GPUs & CPUs & Enthusiast hardware: Questions, Discussion and fanboy slap-fights - Nvidia & AMD & Intel - Separe but Equal. Intel rides in the back of the bus.

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Outside of some rare circumstances, nobody should bother anymore, or they should try underclocking instead.

Raspberry Pi 4? Do overclock to go from awful to slightly less awful. Surprise unlocked i3-12100 may be faster than the relocked i3-13100, RIP in power/performance. I need to check some of the 13100 reviews to see if they have the 12100 stomping it.

That's a shame. On the cheaper side of things if it's an easy overclock it makes sense, like the i3 you mentioned and some Ryzen's. I know my CPU can (most often) be overclocked almost ~30% over stock frequency but I'm to lazy to mess with voltages and crap despite having the big, fat Noctua cooler(for sound reasons).

 

[Brain Problems]

Like people are saying, growing up overclocking was one of those 1337 features that you'd see some fucking kid at the LAN party using and get mad/envious that he managed to trick his parents into overpaying for. Nowadays it doesn't even cross my mind mostly because I'm worried about fucking something up or melting a component, which speaks to my own incompetency and fears more than anything but damn it everything works just fine right now.

 

[AgendaPoster]

Like people are saying, growing up overclocking was one of those 1337 features that you'd see some fucking kid at the LAN party using and get mad/envious that he managed to trick his parents into overpaying for. Nowadays it doesn't even cross my mind mostly because I'm worried about fucking something up or melting a component, which speaks to my own incompetency and fears more than anything but damn it everything works just fine right now.

The melting part won't happen if you're reasonable, at least not from an OC. If you watch some tech channels you'll find out that sadly things do die and stuff does burn, even at stock settings. Bad BIOSes, overvolting the CPUs, bad thermal solutions, VRMs that are insufficient, incompetent factory assembly resulting in the cooling solution not having proper contact with VRMs, RAM etc., it's not uncommon. If you OC one of these problematic components, yeah, you will hasten its demise.
But if you have a "normal" component that's correctly assembled and designed, overclocking it is rather benign.
If you like lower temps and want your things to last, you could just undervolt them some. Depends on what you have, but you could generally have 95% of the performance with much lower temps and power usage.

 

[The Ugly One]

Downvolting is the cool new thing so you can show off running a game reasonably well with a passively cooled machine that's no bigger than a moleskin.

Like people are saying, growing up overclocking was one of those 1337 features that you'd see some fucking kid at the LAN party using and get mad/envious that he managed to trick his parents into overpaying for. Nowadays it doesn't even cross my mind mostly because I'm worried about fucking something up or melting a component, which speaks to my own incompetency and fears more than anything but damn it everything works just fine right now.

Overclocking in 1996: I'm the only person running Quake over 25 fps in software

Overclocking in 2022: Look at this Geekbench score I just posted!

 

[Second Sun]

Yeah, the new Zen 4 non-X vs the X versions shows you can get 95% the performance in most situations for half the power.

GPU undervolting is harder (the voltage curve dealie in Afterburner is not intuitive at all), but still worth it.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

I just remembered the old ATi website, before they got bought by AMD.

Artificial Turd Implementations

The image(s) doesn't load but the title of the page hints at what it is supposed to show.

Yeah, the new Zen 4 non-X vs the X versions shows you can get 95% the performance in most situations for half the power.

GPU undervolting is harder (the voltage curve dealie in Afterburner is not intuitive at all), but still worth it.

A while ago I dumped the clock frequency down to 1400mhz and disabled all cores except for two. It did not hinder my youtube watching while shitposting on KF in any way.

 

[Cpt. Stud Beefpile]

Downvolting is the cool new thing so you can show off running a game reasonably well with a passively cooled machine that's no bigger than a moleskin.


Overclocking in 1996: I'm the only person running Quake over 25 fps in software

Overclocking in 2022: Look at this Geekbench score I just posted!

LOL that sums it up beautifully.

I overclocked my old PC so I could get a few more years without having to replace/OS migrate the damn thing, which I was worried about being (and it was) a colossal pain in the ass. But that's gotta be a fringe group of OC'ers now.

 

[Looney Troons]

curious if anyone else has noticed this or had the same issue/poor luck. I have a 1080 ti (Founders), 2080 ti (Founders), 3080 ti (some shitty Aorus thing with a huge heat sink and a screen), and a 4090 (ASUS TUF). Every card that I’ve owned after that 1080 ti has had egregious coil whine when under just moderate load. I’ve tried to undervolt all of the cards to no avail.

Am I just unlucky, or is there a build quality issue somewhere?

 

[AmpleApricots]

Saving power is all about the race to sleep, most chips (especially x86) are most efficient in their idle, do-nothing states and the idea is to get them into these states as quick and much as possible. It might sound better to limit them to certain speeds or let cores idle permanently, but counter-intuitively, the computer might actually use more power that way because the remaining cores need to stay active longer at higher clocks to do the same work. That said, walling off the highest speeds, usually reached through some kind of "turbo boost technology" can save power as towards the end of the speed spectrum of a given silicon, the power consumption often raises quite dramatically for relatively little gain.

RAPL/cTDP is a tech to basically tell a modern processor to stay inside a TDP bracket to put out heat in a way the cooling can manage. The side effect of that is that they also use less power while using the envelope they're given in the most efficient possible ways as dictated by firmware/microcode/silicon. It's much better to play with these values than to set speed limits or disable cores if you want to save power/reduce heat. Some UEFI-Firmware locks it though and it tends to work much better with intel. You can see some very dramatic power savings here sometimes with little subjective difference in performance as OSes are still not very good at scheduling.

All that fancy tech of course helps nothing if the newest javashit website of the month hogs 50% of one of your CPUs in some nonsensical tight loop for merely being on screen. I swear to god, some power plants on this planet just exist to power poorly-written and implemented webshit.

 

[the_tepes]

So I just bought a new GPU (RX 7900XTX) as the last step of upgrading my PC and a new Tower (Sharkoon CA300T). I've never used
a water cooling system. Is it worth it? My old rig (Akasa Venom - 10 years old by now) did some pretty good job with cooling my hardware so far.
I'm expecting my new tower to do the same if not better job. Is water cooling recommended? If so, why? And which system would you recommend?

 

[Car Won't Crank]

So I just bought a new GPU (RX 7900XTX) as the last step of upgrading my PC and a new Tower (Sharkoon CA300T). I've never used
a water cooling system. Is it worth it? My old rig (Akasa Venom - 10 years old by now) did some pretty good job with cooling my hardware so far.
I'm expecting my new tower to do the same if not better job. Is water cooling recommended? If so, why? And which system would you recommend?

AIO water cooling isn't worth it. Air cooling is the way to go. I like the big ones like Scythe Ninja and Fuma. Deepcool also has some nice coolers on a budget like the ak400. Coolermaster 212evo is no longer the budget king.

 

[Drael]

curious if anyone else has noticed this or had the same issue/poor luck. I have a 1080 ti (Founders), 2080 ti (Founders), 3080 ti (some shitty Aorus thing with a huge heat sink and a screen), and a 4090 (ASUS TUF). Every card that I’ve owned after that 1080 ti has had egregious coil whine when under just moderate load. I’ve tried to undervolt all of the cards to no avail.

Am I just unlucky, or is there a build quality issue somewhere?

That kind of thing seems to be luck of the draw, but more likely to happen with higher wattage cards. For example out of two of the same model of 3080 we have on hand, the first one has a pretty noticeable whine to it as soon as it goes over 150W~ while the other is nearly silent. If it's really bad you could always move the case further from you and use USB/DP extensions. That's what I ended up doing with a noisy 2080Ti that I couldn't stand being 3 feet from my head buzzing at me.

 

[Post Reply]

AIO water cooling isn't worth it. Air cooling is the way to go. I like the big ones like Scythe Ninja and Fuma. Deepcool also has some nice coolers on a budget like the ak400. Coolermaster 212evo is no longer the budget king.

I have a Fuma and I'm a big fan () of it. It's both quiet and lacking the awful coil whine from my last CPU cooler.

curious if anyone else has noticed this or had the same issue/poor luck. I have a 1080 ti (Founders), 2080 ti (Founders), 3080 ti (some shitty Aorus thing with a huge heat sink and a screen), and a 4090 (ASUS TUF). Every card that I’ve owned after that 1080 ti has had egregious coil whine when under just moderate load.

Is there any chance the fans on your current card are replaceable? Maybe you can get rid of the whine that way.

 

[AmpleApricots]

There's conformal coating spray for PCBs. Liberally applied to the coils/capacitors (see below) in question it can stop the whining. PlastiDip works better but also traps heat somewhat stronger so it depends on location.

It doesn't necessarily have to be inductors though, the ceramic capacitors you find on boards like this can resonate quite loudly often too, especially if they're cheap ceramic ones like Y5V. Replacing the offending capacitor with a higher quality X7R one can completely eliminate the whine. Fair warning though, this requires somewhat more advanced soldering skills. The easiest way to find which is the offending component is to make a tunnel (small rubber hose, straw, rolled up paper) and hold one end to your ear and the other to the places you suspect the noise to come from.

Might also be the fans. In my case I've removed the fans from my graphics card and have two high quality noctua ones blowing directly on it instead. It was practical in the way my case was built and is the quietest graphic card setup I ever had. Might not work for you. I also had to do some scripting to control the fans when the card is on/off. (They're so quiet, I don't bother with more advanced fan control beyond that and just run them at one constant speed)

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole 2]

Saving power is all about the race to sleep, most chips (especially x86) are most efficient in their idle, do-nothing states and the idea is to get them into these states as quick and much as possible. It might sound better to limit them to certain speeds or let cores idle permanently, but counter-intuitively, the computer might actually use more power that way because the remaining cores need to stay active longer at higher clocks to do the same work. That said, walling off the highest speeds, usually reached through some kind of "turbo boost technology" can save power as towards the end of the speed spectrum of a given silicon, the power consumption often raises quite dramatically for relatively little gain.

Part of the reason I did it was curiosity, the other was frustration with Win10's power modes. The power saver does what it says but I notice jerkiness as it adapts to what is going on. Like if I was to start scrolling this webpage after reading a post, for half a second it will stutter then scroll smoothly. UI in general feels less responsive in the same way UIs buttons and menus feel responsive when the system is under very heavy load and so on. But only for half a second. And only after every time it woke up from a low power state which was every five seconds. It was driving me insane.

 

[AgendaPoster]

curious if anyone else has noticed this or had the same issue/poor luck. I have a 1080 ti (Founders), 2080 ti (Founders), 3080 ti (some shitty Aorus thing with a huge heat sink and a screen), and a 4090 (ASUS TUF). Every card that I’ve owned after that 1080 ti has had egregious coil whine when under just moderate load. I’ve tried to undervolt all of the cards to no avail.

Am I just unlucky, or is there a build quality issue somewhere?

The fans are not responsible for coil whine, so don't bother.
Coil whine is loudest when the card runs at full usage and high fps at the same time, but some loads can produce whine at lower fps too. Cap the fps and keep it under the refresh rate and you should reduce it some, there are other more exotic ways to deal with it but I wouldn't bother.

 

[blablabla]

I decided to "upgrade" my GPU to an RX 580. Should be as easy as swapping it in, right?

1. 500w power supply shits itself 2 hours into testing.
2. Replace PSU, system is stable, but temps are getting too high.
3. I realize the card is too big for the case and is effectively blocking off airflow.
4. No coolers to throw on it so I dig out this fucking huge Corsair case and move all the hardware over.
5. Temps are great, start gaming.
6. My main monitor begins to flicker on and off inexplicably.
7. Remount GPU, triple check all connections. Nothing helps.
8. Start digging through shit online, realize the only display blanking is connected via DP.
9. Get into the autism of "certified" DP connectors and realize I only have generic shit.
10. Get pissed off.
11. Open up menu on the monitor, toggle off "DP 1.2", problem goes away.

I figured this would be a good half-step towards a new PC in a year or so, but after all this I'm just going to run this thing into the ground like I've done with every other PC I've had. I'm NOT going through this vague troubleshooting shit again because I added ONE new part. Can't imagine all the stuff you have to do with a 100% new build.

i upgraded a r7260x into the 590 and didnt have a single trouble

 

[Dr. Geronimo]

What is the modern power equivalent to the i9-9900k? I haven't really paid attention to the cpu market so I'm curious where I stand these days

 

[Death of an Ego]

So, I've recently decided to upgrade to a new gaming desktop. I was originally going to go with an AMD setup for the first time in over a decade till I saw what the Raptor lake chips are capable of when you undervolt them to save on power. What I do doesn't require an absurd amount of processing power (occasional new AAA games, mostly older ones, no frequent hardcore number crunching, some here and there 4k video editing). I'm bringing a Silverstone 850 PSU and a GTX 1080 from the prior machine into the new build because they'll just work, and I'm not looking to upgrade either part for now. The Silverstone I bought just to have headroom in case a certain job came about which never materialized. What do you all think of the I5 vs the I7? I'm kinda leaning toward the I5, since it's powerful enough, but the I7 really isn't all that much more expensive for it's capabilities over the I5.

 

[The Ugly One]

So, I've recently decided to upgrade to a new gaming desktop. I was originally going to go with an AMD setup for the first time in over a decade till I saw what the Raptor lake chips are capable of when you undervolt them to save on power. What I do doesn't require an absurd amount of processing power (occasional new AAA games, mostly older ones, no frequent hardcore number crunching, some here and there 4k video editing). I'm bringing a Silverstone 850 PSU and a GTX 1080 from the prior machine into the new build because they'll just work, and I'm not looking to upgrade either part for now. The Silverstone I bought just to have headroom in case a certain job came about which never materialized. What do you all think of the I5 vs the I7? I'm kinda leaning toward the I5, since it's powerful enough, but the I7 really isn't all that much more expensive for it's capabilities over the I5.

I have an i9-12900, which is really similar to an i7-13700, and it barely gets used by anything I do. So it should be more than able to handle anything you throw at it for a very long time.

What is the modern power equivalent to the i9-9900k? I haven't really paid attention to the cpu market so I'm curious where I stand these days

According to PassMark, between recent i3s and i5s, so a little on the low end, but there are still brand-new CPUs that are a fair bit slower.