laptop (NVIDIA laptop GPU) and everything works amazingly.

Where linux in general fails, including in CachyOS:

- Wayland/X11/Proton/Wine - all this Windows emulation stuff is very confusing when you are trying to play any games on Linux. There's a lot of trial/error troubleshooting with Steam and the other game launchers, and something could just randomly break at any moment just by installing another game or some update getting released. 99% of the time you can resolve it, but it takes work.

- Absolutely no hardware control over the GPU outside of "system settings." There is no Intel Graphics Software where you can adjust features like shader caching, XeSS Frame gen oeverride, ECC memory on/off, etc. Most of these features cannot actually be activated in Linux. There is no overclocking control, no fan control whatsoever (fan curve is whatever is programed into GPU's firmware), No pretty telemetry tab with reassignable graphs, etc. You GPU just comes as it is in Linux.

- Performance isn't as good. Frame rates in games are significantly lower than in Windows. AMD they can actually improve, but then AMD put a lot of work into developing on Linux, Intel hasn't done quite as much, though they are still quite active.

I have a few creative apps that are just not working on Linux, so for those, I will be booting back into Windows just for those. Hopefully, better tools will be developed for Linux soon, until then I guess I will sit back and wait, and use CachyOS as my daily driver because Windows is just getting worse and worse, and Microsoft is getting more greedy every day.

For anyone who wants to know more about CachyOS, this is absolutely the most comprehensive guide to using it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8C5i1JFCLTI

I just found it interesting and thought I'd share. It's doing a heavy workload right now, and just added this metric to IGS Performance tab. Someone had asked recently why this card wasn't using all its power. Looks like "GPU Power' doesn't report on what everything on the card is doing, just what's going through the diode. That's almost 100W of additional power for cooling and other operations. Also not sure what GPU Power Limited is - I guess 1=yes and 0=no. I don't remember seeing these metrics in IGS or PresentMon before, they must have been added recently.

Actually bought it about a week ago and have been having so much fun messing around with everything it does I'm just getting to this now. It doesn't light up, but it sure makes pretty pictures. I only turned the lights on for this picture, anyway. I prefer a dark machine.

Though I had settled on an A770 16GB, this is the GPU that I've wanted all along. Peak gaming performance for 1440p, with a ton of creative application. It's paired with an Intel i7-13700K that's undervolted for thermals and stability (JayZtwocents method worked like a charm).

This ASRock variant has a hefty cooler with a vapour chamber. The blower fan has actually improved thermals for my CPU by quite a bit. Even under heavy workloads for hours, the fan sticks around 50% and stays pretty quiet at that speed. It's only when I forced the fan to 100% that I could hear how loud it is - it kicks up to 5000rpm and has a high-pitched whirrrr. It has a higher TDP at 290W and boosts the clock up to 2.8GHz ... and stays there as long as the thermals allow (which is basically all the time). I haven't really tried overclocking anything yet, and though I *have* raised the power limit to 100%, it never uses it.

Moving from Alchemist to Battlemage, there's new options available in IGS which is interesting to me. I currently have the consumer drivers installed because 3DMark won't validate the Pro Drivers, but the Pro Drivers do not offer the Pre-Compiled Shaders option, and I don't think Image Sharpening shows up either. They will probably show up in a later driver release. After messing around with 3D Mark I will reinstall the Pro Drivers and turn the ECC Mode back on.

I really wanted that Sparkle B70 Pro (has an even higher TDP), but after speaking with a nice lady at Microcenter, it became clear to me I'd probably have to wait a month or two until it was available to buy on the east coast of the US. The ASRock seemed like a solid alternative, and was only $1000 USD. (I'm clearly a spoiled American who doesn't like to wait)

I play a few games, not many of the newer ones, though! Star Wars Jedi Survivor is incredibly smooth. With RT on, and High/Ultra settings, XeSS On via Optiscaler, frames sit between 50-80 FPS. If I turn RT off, they go way higher. Topaz Video can run its most demanding models for hours at a time. Currently messing around with upscaling Star Trek DS9 episodes to 4K. The Gaia HQ model so far is the most GPU-demanding and the GPU stays at a stable 80C, at 50% RPM. Takes about 5 hours for a 2-part 90 min episode. The local-run Starlight models are currently bugged in the installation process, I can't wait to try them, but they need to fix that. Pro B70 is generally 1.6X better performance than the A770 16GB.

Some quirks - I have 2 monitors - a Mini LED one that I just bought a year ago, and a 60Hz IPS monitor that I bought 10 years ago. No matter which port on the B70 that I plugged into, it marked the 10-year old monitor as monitor one. So the BIOS screen would always show up on that side, and Windows would insist on calling it monitor 1. In Windows I could set Monitor 2 as the "Main Display," but every app that I used would identify it as Display 2. Any time I'd turn off the other monitor and just have one display on, I'd have to set it for "Secondary Screen only" instead of "PC Screen only." Just a minor annoying quirk that seems unfixable. Also, on the first screen of IGS it sometimes tells me that there's only 28GB of VRAM instead of 32GB VRAM. Not a big problem for me, I have yet to use up all that VRAM, it's just weird. Currently it is reading 32GB VRAM.

I can't believe more influencers and news sources aren't talking about this GPU more. The price tag is a little steep, but SO WORTH IT if you can afford it. I refuse to contribute to the GPU duopoly if I can avoid it, and was incredibly disappointed that the B770 never materialized into anything. Little did I know the Pro B70 was better suited to my interests! But I do wonder how the B770 would have fared in performance compared to it! If anyone has any other benchmarks they would like me to run, I'd be happy to.

Part of my decision to buy it was that it's feeling more and more like this was my LAST chance to buy a GPU for my own personal use. It really looks like corporations want to buy the hardware and let you pay a subscription fee to use it remotely. We (the public) just get to buy the leftover scraps that the datacenters don't want.

The cooler on this thing is no joke! My temps never went beyond 80C (Threshold is 100C).

Benchmark was done with gaming drivers, and ECC mode off. Turning ECC on drops the TimeSpy score by about 1000 points, and 2 others congruently. Using the Pro Drivers yield similar results, but scores aren't "Validated" - I guess 3DMark doesn't like the drivers.