iUpgraded to an i7: A 14* Day Journal

[Suika]

I have the Hyper 212 EVO finally installed and all temperatures are sticking below 60C on max load. Pretty happy to have the damned stock cooler gone. That said, anybody have an idea on how how of an overclock I should get, and what temperature I should set as my stopping point?

[Fate]

I have the Hyper 212 EVO finally installed and all temperatures are sticking below 60C on max load. Pretty happy to have the damned stock cooler gone. That said, anybody have an idea on how how of an overclock I should get, and what temperature I should set as my stopping point?

I think mid-high 80's during stress testing is the highest you should go, not completely sure though.

[CameronDSetty]

I think mid-high 80's during stress testing is the highest you should go, not completely sure though.

I have my i5 4690K that I got a few days ago at 4.5 with 1.18 volts, tried for higher but then I started to barely hit the nineties and wimped out.

[Faceman]

I have the Hyper 212 EVO finally installed and all temperatures are sticking below 60C on max load. Pretty happy to have the damned stock cooler gone. That said, anybody have an idea on how how of an overclock I should get, and what temperature I should set as my stopping point?

Yea, the stock cooler with the i7-4790k at a monstrous 1.2-1.3v out of the box is overly ambitious, and I agree, is not a real viable option.

 

When overclocking, you have to keep an open mind.  Don't compare your results to others, because each chip is unique and you should focus on finding the best possible result that you are comfortable with for your chip.  As far as temperatures go, below 85C for a 24/7 OC is perfectly fine.  Stress testing might push it higher than that, but again, thats a stress test.  Also, when you do start stress testing, it is very important to set your voltage to manual/constant/override/static, whatever your manufacturer calls it in the BIOS.  When you are done stress testing, revert back to adaptive voltage and enjoy.

[Dabombinable]

Oi, there's just too many to recommend!

 

RealVision ENB first as always first and essential, but your ENB is dependent on your taste. The author has a few good mods listed on the page, too, and I used a lot of those. I did not use Realistic Water Textures and went back with W.A.T.E.R., HD Ivy is essential to every citizen of Skyrim. Ruins Clutter Improved, Skyrim Flora Overhaul, Beauty of Skyrim, Sounds of Skyrim, and Climates of Tamriel are all essential imo. I have Realistic Lighting Overhaul which is OK, I haven't tried the other lighting mod. Wearable Lanterns goes real well with Lighting overhaul if you don't like having to wear a torch in place of a shield, magic, weapon, or bow. I have all the necessary unofficial patches for the sake of having them. I have the Populated Forts, Towers, Places, and various other things mods which takes a hit on the CPU more than graphics processing. Static Mesh Improvement is another big essential, too. It fixes flat ropes and stuff and everything looks really pretty. Immersive weapons and armors are both pretty cool but are subjective, I like 'em. I have Cinematic Fire Effects but I don't like it, go with the other fire effects thing. 

 

These ones take a HUGE hit on the CPU, so be cautious. Expanded Towns and Cities, and ImpeREAL Empire - Unique Cities - Falkreath. Both of them, as the names kind of imply, improve cities and make them way bigger and cooler. The issue is that these mods in particular will just drop FPS, it completely tanked on my 8350 and made a noticeable drop on my i7.

 

I have a lot of NPC facial mods and improvements, as well as general clothing and hair improvements. If you like kawaii girls in Skyrim these are pretty alright. I never get excessive, though, as I like keeping as lore friendly as possible.

I might just expand on my mods a bit then, I'm planing on doing something similar except with a core 2 duo, then a Xeon and finally my i5, so far Skyrim is just fine on the core 2 (mainly gpu intensive mods though).

[Suika]

My motherboard has a surprising amount of options. I can set my CPU to utilize only two cores with hyper threading, two without, use four cores without hyper threading... It's pretty neat and I may see if I can emulate an i3 lmao.

[Laputacake]

My motherboard has a surprising amount of options. I can set my CPU to utilize only two cores with hyper threading, two without, use four cores without hyper threading... It's pretty neat and I may see if I can emulate an i3 lmao.

Emulate a Celeron

[Dabombinable]

Emulate a Celeron

Its really hard to emulate a CPU that low end, probably couldn't even do it on a core 2 quad.

[Suika]

Day 09

 

I'm really bad at keeping up on this, but I don't want to leave those "I did nothing all day" entries.

 

Anyway I was going to try and prove a point earlier and discovered something interesting in the mean time. As it turns out, you can force TF2 to bottleneck on an FX-8350. Kind of a weird thing, considering how old TF2 is. That said, earlier today I tried running a 24 player server with 23 bots and myself. With my 8350, even while I had my HD 7870 GHz, the framerate would run shockingly low, and I always assumed that 23 bots was just a strain on a game that doesn't utilize a lot of cores. Well, I tried that again today, and it was completely smooth, a single core didn't even reach 100% which was nice. I made sure Vsync was off and everything, and TF2 kept very high rates (that said, running without Vsync feels weird). So yea, an i5 or i3 is much better for a dedicated TF2 player.

 

It's one of those minor things again, but I did force TF2 to become unplayable on an FX chip, when you run settings that a normal person wouldn't lol.

[Laputacake]

Its really hard to emulate a CPU that low end, probably couldn't even do it on a core 2 quad.

Poor celeron. I wonder if it would do for a home office pc?..

 

 

Day 09

 

I'm really bad at keeping up on this, but I don't want to leave those "I did nothing all day" entries.

 

Anyway I was going to try and prove a point earlier and discovered something interesting in the mean time. As it turns out, you can force TF2 to bottleneck on an FX-8350. Kind of a weird thing, considering how old TF2 is. That said, earlier today I tried running a 24 player server with 23 bots and myself. With my 8350, even while I had my HD 7870 GHz, the framerate would run shockingly low, and I always assumed that 23 bots was just a strain on a game that doesn't utilize a lot of cores. Well, I tried that again today, and it was completely smooth, a single core didn't even reach 100% which was nice. I made sure Vsync was off and everything, and TF2 kept very high rates (that said, running without Vsync feels weird). So yea, an i5 or i3 is much better for a dedicated TF2 player.

 

It's one of those minor things again, but I did force TF2 to become unplayable on an FX chip, when you run settings that a normal person wouldn't lol.

That might be because TF2 likes less fast cores rather than lots of weak cores. So Intel is therefore going to win as an overclocked core 2 duo can beat an 8350 in single core performance. Anyway keep it coming as its interesting to see more than just benchmarks.

[helping]

It's kinda nice, my old FX chip used to have to try a bit to stay 250 frames solid on COD4, and this i7 isn't working enough to ramp up the fans for 333 FPS.

Barely even see a reason to overclock, might as well save power and heat and leave it at stock, letting turbo handle it when it needs to.

[Rekx]

im in a pretty similar situation as you Suika. I also made the switch from a FX cpu to a i7. I got my i7 4970k today and got it installed 4 hours ago and i'm finding it to be a bit more stable/faster than my 8320. In games like league of legends and total war it seems like my fps got more stable and my minimum fps got higher. Though the biggest change for me is finally getting on a platform that is actually alive. Things like updated motherboard software/drivers is always nice. Now i only need to look into overclocking on Intel, i have never owned a intel cpu myself.

[Octavialicious]

hey do you mind if I did something like this but at 4K? A lot of people go back and forth on whether the 8350 bottlenecks at 4K because of the GPU heaviness, so I might want to do so something on that if it's ok with you

[RonLopez34]

For overclocking, check out this thread by ProKoN. It's extremely helpful and I was able do my first ever overclock with his help. 

 

http://linustechtips.com/main/topic/41234-intel-haswell-4670k-4770k-overclocking-guide/

[Suika]

hey do you mind if I did something like this but at 4K? A lot of people go back and forth on whether the 8350 bottlenecks at 4K because of the GPU heaviness, so I might want to do so something on that if it's ok with you

Yea, the more the merrier!

 

Plus I'm really bad at updating this considering I'm not home as often as I'd like to be to run complete tests.

 

Thursday I may have a kick at overclocking and come back with video experience from Skyrim to see how noticeable it is.

 

It's kinda nice, my old FX chip used to have to try a bit to stay 250 frames solid on COD4, and this i7 isn't working enough to ramp up the fans for 333 FPS.

Barely even see a reason to overclock, might as well save power and heat and leave it at stock, letting turbo handle it when it needs to.

Yea, so far I've only seen one completely noticeable CPU dependent situation, and that's in modded Skyrim. I wanted to try overclocking to see how much of a difference it makes versus not. I think 4.6GHz is about as high as I want though, considering turbo is 4.4 I don't think it should be out of reach. That and because I lost the Intel bracket for my H100i so I'm stuck with a 212 EVO for cooling.

 

im in a pretty similar situation as you Suika. I also made the switch from a FX cpu to a i7. I got my i7 4970k today and got it installed 4 hours ago and i'm finding it to be a bit more stable/faster than my 8320. In games like league of legends and total war it seems like my fps got more stable and my minimum fps got higher. Though the biggest change for me is finally getting on a platform that is actually alive. Things like updated motherboard software/drivers is always nice. Now i only need to look into overclocking on Intel, i have never owned a intel cpu myself.

Yea, I have to restudy overclocking. While I could achieve 4.9GHz @ 1.49V on an 8350, I don't have any idea what I'm doing on my current board. I need to update the BIOS because most features are locked for some reason, I have no clue how to fiddle with clockrate or voltage etc.

 

That said, though, I have no clue how to modify voltage. On the ASUS M5A99FX it was pretty straight forward, set voltage to manual and input voltage. Now I have like 4 different options for voltage.

[Rekx]

Yea, the more the merrier!

 

Plus I'm really bad at updating this considering I'm not home as often as I'd like to be to run complete tests.

 

Thursday I may have a kick at overclocking and come back with video experience from Skyrim to see how noticeable it is.

 

Yea, so far I've only seen one completely noticeable CPU dependent situation, and that's in modded Skyrim. I wanted to try overclocking to see how much of a difference it makes versus not. I think 4.6GHz is about as high as I want though, considering turbo is 4.4 I don't think it should be out of reach. That and because I lost the Intel bracket for my H100i so I'm stuck with a 212 EVO for cooling.

 

Yea, I have to restudy overclocking. While I could achieve 4.9GHz @ 1.49V on an 8350, I don't have any idea what I'm doing on my current board. I need to update the BIOS because most features are locked for some reason, I have no clue how to fiddle with clockrate or voltage etc.

 

That said, though, I have no clue how to modify voltage. On the ASUS M5A99FX it was pretty straight forward, set voltage to manual and input voltage. Now I have like 4 different options for voltage.

 

Im not sure how advanced options MSI has on their gaming boards. But Asus ROG boards are filled with overclocking features which a normal overclockers never will use. Therefore im now completely lost Other wise i freaking love Asus ROG.

 

I have tried making overclock with 1,28v, 4,5ghz which was a little unstable though i found out later that my windows power options was set to power saver, which downclocked my cpu to 700mhz constant. So ill have to try again. Dammit Windows

[Suika]

Day 10

 

I'm sorry, I swear! Busy life with work and birthdays!... On that note I'm now officially 19 years old lol. I still feel very young on this forum for some reason.

 

All that said, though, I never really admired GIMP because it always felt like it was unstable and almost unusable. Once I learned enough of Photoshop, I had completely dropped the idea of using GIMP. I saw it as inferior (it probably is) because of hardware limitations. Anyway now, as I've said before, it's just completely buttery smooth and a pleasant experience to use. Saving images in a non-XCF format is different (I have to export now?) but now difficult to figure out.

 

Everything I've edited has come out pleasantly, but I'm still relearning since I have Photoshop in my mind while I use it. I dunno. I go from this level of skill to

 

 

to this.

 

 

Ugh, it makes me sad face, and I feel like I could push the i7 a little harder if I started doing a bunch of those 30 layer projects again. I should do that.

 

Multitasking also seems snappier but not side by side comparison different. Like, everything is kind of changing between themselves very easily where as the 8350 was a little slow sometimes. Again, it's not really a head to head difference but after using the FX-8350 for almost two years and an i7 for a month *cough* I feel like the Windows experience is much nicer.

[Timmy-P]

Happy birthday!

 

Glad to see you're keeping up with this, this is a nice project you're doing so far.  Have you considered going back to your 8350 just to see what it's like after using the i7?

[DarkRift5]

Have you noticed any differences in heavily multithreaded programs with 4 strong cores w/ HT vs 8 weaker cores?

[psxpetey]

The i7 4790k is for beginners Try 5960x 

if only we all had $1000 to spend on a CPU LOL

[Suika]

Have you noticed any differences in heavily multithreaded programs with 4 strong cores w/ HT vs 8 weaker cores?

I haven't used a lot of heavily threaded scenarios believe it or not, that or I've genuinely just not payed attention. On that note I have noticed running through multiple programs to be faster and more efficient, I may have to figure out a way where I can stress seven threads and see how the desktop still feels after that.

 

Despite what a lot of people think about the FX series, multithreaded work is just not that common. I haven't gotten to see the i7 really shine yet because... 8 threads isn't relevant to an average consumer, and even in media functions, I still feel like an i5 would beat an FX-8350.

[Suika]

Day 11

 

Alright, I gotta apologize for being so bad at this. I'm not as dedicated of a content creator as some so, my ability to update without becoming redundant... isn't there.

 

On that note, the fool who says the FX-8350 shines in multithreaded work just hasn't worked with Intel before (hey, I used to say that!). Honestly, Photoshop was a flawless experience, no matter how many projects and layers I threw into it. The FX-8350 did have some problems with a single, multiple layer project (I usually have 25+ layers, good sigs got 40+), which is surprising because I figured the 8350 would be fine in Photoshop. Lots of cores mean nothing if a single core can't support a high load. Intel is like a bajillion times better it seems, especially considering only four threads saw consistent usage. Probably meaning, an i5 would be good with Photoshop, much better than any FX chip, and an i3 would be good if you don't do heavy (and I mean, 12, 25+ layer projects at once) work.

 

I checked total usage, with like 12 projects open while I edited one, I still hovered around 15% when I was mostly just fidgeting, maybe 35% when I was messing with filters and opening all of the projects at once. This is also considering that Chrome was open and playing from my YouTube playlist. It was just amazing how smooth and consistent it was, the only thing that slowed me down was the popups telling me that I'm missing text files or something.

 

Intel wins Photoshop hands down, the 8350 just wasn't as smooth and stable, like with GIMP. 

 

Anyway here was my really bad attempt at something lol.

 

 

EDIT: I'm also going to change the goal to 14 days considering the only thing left I want to cover is overclocking and gaming under it.