Does anyone know where is the 'thermal wall' overclock speed for the i5 Ivy Bridge 3570k with Corsair H100 water cooling? I'm hearing people in other overclocking forums saying 4.6/4.7/4.8GHz. BTW I'm not interested in delidding.

 

Right now I'm considering either the Ivy Bridge i5 3570k or the Sandy Bridge i7 2700k. I'm pretty sure I can get close to 5GHz with the 2700k+H100 but the old CPU is actually ~US$95 more expensive than the Ivy Bridge 3570k as I have to purchase it from overseas and I want to know how much of a MHz difference there is and whether it's worth paying that much extra to get the 2700k.

 

FYI I'm not interested in the i7 3770k because I don't need Hyperthreading. (I chose the i7 2700k as I was told it's the best SB overclocker)

Go for 2700K If you are not interested in delidding, you can hit 5GHz for sure with H100. I did 5GHz with Noctua nh-d14 on air. It's more expensive, but that is the some kind of "warranty" that will be a good, high overclocker. You don't need to be lucky like with 2600K for example. This is what i know from OC forums too.

Ivy bridge seems to be a little more efficient on same clock vs sandy, but is more complicate to overclock. Delidding is a must, and you need a good memory too. 2700K is much simpler to overclock, is not pretentious at all, and i'm not sure about that difference in efficiency vs Ivy. I am very satisfied with my 2700K and i'm looking to buy one more for backup, becouse intel stopped sandy bridge production

Just cannot justify the cost of the i5-3570K. No doubt you have the cooling capacity for either the i5-2500K or the i5-3570K. The i5-3570K is 'supposed' to be maybe 5% faster. Do you have a Z77 board? Not mandatory but you do get a native PCI-e 3.0 for graphics. I have a Z68 MB which doesn't natively support PCI-e 3.0 (the Z68 chip set does not support PCI-e 3.0) but the board still does support it.

 

The i5-3570K certainly is the latest and greatest but again it is the price. Have seen the i5-2500K prices fall. I can get a steady 4.8 OC on my i5-2500K and it was very easy to get there, then the brick wall.. Have been to 4.99999GHz but the voltage needed was too high. You have the cooling whatever you decide. BTW I just went through deciding whether to move up to the i5-3570K and a Z77 board. Putting money instead for the graphics card to run multiple monitors and an extra copy of Windows 7.

 

Windows 8 spells the decline of wait for it...Windows. Windows 8 should be named Tiles 8. The world is moving to tablet centric computing and damn usability by those actually using Windows for productive work, not media consumption. Wish W8 was an evolution, not revolution. The days of running FSX are drawing to a close. We are, as M$ puts it, LEGACY. Sorry for the rant, am not happy about M$'s direction with Windows 8 for desktop and said effect on running FSX.

Just to be a little more specific: I'm only after FSX performance, and more clock speed = more FSX performance. What I'm looking for is the thermal limit on these Ivy Bridge CPUs and whether the clock speed gap (or FSX performance) between Sandy and Ivy is high enough to justify paying an extra US$95. Unfortunately for me all Sandy Bridge CPUs, including the 2500k, 2600k and the 2700k are now impossible to find in shops, and I have to buy overseas and pay a similar premium over the Ivy Bridge. Last time I checked the 2500k is $25 more expensive than the 3570k.

 

Do you have a Z77 board?

 

Correct, My new mobo is the Asrock Z77 Extreme4. But PCI-e 3.0 and integrated USB 3.0 isn't very useful for FSX and general gaming these days rarely push the hardware to the limit because most of them are console ports.

 

Also in case you're wondering I'm currently on the Lynnfield i7 860+H100 and I'm hitting my own max safe voltage limit at 4.4GHz, at 1.4 Vcore and 1.45 Uncore/QPI/VTT, which is way above Intel limits but overclockers at other forums report no ill effects, and I've been running on this setup for a while now. Temps are good at ~67C @ 100% load and FSX is stable enough, even though I know this rig will not pass Prime95, Intel Burn Test or LinX due to memory/IMC related BSODs e.g. 0x124 and 0x1A

 

The days of running FSX are drawing to a close. We are, as M$ puts it, LEGACY.

 

There's always dual-boot. You would be surprised how many people and how many corporate software packages still rely on Win XP, and as long as people (including me) continue to use XP Microsoft will continue extending the life of the OS. The same thing also happened to IE6 and will likely happen again for Win7 as Win8 is too tablet focused to be useful for enterprise users, and as long as Win7 is supported we FSX users will be happy because let's be honest, new OSes rarely do anything to legacy programs apart from creating incompatibilities.

 

The thing I'm more worried about is the possible impending death of overclocking with future CPUs. Which means we may never see the kind of performance comparable to FS9 with tons of addons. Just think of Orbx's YBBN, which is purposely designed for 'future' systems. Well I'm afraid that performance 'future' may never come.

 

Read more here:

http://www.extremete...of-overclocking