paulsterio

It drops far below 4GHz, I'm talking around 2.6GHz and sometimes even lower. As an example, my first Cinebench run will be around 880cb (which is typical for a stock 6700K), but buy the fourth or fifth consecutive run, it's down to around 680cb. For example, here, you can see it dipping: Yes, I am.

Hey Everyone, I currently have a 6700K running at stock, with a Gigabyte Z170N-WIFI, Gigabyte GTX970 G1 Gaming, 16GB Corsair Vengeance LPX DDR4 and I have the following problem when running any intensive tasks, e.g. Prime95 or IntelBurnTest (or even repeated runs of CineBench). After about a minute of use, the clockspeed (and %ge utilisation in task manager) begin to fluctuate as follows: I've done all the regular troubleshooting procedures, I've tried it with optimised defaults and it has this problem. I've also tried it with all of the fancy power saving measures (SpeedStep, C2 - C8 states, overheating protection...etc.) disabled as well as Turbo Boost disabled. All give the same results. Clearly it's not thermal throttling as the maximum temperature reached is only 73 degrees. Anybody got any ideas? If anything, I suspect that it is a motherboard issue, as I've borrowed another CPU and it presents the same issues, but I've yet to try my 6700K in another motherboard.

You can get a 980 Ti for around $620. But keep in mind that a 970 is around $310 and 2 x 970s in SLI will be much more powerful than a single 980 Ti, unless you have specific need for a single GPU only.

You have plenty of budget for what you want to upgrade. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i7-4790K 4.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($309.99 @ SuperBiiz) Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-Z97X-Gaming 5 ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($137.50 @ B&H) Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 980 4GB WINDFORCE 3X Video Card ($453.99 @ NCIX US) Total: $901.48 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-12-08 20:46 EST-0500 You have a pretty nice budget for a 1440p monitor now.

Still better to go with 2nd hand parts at that budget. I wouldn't start thinking about new parts unless I was looking to spend at least $1k.

For as low of a budget as $500, I'd honestly just get 2nd hand components. I'm from Australia too and I recently picked up a 2600K, 16GB RAM and an ASUS P8Z68M Pro for $300. You can probably find deals like that on Gumtree. You already have a case, so $200 for a CPU cooler, PSU and storage isn't too bad. You can get a 120mm AIO (e.g. Deepcool Maelstrom 120K for $75, which I highly recommend and recently purchased myself). Overclock that 2600K and it'll smoke anything you can get new for the same price. I got mine to 4.8 GHz with around 20 mins of work and tinkering, it gets higher in Cinebench than basically everything but the 6700K and up.

I'd get the 4690K and AsRock Z97 Anniversary, not that much more and considering you're already getting a nice CPU cooler, pay the little bit extra, overclock it to 4.5 GHz (you'll probably get that with most chips and with the cooler you have) and enjoy the 25% performance bump.

I'm not really comparing the two, they're two cards that I think represent somewhat of a sweet spot. They're all quite fairly priced, with the 970 and 390 priced similarly for similar performance (390 wins in some, 970 wins in some, 970 consumes less power overall) and the 390X is a nice little bump in performance for a bump in price. Going above that though, e.g. to a 980, I think the value definitely takes a hit, you're paying a lot more than the 390X, for not that great of a performance gain. Anyway, apologies if I came across as comparing the two, I wasn't, I just think they're two good cards at good price points.

How about this? Feel free to add a hard drive if you don't have one already. PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i5-4690K 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor (€245.00 @ Amazon Deutschland) CPU Cooler: be quiet! PURE ROCK 51.4 CFM Sleeve Bearing CPU Cooler (€33.24 @ Amazon Deutschland) Motherboard: MSI Z97 PC MATE ATX LGA1150 Motherboard (€89.89 @ Amazon Deutschland) Memory: Crucial 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory (€40.33 @ Amazon Deutschland) Storage: Sandisk SSD PLUS 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive (€44.00 @ Amazon Deutschland) Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 970 4GB Video Card (€344.77 @ Mindfactory) Case: NZXT Source 210 Elite (Black) ATX Mid Tower Case (€49.90 @ Caseking) Power Supply: SeaSonic S12II 620W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply (€73.92 @ Mindfactory) Total: €921.05 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2015-12-04 14:12 CET+0100

MSI has an open air style cooler, which is better for almost all people. The ASUS card has a blower style cooler which is preferable if you have a small case as that won't dump hot air back into your case and other components. That said, it doesn't really matter that much, just go for whichever you like, whichever brand you trust or whichever you can get for cheaper on the day.

Generally, I'd recommend the 380 over the 960, better performance for very similar cost. That said, I honestly reckon you should look towards the used market, plenty of people shipping off their 280X's and upgrading to the latest generation. You can find stellar bargains on that card. I'm in Australia where the dollar is doing quite poorly and I can see plenty of 280X's on Gumtree (our equivalent of Craigslist) for around $200 or a little more (bargain down to $200 easily). That's much less than a 380 and you're getting better performance. If you have a specific budget you want to spend, have a look at a 2nd hand R9 290. Plenty of them going used too, around the same price as a 380 (or maybe a smidge more). If you're buying cards down one or two notches from the top, I always recommend going for the best from previous generations 2nd hand as people who like to stay on top of things sell them off to upgrade. I find that used 290X's tend to be stellar deals, as are used GTX 680's, which can be had for around $200 or so and it performs better than a 960.

Yes, the 390X will max out almost all games at 1080p, you'll probably want to crank the settings down one notch for 1440p, but for most games, max is still fine.

Pretty much just pick a budget and get the best card you can. In terms of a good bang-for-buck, I'd go for either the R9 390X or the GTX 970, these are both great value for money, offer decent performance at resolutions above 1080p and are somewhat of a sweet spot, offering much better performance than the lower cards, but not that far behind the very best. They're around the same level (in the market) as what the 7950 was when you bought it, mid-high range.

Cheers for the heads up, but so far I've managed to get Yosemite working 100% well with proper graphics support and all the right kexts, so audio, USB, SATA, all of that working. I've always been a Chameleon/Chimera user rather than Clover, but with El Capitan, Unibeast is moving to Clover only, which I haven't been able to get to work properly on my system, but it's something I'm willing to tease out later on when this build is in a more complete state. I might see if I can get Clover and El Capitan working on my X99 5820K system, but at least Yosemite is working on this, so I'm happy. Windows works perfectly as well, I'm getting around 830 in Cinebench in Windows and 810 in Yosemite, so hopefully the upgrade to El Capitan can give it a bit of a boost. I'm only at 4.80 GHz, so I can probably nudge it to 5.0 GHz with some finer tuning beyond just cranking the Vcore. Thanks for your input, just checked out your Re-Define build log and it looks great!

Day 9 - Installing the Deepcool Maelstrom 120 So I picked up the Deepcool Maelstrom 120 yesterday for a pretty good price. It's a surprisingly decent performer, able to keep the temps pretty low. Just a quick unboxing for all of you. Not sure which set of fans to use, the Corsair SP120 ones or the Noctua NF-P12 ones. The Noctuas are definitely quieter and better performing, so I think I'll go with them for the time being. These have served me pretty well in the past when I used them as part of a watercooling setup. Now, on with the mounting. Nice, thermal compound pre-applied, saves a bit of time, though the bad thing is that it's only good for one application. Back when they gave you tubes of thermal compound, you could use them a few times. Noctua is pretty generous, you can use theirs up to like ten times. And it's in! Throwing this in the front for now, I'll be mounting it once I get in some radiator mounts. Here's a quick look at how it's looking now, not too shabby for half way in. Basically the rest will be just small cleaning up touches, mounting things properly and then routing all the cables neatly. The system works and the cooler is boss. At stock, it barely reaches above around 35 degrees under load. I've managed to overclock this to a stable 4.80GHz with temperatures probably about as high as acceptable (high 80s under heavy load - i.e. IntelBurnTest, low 80s in AIDA64, mid 70s under normal loads, e.g. Cinebench). I'm pretty gutted that I couldn't reach the fabled 5.0Ghz with this 2600K, but I reckon if I play with PLL voltages and BCLK, I might be able to nudge it to 5.0GHz, hopefully. Benchmark numbers coming in tomorrow, believe me, it's fast!