Meltdown and Spectre turning off protection

alex12

Honorable
Feb 18, 2013
18
0
10,510
HI I'm in a bit of a pickle with my i7 4930k, so I have had the meltdown protection for awhile and I did notice a small performance drop in some games and what not but now recently spectre protection has been added and its a huge drop in performance literally ruining game play especially in cpu intensive games, so much so i used inspectre to disable the protections.


So what i came here to ask is just how dangerious it really is for an average user to disable these protections and regain performance on an ageing cpu?
 
Solution
Well, we don't really know yet. I'm sure someone out there are trying to make the exploits to attack those who don't update. Whether it happens what the results of that are we just don't know yet.

The newer CPU's still have the issues in the same way the older gen do. Apart form the new Coffee lake refresh which most likely have the fixes at a hardware level and incorporated in to the CPU design.

Getting back to the issues, your system seems very capable still. Was HEDT in it's day. So, i'd expect it's possibly a HD/SSD issue. You've plenty of ram, PSU is prob very decent, and CPU is still a monster.

Use windows task manager, and the performance tab, and monitor your disk usage whilst doing some gaming (maybe have a game windowed so...
TBH, I'm not sure where you see the small performance drop, and in what games. You need to be a bit more precise. The updates for spectre and meltdown, have practically no effect on gaming as has been covered here on Tom's own article: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-performance-meltdown-spectre-intel-amd,5457-6.html

I suspect you have something else going on, maybe high HD/SSD usage, ram maxing out (game dependent)

Please list your PC specs and also advise what you have used to determine there is a 'small performance drop'.

Use something like HWMon/info to monitor CPU/GPU usage/temps/voltage so we can see whats going on. Best to do this while gaming, and alt-tab out of the game and post a screenshot of your hardware at load.


Meltdown and Spectre can have a performance hit, specially on internal storage, but this mostly in benchmarks etc

 

alex12

Honorable
Feb 18, 2013
18
0
10,510
well I'm pretty sure most of those CPUs listed in the article are a lot newer than mine doesn't that mean they get less affected?

I'm going to do some more tests and get back to you because like you I'm not 100% certain the spectre patch was the cause I'm just assuming because I noticed performance drops around the same time as the patch.


the rest of my specs are

ASUS rampage iv black
16gb ddr3@2133
1200 corsair PSU
multiple SSD's one HDD
RTX 2080ti
corsair h100i cooling
 
Well, we don't really know yet. I'm sure someone out there are trying to make the exploits to attack those who don't update. Whether it happens what the results of that are we just don't know yet.

The newer CPU's still have the issues in the same way the older gen do. Apart form the new Coffee lake refresh which most likely have the fixes at a hardware level and incorporated in to the CPU design.

Getting back to the issues, your system seems very capable still. Was HEDT in it's day. So, i'd expect it's possibly a HD/SSD issue. You've plenty of ram, PSU is prob very decent, and CPU is still a monster.

Use windows task manager, and the performance tab, and monitor your disk usage whilst doing some gaming (maybe have a game windowed so you can have the two side by side ) this way you can watch disk usage on the fly.
 
Solution

alex12

Honorable
Feb 18, 2013
18
0
10,510
Thanks for the answer that's pretty much what I wanted to know and I guess monitoring things is the only way I can figure out exactly what's going on. Thanks again
 


Okay. Best of luck.

I use HWmon for my system monitoring, and MSI Afterburner OSD to manage some simple on screen metrics whilst gaming. That way you can literally watch everything on the fly.