Question LONG overdue upgrade and I'm amazed...

[Homerboy]

I've been running an AMD Phenom II X2 555 with unlocked cores (x4) for the pas 9 years.
Over that time I've upgraded RAM (8GB) and GPUs
I really don't game too much anymore but occasionally will get sucked into some old titles and Path of Exile still will get me to play every couple of months.

I decided it was time to retire the old girl, but I was not interested in spending much money on anything as I didn't need anything special. In fact, I really didn't NEED anything at all.

I ended up finding a used Intel 6600K/16GB RAM/Asus Z170-E combo quite cheap and purchased it.
Then I realized I needed a HS/Fan so picked up a Zalman CNPS5X
Then I realized I was an idiot and my case was only a micro-ATX and the new MB was full MB so ordered a Thermaltake V200
Those last 2 items sort of pushed me over budget, but so be it.

Anyways, I got it up and running quickly and easily. So I figured "Hell, I've been OCing since the Celeron 300A days, so lets give this a shot"
I figured I'd take the easy way out and let the Asus program do the work for me - hell the UEFI boot menu is confusing enough for an old man like me. Downloaded. Installed. Clicked and let the program do it's thing.

I was shocked at the ease of and the end results. 4.7Ghz and I didn't even have to "think" or try. Just done. Was rock solid the rest of the day and dead silent the whole time.
I'm jealous of how easy things are now and for that matter the incredible OCs that can be reached with such ease. Kids nowadays have it easy!

 

[mindless1]

Yeah, I remember the days when I was soldering a potentiometer or resistor to voltmod the VRM, epoxying heatsinks on the mosfets, making a fan bracket to point a fan at that, using bios vender tools to unlock hidden oc settings and flashing that edited bios to the board, making an OS partition backup in case an unstable oc scrambled the filesystem.

Then again, there's something to be said for doing it in the bios (or jumpers years earlier) instead of a windows app because you can boot to memtest86+ to check memory in the oc state before booting windows and risking filesystem corruption running windows to use an o'c app or memory checker.

 

[DrMrLordX]

@Homerboy

Be careful with the voltage that it might feed your chip using any kind of automatic OS OC feature. How high did the voltage go?

 

[Homerboy]

@Homerboy

Be careful with the voltage that it might feed your chip using any kind of automatic OS feature. How high did the voltage go?

I don't recall off the top of my head to be honest. I will have to look when I get home.

I can't decide if I like the rollercoaster throttling of the CPU either - maybe this is just how the CPUs work now? When sitting idle, it will drop to 1GHz or below (and voltage will adjust) but then in game it ramps up as needed (and voltage does as well)

 

[Ajay]

I don't recall off the top of my head to be honest. I will have to look when I get home.

I can't decide if I like the rollercoaster throttling of the CPU either - maybe this is just how the CPUs work now? When sitting idle, it will drop to 1GHz or below (and voltage will adjust) but then in game it ramps up as needed (and voltage does as well)

Yeah, that how they work now (and early, at least with Intel CPUs).

 

[Zucker2k]

I don't recall off the top of my head to be honest. I will have to look when I get home.

I can't decide if I like the rollercoaster throttling of the CPU either - maybe this is just how the CPUs work now? When sitting idle, it will drop to 1GHz or below (and voltage will adjust) but then in game it ramps up as needed (and voltage does as well)

That's actually a good thing.

 

[mindless1]

I don't recall off the top of my head to be honest. I will have to look when I get home.

I can't decide if I like the rollercoaster throttling of the CPU either - maybe this is just how the CPUs work now? When sitting idle, it will drop to 1GHz or below (and voltage will adjust) but then in game it ramps up as needed (and voltage does as well)

?? Your Phenom II x2 555 didn't do that? It's called "Cool 'n Quiet". Mine does, down to 800MHz and 1.0V, once you set the right thing in Windows Power Management. Might be "Balanced" power plan or something. That might also be the default setting on (Vista or newer?) and there may be some bios setting that is also (IIRC) set by default to allow it. From what I can find, AMD had this since Athlon XP, providing the mobo supported it.

There is a slight latency involved in doing so, a performance hit on things that vary the load. Usually you wouldn't notice, but I have one particular flash game that is poorly designed, and I notice that the enemy advancement rate vs my firepower is increased when it's switching CPU speeds back and forth based on load, opposed to disabling the feature and keeping it at the top clock speed.

Cool'n'Quiet - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

 

[VirtualLarry]

That's actually a good thing.

To clarify for readers that may not know, OP used the term "throttling", but what he actually described, lower voltages/clocks at idle, is SpeedStep (power-saving) (as well as SpeedShift) at work. This, when working properly, saves power, and is thought to extend the lifespan of the CPU, due to lower voltages being applied over a period of time.

ACTUAL "throttling", would be the cpu down-clocking, not at idle, but when you need it THE MOST, like during a game, and it just simply gets TOO HOT, so it IDLES ITSELF (even in the face of high CPU demand) so that it can COOL OFF to operate SAFELY. This can be the cause of "stutters" or "pausing" during high-intensity sequence in a game, for example. You can detect this with ThrottleStop, or MSI AfterBurner (I think).

So, while what the OP is actually seemingly experiencing ("Power Saving") is a GOOD THING, "Throttling" IS NOT.

Not disagreeing with you, per se, @Zucker2k , just clarifying the issue for Google readers. We don't want them to think "Throttling == Good". Quite the opposite.

SpeedStep idle power-saving == GOOD.

Overtemp throttling == BAD, get better cooling, or reduce your overclock or voltage settings, try adjusting LLC with a lower vcore setting.

 

[VirtualLarry]

?? Your Phenom II x2 555 didn't do that? It's called "Cool 'n Quiet". Mine does, down to 800MHz and 1.0V, once you set the right thing in Windows Power Management.

Remember, he was unlocking cores on his. When you do that, you're sort of hacking the CPU's control circuits, in a way. I know that reading the core temps gets locked-out when unlocking cores. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that Cool N Quiet is locked out too.

 

[Homerboy]

@Homerboy

Be careful with the voltage that it might feed your chip using any kind of automatic OS feature. How high did the voltage go?

I just re-ran the auto-OC program and it got to 4.6Ghz this time (good enough for me). The side panel was off last night when it hit 4.7, but I have it all buttoned up now, the A/C is off in the house so it's a bit warmer too. I figured I should give it another shot. Here's the readings:

Pretty sure 1.245 should be within the safe range for the 6600K, but I will let you experts pass your judgement,

 

[Homerboy]

Remember, he was unlocking cores on his. When you do that, you're sort of hacking the CPU's control circuits, in a way. I know that reading the core temps gets locked-out when unlocking cores. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that Cool N Quiet is locked out too.

This is right. I was thinking about that after I posted it and I do recall the default x2 doing the "Cool n' Quiet" thing. It's been unlocked for 9 years though and totally forgot about it. I'm pretty sure it had to be turned off in the bios to get the unlock to work - or it just turned off by default once the bios settings were messed with

 

[mindless1]

Remember, he was unlocking cores on his. When you do that, you're sort of hacking the CPU's control circuits, in a way. I know that reading the core temps gets locked-out when unlocking cores. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find out that Cool N Quiet is locked out too.

My Phenom II x2 555 BE (Black Edition) has the other two cores unlocked and Cool 'n Quiet still works... has since day one years ago.

Core Temp Reading doesn't work on it with utilities like HWMonitor, but apparently Asus figured out a way, maybe an on-board temp sensor it reverts to because their whatever-it's-called utility does show CPU temp and it does rise and fall as expected with load, though it only shows one temp, not per-core.

 

[Iron Woode]

My Phenom II x2 555 BE (Black Edition) has the other two cores unlocked and Cool 'n Quiet still works... has since day one years ago.

Core Temp Reading doesn't work on it with utilities like HWMonitor, but apparently Asus figured out a way, maybe an on-board temp sensor it reverts to because their whatever-it's-called utility does show CPU temp and it does rise and fall as expected with load, though it only shows one temp, not per-core.

same with my X3 455. I unlocked the 4th core for a 3.3 ghz quad core and with C&Q it ran great and the temps were fine. I did notice it went from 95 watts to 125 watts.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Pretty sure 1.245 should be within the safe range for the 6600K, but I will let you experts pass your judgement,

Yeah that's really good for a 6600k. I think you got a golden chip there. Most of them will not run that fast on that voltage.

 

[Homerboy]

Yeah that's really good for a 6600k. I think you got a golden chip there. Most of them will not run that fast on that voltage.

Cool. Thanks for the feedback. Maybe someday I'll snag a AIO and go for broke

 

[DesiPower]

Yeah, overclocking has gotten very easy these days. The first time I let the mobo do its magic without me thinking was devil's canyon on a MSI motherboard, iirc I got to run at 4.6ghz. Later I tried manual tweaking but could not get any higher stable speeds, same with 6850k, could not beat mobos Xtreme mode. With my 8086k however, Z370 taichi could not go over 4.8 ghz, but manually I am able to get 5ghz stable (silicon lottery delided)

 

[DesiPower]

Yeah that's really good for a 6600k. I think you got a golden chip there. Most of them will not run that fast on that voltage.

Yeah, as per Silicon Lottery's historic binning data, 4.6 would be at 1.392 volts... OP is lucky!

 

[Homerboy]

Yeah, as per Silicon Lottery's historic binning data, 4.6 would be at 1.392 volts... OP is lucky!

So is there a chance I could squeeze more if I wanted? I don't really NEED to as I'm far from a power user anymore. I might WANT to mess around with it on a boring rainy day though...

 

[Arkaign]

Wow, yeah that is a 'holy crap' kind of upgrade. It's more than just the CPU perf as well, IO and QOL has vastly improved. Even when you have a maxed out FX AM3+ setup, the chipsets, SATA, and USB performance is pretty bad. I was so happy to see how drastically improved the Ryzen chipsets have been at every level. And of course Intel has been extremely good in this regard as well.

 

[Ranulf]

USB3 performance on systems from say after 2014-15 really got miles better.

 

[mopardude87]

Wow, yeah that is a 'holy crap' kind of upgrade. It's more than just the CPU perf as well, IO and QOL has vastly improved. Even when you have a maxed out FX AM3+ setup, the chipsets, SATA, and USB performance is pretty bad. I was so happy to see how drastically improved the Ryzen chipsets have been at every level. And of course Intel has been extremely good in this regard as well.

Yeah when i went from my H81+4460 to my 8700 non k and Z370 that was a holy crap upgrade too. But every build going back to 2011 has had a budget motherboard and its been alright but that H81 was a special kind of bleh. Its amazing even how feature packed a B360 is these days.

Will prob go the route of the op and sit on this 8700 a decade, i am typing this on my spare rig with a 8 year old i3 2100 and its still fine for basic usage and light gaming. Sadly some games kind of tank so its being replaced with a i5 2500. Thought about a i7 2600 but its like double to triple the cost of the 2500 which can be had for like $25 or less. But getting a entire decade from a single computer is kind of mind blowing.