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i7 920 @ 4.2 with 7990/7970 to 4930k - Marked difference!

blackninja

blackninja

blackninja

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Joined
13 Nov 2007
Posts
1,483
Just went, this weekend, from i7 920 @ 4.2 with 7990/7970 to 4930k @ 4.7 and I have sort of finalised the overclock I think. I have a solid subjective view of this now after some time with the system. Daily use it feels snappier (but see below!).

I was concerned tbh that it might not be the right thing to do having read various posts on here (and elsewhere) and almost convinced myself that the CPU was coping fine but having done it I am reconciled that the money was indeed well spent to cover the next few years :D (had 4 years on the 920).

At 2560x1600 in Crysis 3 for example, have gone from occasionally choppy in game lows, my GPU usage was 60%-90% range mostly (still good) to a consistent 90s percentage usage. The CPU was going from 90% usage previously to about 40% now :eek: ... that's with the GPUs @ 1150/1650 so they need to be fed. Minimums in game play felt like they were too low for my liking but now it's really smooth everywhere and I really do feel the difference.

BF3, another example, never had an issue as such, looked great and played good but if I dropped settings it was very smooth such that I noticed it and knew that those massive fps on highest settings were hiding something ... now, its tangibly smoother at even higher fps, GPUs are nearly maxed out most of the time and CPU is hardly being taxed!

These 2 games are what I have played recently (before & after the upgrade) and both are undoubtedly smoother with the CPU having loads of spare headroom for the future. There are probably 2 major GPU upgrades on this CPU/Board I reckon ... the 920 went through GTX 260s/5970/6970s/7970s ...

I am satisfied with the upgrade but the caveat here is that my experience is with 3x7970s so not sure how this would be if I had 2 or even 1 .. and just to make sure I really felt the difference after spending on this I installed windows 8.1 on SSD raid and so far so good! :D

CPU is air cooled and is as below, showing under load condition. It's using vcore offset on an Asus RIVE:

g9b9.jpg
 
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Dammit - NOT what I wanted to read!

;-)

EDIT:-

Ordered 4770k, GA-P87X-UD3H and EK Supremacy waterblock - damn you blackninja!
 
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I fear I may find myself replacing my i7 920 with a 4930K in the near future.
Keeping my eye out for a decent/cheap second hand X79 motherboard (mainly looking as Asus Rampage Formula/Extreme or Sabertooth boards) to keep costs down as much as possible.
 
If you are on the fence with respect to the upgrade, if you use VMs and if you have multi GPUs then you will definitely see a significant improvement! I don't encode much but I hear that goes kind of well too.

I used 8 Pack's guide here and Asus ROG guide here ... now, I got some 4x4GB DDR 2400 C10 ram to play with when I get the time this week hopefully.

TBH I was holding back on this for ages but once dialled in I have no regrets. Looking at the CPU usage graph in the second post referenced below I note that at times the max single thread utilisation is in the 80s so something is happening in BF4 that takes the straight line horsepower and makes use of it! The average drops when the peak single one goes up as well ...

I am using the TRUE cooler from the 920 with 2 fans and temps get up to 80 under Prime load (was 75c for the [email protected] with 1.375 vcore) and mid 60s gaming so a bit more heat and still no bother though. Have stabilised this chip @ 4.8 under water with higher vcore so sticking with air for now for this build.

Couple of posts I did elsewhere with some data:

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=25233591&postcount=3656

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=25231930&postcount=283
 
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Gazb said:
I fear I may find myself replacing my i7 920 with a 4930K in the near future.
Keeping my eye out for a decent/cheap second hand X79 motherboard (mainly looking as Asus Rampage Formula/Extreme or Sabertooth boards) to keep costs down as much as possible.
Click to expand...

With the imminent arrival of RIVE BE I got a deal on the RIVE and with re-use of my 920 cooler that tipped me to buying the RIVE tbh. Glad I did ...

I won't buy a board second hand ever again for my personal rig - got one X58 board that has real time latency issues that causes brief sound clicks even in music and just about perceptible graphical 'clicks' too and another that clearly was unstable under moderate overclock (AMD). Hard to agree on those issues as flaws so not again ... I have trust issues :)
 
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Nice im not worried about cooling as I have a custom loop, im glad it games well because although im buying mines as im a networking student with a lot of VM's I love to game also I only have one card just now but ill deffo add more lightnings when finances allow :)
 
I've got my 4930K at 4.4ghz 1.28-1.3V it's Prime95/IBT basically everything etc stable... 4.5ghz is unstable under testing even with 1.325V and I'm not prepared to go higher for the sake of a hundred MHz or so, temps are in 70-75C region under maximum stress using Rampage IV Gene and DH-14 2011.

It's a lovely chip imo doesn't clock as high as 3930K but the IPC makes up for that, I think the biggest difference is power usage it doesn't seem to hammer the VRM's as hard when overclocked.

I would have gone with 4770K but the temperature/TIM issue would have probably drove me nuts, so I'm avoiding them until Intel get it sorted out. :p
 
nice I know it will be hardish ive only OC'ed once so far my 3570k but with your guys and guides helps should be easy and im abit of a black freak that's why when the Rampage Black came out it sealed my choice really plus, it shouldn't look as tiny as my z77 does in my 900d lol
 
mmj_uk said:
I've got my 4930K at 4.4ghz 1.28-1.3V it's Prime95/IBT basically everything etc stable... 4.5ghz is unstable under testing even with 1.325V and I'm not prepared to go higher for the sake of a hundred MHz or so, temps are in 70-75C region under maximum stress using Rampage IV Gene and DH-14 2011.

It's a lovely chip imo doesn't clock as high as 3930K but the IPC makes up for that, I think the biggest difference is power usage it doesn't seem to hammer the VRM's as hard when overclocked.

I would have gone with 4770K but the temperature/TIM issue would have probably drove me nuts, so I'm avoiding them until Intel get it sorted out. :p
Click to expand...

Been putting my chips as far as I can since my first overclock on a Cyrix 586 ... never lost one to overdoing it yet. I did have a Barton XP 2500+ degrade on me after 2 years with silly volts under water but that is all I can recall as an issue. Since I have this on offset vcore I reckon it will not spend much time at the highest volts anyway (on desktop it goes down to 1.09v @ 2.8GHz which does go up and down with speedstep, mostly 1.15 ish ..). I won't advise anyone to overstep the recommended 24/7 vcore (1.35v for these I believe) but I am happy to do so myself and I don't think I am stressing this board at all at my clocks!

Having said that I am willing to take on advice if what I am doing will likely break my chip as this is the most expensive one yet, lol!
 
920 @ 4.2 is exactly what I'm sitting on. My own personal roadmap is to get another 780 but going from the OP I don't think my 920 would keep up.

I was hoping to last until the next gen CPU's however, 5770k or whatever they'll end up being called.
 
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