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United Kingdom20326 Posts
The only thing I'm wondering about is thermal paste between the i5 and the Noctua, but I'm sure there's something here on the TL forums about it. (I vaguely recall a "grain of rice" method.) And of course, youtube and google.
For the love of god don't youtube or google it, ask here or on an enthusiast overclocking site.
It's one of those things where "normal" people won't care at all if their CPU is 5c or even 10c hotter than it's supposed to be, so everybody self validates by it not exploding and shows the world their terrible way of applying 15x too much paste.
Good overclockers are the only people who actually have any idea what they are doing 99% of the time there, because they care about 2-5c temp drops (it won't be more than 5 unless you really mess it up, sadly i see that a lot) enough to learn the basic physics and idea behind using thermal paste.
TL;DR is line shape top to bottom, as little paste as possible to cover the die area
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Following my RAM question, I've decided to upgrade the whole package (I already bought some RAM though)
What is your current build?
PSU : Corsair GX650w
Motherboard : Asus P7H55 (socket 1156)
CPU: i7-870 @3,73GHz (OC'd)
Heatsink cooler master hyper 212 with 2 fans (push-pull) (IIRC, socket 1156 and 1150 can use the same heatsinks ?)
RAM: 14 GB (8GB + 3*2GB) DDR3-1600 CL10 1.5V (running at DDR3-1360 because of the OC)
GPU : PNY Geforce GTX 660 OC + PNY Geforce 460 1GB OC (second one is not in yet, because I don't have any available PCIEx16 port on the motherboard)
SSD: OCZ vertex PLUS 60GB
HDDs : 3 * seagate Barracuda : 2*500GB, 1*320GB
2 SATA DVD reader/burner
Case doesn't matter much, since pretty much everything is outside of it because of the lack of place, and it's permanently open
What is your monitor's native resolution?
2 * 1920*1080
1 * 1680*1050
Why do you want to upgrade? What do you want to achieve with the upgrade?
I want to put that 2nd GPU to some use (f.ex, discharge the 2 monitors I don't use for gaming on the 460 while keeping the main one on the 660. I think you can use it as a separate physx processor too)
That means I need a 2-PCIE-port mobo, so I'll upgrade the processor at the same time.
I'd like to keep an i7, since I often run multiple VMs so the added threads are quite useful.
I will overclock the CPU.
Maybe a real case too.
What is your budget?
Around 500€, up to 700 if necessary
What country will you be buying your parts in?
France, online is not a problem though.
If you have any brand or retailer preferences, please specify.
I'd prefer an Asus board, but I can be convinced to change. ATX mobo, no mATX
Summary/conclusion :
I'm looking for a mobo with 2 PCIE slots, if possible SLI in case I buy a (or several) new GPU, and a i7 to go with it
When I bought my current setup, the overclocking was made mainly using BCLK and not CPU multiplier, so the k editions (I'm not even sure they existed) weren't that interesting. From what I can gather here, it isn't the case anymore.
If someone knows an interesting/good looking <=100€ ATX case, let me know too !
If something was awfully wrong in my previous build, I'd like to know that too
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
I want to put that 2nd GPU to some use (f.ex, discharge the 2 monitors I don't use for gaming on the 460 while keeping the main one on the 660. I think you can use it as a separate physx processor too)
I don't think that's actually of much use, dunno about Physx but there's little trouble with additional monitors these days.
How hard do you want to push the CPU?
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I plan to get a 2nd 660 for SLI sometimes soon anyway, but it breaks my heart to have that card on my desk and not be able to use it :/ I should sell it, but I don't think it'd go for more than ~50€ so I'm not that interested, I'd rather build a new rig with the old (actually, current since I haven't upgraded yet) parts and sell it as a whole to my friends who don't know/want to know how to build a PC
I pushed the current one to 3.9 (last stable clock with acceptable vcore), then dialed back a bit just to be sure, so I'm looking to do the same thing : push it as far as I can then settle for a bit lower for everyday use.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
You can't do that with ivy bridge and Haswell very easily because thermal limits are a problem before voltage is, particularly with i7 and low end cooling like a hyper 212
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On December 01 2013 19:45 skyR wrote:
If you bought Intel then the CPU lever is going to take a bit of force and is going to make a very scary sound which is completely normal.
Common mistake for rookies is forgetting to plug in the 4+4pin connector near the CPU socket and forgetting to plug in the PCIe connectors for the video card.
First part is totally true; it's also rendered even MORE scary when you also make the second mistake. This happened to me. On my motherboard there is only a single 4 pin connector for the CPU, I plugged in the wrong connector and had a very unpleasant 10 minutes trying to troubleshoot the problem, having no experience assembling PCs beforehand.
If I have one piece of advice, it's to assemble your PC in this order:
1. PSU into case
2. CPU and cooler into motherboard, then RAM into motherboard
3. Motherboard into case, plug everything you can (24 pin connector for motherboard, 2x4 pin connector for CPU, etc)
Then connect monitor to motherboard, plug in PSU and test boot the system. You should enter the BIOS and have some sort of message saying that there's no bootable device.
Personally I know that if I hadn't test booted the system in the way I just described, I would have had to disassemble everything (including HDD and graphics card), which would have taken a lot of time, just to fix the very simple mistake I made.
Edit: I thought that the best way to apply thermal paste was a single dot in the middle, the size of a pea.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
2. CPU and cooler into motherboard, then RAM into motherboard
RAM first for some bigger heatsinks
Edit: I thought that the best way to apply thermal paste was a single dot in the middle, the size of a pea.
That's quite simple and hard to get completely wrong, but kinda covers the entire IHS instead of just the part you need. For fighting for a few degrees i'd always do line top to bottom without enough to reach the very top after spreading (looks like a ricegrain) or spread out more than oval-shaped
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/JDBkPMpl.jpg)
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On December 01 2013 22:12 Cyro wrote:
You can't do that with ivy bridge and Haswell very easily because thermal limits are a problem before voltage is, particularly with i7 and low end cooling like a hyper 212
Shit, they've become THAT good ? Time to invest in some real cooling then (and add more money)
If I go up to 700€, can I get some good cooling with it ?
EDIT : I looked at the prices quickly, I think it'll be fine. I just have absolutely no idea which cooling is good at the moment :/
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Shit, they've become THAT good ?
Not really. There's a manufacturing defect that increases temperatures by ~20c.. without it, they're not in too bad spot, especially i5. It's just hard to use ~1.3-1.4v with hyperthreading because it adds significant power draw and temperatures too
If I go up to 700€, can I get some good cooling with it ?
Easily, it's just a question of it you want to pay to step up probably 100-300mhz on the cpu, some examples would be thermalright hr-02 macho or silver arrow (which are usually priced well in europe), or if you want to go all-out without custom water, a closed loop liquid cooler in push/pull (example; h100i with four sp120 fans added) but that's a noisier, significantly more expensive option without too good returns - It's a go-to if you really want those last 5 degrees. I like the higher end air options around 65 euro.
The type of overclock you'll actually get depends a lot on the chip and luck, but especially with i7 you can push further with better cooling.
4.5ghz HT on and 4.7ghz HT off gives me the same temperatures, even though the second option is at ~1.36v and the first is at ~1.25v. They're both about as hot as i'd want the chip to be running 24/7* (low 70's average encoding, peak ~80, hotter under extreme stresses) with silver arrow, ok airflow and normal uk ambients. Depending on the chip, 1.25v can be either 4.3ghz or 4.8, realistically.
We know more about Haswell than we did 3 or 6 months ago, it was pretty wild on release, but they're good chips (good step up from sandy bridge; just not amazing, unless you like RAM clocks**) and OC is somewhat figured out at this point, which is nice. It took a lot longer than sandy/ivy bridge
*People run hotter all the time, i don't think there's much point overclocking to leave your average temp in the 60's - the throttle point is 100c and the chips can handle quite a lot
**Ivy bridge often found itself IMC limited around ~2200-2400mhz, Piledriver has poorer memory performance. Haswell's the only CPU arch where you can buy a 2x4gb $63 kit from newegg and clock it to 2800c12 24/7 and get a significant performance improvement, in the leagues of like 5% over 1600c9 in some benches and cpu bound tasks
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I'll stay with air cooling for now I think, maybe in a few years if I build a top-end config I'll do custom water (by that time I hope I'll be knowledgeable enough to choose it by myself) but for now it's more noise than I'd like. This system is currently quite silent, the GPU is noisier than the CPU anyway
I have heatsinks on my ram sticks (I don't even know why I did that), so the silver arrow seems impossible, the HR-02 seems a bit better but I'm still afraid it'll be difficult to install.
Thanks for your values, I got unlucky with the previous chip, it seems many people had better clocks with lower voltages than me, maybe karma will be nice with me this time 
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
On December 01 2013 23:19 Natolumin wrote:I'll stay with air cooling for now I think, maybe in a few years if I build a top-end config I'll do custom water (by that time I hope I'll be knowledgeable enough to choose it by myself) but for now it's more noise than I'd like. This system is currently quite silent, the GPU is noisier than the CPU anyway I have heatsinks on my ram sticks (I don't even know why I did that), so the silver arrow seems impossible, the HR-02 seems a bit better but I'm still afraid it'll be difficult to install. Thanks for your values, I got unlucky with the previous chip, it seems many people had better clocks with lower voltages than me, maybe karma will be nice with me this time
GL! 
![[image loading]](http://cdn.overclock.net/3/33/338c40db_AMD-Carrizo-APU-Desktop-Roadmap.png)
Wow AMD, this is getting pretty sad
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So I should just get the 4770K + any Z87-based mobo that has the features I'm looking for, along with the cooling you recommended.
No other potential surprise I should be aware of ?
EDIT : is "this is getting pretty sad" related to the fact that everything new is an integrated SOC from now on ?
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
The FX-8350 was a competitor to the Ivy Bridge i5, they've since offered nothing to beat their 4-module-8-thread CPU's and they'll have the same flagship for 38 months, minimum, based on that official roadmap - which hurts a lot. No new CPU for three and a half years is insane, even with the slower paces recently. Their only offerings in the foreseeable future are APU's to undercut the cost of an i5 paired with a discrete graphics card for the lower end market
So I should just get the 4770K + any Z87-based mobo that has the features I'm looking for, along with the cooling you recommended.
Yea i guess so (ask others here), z87x-d3h is a good option, the implementation of adaptive voltage (800mhz core and very low idle vcore) is much better on gigabyte than asus (where using adaptive will give you significantly less control over your vcore at load) and there's also some question for asus boards handling VRIN and killing chips when pushing them hard (due to board spiking VRIN which becomes dangerous if it's initially high to stabilize a higher OC). Shouldn't be a problem if you're not pushing chip close to limits and i don't have much data on it, but Belial keeps bringing it up.
You can make pretty much any z87 board work though
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Smaller than black (though depends a lot on the paste), it squishes out to be many times the height and width. I just did half a dozen mounts and looked at paste left over after my first one (being cautious) had still more than optimal
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Ah so it's as I imagined it to be, a true grain of rice.
Thanks
edit: i'm a bit bored so i decided to do some reading. found this picture of a haswell die map for quad core:
http://images.anandtech.com/doci/7003/Screen Shot 2013-05-31 at 7.59.16 PM_575px.png
is it normal that the processor graphics take up that much room? that's the part for integrated graphics (ie the part that we don't use with our dedicated GPUs)?
if so, isn't that a big waste of space?
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What do you mean by normal? On the quad-core APU models from AMD, it's even more of the space. Yes, it costs money (a little extra money for Intel to manufacture; or alternatively, think of it as space not being dedicated to two more CPU cores), and yes, people have been bitching about Intel doing it since Sandy Bridge.
+ Show Spoiler [die map for Trinity] +
Regardless of this handicap and also how much larger the AMD FX chips are (no integrated graphics; 319 mm^2 as opposed to 177 mm^2, on larger process size), the Intel ones are still better and priced accordingly.
For a lot of users, the integrated graphics is worthwhile. Honestly, it doesn't cost all that much for Intel to put in there. If you want the whole chip to be CPU and various controller and non-GPU support hardware, you can buy Ivy Bridge-E or server chips.
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Yeah I definitely saw it as space not being used for 2 more cores, I also didn't except it to be that big in terms of overall surface area. Or maybe "larger" cores but let's be honest I know jackshit about CPU architecture so for all I know I'm suggesting using baking soda to cook an omelette here.
That said, when you think about it, integrated graphics is a good thing to have (things like test-booting, what happens if your GPU dies, or for builds that don't require a GPU at all, etc), I guess more is gained having the integrated graphics there than by not. Let's just say I was surprised that it would take up that much room given the overall importance it has compared to the cores and memory controllers.
Edit: yeah something like this indeed: http://www.bjorn3d.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/5.jpg
That looks pretty beefy, didn't check prices but it's probably also a lot more expensive than every the 4770k.
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I think in Intel's view it is also quite important.
You know that performance roughly scales (linearly) with area for GPUs, right? To have reasonable integrated graphics performance, they need to give it some respect and size, unlike what they did several years ago.
You can't really make larger CPU cores without a redesign of parts. And it wouldn't be much larger anyway unless you're duplicating stuff to such an extent that it's more efficient and makes more sense to just put more CPU cores instead. I guess an easy way to increase size would be adding more cache in various places, but that could increase latencies, and there's kind of diminishing returns anyway even if that weren't true.
Most of the parts take as much space as needed. GPU cores and maybe memory in general are the only things that really scale well in terms of usefulness the more area you give them.
So it's really about not having two more CPU cores, if anything... for whatever that is worth to people. For just testing / backup you could have a pretty small integrated graphics section; the size is for performance not to be good enough for casual gaming or older games.
edit: current-gen available i7-3930k is $450, yeah. That's after some heavy price drops. The price is whatever Intel wants to set and people will buy if they need the e-peen or need to work with that many cores at that performance level. Still costs less for Intel to make than one of those FX-8350 processors for AMD.
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On December 02 2013 02:21 Myrmidon wrote:
I think in Intel's view it is also quite important.
You know that performance roughly scales (linearly) with area for GPUs, right? To have reasonable integrated graphics performance, they need to give it some respect and size, unlike what they did several years ago.
You can't really make larger CPU cores without a redesign of parts. And it wouldn't be much larger anyway unless you're duplicating stuff to such an extent that it's more efficient and makes more sense to just put more CPU cores instead. I guess an easy way to increase size would be adding more cache in various places, but that could increase latencies, and there's kind of diminishing returns anyway even if that weren't true.
Most of the parts take as much space as needed. GPU cores and maybe memory in general are the only things that really scale well in terms of usefulness the more area you give them.
So it's really about not having two more CPU cores, if anything... for whatever that is worth to people. For just testing / backup you could have a pretty small integrated graphics section; the size is for performance not to be good enough for casual gaming or older games.
edit: current-gen available i7-3930k is $450, yeah. That's after some heavy price drops. The price is whatever Intel wants to set and people will buy if they need the e-peen or need to work with that many cores at that performance level. Still costs less for Intel to make than one of those FX-8350 processors for AMD.
Ahh, that was pretty informative, thank you very much! I didn't know that that GPU performance scales with area, in fact I did the opposite, supposing that CPU performance scaled with area. In which case it's a good call to give the integrated graphics that much space, I guess. Especially since CPU cores don't scale with area and especially since most people don't need more than 4 cores for most stuff.
I'm more surprised that you can get larger CPU cores without redesigning the core itself. The answer as to why that's the case is probably too complicated for me to understand so I'll just leave it at that. Pretty interesting all this stuff really. It also somewhat explains why intel does tick tock the way it does. Meaning, first they reduce size on already existing architecture, then they re-do the architecture at that size, then they reduce.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/uBYocxcl.jpg)
