BQ Dark Rock 4 or Dark Rock Pro 4 for 6600k Overclocking

[PeterPorker3]

Im at the point where in all the rendering and some of my gaming workloads I am mostly bottlenecked by my CPU (I5-6600k) with it reaching 100% usage in a lot of the programs I use, even with a 4.4GHz overclock. Im thinking about overclocking it more, but if I push more than 1.27v through the CPU core my Cooler Master Hyper 212 evo can't keep the temps under control. I have a few questions, the first one is how beffy of a cooler do I need to reach 4.8GHz. I have settled on Be Quiet! coolers because I also don't want it to sound like a jet engine, so should I get the Dark Rock 4 or the Dark Rock Pro 4? Second, is the extra 400MHz increase in clock speed over what I can already achieve worth $75-90 on a cooler, or am I better off saving some money and getting a used I7-7700k?

[Princess Luna]

By all means you are way much better off saving for a second hand i7 7700k, it at stock will already outperform the i5 6600k at 4.8ghz to begin with.

[WoodenMarker]

What programs are you using? Depending on your render settings, 100% cpu usage is to be expected and isn't a bad thing.

[Conza]

May be simplistic - why not both?

 

The cooler is a much less expensive component of the system, so save up for a 7700k (new or used, its not that expensive new now any more? $440 AUD whatever that's worth to you), and a DRP4 cooler then install both.

 

I just installed a DRP3 cooler on a system with an 8700k and it's running fine, we're still yet to turn up the overclock but a simply 1.25V 4.7GHz is hardly stressing the cooler at this stage.

[PeterPorker3]

3 minutes ago, WoodenMarker said:

What programs are you using? Depending on your render settings, 100% cpu usage is to be expected and isn't a bad thing.

You are correct, things like blender are supposed to be at 100%. My problem is I play a lot of games that are in-development and or not graphically intensive, those are the main programs that shouldn't be running at 100%. Other things like rendering in Vegas is also heavily dependent on CPU strength. I didn't know that the benchmark scores between the 6600k and 7700k are that different, so I guess I will start saving my money. 

[WoodenMarker]

1 minute ago, MineParker101 said:

My problem is I play a lot of games that are in-development and or not graphically intensive, those are the main programs that shouldn't be running at 100%

Are you experiencing low performance in these games? 

If the games aren't well optimized, raising the oc or getting a cpu that isn't significantly better isn't going to lower the cpu usage.

[PeterPorker3]

9 minutes ago, WoodenMarker said:

Are you experiencing low performance in these games? 

If the games aren't well optimized, raising the oc or getting a cpu that isn't significantly better isn't going to lower the cpu usage.

Yes, I get a lot of lag spikes in some of those games, and It seems like the games are taking full advantage of my cpu, puching it to 100% usage. It seems like the CPU is the bottleneck because the GPU is barley being utilized. 

[WoodenMarker]

Just now, MineParker101 said:

Yes, I get a lot of lag spikes in some of those games, and It seems like the games are taking full advantage of my cpu, puching it to 100% usage. It seems like the CPU is the bottleneck because the GPU is barley being utilized. 

Are the games performing similarly for others with similar specs? Are there any settings you can lower?

Low gpu utilization seems normal for games that aren't graphically intensive.

[PeterPorker3]

9 minutes ago, WoodenMarker said:

Are the games performing similarly for others with similar specs? Are there any settings you can lower?

Low gpu utilization seems normal for games that aren't graphically intensive.

Yes they are, but they are open world games so it heavily depends on how many objects you spawn in them. Beamng Drive for example, with push the CPU to 100 if I spawn enough cars into the game. The only settings that I can mess around with are the graphics settings, but the games that im having trouble with barly use my GPU (1060 6gb), making lowing graphics settings usless. 

 

[WoodenMarker]

10 minutes ago, MineParker101 said:

Yes they are, but they are open world games so it heavily depends on how many objects you spawn in them. Beamng Drive for example, with push the CPU to 100 if I spawn enough cars into the game. The only settings that I can mess around with are the graphics settings, but the games that im having trouble with barly use my GPU (1060 6gb), making lowing graphics settings usless. 

I'm not sure which games you're having issues with but upgrading to a 7700k should help if you know that others using the same cpu aren't having these issues.

[PeterPorker3]

Just now, WoodenMarker said:

I'm not sure which games you're having issues with but upgrading to a 7700k should help if you know that others using the same cpu aren't having these issues.

Yea, I think i'm just going to go with that, a lot of my rendering workloads and even some games are surprisingly multi threaded and will equalize the load across all cores, which leads me to believe that not only will the extra single core performance benefit me, the extra threads will also be beneficial. I didn't know how much of a performance gains I would get from ether upgrade, but now I know. Thanks to all who contributed.