Got my 4930K installed and thought I would write a mini review...
This is a retail 4930K from OCUK
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
