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!

Yep, liquid cooler it is! Yep, going to mount it to the top horizontal dividing panel near the front. I guess I could also mount it on top of the power supply, not sure which I will go with at the moment.

Day 8 - Testing the Corsair H105 So today I needed to make a decision on what to do regarding cooling this PC. Because of the layout of the case and the fact that stand-offs are glued on rather than screwed on, I think the best option would be to go for an AIO rather than a large tower heatsink. I wanted to test how the Corsair H105 would fit, so I removed it out of my main rig, where it's cooling a 5820K. Looking up the instructions to find out how to mount it to an LGA1155 board. Found the hardware required. Backplate is on! Stand-offs for the cooler. Installing the standoffs and it's ready for cooler installation. The 2600K in the case and right before the cooler is about to be installed. Just my luck to find out that the damn thing doesn't fit. So there was just no way I would be able to fit a 240mm radiator in there without removing the top panel, something I don't want to do as I'm hoping to convert that into a space for some hard drives. So I guess that means we have to go with a 120mm radiator. Went to the shops and picked up this bad boy for pretty cheap, so tomorrow we'll be installing it and taking a look at some temperatures and performance. Thanks for reading, stay tuned!

Day 7 - Installing OSX and Why Sandy Bridge? I'm happy to report that OSX has successfully been installed. Perks of installing on such an older system is that it's relatively easy and painfree to install because everything is supported. I used the iMac 12,2 (Sandy Bridge) system definition and used the bootflags "-v npci=0x2000 IgpuEnabler=Yes". After that, everything flowed painlessly. I want to address why I decided to go with Sandy Bridge today. In my eyes, there have been several moments throughout history where Intel really moved forward the entirety of personal computing. Most people would recall Conroe (the original Core 2 Duo) as the moment Intel became competitive in mainstream desktop computing again. From there, improvements were logical and as expected. The move to Nehalem was big, but fundamentally not as significant as it seems in hindsight. Westmere was small (similar to what Broadwell ended up being on desktops) and the big move was Sandy Bridge, which (per core, per GHz) beat out Nehalem by around 30%. That's huge. Ever since then, improvements have been incremental and small. Haswell was a nice bump, but Skylake is pretty disappointing from a performance standpoint. Let's have a look at some charts. Below, I've presented Cinebench R10 Single Threaded scores (to neutralise for core count - even though all are quad cores, and HT). This demonstrates the architecture performance. I've also presented a clock speed equalised graph, which shows the score per GHz, so it's a comparison as if the CPUs were clocked at the same clock speed and lastly, I've provided the percentage improvement over the last generation. Of course, what is striking is that up until Sandy Bridge, we see a pretty clear exponential increase in performance, as per Moore's Law, but after that, we've seen a much more logarithmic model. For the mathematicians out there, the two most common models for growth are exponential and logarithmic. This is because the underlying equations are differential equations (usually first order). Either the rate of growth is increasing as the population increases (this is like bacteria growth, because each splits into two...etc.) or the rate of growth decreases as the population increases (this is like human growth, people grow much quicker when they are young and the rate of growth slows as they grow older). Essentially, the first case is a first order differential equation in exponentials and the second is a first order differential equation in inverses. The first leads to an exponential model of growth (the integral of an exponential is an exponential) and the second leads to a logarithmic model of growth (the integral of an inverse i.e. 1/x is the natural log). Moore's law postulates that performance increases are exponential, but have we reached a point of inflection of sorts and are now starting to see diminishing returns (i.e. a logarithmic model of growth), I guess we will have to wait and see. The point is, the gains Sandy Bridge had were huge, 30% per core, per GHz over Nehalem and even greater if you consider performance as a whole without looking at clock speed (as SB had a massive clock increase compared to Nehalem). So when you own Sandy Bridge, you own a piece of history and it'll be a while before Intel releases something that's worth upgrading to. Boring day, but just some background info. Tomorrow will be more interesting for sure, stay tuned!

You really need to get an SSD, it's almost mandatory these days, the user experience with an SSD is just so much better.

Day 6 - Main hardware is here! A little bit of a story for you all today, which has been a seriously exciting day. I went and picked up all the hardware for the main build today, which consisted of: ASUS P8Z68M PRO Intel Core i7 2600K 16GB Kingston DDR3 RAM I managed to get scammed in the process, but I'm still pretty happy with what I managed to pick up. So initially, the ad was for exactly that, except with 32GB of Kingston DDR3. All of that for $300 AUD is an excellent deal, so I was pretty keen to pick that up. Note that this is still less than a brand new i5 6600K by itself! I had the intention of selling 16GB of RAM for around $80 or so, enabling me to have a slightly bigger budget for the GPU and cooler. Obviously I checked the components when I was picking them up (though did not do a test boot). The RAM modules clearly say 8GB on each of them, so fair enough, it does look like 32GB, as you can see in the pictures below. When I got home, however, it was only registering as 16GB (4 x 4GB), so I thought that I had been scammed and the stickers had been replaced. However, upon further inspection, Kingston writes the capacity of the entire kit, so this is essentially two 8GB (2 x 4GB) kits, so what's been printed on each stick is the total kit capacity. Now, this is stupid. I checked with another Kingston kit I have and it's the same, I also have a kit of Strontium RAM, that came in a 2 x 4GB kit, each stick says 4GB as it should. So did the seller know that it was actually 16GB? I don't know, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, though the fact that he hasn't replied to my messages asking about it is shady. Either way, it doesn't matter, $300 for that much hardware is still a good deal, not excellent, but still pretty good, given that people were after $200 for a 2600K alone and that mATX Z68 boards are pretty hard to come buy. Anyway, some pictures of the new haul. It's all a bit dirty and in need of some cleaning, but that's nothing I can't do. Obviously the first thing I needed to do was to make sure it POSTs and everything works as it should. Great to say that it was a success (though note it says 16GB RAM, even though each stick misleadingly says 8GB). Here it is in all of its glory running on my table. Windows was installed and everything was tested. It all works great. I managed to run some benchmarks at stock and the thing clocks in around 610 in Cinebench R15 slightly throttled (it was in the 90s for the entire time), so suffice to say, the stock cooler isn't doing a good enough job. I'll see how it goes after I push it with an aftermarket cooler. I haven't decided on what to get yet, but I'll have to think about it. I do like air coolers, but an AIO might suit this better because it places less weight on the motherboard. The standoffs are glued on, so I'm not sure how much they can hold. Right now, I'm installing OSX, so I better get back to that, but with tomorrow's update, I'll also make sure to talk about why I've decided to go with Sandy Bridge and how I think it stacks up against the latest and greatest from Intel. So that's it for quite an eventful day. Thanks for tuning in guys.

I'd like some combination of Season 1 and Season 3. So the first season was where the contestants had a fixed budget and built a more powerful system with that budget. The third season was where the contestants had no fixed budget and had to build the PC best for performance per dollar. The only problem is, older hardware tends to do better at performance per dollar and I don't think that a Q6600 system (despite how well it may do at performance per dollar) is powerful enough for modern tasks. I really want to see a challenge where all contestants must hit a specific benchmark number (e.g. 600 in Cinebench R15, 30 fps average at 1080p in certain AAA titles) and the winner is the person who can build such a system for the cheapest cost. I think it might also make sense to have some specific requirements in the rules as well, such as only certain brands/models of power supplies. I would also like to see perhaps a bit more time for the contestants. I feel like the current style is a bit too rushed. Sure, it's good for the drama and intensity, but I feel like it encourages the contestants to put together components hastily and often it seems as if the rigs barely work.

The i5 4460 has much better single-threaded performance, which is what most of computing still is. If you spend a lot of time crunching numbers or doing rendering, then the 8350 might have a benefit if you OC it a bit, but the i5 4460 is the better and more solid all-round chip. Personally, I would try and stretch a little and get the Xeon E3 1231 V3, it's like $50 more than the 4460 or something but features a higher clock and HT, it'll cream the 8350 for sure. If you want to OC, you can try and get a 4690K.

This is the diagram I used:

Day 5 - Modding the power button Nice and easy work today, just modding the power button so that it leads out to a normal power button lead. You can also mod it so that the power LED works, I won't be doing this because I'm not much of a fan of power LEDs (I find them distracting when I'm trying to sleep and the system is on), so it's just the power button. Short update for now, but the next one will be big, I've got an ASUS P8Z68-M Pro + i7 2600K + 32GB DDR3 coming in today for $300 AUD (which is around $215 USD), so it's a ripper of a deal and the next update will be testing all the components, making sure they all work and preparing for a test fit.

Yeah, the IBM chips is a little unfortunate, but I think we all knew that Intel Macs were coming when the G5 came out, it packed such a ridiculous amount of cooling. That said, I wonder how powerful the G5 would have been compared to something like the Athlon X2 or Pentium D from the era, it probably wouldn't have been able to hold a candle to Conroe though. Great to see you're enjoying it. I agree, I don't necessarily agree with Apple's philosophies on everything, but I think they do have a very keen eye for design and they're one of the companies bold enough to make great looking products (and make consumers pay for them, too). The G5 case certainly is excellent though.