Kaby Lake Overclocking Revealed: Simultaneously impressive AND disappointing

[patrickjp93]

2 minutes ago, Prysin said:

play the right game and you learn that "Gaming stable" is a bullshit concept

 

Tomb Raider games, Guildwars 2, Far Cry 4 will crash much faster then almost any other game ive ever played if your OC isnt stable. These games/game engines has almost zero tolerance for errors caused by instabilities.

I've never had GW2 crash, and my Mom plays on an overclocked 6700K with dual-channel 3600MHz G.Skill RAM.

[MageTank]

1 minute ago, Prysin said:

play the right game and you learn that "Gaming stable" is a bullshit concept

 

Tomb Raider games, Guildwars 2, Far Cry 4 will crash much faster then almost any other game ive ever played if your OC isnt stable. These games/game engines has almost zero tolerance for errors caused by instabilities.

Overclock your ram incorrectly by even a single timing, and you will learn notepad isn't stable, lol. 

 

I've already tested this myself, and have proven that my system can be considered stable at 4.5ghz IF i don't do custom Linpack/Prime95. If I stick to Intel XTU's tamer version of Linpack or Aida64's "stress test", I am "stable". For most people, that is perfectly okay. I just don't consider myself most people. Sometimes, I do very stressful things, and do not like booting back into the BIOS to load a "more stable" profile. I have to agree with @Ryan_Vickers, that the word "stable" shouldn't require a prefix. You are either stable, or you are not. I just believe stable should imply at all potentially known workloads. 

[Prysin]

1 hour ago, patrickjp93 said:

It would provide higher performance for scalar code where instructions already have a 1-cycle latency and would be very difficult to drop, but just about everything else would drop, especially if cache clocks can't keep up.

depends on the sumplicity of the task. Even AVX can benefit more from Hz then IPC, given that the complexity of the operation is as simple as possible. This is why i ask for testing your code in your blog entry the way i did.

 

As we both know, Intel is starting to hit a wall on IPC, there isnt much more to haul out of their current design, so hoping to see large performance jumps based on IPC alone is unlikely. AMD is simply catching up on IPC as it currently is.

 

we will eventually regress to a MHz war and "core war", once software catches up to current limitations that is

[vanished]

2 minutes ago, Prysin said:

depends on the sumplicity of the task. Even AVX can benefit more from Hz then IPC, given that the complexity of the operation is as simple as possible. This is why i ask for testing your code in your blog entry the way i did.

 

As we both know, Intel is starting to hit a wall on IPC, there isnt much more to haul out of their current design, so hoping to see large performance jumps based on IPC alone is unlikely. AMD is simply catching up on IPC as it currently is.

 

we will eventually regress to a MHz war and "core war", once software catches up to current limitations that is

Any war would be nice considering what we have right now  

[Prysin]

5 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

I've never had GW2 crash, and my Mom plays on an overclocked 6700K with dual-channel 3600MHz G.Skill RAM.

not hard to crash it, you need very high OCs and or a shitty thermal throttling i7 4770k, @Dackzy can tell you how that happens.

 

Ive been unstable in GW2 at 4.5Ghz with too low voltage on my FX, but generally only RAM clocks makes it unstable. I have even crashed on XMP in GW2 because it marginally touched the BCLK and the NB/SB didnt have the voltage needed to deal with that marginal bump in IO clock.

[Prysin]

4 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Any war would be nice considering what we have right now  

oh but there is a war, intel is fighting the complacency war. Trying to do as little as possible without the consumers roiting, whilst AMD catches up

[MageTank]

1 minute ago, Prysin said:

not hard to crash it, you need very high OCs and or a shitty thermal throttling i7 4770k, @Dackzy can tell you how that happens.

 

Ive been unstable in GW2 at 4.5Ghz with too low voltage on my FX, but generally only RAM clocks makes it unstable. I have even crashed on XMP in GW2 because it marginally touched the BCLK and the NB/SB didnt have the voltage needed to deal with that marginal bump in IO clock.

Technically, that could be the board itself having a rounding error with the BCLK. I had to manually define the BCLK on my Z97 ASRock boards, as they would often change anywhere from 99 to 102, which would cause instability with my ram. Manually inputting the BCLK was rock solid.

 

I have not played GW2 in a long time, quit right before Heart of the Thorns. I don't know how it acts now, but it was pretty CPU intense at the time I played it. 

[Space Reptile]

so kaby is not the second coming of christ?

 

 

0/10 complete faliure 

[vanished]

8 minutes ago, Space Reptile said:

so kaby is not the second coming of christ?

 

 

0/10 complete faliure 

I wonder if we'll ever have another Sandy Bridge... something that becomes legendary to the point of people having nostalgia for it and that can still hold its own 5 years on.

[MageTank]

1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I wonder if we'll ever have another Sandy Bridge... something that becomes legendary to the point of people having nostalgia for it and that can still hold its own 5 years on.

I imagine that is what Zen will be for those that prefer AMD. Might remind them of the Phenom days. If the 8c/16t SKU is priced low enough, I might even jump on that bandwagon myself. Haswell IPC (hopefully) with that much lifting power is perfect for my workloads.

[patrickjp93]

32 minutes ago, Prysin said:

depends on the sumplicity of the task. Even AVX can benefit more from Hz then IPC, given that the complexity of the operation is as simple as possible. This is why i ask for testing your code in your blog entry the way i did.

 

As we both know, Intel is starting to hit a wall on IPC, there isnt much more to haul out of their current design, so hoping to see large performance jumps based on IPC alone is unlikely. AMD is simply catching up on IPC as it currently is.

 

we will eventually regress to a MHz war and "core war", once software catches up to current limitations that is

Eh... AVX instructions have a latency of 3-5. IPC would be more beneficial in this case, especially as you start combining operations that are dependent on previous results.

[Prysin]

57 minutes ago, MageTank said:

Technically, that could be the board itself having a rounding error with the BCLK. I had to manually define the BCLK on my Z97 ASRock boards, as they would often change anywhere from 99 to 102, which would cause instability with my ram. Manually inputting the BCLK was rock solid.

 

I have not played GW2 in a long time, quit right before Heart of the Thorns. I don't know how it acts now, but it was pretty CPU intense at the time I played it. 

its DX9 based so naturally, a near total single core dependent game that has been shoddily coded to run on at most 4 threads will be terribly demanding.

My 4790k, even at 4.6GHz (no, i havent tried to push my i7. Just typed in a clock to see where it would crash. 4,6 seems to work fine without adjusting anything else). It barely keep 30 FPS at minimum when running 3440x1440 max settings with supersampling.

 

Heart of Thorns didnt make it any better, actually, in the past few months i would argue it has made it increasingly worse due to shoddy coding.

 

That game engine was never built for such a large game and so many players to be in one spot. It was built to be ported to consoles (target was PS3 and Xbox 360), and you notice that.

[Dabombinable]

1 hour ago, Prysin said:

play the right game and you learn that "Gaming stable" is a bullshit concept

 

Tomb Raider games, Guildwars 2, Far Cry 4 will crash much faster then almost any other game ive ever played if your OC isnt stable. These games/game engines has almost zero tolerance for errors caused by instabilities.

For me its Skyrim for CPU instability, and World of tanks for graphics card instability.

[patrickjp93]

1 hour ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

I wonder if we'll ever have another Sandy Bridge... something that becomes legendary to the point of people having nostalgia for it and that can still hold its own 5 years on.

At the rate of consumer code optimization, Sandy Bridge will have its own second coming when AVX starts getting used in games. Just see my SIMD Game Engine code blog here on LTT.

 

Whatever CPUs start getting big bandwidth upgrades at the same latencies as now will also have a large impact beyond that.

[Juanitology]

The main reason I was considering to upgrade to Kaby Lake was that (in theory) it'll be the first platform to have the required safety and cryptography features to do 4K streaming on PC. I'm still on my trusty old 2600K slightly overclocked to 4.5GHz which is more than enough for the casual gaming and photo editing I do today. I've not upgraded so far because Sandy Bridge is actually a beast overclocked and super stable, but I want to move to Kaby Lake more for the platform improvement than a need for more processing power tbh. Move to nvme ssd, get USB 3.1, DDR4 support and all that jazz. Do you guys think it's worth it if Kaby Lake turns out to be as good of an overclocker as sandy was??

[MageTank]

1 minute ago, Terodius said:

The main reason I was considering to upgrade to Kaby Lake was that (in theory) it'll be the first platform to have the required safety and cryptography features to do 4K streaming on PC. I'm still on my trusty old 2600K slightly overclocked to 4.5GHz which is more than enough for the casual gaming and photo editing I do today. I've not upgraded so far because Sandy Bridge is actually a beast overclocked and super stable, but I want to move to Kaby Lake more for the platform improvement than a need for more processing power tbh. Move to nvme ssd, get USB 3.1, DDR4 support and all that jazz. Do you guys think it's worth it if Kaby Lake turns out to be as good of an overclocker as sandy was??

I mean, there isn't a reason to choose Skylake over Kaby if they are priced exactly the same. Kaby is basically Skylake at its core, with additional features added with Z270. As for its ability to overclock, I can't imagine it will be worse than Skylake, and we have evidence to support that it overclocks quite well (as limited as the evidence is).

 

Raw clock speed isn't exactly everything. At 4.5ghz, a Skylake chip would beat a 5ghz Sandy chip. Factor in the extra platform features (DDR4's bandwidth helping in compression, new storage features, higher capacity ram options for ram disk/drive caching, etc) and it makes for a pretty decent upgrade.

 

I would probably wait a little longer, since Zen should be coming out relatively soon alongside Kaby, and it would be great to see its costs and performance compared to similarly priced Intel SKU's. 

[Lays]

5 hours ago, patrickjp93 said:

6 hours under IBT and it'll be rock solid for anything Joe Consumer is doing.

Agreed!  Honestly in my experience like 1 hour of Prime95 and a few other random stress tests never gives me any stability problems .   I'm sure if I ran prime 95 or IBT for 24 hours my 5 Ghz OC wouldn't hold up.  But for an hour if prime or  a couple hours of other things, no problem. 

[MageTank]

5 minutes ago, Lays said:

Honestly in my experience like 1 hour of Prime95 and a few other random stress tests never gives me any BSOD.   I'm sure if I ran prime 95 or IBT for 24 hours my 5 Ghz OC wouldn't hold up.  But for a couple hours of prime or other things, no problem.  

I wish my paranoia didn't force me to do several hours of 1344-2688, another several hours of 512-4096, and 15 minutes of 48k after every single minor adjustment to RAM/CPU. I mean, I am at the point where I can pretty much feel if something isn't going to be stable with how much I've tinkered with both my ram and CPU, but I still can't help myself. I've probably done more harm to my CPU and memory than any amount of harm instability would have ever done for the non-mission critical tasks I do. I am also the same person that asks himself "Gee, this didn't get me to thermal junction temps. Wonder how much ram I would have to dedicate to Linpack before that happens?". Mind you, this is in an ITX case on a 45mm cooler, lol. 

[Dackzy]

3 hours ago, Prysin said:

not hard to crash it, you need very high OCs and or a shitty thermal throttling i7 4770k, @Dackzy can tell you how that happens.

 

Ive been unstable in GW2 at 4.5Ghz with too low voltage on my FX, but generally only RAM clocks makes it unstable. I have even crashed on XMP in GW2 because it marginally touched the BCLK and the NB/SB didnt have the voltage needed to deal with that marginal bump in IO clock.

ffs prysin it does not thermal throttle, I have no idea where you got that part from, but yeah GW2 hates when I OC, my brother has a 5820 and he has it OCed, just a tiny OC, I tried to play GW2 for 5 hours and his PC also crashed.

 

3 hours ago, MageTank said:

Technically, that could be the board itself having a rounding error with the BCLK. I had to manually define the BCLK on my Z97 ASRock boards, as they would often change anywhere from 99 to 102, which would cause instability with my ram. Manually inputting the BCLK was rock solid.

 

I have not played GW2 in a long time, quit right before Heart of the Thorns. I don't know how it acts now, but it was pretty CPU intense at the time I played it. 

mmhhh I have not seen anything back then that would point towards my mobo or my brothers, but now my PC sometimes start up in the bios with my ram speeds reset, not sure how or why. I have a Formula VI motherboard.

[MageTank]

1 minute ago, Dackzy said:

ffs prysin it does not thermal throttle, I have no idea where you got that part from, but yeah GW2 hates when I OC, my brother has a 5820 and he has it OCed, just a tiny OC, I tried to play GW2 for 5 hours and his PC also crashed.

 

mmhhh I have not seen anything back then that would point towards my mobo or my brothers, but now my PC sometimes start up in the bios with my ram speeds reset, not sure how or why. I have a Formula VI motherboard.

Look for an option called "MRC Fast Boot". Should be located after the tertiary timings on your board. Turn that off. It can cause training issues when using memory overclocks, and is extremely annoying in that regard. 

 

As for the crashing when playing GW2, is there any specific stop codes? Or is it just crashing to desktop? Is it a hard freeze? I used to play GW2 on an overclocked G3258 without any crashes (though, I had the general dual-core lag associated with dual cores). My overclock was quite tame, being 4.2ghz at the time of me playing that game. If it is a blue screen crash, please don't say 0x124. That can come from a plethora of things x.x

[Dackzy]

7 minutes ago, MageTank said:

Look for an option called "MRC Fast Boot". Should be located after the tertiary timings on your board. Turn that off. It can cause training issues when using memory overclocks, and is extremely annoying in that regard. 

 

As for the crashing when playing GW2, is there any specific stop codes? Or is it just crashing to desktop? Is it a hard freeze? I used to play GW2 on an overclocked G3258 without any crashes (though, I had the general dual-core lag associated with dual cores). My overclock was quite tame, being 4.2ghz at the time of me playing that game. If it is a blue screen crash, please don't say 0x124. That can come from a plethora of things x.x

I always got bluescreen, I cannot remember the code, because it has not done it since I removed the OC or rather it has done it one time shortly after I removed my OC, but it has not done it in months. I ran my 4770k at 4.6, 4.5, 4.2 and then I just removed it. The lower the OC the more stable GW2 were, but I had stress tested all of those OC's and they were all 100% stable, so not sure what is up with GW2.

 

I cannot seem to find "MRC Fast Boot"

[Dackzy]

17 minutes ago, MageTank said:

snip

 

found it

[MageTank]

4 minutes ago, Dackzy said:

found it

Great! The biggest problem with MRC Fast Boot, is that it doesn't play nice with RTL/IO-L. At least, I couldn't get it to play nice on any of my ASrock boards. @Lays might be able to vouch for this, as he also tinkers with ram.

 

Any who, the auto-trained RTL values would change randomly after each boot with MRC Fast Boot turned on for me, even if I had things manually dialed in. After turning it off, and manually dialing things in, I never had another issue. It would actually boot into the BIOS with JEDEC ram speeds, the same issue you had (Though, on my ASRock board, it would say "overclocking failed" before doing so). 

 

Give that a try, manually dial in your timings and see if it stops doing that. 

[Dackzy]

9 minutes ago, MageTank said:

SNIP

Never trusted Asrock, they have always failed my friends, so I have never owned a Asrock, only Asus. Mainly because I go after "high end" motherboards and Asus always seem to make the best motherboards for OCing.

[Lays]

1 hour ago, MageTank said:

I wish my paranoia didn't force me to do several hours of 1344-2688, another several hours of 512-4096, and 15 minutes of 48k after every single minor adjustment to RAM/CPU. I mean, I am at the point where I can pretty much feel if something isn't going to be stable with how much I've tinkered with both my ram and CPU, but I still can't help myself. I've probably done more harm to my CPU and memory than any amount of harm instability would have ever done for the non-mission critical tasks I do. I am also the same person that asks himself "Gee, this didn't get me to thermal junction temps. Wonder how much ram I would have to dedicate to Linpack before that happens?". Mind you, this is in an ITX case on a 45mm cooler, lol. 

 

I ran p95 at 4.8 1.375v for an hour, no crash, bumped up to 5g 1.43, ran for 30 mins and didn't crash, then ran realbench for like 1hr 30 min I think, then GSAT on Linux for 1 hour.   I've been running 1.425 or 1.43 in bios ever since for like 4 months and haven't BSOD once, so I'm just going to assume I'm good lol   All i really do on my PC is game/netflix/ watch movies and listen to music lol