GTBTK

The Asrock X370 Taichi and X370 Gaming professional are almost the same board at the top of the Asrock tree with a dedicated BCLK chip, 60A mosfets and 12 phase VRM. The main differences are the colour and the Gaming Professional board also has the 5Gb/s network adapter included. I read a spec sheet somewhere that said the ac Wifi may be a bit disappointing and be limited to the single channel 430Mb/s bandwith instead of the dual or triple channel cards that will do 867Mbs or 1.2Gbs From what I am hearing, AMD's project management was terrible and they forgot to tell the motherboard manufacturers and the Cooling solution manufacturers anything much in the way of specific details to facilitate Bios development and Mounting hardware engineering until a couple of weeks before launch. Like all x370 motherboards they are still immature and being updated regularly but they seem to be providing the most carefree experience from all the manufacturers at this point in time. I have not heard of any asrock boards bricking themselves. If you are buying this week and want AIO water cooling, the Cool-it sourced corsair units are the only ones around that use the top mount bracket that clips on the black plastic hooks near the socket so they are your only choice until the asetek mounts start shipping (H100i and H110i with the square block/pump)

The Firestrike combined test is the most relevant score in Firestrike if you are having a discussion about Ryzen gaming performance and it is the score that has been universally ignored by every reviewer that I have seen. That graph is the only mention of combined scores that I have seen in an article about Ryzen. It would appear that the majority of tech reviewers don't understand the firestrike benchmark at all. It is important because it is the only part of the benchmark that does something similar to what is going on when you play a game. The Graphics and physics tests are also important as they show the performance of either the Graphics or CPU running almost in isolation. If reviewers had bothered to pay any sort of attention to the Combined score, They may have noticed that the Ryzen graphics and physics scores were both fairly comparable to what you score with an Intel 6900K and beat the 7700K scores, however the combined score seriously under performed both of the Intel platforms, giving a hint where they should be looking for an explanation of the slow gaming problems - ie. It is not the CPU or GPU itself, it is not the PCIe bus because that runs to a standard, it could only be the connectivity to the memory or the PCIe controllers in the Data Fabric on the chip. This is from the 3DMark Technical Guide that you can download from here http://s3.amazonaws.com/download-aws.futuremark.com/3DMark_Technical_Guide.pdf "3DMark Fire Strike Combined test stresses both the GPU and CPU simultaneously. The GPU load combines elements from Graphics test 1 and 2 using tessellation, volumetric illumination, fluid simulation, particle simulation, FFT based bloom and depth of field. The CPU load comes from the rigid body physics of the breaking statues in the background. There are 32 simulation worlds running in separate threads each containing one statue decomposing into 113 parts. Additionally there are 16 invisible rigid bodies in each world except the one closest to camera to push the decomposed elements apart. The simulations run on one thread per available CPU core. The 3DMark Fire Strike Combined test uses the Bullet Open Source Physics Library." The guide gives details on the graphics and physics tests as well as how the benchmark is scored, as well as how the other benchmarks are run as well but you can download the file and read up yourself.

Doh! I was just home from the pub when I typed that. sorry

I am still using an Asus p8z68-v i7-2600 @4.44Ghz 16GB Fury X PC12800 Ram at 1972Mhz MSI Gaming X GTX1070 Corsair HX850i Samsung 840 Evo Thermaltake Armor V60 Case P67 boards do not support iGPU but overclock slightly better than Z68. Z68 do support iGPU and have the Intel IRST ssd disk caching feature

You need to keep up better. 60 degree Idles were resolved with the latest bios update yesterday or the day before. ;-) The joys of immature platforms.

If you go Ryzen, consider 1700. Remember that the platform is still Immature It runs cooler and overclocks to similar speeds to 1800X plus you only spending about the same as a 7700K. For any Ryzen build you want the fasted RAM you can get using Samsung b-die chips. The g.Skill Trident Z range seems to be the best range at present and 16 GB (2x8) @ 3600MHZ is about as fast as they can get ram running now and will help boost performance. Dont buy a cheapy motherboard if you want ultimate performance. You want a board that has an external clock such as Asus CH6, Gigabyte Gaming 5 or Asrock Taichi or gaming pro (I assume the MSI Titanium as well but not sure) so you can make use of the bclk for maximizing Ram speeds. Cheap boards cannot do bclk overclocking and will be stuck with lower Ram speeds and lower performance Gaming benchmarks at 4K are the same as 7700K. Even 1080p benchmarks that appear weaker were all done using a Titan X that generates so many FPS that the data Fabric bandwidth of the Ryzen SOC gets overloaded and bottlenecks the GPU PCIe connectivity when the CPU is also doing all the physics calculations and using the Data Fabric for memory access and the CCX modules doing thread switching. The framerates that the Ryzen still achieves are still very playable. The available bandwidth is directly related to your installed Ram speeds. I think that it is a safe bet that the lower PCIe overhead compared to Intel, in areas that people will normally not venture is a power saving thing. A 1060 at 1080p will perform in games at the same framerates on both systems at 1080p so things are not as bad as all the doom mongers would have you believe..

In case you have not seen feature yet, On the Fuji X cameras, you can individually adjust the shadow and highlight tone curves to increase the dynamic range. Use the flattest film mode (Pro Neg Std is probably the best choice) and while not all the way to f-log, it is a flatter image that you would have otherwise. You can save the combination of settings to one of the selectable presets available through the Q-Menu.

You need to Color calibrate both monitors to get the image colours to match. You will probably find that one monitor is set to 6500K that is close to saylight and the other one is set to 900K which looks quite blue. Linus did a tech quickie video on calibration the other day that you might find helpful

I installed the latest Insider preview build of Windows 10 with game mode yesterday. It does not provide any performance improvements. It also re-enables the Game DVR that actually robs Graphics performance. After a few test benchmarks, I turned it off. It is only a beta release at the moment so maybe the next release will see some improvements. I will revisit then to see if it improves anything.

With Pascal the slider is a percentage of the voltage headroom between the base value of 1.061 and the maximum of 1,093v. No you cannot change units and 1% does not equal 1mv. Pascal overclocking is mainly relying on the GPU boost to get the 2100mhz that you are hearing about. The best core clock that you will be able to get is somewhere in the region of 1700 using the slider. If you look at the voltage curve (Ctrl-F in AB), you can see how the curve increases in the Y value as voltage increases across the X axis from left to right. Each voltage point actually has different overclocking potential. With your card, the point at 1.061V can OC +135 points, as you increase the voltage slider, the next point becomes active, however, 1.075V cannot OC to +135, maybe 1.075V can only get to +130 and remain stable. That same principle applies to each of the remaining points as you move across the graph. You need to test each point along the way to maximize your clock settings. As you do not game down around teh .800V level, you also have the option of leaving the entire curve at stock values and only pulling the curve values in the 1.075 - 1.093 range up to the high clock speeds and testing your FPS level. With the lower voltage points remaining at lower levels, the card will tend to draw less power and keep you high gaming clock speeds more stable

you could always flash the gaming X card with a Gaming Z bios and get the extra clock speed by default

As much as I don't like the high prices as a consumer, Something is worth whatever another person is willing to pay for it and there are a lot of people paying the prices so it must be about right. Nvidia has no real competition at the high end right now and there was a large pent up demand for high end graphics cards due to the 2 year gap between Maxwell and Pascal. They were very lucky that AMD didn't come along with something really desirable in that time gap

You are sort of right. The Video card will pull textures in from system ram in a similar way that the system uses the paging file

I am still running an i7-2600 machine with a GTX 1070 and it is still competitive with modern i5-6600 Skylake machines. It has been left behind by 6700K and x99 Haswell-E/Broadwell-E systems in outright performance but it still provides good enough CPU power for all the modern games I have used it with. The i7-4790K you have should last you a good 5-6 years providing "good enough" performance, particularly if you overclock. You will find though, that your GPU will be left behind as time goes by. I would expect your 980TI to provide "good enough" performance for about 3 years before you would have to start looking to upgrade that component. Of course, If your expectation is to run every game at ultra settings without compromise, that time estimate will be shorter. fortunately GPUs are modular and can be upgraded separately to the CPU

OK well scratch that Idea. I forgot about the extra PWM header the Asus cards have. If I use a curve, I am using it with the expectations that the fans will spin 100% of the time and only vary speed with temperature changes. Are you setting the curve to try and emulate the default silent mode and start at say, 40 degrees? If the fan is spinning up and cutting off again as the temp swings around the cut off temperature, try setting the temperature hysteresis setting to 5 degrees and see if that calms your fans down. You can experiment by adjusting the value and you should be able to get exactly what you are looking for.

didn't you know that PC "enthusiast" actually meas someone so obsessed with Computer bits and pieces that these Vendors can sell half baked rubbish and the enthusiasts will actually treat it as a feature? GPU Tweak II has always been buggy and flawed in my experience. The last time I tried it with my old Asus GTX 660, The manual fan curve didnt work at all. While I understand that you may need to have it installed to have a way to manage the silly LED lights on the card, MSI Afterburner is a much better, more fully featured Overclock Utility than the Asus software

Just remember that there will be a bottleneck somewhere in the system with every CPU and every GPU, even an i7-6950X or an i7-6700K with a Titan X. The term bottleneck only refers to the component that places a limit on the maximum performance of the entire system. The relevant issue is will the CPU/GPU combination limit performance to less than what is an acceptable frame rate when you play games. COD getting 300fps with a titan is still bottlenecked by the GPU at 300fps. Because we don't have 300hz monitors that bottleneck doesn't really have any meaningful impact on what you are using the system for. I am running an i7-2600 with a 1070 and I can get 115fps at 1920x1200@60 at ultra settings. I'm sure that a 6700K would allow me to get a better result but it really doesn't make any difference to my gaming experience. With my bclk overclock, my cpu is giving me about the same performance as an i5-6600 at stock clocks. Having said that, even without an overclock, your Haswell i5 should be acceptable to run 2500x1080@60 with a 1070. An overclock will make things better still. Remember, you can transfer the pascal card to any upgraded PC you get in the future as well. If you are looking at coolers, decide if you just want to set and forget with a moderate overclock, in which case an Hyper 212 evo or Cryorig H7 would be fine. If you are interested in tweaking and extracting every last bit of computing performance from your PC then spend the extra on an high end air cooler or an AIO water cooler. Just make sure that your case is big enough to support the cooler that you would like to use before you buy one.

you know that you can flash the Strix OC bios onto the Strix non OC card and save yourself a bit of money

Oh Dear, the problems with a good online slut spurt

works fine accessing from Hong Kong. Must be local geographic node related

3dMark is 85% off. Many games available too

I Thought so too.

Nice. I'm happy with what I can get with an i7-2600 and a single 1070 http://www.3dmark.com/fs/11152518

I'm in HK. Only $HK26 here but I bought my copy at the sale last year. I think it may be even cheaper this year.

The steam winter sale is on now. 3Dmark is 85% off. No more need to sit through the demos when you are benchmarking your graphic card overclocks http://store.steampowered.com/sub/114165/