The Official Graphics Card and PC gaming Thread

So I went to see if I could update my graphics drivers again since 13.4 is causing the occasional (every 3-4 weeks) BSOD, and was rather surprised to see AMD no longer produce WHQL graphics drivers - every release is left as beta and then moved onto the next version - the last official driver release is actually april's, patched in may, and no CAPs have been produced since then either - small wonder people have had so many issues with crossfire lately.
I wonder if the guy who single-handedly wrote most of AMD's graphics driver code left the company...

 

I've noticed that as well Sam. Several high profile titles have yet to have a proper Crossfire Profile released(Metro Last Light needs it very badly). I am also wondering what's going on with AMD right now. I've never seen them lag behind on drivers so badly. A far cry from when they would release several versions of one driver just to address small performance issues. Skyrim, The Witcher 2, etc all had a large amount of attention paid to them.

To their credit, AMD cards don't really have many major performance issues barring certain HD6 series cards and a small few Nvidia titles. While Crossfire is the hardest hit section of their lineup, single cards are still fighting strong, which is where the majority of gamers will be looking for their performance fix. Still a shame though, and does screw over users like ourselves who adopted the technology precisely because of its usefulness when it works properly. When video memory wasn't being a PITA for me, negative Crossfire scaling would screw me anyway.

Another boon for AMD, the HD7970 has finally taken a decent price drop. 7970s available for $300 on Newegg. If the GTX760 weren't already purchased I might be buying one, but I actually have specific need of an Nvidia card for certain things right now. Sorry AMD, you'll have your chance next time

Their CPU division looks to be cooking up something worthwhile. Steamroller is said to be an even bigger jump from Piledriver than Piledriver was from Bulldozer. Considering how huge of an improvement Piledriver was(technically, not performance-wise), I am interested to see how it does. This X6 performs with the best of them, but the clockspeed scaling is so high on the newer chips, it's starting to look like a proper upgrade to Thuban might finally be showing up. Time will tell, and I'm not inclined at all to upgrade unless it's a significant improvement. My 4GHz X6 is already equivalent to a 4.6-4.8GHz Piledriver. AFAIK, that's the usual OC limit for Piledriver anyway, so I'm not exactly jealous.

I wish my income was steadier and my living expenses were as low as they were in Highschool. I'd already be going Intel. Being on a budget isn't bad though when the hardware is good. This X6 has paid for itself and I intend to use it until its far past its prime much like the HD6850s. So far though, that is not the case at all. As your posted benchmarks from the other thread show, Thuban is still putting up a spirited fight.

 

Wow, I've been gone for a while - I got totally hooked on Bioshock 2. I know, Jeff, you weren't thrilled with that title. But, not to argue the point, to me the way I approached the series - starting with Infinite, then deciding to check out the source of it all with the first Bioshock, to my surprise, given my low expectations based on what you said, Bioshock 2 turned out to be a wonderful sequel - simplifying cracking by getting rid of those interesting plumbing bends, and simplifying photography (I really didn't get the idea at all in Bioshock and I had a very tough time through the entire game because of it - all the film I kept picking up went to waste) so that this time I advanced to refilling "fountain of youth" as well as "camouflage" - I turned invisible if I stood still for 3 seconds.

And finally - some wonderful weapons. This might be what you didn't like about it, Jeff, because shotgun is terribly under-powered, and machine gun has virtually no sound, but forget those weapons. Rivet gun rocks - it's basically a good 12-round pistol - and the heavy rivet is like a magnum round - kill anything with about a dozen hits of it. And what about spear-gun. An absolute delight - pin those idiots to the wall with a head-shot - upgrade to the telescopic lens and get about a 3x zoom - for accurate spear-chucking from about 35 yards out. I just loved it!!!

I played at the hardest level of difficulty as per usual (makes most games more challenging and thereby more interesting, and if they let you change anytime, it's not too risky) and I saved specific areas where I fought the Big Sister - and believe me - I rule the Big Sister, even with no gimmicks, just her and me dancing around a tree - she hits the dirt 90% of the time. And that scream she makes when she dies is so worth it, lol. (This is payback - for the longest time I could not figure out how to effectively deal with her maniacal onslaught.)

Okay, regarding that game, with about 300 screenshots, I'll post a proper review later, lol.

I'll also post what may be some surprising information on the most powerful weapon against the Big Sister. Any guesses? I bet it's not what you're thinking.

Well, Infinite is exquisite, and deserves all the time you plan to give it. I picked up the DLC also, Clash in the Clouds, and it was quite diverting - for almost a week solid.

But Sam, I am so glad you own Dishonored - and when you finally get into it I highly recommend the sequel, Knife of Dunwall. It takes you back to one of my favorite maps of the main game, and adds some other interesting material. The Dishonored people, like creative director Viktor Antonov (when at Valve he designed City 17) have a lot of good things to say about Bioshock. The worlds created by these two games are on par with Half Life 2.


Hardware-wise - Jeff, it really looks like you're honing in on that GTX760.

First:

To that I have to say - Last Light was awesome beyond belief and very enjoyable - I really like the Russian story-telling flavor with that series.


Second:

What does "already purchased" mean - as in already on layaway waiting for Christmas? Does a person by the name of Christa have anything to do with that?

Thanks for the tip about Tomb Raider. I did play some very early tomb raider, like the one where she is on the great wall of china - but I think it was just a demo. And another demo where she was in Venice, which had a speedboat in it I think. And maybe a full game - I remember a tomb (naturally) with pivoting rocks of course, etc. Fast forward 10 years later - after playing 3rd person Assassins Creed 3, and enjoying it, I am inclined to consider giving Lora Croft another go, if the graphics are as nice as you say they are.

A last note - I finally got the mid-tower Lian Li with the i7 in it, plus 12 gigs of ram - it's an evga classified x58 and it came with an evga285. I just changed the cooler - yes Sam, you were quite correct, I had totally botched the arctic 5 repair on the tiny stock cooler - I didn't smoosh it around enough, and/or the tube from Radio shack was too old and dry - when I pulled the old tiny cooler off today, the stuff was only smeared on one-half the die.

(Don't tell anybody.) Anyway, they had shipped him another rig very quickly with the SSD, so he became happy very quickly - and the truth is, that pathetic stock cooler was sooo tiny - the rig had been running hot, that's when I noticed that the fan was loudly cycling on and off, and I suggested I take a look and sabotage it - I mean - make sure the cooler was working. We went around the corner and I was so amazed that Radio Shack carried Arctic Cooler 5 - I didn't notice the time stamp from 1980. He's happy now, and I finally got over there to pick up the not booting Raid machine that I immediately got working again - his photo server - I have to deliver it back to him soon - and that's when he told me to take the i7 - he had pulled out the disks and had no further use for it. The new case they sent him was also a Lian Li, so he is using 4 disks and 4 Lian Li disk trays - I have no disks and no trays. I'll be visiting their web site soon. But hard drive-wise, I have a left-over WD 1TB equal to my 9450 main drive, when I abandoned the idea of running Raid 0 on that machine, so I am okay on that score, running it while it sits on top of the case.

Regarding HSF - I own the latest TRUE - the one with 3 fans - the silverstone or something like that - but I also have in my inventory a couple of Arctic coolers - one of them the 13, which I just popped onto the cpu without a backplate - just to get the thing running. Bios temps went from 70 down to 35. I shmooshed the cooler down and around like nobody's business - it came with some paste on it, so that's what I used for now. Later when I do the TRUE I'll go back to Arctic Silver 5. So I think the 13 is on okay for now. If testing shows that it really is a major step up in cpu power for me, then I would move all the guts over to my full-tower spedo case where it will get decent ventilation without those noisy kazes.

But for now, as I overclock it, I want to test it in the Lian Li case, so the two kaze 3000 rpm LOUD 120s will hopefully help me get enough airflow to give it a solid test. But maybe I'll have to pull the board and put the TRUE on it. My thinking is that if I can get it to 4.5 ghz, like many can, then that gives me 4.5/3.343 X 1.25, assuming i7 is 25% faster at same clocks than 9450 (maybe the real number is 15% faster.) That gives me a 55%-68% increase in cpu power. I'll be pulling more wattage - it comes with an 850 watt Antec power supply, a little step up from my current Toughpower 750.

I know that's not as elegant, nor as powerful, nor as energy-efficient, as a brand new solution like you have, Jeff, or you Sam, a sandy or an ivy bridge, or whatever is newest, but free is free, and if I can overclock it near 4.5, that should hold me for a couple years I think.

Rich

 

Still rocking my original i5 750 in my main gaming PC actually The LAN PC gets the 3470 Ivy Bridge but that's not overclockable so roughly the same level of performance.

Arctic Cooling and Arctic Silver are two different companies by the way, and Arctic Silver is far from being the best thermal paste these days, good though it is.

 

Hahaha purchased this weekend and being shipped this week. Will probably be playing with it by the weekend. Christa did argue a bit but no complaints after I explained what was going to happen with Skyrim XD


Personally guys I use nothing but Arctic Silver Ceramique. No complaints here. Won't use anything else.

 

I use pretty much whatever's around, Thermalright Chillfactor, OCZ Freeze, Arctic Silver, Arctic Cooling MX-something, they all do a roughly similar job, but the modern non-conductive pastes are certainly as good or better as AS5 without the spill risk. Various benchtests of pastes normally place Arctic Silver V near the bottom, good though it is. Of course, for the sake of a couple of degrees, 'bottom' doesn't mean too much, but wherever you can squeeze in slightly lower temps, can't hurt right?

 

Ceramique is roughly the same as any type or brand as well. I use it because it performs like any of the other top-end pastes, is non-conductive, chemically stable, and cures hard instead of drying out. I'm sure others will argue for their own favorite brand but ceramic paste has undeniable properties outside of actual performance. A lot of the better performing products tend to dry out after a while, which I really don't like. The less I have to fiddle with my cooler the better.



As you can see here the performance difference is basically nothing disregarding the few outliers. Depending on the quality of the mount and the cooler in question I've seen Ceramique beat AS5 in some reviews. I do, however, intend to give Ceramique 2 a try at some point. Not much motivation though as I have 2 of the huge tubes of Ceramique and am likely never to run out. Never had it dry up on me or change properties.

AFAIK AS5 is prone to drying.

Also, all other things being the same, a bolt-thru mount will usually perform better than a stock AMD spring clip or Intel twist clips. The mounting method and cooler being used make a larger difference than the paste in most situations.

 

Yeah, I guess I'll have to put a bolt-through to get it to 4.5 ghz - it's running at 30 right now with w7 loaded up. Again evga x58 classified tri sli motherboard, with 940 chip.

I didn't know that Arctic Silver and Arctic Cooling were not the same company - thanks for clearing that up Sam.

Also, Jeff, that graph was kind of interesting - arctic silver 5 is not quite the all-time champ that I thought.

Yeah - I have to wonder if I was using some old dried up paste that Radio Shack sold me. I was quite surprised yesterday to pull off the small intel stock cooler and see the paste not at all on one half of the die. That's kind of a head-scratcher. Possibly it was too dry. I guess I should have put the paste on the cpu, not the cooler. I thought I did that. Not too much experience with paste I have to admit.

But the paste was evenly spread on the cooler itself, and I thought the cooler was exerting downward pressure - but I guess not.

Anyway, the mounts the Arctic Cooling 13 uses are two-part - and they seem like they got applied fairly securely. The base goes into position, then you screw down the cooler. And like I mentioned, I just used the layer of paste they had on the cooler, after using the Arctic silver two-step cleaning on the cpu. And I squished it quite hard to smear the paste as much as possible. So the led display is showing 30 right now.

I may not be able to get to 4.5 ghz until I mount the TRUE - but if I can get to - let's say 4.2, that will probably be enough incentive to swap out the motherboard and move everything to the spedo.

Before I do that I'll test an actual game with both 7950s into the mid tower lian li case.

Aided by the kazes, I'll do a one-on-one comparison for example on Far Cry 3, where I was definitely cpu-limited - I could see it in the OSD. I have all the game saves and I can go right in at the same spot and kind of do my own benchmark comparison - jet skiing around the lake.

Hey guys, how about a few overclocking pointers - it's a 940 chip. Should I just visit some evga overclocking forums for that board and see what they did - or read some reviews? Any thoughts on max cpu temp, max voltages, etc.

That one paragraph you gave me, Sam, about two years ago, on the 9450, was a huge help on that overclocking adventure.

This mobo has a nice northbridge cooler with fan - and there seem to be every temp you need in the health section of the bios - so I should be able to monitor all the temps fairly well. I haven't given you memory type - I don't know. I have not yet loaded any of my utilities that will tell me everything - not even cpu-z or anything yet.

I see that the memory is low-height, 12 gigs. I believe that will allow me to position the silverstream so that it pushes the air up, not back, since I have that 200mm ceiling exhaust - once I get it over to the spedo case. And like I say, once I pull the mobo, for sure I'll put the giant cooler on the cpu. I mgight as well - I paid a $100 or so for it, no sense letting it sit in a box - and the i7 will need it, not the newer cooler running sandy or ivy guys.

Jeff when I put the silver stream on, do you still recommend ceramique despite the chart, for example due, to other factors, like not drying out - which I agree I would not want to occur. (I had thought that Arctic silver 5 did not dry out - but I see Jeff that you mention that it appears to you that it does dry out - and again - I keep thinking of how that cooler came off, with no evidence of paste on half the cpu die - maybe the paste that was there just peeled off in separating the cooler. Is it possible that the arctic silver was just totally dried out? Why didn't I realize that? duhhh.)

:/

Rich

 

Rich, AS5 really has nothing wrong with it. It should spread evenly if applied correctly. Don't worry about the very edges getting full coverage as long as it spreads in an even circle. The chip is usually in the center of the heat spreader.

As far as your application being dry that maybe a possibility. A fresh application never hurts. Most pastes will lift from the CPU to some degree when you pull the cooler.

Also, you have an i7 now? haha I never knew. Last I heard you were still using the 9450. Forgive me if I'm a little behind Some of those chips were not the best OC'ers. 4GHz+ shouldn't be a major issue though. As far as OCing them Sam would be your best bet here. AFAIK his i5 750 is very similar.

 

Hi thanks Jeff.

Yes - the i7 is the one that was overheating terribly for a close relative (animator dude who works for a game company.) I was up there about 6 months ago - maybe 9 months ago - and his machine was loudly cycling the fan. I said - Hey, that huge noise - your machine is way overheating. They were bothered by the cycling, and there had been some performance effects - I think some slowdowns - but no crashing yet.

Anyway, the tiny stock cooler was all caked up with dust - I took it off. Then it occurred to me that I had to put it back on, and we ran over to the local Radio shack and they had some AS5. I used an old credit card to smooth a very thin layer on the cooler - but I assumed the cooler would be pushing down hard on the cpu - but again with the push-pins of the original stock intel, I guess not.

Or maybe what you say is more relevant - perhaps it was spread more evenly than it looked - but it just lifted on removing the cooler. Anyway, I didn't do a full smooshing down - because I couldn't - the push pins were in the way. Sam said later it sounded like the paste job had failed - and should be redone - and he was right - but I never went back there for months and months.

So the i7 began to run hotter and hotter for him, and even when over the phone we dropped off some of the cores, and reduced the frequency multiplier - while that helped for a while - it within a week or so began to shut off for him. His IT guys said - hey no problem - and they just shipped him another machine - the new i7 with the Samsung 256 gig SSD. (It is some kind of super i7 - xeon I think - takes up to 32 gig of ram as I recall - and I think it will take another cpu - I don't know why they went so heavy-duty on the processor and motherboard. Almost like a CAD workstation type of rig - like the one I helped my brother activate.)

I think that was about a year ago. All those game dev guys are paid pretty well, as you might guess, so the IT guys don't sweat supplying them with whatever hardware they need, esp when the rig has been in place for over a year, and he got this i7 early 2010 until it died end of 2012.

The 9450 that I picked up in Fall of 2010 was an exception - I didn't get it until he had it in his garage for about 8 months - but he had it in use only 2 weeks before the asus p5e bios changed the sata settings from ide to raid, and he couldn't boot up. He called them, and they said "Yeah, we've been having trouble with that mobo" and they instantly shipped him this i7 - that was very early 2010. So, the 9450 sat in his garage for 8 months - he told me about it a couple months later, and then he had me take it with me one day in September of that year, 2010. So he got about 2+ years out of the i7 before the overheating.

Funny thing - I looked at his new rig 6-8 months ago - not long after he got it, and he again has a crummy little stock cooler, whereas on his photo server, the core duo 2-core, with gtx8800 graphics card, he has a round copper heat-pipe hsf with fan in the middle - same as on the 9450 which also came with a gtx8800. The old computer supplier was using sonata cases and upgrading the coolers whereas the new supplier is using Lian Li cases but just the standard intel non-heat pipe stock cooler. I wonder why the IT guy doesn't have them put on something just a bit better than that like they used to? They want the guys to do some gaming, especially in testing their own games - and they give them state of the art gaming rigs, but with lousy stock coolers. How does that make sense?

That's why I picked up the two little push-pin Arctic Cooling Pro coolers, the 7, and then the 13 - they were cheap at newegg - I figured I'd start his new i7 out with better cooling. Also I picked up another vantec card and some flush-mount sata cables and flush power cables. I don't know about the Lian Li, but on the sonata, with flush-mount, you could sit a vantec dual-fan card up on end, with one fan on top of the other, in front of the hdd cage, with enough room to still get the door shut, and cool all the hard drives, keeping them in that optimal 30-40 zone.

But I never got around to doing any more work on his machine, or picking up the old one, until just now.

So yes, finally I have the i7. I've thought I might have access to it - for what - nearly a year?

Sam has been saying, loaner or not, that I should skip this upgrade and opt for a proper migration to an ivy - or whatever is the latest - but that's what - at least $500 for mobo, cpu, memory? Am I right?

I actually am not that excited about this project - it almost seems too soon - it was a lot of work to overclock that 9450, and then to move everything to the spedo. And I've got it all just how I like it - lots of fans - runs pretty well - I changed out the super fine type filtering and went to the standard mesh silverstone magnetic filters, which are not nearly as fine - to allow increased air-flow - kind of striking a balance - letting in the finer dust particles so as not to take such a hit on air flow. I could see that despite all the fans, the machine was still tending to overheat in some of this hot summer weather we've had - and the looser mesh filters certainly did improve the cooling - maybe 15-20% better airflow.

But I guess I'll have to get myself excited. Yes - I finally have the i7. If I get it to 4.5, no matter how much heat it throws off into the giant triple-fan TRUE - silver shadow I recall - then that's 55-70% increase in compute power.

Get excited Rich!!!

 

I personally would be surprised if you have the 940 stable at 4.5Ghz. Really, clock speeds that high are only primarily the domain of Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge/Haswell CPUs, the first generation i5s and i7s aren't really capable of it.
The i5 750 has a natural limit of 4.1Ghz that's pretty much a brick wall, hence why that's what I aimed for with mine and no further (which it has run at for more than 3 years). The i7s have no such limit but with the 130W base TDP (versus 95 of the i5s and, more importantly, Core 2 Quads like the Q9450) are more of a handful, and do require considerable voltage increases north of 4.0Ghz. You may or may not have a good stepping that gets you to 4.2 or so on air, but beyond that point I'd be surprised if you don't start needing to exceed the voltage safety thresholds which means two things - short life-expectancy, and considerable heat output (250W+) which even the best air cooler will have a hard time dealing with.

The performance increase will be fairly substantial, as you already have a 20% gain per-clock, plus any additional clock speed you can achieve. (20% might not seem much but the difference going from original i7s, past sandy bridge, past ivy bridge, straight the way through to haswell is only 25% per core! - The difference is of course with Haswell you get 3.5Ghz out of the box, at half the wattage)

My understanding about use of stock coolers Rich, is you don't overclock when testing software/games. If you do, you'll never really know if that crash was your code, or your CPU. Ultimately, if you're running at stock, unless you're doing something wrong, believe it or not the stock cooler is always good enough. Those Intel stock coolers may look pathetic, but they get the job done, amazingly.

 

Great information Sam. Well, can you point me to some references on what would be considered dangerous voltages?

You had some great numbers for me on the 9450, and following that one paragraph that you wrote about 4 years ago, I was able to get it up to 3.343 - and no more - 418 fsb clock. The goal was 450 but even 420 produced too much heat, and I encountered that delicate balance between adding just a tiny fraction more voltage for stability - but then having that tip the heat over the line raising core 0 above 71 where I got errors on the LinX (similar to intel burn test which wouldn't run on my P4 as I recall.)

I see what you're saying about the stock cooler - no they don't overclock - none of those devs do that - for obvious reasons as you pointed out. His stock cooler did work fine - until ultimately it was caked in dust - really caked. In order to clean it I decided to take it out of the case and give it a thorough cleaning - but then I realized I had no paste with me. In retrospect, a can of compressed air, taking the whole rig outside, might have been a better idea.

Well, in regard to whether this i7 was really faster, my curiosity got the better of me, and I had an exciting thing happen this afternoon. Just for the fun of it, at the 2.91 ghz where I am right now with no overclocking, I decided to run my little benchmark, the pizarra m4v to avi converter - which I have run on all my various computers to get an idea of relative speed of each. You were mentioning once Sam that you get about 1000 conversion frames/sec which seems about right - probably with just one core going 100%. Anyway, this little converter only exercises one core.

I got a max of 230/sec on my old gaming 4 ghz p4 which is in the sunroom.
I get 202/sec on my dell office desktop that I am typing on now in the non-gaming end of the trailer.
I get 425/sec on my gaming 9450.
The phenom quad core HTPC gets 325 on one core.
The core duo two-core photo server that my animator relative had before the 9450 gets 330.
But today the i7 clocked in at 483 - at the present 2.91 ghz.

That is an exciting 30% faster than the 9450 adjusted for same clocks!

I realize of course that video conversion is not necessarily indicative of game play - but I had been thinking max of 15-25% speed gain, so 30 got me excited! Looking at 4.0, 4.25, and 4.5, those clocks, using the 30%, would give me a 55%, 65%, and 75% cpu power gain. And DO I NEED IT RIGHT NOW!!



I am presently playing a lot of Tomb Raider. No matter what my framerate is (I have used RadeonPro to set various target framerates using its dynamic sync tweak, like from 60 down to 15 in various stages) the load on core 0 is always virtually 100%. I have the game totally maxed in all particulars, shadows, everything ultra. I get pretty good framerates, sometimes in the 40s, sometimes in the 70s.

The game crashes once in a while - I guess on average every 3 hours - and that is due to core 0 heating up to 71 and sometimes 72 - I can see it right there on my OSD - that's when the cpu starts producing errors as I discovered from the LinX stress testing - and you had said that 70 (or was it 71) is an upper core temp limit on the 9450.

So if I can get to 4.0, that's a 55% gain, and my core 0 would be cruising along at maybe 65% loads or so, nice and cool, no crashing. I'll take it!

So if you have some voltage numbers handy, that would be cool. If nothing is handy, I'll get around to googling some overclocking forums on that chip and motherboard and I know there will be a ton of stuff to read.

And on the air-cooling, I might run into problems trying to mount the silver shadow TRUE - they have a tall VReg cooler with fan that might be in the way. Memory is not an issue - it's 12 gigs of low height memory. (By the way, the bios reserves 4 gigs for hardware - so usable is "only" 8 gigs. I guess that's okay since I recall you saying that in some testing you did on crysis, you saw that your rig never used more than 6 gigs. But I wonder why that bios thinks it needs so much memory for hardware. I read a few posts about that subject - I'm not too concerned since the remaining 8, as I say, seems like plenty.)

Anyway, I might have to look at that Vreg cooler. There is also another fairly high cooler right next to it - at first glance it doesn't look like you can remove it. I would like to position the TRUE with the fans facing the ceiling where my 200 mm ceiling exhaust might help suck up that heat - I can add up to 3 140mm fans to the silver shadow - I already own enough fans left over from populating the spedo, and they all blow pretty well, upwards of 60-75 cfm each.

So, unless I botch the paste job again, I should be able to handle quite a bit of heat - but maybe not 4.5 ghz worth. I am noping to get at least to 4.0 in this Lian Li case, with the present Arctic 13 cooler, and the kaze blowing like mad directly behind it. (The kaze is already in place - the kama bay slid right in.)

That would clinch it for me, and then I'd plan to move all the guts into the spedo, and install the TRUE. I wonder if I should pick up a lapping kit? Paste-wise I am not so sure about AS5 any more - althought I own two tiny plungers of it. I think I'll look at that newer ceramique that Jeff likes. My AS5 is ancient - about 5 years old - and the AS5 from Radio Shack was purchased only 1 year ago - but who knows how long they had it in inventory. I will never take pasting for granted again

Say, on another note, power-wise, do you think the 850 watt Antec psu is going to be enough? It's 100 watts more than what I have now in the Toughpower. Is that i7 cpu, at 4.5ghz (if I ever get there) going to burn MORE than 100 watts additional to what I am consuming now with the 9450 at 3.343 ghz? It's rated at 130, and you said I could burn up to 250 - but I must be burning nearly 130-150 right now, right? It should be enough, don't you agree?

(Rich doesn't want to buy another power supply - somehow that sounds familiar! hahahaha)

(I have about 500 new screenshots of various games and DLC. By the way, I just started the DLC of Walking Dead - The First 400 Days it's called. Pretty good so far! The two Dishonored DLCs were magnificent. I'll be posting on the builder thread probably in a couple days. I unhooked myself from Tomb Raider and am trying to take a week or two off from gaming to get other things done, lol.)

Rich

 

OK then:

I have not owned a 900 series i7 CPU so only have the experiences of others to go on. i5 700 series CPUs while sharing some similarities should not be treated the same as they have inbuilt PCIe controllers and a much lower TDP.

The i7 940 is an earlier model as it was effectively replaced by the 950 in the latter days of original i7s, and that tells me 4Ghz will be a fair amount of work and quite a lot of volts. Also bear in mind it's nearly 5 year old hardware you're pushing to the limit here.

I'd expect 4Ghz to take a fairly substantial voltage increase but what specifically I have no idea, you're maybe looking at 250W+ so not 100 more watts than now, but many.
Your PSU will be fine, not even my quad crossfire setup drew 750W in the real world, but I doubt you're cooler is up to the task

 

Is that Tomb Raider a CPU whore, or a GPU whore? LOL! Seriously Looks interesting!

 

Thanks Sam, I think my GTX 570 paired with 1090t should fair just fine. For my liking anyhow I generally don't run AA when it hovers in the 30s - 40s.

 

Ah, yes. You're right - the arctic 13 is likely not going to be able to handle that much heat. Right now at 2.91 the cores are reaching 50 - the kaze at max in the kama bay drops them 2 degrees to 48.

Maybe I should consider 3.6 ghz my present target - up from the 2.91 it is running, while I have the small arctic 13 cooler on it, and while I'm here in the Lian Li case.

That would give me a 40% speed increase over what I have now if the video conversion numbers hold for gaming.

Once I got that stable, I could move the two 7950s over to the Lian Li and run some benchmarks, for example Heaven, where I'm at 2860 running the benchmark that Jeff proposed (1920x1080, full screen, 4xaa, 16 af, tesselation normal) or 3dmark11, where my combined score right now is 4382, or crysis, and make a direct comparison between the two cpus. I would take the Lian Li into the trailer and do all testing on the big 30" monitor.

It might be fun to go back to one of my favorite saves in Far Cry 3 and drive the wave runner around the alligator river - where I have always been able to see that one of the cores - the second or third as I recall - was totally maxed and limiting my frame rate to low 30s. That would be an interesting comparison.

If all of that worked, in taking out the evga x58 motherboard and putting it into the spedo, I could then mount the TRUE backplate, and the really hefty cooler, and plan to continue the rest of the serious overclocking in the spedo - hopefully hitting 4ghz for a 55% cpu speed increase.

I know the 940 is not the 950, but I recall when guys were hitting 4 ghz or more on the 920, with the D0 stepping, until things improved with the 930 chip, so the 940 should take me to 4 and beyond I would imagine.

So what do you think of the 3.6ghz target for now?

Hey Kev, go back to top of this page, Jeff's post 8580 - that is what got me to try it - and I have to say "thank you once more Jeff for a great recommendation" - the game is stellar. Everything Jeff said about the awesome graphics is true - really really impressive.

I would say it's both a cpu and gpu whore, but I'm running it at full 30" 4 megapixels - whereas at 2.3 megapixels it's going to be a lot more manageable, and as you already saw with Sam's beautiful bar graphs, you'll be able to run it just fine, and you can always tweak some of the settings.

The graphics are very outstanding, and I plan to do a more complete post on it on the builder thread in a couple days. The shooting is very fps-like - real aiming. Anyway, not to steal my own thunder - I'll have about 5-8 screens on the builder thread later this week or early next week.

Rich

 

I'm not sure if they ever released a D0 stepping for the 940, you'll have to check what yours is with CPUZ or similar. 3.6Ghz sounds like a reasonable target.

 

Thanks - I'll check my stepping with cpu-z and I guess I could google it to see if that is recognized as a good stepping for the 940.

Okay - target 3.6. Present case Lian Li midtower, Kaze kama bay helping out a bit, arctic cooler 13 push-pin cooler with 4 heatpipes - not a TRUE, not the silver shadow, but okay for starters.

Finally, Sam, before I wander off into internet overload - like walking into the library of congress - do you have some pointers for me - like some favorite sites for overclocking? I remember that Canucks review on the DFI Lanparty board which I was very impressed with. Maybe I'll see if they ever reviewed this board. By the way, I have the classified, if that matters. (Maybe slightly better build quality on the board??)

Other than overclocking reviews, I guess the various forums should be helpful. I supposed I should just google evgax58 tri sli overclocking, and gobs of stuff should come up. Maybe same thing on the i7 - you said I have which model? It's a 940 - so it's a 900 series i7. Should I google my exact stepping?

I'm not going to rush the project - but I should hit 3.6 within a couple weeks I would guess, with some overnight prime stability testing - by end of month perhaps.

Rich

 

Good luck on your OC Rich. The 1090T wrestled with me all the way to 4GHz. Never had a more stubborn chip. The application of some higher performance cooling and a new cooler on my motherboard saw an end to that though. Now I've never had a more stable or well behaved OC. Overclocking the Northbridge gives me another ~10% raw speed so makes it somewhat difficult to compare it to stock CPUs. Mine would be more equivalent to a 4.2-4.4GHz Phenom II without the NB OC. Really nice chip.