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Core i7-4790K Overclocked to 7003.38 MHz on ASRock Z97 OC Formula

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June 18, 2014 5:30:21 AM

wow. :o 
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June 18, 2014 5:30:34 AM

Sustainable or not, there is not much point in overclocking an i7 to 7GHz if you are going to have to disable half of its core and HT to get there... you basically have a very expensive Pentium-K at this point.
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June 18, 2014 5:39:48 AM

Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.
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June 18, 2014 5:47:34 AM

WOW the 1.792v is pretty insane... I'm curious how stable this chip is running @ 7Ghz... Would love to see some benchmarks...
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June 18, 2014 6:18:56 AM

Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


I wouldn't call it holding back, but it degrades the chip and shortens the life of the CPU. Not exactly a good thing..
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June 18, 2014 6:19:03 AM

Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.
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June 18, 2014 6:47:55 AM

CaptainTom said:
Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.


What game(s) utilize more than 4 cores efficiently?
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June 18, 2014 6:50:36 AM

Quote:
Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.


I would like to see a stock i7 compete against an OC i7 lol. Even with Hyper Threading disabled. I have a 2600 too @ 4.3 and I really don't see any reason to upgrade.

And this overclock to 7ghz, who cares, its not stable, you can't use it. If it were 5.5 or 6ghz and underwater and stable for daily use with low temps, I would be very excited. I like practicality and usability, those are most important IMHO.
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June 18, 2014 6:59:13 AM

Quote:
Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.


You do know that hyper-threading actually decreases FPS in games, right? Look it up before commenting...
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June 18, 2014 7:28:31 AM

Quote:
CaptainTom said:
Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.


What game(s) utilize more than 4 cores efficiently?


Guild Wars 2 is the big one here... my friend upgraded his i5 to an i7 3770k, and running that at stock speeds against my i5 2500k (4.4 Ghz), he gets about 30% more FPS than I do. Sure that shows that the game has some coding inefficiencies, but still, I just wanna play my game
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June 18, 2014 7:37:17 AM

Hyper-threading will improve performance in some games, others it won’t do as-well. But we are talking old games; most these days are using 4+ cores. However most are slowly moving most things off the CPU to the GPU. The CPU is slowly becoming more of a data director over actually computing things.

In all honesty the only real reason to upgrade the CPU is for more bandwidth and PCI lanes. I’d say the best place to look at speeding stuff up is the GPU memory size/bandwidth utilization and storage. Most cards haven’t come close to touching the bandwidth that the PCI-E can provide. And storage devices are still fairly slow even the new M.2 standard is fairly slow in the grand scheme of things.
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June 18, 2014 7:37:28 AM

slykrysis said:
You do know that hyper-threading actually decreases FPS in games, right? Look it up before commenting...

You might want to look at BF3/BF4, Watch Dogs and other higher-end game benchmarks.

HT has a SLIGHT negative impact on single-threaded games but also has a significant positive impact on more heavily threaded games and applications.
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June 18, 2014 8:28:14 AM

Quote:
I would like to see a stock i7 compete against an OC i7 lol. ...


Which model of i7, and what benchmark tests are you interested in?

Ian.

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June 18, 2014 8:39:56 AM

This is completely pointless if you have to cripple the CPU just to hit a number, can it even bench? play games? or is it just to say you got to XXXX number without crashing? Total mhz doesn't really mean anything to me anymore, unless it's fully functional and can be sustained I just don't care and thus no this wouldn't impact which brand of board I buy next.
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June 18, 2014 8:40:16 AM

R.I.P. normal electricity bill :( 
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June 18, 2014 8:50:26 AM

pills161 said:
can it even bench? play games?

Most likely not since they already need to disable HT and two cores just to get the thing to boot into Windows.

I wish OCing contests required that overclocks be Prime95-stable for 10 minutes to qualify... and have separate categories for fully-enabled CPUs and completely unrestricted crippling.
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June 18, 2014 9:17:42 AM

InvalidError said:
I wish OCing contests required that overclocks be Prime95-stable for 10 minutes to qualify...


Even better, 10 mins stable using 1344 and 1792 FFTs. :D  I've seen oc's which are fine at default settings
with P95 but don't last 5 mins at these sizes. Good idea about the categories aswell.

Ian.



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June 18, 2014 9:29:21 AM

Hyper threading haters.. LOL

Dont comment if you dont understand the tech.


im curious if they get diminishing returns on performance as clock speed increases. At what point is it not worth it?
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June 18, 2014 10:08:57 AM

Impressive! These kinds of things don't affect my buying decisions at all. Hardware is so powerful these days that even stock machines from a few years ago are far more than adequate for generally all consumer tasks; including modern "extreme" gaming where most of the load is off-loaded to the graphics hardware anyways. For the most part, the money spent on things like this is either for personal challenge, or to impress your friends on the forums. Nothing wrong with that, but not a purchasing decision for me!
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June 18, 2014 10:13:15 AM

Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


Yepper! I found better FPS with HT disabled and a higher clock speed than having HT enabled. Even BF4 was tested. But yet again I do have high video card bandwidth.

LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.


You do know that hyper-threading actually decreases FPS in games, right? Look it up before commenting...

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June 18, 2014 10:14:12 AM

Although:

Quote:
... it's always nice to see how close the hardware can be pushed before reaching its breaking point


To me it seems if you have to disable the majority of the features to have it run for any amount of time, you've exceeded its breaking point.

Otherwise, by that logic, a 100GHz crystal attached to nothing at all qualifies as an "overclocking record with some features disabled" - "some features" being all of them...
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June 18, 2014 10:20:00 AM

firefoxx04 said:
im curious if they get diminishing returns on performance as clock speed increases. At what point is it not worth it?

Probably sooner than most people think with on real-world apps and games due to the amount of background stuff the extra cores and hardware threads (vs the 2C2T i7 @ 7GHz) can take care of even if the application or game itself is only lightly threaded.

Also, the bigger the gap between the CPU cores' speed and the un-core and external IO is, the more time the (remaining) cores will spend just waiting for off-core stuff to happen. Instead of waiting for ~60 cycles on a cache line miss at 4GHz, you now wait 100+ cycles at 7GHz and this penalty will likely happen more often as well. This means more execution slots not getting filled because the scheduler is stalled waiting for data.

Overclocking contests may produce impressive numbers but they are not very useful beyond that.
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June 18, 2014 11:44:13 AM

firefoxx04 said:
Hyper threading haters.. LOL

Dont comment if you dont understand the tech.


Indeed; the old version of HT in the old days didn't work very well, but today there aren't
may apps that don't benefit from it to some degree.

Ian.



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June 18, 2014 11:56:18 AM

Quote:
firefoxx04 said:
Hyper threading haters.. LOL

Dont comment if you dont understand the tech.


Indeed; the old version of HT in the old days didn't work very well, but today there aren't
may apps that don't benefit from it to some degree.

It's not just the old HT that's improved: back in the day, WinXP didn't know how to park threads properly and your single-threaded game could camp on a crap HT "core." Win7 (and to a better extent, Win8) can differentiate and utilize real cores over HT cores whenever available. The HT haters are still stuck in 2002.
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June 18, 2014 12:33:36 PM

yarmock said:
CaptainTom said:
Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.


What game(s) utilize more than 4 cores efficiently?


Man it's a long list: BF3 & 4 , BFH, Crysis 3, Metro: Last Light, Watchdogs, and literally every big game that comes out these days. Go read the review of the new unlocked pentium. It was overclocked to 4.6 GHz and still narrowly lost to an i3 clocked substantially lower. Hyper-Threading gives a 50% boost in performance when used. But yeah go ahead and use double the energy instead lol.
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June 18, 2014 12:38:20 PM

ammaross said:
Quote:
firefoxx04 said:
Hyper threading haters.. LOL

Dont comment if you dont understand the tech.


Indeed; the old version of HT in the old days didn't work very well, but today there aren't
may apps that don't benefit from it to some degree.

It's not just the old HT that's improved: back in the day, WinXP didn't know how to park threads properly and your single-threaded game could camp on a crap HT "core." Win7 (and to a better extent, Win8) can differentiate and utilize real cores over HT cores whenever available. The HT haters are still stuck in 2002.


Or trying to double justify their purchase of an i5 instead of an i7. I mean it is $100 cheaper for a reason people so don't be surprised in 1 year when your 290X CF becomes massively bottlenecked...
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June 18, 2014 12:50:06 PM

CaptainTom said:
Or trying to double justify their purchase of an i5 instead of an i7. I mean it is $100 cheaper for a reason people so don't be surprised in 1 year when your 290X CF becomes massively bottlenecked...


Oc'ing the i5 can make up for the disparity to some extent of course, but yes there comes a point where
the gain from HT would help, and then the i7 can be oc'd too. 5GHz guaranteed = ASUS M4E + 2700K
(I've built five of these combos so far).

Having more proper cores would be even better though. That's what I meant by X58 not historically
feeling like an extreme high-end chipset because of the availability of several 6-core options, and
since oc'ing was mainly by bclk, lesser cost chips such as the i7 970 meant access to 6-core
wasn't crazy expensive.

Given the CPU loading of modern games, Z97 deserves a 6-core option IMO. No reason why
Intel couldn't do that.

Ian.

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June 18, 2014 12:58:55 PM

mapesdhs said:
CaptainTom said:
Or trying to double justify their purchase of an i5 instead of an i7. I mean it is $100 cheaper for a reason people so don't be surprised in 1 year when your 290X CF becomes massively bottlenecked...


Oc'ing the i5 can make up for the disparity to some extent of course, but yes there comes a point where
the gain from HT would help, and then the i7 can be oc'd too. 5GHz guaranteed = ASUS M4E + 2700K
(I've built five of these combos so far).

Having more proper cores would be even better though. That's what I meant by X58 not historically
feeling like an extreme high-end chipset because of the availability of several 6-core options, and
since oc'ing was mainly by bclk, lesser cost chips such as the i7 970 meant access to 6-core
wasn't crazy expensive.

Given the CPU loading of modern games, Z97 deserves a 6-core option IMO. No reason why
Intel couldn't do that.

Ian.



I would agree with you on that for sure. All they would need to do is remove the uses integrated graphics and place to more cores in their place. The TDP would probably be ~125-140w but who cares?

No they just want you to buy their crazy old "Premium" set-ups. The fact that their Ultra-High End line is always a year behind Architecturally puts them in direct competition with their cheaper and usually equally powerful lines.
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June 18, 2014 1:17:41 PM


Almost as if they create their own product crossover conflicts. Sure, a 6-core S1150 chip would
conflict with X79/X99 options, but that'd be entirely Intel's fault since they should have moved
X79 onto 8-core anyway (and let's face it, the 3930K was an 8-core, just with 2 cores disabled).
IMO HW-E should be 8 or 10 core, not 6 or 8. It's a whole step behind.

Even worse for those I've been talking to, I fear the max RAM will still only be 64GB, which isn't
enough these days for various pro tasks.

Ian.

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June 18, 2014 2:06:10 PM

mapesdhs said:
Indeed; the old version of HT in the old days didn't work very well, but today there aren't may apps that don't benefit from it to some degree.

HT on the P4 worked fine if you had software that actually used more than one active thread or were multi-tasking - on my P4, I was getting 20-30% extra performance from HT.

Intel's Haswell CPUs have twice as many execution units as my Northwood had and in some benchmarks, the i7 gains 50-70% extra performance from HT, which quite impressive.
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June 18, 2014 4:35:13 PM

So, the difference between the 8 and 9 series chipsets is more significant than a "meh". Guessing this is due to the new TIM. Going to pump the breaks on a new build until we see the next proc with using the Z97 boards but this is impressive
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June 18, 2014 4:54:21 PM

InvalidError said:
HT on the P4 worked fine if you had software that actually used more than one active thread or were multi-tasking - on my P4, I was getting 20-30% extra performance from HT.


Unfortunately, in other cases HT did slow things down (I tested this extensively with my Dell 650, dual-P4/2.66),
but even worse was the fact that so many P4 systems had rather slow RAM (266), a single-CPU Athlon64 with
400 RAM could easily beat a dual-P4, eg. see (tables later down the page):

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/misc/mysystemsummary.txt

For 3D tasks (tested with Oblivion), it wasn't too bad at medium detail, but at high detail performance would
take a nose dive on the P4 Dell, and check the general tests, the dual-P4 is far behind. The HT tests I did
are not mentioned on that page, but I do remember it only helping in a few cases, hurting in others, mostly
the latter. Mind you, as someone pointed out, this was with XP Pro so perhaps the OS didn't help matters.

Ian.

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June 18, 2014 5:17:29 PM

mapesdhs said:
but even worse was the fact that so many P4 systems had rather slow RAM (266), a single-CPU Athlon64 with 400 RAM could easily beat a dual-P4

Everyone knows the P4 was a failure (for the most part) so comparing it with something else to try making a point about how HT helps or hurts performance in any given benchmark is pointless. It can only be compared to itself with HT on and off to make that determination. By the time Northwood with HT rolled out, DDR-400 was practically standard so DDR-266 for people who remotely cared about performance does not really apply.

In any case, we are not talking about HT from 10 years ago; we are talking about how much HT improved since then and today, there is practically nothing to gain from disabling it but a lot more to lose than before.
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June 18, 2014 5:37:15 PM

InvalidError writes:
> Everyone knows the P4 was a failure (for the most part) so comparing it with something else to try
> making a point about how HT helps or hurts performance in any given benchmark is pointless. ...

It's not pointless at all, partly because the comparison shows the reality of what was going on at
the time (HT a waste of time since rival options were quicker overall anyway) and partly because
as I say I did do lots of HT tests. Clearly you've chosen to believe I'm lying just because that
file doesn't have the data. Feel free to believe that if you wish, but such a notion isn't remotely my
MO as anyone who knows what I do can attest.


> ... DDR-400 was practically standard so DDR-266 for people who remotely cared about performance
> does not really apply.

In numerous cases systems back then did not support 400 speed, so the idea that 266 data is
not relevant is just silly. That was the reality for numerous machines at the time. It's important
because I found that memory speed made by far a greater difference to overall performance
than even the best possible usage case of the P4's HT. Back then, there was a lot of marketing
pushing the HT aspect of the P4, when in reality customers were much better off just getting
something with the fastest possible RAM, and by the time I was doing those tests, an AMD. The
Athlon64 system I built for my brother left my dual-P4 Dell in the dust.


> In any case, we are not talking about HT from 10 years ago; we are talking about how much HT
> improved since then and today, there is practically nothing to gain from disabling it but a lot more
> to lose than before.

Yes, I entirely agree; I think the point some were making earlier is precisely that many have an
attitude towards HT today that's based on how poor it could often be many years ago with the P4.
They don't realise the tech itself is a very different design now, but it helps to understand why some
assume it can't be good for modern gaming, and hence help inform their opinions, update their info,
rather than just yell at them. :}

Ian.



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June 18, 2014 6:31:18 PM

mapesdhs said:
It's not pointless at all, partly because the comparison shows the reality of what was going on at the time (HT a waste of time since rival options were quicker overall anyway) and partly because
as I say I did do lots of HT tests. Clearly you've chosen to believe I'm lying just because that file doesn't have the data. Feel free to believe that if you wish, but such a notion isn't remotely my MO as anyone who knows what I do can attest.

I am disregarding what you said because benchmarking a P4-HT against an Athlon proves absolutely nothing about HT that cannot already be explained by Netburst already being a lackluster architecture regardless of HT. Also, I do have a computer with a 3GHz Northwood in my inventory and did my own HT on/off benchmarking back then. That's where I drew my 20-30% performance gain while multi-tasking from. That may not be a lot but it did make the system noticeably more responsive while heavily loaded.

mapesdhs said:
In numerous cases systems back then did not support 400 speed, so the idea that 266 data is not relevant is just silly.

Northwood launched with the i865 series chipsets along with FSB800 and DDR-400 support. Anyone who cared to get the most performance out of their Northwood would get the FSB800-based model with i865 chipset and DDR-400 memory just like anyone who cares to get the most performance out of their Haswell today (without overclocking) would get a 9x series chipset and 1600MT/s memory.

Netburst was bad enough even under optimal circumstances, no point in adding unrealistic artificial handicaps. Only people who did not give a damn about performance would have paired a Northwood (or Prescott) with FSB533 and DDR-266... that's a completely unnecessary ~30% performance handicap right there.
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June 19, 2014 1:54:01 AM

I'd like to know myself. How many hardcore OC'ers can there be in the world. Personally I've stopped buying K processors. I've only really ever done auto tuning kind of overclocks. And they've never made a real difference in my experience. Faster and more memory, SSDs, things like that... That's where I have seen real perceptible changes to my computing experience.
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June 19, 2014 4:52:50 AM

The_Trutherizer said:
Personally I've stopped buying K processors. And they've never made a real difference in my experience.

Overclocking had nice benefits in the P3 days where many CPUs could be overclocked by 30-100% but with modern locked chips where a large chunk of the overclock headroom is already skimmed off the top by forcing people to buy K-chips which already are at the top of available speed bins, the leftover headroom is only 10-20%.

By the time I start feeling like my computer is too slow, even an optimistic 20% overclock would be unlikely to change that in any meaningful way.
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June 19, 2014 5:05:22 AM

Of course it sways our favor towards a company which can demonstrate how good they can manufacture their hardware.
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June 19, 2014 5:32:24 AM

slykrysis said:
Quote:
Quote:
Unless it's water who cares. And I have my 2600k 1.5v @ 5.1ghz with hyper-junk disabled and it eats through anything. Ram is 2400mhz cas10. All on a maximus 4 extreme. Koolance block, Koolance 240 and DD pump. 64c load temps. For this exact reason I think Intel is holding back.


LOL that "Hyper-Junk" would allow a stock i7-2600K to outperform yours in some games.


You do know that hyper-threading actually decreases FPS in games, right? Look it up before commenting...


I've not seen that since switching from a I5-3570k 4.4ghz to a xeon E3 1230 3.4ghz. Xeon has much greater performance in recent aaa games.

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June 19, 2014 9:56:13 AM

Wow impressive, yes this does influence my buying decision. It tells me the 4790k is a great CPU to overclock and tells me the ASRock mobo does a great job as well.
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July 1, 2014 8:44:31 AM

Quote:
R.I.P. normal electricity bill :( 


There is your problem. The electricity bill goes out the window and then no more happy campers. I just wish they would work fitting or seating a heat sink to pull out more heat efficiently and the only way i can think of that happening is to use the case.
Use the desktop and make it more efficient then the laptop because of the space you have.
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July 18, 2014 9:23:48 PM

Wow, their is SO much misinformation in this thread. Toms hardwares popularity is it's own worst enemy. Chock full of retards.

Hyperthreading sucks?!? Wut?

Is it stable I wanna see some benchmarks (regarding 7k ln2 oc) srsly?!

I'm afraid the haswell e dram limit is going to be 64gb which is not enough even now .... Deeeeerp /sigh

It was at this point I stopped reading. Statistically that's likely only half the gems i would be able to pick out. Ignorance is bliss. Not sure who said it, but the guy was a frigging genius!
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July 19, 2014 4:23:02 AM

klepp0906 said:
I'm afraid the haswell e dram limit is going to be 64gb which is not enough even now .... Deeeeerp /sigh

DDR3 has a limit of 8GB per DIMM and two DIMMs per channel while DDR4 has a limit of 16GB per DIMM and one DIMM per channel. I imagine LGA2011 would be a fair bit less popular if it required slower, more expensive, server-oriented buffered DIMMs.

LGA2011 CPUs are not meant to replace the Xeon E5/E7 for serious workstation/server-style workloads
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July 23, 2014 10:32:01 AM

'When you buy a new motherboard, does this kind of information sway you in favor of the motherboard itself, the vendor, or does it not affect your buying decision at all?'

No, my business requirements drive me in planning for new Hardware.

My latest high-end horses (9) based on Z97 WS boards churning loads of work under VMs; three 27" displays for each machine.

OC is NOT preferred at my work places (policy), hence 'K' bad guys sit at my home! Oh BTW, I'm planning for a dozen more 'Pentium-K based' office PCs but pondering on the Z97 or H97 boards. Most likely MSI Z97 PC Mate (bundle offer).
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!