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4 year old build, problems, advice and where to proceed from here.

C

ChineseDragon

Junior Member
Rig is 4+~ years old, GPU is almost 3 years old.

Specs up front -

Processor: i7 920 (D0)
Motherboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme (X58)
Ram: Corsair Dominator 12GB (1600mhz)
PSU: Corsair Gold 80Plus, HX750 (750Watt)
GPU: Point of View GTX 570 OC (2560MB)
Case: Silverstone Raven RV02 (old fan version)
HDD1: WD Black 1TB
HDD2: WD Black 1TB
HDD3: WD Black 1TB
HDD4: Maxtor 1TB
Case Cooling: Intake: 3x AT-181 18cm case fan, out: 1x Scythe Kaze Jyuni
CPU Cooling: Megahalems Rev-B, (2x Scythe Kaze)
Monitors: 2 (2560x1440, 1600x1200)

Onto the problem...

I built this rig about 4 years ago with an ATI card and had a great deal of problems with it.

Firstly overclocking it seemed almost impossible, I'm no professional when it comes to overclocking, but I have some reasonable experience. and nothing seemed to make this thing stable at anything like the clock speeds people were getting with apparent "ease".

Secondly this rig runs HOT, or at least what i felt was hot for the amount of cooling I had thrown at it.

Thirdly the graphics card also runs very hot, I'll cover these in turn.

The Temperature, and the sad story of one i7.

When I built the rig I had the idea of running it at 4.0ghz, but after weeks of problems with temperatures I gave up and abandoned the project at the measly stock speeds of 2.67Ghz, and even lowered the stock voltage a bit to try to combat these temperatures, and prolong the life of the CPU.

Stock Speed/slight under-voltage:
Idle: 45-50ºC (average per core)
Load: 80+ºC (average per core)
Ambient: 30ºC - Seems high considering I live in Scotland...


It has run stable at these temperatures for nearly 4 years now, but considering this is stock speeds., it seems excessive. but I ended up defeatist and didn't have money or patience for it any more.

I tried re-seating the heat sink twice over some time, each time with an even finer attention paid to the thermal paste and seating, but no real measurable results yielded.

The story of 1440p is too much for this card.

Originally this rig had an ATI card which got poor fps and was replaced with the current "Point of View GTX 570", i got the 2.5gb version as word on the street is more memory helps alleviate problems with high resolutions.

At this point performance became less of a problem, at 1440p the card gets reasonable to vsync fps in basically everything with max settings.

At the time i was just glad something with the rig was going right, and didn't bother to check the operating temperatures of the card.

... But it's too good to be true for this rig, within a few months the card started black screening and lockups.

I discovered the card was running a stock voltage of 1.088v and could easily break 100ºC under heavy load.

Using NVIDIA inspector i pulled the voltage back to 1.038v, where it has sat for 2 years now with no problems of lockup or black screen, but i tend to stare in paranoia at the temperature dial as it rushes past 80ºC with high-load games, and have taken to running games with no AA (at 1440p the difference honestly isn't huge)

et omega

Now i have a bit of money again and some restored resolve to make this rig work, my first notion was to bury it in the garden and buy everything new, but before i did that i felt it worth coming to you, the community of experts and amateurs for advice on the matter.

I use my build largely as a 3D development workstation (home use), and general gaming.

What is a good path to upgrade from this kind of build? or suggestions where to go for rebuild?
And what insight do you have into what went wrong this time round?
 
Right, lets see what I missed from that.

2, about £1000.
3, Scotland.
4, overclockers.co.uk, dabs.com, amazon.co.uk, etc.
5, intel, nvidia, but up to criticism on that.
9, within the next month or so.

- thanks.
 
ChineseDragon said:
Stock Speed/slight under-voltage:
Idle: 45-50ºC (average per core)
Load: 80+ºC (average per core)
Ambient: 30ºC - Seems high considering I live in Scotland...
...
I discovered the card was running a stock voltage of 1.088v and could easily break 100ºC under heavy load.

Using NVIDIA inspector i pulled the voltage back to 1.038v, where it has sat for 2 years now with no problems of lockup or black screen, but i tend to stare in paranoia at the temperature dial as it rushes past 80ºC with high-load games, and have taken to running games with no AA (at 1440p the difference honestly isn't huge)
Click to expand...

First things first, I think we need to set some expectations as to what temperatures are safe for computer components. 80C under load is fairly warm for a CPU but certainly not in the danger zone. 100C is too hot for a GPU, but 80C is is perfectly OK (in fact, it's quite cool).

Your case and fan setup should provide plenty of airflow. The RV02 is a bottom intake case, so make sure that it's sitting on a hard surface. Also check the obvious things like "are the fans spinning", etc.

As for upgrading, you don't need to change the case, cooling, PSU, or HDDs. Whether or not to change the RAM depends on if you have 3x4GB or 2x6GB. You'll also want to add an SSD.

With that in mind:
i7 4770K £276
ASUS Z87-A £120
MSI GTX 780 £534
Samsung 840 EVO 120GB £85
Total: $1015

This is assuming that you don't need to change your RAM. If you do, you can either drop down the CPU to the 4670K or the GPU to the GTX 770. The choice depends on whether you value your gaming or pro work more.
 
80ºC is really standard temperature for an undervolted, stock speed cpu? i'd seen people running lower temperatures with heavily overclocked equivalents of the same cooling/cpu setup.

the ram is 6x2GB sticks, and I value the professional side more, games can always be lowered in settings at the end of the day.

Also, thanks for the recommendations.

all the fans are spinning and on their highest speeds, set via switches and fan controllers with the case sitting on a desk with no obstruction on either side.

I'd been interested in slotting an SSD in there for some time but there's a great deal of fairly confusing and conflicting advice on them, especially things like lifespan and rapidly decaying performance overheads.

Any straight advice about these closed loop watercooling setups for cpu's also?, i've seen some strong reviews for them so far, but wonder if anyone has some personal experience/advice on them.
 
ChineseDragon said:
80ºC is really standard temperature for an undervolted, stock speed cpu? i'd seen people running lower temperatures with heavily overclocked equivalents of the same cooling/cpu setup.
Click to expand...

I didn't say that. I said, "[it's] fairly warm for a CPU but certainly not in the danger zone."

ChineseDragon said:
the ram is 6x2GB sticks, and I value the professional side more, games can always be lowered in settings at the end of the day.

Also, thanks for the recommendations.
Click to expand...

Since you need new RAM, drop the GPU to the GTX 770 4GB for £380 and pick up this Team DDR3 1600 16GB kit.

ChineseDragon said:
all the fans are spinning and on their highest speeds, set via switches and fan controllers with the case sitting on a desk with no obstruction on either side.
Click to expand...

Silly question, but is the underside of your HSF free of any plastic film?

ChineseDragon said:
I'd been interested in slotting an SSD in there for some time but there's a great deal of fairly confusing and conflicting advice on them, especially things like lifespan and rapidly decaying performance overheads.
Click to expand...

That may have been true with the first gen SSDs of several years ago, but it's not really true today. The lifespan of a good quality SSD (the Samsung 840 EVO qualifies) is easily 7-10 years on a normal desktop workload. The OS TRIM support available in Windows 7 and 8 and improved idle garbage collection routines keep performance from degrading over time.
 
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the cooler is clear of anything like that, I considered even trying to lap it, but it's practically mirror already so as an amateur at such things i figured i'd probably cause more harm than good there : p

some people said the sensor on early i7 920's are sometimes faulty, but i'm not sure how that'd explain the poor stability with even minor overclocks.

Would running 4x8gb ram effect stability/overclocking on this board/cpu?
I love RAM : p, at the very least as a future upgrade on 16gb.

Good to know SSD's are a strongly viable option now, i'll grab one of those for the OS and programs at least.

What about that SLI stuff all the cool kids are doing these days?, my only experience with it is chaining voodoo with external cables xD. are there particular performance advantages to such an approach? or is mostly hobbyist fun with too many disadvantages/cost?
 
ChineseDragon said:
Would running 4x8gb ram effect stability/overclocking on this board/cpu?
I love RAM : p, at the very least as a future upgrade on 16gb.
Click to expand...

I goofed on the original RAM link, it was an 8GB kit nestled in with the 16GB kit. Fixed now. RAM speeds are decoupled from CPU clocks nowadays, so the impact of RAM on overclocking is much much lower. Extreme overclockers will still run 1 stick of the lowest density stuff they can get their hands on, but it doesn't matter for 24/7 overclocks.

ChineseDragon said:
What about that SLI stuff all the cool kids are doing these days?, my only experience with it is chaining voodoo with external cables xD. are there particular performance advantages to such an approach? or is mostly hobbyist fun with too many disadvantages/cost?
Click to expand...

SLI comes with a lot of a headaches and imperfect scaling, so it only really makes sense after you've topped out on single-GPU cards. Given your budget that isn't going to happen (over 1000 quid for two GTX 780s alone).
 
Headaches like compatability/performance problems?, instead of two 780's, i meant more like two 760's for example and compared to a single 780? or this concept just isn't cost effective?

on a side note, i heard the newer 8-core AMD's are showing good performance?
 
ChineseDragon said:
Headaches like compatability/performance problems?, instead of two 780's, i meant more like two 760's for example and compared to a single 780? or this concept just isn't cost effective?
Click to expand...

Yes, compatibility and performance problems. Two midrange cards like the GTX 760 don't make sense in SLI because they are marginally faster than a GTX 780 in the best case, but quite a lot slower in the worst case. SLI setups also have bad frame pacing compared to single GPU setups, lowering the perception of smoothness even those average FPS is high.

ChineseDragon said:
on a side note, i heard the newer 8-core AMD's are showing good performance?
Click to expand...

Good performance relative to the previous AMD's? Yeah. Relative to Haswell? Not quite.
 
With the i7-4820K/4930K due out within a week or two, it'd probably be a good idea to see how they size up before I put anything solid into this, that's how I'm feeling just now anyway. but with the 3930k 6-core averaging £450 i can't see the 4930K being terribly cost effective either; But the 4820K might surprise.
 
The 4820K is only a quad core, so I don't see how it will be worth it. Keep in mind that TPC (total platform cost) is about double with even the cheapest Socket 2011 part because you have to get a more expensive mobo as well.
 
Yeah, i was looking into the 2011 platform, it has a couple of advantages over the 1150/1155 (64gb/ram, more pcie lanes etc), with the new boards coming out supporting usb3.0 and PCIE3.0 also, but as you say the cost of the board spikes substantially over the large market of 1150/1155 boards.

With that in consideration I was also thinking I should dial back my interests towards a 4770K again.

currently i'm looking at something like~

CPU: 4770k
RAM: 32GB
GPU: 770 (stretch 780 perhaps), or looking into AMD alternatives (though I'm more into nvidia really)
SSD : Throwing a decent SSD into the mix, i was researching the one you recommended (840 EVO) it has some fairly glowing reviews.

I was considering investing in one of those closed loop cpu coolers (like the h90i/etc), but i've seen some fairly strong problems in that district.

I've been trying to decide for a while if I want to replace the case also, as much as i love the build quality of the case the cooling problems that arose in my previous build makes me uncomfortable about building a new rig in it.
 
you're absolutely right actually, I'm just being a bad artist and blaming the tools as they say; the raven is a really nice case to work with.

my budget is actually more like £1300-1400, but i'm trying to keep it tighter to £1000 as it's easy to lose perspective and spend too much for insignificant gains.

You know, ram often comes with or without heatspreader's/heatsinks attached to them, do these make any real world difference or are they really just aesthetic? in your experience.
 
Heatspreaders on RAM serve two purposes, neither of which are related to performance or cooling:

1. To look "cool" and entice customers who don't know better.
2. To hide the markings on the DRAM chips themselves so that customers and competitors can't tell exactly whats on the board.

Since heatspreaders functionally don't matter, I try to get RAM that doesn't have them, or at least has the short style that don't extend much above the PCB itself (like the Team kit I linked). Taller ones tend to run into clearance issues with big HSFs.
 
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