Sweeeeeeet, new CPU to play with!
- Thread starter Albuquerque
- Start date
My ram is good to about 1159 before it starts to wuss out and need extra coaxing, and my GA-X38-DS4 was doing 575FSB on all-stock voltages (where the ram ended up stopping) on an E6850 on a 6x multi -- just for board testing, mind you.
I've got four instances of Prime running at 3.2Ghz on stock volts (1.2375 BIOS, 1.168 actual) Temps are really nice so, in the low 40's full load.
Edit: because Davros snuck in on me
What's slow on a 4.3Ghz E8400? Absolutely nothing That's not the point!
I've got four instances of Prime running at 3.2Ghz on stock volts (1.2375 BIOS, 1.168 actual) Temps are really nice so, in the low 40's full load.
Edit: because Davros snuck in on me
What's slow on a 4.3Ghz E8400? Absolutely nothing
That's not the point!
Thought I'd mention: went home at lunch, and it's still dual-Orthos'ing at Priority 10 with in-place 10k FFT's on it's 13th hour. Volts are 100% stock except ram (the Micron D9's need ~2v to be stable at 900 at 4-4-4-10); CPU is at 3.6Ghz (450 x 8), hottest core was 52*c according to RealTemp.
Looking really good so far...
Looking really good so far...
3.6ghz at stock Vcore? Which mobo? I'm getting one of these soon and returning my P5K Premium, thinking about getting the X38 P5E.
You can use the latest multithreaded build of Prime95 and set custom FFTs as well.
Sorry, didnt see someone had replied
My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-X38-DS4 with F3a bios. This chip has a massive FSB wall, the likes of which I've never seen 461FSB is the highest it will go so far, but interestingly it's still at 1.232v under load (1.275 in the bios -- stock voltage for this CPU is 1.2375, so technically I think I'm doing quite well). I had to twiddle with the GTLREF to get it stable here, 455FSB was my previous "wall" without adjusting it.
Temps after 18 hours of Orthos x 2 at full priority / 10k FFT's in-place with my fans at ~6v are 53*c on the hottest core; I'm watercooling so take that for what it's worth. It's stupidly fast in the apps that use all four cores though, like H.264 encoding. Definitely keeping this over my 4.3Ghz E8400...
My motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-X38-DS4 with F3a bios. This chip has a massive FSB wall, the likes of which I've never seen
461FSB is the highest it will go so far, but interestingly it's still at 1.232v under load (1.275 in the bios -- stock voltage for this CPU is 1.2375, so technically I think I'm doing quite well). I had to twiddle with the GTLREF to get it stable here, 455FSB was my previous "wall" without adjusting it.Temps after 18 hours of Orthos x 2 at full priority / 10k FFT's in-place with my fans at ~6v are 53*c on the hottest core; I'm watercooling so take that for what it's worth. It's stupidly fast in the apps that use all four cores though, like H.264 encoding. Definitely keeping this over my 4.3Ghz E8400...
LOL! Absolutely nothing that fancy, I assure you
Via Aqua 1300 pump that's about five years old, 1/2" ID tubing from the local Lowes (the PVC-mesh reinforced stuff so it doesn't collapse when bending), a heater core from an old Bonneville (basically a dual 120mm rad), and the "crown" of the set is the Apogee GT block. The fans are nice although louder than I wanted: Sanyo Denki Sun-ACE 120mm units. At 12v they're stupidly loud, at 6v (which is about as low as they go) they're not bad.
Case is an Armor TT; radiator takes up the bottom ~9 drive bays leaving room for my harddrives, DVDRW, and little fanbus thingie.
Via Aqua 1300 pump that's about five years old, 1/2" ID tubing from the local Lowes (the PVC-mesh reinforced stuff so it doesn't collapse when bending), a heater core from an old Bonneville (basically a dual 120mm rad), and the "crown" of the set is the Apogee GT block. The fans are nice although louder than I wanted: Sanyo Denki Sun-ACE 120mm units. At 12v they're stupidly loud, at 6v (which is about as low as they go) they're not bad.
Case is an Armor TT; radiator takes up the bottom ~9 drive bays leaving room for my harddrives, DVDRW, and little fanbus thingie.
It appears that these 45nm chips need lots of VTT and NB voltage to break through the FSB wall (I'm not entirely sure what PLL does), you might be able to get close to 500FSB if you play with them a little. Your CPU seems to be excellent as most of the 8x multi 45nm quads I have seen so far need at least 1.3v for 3.6ghz. You definitely have a keeper there, if I was able to hit 450FSB at stock voltage settings I would probably call it a day, my Q6600 needs a 1.4v to 1.5v jump to go past 3.4ghz.
My northbridge is at 100% stock voltage, and adding more isn't doing anything to the overclock.. GTLREF needed a nudge, but any more and it's not stable either. I think the only way this puppy would hit 500FSB is under some sort of cryogenic cooling.
But if it had a 9x multiplier, I'm quite sure it would boot straight to 4Ghz without much fanfare.
But if it had a 9x multiplier, I'm quite sure it would boot straight to 4Ghz without much fanfare.
The dual-core Penryns are a much different beast than the quads.
I came from an E8400, and I'll tell you this: If you have a motherboard that's good for ~525-550 FSB, then I'd suggest buying the E8200 chip instead.
The E8200, E8400 and E8500 all overclock to pretty much the same end: somewhere between 4.0 and 4.3Ghz. The only (obvious) difference is the FSB speeds... The average overclock (to me) seems to be around 4.2Ghz -- that's 525FSB on the E8200, 467FSB on the E8400, and ~442FSB on the E8500.
Bottom line is this: The E8500 really isn't worth it, at all. The E8400 is gonna be easier on a "lower end" motherboard, but hell most P35's will do 500+FSB without blinking. So if you've got a decent P35 or X38 chipset, go for the E8200 and start loving your FSB.
Oh, and at which point, 1066 ram would make sense :
I came from an E8400, and I'll tell you this: If you have a motherboard that's good for ~525-550 FSB, then I'd suggest buying the E8200 chip instead.
The E8200, E8400 and E8500 all overclock to pretty much the same end: somewhere between 4.0 and 4.3Ghz. The only (obvious) difference is the FSB speeds... The average overclock (to me) seems to be around 4.2Ghz -- that's 525FSB on the E8200, 467FSB on the E8400, and ~442FSB on the E8500.
Bottom line is this: The E8500 really isn't worth it, at all. The E8400 is gonna be easier on a "lower end" motherboard, but hell most P35's will do 500+FSB without blinking. So if you've got a decent P35 or X38 chipset, go for the E8200 and start loving your FSB.
Oh, and at which point, 1066 ram would make sense :
Berek
Regular
Thank you, that helped me to understand the situation between the different dual core CPUs in o/c mode.
One of the questions still spinning in my mind is if the o/c is all worth it. Do not games top out by the CPU at 3Ghz or so? So between 3-4ghz the performance increase is negligible? That always brings me back to "why not get a quad core then" with its benefits and ability to also reach well into 3Ghz. They won't do 4Ghz, sure, but does it matter?
http://techreport.com/articles.x/14573
The above performance review shows quite clearly how well the E8400 and E8500 do, but the Q9450 for instance and Q9300 stay right with it, only falling behind in minor instances, while pulling ahead big time in many applications (I don't count the synthetic stuff). For games it remains relatively flat, with the Q9xxx pulling ahead in one major instance, but never falling behind significantly in any others. This also takes into account the overclock page as well.
Only real problem I see with a Q9450 or higher... price. Some might suggest heat (at least with the Q6xxx, not the Penryn's so much) or power usage, but that's yet another reason to get the Penryn series. I'm not too worried about power usage differences anyway as it isn't that big of a deal, unless it adds up to cost me an extra xx bucks or more a month or something that might be worth scoffing at. What does an ultra clocked E8xxx burn on watts vs. a o/clocked Q9xxx anyway? Since the E8xxx can do more, the wattage gap may close too.
When considering a processor I personally want to look at everything I will be doing. I won't be playing games but also doing some rendering on 3DSmax, editing games via map editors, and running a lot of multi-tasking background programs at the same time. Games will be huge, but as this review states getting a Quad-core is just as good.
What we need are reviews for Quad-cores that actually show systems with multi-tasking environments, not just multi-threaded environments. If in the end Quad-cores don't do much difference here, than my money may rest on the E8400.
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I don't think so -- the volts needed to get an E8x00 to 4.0Ghz is pretty much the same, regardless of where it started. There are "outliers" just like there are in any processor group, but these Penryns all seem to stop at about the same overclock, no matter where you started.
That's a bit of a generalized statement, isn't it? You're on a 3D forum -- do games "top out" at an 8800GT? 1GB of ram? 512mb of VRAM usage? You know just as well as I do that the bottleneck can be anywhere, and will quite assuredly change as time marches on.Berek-Halfhand said:
I'm not saying you need a 4Ghz processor to enjoy games; I'm saying you shouldn't pay for more speed than you'll use. An E8200 at stock speeds will have no problems chewing through whatever you throw at it - in my opinion. If you think you need more, then turn it up a little -- these Penryn dual cores seem to love the speed.
For games that do not use all the cores, the difference between an E8x00 and a Q9x50 will only be clockspeed. Please note - the Q9x00 series has less cache than the E8x00 and Q9x50 series.
In any case, I have a Q9450 right now. Nothing I do on a daily basis uses four cores except perhaps the operating system. I think I have two or three apps that will use it, but that's really it. In the grand scheme of things, you just finished saying that a game isn't going to use 4Ghz worth of dual-core processing power; would it be any difference for 2.5Ghz of quad-core processing power?
If you perform tasks regularly that can leverage more than two cores, then perhaps a quad is better for you. But if all you do is game, I don't think the quad is worth the cost.
The E8200's I've played with haven't been able to do 4GHz stablely, but I didn't have much time to try them out.
Berek
Regular
"That's a bit of a generalized statement, isn't it?"
Well, in a way if you consider minor alterations (cache) and the entire CPU lines across AMD and Intel. I'm focusing on Intel's Penryn atm. Some games obviously use more CPU than others, but it seems to be a consensus that having more than 3Ghz isn't as beneficial than more GPU power. The returns seems to be negligible in almost every case. That is what I was getting at.
"you just finished saying that a game isn't going to use 4Ghz worth of dual-core processing power; would it be any difference for 2.5Ghz of quad-core processing power?"
I'm not sure what you mean by this. If a game isn't going to use 4Ghz worth of processing power, and I intend to run multiple programs on a system at one time, along with a game, then sacrificing that 4Ghz+ power for a more diverse CPU is perhaps the way to go, in which case then yeah it probably wouldn't matter as much.
What my statements whittles down to is if pushing the CPU power has negligible benefits on games, and my system would have multiple programs and potentially a game running at one time, then a quad core is more beneficial for my case.
I am trying to understand, to be certain, that having a 4Ghz dual-core isn't a serious (noticeable) advantage in games over a quad-core at 3Ghz (when the CPU is the focus of performance)... all assuming of course the game doesn't make use of Quad-cores to level the playing field at its base (Dual-core).
Well, in a way if you consider minor alterations (cache) and the entire CPU lines across AMD and Intel. I'm focusing on Intel's Penryn atm. Some games obviously use more CPU than others, but it seems to be a consensus that having more than 3Ghz isn't as beneficial than more GPU power. The returns seems to be negligible in almost every case. That is what I was getting at.
"you just finished saying that a game isn't going to use 4Ghz worth of dual-core processing power; would it be any difference for 2.5Ghz of quad-core processing power?"
I'm not sure what you mean by this. If a game isn't going to use 4Ghz worth of processing power, and I intend to run multiple programs on a system at one time, along with a game, then sacrificing that 4Ghz+ power for a more diverse CPU is perhaps the way to go, in which case then yeah it probably wouldn't matter as much.
What my statements whittles down to is if pushing the CPU power has negligible benefits on games, and my system would have multiple programs and potentially a game running at one time, then a quad core is more beneficial for my case.
I am trying to understand, to be certain, that having a 4Ghz dual-core isn't a serious (noticeable) advantage in games over a quad-core at 3Ghz (when the CPU is the focus of performance)... all assuming of course the game doesn't make use of Quad-cores to level the playing field at its base (Dual-core).
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