weberdarren97

Hi, weber here. I did try this on my MSI B350 Tomahawk with my Ryzen 5 1500X and 16GB of G.Skill DDR4 3200MHz memory. It uses Samsung B.die... I forget the model number, but I bought it specifically because it uses the Samsung die that Ryzen loves so much. Anyway, what I did was actually rather simple. I started by finding the limits of how far my CPU could overclock. I've settled in around 3.95GHz, any higher and it requires stupid voltages. After that, I enabled XMP Profile 2 (3200MHz) in BIOS. This yielded higher scores in CPU and memory benchmarking applications, but made my CPU spike at times when the system was at idle, and the voltage was slightly higher at idle than what was set in BIOS. I then went into BIOS and took pictures of all the setting that were set when I enabled XMP. Once I had good pictures, I disabled XMP. I then entered in all the settings that XMP had set, but I did not turn XMP back on. The results were a slightly more responsive system (very small difference if not just placebo), but a noticeable lack of voltage spikes at idle. The only times I see voltage come up at idle is when Windows decides to do something dumb in the background. Below are pictures of the settings I entered in. DISCLAIMER: I do not guarantee these settings to work on your system. Every system is different. Please do not enter these settings into your system and then blame me after it fails to boot properly. I think, but it may have a hand in voltage as well. Not sure. I know that many motherboards (especially Intel boards) also perform a slight CPU overclock when you enable an XMP profile, but this is not always the case. How many BIOS settings are affected by XMP seems to depend on the motherboard manufacturer and what type of BIOS the board is using.

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant CPU: Intel Core i3-6100 3.7GHz Dual-Core Processor ($108.65 @ OutletPC) Motherboard: ASRock H110M-HDS Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($46.99 @ SuperBiiz) Memory: G.Skill Aegis 8GB (2 x 4GB) DDR4-2400 Memory ($52.99 @ Newegg) Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($49.33 @ OutletPC) Video Card: Asus Radeon RX 460 2GB Dual OC Video Card ($97.99 @ Jet) Case: VIVO CASE-V06 MicroATX Mid Tower Case ($33.99 @ Newegg Marketplace) Power Supply: SeaSonic S12II 520W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($50.89 @ Newegg) Total: $440.83 Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available Generated by PCPartPicker 2017-02-07 14:40 EST-0500

I forgot to mention, currency is USD.

Hello LTT users, I'm planning on building myself a new rig, so I'll have leftover parts from my current Dell machine. I was thinking of selling the parts and wanted to know how much I could reasonably ask for them. Note that I will be selling local so there won't be any shipping costs. Here's what I'm looking find a price for: Dell Inspiron 580 case with front panel devices (card reader, audio, USB), CD/DVD combo drive, motherboard equipped with i3 540 3.06GHz dual core with HT (includes cooler), 2 x 4GB DDR3, and the exhaust fan. All data cables are there for all devices on/in the case. No power supply, storage, operating system or expansion cards will be included. Thanks to anyone that takes the time to answer. -Darren

Three radiators and two blocks in a single loop? A D5 pump is not going to respond well to that config. If the GPU block was just a basic block, it might be a little more happy, but you've got the full cover block (cools more than just the GPU die) which has more channels and bends in it that the coolant has to flow through. You could either switch out the D5 for a DDC model, or add a second D5 pump.

Actually, it's the modern UEFI BIOS that companies are putting on their boards that are posing this restriction, not the CPU itself. Somewhere in BIOS you should see a setting that's named something along the lines of CPU Thermal Target. If the CPU goes x degrees over that target, the board will begin to tone down the OC. In many Asus boards, x is somewhere around 20C. That doesn't mean that you can set the Thermal Target to 90C and then allow the CPU to go to 110C before it throttles, it will still throttle at just under 100C. That is a fail safe feature, it cannot be viewed or changed.

I believe you're talking about the temperatures of the CPU itself, not components on the motherboard. Asus wouldn't charge $200+ for a board that can barely run an i7 at stock speeds.

Even if you delid the CPU, use the best block available on the market and use the largest most efficient radiators you can find, you'll still hit the thermal limits of the CPU before you max out that mobo's VRMs.

The Hero boards from Asus are ridiculous. In my opinion, they're a waste of your money. The only way to really get any benefit out of the extremely clean power that the VRMs are capable of supplying is to win the silicon lottery and end up with a perfect CPU. We all know there's no such thing as a perfect CPU because they're made so quickly that each of them carries a unique imperfection. The chances of getting a better or worse chip is known as the silicon lottery, and the fact is that the chances of winning are less than the chances of winning the actual lottery here in the United States. Ending up with a CPU that doesn't overclock too well isn't something you can just tell the seller to avoid.

Is your (I'm assuming R9 290) a custom PCB with aftermarket VRMs on it? If not, it's MOSFETs are not comparable to such an extreme VRM config like what's seen on ridiculously high end Asus boards. Then there's that one Gigabyte board with 32 power phases on it (not kidding), which seems to have proven that any more than 10 doesn't make much of a difference.

1.35V is a rather safe voltage. The highest voltage I can say that would be still be sane for that CPU would be around 1.44V. Although 1.5V won't kill it immediately and it won't damage it while it's running either (unless the heat kills it), you need to consider that the VRMs on motherboards need a few cycles to get their crap together. That means that for a period of about .0005 seconds during the initialization stage of startup, the voltage can sometimes be up to .3V higher than your current setting. 1.8V to a Skylake CPU, even for just one cycle, would fry it. I don't want the above paragraph to scare you, it's the truth but there are also safeguards between the VRMs and the CPU itself. Unless you set the voltage insanely high (1.5V for example), no harm will come to your CPU. This is how I generally think of voltages on Skylake chips: 1.25V: Won the silicon lottery 1.3V: Cool 1.35V: You've made some small changes 1.4V: Man, you go hard 1.45V: Mate, be careful 1.5V: But, why >1.5V: No.

80C is very close to killing the chip. You do know that AMD chips need to be kept cooler than Intel chips, right? I've found that the FX 8350 throttles at 61C on the CPU as a whole or 55C on the hottest core, whichever comes first. Can you try to OC on the current cooler? Sure. Will you get more than 100-200MHz out of it? I doubt it. Will it be obnoxiously loud? Definitely.

I don't think any of those temperatures are your VRMs, it would be labeled something like VRT (maybe a number after t if there's multiple sensors). It's not uncommon for motherboards to not report VRM temperatures to the operating system. Most UEFI BIOS keep that information for themselves, which means you'll never see the temps of the VRMs during a stress test. Anyways, it's not something you need to worry about. You're good until about 130C which would require you to take the system fans out of the case, seal the case shut, replace the CPU air cooler with an AiO, and put the radiator outside the case where it can still keep the CPU cool. Basically, you'd have to completely starve the area around the socket from getting any airflow at all and it would still take almost an hour to get to dangerously high VRM temps.

I feel that I should point out that OP is probably unsatisfied with his machine's performance in BF1 because his CPU only has four threads. That game makes even the i7 7700K tank. We need to wait for the devs to improve CPU optimization before we just assume that a CPU upgrade will greatly improve performance in BF1.

I agree. I see in OP's link that he was looking at a CPU upgrade, but a 4790K would do everything a 7700K will do except for really CPU intensive tasks like CPU encoding while gaming. Even recording and streaming while gaming isn't going to push the CPU as hard as encoding a video project in your favorite CPU-bound video editor (like Premiere Elements which lack the GPU encoding features seen in Premiere Pro). As long as you don't make the CPU tank with other tasks while you're gaming, you could stay where you are, upgrade the graphics card and monitor, then move to the 4790K when you have the budget. Until Intel increases IPC in their chips (Kaby Lake's IPC is identical to Skylake), I am not going to view Haswell Refresh chips as being outdated.