The Official PC building thread - 4th Edition

This uses the UEFI GUI BIOS. I am usually a large proponent of pure OCing, but the GUI sure is nice... The board itself is quite well featured and well thought out. It looks great too, runs very cool, and seems to work just as well as any of my previous boards. Same old Gigabyte quality. They have continued to impress so far

I think there are options for reverting back to Legacy BIOs. I'll look into that and see what can be done. I think it may be an option only for the older Revisions.

Even without an increase in clockspeed, I was able to gain an increase in my NB clock and a decrease in the amount of voltage needed to achieve 4GHz, which certainly has benefits. I can't say I'm disappointed in the board. It does everything I could've asked of it.

Also remember I have server fans and a duct on it, so it's far from stock performance. Though I'd have to say yours would probably be better given the same changes. It's a direct pipe contact cooler just like mine, but more capable I think.

As far as OCing, 3.8GHz is easily within your reach. Any higher is where the difficulty comes, but I have some nearly foolproof settings for 3.8 if you're interested. No guesswork, just set it and go. Minimal stress even on a poorly cooled motherboard.

 

I've been at 3.8 on this board. Rock stable, and pretty cool. But the northbridge temperatures had me concerned. It's my hope, that another board will run cooler, allowing this chip to go further.

 

Absolutely. With a newer board, even 4GHz would be in reach.

May I ask how hot your NB was getting? The one on this 990 board hasn't gone past 40 yet on my horrible torture runs trying to push past 4GHz. At my rock solid 4GHz settings, it ran Prime95 all night and never topped 35 on the NB. Runs a teeny bit warm at 58 on the CPU, but regular usage never pushes near as high as Prime95 so am quite satisfied with that.

 

I recall seeing high 50's. 58 if memory serves.

This wasn't consistent, but it was enough to make me nervous. X264 encodes easily hit 55C. Been so long, I'm not even sure what my NB Voltage settings were. But it was necessary.

 

Oh ouch. Yep, I would be careful then. Mid 40s I'd say you're fine but... yeesh. I can't blame you for staying stock. I modded the chipset cooler on my 890 board for just that reason.

Also, read my edit on the last post.

Haha, just noticed that thread link. Funny stuff. Classic fanbois. Believe it or not, without them, PC gaming would be in trouble. You need the uneducated masses to pump money into everything. I say let 'em argue

 

I gotta have an updated board! LOL! Should be only a month away Probably lower voltages, and higher overclocks Plus, I'll have UEFI bios.

 

I wonder if this will be an IPS panel? 28" Ultra HD 4K
http://www.afterdawn.com/news/artic...terENG&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=20140110

 

Welcome back to all the veterans, thanks for stopping by

Chipset cooling, remind me, what was that again?

Omega: That may be an IPS panel, but the reason it's cheap is that it's capped at 30Hz. Until you use it, you won't realise what a drawback that is. It's great that monitors like those are helping popularise UHD (4K is not an allowable term for 3840x2160 it turns out, as 4K refers exclusively to 4096x2160).
It may get to the stage where I want to get one of those so I can use it in portrait, but there's no great urgency at the moment. I have monitors everywhere as it is right now.

I'll wait and see what the new APUs achieve. Personally I'm very dubious of those graphs.

 

30hz?! Screw that then. That's not nearly good enough

 

Hence the price
Technology does come down in price quickly, but it's going to be a fair while yet before genuine UHD monitors reach WQXGA monitor prices, and as I've alluded to before, I think that really will only happen when we can do away with MST, as it's only then that the technology will be reliable enough for the average joe to use.

 

Mmmm, fair enough. Well, I'm not interested in running multiple GPUs to run at those freakish resolutions yet anyhow. As you know, I'm not an avid gamer. I just like being able to run one reasonably, when I WANT to So, it's the waiting game for me.

 

Haha Sam, the shot about Northbridge cooling. Yes, I suppose it's been a while since you've even HAD a Northbridge. One of my friends wants me to build him a Haswell rig soon, so I suppose I'll get to do some learning

 

Three of my PCs still have a northbridge to be fair, X48 in my file server, X38 in my work PC, and P31 in my XP PC, but none have been overclocked for a long time.

 

56-58 was what my sisters ran at too, but it was still rock solid even at that temp and I didn't feel it was going to run away on me.

 

Gotta love my friends 1100T on its way to my house in a week or so along with a Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme. A little kickback for my services as he is replacing them with a Corsair H100i and a Haswell. I'm going to be doing installation for him so...

Time for another shot at this overclocking venture. I simply need more wattage dissipation and the twin 140mm tower Silver Arrow is almost undisputed as the best air cooler available. The Hyper 212 Evo is great, but just doesn't have the raw grunt I need. AMD OCing is very cooling sensitive and requires powerful cooling almost by default. The Hyper 212 would be much better suited to OCing an Intel CPU, i7s being much lower wattage to begin with.


Only holdback I can think of there is that the Silver Arrow tall enough for me to have to move my side fan to the outside of the panel. I can always throw a fan grill on it and make it look intentional...

 

Thermalright Silver Arrow SB-E Extreme on its way!

1100T coming as well whenever buddy boy decides to make his purchase. Prolly ordering the new parts for him sometime this week, so stand by for the awesome!

Relative speed doesn't matter to me. I have more than enough raw grunt for any game I want to play or software I want to use. I have fun just getting the most out of what I can get my hands on. As long as it's "good enough", I can have all the fun I want. Currently, it's more than good enough, so any increases in clockspeed are solely for my own satisfaction

Also, the GTX760 continues to exceed my expectations. Further research shows that there are two different versions of the card: One built on the GTX660 PCB and one built on the GTX680 PCB. Mine is built on the GTX680 PCB. While the on-paper specs between the two models are apparently identical, performance however, is most decidedly not. The 680-based cards are capable of higher clocks and better boost frequencies. In real-world terms, that means my 4GB GTX760 OC(the good PCB, plus every extra that is possible to add)is currently benching higher than a stock clocked GTX680. The cheapest of which is still more expensive than my GTX760, with less video memory to boot!

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814121635

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125470

Not to mention it handily beats a stock clocked HD7970, though definitely not a GHz Edition. Nvidia basically had zero business making a mid-range card this powerful. The GTX660-based cards aren't even in the same ballpark. Call it a diamond in the rough This card is certainly worthy of the legacy built by the legendary 6600GT.

 

Kaveri benchmarks are out for the new APUs. In very short summary, the CPU performance is basically identical to their predecessors, there's no real change one way or the other, A10-6800K ~~ A10-7850K. The integrated GPU is however, about 100% more powerful. That's certainly welcome, but no performance increase at all doesn't really bode well for the upcoming implementation of this architecture for mainstream products, especially considering they're not releasing for a long time yet to come.

Jeff: To all intents and purposes, a GTX760 is a GTX670, so the best available overclock pushing it slightly above GTX680 levels sounds about right. Fair point on the video memory, but you can't really comment much on price as the GTX680 is now a legacy product, having been superceded by the GTX770.

 

"Thanks to HUMA and heterogeneous queuing, applications can easily run processes on different types of cores, such as x86 CPU or GCN GPU compute units. As a result, AMD claims that its new Kaveri features twelve compute units in total. While the claim is technically correct, it should be kept in mind that not all applications can offload computing to stream processors of graphics adapters, hence, a number of programs will take advantage of only four x86 processors."

So, until more applications support the processors capability, we won't see it's true potential?

 

That sort of thing is getting a bit tired though, we had it with Bulldozer and Piledriver - might even have had it with Phenom, I'm not sure. Something like combining CPU & GPU is not necessarily going to become commonplace within the lifetime of that CPU, so I wouldn't get too excited about it personally. It's not necessarily the fault of the CPU, but too many applications still basically need good old fashioned CPU grunt, which is something AMD have not been able to achieve successfully since 2005, so they look to other ways of getting more performance. Dual core was a good idea and paid off massively, 64-bit was a good idea and paid off eventually, dual-thread modules was, hmm, I'm as yet unsold on that idea. I still would rather have seen a Phenom II X8, die shrunk to keep the TDP to 125W.

 

The point about price is true. The GTX680 is out of production and now a last generation product. Still good to know that my card is at least as good as one The only point I'm making is that it seems to have much higher capabilities than you usually expect out of a mid-range card... Which makes me happy as my last mid-range cards underperformed

Now THAT would be a solid performer.