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Calranthe

Calranthe

Calranthe

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Joined
5 Oct 2007
Posts
620
Now this will be a strange type of project log, it may or may not include hardware updates but the goal is to see just how far I can push my pc without spending a lot of money.
Today I was about to buy myself a shiny new i7 8700k and an Nvidia 1080ti + Z370 mb and 32gb Ram, not an inconsequential outlay but I woke up to the realisation that my old pc is not really that old and what could I do to improve it, could I get near performance of a new system by first software and then maybe hardware upgrades.

Many years ago I built a custom Q6600 rig which was the envy of my local friends, it ran stable at 4ghz for 4 years, it had a custom Water cooling rig and including the graphics cards of the time I probably boosted the real world performance of that setup by 40%.

Now lets look at my current hardware.
OS Windows 10 professional
OS Drive Samsung 950 M2 500gb (up until the new 960 etc it was the fastest thing you could put an OS on)
Motherboard Asus Z170 Pro gaming Nice board and fully updated to the most recent bios
CPU i7 6700k
Graphics card GeForce GTX 1080 G1 Gaming RGB 8192MB
Memory Vulcan T-Force 16GB (2x8GB) DDR4 PC4-19200C14 2400MHz

It is no slouch of a machine but I do play a lot of VR and with SS well lets just say the upgrade can be justified in some way.

Current machine has never been overclocked in any way.

But...

From my calculations which may be wrong real world performance gain going from what I have to what I want would be 25-35% performance gain and I would be dropping over 1k in funds, money is not the issue though.

So first stage will be a VR MARK benchtest of my system as it is now, then I will read all the guides update all the software and tweak the settings, get the most I can out of it.

Limiting factors I believe will be Thermal throttling on the graphics card and temp limit on the cpu.

Solution to that will be stage 2 buying of an AIO cpu cooler and GPU cooler (do not want to build my own cooling rig again and the off shelf versions these days do quite well.

Parts will be bought on top of this if needed.

So lets do a fresh reboot and VR Mark then 3d Mark, results I will post here as a base line before tweaking begins.
 
VR MARK Orange room score: 9623
Average FPS 209.78
VR Mark Blue room score: 2338
Average FPS 50.96

3DMark Time Spy Direct X 12 result
Main Score:6983
CPU Score:4947
Graphics Score:7531

All tests run as default settings.

So we have a benchmark.

After tweaking part one

VR MARK Orange room score: 10212
Average FPS 222.61
VR Mark Blue room score: 2458
Average FPS 53.59

3DMark Time Spy Direct X 12 result
Main Score:7348
CPU Score:5094
Graphics Score:7971

Tweaking part two.

VR MARK Orange room score: 10590
Average FPS 230.86

3DMark Time Spy Direct X 12 result
Main Score:7428
CPU Score:5238
Graphics Score:8021

Okay overclocked the CPU to 4.3 I know people can get a 6700k to 4.6 and above but I think it is my memory that is letting my down on this oc, 4.3 is better than nothing and it is completely stable.
Graphics card is mem + 505 and clock +143 stable.

I have gained about 15% in total performance without buying anything.
 
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Have you already done stuff to the rig like say delidding the cpu where you can push it further or is everything stick with no clocks mods?

Will be interesting as like you say sometimes upgrading the benefits may not be that great we just do it for the new parts
 
Aneskimo said:
Have you already done stuff to the rig like say delidding the cpu where you can push it further or is everything stick with no clocks mods?

Will be interesting as like you say sometimes upgrading the benefits may not be that great we just do it for the new parts
Click to expand...

This is my games machine and I have not done anything before today beyond installing drivers.
 
My firestrike score is: 18112
https://www.3dmark.com/3dm/22729808?
Better than 94% of computer results, not too bad.
Graphics 23332 physics 13637 combined 8287.

Now I know that benchmarks are not real world data but lets look at a 3dmark result for a non overclocked i7 6700k and a 1080ti
Firestrike score 24694
Better than 99%
Graphics 31820
physics 18140
combined 11554

Looking at those numbers vs my overclocked build we are talking almost a 40% performance boost if I just take out the 1080 and install a 1080 TI over a my base setup, I think that is justified and lets think if I can overclock the graphics card by 10% on top that is a 50% pc performance boost by replacing one part which when we are talking about VR that is a big bonus.

This experiment was not a fail, I have cleaned up my pc it is working better, I will now look into the different 1080 TI cards out there and see which one I should get then update this build who knows maybe I will liquid cool it :).
As for my cpu the Bequiet air cooler seems to be able to handle the overclock fine.
 
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