Intel "Coffee Lake" Builders Thread

[IEC]

Got an order in for a ASRock Z370 Taichi motherboard + 16GB (2x8GB) G.Skill DDR4-3600 CL15. As soon as I can get a delidded chip from Silicon Lottery, I will.

Cooling will be via a Noctua D15.

 

[TheF34RChannel]

Well, you should at least go into the BIOS and see what it's set to.

Done; was set to Standard, put it on the Turbo profile (1 click before maximum 24/7) so it's now a much more aggressive curve.

Asus is funny; I have MCE off and thus the board uses the Asus Auto profile mode (instead of the Intel mode) and when e.g. gaming it's 6x3.4 max, however in Windows they easily jump to 6x4.7. I think that's Asus its secretly present (but not advertised this time) OC socket+that mode.

Just got my i7-8700k from Newegg.. No cooler?? Ok well what should I do about cooling this thing? Pretty sure I am not putting my Phantek pc14 on this sucker.To scared the weight will crack the pcb of the cpu. Should I go water cooling this time around? Is water cooling gonna be a must anyways? Looking at the Corsair H115i v2., is this any good or will I need something bigger like a 360mm or 420mm rad?

Intel hasn't been doing coolers on their top end chips for quite a while; they're inadequate anyway 😉 The AIO you mentioned sounds good. I'd replace any stock fans on any cooler tbh. If you want to go quiet that's cool, however do expect higher temps as the trade-off. I had a quiet setup before and it was very good, now I'm on a 'louder' setup and that's fine too as the temps are lower.

 

[weevilone]

I have a silly question. I just finished a build with 8700K, but I've recently had to reinstall Windows and don't have any of my performance monitoring tools installed any longer. What is recommended to monitor temps, voltages, etc during tuning of the CPU and RAM?

I tend to deep dive into the overclocking stuff when I do a build, but after I have it generally set then I'll back it off just a bit and leave it there indefinitely.

 

[TahoeDust]

I have a silly question. I just finished a build with 8700K, but I've recently had to reinstall Windows and don't have any of my performance monitoring tools installed any longer. What is recommended to monitor temps, voltages, etc during tuning of the CPU and RAM?

I tend to deep dive into the overclocking stuff when I do a build, but after I have it generally set then I'll back it off just a bit and leave it there indefinitely.

HWInfo64

 

[DrMrLordX]

Assuming he didn't delid, the TIM 😉

shhh don't get people started on that, heh

Cooling will be via a Noctua D15.

You know you can get Noctua's IndustrialPPC fans running one of those, right? Just order the fans and ask them for the clips. They ship from Austra though so it takes awhile.

I have two of the 3000 rpm ones. Whooooooosh.

 

[Justinbaileyman]

Thanks guys, yeah I think I will get the Corsair H115i v2 then. Nope sounds not a problem for me as long as I get cool temp and my system remains stable 24/7 then I will be happy. Our local E-shop has a 115i unit for $129 + tax.Not sure if this is a good price or not or if you guys know where to get it cheaper?

 

[Bouowmx]

ARCTIC Liquid Freezer: the 120 and 240 models have deep radiators: 49 mm on 120, and 38 mm on 240, and come with 2 fans (F12 PWM PST) on 120, or 4 on 240, for push-pull.

 

[Arachnotronic]

ARCTIC Liquid Freezer: the 120 and 240 models have deep radiators: 49 mm on 120, and 38 mm on 240, and come with 2 fans (F12 PWM PST) on 120, or 4 on 240, for push-pull.

Can vouch for Liquid Freezer 240. That thing keeps my non-delidded 7900X nice and cool.

 

[Aikouka]

ARCTIC Liquid Freezer: the 120 and 240 models have deep radiators: 49 mm on 120, and 38 mm on 240, and come with 2 fans (F12 PWM PST) on 120, or 4 on 240, for push-pull.

Hm, I'm actually surprised at how cheap those are. The fancy ones from other companies are 50% or more expensive. I use an Arctic cooler in my server as it's one of the few larger tower coolers that I've seen that fits in a 4U case whereas CM's Hyper 212 EVO is slightly too big, and I've got no complaints about it.

I was keeping an eye on my thermals when I was running some of the tests on my 8700k. Now, to be fair, it's hard for me to know how hot it will truly run, because I was setting it up in a spare bedroom that also has a 1080 Ti and 1060 mining in it. So, while the room wasn't ridiculously hot, it wasn't as cool as other rooms. I recall seeing my CPU idling at 50C while in the BIOS, and that was with a Noctua D15 with both fans attached. I do recall also seeing it with temperatures in the 40s as well.

I decommissioned one of my older mining systems, which was a Pentium G4400 on an MSI Z170 board -- just a tad bit in the overkill department. 😛 (I replaced that board with my ASUS Maximus IX Hero.) Anyway, I figured that since the G4400 is such a cheap CPU ($53.60 right now on Amazon), I can practice delidding on it. I'd much rather break a $50 CPU than a $400 CPU! I'm actually more sheepish about properly applying the Thermal Grizzly TIM more than anything as I assume that it is electrically conductive..

 

[Justinbaileyman]

I see every one delidding then relidding after applying liquid metal. Isn't is possible and wouldn't it be better to just apply thermal paste like arctic silver to the die and mount a water block directly on to the die? Or shim then water block? I bet temps would be much lower this way. Unfortunately I am to much of a chicken to delid my cpu.

 

[Ferzerp]

It’s super easy to chip the cpu and super hard to get a good mount like that. It works better if you can pull it off, but putting the ihs back on is far safer.

To direct mount you must either have a special water block or remove the retention clip to be able to get the block to mate to the die. A shim is no better than the ihs which is mostly copper anyway with a nickel plating.

 

[IEC]

I see every one delidding then relidding after applying liquid metal. Isn't is possible and wouldn't it be better to just apply thermal paste like arctic silver to the die and mount a water block directly on to the die? Or shim then water block? I bet temps would be much lower this way. Unfortunately I am to much of a chicken to delid my cpu.

This is how you kill chips. I killed an old Athlon Thunderbird back in the day through cracking the die.

 

[StinkyPinky]

You don't need to delid to get 5 Ghz on the 8700k as long as you go with a water cooler or a high end air cooler. At least that's the experience with my own and from what i can see, the review samples also (which may be hand picked but I like to think they aren't)

 

[thxdd]

Wrong thread.

 

[Justinbaileyman]

You don't need to delid to get 5 Ghz on the 8700k as long as you go with a water cooler or a high end air cooler. At least that's the experience with my own and from what i can see, the review samples also (which may be hand picked but I like to think they aren't)

Not even sure I was gonna go for 5.0Ghz really. I have just been hearing lots of rumors how the i7 8700k runs super hot and takes like a magical wizard to conjure up a mystical water cooler to tame the beast.. 😀 Maybe looking at something more modest then like a 4.6Ghz all core overclock with nice chili temps for 24/7 use..

 

[CraptacularOne]

My 8700K isn't very hot at 5Ghz. I haven't delid it either. I'm using a Corsair H100i CLC on it. Nothing too exotic for cooling. Keeps temps around 75C load at 5Ghz with 1.35v

 

[MTDEW]

You don't need to delid to get 5 Ghz on the 8700k as long as you go with a water cooler or a high end air cooler. At least that's the experience with my own and from what i can see, the review samples also (which may be hand picked but I like to think they aren't)

Can you share your thoughts on your Gigabyte Aorus Ultra Z370 board?
My brother is thinking of buying that board and Ive been in the Asus camp my last few builds so I haven't kept up with Gigabyte boards enough to tell him if its a good choice or not.
Does the dual bios feature save from bad flashes like the Asus flashback feature does?

 

[psolord]

My 8600k arrived today! 😀

Man I thought they had forgotten to put it in the shop's box. I actually asked the courier to wait and I opened the box in front of him. Then I saw how tiny the 8600k's box was, lol. I had forgotten it comes without the cooler and some of the pics I had seen in reviews made it look huge.

Here's the truth, compared with my older 2500k and 860 boxes.



The bad thing is that I have to wait for my Asrock z370 Extreme 4 to arrive in 10 days! 🙁 The 8600k arrived in less than 24 hours. xD

 

[Crono]

It looks like the CPU core voltage on auto was indeed the culprit: the motherboard was taking it up to 1.328V at load. I lowered it to 1.2V fixed voltage in BIOS (tried 1.15, but it wasn't stable) - though CPU-Z is reporting 1.136-1.152V while stress testing. I knew that motherboards often apply way too much voltage out of box, but forgot to check during initial testing (got lazy with it being a locked processor 😳). Let this be a cautionary tale for the newbs. 😀

I also changed the fan setting from "standard" and set a custom fan curve for the Dark Rock TF, though the temp is now low enough that it doesn't need to spin up much: load temp for CPU now hovers around 60-62C after a 10 minute run of AIDA64 (about the same running Cinebench 15, as well).

I think this is about as good as I can expect, with RPM of fans staying at ~500 RPM idle and ~900 load (Be Quiet! Silent Wings 3 fans can run as low as 200 RPM, but they are still very quiet at higher RPM, under 1,100 or so). I should probably switch to offset voltage, though. Does LLC make a difference for a locked chip? Never played around with it on my last Intel CPU (i7-6700K).

ARCTIC Liquid Freezer: the 120 and 240 models have deep radiators: 49 mm on 120, and 38 mm on 240, and come with 2 fans (F12 PWM PST) on 120, or 4 on 240, for push-pull.

I have a Liquid Freezer 360 that I used with a Ryzen 7 1700X. Very nice AIO, and the Arctic F12 PWM PST are some of the quietest for their performance. I'm going to use 3 of the F12s for my CL build as case fans. The 5 packs on Newegg are also inexpensive ($30 = $6 per fan) if anyone needs a bunch of quiet 120mm fans that can be daisy chained for PWM control.

 

[coercitiv]

It looks like the CPU core voltage on auto was indeed the culprit: the motherboard was taking it up to 1.328V at load. I lowered it to 1.2V fixed voltage in BIOS (tried 1.15, but it wasn't stable) - though CPU-Z is reporting 1.136-1.152V while stress testing. I knew that motherboards often apply way too much voltage out of box, but forgot to check during initial testing (got lazy with it being a locked processor 😳). Let this be a cautionary tale for the newbs. 😀

I did some testing last week with only 1 core activated in order to check lowest stable voltage for 4.6Ghz. Last value I checked was 1.14V, it was almost stable, so 1.16 or better yet 1.18V would likely be a safe bet. (1.186V is the VID for 4.3Ghz on my 8700). Test was done with a medium LLC setting (Mode 4 on the MSI board).

I'm currently running a -50mV Offset, but I should probably check stability thresholds for base & turbo and move towards an Adaptive setting.

 

[Aikouka]

Hm, so I learned the hard way to be a bit more cautious about supported M.2 drives. I checked when I bought the ASRock board, but I wasn't nearly as leery with the ASUS board. My plan was to reuse a Samsung 850 EVO M.2 drive (SATA) with a Crucial M.2 drive (SATA) in the ASUS ROG Strix Z370-H Gaming, but it turns out that the board only supports PCI-E M.2 drives in one of its slots. Fortunately, my 8700k system has a 960 EVO, which is the exact same size as the 850 EVO. So, I can just swap them and likely see no difference. I'd prefer the "better" drive to be in my main desktop, but it seems like a waste to spend the money on another PCI-E M.2 drive when I have something perfectly good lying around.

Although, it just came to me... if I want my main desktop to "have the best", my current i7-6700k desktop is using the 960 EVO 250GB drive as its OS drive too. If that slot supports SATA, I could steal that drive, and make some weird, convoluted mess of hard drive hot potato. 😕

Man I thought they had forgotten to put it in the shop's box. I actually asked the courier to wait and I opened the box in front of him. Then I saw how tiny the 8600k's box was, lol. I had forgotten it comes without the cooler and some of the pics I had seen in reviews made it look huge.

Same thing happened to me when I had my processor shipped by itself. We're just so used to those lackluster stock coolers that we expect them to be there. 😛

It looks like the CPU core voltage on auto was indeed the culprit: the motherboard was taking it up to 1.328V at load.

Do you have MCE (Multi-Core Enhancement) enabled? I remember reading that motherboards will jack up the voltage to support MCE, but I don't think the feature is fine-tuned enough to adjust the voltage dynamically if it's really needed or not.

 

[ozzy702]

Ok, I have my 8700k, Asrock Z370 Gaming K6, Noctua U-14S, Gskill DDR4 (mem support blows right now) and am playing around with it on a test install of Windows 10.

Any ideas on voltages at different clock speeds? I'm playing around with 4.7ghz right now to get an idea. So far (hour in), in Prime95 with no avx offset I'm at around 65F with -20 offset on level 5 LLC (lowest level) which looks to be about 1.29v vcore under load. I think I'll bump it up to 4.8 and see how that goes, I'm not looking to push things crazy high and I'm more concerned about not over-volting the thing since it appears that at least the current bios is all too happy to pump voltage into this CPU.

EDIT: Popped it up to 4.8ghz, no offset, Small FFTs, and looks like temps are way higher. Will update in a bit. Looks like high 70s to low 80s @ 4.8ghz but I bet it's still using too much voltage.

EDIT2: Tried 4.8hz, -50 offset, but it crashed around 20 minutes in. Trying -20 offset now.

 

[TheF34RChannel]

Got to love the Asus OC socket: some more gameplay saw them max at 6x 4.4-4.5, highest temp 56C.

When I do start my overclocking, can I use it to set a max for all cores but keep SpeedStep on, same for the voltage? I don't need or want a 24/7 OC.

 

[Ferzerp]

I’m pretty sure EK sent me PETG instead of acrylic since the longer acrylic I ordered elsewhere is impossible to cut with a pipe cutter and the EK stuff just bends instead of cracking. I ended up ordering more PETG in 1m length to finish up since I have 2 runs over 50 cm. There is no way I’ll not change out things before the drawbacks of PETG can matter at all. Honestly, I’m worried about the durability of the acrylic far more since it cracks so easily.

The cpu and some 90 degree fittings will be here tomorrow so I can finally finish the build over the weekend if not before.

 

[AK169]

Hi guys

I want a CPU for pure gaming.
not sure which one of coffee lake is the best for me
the 8700K has the best single core performance but
1- I'm not into overclocking
2- I have some temperature concerns
my PC will be running 24/7 and I play 5-10 hours a day and I don't want to be bothered by heat problems at any point

8700 8600K 8400
not sure which one is suitable for me
I prefer something doesn't run so hot and can be used with the stock cooler or 50$ cooler


what do you think