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4930K Retail - Mini Review

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Got my 4930K installed and thought I would write a mini review...

This is a retail 4930K from OCUK

DSC06997s.jpg


DSC07000s.jpg


Installed it into an Asus Rampage IF Formula which I brought new from OCUK.
First challenge was that the motherboard would not boot with the new CPU due to the board having a none Ivy-E bios... Thank goodness for Bios flashback on the board. All I had to do was put the latest Bios on a USB stick and the board flashes itself. Once the bios was installed everything booted properly :)

The processor comes in a box, but its just the CPU inside no heatsink as has always been the same with socket 2011 I think. My chip is Costa Rica as can be seen in the pic above.

I have been playing with the new processor and here are some of my findings.

Before the detail a few headlines:

5GHz was easy to hit on the Core, admittedly with 1.45v (Bios)
4.8GHz seems a really good sweet spot between RAM and CPU at 1.32v (Bios)

4800Mhz_RamXMP-small.png


5000Mhz_1866Ram-small.png


My machine is...
Intel i7 4930K retail boxed
Asus Rampage IV Formula Rev 1.01
16GB (4x4GB of G.Skill TridentX 2666MHz)
1TB Samsung EVO SSD
MSI 780 Lightnings in SLI
Custom water cooling - Heatkiller 3.0 Block - D5 pump - 240 and 360 Rads
Windows 8 Pro

First thing I tried was the CPU at stock and setting the RAM to XMP. Which worked perfectly...
I noticed that stock voltage was set to 1.2v and PLL 1.8v
Stock_RamXMP.png


CB_Stock.jpg

Next I raised the CPU to 4.5GHz with the RAM still at 2666MHz XMP.
I did have to raise the CPU voltage to 1.3 to maintain the clock and keep the memory at XMP.
4500Mhz_RamXMP.png


CB_4500_XMP.jpg

As I increased the CPU clock further, which it seems to do really easily I found that I had to reduce the RAM speed, much like the SB-E did, but SB-E would not have run my ram at XMP at all.

At 4.8GHz I think I have found a nice sweet spot for this CPU. Ram is dropped to 2400MHz, but I'm confident I can go more aggressive on the timings.
This seems very stable even in Prime95.
I was also able to reduce PLL voltage to 1.5v without any ill effects.

4800Mhz_RamXMP.png


CB_4800_2400Ram.jpg

The CPU was fairly easy to get to 5GHz but again I had to drop the memory back. As the memory is increased I have to raise the Vcore to get it stable.
5000Mhz_2133Ram.png


5000Mhz_1866Ram.png


CB_5000_2133Ram.jpg

All of the screen shots seem stable for me, the 5GHz is a bit on the edge and I would not want to run for long like that. I did manage to run a few 3D benchmarks at 5GHz / 1866 Ram though.

4.8GHz / 2400 Ram is a very nice balance. I think there is better speed that a 3930K at the same but as I no longer have a 3930K I can't really tell. Maybe someove could publish some comparable Cinibench scores.

Temperatures are what I would consider normal. When running Prime 95 at 4.8GHz my cores report about 60c after 15 minutes.

Well there you go. I'm really pleased with it.
 
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Booted to windows 4.4@ 1.250 vcore, everything else auto. Tried 4.6@ 1.300 vcore but this crashed right after loading. Encouraging although it looks like my cooling may need an upgrade from the brief test I ran at 4.4, the tech lab fathoms are looking pretty good.

What RAM speed are you running?
Anything over 4.4 / 4.5 and I have to start scaling back the RAM speed.
 
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Looking great !

I just have one tiny question. Now with the 4930K and GTX 780 SLI are you running PCI-E 2.0 or 3.0 ? If you're running 3.0 then was it necessary for you to use the nVidia X79 PCIE 3.0 patch to enable PCIE 3.0 ? I haven't been able to find answers to this :)

Yes it still requires the patch, which works fine.
It's NVidia drivers that will finally stop us having to apply the patch... Talking of which it's ages since the last Certified drivers - come on NVidia.
 
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With a little help from 8 Pack today I managed to sort out getting my ram to run at full speed while the CPU is at high clock speeds.

We started adjusting VCCSA and I found that more than anything else it needs help in this area when in the initial boot phase. There is a setting in the Asus bios that lets you set this specifically for the initial boot and setting this to 1.3v while normal VCCSA was set to 1.2v enabled my ram to run slightly above stock speed and with the sort of timings that it was capable of with Haswell.

2666Ram.png


Although with slack timings I could run the ram right up to 2800 - again much the same as with my best 4770K

2800Ram.png


A little more VCCSA lets me in at 5.0GHz CPU and 2666 ram, but I need a bit more tweaking to make that stable.

Good progress though, showing that with a little tweaking and an 8 Pack in your pocket :) Ivy-E can perform extremely well with high memory speeds and normal cooling.
 
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