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On January 18 2015 08:44 skyR wrote:
Just minor improvements. Why not just RMA your motherboard? It should still be within warranty if you purchased from MSI, ASUS, or Gigabyte as they all have a three year warranty. If it's not under warranty then just purchase a new motherboard for under $80 and continue using your Core i5 4430.
I wish I had really bought those top 3 company boards but unfortunately I was on cheap budget and went with AsRock. When I emailed technical support they told me to go to the distributor (NCIX). I don't have my original receipt and NCIX wouldn't do anything about it so I'm stuck here using half dead mobo.
My friend is selling me his 4690k for cheap price so I wasn't sure whether to take the deal or not
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If you want to purchase a Z97, a heatsink, and overclock it then sure go for it, depending on the price. If you have no intention of overclocking it then no, just purchase a H97, H87, H81, or B85.
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GTX 960 is out, guys. It has half the shaders, ROPs, memory, and memory bus width of the GTX 980, for ~200 USD. Performance is overall roughly in the range of the R9 285 (better than GTX 760 but not by much) but with much less power consumption. Reviews in the usual places.
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Yea i think closer to 770 but it definitely falls short. OC is usual story ~low 1500's core on 1.2v (so you can just add 100-200mhz on the factory oc models with no increased voltage) and ~7500mhz with hynix RAM, ~8100 with samsung. Nothing special on price/performance, there is a bit of an nvidia/maxwell tax especially on the nonreference cards.
They're kinda doing the same thing as 600 series here; can probably expect a cut down gm204 as a 960ti (which could be 1.5x faster than 960, as that would only require 12 smm, 192 bit bus and would still fall short of the 970's 13 smm, 256 bit bus). With the 600 series, the gk106 was 660, and the lowest gk104 card was the 660ti (which was a great place to buy in for a powerful but still affordable gaming card)
With next "gen" (rehashed same tech/gpu's) we could probably expect this 960 as a 1050 or 1050ti and gm204 to fall into the real "1060" place to allow for a new gm200 "1080" (see 600 series rebadge into 700 series with gk110 gtx780 addition)
Also, MFAA support got expanded to almost all dx10/dx11 games, but i have not yet tested that out.
Of significant note, there seems to be a widespread problem with gtx970's not being able to use the last half gigabyte of memory correctly. There's a lot of debate about if it's actually a thing and how much it matters, but i've tested and read myself and am pretty sure it affects a significant portion of, if not all 970's.
![[image loading]](http://cdn.overclock.net/7/78/78ab3216_4vciohfw.png)
In some cases the card/driver just refuses to allocate the VRAM and pages to a hard drive instead of going past ~3550MB. My card does this; while a friend is able to make SOM use 3800-3900MB, my game either hard crashes (paging file disabled) or pages to my hard drive when trying to use VRAM intensive settings. It's obvious that there's a problem because VRAM bounces up and down within a small window (of like 3520 - 3560MB) exactly like when you allocate all of your memory with prime/linpack and it's being unallocated from places where it's not needed, and also windows pops up an error telling you that it's out of memory and you should close X program (the game) even though half of your system RAM is empty.
This has been ongoing for a week or so, no comment from Nvidia and seems to extend to ROP's/Cache.. If that's true, only 81.25% of the l2 cache and VRAM actually functions at usable speeds on 970's (as well as rop's)
On the subject of shit being broken, Samsung's fix for the 840 and 840 evo slowdown problem didn't actually work properly and many people are still having confirmed issues with the drives across a large range of hardware setups
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This is a build/rebuild request. Original build here
Giving the old build to a friend, new pc is priority but would like to have old PC remain usable for <$300 budget
What is your budget?
~$1200 for new pc
What is your monitor's native resolution?
1 at 1920x1080 1 at 1280 x 720
What games do you intend to play on this computer? What settings?
Everything as hard as I can. Plan on streaming a bunch since I no longer live on a farm and get my internet through a cell phone tower.
What do you intend to use the computer for besides gaming?
Audio/video production. Mobo needs firewire input for my recording interface.
Do you intend to overclock?
Most likely
Do you intend to do SLI / Crossfire?
If budget permits, yes, if not I] would like it to be ready minus the second gpu
Do you need an operating system?
Not sure yet. Don't know anything about which of 7-8 is more stable with xsplit/obs, and 10 is obviously unknown.
Do you need a monitor or any other peripherals and is this part of your budget?
have 2 32" monitors, need a webcam and I believe that's it. Razer Abyssus has been pretty reliable.
If you have any requirements or brand preferences, please specify.
No allegiance
What country will you be buying your parts in?
North Carolina, USA
If you have any retailer preferences, please specify.
None
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On January 23 2015 05:08 Cyro wrote:Yea i think closer to 770 but it definitely falls short. OC is usual story ~low 1500's core on 1.2v (so you can just add 100-200mhz on the factory oc models with no increased voltage) and ~7500mhz with hynix RAM, ~8100 with samsung. Nothing special on price/performance, there is a bit of an nvidia/maxwell tax especially on the nonreference cards. They're kinda doing the same thing as 600 series here; can probably expect a cut down gm204 as a 960ti (which could be 1.5x faster than 960, as that would only require 12 smm, 192 bit bus and would still fall short of the 970's 13 smm, 256 bit bus). With the 600 series, the gk106 was 660, and the lowest gk104 card was the 660ti (which was a great place to buy in for a powerful but still affordable gaming card) With next "gen" (rehashed same tech/gpu's) we could probably expect this 960 as a 1050 or 1050ti and gm204 to fall into the real "1060" place to allow for a new gm200 "1080" (see 600 series rebadge into 700 series with gk110 gtx780 addition) Also, MFAA support got expanded to almost all dx10/dx11 games, but i have not yet tested that out. Of significant note, there seems to be a widespread problem with gtx970's not being able to use the last half gigabyte of memory correctly. There's a lot of debate about if it's actually a thing and how much it matters, but i've tested and read myself and am pretty sure it affects a significant portion of, if not all 970's. In some cases the card/driver just refuses to allocate the VRAM and pages to a hard drive instead of going past ~3550MB. My card does this; while a friend is able to make SOM use 3800-3900MB, my game either hard crashes (paging file disabled) or pages to my hard drive when trying to use VRAM intensive settings. It's obvious that there's a problem because VRAM bounces up and down within a small window (of like 3520 - 3560MB) exactly like when you allocate all of your memory with prime/linpack and it's being unallocated from places where it's not needed, and also windows pops up an error telling you that it's out of memory and you should close X program (the game) even though half of your system RAM is empty. This has been ongoing for a week or so, no comment from Nvidia and seems to extend to ROP's/Cache.. If that's true, only 81.25% of the l2 cache and VRAM actually functions at usable speeds on 970's (as well as rop's) On the subject of shit being broken, Samsung's fix for the 840 and 840 evo slowdown problem didn't actually work properly and many people are still having confirmed issues with the drives across a large range of hardware setups
Was about to post this, that shit is pretty frustrating.
Also, I bought my brother an 840 EVO for christmas anticipating that the fix would work, pretty disappointing that it didn't
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Buying a 4GB VRAM card and only having 3.25GB or 3.5GB of it run at speeds usable for VRAM sucks. At least we know they could make a 960ti (3GB 192 bit with something like 12smm) and it would be only a hair weaker than 970 if that issue isn't fixed; not cutting the extra memory/rop's/cache etc or even memory bus from the 980 isn't very helpful if they're extremely slow in the rare scenario the the graphics card actually chooses to use them. Nvidia commented again that they are looking into it
+ Show Spoiler +
seems to affect 970 but gk110, gk104 cards run fine and even the mobile cut down gm204 is working correctly(?)
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Is it worth waiting for Intel's new generation CPUs this year?
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On January 24 2015 01:04 Cyro wrote:Buying a 4GB VRAM card and only having 3.25GB or 3.5GB of it run at speeds usable for VRAM sucks. At least we know they could make a 960ti (3GB 192 bit with something like 12smm) and it would be only a hair weaker than 970 if that issue isn't fixed; not cutting the extra memory/rop's/cache etc or even memory bus from the 980 isn't very helpful if they're extremely slow in the rare scenario the the graphics card actually chooses to use them. Nvidia commented again that they are looking into it + Show Spoiler +seems to affect 970 but gk110, gk104 cards run fine and even the mobile cut down gm204 is working correctly(?)
This was posted to /r/pcmasterrace earlier today.
http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/2tfybe/investigating_the_970_vram_issue/
''In conclusion: it really seems like that everything is fine - there was no performance drop in DA:I as the VRAM usage gradually rised from 3GB to 3,6 (according to my Nai's benchmark results, the "slow" area starts at 3200MiB, which is equal to 3355MB), Watch_Dogs ran at 4k with 4xmsaa at ~20-22 FPS, which is much better than I expected, and at 1440p with 8xmsaa at cinematic (~30-32) fps, with no stuttering that was present in 4k+4xmsaa due to VRAM being simply full.
And the most important part: GPU Usage was pretty much locked at 99% (except during sutters in w_d at 4k+4x), indicating that there was no bottlenecking in terms of memory bandwith suddenly becoming worse etc.''
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Allocated VRAM does not mean used VRAM. It's already a confirmed issue; he's just testing wrongly. If you insist on testing entirely with games, the best out there is probably Shadow of Mordor @ 1080p (high FPS, like 60-100) with over 3.5GB of VRAM used, but it refuses to allocate it at all for me even though it will on a 980 or 290.
He also used the benchmark wrongly, you're supposed to use it with the GPU being headless. Surprising how 90% of the people running it don't take the minute of work to boot to bios and back (if they disabled igpu) and move a dvi plug around even when it's posted pretty much everywhere that you need to do that for it not to give bad results (randomly slower than expected VRAM reported on any card)
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
On January 24 2015 22:52 darkness wrote:
Is it worth waiting for Intel's new generation CPUs this year?
If you care about a performance gap of about 10-20%. Skylake might use exclusively ddr4 also, which could mean that if you bought before it, you'd be buying ddr3 for the last cpu to use ddr3.
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Mobile Skylake will be using universal DIMM which will accommodate both DDR3 and DDR4 so there's always the possibility of this happening on the desktop side as well.
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On January 25 2015 02:48 Cyro wrote:
Allocated VRAM does not mean used VRAM. It's already a confirmed issue; he's just testing wrongly. If you insist on testing entirely with games, the best out there is probably Shadow of Mordor @ 1080p (high FPS, like 60-100) with over 3.5GB of VRAM used, but it refuses to allocate it at all for me even though it will on a 980 or 290.
He also used the benchmark wrongly, you're supposed to use it with the GPU being headless. Surprising how 90% of the people running it don't take the minute of work to boot to bios and back (if they disabled igpu) and move a dvi plug around even when it's posted pretty much everywhere that you need to do that for it not to give bad results (randomly slower than expected VRAM reported on any card)
Ah, okay. It's been more or less confirmed that this is not a hardware issue, right? A recall of 970 units won't be required I have read (not an official Nvidia post however.)
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
On January 25 2015 03:27 Thalandros wrote:Show nested quote +On January 25 2015 02:48 Cyro wrote:
Allocated VRAM does not mean used VRAM. It's already a confirmed issue; he's just testing wrongly. If you insist on testing entirely with games, the best out there is probably Shadow of Mordor @ 1080p (high FPS, like 60-100) with over 3.5GB of VRAM used, but it refuses to allocate it at all for me even though it will on a 980 or 290.
He also used the benchmark wrongly, you're supposed to use it with the GPU being headless. Surprising how 90% of the people running it don't take the minute of work to boot to bios and back (if they disabled igpu) and move a dvi plug around even when it's posted pretty much everywhere that you need to do that for it not to give bad results (randomly slower than expected VRAM reported on any card) Ah, okay. It's been more or less confirmed that this is not a hardware issue, right? A recall of 970 units won't be required I have read (not an official Nvidia post however.)
It's been confirmed that there is an issue, unknown if it's hardware side or just something like bios (or even driver). That thread has so much misinformation in it (kinda as usual pcmr has a lot of people who kinda have some idea what they are talking about, but very far from well informed enthusiasts) so just default to the OCN thread~ There are also a lot of people browsing there, as it's very popular/mainstream, who don't know the difference between a good answer and a bad answer so while there's some good stuff, a lot of awful posts or stuff that completely misses the point gets high standings.
http://www.overclock.net/t/1535502/gtx-970s-can-only-use-3-5gb-of-4gb-vram-issue/#post_23452483
He even starts off with this One of the things I've noticed is that people with different GPUs (Titan, 670, 980) were reporting similar results.
While reading what different people were reporting about the issue, I've noticed that one of the users said that the benchmark is meant to be ran in headless mode (with the screen being connected to iGPU) due to VRAM usage being anything other than 0 negatively affecting the results - something that isn't exactly mentioned a lot, and I'm willing to bet that a lot of you (and me) ran it "as is" and got incorrect scores.
which he shouldn't have to in the first place because the only results accepted by people actually discussing the issue and not just jumping on the bandwagon were headless ones in the first place since like 2 days ago
On January 25 2015 03:11 skyR wrote:
Mobile Skylake will be using universal DIMM which will accommodate both DDR3 and DDR4 so there's always the possibility of this happening on the desktop side as well.
source?
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United Kingdom20326 Posts
Cool thanks
From Nvidia:
The GeForce GTX 970 is equipped with 4GB of dedicated graphics memory. However the 970 has a different configuration of SMs than the 980, and fewer crossbar resources to the memory system. To optimally manage memory traffic in this configuration, we segment graphics memory into a 3.5GB section and a 0.5GB section. The GPU has higher priority access to the 3.5GB section. When a game needs less than 3.5GB of video memory per draw command then it will only access the first partition, and 3rd party applications that measure memory usage will report 3.5GB of memory in use on GTX 970, but may report more for GTX 980 if there is more memory used by other commands.
http://techreport.com/news/27721/nvidia-admits-explains-geforce-gtx-970-memory-allocation-issue
So for games that might hit 3.5GB - 4GB allocated, not such a big deal. If you're trying to use the VRAM for something that requires high bandwidth like maybe a non-game application, only ~3.25 (or 3.5? it's very unclear) GB runs at anywhere near full speed
i'm a bit skeptical of those test results because they are official and games can easily allocate for example 3600MB while only using 3200MB heavily. Bandwidth loss doesn't show unless you're trying to access stuff in the low bandwidth area. There could be scenario's where much bigger losses are shown, so the 970 should be treated as a card with 3.25GB or 3.5GB accessible and fast VRAM, with the rest only being used as support.
There's also confusion over why sometimes they outright refuse to allocate the extra VRAM, sticking at around 3400-3600MB and then paging to a hard drive, before throwing low memory errors in windows and crashing the game if the paging file is disabled or very small.
When a game needs less than 3.5GB of video memory per draw command then it will only access the first partition
Actually i guess that explains it. It's still not perfect though; why leave half a gigabyte of memory empty while paging to a HDD?
What is the source of this staement? Which person or department issued this?
I was speaking to Nvidia tech support moments ago and they say the issue is still under investigation and they are trying to find a solution.
They also said directly that they know nothing of this statement and that any information would also be posted on their site/forum.
Also, if true, that confirms that 970's are just stuck with an effective ~208 bit bus. They have substantially less memory bandwidth than 770 even though they perform ~55-70% stronger.
At least it makes upgrade to full gm200 more appealing; at the rumored 24 smm, 384 bit specs, the uncut chip would be ~84.6% faster than the 970 in every way.
Nvidia seemingly incorrectly lists the memory bandwidth of the 970 to be the same as the 980 on their website.
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On January 25 2015 04:35 Cyro wrote:Nvidia seemingly incorrectly lists the memory bandwidth of the 970 to be the same as the 980 on their website.
Are you sure? If the bus is 256 bits and is fully operational, it is what it is. End-to-end throughput is something else.
It doesn't mean that resources behind the bus to handle and access the memory is the same as on the GTX 980 or anything else.
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Is this good?
Build
+
Solid
+
cooler
My understanding is that I can get another 970 of the same type at any time later on if I want/need to double up? (granted I'm not exactly sure how likely this is, considering I'm already multiplying my current capabilities by a factor of 4)
Also there's this 3 item combo
that replaces the original 2x4gb ram in my build with 1 8gb stick. Is it worth it for like -$30 and what is the effective difference between the two?
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On January 25 2015 06:56 Jormundr wrote:+ Show Spoiler +Is this good? Build+ Solid+ coolerMy understanding is that I can get another 970 of the same type at any time later on if I want/need to double up? (granted I'm not exactly sure how likely this is, considering I'm already multiplying my current capabilities by a factor of 4)
All retail motherboards include SATA cables, you do not need to buy additional SATA cables for one drive.
You need a 4690k to overclock.
650w variant of the Capstone is more than sufficient for SLI GTX 970.
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EPT![[image loading]](http://puu.sh/eVpXJ/4669b218bd.png)
